There's Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself: Preying Upon People's Phobias

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Asked what he feared, Stephen King once replied, “Everything!”

While his reply might have been purposefully overstated, it suggests a way of enhancing the fear factor of the horror story. The horror fiction writer can enhance the audience’s aversion to and anxiety toward the story’s antagonist (the monster) by preying upon readers’ natural fears.

Fortunately, if they don’t fear quite everything, many people do fear many things. We tend to be rather fearful creatures.

First, there are the phobias. There are plenty. Although these fears are held to be irrational, there may be an organic cause for them, according to psychologists, who, Lea Winerman, author of “Figuring out phobias,” says, locate the amygdala, perhaps by way of the brain’s higher cortex, as the point of origin for fear. Dr. LeDoux offers an example of the split-second timing characteristic of the fear response to threatening stimuli: “If a bomb goes off, you might not quickly be able to evaluate any of the perceptual qualities of the sound, but the intensity is enough to trigger the amygdala. If you knew a lot about bombs, then through the cortex pathway you could evaluate the danger, but it will take longer.”

Although studies have focused on obsessive-compulsive disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias were once believed to represent “abnormalities in the fast-track through the amygdala,” Dr. Scott Rauch declares, but further research suggests, instead, that “the amygdala responds immediately to anything that might be threatening, but that with more time to process other areas of the brain suppress the amygdala's initial response.”

Fear, like other emotions, appears to have an organic and chemical basis.

Meanwhile, there are the phobias, such as (just to list some that begin with “a”) acrophobia (fear of heights), agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), androphobia (fear of males), arachnaphobia (fear of spiders), astraphobia (fear of thunderstorms), autophobia (fear of being alone), aviophobia (fear of flying). For those who are interested in others, a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) article, “The A-Z of Fear,” lists a number of select others, only one of which, anuptaphobia, the fear of remaining single, begins with “a.”

How can phobias be used to heighten horror? Many people are claustrophobic. They fear close places, which suggests that they also fear being trapped. A person who is trapped is at the mercy of his or her environment, which means that the trapped individual is at the mercy of other people (perhaps his or her captors, from whom the person had escaped before becoming trapped), of wild animals, of extreme temperatures, of hunger and thirst. The trapped individual has no control over circumstances or events. By setting a story in a cramped environment from which there is no escape, such as a subterranean cavern that becomes sealed off by a landslide or an avalanche, a writer takes advantage of the audience’s claustrophobia. If, before reading such a story, a person was not claustrophobic, afterward, he or she might be.

Many horror movies have been produced that revolve around wild animals as the monsters. One reason may be that men and women fear quite a few animals, including cats (ailurophobia), bees (apiphobia), spiders (arachnaphobia), bats (chiroptophobia), dogs (cynophobia), insects (entomophobia), horses (equinophobia), reptiles (herpetophobia), mice or rats (musophobia), snakes (ophidophobia), birds (ornithophobia), frogs (ranidaphobia), and animals in general (zoophobia).

In reading through this list, you probably thought of several movies that are based upon these phobias, but let’s list a few, anyway, for those who may have missed them:

• Ailurophobia - Cat People
• Apiphobia - Attack of the Killer Bees
• Arachnaphobia - Arachnaphobia
• Chiroprophobia - Dracula
• Cynophobia - Cujo
• Entomophibia - Them!
• Musophobia - Willard
• Ophidophobia - Snakes on a Plane; Anaconda
• Ornithophobia - The Birds
• Xenophobia - The War of the Worlds; Alien
• Zoophobia (and some others as well) - The Food of the Gods

Another film, The Others, even preys upon photophobia, the irrational fear of light!

One might say that horror fiction itself is based upon phobophobia, the fear of fear.

Writing As A Schizophrenic, Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In Part I of "Writing As A Schizophrenic," we saw that, while two heads may be better than one, neither nature nor God has seen fit, more than rarely, to equip any of us with such an advantage. We also discovered a work-around. It may not be possible to grow a second head, but we can develop multiple perspectives on the same topic, or theme. Good news! There's another advantage to having several points of view toward something. In this case, the "something" is the object of fear.

An example may help, as examples usually do.

Let's bash the lowly snake. Let's say you imagine six different characters, each of which is afraid of the serpent. Some may be older, and others may be younger, and we should have some males and some females among the crowd we're imagining, so we can have a variety of perspectives--in this case, a variety of reasons (and non-reasons) as to why the serpent is feared. The result may be something like this:

Boy 1 fears the snake because of its appearance: it is long and narrow, without legs, and it has pitiless, lidless eyes, flared nostrils, and a flickering, forked tongue.

Boy 2 fears the snake because of the physical associations he imagines it has: it is slimy and cold (he believes), and its skin is coarse and raspy.

Girl 1 fears the snake because of the things a friend told her about an encounter with a blue racer that her grandmother had as a child. According to the grandmother’s story, she was in an outhouse when a blue racer inside the privy chased her from the toilet and across the backyard in front of a neighbor boy who saw her immodestly attired, the snake in hot pursuit. Irrationally, the girl fears that something similarly frightening and humiliating might happen to her (despite the fact that blue racers are not indigenous to her own locale).

Girl 2 fears the snake because of a personal experience that happened to her. To tease her, her pesky little brother once held a snake inches from her face before awakening her, causing her to have nightmares about the creepy reptiles ever since.

Woman 1 fears the snake because of its symbolic value. The serpent is associated with evil, temptation, and sin, and seeing one gives her the willies, making her think that she may be in the presence of Satan himself in his serpent’s disguise.

Woman 2 fears the snake because a cousin had the misfortune of being killed by a rattlesnake when he fell off his horse at an inopportune moment.

Man 1 fears the snake because it’s one of the creatures of which he is afraid, and he fears encountering one because, in doing so, he may expose his fear of the animal.

Man 2 fears the snake because, well, he fears snakes--in other words, he has snake phobia, or ophidiophobia, "an unwarranted fear of the reptiles" that causes him to suffer such symptoms as "shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, nausea, and. . . dread."

By imagining six different characters and the reason (or, in some cases, the non-reason) that each fears the snake, we’ve added verisimilitude to our character's or characters’ emotional reactions to serpents. We can combine one or more of these six emotional responses so that the same character has all of them or we can parcel them out to as many as six different characters. We can also scatter these emotional reactions throughout our story, keeping the appearances of the snake interesting because, each time it appears, it frightens the same character for a different reason (or non-reason) or frightens a different character because of his or her ideas and attitudes concerning the snake.

Once again, writing as a schizophrenic proves the old adage, “Two heads (or, in our case, two or more perspectives) are better than one.”

Why Monsters? Why Metaphors?

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: The answers to the "Creepy Crawlies Quiz" are posted at the end of this article.

If you’ve had a chance to read my other posts, you’ve seen that horror writers (perhaps more than writers in other genres of fiction) tend to use metaphors to represent existential and spiritual themes. Often, these metaphors take the forms of the monsters that function as the narratives’ antagonists. The questions naturally arise, Why monsters? Why metaphors?

There are likely to be many answers to these questions. In this installment, I’ll address the two that occur to me at the moment.

First, they have presence.

What do I mean by “presence”? Walker Percy illustrates the idea well in his novel The Moviegoer. His protagonist, Binx Bolling, a soldier at this time in the story, has been injured in a battle. As he lies upon the battlefield, he catches sight of a dung beetle. Normally, he probably wouldn’t have seen the insect and, if he had, he wouldn’t have been likely to devote careful study to it. However, he is not operating under normal circumstances, and he is astonished to see the beetle, in all its glorious detail. It has presence for him; it has become visible. In doing so, it has shed the malaise of everydayness and become real.

Here’s the way that Percy describes the scene:

. . . I remembered the first time the search occurred to me. I came to myself under a chindolea bush. . . . Six inches from my nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves. As I watched there awoke within me an immense curiosity. I was onto something.

Later, a similar experience happens to Binx:

. . . This morning, as I got up, I dressed as usual and began as usual to put my belongings into my pockets: wallet, notebook. . . pencil, keys, handkerchief, slide rule. . . . They looked both unfamiliar and at the same time full of clues. . . . What was unfamiliar about them was that I could see them. They might have belonged to someone else. A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand. Once I saw it, however, the search became possible. . . .

We can all remember the times, usually as a child, during which we could lose ourselves in the contemplation of everyday objects such as a daisy or a drop of dew. We could see each grain of pollen, every glistening color of the rainbow that seemed to emanate from within the clear drop of early morning dew as it shimmered upon a green leaf. All the world was present in a grain of sand.

Then, as we grew older, things changed--or we changed. Saddled with responsibilities and governed by social expectations and conventions, our priorities changed. Eventually, we changed. We no longer had time to appreciate, admire, and embrace the world around us. We became alienated from our environment and estranged from or surroundings. We took for granted the wonders and enchantments of nature. More and more, the world began to disappear as we took birds and brooks, sun and moon, mountains and beaches, and pine trees and breezes for granted. The malaise of everydayness spread until we were nearly blind and deaf to the world around us. Things and people alike began to lack presence.

Occasionally, something happens, and we see again. We hear again. The world becomes present to us again, as the dung beetle became present for Binx. We recover the world or, perhaps, only a tiny portion of the world--maybe nothing more than a dung beetle. But it’s a start. If we can see an insect today, maybe someday we can see a forest or, looking into a looking-glass, even ourselves.

Monsters make us sit up and take notice. They grab our attention. They have immediate and intense presence, even in a world devoid of detail and force. Like a snake, a monster’s hard to miss. Emily Dickinson suggests this quality when she describes a hiker crossing a serpent’s path:

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not?
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

The monster, likewise, is noticeable, immediately. That’s one reason that horror writers employ the monstrous. Monsters have presence. They’re bold font, italics, exclamation points, underlining.

Flannery O’Connor, asked why her fiction contains so many grotesque characters--physically, emotionally, or spiritually deformed characters (monsters, of a sort, really)--implied that she wrote for a “hostile audience“ and explained that, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large, startling figures.”

Often, monsters are the horror writer’s way of getting their readers’ attention.

That’s one reason horror writers employ monsters in their fiction. Another reason is that, by doing so, such writers also help their readers to face truths that are even more hideous than the monsters that represent these truths.

It's bad enough to come face to face with a ghost, a vampire, or a zombie, but it’s worse yet to encounter Ted Bundy, a child with cancer, the loss of a limb (or a mind), or sudden blindness. Lots of things are worse than demons and trolls and werewolves--Alzheimer’s, insanity, spinal bifida--but, as a rule, people don’t want to think of themselves or their loved ones succumbing to such real-life bogeymen. Therefore, horror writers use stand-ins--goblins in place of serial killers, witches in lieu of drug addiction, alien parasites instead of heart disease, autism, or intellectual and developmental disabilities. By facing these understudies, readers learn how to face the actual situations, circumstances, and incidents that these monsters symbolize.

In the process, we come to understand that we can survive losses more terrible than we want to imagine--or to face.

Note: These are the answers to the "Creepy Crawlies Quiz":

1. B; 2. B; 23. D; 4. B; 5. C; 6. A; 7. B, 8. C; 9. A; 10. C.