Horror: The Contributions of Personification and Dehumanization

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movie monsters often have offensive capabilities modeled upon those with which nature has equipped terrestrial animals. Sil, Species's female alien-human hybrid created through a synthesis of alien and human deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), is a case in point. An extended description of her appearance and her abilities shows that, despite her human characteristics, she is, at heart, much more alien than human:

Her human form is, in truth, merely a disguise and her true alien form is an exotic, sensual, alien mockery of the human form. Her form is chitinous and reptilian, somewhat reminiscent of the creatures from the film Alien, but still humanoid in appearance. Her “hair” is a mass of prehensile tentacles which are slicked back behind her head. She possesses two sets of teeth with the internal set being razor sharp. Her breasts, rather than storing fat or mammary glands, instead store long, slimy tentacles which emerge from her “nipples.” She can use her breast-tentacles as weapons but they are also used in her amorous mating ritual (as shown in the second film). Sil has long sharp spines up her back that she can retract and extend at will. These seem to be utilized as a weapon in Species 2 by Eve. Last but not least, Sil's infamous tongue. Her long tongue is tipped with sharp spines and is her primary defense mechanism (or weapon). When threatened, she can simple impale her aggressor with her tongue. This "kiss of death" is shown in each of the franchise's films at least once. Sil’s alien form is also capable of holding its breath underwater for an extended period (“Sil's Appearance”).

A conglomeration of insect, reptile, mollusk, feline or bird, and human, Sil possesses anatomical weapons that resemble those of the shark (her “two sets of teeth”), the octopus (her “prehensile tentacles”), spiny lizards (the sharp spines on her back), and cats or birds (her barbed tongue). In biological terms, she is more than simply a hybrid, or cross-bred organism; she is, in fact, a chimera, “an organism or tissue that contains at least two different sets of DNA.”

The surrealist artist H. R. Giger, who helped to develop the designs for Sil, the original of which, for her tongue, was festooned with shark's teeth, said, “My original idea was for a death kiss in which Sil forces her lethal tongue down her lover's throat, and pulls it out tearing his insides out with it. It was not to smash through the skull as in the final film.” From the beginning, Giger envisioned Sil's tongue as an anatomical weapon: “My original idea was for a death kiss in which Sil forces her lethal tongue down her lover's throat, and pulls it out tearing his insides out with it. It was not to smash through the skull as in the final film, exactly as it was done in Alien and Alien3.”

Giger also designed the spines that project from Sil's back, “hair with flaming tips,” breast tentacles, and “claw[-]like nails.” Oh, yes—she would be fire-resistant as well. Although he wasn't satisfied by the way his designs were incorporated, sometimes in an altered fashion, in the film, without his creative ideas, the movie would have been as original and as, well, surreal.

Before his work on Species, Giger also designed the Alien alien that has come to be known, unofficially, as the xenomorph. The creature's five-stage “life cycle” (Ovomorph, Facehugger, Chestburster, adult, and Queen) is elaborate and reminiscent, to some extent, of that of “wasps of the Chalcidoidea and Ichneumonoidea families, which lay their eggs on live prey that are then consumed by the hatching larvae.”

A mobile ovary with finger-like appendages and a phallic proboscis, the Facehugger attaches itself to its host's face after emerging from an egg laid by the Queen. After incapacitating its host with “a cynose-based paralytic chemical,” the Facehugger uses its proboscis to implant the creature's egg (formed during the first stage of the alien's life cycle) in its victim's chest. It then detaches itself, “crawls away and dies.” (While it's still attached, its “acidic blood prevents” its removal.)

The attachment of the Facehugger to its victim's face and its subsequent death are somewhat reminiscent of the fate of the male anglerfish, except that it attaches itself to the larger female, withering away until it becomes nothing more than a pair of testicles.

This stage of the xenomorph's “life cycle,” some contend, is a parody of the human reproductive process, substituting rape by means of something akin to oral sex for penile-vaginal intercourse performed in a context of mutual love and respect. (Alien is not recommended by feminists.)

The implanted egg is not only parasitic, but also tumorous in its growth, and it's like a virus, commandeering the host's body to use the host's DNA and other “biological material” to develop its own body, which includes assuming some of the host's own “physical traits [e. g., bipedalism] via a process known as the DNA Reflex.” Once the egg develops into a Chestbuster, it bursts through the abdomen of its host and flees, rapidly increasing in size until, within mere hours, it reaches its adult dimensions.

In short, Giger's design for the xenomorph's “life cycle” envisions reproduction as a monstrous process involving sodomy, rape, parasitism, infection, disease, and death. In his view, sex is not lovemaking, but rape combined with sexual perversion, which leads to death as well as birth, and may substitute a male host's abdomen for the uterus: the fetal Chestbuster erupts from the chest; it does not emerge from the womb. Sex, as Giger envisions it, isn't merely messy; it is itself a confusing and contradictory mess devoid of love and respect, involving violence, invasion, parasitism, infection, and disease.

Daniel D. Snyder sees the xenomorph as representing “obvious distortions of the standard human physique.” Although I'm not sure what he has in mind by “the standard human physique,” his observations are, otherwise, intriguing. Giger's alien, Snyder says, “is a filthy, primal parasite whose very survival is contingent on it's [sic] continued rape and exploitation of other species.” As such, Snyder believes the xenomorph reflects the Darwinistic struggle to survive not only by adaptation, but also through the reproduction of the species, or as Snyder himself puts it, “the cold, mechanical struggle to survive.”

He sees in Giger's monstrous vision of sex, an experience that can cause “pain” and death, and a fusion, in the xenomorph's phallic form, or “phallus and . . monster” that suggests “that thing between your legs [if one happens to be male] is also an instrument of evil.” The monstrous creature of Alien is not ourselves, exactly, but “a penis come to life [and] running amok.” As such, it is also somehow “our own weapon [turned] against us” to show “the terror of what we do to each other and the creatures we torture and exploit every day as a matter of simple survival.”

While Snyder may go a bit over the top with his xenomorphy-as-exploiting-human “run amok,” his understanding of the xenomorph's phallicism is certainly on target, as I have likewise suggested, and the creature's complex, perverse “life cycle” obviously does parody, if not critique, sexual reproduction in general.

In such monsters as Sil and the xenomorph, both personification and dehumanization are at work simultaneously, as they often are when non-human organisms or objects are given human characteristics or abilities and human beings are regarded as less than human. A mermaid is a woman—in part—but she is also a fish—in part. That's why the mermaid is extraordinary and, it must be admitted, not only eldritch, but also horrible.

By increasing or decreasing the quality of a person, an animal, or a thing, we alter it. We transform it, so that it is no longer itself. Whether, in doing so, we make it more or less than it as before, we have meddled with its identity and its essential character. We have played God, creating Sil, or the xenomorph, or whatever in our own image and likeness. That which we have changed remains changed, as does it nature, its existence, and, if it is sentient or intelligent, its experience. Where “man-made monsters” are concerned, this is the true and lasting horror, the horror of Pygmalion and Prometheus and Frankenstein: the creator becomes more monstrous than his or her creation.

Like the bat, a pit viper (the bushmaster, copperhead, and rattlesnake, among others) is equipped with a heat-seeking organ located between its eyes. This organ helps the snake to “accurately aim its strike at its warm-blooded prey.” (The bat uses its heat-seeking organ to locate blood.) Not only the chameleon and other lizards, but also plenty of other animals, including insects, fish, birds, and mammals, use various forms of camouflage, as do soldiers, to conceal themselves from predators. Insects have green blood. So does Papau New Guinea's green-blooded skink. But blood doesn't exist only in red and green; some species of octopi have blue blood, and the ocellated icefish has clear blood. Although, as far as I know, no animals have luminescent blood, many of them, including lightning bugs, or fireflies, glowworms, Jellyfish, and anglerfish, to name a few, are bioluminescent.

The alien creature in the Predator movie (1987) senses body heat, can camouflage itself (using a cloaking device, rather than natural means), and has luminescent green blood. Its traits and abilities are extraordinary, but they're not unique. Appearing in, or exhibited by, a biped creature of humanoid shape, these traits and abilities do seem novel, however, making the extraterrestrial marauder seem to be truly out of this world. They make the monster seem more nonhuman, even as its bipedalism, use of tools, and thinking ability make it seem not altogether unlike its human prey. Again, the monster is both enhanced by personification and degraded by dehumanization. The combined personification and objectification of the creature makes it seem uncanny and, therefore, all the more horrible and frightening.

"The Cone": Style, Sentence by Sentence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” Wells is a master of style. He makes every word count toward the creation of the final effect he designs his stories to create. Style, as Jonathan Swift defines it, is “proper words in their proper places.” Mark Twain, like other writers, agrees that “the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” AlfredHitchcock says something similar concerning images, the lexicon of film. It is not any single image that matters, he says, but the way in which they are assembled to evoke thought and feeling. On the importance of style, a science fiction writer, a satirist, a humorist, and a master of suspense agree, as does any serious writer or producer. Style is not a small thing; it is everything, for it shapes and invigorates everything: character, including dialogue, action, plot, setting, theme.

With a single phrase or sentence, Wells often accomplishes several narrative or rhetorical purposes at once in his exemplary short story, “The Cone,” as he does in his other tales. The story is a true tour de force, the literary equivalent of expressionistic and surreal paintings, but, as I discuss this aspect of the story in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” there's no need to repeat it here. Instead, I will concentrate on the effects, literary and rhetorical, he achieves by several phrases and sentences in “The Cone.”

At the outset of the story, his omniscient narrator comments, “They [Mrs Horrocks and the artist Raut] sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there.” This sentence accomplishes three things:

1. It suggests that the air is not “fresher” near the open window, because it is not “fresh” anywhere.
2. The fact that they are “trying to fancy” fresh air near the window means that they are not succeeding. The open window admits no fresh air; like their attempt to imagine fresher air, the open window is a mere prop and, therefore, a failure.
3. The illicit couple's attempt to “fancy the air was fresher” characterizes them. In the face of a reality they find unpleasant, they imagine their circumstances are different. They seek to impose their own preferences upon the world, adjusting what is to what is suitable to them. In this, the sentence's use of “attempt” suggests, they also fail.

Wells gets much out of other phrases, too. In the story's fifth paragraph, his narrator describes an approaching train: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed” not only shows the passing of the cars, but also makes readers count them as they go past: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks.” The counting helps to make the paragraph active, but it also reinforces the number of cars in the train. The ironworks, we think, is a busy, productive place. In the same sentence, the narrator adds that the cars “were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel,” causing readers to imagine each car being “extinguished” as it enters the tunnel's “throat.” This description includes one of the many personifications Wells uses to bring his ironworks to life as an active, vengeful, and menacing entity.

For Raut, the ironworks represents “Gehenna,” meaning “a place of burning, torment, or misery,” or, “(in Judaism and the New Testament, Hell).” The ironworks is impertinent, daring to belch “fire and dust into the face of heaven.” Raut's words suggest that the ironworks is an affront to God Himself, an impious, wicked hell the very existence of which is an insult to heaven. “Fire and dust,” the insults, as it were, which the hellish ironworks belch “into the face of heaven,” are later juxtaposed to the Biblical phrase “pillars of cloud” and “pillars of fire” in which God appears to Moses and the Israelites as He guides them across the desert after their escape from pharaoh: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” (Exodus 13:21). The substitution of “fire” for the more eloquent phrase “pillars of fire” and of sullying “dust” for the more elegant expression “a pillar of a cloud” degrades the poetic language of the Bible, substituting crass terminology for its elevated diction. While Raut accuses the ironworks of insulting God, it is he, through his paraphrases of scripture, who actually does so.

In two clever sentences, Wells creates a sort of reverse-personification. His omniscient narrator describes blast furnaces, which stand “heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron,” as if they are hearts full of passion and rage; Horrocks himself, as their manager, is the mind, or soul, that controls these savage breasts. His “seething” passions and the “incessant turmoil of [the] flames” of his rage are the vengeful hearts that will burn Raut alive. 

 

Throughout descriptions of the ironworks, Wells's omniscent narrator uses phrases suggestive of violence, blood, death, and hell to depict the ironworks, the scene of Raut's eventual demise: “ghostly stunted beehive shapes,” “a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts,” “fitful flames,” “hammer beat heavily,” “palpating red stuff,” “blood-red reflections,” “succession of ghosts,” “blood-red vapour as red and hot as sun,” “white as death,” “fire writhing in the pit,” “sulphurous vapor,” “boil the blood,” and “hot suffocating flame.”

References to Gehenna, “the pit,” “pillars of cloud by day,” “pillars of fire by night,” “sin,” “sulphorous vapor” and “God” give the story a Biblical, if not an expressly Christian, context, as does Horrocks's horror at what he has done when “his sanity returned to him,” following his apparent crime of passion and he observes the effect of his vengeance, the sobbing, “inhuman, monstrous creature” that had been Raut. However, this context is undercut by Raut's reference to Jove and the omniscient narrator's allusion to “half-naked Titans.” Not only does the adulterous behavior of Raut and Mrs. Horrocks and Horrocks's seeking of vengeance against Raut suggest that religion is, for them, merely conventional, rather than sincere and devout, but Raut's use of the expression “by Jove,” like the omniscient narrator's employment of the phrase “half-naked Titans,” also implies that none of the characters is religious. Whether Horrocks' own plea to God at the end of the story is genuine or merely an expression of his horror at the sight of what he has done is open to question.

Through his conscious and deliberate selections of words and constructions of phrases throughout “The Cone,” Wells creates and maintains a style that is not only appropriate to his tale, but one which complements it at every turn, creating ironic contradictions; movement and pace; a religious context; complex characterization through allusions and personification; a sense of violence, blood, death, and hell; doubt concerning the characters' true devotion to the religious faith that is implied by the story's allusions to religious themes and theological concepts; and, overall, the unity of effect that produces a seemingly inevitable resolution of the story's central conflict. Wells' style delivers a great deal, largely thanks to his deliberate use of language—“proper words in their proper places”—a and to his own inimitable artistic genius.

H. R. Giger: A New Approach to Horror Fiction?

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

H. R. Giger's biomechanical art combines the organic with the mechanical, human bodies with machines, biology with technology. Typically, his bodies are female. Dehumanized, they lack consciousness; sometimes, they appear to be catatonic or even dead. Were they analyzed according to Martin Buber's categorization of relationships, the female figures in Giger's art would be involved in—not participating in, but involved in—an “I-it,” as opposed to an “I-thou,” relationship. In Giger's art, women are not flesh-and-blood creatures, or not entirely; rather, they are biomechnical hybrids, more dead than alive, and they are more subsumed by the mechanical than the mechanical is subsumed in them.

Often, the female figures' involvement in these associations with mechanical systems is compelled, rather than voluntary; the females are restrained, held in place by mechanical arms, pipes, vises, form-fitting chairs, needles, or masks. They appear to be nothing more than human hosts to industrial parasites or to a system comprised of interacting mechanical parts. Often, their eyes are closed or completely white, lacking both irises and pupils. It is as if their humanity has been extracted along with whatever the needles, tubes, pipes, coils, clamps, suction hoses, hydraulic devices, cables, pumps, phallic appendages, beakers, and baths extract from their mouths and other, more intimate, bodily orifices. Giger's paintings are impersonal, detached, disinterested, and, in this sense, inhuman, depicting scenes that involve actions resembling rape, although it is questionable whether the machinery of technology can commit such an offense in any real sense of the word.

Of course, someone had to create these fantastic hybrid female-machines. The existence of biomechanical factories dedicated to exploiting human females implies that other human beings, perhaps men, since their sex is almost completely absent in Giger's work, designed and operate this system for their own benefit, albeit for mysterious purposes. If men are in charge of the system, if they have converted the females of the species largely into a power supply or an exploitable resource of some kind—chemical, perhaps, or sexual—they must be inhuman; they must be monstrous, indeed, to have deprived women of their lives, of their liberty, of their pursuit of happiness—and, indeed, of their very humanity itself. One would not be surprised to find someone like Josef Mengele in charge of the sadistic, clandestine, mechanized operations.

Each painting depicts a nightmare world unto itself, disconnected from any other. Each of the paintings suggests a narrative, but none connects to any other, and none explains the situations it depicts. It is as if each one is the start of a tale which begins in media res, but never progresses beyond its beginning. Therefore, each scene is without context and without meaning, an existential nightmare devoid of significance from which, like Jean-Pal Sartre's No Exit, there is no escape. Perhaps this is Giger's vision of modern life, a world in which men operate a vast system of machinery, preying upon helpless, dehumanized females like parasites feeding upon hosts, for purposes unspecified, but likely involving, at the very least, sex and exploitation.

Most of Giger's work is unique, in a class of its own, but a few pieces, those he designed for various film projects, do have a context, although not one created exclusively, or even primarily, by Giger himself. However, he often expressed his enjoyment of the movies' scripts. His comments on some of his work on specific motion picture projects may suggest insights concerning his overall intentions as an artist. 

Giger was commissioned to create some potential designs for the movie Dune, including Harkonnen, a castle symbolizing “intemperance, exploitation, aggression, and brutality”—all elements commonly featured in his work. The castle is equipped with a “drawbridge which can be lowered like an enormous penis to admit visitors,” Giger explained. (Many of Giger's paintings also include phalli, most of which are mechanical, rather than organic.) His castle “is a gigantic Moloch, which functions by converting living beings into energy. Every visitor is materially or spiritually exploited.”

In describing the castle, Giger could be describing almost any of his own paintings:

Whoever enters the castle stays there for the rest of his life, which in any case can only last a few seconds. The belly of Harkonnen is a gigantic, senseless Gothic, empty space in which corpulent beings swing through the abyss on their suspensors. The thin, plump external skin is supported from inside by a bone-like structure in the form of gigantic vertical plates. The egg in the desert, a symbol of fertility and reclusion—nothing but a fragile, empty sham.

Although his contributions were not used in the film, the fact that Giger had “a completely free hand” in designing Harkonnen suggests that, in developing the castle's designs, he may have used the same ideas and themes he'd expressed in his other work. If so, in Giger's comments about the work he did for various movies, we may have an insight into some of the views the artist sought to express through his own biomechanical paintings. 

Giger designed aliens for the Alien film series, Species's Sil and Ghost Train, the Batmobile for Batman Forever, art for the poster promoting Future-Kill, creatures for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, and murals and other work for Prometheus. He also served as a creative consultant for set designs for Killer Condom. We'll consider those works which pertain to our own interest, the new approach for horror fiction that may be represented in Giger's work.

Batmoble Art describes Giger's Batmobile as an “'X'[-]shaped design” that included “articulated front legs/mandibles, retractable fins, and Gatling gun emplacements on each of the four pods on the sides of the vehicle,” noting that Giger's “design also combined side and forward intake ports with organic spines and a central pod connecting the four legs.” 

The result looks more like a living organism than a vehicle and, apparently, it was considered too avant-garde for the Caped Crusader, despite Batman's own penchant for the grotesque. It does indicate, though, that, for Giger, with regard to objects that have a definite, definable purpose, function determines form, where design is concerned.

Angela Cartwright, who plays the navigator of the Nostromo in Alien, describes the set that Giger created as the spaceship's interior as “visceral” and “erotic”: “it's big vaginas and penises . . . the whole thing is like you're going inside of some sort of womb.” Such a description could be applied to many of the backgrounds and settings of Giger's own paintings, Penis Landscape in particular. 

According to David Edelstein,

Alien remains the key text in the “body horror” subgenre . . . and Giger’s designs covered all possible avenues of anxiety. Men traveled through vulva-like openings, got forcibly impregnated, and died giving birth to rampaging gooey vaginas dentate . . . . This was truly what David Cronenberg would call “the new flesh,” a dissolution of the boundaries between man and machine, machine and alien, and man and alien, with a psychosexual invasiveness. [One might add that the film also dissolves the divide between male and female, since male characters are impregnated and give birth.]

Another of Giger's works, the so-called space jockey, was included to depict the dead alien pilot of a spaceship that enabled its crew to drop his species' eggs onto a planet whose life the parasitic hatchlings could then use as their hosts.

In designing the alien “facehugger,” Giger ultimately decided “on a small creature with humanlike fingers and a long tail.” He may have had its means of locomotion and its sexuality in mind. The alien assumes this form during “the second stage” of its “life cycle,” using its eight legs to “crawl rapidly” and its tail to assist it in “making great leaps.” Its legs and tail also help the facehugger to “hug” its victim's face: it grips the host's head with its legs and wraps its tail around the victim's neck. Once it has done so, the creature “administers a cynose-based paralytic,” which causes the victim to lose consciousness and the ability to move. The creature is also equipped with a tubular proboscis, which it introduces into its human host's mouth and esophagus to implant its embryo—reproduction by oral (and nasal), rather than genital means. It seems that, for Giger and the others who designed the facehugger, the creature's function determined its form.

For Sil, the female alien in Species, Giger was interested in maintaining her beauty while portraying her as deadly. She would change colors as she transformed into an assassin, and she would use her barbed tongue to kill her victims:

The character is to go through four distinct stages of evolution [Giger explains:] “She's looking for good-looking, healthy men to breed her race on Earth. If her lover's not healthy, she sees a green aura around him. When she gets angry she first becomes dark red, then orange-red hot. Her clothes and hair burn off and on her back there are these sharp spikes coming out. Her body weapons are like red glowing steel. Then she cools to transparent carbonized glass and you see her inside bone construction: veins, body organs and discs.” It is at this stage when her killing cycle begins and she loses her transparency.

Giger also wanted Sil to have a tongue “composed of barbed hooks. Sil would kiss her lovers, forcing her tongue into the victim's mouth and down their throats, then yank the insides out.” Instead of using her proboscis to impregnate men, Sil would use her tongue to disembowel them. This idea, like the idea of having Sil change colors, was rejected.

While it seems that, during collaboration with others, Giger considers carefully the effects he wants to create, allowing the forms of his designs to follow the functions of the films' fantastic characters, it may be that he is guided more by intuition than by intention. Since nearly all of his paintings and drawings have similar qualities and express similar themes and emotions, Giger may operate from an unconscious template in which bondage, masochism, sadism, and the “intemperance, exploitation, aggression, and brutality” his Harkonnen castle embodies provide a palette for creating the forms that allow various characters to accomplish the tasks assigned them by a particular movie's script.

Indeed, in creating his own paintings, Giger appears to rely largely on intuition, with no preconceived notions about function or purpose, although current events and fads may, like his own dreams, play a role:

I just start from one side and go to the other. I paint whatever comes to my mind. There is no pre-planning. For instance, the ones that feature penis imagery and grotesque baby heads, I just felt like doing that. People have said that I look like these babies a little bit. At the time, 1973, there was a problem with oil and gas—the energy crisis. You can see burners in some of my paintings. The other images must also have some reason behind them. Condoms, of course are very “in” now.

He has also admitted to having been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book of spells and magic, and Lovecraft's cosmicism, the view “that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as God, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence.” 

Giger, who died in 2014, left quite a legacy in his works of art, which include his remarkable, disturbing, and fascinating drawings, paintings, and sculptures, as well as in his style, which mixes the fantastic with such concepts as Lovecraft's cosmicism and the existential angst of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other existential philosophers. However, his work also suggests a new approach to horror fiction that could breathe new life into a genre that has, of late, become predictable and stale.


Too often, horror is about acquiring new knowledge about a bizarre anomaly or singularity, often of an origin that is otherworldly (Alien), paranormal (Paranormal Activity), supernatural (The Exorcist), or abnormal (Psycho). For most of such movies, the strange is emphasized, but, once characters learn, through discovery, education, or revelation, the nature of the beast, the alien, ghost, demon, or madman (or woman) is neutralized or eliminated, and all's well again with the world. Since the 1950s, this approach has worked well in horror, as it has in science fiction, but, after well over half a century, this plot has become more than a little threadbare.

Giger's art offers a new approach, one in which there is no discovery to be made, in which education cannot provide answers, in which revelation is not forthcoming. Every story is a story in progress, so there is only what is happening now. There is no context, so everything is a mystery, which means there is no certainty, no security, and, quite possibly, no safety, and, certainly, no meaning. Characters may act by reason or faith or out of compassion, guilt, fear, or a desire for vengeance. They may act blindly. At times, they may triumph, but over what will remain unknown, and reason, faith, love, or other motivators may just as easily fail as succeed.

Giger's worlds are dark, mysterious, dangerous, disturbing, strangely erotic, meaningless, and compelling. They are worlds in which anything may happen and the only certainty is that there is no certainty. Such worlds may be mad. They may be pictures of hell. They are full of exploitation, violence, existential absurdity, hopelessness, helplessness, and terror—just like “real life” itself. Nihilistic worlds, they are devoid of heroes. They are worlds in which unseen, monstrous managers rule, unseen and unknown, faceless, nameless, and inhuman.

They are perfect settings, in other words, for horror fiction, whether written or performed.

H. G. Wells: The Art of "The Cone"

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

H. G. Wells's masterful short story, “The Cone,” tells a simple, straightforward tale of vengeance and horror. During his stay with Horrocks, who manages the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the artist Raut, who is making a study of the ironworks, has an affair with Horrocks's wife, talk of which the manager overhears, including his wife's confession of her love for Raut.

During the lovers' conversation, Horrocks's wife insults and denigrates her husband as unimaginative and insensitive and praises Raut for the love and beauty he has brought into her dull, drab life. Like Raut, she has an aesthetic appreciation of life, whereas, she tells Raut, her husband “thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel,” having “no imagination, no poetry.” Horrocks also overhears his wife's mockery of him, before he enters the room and offers to take Raut for a tour of the ironworks so the artist can get a better view of its aesthetic effects.

As the men tour the ironworks, Horrocks points out its “effects,” as he leads the artist along, gripping his arm so firmly that it hurts Raut. On their way through the industrial landscape, Horrocks explains how cones have been added to block the throats of the furnaces so fire doesn't “flare out” of them like “pillars of cloud by day . . . and pillars of fire by night.” Despite the cones, however, occasionally a furnace does belch “a burst of fire and smoke.”

A sign warns, “Beware of the Trains.” As a train approaches, Horrocks shoves Raut into its path, pulling him back at the last moment, so that the artist narrowly escapes death. As they resume the tour, Raut wonders whether Horrocks is aware of his affair with his wife and whether, as a result, he had “just been within an ace of being murdered.”

Continuing the tour, Horrocks points out additional effects, such as the canal. “You've never seen it? Fancy that! You've spent too many of your evenings philandering,” Horrocks tells Raut.

They take an elevator to a “narrow rail” overhanging a furnace seventy feet below. “That's the cone I've been telling you of,” shouts Horrocks, “and, below that, sixty feet of molten metal, with the air of the blast frothing through it like gas in soda-water.” He adds that the cone's “top side” is 300 degrees, which is hot enough to “boil the blood out of you in no time.” Raut tries to escape, struggling with Horrocks, who detains him, and Raut plunges into “empty air.” Although his lower body makes contact with the “hot cone,” Raut manages to cling to the chain from which the furnace's cone is suspended, the tremendous heat singeing his hands and causing “intense pain” to assail “him at the knees.” Raut tries to ascend the chain, but Horrocks flings coal at him, shouting, “Fizzle you fool! Fizzle, you hunter of women! You hot-blooded hound! Boil! boil! boil!”

Only after Raut, still clinging to the chain, has been immolated does Horrocks's anger pass and “a deadly sickness [comes] upon him.” as he smells “the heavy odour of burning flesh . . . . his sanity” returning.

From “below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of rolling in the shed ceased abruptly.”

* * *

The plot of Wells's story is itself a thing of beauty. Tight, unified, and artistically executed, with every detail leading to the final effect, it's a tale of terror worthy of Edgar Allan Poe.

Beyond the plot itself, Wells's story is a masterpiece of literary excellence because of its style. A tale of vengeance against an artist, the story is rendered as if Raut himself might have painted it, as a series of images, some impressionistic, others surreal. Wells's protagonist doesn't only speak of the aesthetic effects of his workplace, but the omniscient narrator's artistic descriptions of these effects is like detailed verbal paintings, as these few samples indicate:

The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering sunset of mid-summer. . . . The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and dark; beyond in the roadway a gas-lamp burnt, bright orange against the hazy blue of the evening. Farther were the three lights of the railway signal against the lowering sky.

* * *

Horrocks pointed to the canal close before them now: a weird-looking place it seemed, in the blood-red reflections of the furnaces. The hot water that cooled the tuyeres [“a nozzle through which air is forced into a smelter, furnace, or forge”] came into it, some fifty yards up—a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam rose up from the water in silent white wisps and streaks, wrapping damply about them, an incessant succession of ghosts coming up from the black and red eddies, a white uprising that made the head swim.

* * *

They went . . . through the rolling-mills [“a factory or machine for rolling steel or other metal into sheets”], where amidst an incessant din the deliberate steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black, half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between the wheels. . . . They went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and saw the tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left the eye blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing across the dark, they went to the lift . . . .

These descriptions support Horrocks's view of the ironworks as itself an artistic setting as well as a technological marvel. Unlike Raut and his own wife, Horrocks is able to see the beauty of technology and industry. It is ironic that such beauty, as Horrocks perceives it and the narrator describes it, should be the background to the artist's demise at the hands of Horrocks and the technology of the ironworks itself.

But Wells achieves yet more through the figures of speeches, allusions, and point of view his omniscient narrator employs in describing what, to Horrocks, is a work of art and what is to his victim, “Gehenna,” “a place of burning, torment, or misery.” From Horrocks's point of view, the ironworks is described as a work of art; the furnace is personified as Horrocks's “pet” (“I packed him myself, and he's boiled away cheerfully with iron in his guts for five long years. I have a particular fancy for him”); and the water of the steaming canal is described with an allusion to “sin” and “death,” just as the “flames” that once erupted from the “throats” of the furnaces looked like God, as He revealed Himself to Moses and the Israelites, as “pillars of cloud by day . . . and pillars of fire by night” (Exodus 13:21-22) as they journeyed through the wilderness.

Wells's descriptions are dynamic, not static; they move and act, as if the ironworks is itself a conscious entity, a willing instrument of its manager's revenge. The movement prevents the plot from slowing, keeps up the pace of the action, and is perfectly suited to the tour of his workplace that Horrocks conducts. The descriptions heighten and underscore the unity between Horrocks and his beloved ironworks, emphasizing the relationship that exists between him, as a man, and the industry and technology of the works he manages.

Horrocks's appreciation of the beauty of the ironworks also suggests that both the artist Raut and Horrocks's wife underestimate his sensitivity, intelligence, and imagination. It is not that he lacks the ability to appreciate beauty, but that the type of beauty he appreciates differs from that of Raut and Horrocks's wife. They are detached from the material world, thinking in terms of “effects” and of romantic passion; a man of the earth, a “Titan,” Horrocks is immersed in the physical world of labor and sweat, of industry and technology. To him, the ironworks is a place of beauty, whereas, to Raut, it is a “Gehenna,” a blot upon the beauty of the countryside, and, to Horrocks's wife, it is a stifling, suffocating place devoid of beauty and love. The story suggests that it is the illicit lovers who are unable to appreciate beauty—at least the beauty that Horrocks is able to see.

The characters live in different worlds, which results in a conflict of aesthetics, passion, and love that ends in horrible death for Raut, a realization of the darkness within him for Horrocks, and the end of an affair that Horrocks's wife said opened “a world of love” to her. The story suggests that life, like the setting in which it is experienced, may be a place of beauty which suggests the presence of God, as the ironworks does for Horrocks, or a “Gehenna” of torment and anguish suggestive of hell for those who cannot fathom the beauty and majesty of the place. The story also suggests the significance and power of aesthetics, for it is both the appreciation of the ironworks's beauty, on Horrocks's part, and the failure to appreciate the beauty of such a place, on Raut's and Horrocks's wife's part, that leads to adultery, betrayal, vengeance, and murder and to the horrific death of the artist at the hand of the ironmaster:

His human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had passed, Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood, still clutching and fumbling with the chain, and writhing in agony—a cindery animal, an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing intermittent shriek.

Abruptly, at the sight, the ironmaster's anger passed. A deadly sickness came upon him. The heavy odour of flesh came drifting up to his nostrils. His sanity returned to him.

“God have mercy upon me!” he cried. “O God! what have I done?”

He knew the thing below him, save that it moved and felt, was already a dead man—that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in his veins. An intense realisation of that agony came to his mind, and overcame every other feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and then, turning to the truck, he hastily tilted its contents upon the struggling thing that had once been a man. The mass fell with a thud, and went radiating over the cone. With the thud the shriek ended, and a boiling confusion of smoke, dust, and flame came rushing up towards him. As it passed, he saw the cone clear again.

Man’s Best Friend, Vitalism, The Ghost in the Machine, H. R. Giger, and a Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Whoever has observed a kitten or a puppy play with a mechanical toy has probably noticed how the animal is confused by the automaton’s movement. Locomotion is one of the characteristics of living things, scientists tell us, and animals seem to be instinctively aware of this fact. Movement implies the possibility of danger, because things that move could attack. Alternatively, movement suggests food, because things that move, if only to flee, may be nutritious, even delicious, especially if they happen to be smaller than oneself--”nature, red in tooth and claw,” and all that.

However, the adult cat or dog is not fooled by mechanical toys: such playthings fail the smell test. For full-grown animals, scent--or, less delicately, body odor--distinguishes the living from the mechanical (and, among so-called cadaver dogs, the quick from the dead). As the Bible insists, life is in the blood (and other body fluids, Fido might add). In other words, life is organic. Movement is not, in itself, a sufficient attribute for determining life, nor, robotic assembly lines show, is reproduction.

If life is in the blood (a synecdoche for the organism’s organs), how much blood (or how many organs) are needed for something to be considered alive? Are cyborgs only partially human, while robots are not human at all?

Western culture’s Judeo-Christian religious tradition, like the idealism proposed by Plato and pagan beliefs in animism, posit the existence of a soul, or a vitiating principle, a life-force that makes the human (and, some argued, the animal) viscera quick rather than dead. It was this breath of God, so to speak, that made humans (and maybe animals) live; without it, their bodies would be as dead as the rocks and stones and trees in William Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, one of which (the hauntingly eerie “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”) laments,

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Rene Descartes argues that the universe is like a gigantic machine, as are the bodies of human beings themselves, wherein the spirit, or soul, is, as it were, a “ghost in the machine.” Scientists would later argue that the machine of which Descartes speaks is tenantless, that there is no such “ghost” haunting the machine. The spirit or soul is not necessary, they insist, to explain life, human or otherwise, any more, they add, than is a belief in a Creator. Most recently, Steven Hawking has claimed that the laws of physics, not God, created the Big Bang that gave rise to the universe, concluding, in The Grand Design,

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Most, but not all, scientists believe that nature is explainable without the need to invoke the existence of a divine Creator. Deism, like theism, has been cast off my the majority of scientists. However, some scientists do maintain Christian or other religious faith, many of them finding the cosmological argument a persuasive justification for such belief. The argument between atheists and theists is not likely to end any time soon, even among scientists.

Nevertheless, the secular world view is decidedly atheistic or agnostic, and, some contend, even militantly opposed to the “superstitious” beliefs of the religious. It is high time, they argue, that such outmoded systems of belief be committed to the dust heap of history so that humanity can “progress.” (The very belief in human progress is itself a highly debatable position, of course; see the quotation, for example, by Edgar Allan Poe in the column to the right.)

In science (or the rejected science of the past), animism was known as vitalism, which is the belief, as William Bechtel and Robert C. Richardson point out, that “living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things” (“Vitalism,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy).  According to Bechtel and Richardson,

In its simplest form, vitalism holds that living entities contain some fluid, or a distinctive ‘spirit’. In more sophisticated forms, the vital spirit becomes a substance infusing bodies and giving life to them; or vitalism becomes the view that there is a distinctive organization among living things. . . . Mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena were extended to biological systems by Descartes and his successors. Descartes maintained that animals, and the human body, are ‘automata’, mechanical devices differing from artificial devices only in their degree of complexity. Vitalism developed as a contrast to this mechanistic view. Over the next three centuries, numerous figures opposed the extension of Cartesian mechanism to biology, arguing that matter could not explain movement, perception, development or life. Vitalism has fallen out of favour, though it had advocates even into the twentieth century. The most notable is Hans Driesch (1867–1941), an eminent embryologist, who explained the life of an organism in terms of the presence of an entelechy, a substantial entity controlling organic processes. Likewise, the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1874–1948) posited an élan vital to overcome the resistance of inert matter in the formation of living bodies.

The authors contend that there may vitalism as an explanatory theory of life and its processes is not as absurd as it is sometimes characterized--or caricaturized--as having been, although, in the end, they agree that the “mechanistic” view of life offers a superior empirical basis for experimentation:

Vitalism now has no credibility. This is sometimes credited to the view that vitalism posits an unknowable factor in explaining life; and further, vitalism is often viewed as unfalsifiable, and therefore a pernicious metaphysical doctrine. Ernst Mayr, for example, says that vitalism ‘virtually leaves the realm of science by falling back on an unknown and presumably unknowable factor’ (1982: 52). C.G. Hempel, by contrast, insists that the fault with vitalism is not that it posits entities which cannot be observed, but that such explanations ‘render all statements about entelechies inaccessible to empirical test and thus devoid of empirical meaning’ because no methods of test, however indirect, are provided (1965: 257). The central problem is that vitalism offers no definite predictions. Neither complaint has much historical credibility. Many vitalists were in fact accomplished experimentalists, including most notably Pasteur and Driesch. Moreover, vitalists took great pains to subject their views to experimental test. Magendie, for example, insisted on the importance of precise quantitative laws. Vitalism, as much as mechanistic alternatives, was often deeply embedded in an empirical and experimental programme. Typically, vitalists reacted to perceived inadequacies of mechanistic explanations; in many cases they rightly recognized that the forms of mechanism, materialism or reductionism advocated by their contemporaries were undercut on empirical grounds. In the end, though, their own proposals were supplemented by empirically more adequate mechanistic accounts.

Battles won in religion and in science are often still waged in the public imagination and, therefore, in the pages of fiction and on the stage of drama or the silver screen of cinematography. In each individual, the history of the one’s own culture must reoccur; the history of the species, including that of its ideas, must unfold. What is fought out in the cultural and social spheres must also be fought out in on the individual level. Each person must understand such notions as animism and vitalism for him- or herself. The collective and the historical remains both collective and social only insofar as it is also individual and personal.

Until all have agreed to disagree with Fido that life can be distinguished from non-life on the basis of scent, each thing, whether mineral, plant, or animal either passing or failing the smell test, ideas such as vitalism and even animism are likely to remain attractive alternatives to biology’s and chemistry’s no-nonsense, unromantic, and mundane explanations of existence in purely material and mechanistic terms. For science fiction devotees, the question of how much life (in terms of a soul) one should attribute to a cyborg (or, for that matter a machine, such as a computer, that possesses artificial intelligence) is a moot one. Indeed, the answer is already given. Neither a cyborg nor a computer has any more of a soul than a human being; the universe and all things in it are merely mindless atoms moving according to universal scientific principles without author or design.

In a sense, the artwork of Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger (pronounced like “eager”) is largely a representation of human existence in a post-vitalistic, atheistic age. In his paintings, men and women are hybrid beings, part human and part machine. The eyes in the human faces are either closed or vacant, the whites rather than the irises showing. Their humanity is lost in a hellish hybridization in which bodies--or, more frequently, body parts--seem to nourish mechanical apparatuses which feed upon them, as it were, as if the machinery were somehow parasitical.

Giger‘s art belongs to the horror genre as surely as anything ever written by Robert Louis Stevenson or Mary Shelley. It belongs, also, to the science fiction genre, as the artist’s work in creating the extraterrestrial monster in the Alien film series attests. In many ways, Giger’s work, which was, in part, inspired by the art of Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dali, is original. However, it also rests upon, if not arises from, earlier works in which human figures are dehumanized and their sexuality is desexualized. This earlier form is that of the animal-human hybridization that is common to Egyptian and other mythologies. Sexually, it is represented by bestiality, which is usually considered taboo beyond ancient times, suggesting, as it does, an equality between the animal and the human that many would reject and which would offend, perhaps, even those, such as PETA members and sympathizers, who would accept the equality of animals and champion their rights alongside human rights.

In the past, animals were regarded as occupying a lower ontological position than human beings occupied in the great chain of being. To be human was not to be merely different, but, more importantly, to be qualitatively superior to animals. Humans who behaved in a brutal fashion were regarded as being inhuman, which is to say, animal. As werewolf movies, H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, the movie Cat People, and many another story, including King Kong, warned, there is a gulf between the lower animals and the highest animal, man, that cannot be crossed--at least, not with impunity, whether this boundary was crossed ontologically, socially, or sexually.

Before the advent of machinery, during the Industrial Revolution, there was no other way to suggest the degeneration of humanity, of a man’s descent to a lower spiritual and ontological level of being, than to posit his reduction to a purely animal state. For this reason, sex between animals and humans became taboo, although, in earlier years, when a brotherhood of equality was posited between animals and human beings, such sex was either permissible or its occurrence was ignored.

With the invention of the machine, society acquired an even lower place to which men and women could sink than the animal realm. A person could lose both his or her soul and his or her body, casting off flesh as well as thought, and become purely robotic, or mechanical, going through the motions of life without actually being alive, as the cyborg destroyer in Terminator does or the robots in countless science fiction and horror movies, including I, Robot, do. Humanity could be reduced to a new and lower place that wasn’t human, animal, or even so much as organic--that of the mere automaton that could be switched off and on, to act upon preprogrammed instructions or to wait, idle, until its services were needed or desired. Where once it would have been insulting to have been called an animal or a beast, it was now offensive to be labeled a machine or a robot. Consequently, when stories did dare to suggest sex between a human being and a humanoid robot or cyborg, these tales were careful to also condemn such unions as horrific and repulsive and, most likely, a form of mechanical or mechanized rape on the part of the mechanical participant.

Human beings have long defined themselves by what they are not as much as by what they are. In the past, they learned that they were not animals--or, at least, not lower animals; presently, they insist that they are also not mere machines, although, perhaps after Descartes, some may have nagging doubts as to whether they are ghosts (that is, spirits or souls) inside the machines, so to speak, that are their mechanical bodies.

Giger’s art violates the taboo against sex between men (or, more often, women) and machines (often represented as male). In the process, he also suggests the consequences of such an outrageous act. These consequences are severe, indeed, most often involving the total loss of the self, as the human body, having been incorporated, as it were, into the mechanical assembly, is reduced to organic parts: the eyes either close, blotting out consciousness, or show their whites, as if the human component (in this case, the usually feminine face) has been rendered comatose. Frequently, the human part of the machine retains only her face, anus, and genitals, but when other appendages, such as her arms and legs, are also present, they are festooned with hoses, cables, and wires that make them as much mechanical as human.

The sex itself is perverted as well: non-reproductive by its nature, it is, by necessity, sterile. Giger’s mechanical phalli are incapable of inseminating the mechanical females’ orifices, whether they are of human or mechanical design. Instead, the sex act seems to be a means for the masculine components of the machine to draw energy into itself. Even sex, in Giger‘s work, is parasitic, not fecund, and mechanical rather than animalistic. Human beings are reduced to machinery in this regard, just as they are in every other manner.

Horror springs from a culture’s Weltanschauung as much as it does from anything else, and the Weltanschauung of the Western world is material and mechanistic. There is no place for the soul, no place for God, and no place for anything but the relentless, fluid, and utterly meaningless goings through of the motions of life that Cartesian ontology has laid out for us--unless one happens to question, perhaps, why anyone should agree, disagree, or even care about the end-products of a purely mechanical automaton’s thought processes. If ideas are but the results of atoms in motion, obeying impersonal, mechanistic laws of nature, why should anyone care what conclusion such particulates of matter in motion reach?

The horror is, perhaps, not without exit, Samuel Beckett’s assertions to the contrary. As Descartes argues, the existence of thought implies a thinker, or a ghost in the machine. There is someone, an “I,” inside the body, even if this “I” is simply an effect of the entirety of the physiological processes, a consciousness, as it were, of the physical organism. In humans, this consciousness is self-evident: we know that we know; we feel that we feel; we think that we think; we value that we value. Our selves are known by themselves. As Soren Kierkegaard argues, in an age of scientism, the self, or “I,” is leftover as a “concluding unscientific postscript.” Giger’s art, like Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed (1973), David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), much of Ray Bradbury’s fiction, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), Rachel Talaway’s The Ghost in the Machine (1993), Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse (2009), and a host of other novels, short stories, and films, arises from the doubt and insecurity that human beings have as ghosts in the machines of their flesh, but such artwork also presupposes that there is a ghost, however comatose and moribund, among the cogs and wheels, the clamps and gaskets, the pipes and hoses, and the nuts ad bolts of their otherwise mechanical existence. Otherwise, why should one paint, write, read, or do anything else?