Showing posts with label technique. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technique. Show all posts

Saturday, October 16, 2021

Creating an Eerie Setting and Tone, Part II

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

In the first part of this series, we considered this same topic. In this post, we take a look at it from a different perspective.


Woods can be unsettling. Why? They are apart from developed areas, which are products of human knowledge, innovation, art, technology, imagination, and technique. Development takes (and shows) a mastery of the environment, control over nature.

We did not ask trees to assume the dimensions and configurations of floors and walls and ceilings. We used trees to make planks and boards, panels and drywall, just as we used lime or gypsum and sand and water to make plaster and converted sedimentary material into clay to make bricks. Every building, commercial, residential, or otherwise, is a human product, an example of humanity’s power and control over the earth.

Outside cities and suburbs and farms, though, nature, not humanity, rules. Beyond civilization, the wilderness reigns. Woods, like other natural landscapes, represent the untamed world of nature, “red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1992) reminds us. Our power centers are only fortresses and outposts in an indifferent universe in which menace and death are as likely as benefit and nurture.

Like deserts, islands, mountains, rain forests, swamps, and the open sea, woods, or forests, remind us that human power and authority over nature are limited, especially outside the cities and suburbs and farms that peoples have carved out of the wilderness, and “tamed” (to some extent) for themselves, as centers of human enterprise. (Blizzards, earthquakes, forest fires, floods, hurricanes, landslides, tornadoes, and other natural disasters are also reminders that human power and authority are limited and fragile; both can be lost in a moment of time.)

When we leave behind our homes and communities to venture into the wilderness, we leave behind the support and assistance of government, families, friends, and neighbors; we also leave behind the organizations and institutions we have created and developed over centuries: military forces, police, firefighters, paramedics, hospitals, doctors, nurses, jails, prisons, forts, highways, vehicles. We put ourselves, to a large degree, at the mercy of nature, “red in tooth and claw.”

Certainly, we may have some tools at our disposal: a tent, food, water, a knife, perhaps a pistol or a rifle, a telephone, matches or a lighter, maybe a hatchet. While such items certainly assist us with everyday tasks and provide the means to satisfy basic needs, they might not be all that helpful against a bear, a cougar, a forest fire, a flash flood, illness, or an escaped prisoner.

What copywriter Barbara Gips observed, in suggesting the tagline to her husband, artist Philip Gips, for the Alien movie poster he was creating, “In space no one can hear you scream” is as true in the woods as it is beyond the exosphere or, as Star Wars puts it, “in a galaxy far, far away.” We are cut off, isolated, on our own, without recourse to protection or any other kind of assistance.

People who read our fiction may not remember their vulnerability as they sit down to read a novel or a short story of watch a movie, but they will feel this helplessness and exposure, all right, if we, as writers, do our jobs well, because our fiction—and our settings—will put them at risk, if only vicariously, and the risk will not be slight; it will be the risk of the loss of life or limb. Described properly, an eerie setting can, and should, suggest this vulnerability to injury or death or, at the very least, to peril, to menace, to danger, to jeopardy, to pain and suffering, and, quite possibly, death.

“Think globally, but live locally,” we have been advised. Similar advice is good for writing: “Think cosmically but write personally.” As writers of horror, we have a Weltanschauung, or world view, that is likely pessimistic: we may hope for the best, but we expect the worst. Possibly, that’s the case because we are aware that the shadow of death falls across all things: friends, family, pursuits of happiness, love, and life itself. With some exceptions, for horror writers, life is a tragedy, ultimately: Life is a bitch, and then we die.

Again, we shouldn’t expect our readers to think about such glum ideas as they read our stories, but we should; we need to know what lies ahead, and, we know, what lies ahead is not a pretty or an encouraging sight. All may be well that ends well, but life does not end well. Instead of lecturing readers, we show them. What happens to our characters, we suggest, could happen to our readers. That’s what identification and vicarious experience are all about.

We describe settings as eerie; we show what happens to our characters in such a setting. We leave it to our readers to discern that they, too, could become prey or victims, whether of the environment itself or a wild animal, a monster, a serial killer, or some other peril. 

I am studying a picture, now, of woods. The image evokes a feeling of disquiet, of uneasiness; it is unsettling, eerie. I write, describing it.

The fog, white here, gray there, as if unable to settle on one shade or the other, is a wall. Rising from the forest floor, it ascends into the sky, a screen, a barrier that cuts off sight, rather than passage. It does not move, does not waver or drift, but stands, a wall immovable and resolute, sinister in its immovability, in its resolute intent.

Leafless trunks, sparse of branch and twig, stand, tall and thin and dark—at least up close; those more distant are vague suggestions, obscured by the pallid pall of the fog engulfing them, the mist that seems to leech away their vitality, their form, their very being. They are more the ghosts of frees, it seems, pale and thin in the motionless haze of the fog. The stand of trees is lost, kindling wood awaiting the flames, should lightning strike this dreary wood in a storm that has not gathered yet, but will.

The fog and the frail, thin trees I take in at a glance, but my eye is arrested by the leaves shed by the trees, the leaves lying, by the hundreds and the thousands, red, like drops of blood, upon the forest floor, lit by a moon unseen—or, perhaps, by an unearthly, unnatural light not of this world. It is as if the very trees or the earth itself bleeds! What power could injure the land itself, blight a forest, obscure the wilderness itself with a veil that is not of this world?

Let’s trek through this forest, the forest of my description, and mark the rhetorical trail we have forged through the narrative wilderness, the better to see the way we have come, and how.

We start with a personification, as the fog is unable to decide (“settle on”) whether to be white or gray and, consequently, is both. An effect of the weather, fog has no intelligence or will—except that we have given it both! If the fog is possessed of a mind that can consider alternatives and make choices, in principle, at least, it could decide to act against us and plan an attack upon us. Its indecisiveness may not work to our advantage. If the fog is unable to decide how best to kill us, it might try several methods, proceeding by trial and error. It is also a barrier, cutting us off—from what? Community? Society? Assistance? The infrastructure of organizations and institutions? Highways? Resources? Or is the fog preventing us from seeing whatever lies beyond it—our way out, perhaps, our avenue to rescue or escape? Whatever its aim, the fog’s intent seems hostile. It is also resolute, determined, staunch: it will not permit sight and the knowledge that vision provides. By blinding us, it keeps us ignorant and, therefore, vulnerable—perhaps to whatever it hides.

The trees of the forest suggest that nature itself is under attack. The trees are bare, leafless, perhaps lifeless. They are thin, pale, perhaps sickly. They are “engulfed” by the parasitic fog, which seems to “leech away their vitality, their form, their very being.” Whatever threatens the trees—the very forest itself—is likely to threaten any who enter the forest, including us. Seen from a distance, the trees appear to be already dead, to be mere “ghosts of” themselves. They seem to be “lost” souls, as it were, awaiting the destructive “flames” of divine judgment, of a wrathful god’s lightning bolt. We, who have entered the forest, are likewise under the sentence of divine judgment.

Finally, our gaze is “arrested” by the sight of the blood-red, fallen leaves, which make it appear that “the very trees or the earth itself bleeds!” We wonder, as does the omniscient narrator, “What power could injure the land itself, blight a forest, obscure the wilderness itself with a veil that is not of this world?” Whatever it is, it is a power with which to reckon, to be sure!

These techniques—personification; ambiguous, paradoxical personality traits; and suggestions of a force able to attack and drain the vital forces of nature itself, with specific references to tangible natural objects, fog, trees, and leaves—create an eerie setting that imperils both the forest and anyone, including the story's characters and we, readers who identify with the characters, conveying feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, confusion, and terror.


Tuesday, March 24, 2020

The Humor of Horror (Or Is It the Horror of Humor?), Part 1

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movies often include a humorous scene or two, ostensibly as a means of relieving the tension that results from sustained, intensifying suspense. Frequently of the black humor type, such visual jokes are intended, perhaps, to refocus both the teller and the listener on the normal, the customary or traditional, the everyday, rather than on the abnormal, the non-traditional, or the extraordinary.


Alfred Hitchcock presents Psycho's audience with a humorous scene after Norman Bates kills Marion Crane. He has loaded her corpse and meager possessions into her car and pushed it into a lake to dispose of the evidence of his crime. As Norman looks on, the car begins to sink. It continues to slip deeper and deeper into the water, but, then, abruptly, it stops, only partly submerged, and Norman's expression, partly anticipation, partly glee, up to this point also suddenly changes, to one of not only worry but also panic.

Unless the car fully sinks, he himself (and his “mother”) will sink, as his charade is exposed and he is confined to a mental asylum or a prison for his “mother's” dastardly deed. At the last moment, the car does, in fact, completely submerge, and Norman looks relieved. He has gotten away with murder, after all, it seems. The television series Dirty Little Liars provides its audience with plenty of black humor, much of it through its allusions to such Hitchcock films as Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, and others.

Finding the humor amid horror is a difficult task. If done clumsily, the use of humor to alleviate tension can backfire on the author. In times of hyper-sensitivity and political correctness, it is especially important not to offend readers' sensibilities, even in horror fiction. However, looking to cartoonists whose work involves the macabre can offer some pointers for effective use of black humor, although writers should use them at their own risk.


One such cartoonist is Gahan Wilson, many of whose works appeared in Playboy magazine over a period of years. Most of them include a gruesome twist. For example, most of us do not fear optometrists. We go to them voluntarily, trusting ourselves to their care, believing them, as men and women of medicine, to have our welfare at heart and in mind. It is the violation of this trust by a mad doctor that underlies the ghoulish humor of this cartoon:




In reading the eye chart, we assume the role of the patient; we are trusting, unaware, and helpless as we read of the optometrist's intention to kill us. As we read the chart, the letters tend to blur, reminding those of us whose vision isn't perfect (many of us, alas, who are of the patient's age), suggesting the additional horror that, even with our fate spelled out for us, unable to read the writing on the wall, we are in danger of being killed where we sit, unaware of our fate until it is too late.

This cartoon offers us a technique widely used in horror movies (and, less often, in novels): have the viewer (or the reader) assume (or, more often, identify with) the role of the helpless victim.

In this cartoon, Wilson shows the absurdity of a popular pastime, a supposed “sport” in which armed men kill animals that have no chance against their killers. In the cartoon, the hunter's hubris has led him to kill every animal he and his friend have encountered, as the presence of blood-splattered snow and the friend's ironic comment suggest: “Congratulations, Baer—I think you've wiped out the species!”





Naming the shooter Baer doubles the cartoon's irony, since the name sounds like “bear.” Like a bear, Baer is a predator. Unlike a bear, however, Baer kills for “sport,” not survival, killing every animal he encounters. His smug, slightly crazed look suggests that he is insane, which, in turn, suggests that hunting, at least the way he practices it, is also insane.

This cartoon's technique is to exaggerate a commonplace activity to reveal the absurdity of the pastime and those who participate in it.

Many horror movie plots, novels, and short stories take place in isolated settings. This cartoon is also set in such a locale. A small eatery in the middle of nowhere, near a two-lane blacktop next to bare mountains possibly in Alaska or the Yukon, judging by the aurora borealis seen in the night sky, bears bright signs on its rooftop and exterior walls: “EAT.” As a gigantic monster of vague, gelatin-like form, crawls over a ridge, toward the roadside cafe, one employee, the cook, possibly, says to another, the waiter, perhaps, “My God—do you suppose it can read?”




This cartoon turns the tables on humanity. It's all right to be a carnivore, Wilson seems to suggest, as long as we are the carnivores. To be the eater rather than the eaten is all well and good, but if the roles are reversed, the horror of the eat-or-be-eaten world is exposed. With apologies to Socrates, in some cases, it seems, the unexamined life may be worth living.

Role reversal is another way that cartoonists like Wilson reveal the horror inherent in everyday practices that we take for granted.

A study of other Wilson cartoons reveals other techniques for showing the horror in everyday situations and practices, but, in our next post, let's take a look at the work of Charles Addams, another artist known for disclosing the humorous within the horrific.

Friday, March 20, 2020

The Thrill of It All, Part 2

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Part 1 of “The Thrill of It All,” we analyzed some of the design techniques that movie posters for thrillers use to attract audiences. The techniques that we identified are:
  • Make sure that your protagonist stands out from other characters.
  • For as long as possible, merely suggest the menace that your main character faces.
  • For as long as possible, withhold context: do not explain the cause of the protagonist's dilemma until the end of the story; this ploy keeps your readers guessing and maintains suspense.
  • In dialogue or the protagonist's own thoughts, pose a rhetorical question or two (but not too many at once) to introduce or heighten suspense by hunting at the problems your protagonist faces or may face in the future.
  • Deliver on the implied promises your use of each of these techniques creates in the minds of your readers.
In Part 2 of this series, we will examine how thriller movie posters use color to appeal to the interests of thriller movie audiences.

Black and dark colors, such as browns, may have symbolic significance that viewers and readers “read” on an a subconscious level, based on associations with such colors that are transmitted culturally, through the arts in general. Black, for example, is often linked to the unknown, to evil, and to death. Like dark colors, black also obscures vision, rendering characters “blind” and reducing them to helplessness. For these reasons, black and dark colors, in general, have taken on an ominous quality. When describing scenes, refer to black and dark colors to create a sense of menace or to obscure your protagonist's sense of sight, as the poster for Thriller (2018) does.


White and light or bright colors, such as yellow and orange, can illuminate darkness, for a few inches or feet, at least, allowing a character to see that which is obscured; at the same time, white or light colors can illuminate the protagonist's face, highlighting him or her, which, of course, can make the main character vulnerable, allowing the villain to locate or attack him or her, so such colors =can both benefit and endanger the main character.


Monochromatic color use can emphasize a protagonist while, at the same time, immersing him or her in the environment, since his or her surroundings are the of a hue that is lighter or darker than the hue in which the protagonist is shown. This technique is used with good effect in the poster for Gothika (2003).

Although this technique might not be used often in novels or other written forms of fiction, it can be the basis of a pertinent descriptive passage when it is warranted. For example, a girl in a green dress may awaken in a pasture, a boy dressed in blue may walk alongside a swimming pool the water in which is reflective of a blue sky, or a man or a woman in red may enter a red room. Usually, such scenes would be reserved for significant, stand-alone scenes or short stories. Edgar Allan Poe uses this technique to great effect in his masterful short story “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842).


The Regression (2016) poster combines the use of black and gray with the use of red. The latter color appears only in one place in the poster's image, in the form of a fiery inverted cross that burns along the junctures of a barn's hayloft doors. (The color also appears once in the text at the bottom of the poster, advising viewers that the picture will play in theaters in December.) An inverted cross represents evil, since it literally turns the Christian sign of Jesus's sacrificial death upside-down. (In occult lore, an inverted sign supposedly cancels out the power represented by the sign). The fact that the cross is afire also suggests its destruction, but this image may also imply the passion with which this destruction occurs—the passion, in other words, of the unseen foe.

On the literal level, the black and gray represent night; symbolically, they might also suggest evil. The judicious use of color can accomplish as much in a novel's description as it does in the imagery used in the Regression poster.


The poster for The Night Listener (2006) uses black, white, and blue to guide the viewer's eye downward and to the right. The left side of the poster shows a a line of dark trees in silhouette. The right side of the poster shows a large image of Ganriel Noone (Robin Williams) and Donna Logand (Toni Colletee) standing side by side. The treeline on the left and the couple on the right frame the white and blue colors which, together, form hazy light, perhaps the result of a full moon shining through fog.

The wedge-shaped light funnels the viewer's vision down and to the right, past Noone and Logand, to a much smaller image of Noone, standing alone in the middle of what looks like a forest trail or road. Bright white light appears at his sides and begind him. Although the source of the light is unseen, its placement seems to suggest that the illumination radiates from Noone himself. Deliberate placement of objects and color can create symbolic effects like the ones in this poster.


As we have seen, color, as it is used in movie posters, often has a symbolic significance. In the movie poster for the thriller Bardo Blues (2019), blue is the primary color. The face of the protagonist, Jack, a mentally ill young man (Stephen McClintik), is shown amid an inkblot formed by dark purple against a variety of blue tones that create a shimmering effect.

The title of the film, Bardo Blues, references depression (colloquially known as “the blues”), suggesting that the man depicted on the poster suffers from clinical is depression. The inkblot shape implies that he is mentally ill, since inkblots were once commonly used in the controversial Rorschach test designed to uncover thought disorder. The shimmering effect of the blue tones that form the poster's background suggest confusion or instability, complementing the inklblot shape's suggestion that the protagonist is in some way mentally unstable.


Colors are used in many other ways, for a variety of additional purposes. Study other posters' uses of color to discover how you can use color in your own writing to achieve similar effects as those that the posters employ.

A couple of caveats are in order, before this post concludes.

First, the posters are ads, not stories. As such, they are designed to sell the products, the films they promote, not to present a drama that enacts a well-plotted story. Therefore, posters often do not correspond to the dramas they promote or have only a slight correspondence to the films' plots.
 

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) summary for Thriller reads: “A childhood prank comes back to haunt a clique of South Central Los Angeles teens when their victim returns home during their high-school Homecoming weekend.” The poster doesn't seem to have much to do with a “childhood prank,” with “a clique,” with “South Central Los Angeles teens,” or with a “high-school Homecoming weekend.”


IMDb summarizes Regression as involving the attempt by “a detective and a psychoanalyst [to] uncover evidence of a satanic cult while investigating a young woman's terrifying past.” The only indication of satanism as an element of the plot is the inverted fiery cross, and there is no hint of a police investiagtion, a psychoanalyst's involvement, or the young woman's “terrifying past.”


The poster for The Night Listener seems to have even less connection to the film it promotes. IMDb summarizes its plot: “In the midst of his crumbling relationship, a radio show host begins speaking to his biggest fan, a young boy, via the telephone. But when questions about the boy's identity come up, the host's life is thrown into chaos.” The poster shows no indication of the male figure's profession or “relationship,” does not refer to a “young boy,” and shows no “chaos.”

A more detailed summary of the movie's plot suggests that the poster is based on one scene, the pertinent sentence of which is, “Donna collapses in the middle of a road and tries to hold him [Noone] with her in the path of an oncoming truck.” Although the poster shows Noone in the road, a source of light behind him, Donna is not in the road with him; she is not hold him down, and there is not indication of a ruck, other than the light behind Noone, which is, apparently, produced by the truck's headlights.


Again, it must be remembered that the posters are intended to sell the movies, not to faithfully portray their plots or any details of the story (other than, perhaps, the appearance of the characters).

Second, as an integral part of a written work's story, description, wherein the visual techniques we are discussing—composition, imagery, color, symbolism—appear, must be a vital part of the narrative; it must be part of the story itself, not something that has no intrinsic significance. Description must be part of the product, not merely a sales pitch separate and largely unrelated to the action of the story.

How can a writer use the techniques that movie posters use to appeal to their audience's interests? We will take a look at some of these techniques in the last post of this series.

For now, let's sum up what we have learned about the techniques of color use:
  • Color can convey symbolic meanings.
  • Color can suggest emotional effects.
  • Color can conceal, reveal, or highlight (or produce any combination of these effects).
  • Color can emphasize a character's relationship to his or her environment while, at the same time, associating him or her with his or her surroundings.
  • The study of other movie posters will show how color is used to accomplish a variety of other purposes and effects.
  • In descriptions, color use must be an integral part of the story, not something used without narrative purpose.
There's more to learn from analyzing thriller movie posters. We'll do just that in a future Chillers and Thrillers post.

Thursday, January 9, 2020

The Tzvetan Todorov Plot

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman


In The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Dr. Tzvetan Todorov differentiates between fiction that is fantastic, uncanny, or marvelous.

 
A story is fantastic, he says, if it cannot be resolved as either uncanny or marvelous. For example, at the end of Henry James's novel The Turn of the Screw (1898), it remains unclear whether the ghosts are real or simply products of the governess's hallucinations.


A story is uncanny if its seemingly fantastic incidents can be explained rationally or scientifically. According to this understanding, H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” (1894) is uncanny: the ghost that allegedly haunts the castle in which the protagonist has come to spend the night turns out to be the invention of his imagination, an effect of his fear.


A story is marvelous if its incidents cannot be rationally or scientifically explained. Stephen King's short story “1408” (1999) is marvelous, because the ghosts (or demons) that allegedly haunt the hotel room in which the writer spends the night are, in fact, truly supernatural.

Whether intentionally or not, Todorov offers a formula for plotting fantastic, uncanny, or marvelous fiction. It sounds complicated, but it's actually fairly simple. This is how it works:
  1. Develop a single situation that can be understood in either natural and or terms or that can be interpreted by reference to the supernatural or faith.
  2. During the course of the story, indicate that the situation may be supernatural.
  3. Show that the situation actually is supernatural or natural in origin of character or that the situation cannot be resolved in either way.
Fiction provides many models of this approach. Here are a few:


Uncanny:“The Damned Thing” (short story) (1893) by Ambrose Bierce; “The Premature Burial” (short story) by Edgar Allan Poe (1844); A Tough Tussle” (short story) by Ambrose Bierce (1888)


 Marvelous: The Exorcist (novel) (1971) by William Peter Blatty; The Sixth Sense (movie) (1999) directed by M. Night Shyamalan; “Dracula's Guest” (short story) (1914) by Bram Stoker


Fantastic: The Exorcism of Emily Rose (movie) (2005) directed by Scott Derrickson;“The Birds” (short story) (1955) by Daphne du Maurier; Let's Scare Jessica to Death (movie) (1971) directed by John Hancock

By analyzing these stories and others that use the Tzvetan Todorov plot, we can see what specific techniques their writers use to create and sustain the ambiguity that results from the tension between the two opposite interpretations of the stories' incidents, that of the natural and that of the supernatural.

Uncanny: In writing “The Red Room,” Wells withholds the actual (natural) cause of the allegedly supernatural incident (the ghost's haunting of the red room) that the protagonist investigates. By doing so, Wells allows the extinguishing of the candles and the fire in the room's fireplace to seem to be the work of the ghost. His panic causes him to run through the chamber in the dark, seeking escape, which results in his knocking himself unconscious when he collides with a piece of furniture. It is only upon awakening that he realizes that the red room was haunted only by his own fear-fueled imagination.


Marvelous: In The Exorcist, Regan MacNeil's strange behavior causes her mother Chris to seek both medical and psychiatric help for Regan after Chris cannot rationally account for Regan's behavior. Both sciences fail to help Regan, who becomes worse. To help Regan, Chris eventually turns to a priest, Father Damien Karras, despite her own atheism. Through exorcism, at the cost of his own life, Father Karras rids Regan of the demon that possesses her. By postponing the revelation that Regan's apparent demonic possession is, in fact, genuine, Blatty creates and sustains ambiguity as to whether the possession is apparent (the result of a physiological or mental disorder) or real.

Withholding the cause of the seemingly fantastic, as Wells does in “The Red Room,” or showing the failure of both reason and science to account for a seemingly supernatural incident before revealing that the incident actually is fantastic, as Blatty does, introduces the possibility of the fantastic while establishing it as subject to natural or rational interpretation or as genuinely marvelous. 

Other techniques that writers using what is here referred to as the Tzvetan Todorov plot include:
  • Swinging back and forth between the natural or scientific explanation of an incident that only at first appears to be marvelous and never explaining the incident's inexplicable mystery (i. e., implying its truly marvelous character).
  • Explaining, eventually, that the apparently fantastic incident is the result of a trick; it is a hoax, a prank, or a publicity stunt.
  • Explaining, eventually, that the apparently fantastic incident is the enactment of a rite or ritual performed by people who genuinely believe that the act is supernatural.
  • Confusing one state of affairs (e. g., a cataleptic trance) with another state of affairs (e. g., death).

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Plots That May Challenge of Change Common Perspectives

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Not all of the examples in today's post are exclusively related to the horror genre, but each of the techniques could be or have been used by writers of horror fiction.

Usurpation: a minor character becomes the main character.


John Garner uses this approach in his novel Grendel (1971), a retelling of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, in which the villain of the poem, portrayed as an anti-hero, becomes the main character.


In Gregory Maguire's 1996 novel Wicked: The Life an Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a retelling of L. Frank Baum's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Altered History: a sub-genre of speculative fiction, alternative history is based on the premise that historical events occur differently than they actually took place. There are many examples of this sub-type, including:


Ward Moore's novel Bring the Jubilee (1953), in which Robert E. Lee wins The Battle of Gettysburg, paving the way for a Confederate Civil War victory.


1945, a 1995 novel by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, wherein the United States defeats Japan, but enters a Cold war with undefeated Germany, rather than with the Soviet Union.

The-Future-Is-Now: visionary predictions of things to come form the basis of this type of plot.


George Orwell wrote a Future-Is-Now dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in which a totalitarian government uses science and technology, propaganda, revisionist history, and other techniques to control its citizenry.

Intersection Stories: explorations of the crossroads between two opposites or extremes.


Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge (1968), a novel featuring a transgender protagonist, meets male and female and masculine and feminine binaries as it lampoons and challenges feminism, gender, sexual orientation, and social mores.

In Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers an early (1882!) comic novel by Thomas Anstey Guthrie, magic causes a father and a son to switch bodies, the father revisiting adolescence as his son experiences maturity.


Of course, Robert Louis Stevenson's Gothic horror novel, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), investigates the intersection of good and evil.

Alien Archaeologist: an alien or some other type of fish out of water (who may or may no be an archaeologist) studies human society and culture, often interpreting his or her experiences in an altogether unfamiliar manner.


My short story, “One Dilemma After Another” (in One Dilemma After Another, Volume II) (2018) is an example: an extraterrestrial military scout tries to hide among us, but his attempts to mimic human beings confronts him “one dilemma after another.”

Schizophrenic Studies: a subject is examined from a variety of points of view.


William Faulkner's 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury tells the history of the Compton family from the perspectives of Benjamin, Quentin, and Jason, whose stories touch on many of the same incidents, but provide their narrators' own peculiar interpretations of the vents.

Using these techniques often results in a truly “novel” (i. e., fresh) novel, since each technique offers a way to challenge or change readers' perspectives on the subjects of the books that are based on these approaches.

Thursday, February 21, 2019

"When you paint, always think of something else"

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

When you paint, always think of something else.”—Salvador Dali

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Association-DIY-Diva-Mystery-ebook/dp/B07MQ73LJQ

Murder mysteries withhold the explanation of the event or events upon which their stories center—the crime (or what), the method of committing the crime (how), the identity of the criminal (the who), the motive (why) or some other element (when, where, how many, how much). Indeed, it is by withholding such information that a mystery is a mystery. 

In this regard, horror stories are mysteries, too, because they likewise withhold the nature of the threat (who or, in horror, what, since many horror villains are monsters or other inhuman beings), the cause (how), the quantity (number, usually, rather than volume) of the antagonists or their victims, or some other element.

Often, such withholdings are fairly straightforward, but, in the hands of accomplished writers, the mystery can be sophisticated, either in itself or in its execution. Shirley Jackson, who is surely a sophisticated writer of horror fiction (and other genres), is a case in point.


In one of her stories, unpublished until 2015, nearly half a century after her demise, her protagonist, Mr. Halloran Beresford prides himself on his appearance and congratulates himself for remembering his wife's birthday: he has bought a box of chocolates for her. However, he does not stand out from others in a crows. Nevertheless, he seems satisfied with himself and his mundane life. In fact, he seems a little smug. He interprets harmless, everyday actions, whether they are innocent in themselves or rude, as deliberate acts of aggression directed at him personally. An observant man, he notices details and, at times, obsesses about others—a “man in a pale hat,” a store clerk, a bus driver, even, at last, his own wife. At first, there is just enough sense in his interpretations of these details to make one wonder whether he is being stalked or harassed, but, ultimately, they don't add up. Why would strangers, unknown to him and to one another, conspire or act by sheer coincidence to abuse him? Why would the woman to whom he's apparently been married for years do so? None of them has a motive to join others to persecute him, save for the man in the pale hat, perhaps, who, Mr. Beresford supposes, might have been offended by Mr. Beresford's touching of his own upper lip as he noticed the other man's “small mustache”—a theory that seems unlikely, to say the least. Even if the man had been somehow offended by Mr. Beresford's gesture, would his annoyance have been sufficiently strong to motivate him to follow Mr. Beresford all over the city merely for the sake of badgering him? 

The story's title explains the cause of Mr. Beresford's strange behavior; his actions are due to his “Paranoia.” The story remains interesting because of its characterization of its protagonist and the twist at the narrative's end, when Mr. Beresford, suspecting his wife is one of the conspirators in the campaign of his bedevilment, overhears (or imagines) her reporting him to her supposed accomplices, from whose pursuit and surveillance he seems to have escaped: over the telephone, she informs one of them, “We have him.”


Without this title, the story's mystery would have been retained, but the story might have been too bizarre and, in a word, inexplicable for the market without such an explanation by way of title, so, it seems Jackson painted—or wrote—herself into a corner. Should she explain the story's bizarre incidents with the title or, delaying the explanation, postpone the revelation of the cause of Mr. Beresford's behavior, his paranoia and, in so doing, perhaps ensure the story's lack of marketability? She seems to have former course, which is all the more reason that her failure to find a publisher for her story during her own lifetime is dispiriting.


“With the addition of the one element of fantasy, or unreality, or imagination, all the things that happen are fun,” Jackson wrote. By substituting the phrase “made mysterious” for the word “fun,” we gain an insight into the technique Jackson often employed to strike an element of the bizarre, the fantastic, the eerie, or the uncanny into her stories. In “Paranoia,” it is paranoia itself that provides the “element of of fantasy, or unreality, or imagination.” The story is an example of how Jackson's use of this element can transform a series of mundane happenings into a unconventional tale of mystery.


Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Poster Pointers: Color, Imagery, Figures of Speech, and Horror

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Artists often learn from one another, especially with regard to technique. In particular, visual artists—illustrators, painters, and the like—use techniques that writers can adopt, just as the reverse is true.


In this post, we'll take a look at how horror movie poster artists use color to express themes, evoke emotions, and sell films. Microsoft's Bing image browser lets users choose the color (that is, the predominant color) of images. (Other browsers may do so as well; I'm not sure.) This ability helps observers to focus on an artist's exploitation of a particular color as a means of highlighting and conveying themes and emotions.


Sometimes, a writer may be able to accomplish something similar, through description, but, even when doing so is impossible, the painter's use of color can show a writer what the painter emphasized; as a result, the writer can view his or her own subject through the eyes of another artist, one who is, in all likelihood, more visually oriented than writers, in general, as we tend to be more linguistic than visual in our orientation.


Against a black background, a poster for Craig Anderson's 2016 movie Red Christmas shows a round, red Christmas ornament inside which is a human fetus, umbilicus attached. The ornament, transformed by the presence of the fetus into a womb image, drips blood. The poster's text, in white font to the left of the ornament-womb, against the black background, reads, “This Christmas the only thing under the tree is terror.”

By using only the image of the ornament-womb, the artist stresses the metaphor which compares the ornament to a mother's womb. The metaphor also alludes to the birth of Christ, for Jesus's birth is celebrated on Christmas Day, a holiday often represented by the colors green and red. However, blood leaks from the ornament-womb, suggesting the fetus's viability is at risk. Thus, red, which is both one of the colors of Christmas and of blood, fuses the holiday with a suggestion of violence. (In the movie, a woman sought to abort her fetus, but the procedure failed when the clinic was bombed, and her child, a son, survived. Now, on Christmas Day, he returns to exact vengeance.)

The poster seems simple, but it attains depth through the artist's expert used of an image that is both metaphorical and allusive on several levels. Writers frequently use metaphors, too, of course, sometimes as central tropes, but, more often, as figures of speech related to specific narrative points, rather than as an all-encompassing, unifying, central trope. By using metaphors more deliberately and purposefully, writers can heighten and enrich the horror they seek to effect. The tip from this artist to writers seems to be not only to think in images, but also to use metaphors to encapsulate the story's theme.

A poster for Alexandre Aja's 2010 comedy horror film Piranha 3D, a spoof of the 1978 film Piranha, both alludes to and lampoons the famous poster for Steven Spielberg's 1975 horror movie, Jaws. Here are the posters, side by side:


In both posters, positioned at the top center, a young, nude blonde swims upon the surface of the ocean. In the Jaws poster, a shark, its mouth open to show its long, jagged teeth, streaks toward the unsuspecting swimmer. There is no accompanying text; the artist is willing to let the images speak for themselves. In the Piranha 3D poster, a piranha, shown close-up, appears huge in relation to the woman above it. Behind this fish, a school of other sharp-toothed piranha crowd the sea. Their shadowy presence looks eerie, as their features are somewhat indistinct, making them resemble fish, but also plants or rocks, emphasizing their primitive, prehistoric origin. They are clearly a species altogether different from that of human beings. The caption, in title case and sea-green letters, beneath the movie's title, which appears in all-capital, blood-red letters, advises, “Sea, Sex, and Blood—Don't Scream . . . Just Swim!”

The Piranha 3D poster's school of piranha, as opposed to the single shark in the Jaws poster, suggests that the latter movie is many times more horrific than the latter film; after all, an entire school of the deadly fish, not a lone shark, are about to attack the helpless swimmer. The unlikelihood of the swimmer's escaping the predatory piranha by swimming heightens the horror, just as the tongue-in-cheek advice heightens the poster's humor.

Since both posters promote horror movies associated with attacks by marine predators, their dominant color is green; however, the Jaws poster also employs shades and hues of blue (another sea color, reflective of the sky), while Piranha 3D includes grays and red (in the title). In the latter poster, the swimmer is also more clearly seen, as is her golden skin and her blonde hair, which helps her assume presence among the predatory fish that are about to attack her. The woman's placement near the top of each poster devotes much more room to depict the ocean below her. She is small, in comparison to the shark or the school of piranha, which emphasizes her helplessness while highlighting the shark or the size of the school of piranha, which makes them seem all the more formidable.

What lesson does the Piranha 3D poster offer horror novelists and short story writers? If a story is to include humor alongside horror, the humor is apt to arise from the situation. Although the situation itself is horrific, the humor is accomplished by undercutting the horror. The story alternates between presenting scenes that are truly horrific and, at the end (or, sometimes, during) the same scenes, undermining the horror, perhaps with ludicrous advice (swim—maybe you can outpace the piranha) or some other means. Mixing humor and horror is difficult. Before attempting such a feat, it is a good idea to study how screenwriters accomplish this task. Buffy the Vampire Slayer offers some excellent examples.

These posters also show the need to design the action of a scene to maximize its horror. The woman's comparably small size, her isolation—she is alone in the sea—and her utter helplessness in the face of predators much larger than she, increase the horror of her situation. At the same time, the poster's design focuses the action of the scene on the conflict between the woman, as victim, and the shark or piranha as monstrous creatures intent upon attacking, killing, and gorging upon her, even before she dies. A well-planned combination of images can both direct action and unify the scene in which it occurs.


Some horror movie posters use a dominant color because the color is suggested by the film's title (Red Eye, Red Water, Red Christmas); because the color is associated with a holiday or the season of the year during which the story unfolds (Red Christmas uses red; Halloween, orange); because the color has symbolic associations with the movie's subject matter (Red Eye's caption makes it plain that this is one of the reasons for its use of red: “He wants to see your insides”); because it contrasts sharply with, and, therefore, emphasizes, the subject matter or its representation, in the case of The Eyes of Laura Mars, by way of a synecdoche, which shows the whites of her eyes against her shadowed face and a black background); or, in some cases, as an alternate way to convey a condition or a situation (dark blue is often used to represent darkness, as it is in the poster for Poltergeist and many other films, because black is too dark). Doubtlessly, there are many other reasons that a particular color is chosen. What is done with the color is what separates amateur designers and artists from the pros. Use the color selection tab on Bing or the image browser of your choice, and see what you can discover.


Many other horror movie posters show how carefully planned images can convey unity, theme, action, emotion, and other elements of a story using color, the positioning of models (in stories, characters), settings, figures of speech, lighting, camera angles, points of view, and other elements of storytelling and cinema. Studying them can suggest similar ways of accomplishing these goals in a novel or a short story.

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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