Aphoristic Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Aphorisms, as themes, can give rise to story ideas. Consider the possibilities with regard to such a maxim as “Be careful what you wish for.” This adage could well have been the basis of W. W. Jacobs’ classic tale of terror “The Monkey’s Paw” (see the column to the right), in which a mother wishes for something she believes she wants, even though it is likely to be horrifyingly monstrous. (The same proverb, incidentally, could have been the basis for Stephen King’s novel, Pet Semetary, a sort of expanded and updated version of Jacobs’ story.)

Could “Two heads are better than one” have inspired Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”?

When the antagonist is dealing agonizing death, the saying, “It’s better to give than to receive” certainly springs to mind as a basis for any number of horror stories, especially of the slasher variety.

Had the alien shape-shifting protagonist of a Ray Bradbury story hearkened to Polonius’ advice to Laertes, “To thine own self be true,” he wouldn’t have suffered the fatal fate that he did.

The cruel king and the courtiers upon whom Hop-Frog takes revenge in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Hop-Frog” would have done well to remember, if they had ever learned, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” because it was the king’s insult to the protagonist’s girlfriend Tripetta that initiated her lover’s plan to avenge her honor.

Intriguing Chapter Titles

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Although it isn’t a horror story--at least not in the conventional sense--Ihara Saikaku’s short story, “What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac Maker,” a tale of adultery as a literally fatal attraction (based, it might be added, on a true story) offers a technique not seen often, if at all, in typical horror novels, but one which provides a simple, but interesting and effective, way of creating and maintaining suspense and of driving the story forward.

True, Saikaku’s choice of a true story as the basis for his story, his use of foreshadowing, and the situation itself, involving participants in an illicit affair against a background of sexual licentiousness and the concern of the protagonist’s society with superficial rather than meaningful matters create interest and suspense as well, but these are techniques already known to, and used by, writers of Western literature (by the use of which term, no, we do not intend to reference cowboy stories--or not only cowboy stories).

The technique we’re interested in is his use of cryptic, apt, and sometimes rather poetic titles for the segments--they are too short to be labeled chapters--of his story. Divided into five sections, these divisions are named:

1. The Beauty Contest
2. The Sleeper Who Slipped Up
3. The Lake Which Took People In
4. The Teahouse Which Had Not Heard of Gold Pieces
5. The Eavesdropper Whose Ears Were Burned

Western writers have named the chapters in their novels. That’s nothing new. However, such titles have more often than not been straightforward. (A memorable one that is both cryptic, appropriate, and somewhat poetic is the title of chapter thirteen of Ian Fleming’s novel, Live and Let Die, in which James Bond’s CIA counterpart, Felix Leiter, encounters a shark in a swimming pool: “He Disagreed With Something That Ate Him.” However, it is Fleming’s habit to extract a phrase or, more rarely, a sentence from the chapter and to let it stand as the chapter’s title. The title of chapter thirteen of Live and Let Die, for instance, appears, in the chapter itself, on a note attached to Leiter’s body.).

The key to the use of intriguing (as opposed to straightforward) chapter titles is to make the title both cryptic and poetic but apt. It should hint at, rather than directly state, the chapter’s plot, theme, or significance, and it should do so in a figurative, metaphorical, or symbolic manner. For example, the title of the third division of “What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac Maker” alludes to a lake in which the protagonist, Osan, and her illicit paramour, Moemon, pretend to drown themselves. Therefore, it alludes to the central point of the narrative segment, using the literary devices of (an apparent) personification and a play on words to do so. Read literally, as people are wont to read anything they peruse, “The Lake Which Took People In” suggests that a body of water will deceive someone, that it will take him or her or them in, or con them. The absurdity of such an idea, in turn, alerts the reader that he or she has misread the title, and that it should be understood differently. As it turns out, the reader will discover that the lake literally takes in people--those who enter its waters, to swim or, as Osan and Moemon pretend, to drown. Therefore, the title is appropriate. It is descriptive of the action that the story segment contains, and it also suggests the subterfuge of the characters who perform the actions, for it is by pretending to have drowned in the lake that Osan and Moemon intend to “take in,” or deceive Osan’s husband and others.

The chapter of the final section of the story, “5. The Eavesdropper Whose Ears Were Burned,” is also intriguing (as opposed to straightforward)--that is, cryptic, poetic, and apt. It suggests that a particular type of person, an “eavesdropper,” will be punished--in a fitting manner, by having his ears burned. In this case, the eavesdropper is Moemon, who, during a nostalgic return to his hometown, while disguised, overhears people insulting him. His ears, metaphorically, are burned. However, when he, Osan, and the servant who had served as an intermediary between them, helping them to cuckold Osan’s husband, the culprits are “burned” in quite a different manner. After being paraded before the townspeople, as a warning of the punishment that comes to adulterers, they are executed, dying “like dewdrops from a blade of grass.”

As a way of practicing this technique, one might name or rename the chapters of various horror novels or segments of horror movies, selecting titles which meet the three requirements we’ve identified as belonging to intriguing headings, so that the results are once cryptic, poetic, and apt. A good intriguing title takes some effort, but it should pay dividends in being another means by which to create and maintain narrative suspense and of driving one’s horror story forward, toward its inevitable crisis, its possible catastrophe, and its satisfying resolution.

By the way, these are the titles of the Live and Let Die chapters; note that, on the basis of our analysis, most are straightforward rather than intriguing:

1. The Red Carpet
2. Interview with M
3. A Visiting Card
4. The Big Switchboard
5. Nigger Heaven
6. Table Z
7. Mister Big
8. No Sensayuma
9. True of False?
10. The Silver Phantom
11. Allumeuse
12. The Everglades
13. He Disagreed With Something That Ate Him
14. Death of a Pelican
15. Midnight Among the Worms
16. The Jamaica Version
17. The Undertaker’s Wind
18. Beau Desert
19. Valley of Shadows
20. Bloody Morgan’s Cave
21. Good Night to You Both
22. Terror By Sea
23. Passionate Leave

Guest Speaker: H. P. Lovecraft: Supernatural Horror In Literature, Part VI

VI. Spectral Literature On The Continent

On the continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short tales and novels of Ernst Theodor Wihelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are a by-word for mellowness of background and maturity of form, though they incline to levity and extravagance, and lack the exalted moments of stark, breathless terror which a less sophisticated writer might have achieved. Generally they convey the grotesque rather than the terrible. Most artistic of all the continental weird tales is the German classic Undine (1814), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouqué. In this story of a water-spirit who married a mortal and gained a human soul there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship which makes it notable in any department of literature, and an easy naturalness which places it close to the genuine folk-myth. It is, in fact, derived from a tale told by the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus in his Treatise on Elemental Sprites.
Undine, daughter of a powerful water-prince, was exchanged by her father as a small child for a fisherman's daughter, in order that she might acquire a soul by wedding a human being. Meeting the noble youth Huldbrand at the cottage of her fosterfather by the sea at the edge of a haunted wood, she soon marries him, and accompanies him to his ancestral castle of Ringstetten. Huldbrand, however, eventually wearies of his wife's supernatural affiliations, and especially of the appearances of her uncle, the malicious woodland waterfall-spirit Kuhleborn; a weariness increased by his growing affection for Bertalda, who turns out to be the fisherman's child for whom Undine was changed. At length, on a voyage down the Danube, he is provoked by some innocent act of his devoted wife to utter the angry words which consign her back to her supernatural element; from which she can, by the laws of her species, return only once--to kill him, whether she will or no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when Huldbrand is about to be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her sad duty, and bears his life away in tears. When he is buried among his fathers in the village churchyard a veiled, snow-white female figure appears among the mourners, but after the prayer is seen no more. In her place is seen a little silver spring, which murmurs its way almost completely around the new grave, and empties into a neighboring lake. The villagers show it to this day, and say that Undine and her Huldbrand are thus united in death. Many passages and atmospheric touches in this tale reveal Fouqué as an accomplished artist in the field of the macabre; especially the descriptions of the haunted wood with its gigantic snow-white man and various unnamed terrors, which occur early in the narrative.

Not so well known as Undine, but remarkable for its convincing realism and freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, another product of the German fantastic genius of the earlier nineteenth century. This tale, which is laid in the time of the Thirty Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript found in an old church at Coserow, and centres round the writer's daughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of witchcraft. She has found a deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various reasons, and the unexplained wealth obtained from this lends colour to the accusation; an accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman Wittich Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The deeds of a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in prison, are glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical witchcraft trial with forced confessions under torture she is about to be burned at the stake when saved just in time by her lover, a noble youth from a neighboring district. Meinhold's great strength is in his air of casual and realistic verisimilitude, which intensifies our suspense and sense of the unseen by half persuading us that the menacing events must somehow be either the truth or very close to the truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular magazine once published the main points of The Amber Witch as an actual occurrence of the seventeenth century!

In the present generation German horror-fiction is most notably represented by Hanns Heinz Ewers, who brings to bear on his dark conceptions an effective knowledge of modern psychology. Novels like The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Alrune, and short stories like “The Spider,” contain distinctive qualities which raise them to a classic level.

But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victor Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass's Skin, Seraphita, and Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less extent; though generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and dæmonic intensity which characterizes the born artist in shadows. It is in Theophile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mystery which, though not continuously used, is recognizable at once as something alike genuine and profound. Short tales like "Avatar," "The Foot of the Mummy," and "Clarimonde" display glimpses of forbidden vistas that allure, tantalize, and sometime horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in "One of Cleopatra's Nights" are of the keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of æon-weighted Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture, and uttered once and for all the eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs, where to the end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in the blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable summons. Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic phantasy like The Temptation of St. Anthony, and but for a strong realistic bias might have been an arch-weaver of tapestried terrors. Later on we see the stream divide, producing strange poets and fantaisistes of the symbolic and decadent schools whose dark interests really centre more in abnormalities of human thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural, and subtle story-tellers whose thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black wells of cosmic unreality. Of the former class of "artists in sin" the illustrious poet Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the psychological novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the eighteen-nineties, is at once the summation and finale. The latter and purely narrative class is continued by Prosper Merimée, whose Venus of Ille presents in terse and convincing prose the same ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas Moore cast in ballad form in The Ring.

The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own; being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen. Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and poignancy; suggesting with marvelous force the imminence of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness. Of these stories “The Horla” is generally regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department; notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz-James O'Brien for details in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster. Other potently dark creations of de Maupassant are Who Knows?, The Spectre, He, The Diary of a Madman, The White Wolf, On the River, and the grisly verses entitled Horror.

The collaborators Erckmann-Chatrian enriched French literature with many spectral fancies like The Man-Wolf, in which a transmitted curse works toward its end in a traditional Gothic-castle setting. Their power of creating a shuddering midnight atmosphere was tremendous despite a tendency toward natural explanations and scientific wonders; and few short tales contain greater horror than The Invisible Eye, where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic spells which induce the successive occupants of a certain inn chamber to hang themselves on a cross-beam. The Owl's Ear and The Waters of Death are full of engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter embodying the familiar over-grown-spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists. Villiers de l'Isle Adam likewise followed the macabre school; his "Torture by Hope," the tale of a stake-condemned prisoner permitted to escape in order to feel the pangs of recapture, being held by some to constitute the most harrowing short story in literature. This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself--the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors. Almost wholly devoted to this form is the living writer Maurice Level, whose very brief episodes have lent themselves so readily to theatrical adaptation in the "thrillers" of the Grand Guignol. As a matter of fact, the French genius is more naturally suited to this dark realism than to the suggestion of the unseen; since the latter process requires, for its best and most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent mysticism of the Northern mind.

A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird literature is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the sombre heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical inclinations; and the wealth of underground horror-lore surviving in ghettoes and synagogues must be much more considerable than is generally imagined. Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy explaining the universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving the existence of strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible world of which dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret incantations. Its ritual is bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old Testament, and attributes an esoteric significance to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet--a circumstance which has imparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular literature of magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and mystery of the past, and when more thoroughly studied is likely to exert considerable influence on weird fiction. The best examples of its literary use so far are the German novel The Golem, by Gustave Meyrink, and the drama The Dyhbuk, by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym "Ansky." The former, with its haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels and horrors just beyond reach, is laid in Prague, and describes with singular mastery that city's ancient ghetto with its spectral, peaked gables. The name is derived from a fabulous artificial giant supposed to be made and animated by mediæval rabbis according to a certain cryptic formula. The Dyhbuk, translated and produced in America in 1925, and more recently produced as an opera, describes with singular power the possession of a living body by the evil soul of a dead man. Both golems and dyhbuks are fixed types, and serve as frequent ingredients of later Jewish tradition.

Guest Speaker: H. P. Lovecraft: Supernatural Horror In Literature, Part II

II. The Dawn Of The Horror Tale

As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves.

Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of dæmons and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based enduring systems and traditions whose echoes extend obscurely even to the present time.

Touches of this transcendental fear are seen in classic literature, and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis in a ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but vanished for lack of a written medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an enormous impulse toward expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving and amplifying the dark heritage, both of random folklore and of academically formulated magic and cabalism, which had descended to them. Witch, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and needed but little encouragement to take the final step across the boundary that divides the chanted tale or song from the formal literary composition. In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted horrors.

Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs--descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds--were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity. Ibis secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of years despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in the regions involved, was marked by wild "Witches' Sabbaths" in lonely woods and atop distant hills on Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe'en, the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle; and became the source of vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides provoking extensive witchcraft--prosecutions of which the Salem affair forms the chief American example. Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret system of inverted theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the famous "Black Mass"; whilst operating toward the same end we may note the activities of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical--the astrologers, cabalists, and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Ramond Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depth of the mediæval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the dæmoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the most famous specimens. And throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst educated and uneducated alike a most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest doctrines of Christianity to the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was from no empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists--Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like--were born.

In this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and legend which persist in weird literature to this day, more or less disguised or altered by modern technique. Many of them were taken from the earliest oral sources, and form part of mankind's permanent heritage. The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones, the dæmon lover who comes to bear away his still living bride, the death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the man-wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer--all these may be found in that curious body of mediæval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense; for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings.

Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard literature. Most of the ancient instances, curiously enough, are in prose; as the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome passages in Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger to Sura, and the odd compilation On Wonderful Events by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, Philinnion and Machates, later related by Proclus and in modem times forming the inspiration of Goethe's Bride of Corinth and Washington Irving's German Student. But by the time the old Northern myths take literary form, and in that later time when the weird appears as a steady element in the literature of the day, we find it mostly in metrical dress; as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly imaginative writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas thunder with cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear of Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst our own Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the later Continental Nibelung tales are full of eldritch weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and in Spenser's stately stanzas will be seen more than a few touches of fantastic terror in landscape, incident, and character. Prose literature gives us Malory's Morte d'Arthur, in which are presented many ghastly situations taken from early ballad sources--the theft of the sword and silk from the corpse in Chapel Perilous by Sir Galahad--whilst other and cruder specimens were doubtless set forth in the cheap and sensational "chapbooks" vulgarly hawked about and devoured by the ignorant. In Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster we may easily discern the strong hold of the dæmoniac on the public mind; a hold intensified by the very real fear of living witchcraft, whose terrors, wildest at first on the Continent, begin to echo loudly in English ears as the witch-hunting crusades of James the First gain headway. To the lurking mystical prose of the ages is added a long line of treatises on witchcraft and dæmonology which aid in exciting the imagination of the reading world.

Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century we behold a growing mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still, however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted literature. Chapbooks of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse the eager interest of the people through fragments like Defoe's “Apparition of Mrs. Veal,” a homely tale of a dead woman's spectral visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne's reign and taking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling--the era of new joy in nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels of the day--such as Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom--the release instinct precipitates itself in the birth of a new school of writing; the "Gothic" school of horrible and fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard literature is a child of the eighteenth century.

A Dictionary of the Paranormal, the Supernatural, and the Otherworldly (A - C)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: Unless otherwise noted, definitions are courtesy of dictionary.die.net, an Internet dictionary in the public domain.

A

The Alchemist

Abracadabra--A mystical word or collocation of letters. . . . worn on an amulet. It was supposed to ward off fever. At present the word is used chiefly in jest to denote something without meaning; jargon.

Abominable Snowman (Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti)--a large hairy humanoid creature said to live in the Himalayas.

Acupuncture--The insertion of needles into the living tissues for remedial purposes.

Ad hoc hypothesis--an interpretation of facts that explains away evidence that contradicts a favored idea or belief (the author).

Akashic record--a spiritual or incorporeal plane upon which all knowledge is stored (the author).

Alchemy--An imaginary art which aimed to transmute the baser metals into gold, to find the panacea, or universal remedy for diseases, etc. It led the way to modern chemistry.
Alien (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, EBEs)--a form of life assumed to exist outside the Earth or its atmosphere.

Allopathy--That system of medical practice which aims to combat disease by the use of remedies which produce effects different from those produced by the special disease treated; -- a term invented by Hahnemann to designate the ordinary practice, as opposed to homeopathy.

Alpha wave--the normal brainwave in the electroencephalogram of a person who is awake but relaxed; occurs with a frequency of 8-12 hertz.

Altered state of consciousness--a trance or trance-like state of mind (the author)

Amityville (New York) haunting--a hoax; the Lutz family, owners of a Dutch Colonial house in Amityville, NY, claimed their residence was haunted; prior to their purchase and residence in the house, Ronald DeFeo, Jr., killed six of his family members in the same house (the author).

Amulet--An ornament, gem, or scroll, or a package containing a relic, etc., worn as a charm or preservative against evils or mischief, such as diseases and witchcraft, and generally inscribed with mystic forms or characters.

Angel--spiritual being attendant upon God.

Animal ghost--the ghost of an animal.

Animism--the doctrine that all natural objects and the universe itself have souls.

Anomaly--deviation from the normal or common order or form or rule.

Appeal to authority fallacy: the idea or belief that the credibility or authority of an expert is sufficient cause to accept the claims of an argument (the author).

Apollo--Greek god of light; god of prophesy and poetry and music and healing; son of Zeus and Leto; twin brother of Artemis.

Apparition--the appearance of a ghostlike figure.

Apport--the transference of an article from an unknown source, to you, or another place by unknown means (Wikipedia).

Argo--The name of the ship which carried Jason and his fifty-four companions to Colchis, in quest of the Golden Fleece.

Argonaut--one of the heroes who sailed with Jason on the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece

Argument from design (teleological argument)--the argument that the order the universe and the inetraction of its myriad parts necessitates the belief in God as a ominscient and omnipotent designer (the author).

Argument from incredulity--see "Divine fallacy."

Artemis--the virgin goddess of the hunt and the moon; daughter of Leto and twin sister of Apollo; identified with Roman Diana.

Astarte--a Phoenician goddess; counterpart of Ashtoreth and Ishtar.

Astral plane--an otherworldly plane of existence or one in a parallel dimension (the author).

Astral projection--the spiritual body’s travel from the physical body (the author).

Astronauts, ancient--extraterrestrial visitors to earth (sometimes mistaken for gods) during prehistoric times to manipulate or control human evolution or culture (the author).

Aura--a distinctive but intangible quality surrounding a person or thing.

Aural hallucination--hearing things (that aren’t there) (the author).

Autism--an abnormal absorption with the self; marked by communication disorders and short attention span and inability to treat others as people.

Autokinetic effect--the apparent movement of a stationary light in an otherwise dark environment (the author).

Automatic writing--writing produced without conscious thought; often considered a means of channeling (the author).

B

Baal--any of numerous local fertility and nature deities worshipped by ancient Semitic peoples; the Hebrews considered Baal a false god.

Backward Satanic messages--supposedly diabolical communications created by backmasking (the author).

Ball lightning

Ball lightning--a rare form of lightning sometimes seen as a globe of fire moving from the clouds to the earth.

Banshee--In Irish folklore, a female spirit who wails to warn of impending death.

Begging the question--circular reasoning (the author).

“Believe It Or Not” strip--a comic strip in which the artist-writer Robert Ripley recounted strange and mysterious incidents and recorded odd facts and trivia.

Benzene molecule--a ring-shaped chemical molecule the structure of which was perceived by Friedrich August Kekulé, a German chemist, during a dream in which he saw a snake biting its own tail (the author),

Bermuda Triangle--an area in the western Atlantic Ocean where many ships and planes are spposed to have been mysteriously lost.

Bible Code--information patterns said to exist in encrypted or coded form in the text of the Bible, or, more specifically, in the Hebrew Torah, the first five books of Old Testament (Wikipedia).

Biorhythm--a hypothetical cycle in physiological, emotional, or intellectual well-being or prowess (Wikipedia).

Blavatsky, Madame Helene Petrovna--founder of the Theosophy Society (the author).

Book of shadows--a witch's personal collection of spells and incantations (the author).

Brainwashing--forcible indoctrination into a new set of attitudes and beliefs.

C

Cardiff giant--a hoax perpetuated by P. T. Barnum in which it was claimed that a giant “petrified man” had been dug up on Cardiff, NY, by laborers digging a well (the author); this alleged giant is the basis of “A Ghost Story” by Mark Twain (the author).

Cartomancy--the art of telling fortunes with cards.

Castenada, Carlos--a Peruvian mystic (the author).

Cayce, Edgar--an American psychic who claimed to channel messages from the dead concerning health, reincarnation, Atlantis, and other matters (the author).

Cattle mutilation--the evisceration of cattle, often on isolated farms, allegedly by extraterrestrials, presumably for research purposes (the author).

Celestine Prophecy--a 1993 novel by James Redfield which discusses various psychological and spiritual ideas which are rooted in many ancient Eastern Traditions (Wikipedia) .

Centaur--a mythical being that is half man and half horse.

Cerberus--three-headed dog guarding the entrance to Hades; son of Typhon.

Chakra--a anatomical energy center (the author).

Channeling--opening oneself as a medium for the receipt of messages from spirits, often during séances (the author).

Chariot of the Gods--book by Erich von Daniken in which the author claims ancient humans were visited by extraterrestrial beings (ancient astronauts) (the author).

Chemtrail--gaseous trails released by aircraft; they are believed to consist of dangerous, but unidentified, chemicals sprayed by the government as part of a nationwide (possibly worldwide) clandestine mission (the author).

Chiropractic--a method of treatment that manipulates body structures (especially the spine) to relieve low back pain or even headache or high blood pressure.

Chopra, Deepak--Indian mystic and author who influenced the New Thought movement in America and elsewhere (the author).

Christ, foreskin of--a holy relic.

Chupacabra--a legendary beast that roams North, Central, and South America, attacking goats and other animals, from which it sucks blood; also known as a “goatsucker” (the author).

Close Encounters of the Second Kind (CE2)--an observation of a UFO and associated physical effects (heat, radiation, damaged terrain, human paralysis, frightened animals, interference with engines or TV or radio reception, and/or crop circles found in the vicinity of the UFO (Wikipedia).

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE3)--an observation of. . . “animate beings” in association with a UFO sighting (Wikipedia).

Coelacanth--a supposedly extinct fish caught (several times) by Japanese fishermen and others (the author).

Cold reading--a medium or other’s use of people’s innate need and tendency to make sense of experiences by imposing order and cause upon otherwise random or seemingly random incidents as a means by which to ascertain information and to seem credible as fortunetellers or others who are adept in the use of allegedly paranormal or supernatural abilities (the author).

Collective hallucination (mass hallucination)--the same hallucination, shared by several (often many) people (the author).

Conspiracy theory--the belief that many individuals or organizations are involved in an attempt to conceal evidence, mislead the public, discredit individuals, secure power, promote a hidden agenda, or otherwise extend influence and socio-economic and political power over the unsuspecting masses (the author).

Cosmobiology--the metaphysical study of the universe; the astronomical study of the universe (the author).

Course in Miracles, A--a book that Helen Schucman (1909-1981) claims was dictated to her by Jesus Christ (the author).

Crop circle

Crop circle--geometrical patterns cut into the crops or grass of a field, allegedly by extraterrestrials, possibly as messages or navigational aids; some have been revealed as elaborate hoaxes (the author).

Crowley, Aleister--author of several books of occult mysticism, including Magick in Theory and Practice and The Book of the Law (the author).

Cryptomnesia--forgotten or repressed memories (the author).

Cryptozoology--the study of legendary, mythical, or unknown animals (the author).

Crystal skull--skulls carved in quartz or other stone and sometimes alleged to be endowed with magical powers of various kinds (the author).

Cult--adherents of an exclusive system of religious beliefs and practices.

Cupping--a treatment in which evacuated cups are applied to the skin to draw blood through the surface.

Curse--an evil spell.

Cyclops--In Greek mythology, one of a race of giants having a single eye in the middle of their forehead.

Everyday Horrors: Bureaucrats

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Come on, come on, come on, now, touch me, babe.
Can’t you see that I am not afraid?

-- The Doors

Caution: The Yuck Factor of this paragraph is 8.8 on a scale of 10! A couple of years back, upon visiting a restroom at a fast-food restaurant, I witnessed an employee exit a toilet stall. He didn’t so much as pause at the sink on his way out. Sure enough, I saw him behind the counter, in the food preparation area, and I promptly notified his manger, who was chewing him out (but should have fired him on the spot) as I left, making a mental note never to frequent this establishment again.

In public restrooms, we put paper sanitary shields on toilet seats before using the commode (although we’re not sure how effective a barrier to germs a thin layer of paper really is) and most of us use a paper towel as a makeshift glove before turning the door handle to let ourselves out of the facility (although we’re not sure how effective a barrier to germs a thin layer of paper really is).

Caution: The Yuck Factor of this paragraph is 9.8 on a scale of 10! The ladies among Chillers and Thrillers' vast audience of readers and writers may not realize this, as most of them are unlikely to have entered many men’s rooms, especially when men have been present within these rooms, but many men do not wash their hands after urinating! They simply walk past the waiting sinks as if neither these fixtures, hand soap, nor paper towels are there. (Fortunately, with a few exceptions, such as the one mentioned in the first paragraph, men do wash their hands after performing the other restroom task.) What’s frightening about men with poor hygiene habits is that not washing one’s hands after urinating is a known transmission route for hepatitis, a particularly nasty disease. (Mothers, do us all a favor, and teach your boys to wash up after using the toilet or the urinal, please!)

We are all victims of systems beyond our control.

-- The Jefferson Airplane

In more innocent days, we used to believe that the government (a) cared about us, (b) was looking out for our welfare, and (c) is competent. We’ve since learned the truth that the government (a) cares only about our tax dollars, (b) is looking out for its own welfare, and (c) is incompetent. In the old days, the government sometimes subjected its citizens to bizarre medical or scientific studies, as when, during the Tuskegee Experiment, black American males who’d become infected with syphilis went untreated so that doctors could study the progress of disease--up to the point, at least, that it killed the subjects.

Now, as far as anyone knows, the government isn’t seeking our death and destruction by any such active neglect (except by its refusal to protect and defend its own borders, which may be creating a resurgence of diseases that the medical establishment once had on the ropes).

The government's incompetence and indifference to its responsibilities causes many significant and dangerous problems, such as the possible infection of 40,000 patients of a handful of medical clinics in Las Vegas, Reno, and Henderson, Nevada, in which medical personnel reused syringes while administering anesthetics to endoscopic and other patients. It turns out that, in many cases, the Clark County Health Department may have been remiss in inspecting these facilities. A lawsuit is in the works, but cash awards and prison time for the doctors and nurses (if, indeed, any are punished in such a fashion) is little comfort to someone who may have been given hepatitis B, hepatitis C, or HIV along with their joy juice.

Science fiction and horror writers have warned readers of the amoral and immoral conduct of government officials and mad scientists for years, but many have supposed such fictional accounts of human greed, sloth, and the other so-called deadly sins inherent in such behavior to have been purely imaginary. Such indifference, arrogance, and greed might provide fodder for suspenseful fiction, many thought, but the U. S. of A. is not, and never will be, Nazi Germany. Americans, in government offices and in scientific laboratories, have morals. They are principled. They have consciences. Doctors even swear to “do no harm.” The terrors unleashed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in H. G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods or The Island of Dr. Moreau, in Robin Cook’s Coma, in Stephen King’s Firestarter and The Stand, in Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, in Douglas Preston’s and Lincoln Child’s Mount Dragon, in James Rollins’ Amazonia, and the many other novels devoted to bureaucratic and scientific insanity and malice couldn’t happen here, not in America.
In most cases, of course, this is true, if for no other reason than that these novels, for the most part, depict terrors and horrors that remain beyond the possibility of science and technology.

For the moment, at least.


“Everyday Horrors: Bureaucrats” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

Fear: A Cultural History: A Partial Review and Summary, Part 4

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, is the author of Fear: A Cultural History. Although she explores several other important aspects of this most basic emotion, Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear concludes its partial review and summary of Bourke’s book with a consideration of her chapter on “Nuclear Threats.”

As Bourke indicates, these threats resulted in a generation of children’ being “raised to fear.” There were the thermonuclear fireball and its resulting widespread, catastrophic physical destruction and the hideous deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of citizens, but there were also the long-term threat of radioactive fallout and lingering death from radiation sickness. Radiation could cause genetic mutations, too, so, if the explosion or radiation sickness didn’t kill one, he or she might undergo grotesque, painful, and eventually lethal mutations, becoming a monster before becoming a corpse.

Also disturbing was the fact that the wholesale slaughter of humanity--or a sizeable portion of the species--was in the hands of a few nations and, within those nations, a few individuals--and not the types of individuals in whom most people had confidence:

With the means of world devastation available to the elite of a few nations, fear became widespread. No longer were humanity’s primary enemies hidden in the
crevices of individual unconsciousness, capable of being lured out by a reassuring confidant. Instead, the fate of humankind seemed to rest with people no one trusted: soldiers, scientists and statesmen.

In fact, “fears about generals, scientists, super-computers, and terrorists,” Bourke states, “were a staple of this genre [science fiction], as was the argument that nuclear war was simply an inevitable consequence of paranoid Cold War animosities.” Another popular subject for such fiction were flying saucers: “It was no coincidence that sightings of UFOs began immediately after the Second World War, a tangible reflection of nuclear and Cold War fears.”

Worse yet, the oceans that lay between America’s east and west coasts were no longer reassuring to its citizens; “long-range aeroplanes and nuclear warheads destroyed this sense of security.”

Bourke points out that the post-war years gave rise to some important themes in the science fiction and horror genres. The most famous such example, she suggests, was Godzilla, “a prehistoric monster resurrected as a result of H-bomb experiments,” who appeared in 1956, starring in “at least sixteen feature films thereafter.” A line of dialogue in Them!, a movie about gigantic, mutated ants, suggests the metaphor that underlies the film: “Has the Cold War gotten hot?” As Bourke points out, the post-war era and the world’s newfound fear of nuclear threats inspired several novels as well, including Margot Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1954), Tyrone C. Barr’s The Last Fourteen (1959), Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog (1969), as well as Jim Harman’s short story “The Place Where Chicago Was” (1962), and Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow “did not flinch from describing a woman sitting on some stairs after a nuclear attack, vainly trying to shove her unborn baby back inside her split belly.”

Overwhelmed by the many horrors and terrors associated with nuclear threats, psychologists warned government officials to expect people to “denial and avoidance,” which would require the use of special techniques of communication, command, and control.

The Civil Defense program that the United States sponsored during the years of the Cold War was never intended, despite its name, to defend civilians from nuclear attack or its consequences, Bourke says--not directly, anyway. Instead, its purpose was to convince the public that, even in the event of a nuclear war, many people could survive by following the procedures they’d learned as participants in the program. Convinced of their potential survival, the general populace, government officials believed--or hoped--would agree with attempts on the part of their leaders to maintain a mutual deterrence policy with the then-Soviet Union, despite the cost of such a policy. Meanwhile, government leaders also endeavored to get citizens to accept the need “to militarize society in the event of a nuclear attack,” to conform to policies and procedures (those who did not might be arrested and “neutralized”), and to accept restrictions upon personal privileges and legal rights. Even the Constitutional right to free speech might be curtailed. The media would likely be controlled by the government to suppress rumors. Leaders hoped that the people would follow the procedures they had been taught as participants in the nation’s longstanding Civil Defense program: “Familiarity with air-raid drills would ensure that people would passively fall into a familiar drill procedure, thus keeping their minds busy and reducing the likelihood of panic.” Meanwhile, radios and vehicles, including airplanes and helicopters, equipped with loudspeakers would transmit or broadcast reassuring messages:

Confusion foreshadowed panic. Irrespective of the veracity of the message, a ‘calm, authoritative voice’ broadcast on an ‘intact public address system’ was crucial. As the Bulletin for the Atomic Scientists put it in 1953: ‘The human being whose normal picture of the world around him is suddenly torn to pieces struggles to replace it with another picture so that he can steer his activity.’ Loudspeakers and radios in public shelters would reorient people, preparing them for a transformed world. Since many people would not have access to radios in the event of a nuclear attack, and since rubble and fires would prevent ground vehicles from getting information to them, disaster agencies would prevent ground vehicles from getting information to them, disaster agencies recommended the use of light planes, preferably helicopters, which would broadcast information and ‘counteract panics.’ All information had to be given
in a factual, calm and easily understood manner so that ‘depressed, fearful and
resentful victims of the disaster’ would be able to understand it.’

Bourke points out that experts admitted that they didn’t really know how people would react in the wake of such a terrible and extensive catastrophe, for nothing of such a scale had ever happened, especially to a civilian population. However, they did think that, possibly at the expense of strangers, family members would stay together and look out for the welfare of one another, and it was believed that men, having more survival skills than women, would be likely to do comparatively well, and women comparatively poorly, in the exercise of adaptive behavior (that is, behavior adapted to the crises at hand). Officials might discover that their greater problem might not be “preventing hysterical flight,” but “getting them to move at all.” Nevertheless, “to provide guidance, disaster experts identified four situations that predisposed people to panic when faced with danger”:

First, partial entrapment was liable to make people panic. . . . Secondly, when the threat was seen as imminent. . . people were likely to ‘freeze’. . . . Emotional extremes would be exacerbated if, thirdly, a blocked or jammed escape faced them. Fourth, confusion and uncertainty about the nature and intensity of threat was particularly distressing.

Never had the world, despite all the many wars its nations had waged, faced such a situation as was posed by nuclear threats. The situation would be characterized by confusion, mistrust, distrust, and fear, and human beings, for the first time in history, would be seen as having “more conclusive” powers than “God, in being bale to annihilate irredeemably and without possibility of redemption.”

In such a world as the disaster experts painted, the horrors of prehistoric monsters, gigantic ants, leveled cities, and even hostile visitors from beyond the stars were mild, even comical, threats, indeed. The horrors of the human technology had outpaced the horrors of the artistic imagination.

Bourke, Joanna, Fear: A Cultural History. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.

Fear: A Cultural History: A Partial Review and Summary, Part 3

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In Fear: A Cultural History, Joanna Bourke distinguishes between fear, as a reference to “an immediate, objective threat” and anxiety, as a reference to “an anticipated, subjective threat,” but cautions her readers that, however useful psychologists may find this distinction, “historians must be extremely wary about imposing such distinctions on emotional states in the past,” because what may be feared by some may not be feared by others. In an interesting side note, she also suggests that scapegoating is a means of converting anxiety into fear, because, in creating a scapegoat, a society creates an “immediate, objective threat” as a substitute for their previously “anticipated, subjective threat,” thereby gaining an adversary whom they can confront. This is a tactic widely used in politics, Bourke says, “influencing. . . voting preferences against an ‘outsider’ group.” (It may be recalled that this was a frequent tactic during the American civil rights movements, during which representatives of the status quo referred to activists and protesters as “outside agitators” who had come to their towns to “stir up trouble.”) The opposite is also true, Bourke notes: “If anxiety can be turned into fear, and thus provide an enemy to engage. . . fear can, similarly, be converted into anxiety,” an effect of which is to reduce collective, participatory behavior and isolate individuals with their own misgivings: “Anxiety states tend to make people withdraw from one another, unlike fear states, which are more likely to draw people together, either for comfort or to defend themselves more effectively against the danger.” Once again, politicians use this tendency as a tactic, pitting one group against another:

The political implications of this are evident, with groups ‘playing off’ fear and anxiety, according to their aim. Between the 1950s and 1970s governments tried to convince people that their fears of nuclear war were ‘irrational’ anxieties rather than ‘rational’ fears, thus discouraging the impulse to unite with other fearful persons against the common threat.

The same tactic is at work in the invention of new “phobias,” such as “homophobia,” as a defense against debate by those--the statistical majority, as it turns out--who do not share the ideas, beliefs, and values of this community or in the labeling of those who oppose open borders as “racists” simply because they believe in and endorse national sovereignty and the integrity of their homeland’s borders.

The isolation of the individual from his or her larger society so that the person is alone with his of her fears and must cope with them as best he or she can is a characteristic of contemporary culture and society, Bourke observes, which seems to have increased anxiety:

Whereas in the past the frightened individual might turn to the community or a religious institution for advice and comfort--a process that often involved the delineation of an evil ‘other’--as the twentieth century progressed, the emotion became increasingly individualized, appropriated by the therapist or, in the most isolated fashion, the contemporary ‘self-help’ movement. . . . As a consequence, anxiety may have been higher. . . .

The information in this part of her book (and the chapter on “Combat”) are especially fertile for horror writers who wish to develop credible scenes in which the fear and anxiety derive from situations and behavioral tendencies that have been subjected to psychological scrutiny.

The “Combat” chapter of Bourke’s book offers these observations, many of which will help horror writers to create believable characters and realistic situations:

. . . [In combat] fear was beneficial, so long as it did not spill over into
hysteria or anxiety neuroses. . . .

. . . in battle ‘normal’ was always pathological. In the words of the author of ‘Psychiatric Observations in the Tunisian Campaign’ (1943): ‘A state of tension and anxiety is so prevalent in the front lines that it must be regarded as a normal reaction to this grossly abnormal situation. Where ordinary psychological signs of fear end, and where signs and symptoms of a clinical syndrome begin, is often difficult to decide.’

[Lieutenant Colonel Stephen W. Ransom considered] “it. . . perfectly normal for combatants to suffer muscular tension, freezing, shaking and tremor, excessive perspiration, anorexia, nausea, abdominal distress, diarrhea, urinary frequency, incontinence of urine or faeces, abnormal heartbeat, breathlessness, a burning sense of weight oppressing the chest, faintness and giddiness.”

. . . the technology of long-distance killing, with its emphasis on anonymous agency and random aggression, placed an intolerable strain on men’s physiological inheritance.

. . . this physiological crisis was exacerbated by a cognitive problem: too many modern soldiers were educated, and thus resistant to rationalizations and primitive conversions (such as the psychological process of ‘converting’ fear into a physical symptom like mutism or paralysis).

According to Bourke’s survey of fear in combat situations, officers were less likely to suffer from incapacitating cowardice, because they have a greater “ego ideal” and feel responsible for not only their own welfare but for that of many others as well. Women are less likely to suffer hysterical breakdowns in combat situations than men are likely to suffer because men fear exhibiting cowardice more than they fear death itself and because society allows women to express their emotions, including their fears, directly and openly; consequently, many discuss these feelings with their peers, whereas men, for the most part, deal--or try to deal--with their fears by themselves. There is also a racial element to white officers’ characterizing black men as being especially prone to fear, anxiety, and panic, despite these officers’ own admissions that black soldiers fight every bit as valiantly as the most gallant white soldier. Physically, blacks, as soldiers, are the equals of their counterparts, such critics contend, but they are weaker mentally and lack the white soldier’s confidence and autonomy.

The prolonged uncertainty, apparent randomness, and fear associated with military combat takes a toll on soldiers’ ability to think and act in a consciously purposeful manner, converting them to “automatons” who go through the motions of defensive and offensive operations. In addition, it was found that “if a combatant could not act, he was more susceptible to fear.” Likewise, soldiers feared most the advantages that indirect fire or long-distance enemy weapons gave them, for, again, it was impossible for the attacked to fight attackers that were not physically present before them and that they could not see: “It was a feeling of ‘inequality’--often described as ‘injustice’ by the men--which was at the heart of fear. When asked why they were afraid of a particular weapon, the ‘inability to retaliate,’ the ‘feeling of vulnerability,’ and the ‘speed and surprise of the attack’ were all as important as ’effectiveness’ or ’accuracy.’”

Recognizing that “The only difference between a brave man and a coward is the fear of the one is controlled whilst the fear of the other is uncontrolled,” as the author of Psychology and the Soldier declares, the military seeks to reduce this tendency in various ways. Since soldiers were found to fear most that which they couldn’t fight against directly, such as passivity (for example, “crew in medium bombers” that “were forced to keep to course irrespective of danger” or to take cover in trenches during enemy artillery attacks which sometimes buried them alive), officers were encouraged to assign their troops busy work to occupy them during breaks between combat and to keep their minds off their fears. They were allowed to expend ammunition even after a target had moved beyond the range of their weapons so as to expend their fear. Men were trained “to respond automatically to orders, to ignore rumours, to focus on the leaders and comrades and to be accustomed to the fog and noise of battle,” but “automatic training” was found to be “less important than training men to obey orders immediately. . . . realism training” being seen as “crucial. . . because it taught men to think under terrifying conditions and it developed their self-confidence” and because not every contingency could be imagined and rehearsed in advance: “only a limited number of routine actions could be taught.” Officers were expected to be models of confidence themselves, keeping any reservations or concerns about their missions to themselves and always exhibiting a calm sense of purpose, on basis of “the belief that people were innately imitative, so fear could be reduced through witnessing the fearlessness of superiors or comrades.”

Of course, the reality of war itself helped, gradually, to harden soldiers to combat and its lethal consequences. Eventually, the sights of massive casualties seemed commonplace, which helped to reduce soldiers’ fears of their own demise.

Anyone who has seen Alien has seen many of these principles dramatized on the silver screen, and anyone who has seen The Descent has seen their opposites on display. The information that Bourke supplies in her “Combat” chapter enables aspiring horror writers to characterize survivors in the former manner and to fashion victims in the latter’s mode. In addition, Bourke’s review of the literature pertaining to the effects of long-term combat on combatants offers a storehouse of other tips for maintaining and heightening suspense, characterizing various dramatic personae, and representing various themes associated with violence, death, and destruction. There are quite a few suggestions, too, concerning the psychology of terror and horror and the motivations of behaviors which, in normal situations, would be classified as psychotic but, in extreme situations, such as combat (or a monster’s attack) might well be simply normal. Perhaps this is the true horror of horror fiction--that we create such situations in the first place. Mark Twain once opined, “If the human race isn’t damned, it ought to be”; war in being not only hell, shows us, as such, that we are the damned.

On that note, we will pause, taking up the last of our review and summary of Bourke’s survey of the subject of fear again in the next post.

Fear: A Cultural History: A Partial Review and Summary, Part 2

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In Fear: A Cultural History, Joanna Bourke summarizes emotionology, or the study of human emotions, which “aims to show how emotions were classified and recognized within particular cultures,” summarizing various psychological theories as to what constitutes an emotion and as to what circumstances are involved in the production of the passions. For Knight Dunlap, of Johns Hopkins University, she says, emotions are specific responses that people make to situations. One may fear or be angry with someone else who threatens him or her, depending upon whether the threatened person perceives the other person as having “greater power.” According to Bourke, the fact, Dunlap contends, that a person can respond emotionally in two or more ways shows that the emotions are responses to situations, not “psychological entities” with “unique affective processes.” Instead, Bourke, stating Dunlap’s case for him, emotions are to be regarded as “nothing more than teleological constructs.”

The definition of any particular emotion, such as fear, depends not only upon “the situation in which the emotion appears,” Dunlap argues, but also upon “the psychological and philosophical theory of the commentator.” A case in point is that of a boy given to tantrums:

In their history of anger, Carol and Peter Stearns. . . observed that ‘a tantrum in a society that has nor word for the phenomenon is a different experience for both parent and child than is a tantrum that is labeled, and labeled with a judgmental connotation.’ As the words changed, so too did the meaning of the emotion within a particular culture.

Her chapter on “Nightmares” reviews, in summary fashion, how this phenomenon has been considered through history. First, nightmares were regarded as “communication with the ‘other world.’”

Later, they were understood as being effects of bodily states and processes. (Remember Ebenezer Scrooge’s explanation of the cause of his nightmarish visits by ghosts as resulting from a bit of undigested potato?)

Subsequently, evolutionary psychologists believed that the past is to blame for “all kinds of fear, including those inspired by. . . nightmares.” One of their number, G. Stanley Hall, thought that the history of the human race is “recapitulated” in every infant. Emotions have survival value; therefore, through evolution, they were retained”: “fear of eyes dated from the time when human ancestors competed for survival with other large-eyed animals,” Hall declares.

Psychoanalysis regarded nightmares as “latent content” that, in a relaxed state, during sleep, the ego allowed to go unrepressed, and it surfaced, as it were, from the unconscious mind, albeit in a disguised state. What the dreamer recalled upon awakening was the dream’s “manifest content.” The purpose of dreams was to express concealed wishes, and, once their manifest content was identified, with the help of a competent psychoanalyst, Freud claimed, “the disguised fulfillment of wishes would become obvious.” For Carl Jung, a one-time follower of Freud, dreams, including nightmares, “contain images and symbols shared by all humanity,” Bourke reminds her readers, arising from the “collective unconscious” that the members of the human species shared with one another, a product (somehow) of evolution and genetics.

William H. R. Rivers, an anthropologist and psychologist, working with victims of “shell shock,” or, as it is known today, post-traumatic stress syndrome, realized that his patients did not wish to relive the terrors they’d faced upon the battlefield and that, consequently, their “nightmares could not be reconciled,” as Bourke observes, “with Freud’s assertion that dreams were a form of wish-fulfillment.” Instead, she tells her readers, Rivers “maintained that the dream was ‘the attempted solution of a conflict’” that plagued the patient’s waking life.

Nathaniel Kleitman’s research suggests that dreams are more likely to be physiological processes than mental activities. A physiologist himself, Kleitman identified four stages of sleep, three of which are characterized by what he calls “non-rapid eye movement,” or NREM, and one of which features “rapid eye movement,” or REM. On the average, a person “experienced four or five REM periods during a sleep of six to eight hours,” during which periods they have dreams, including nightmares. However, more disturbing dreams that mere nightmares, called “terror dreams” or “an incubus attack” (now generally known as “night terrors”) occur “in Stages 3 and 4, before the REM period.” Kleitman’s research has had a profound impact upon the understanding of dreams, as Bourke points out:

. . . Fundamentally, dreams, nightmares and terror dreams were stripped of significant ‘meaning.’ For some neuroscientists dreams and nightmares were a way the brain rid itself of unimportant information. Dreams stopped the brain from becoming overloaded. We dream in order to forget. Others regarded dream images as the result of random bursts from nerve cells in the brainstem during REM sleep: they were simply the brain’s attempt to make sense of stray signals generated by the lower brain.

The upshot of emotionology?

. . . the natural and social sciences were informed by extremely different, even contradictory theories about the nature of emotions such as fear. . . . Clearly the answer to the question: ‘What is fear?’ depends as much upon the psychological and philosophical theory of the commentator as it does on the situation in which the emotion emerges.

For those who are not well informed about the alleged nature and significance of dreams, especially nightmares, Bourke’s review of the psychological and philosophical theories is both amusing and enlightening, although there is nothing new here for those who are already familiar with this material. Nevertheless, Bourke’s review is a remedy for those who, devoid of critical thinking abilities, fall prey to psychobabble by those whose own views are by no means certain foundations for psychological inquiry, analysis, or therapy. If dreams are nothing more than instances of what might be called the brain’s indigestion of neural signals (perhaps Scrooge was closer to the truth than Freud), one can toss out one’s dream dictionaries and any theories, such as those of Freud and Jung, upon which the use of such alleged reference works are based. To paraphrase William Shakespeare, the cause of our dreams is in our bodies, not in our minds.

On that note, we will pause, taking up Bourke’s survey of the subject of fear again in future posts.

Free Horror Films, Part III

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The Internet Archive houses thousands of free items. They’re free because, their copyrights having expired, they’ve fallen into the public domain. Among the offerings are a number of classic horror films (descriptions are from the Internet Archives, where the authors are credited). (Click the title of the movie to visit its download site.)

Werewolf of Washington

A reporter who has had an affair with the daughter of the U.S. President is sent to Hungary. There he is bitten by a werewolf, and then gets transferred back to Washington, where he gets a job as press assistant to the President. Then bodies start turning up in D.C

Revolt of the Zombies

An expedition to Cambodia leads to the discovery of the process for creating zombie slaves.

Fall of the House of Usher

English dubs over French cards in this haunting version of Poe's classic tale. A stranger called Allan. . . goes to an inn and requests transportation to the House of Usher. The locals remain reluctant, but he gets a coach to transport him to the place. He is the sole friend of Roderick Usher. . . , who leaves in the eerie house with his sick wife Madeleine Usher. . . and her doctor.

Frankenstein

This is [Thomas] Edison’s COMPLETE 1910 silent Frankenstein film.

Killer Shrews

No summary available.

The Little Shop of Horrors

Roger Corman classic about a nerdy flower shop clerk who grows a giant, man-eating plant. Jack Nicholson makes his film debut as a dental patient who loves pain.

The Mad Monster

No summary available.

White Zombie

A young man turns to a witch doctor to lure the woman he loves away from her fiancée, but instead turns her into a zombie slave.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter

Legendary outlaw of the Old West Jesse James, on the run from Marshal MacPhee, hides out in the castle of Baron Frankenstein's granddaughter Maria, who proceeds to transform Jesse's slow-witted pal Hank into a bald zombie, which she names Igor.

Black Dragons

It is prior to the commencement of World War II, and Japan's fiendish Black Dragon Society is hatching an evil plot with the Nazis. They instruct a brilliant scientist, Dr. Melcher, to travel to Japan on a secret mission. There he operates on six Japanese conspirators, transforming them to resemble six American leaders. The actual leaders are murdered and replaced with their likeness and Dr. Melcher is condemned to a lifetime of imprisonment so the secret may die with him.

The Phantom Ship

Also known as "The Mystery of the Marie Celeste". [sic]

Indestructible Man

No summary available.

The Corpse Vanishes

A newspaper reporter begins to investigate after a series of brides die suddenly during their wedding. Her quest leads her to the secret of eternal youth and almost gets her killed.

Teenage Zombies

Teenagers Reg, Skip, Julie and Pam go out for an afternoon of water skiing on a nice day. They come ashore on an island that is being used as a testing center for a scientist and agents from "an eastern power." They seek to turn the people of the United States into easily controlled zombie like creatures. The agents steal Reg's boat, stranding the teens on the island. The four friends are then held captive in cages able only to speculate on their fate.

Nightmare Castle

No summary available.

The Red House

Curiosity propels two teens, Meg and Nath. . . to explore an apparently abandoned house in the countryside. Of course they are warned to stay away from the secluded place.

Bluebeard

Young female models are being strangled inexplicably. Will law enforcement be able to stop the crime wave before more women become victims?

The Ghost Walks

No summary available.

The Terror

A young officer in Napoleon's army pursues a mysterious woman to the castle of an elderly Baron where he discovers that she is the pawn of an old witch bent on driving the Baron to suicide.

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women

A team of astronauts crashes on the surface of Venus. Accompanied by their robot, they explore the surface and end up destroying the Venusian God. This film is also known as "The Gill Women" and "The Gill Women of Venus". This film began life as a Soviet-produced work. An American producer then added some new footage and changed the credits to hide the film's Soviet origin.

To download the movies:
After you find the title you want, using the categories and the search windows at the top of the homepage, click on the blue link to the film you want (it will usually be the title). Then, at the left of the screen, select FTP. (This way, if the download is interrupted, it will resume downloading at the point of interruption.) Right-click the link to open it in another window. Then, select from among the file types. Mpg (not the .mpeg) file is usually best. Right-click the selected file and click "Save Target As." The file will automatically download, but you can specify the directory that you want it to be saved in (or just let the computer determine the directory). The "My Videos" folder in the "My Documents" directory is a reasonable choice. Then, pop some corn, grab a soda, and enjoy!

(You can also watch the movies, cartoons, etc. without downloading them, although the screen area is rather small and you need high-speed Internet capability.)

Total Institutions As Horror Story Settings

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A total institution is a world unto itself. It is more or less self-contained and can function pretty much independently, without the need for an inordinate amount of outside assistance or support. These are examples of such institutions, many of which, for reasons we will consider in just a moment, are excellent as settings for horror stories:

• Boarding schools
• Colonies
• Circuses and carnivals
• Dude ranches
• Labor and logging camps
• Hospitals, medical and psychiatric
• Hotels
• Managed-care facilities and nursing homes
• Military and certain other government installations
• Monasteries and nunneries
• Museums and art galleries
• Prisons and reform schools
• Religious cult facilities
• Religious retreats
• Resorts
• Ships and submarines
• Spaceships or space stations
• Summer camps
• Universities

These locations supply much of their own casts of characters. A boarding school will be populated by administrators, students, support staff, and teachers. They may be visited, occasionally, by parents. Dude ranches will feature administrators, guests, riding instructors, and support staff. Hotels will include managers, desk clerks, bellhops and other support staff, including cooks and bartenders, and, of course, guests. Managed-care facilities and nursing homes will be peopled with an activities director, nurses, orderlies, managers, and patients. Family members, doctors, and government officials may visit such facilities on occasion. Military installations will include officers and enlisted personnel and some civilian support staff and may be visited on occasion by other military and civilian personnel, such as government officials, media personnel, and scientists or other experts. Prisons include guards, prisoners, support staff (such as a doctor and nurses), and wardens. Resorts include many of the same personnel as are featured at such other total institutions as hotels and dude ranches. Summer camps feature administrators, camp counselors, support staff, and campers. Parents may visit the camps as well, usually at the beginning and the end of the season. Universities are populated by administrators, professors, students, and a variety of support personnel such as secretaries, cooks, custodians, maintenance personnel, landscapers, and security and police forces. Such personnel can become characters in a horror story that takes place in a total institution.

A total institution can be remote from the rest of civilization. Even those that are in or near cities are, by their very nature as total institutions, set off from the larger community. In most cases, their isolation cuts them--and their residents and workers--off from the organizations and systems of the larger world, such as large-scale medical support, firefighting capabilities, law enforcement and military forces, educational institutions, power companies, repair services, grocery stores, gasoline supplies, and so forth, making them, over time, vulnerable on many levels. These institutions also cut off their residents and workers from the cultural belief system that supports daily life. Over a long period of time, the people in such places could revert to a primitive state or set up a society of their own that is based on values and beliefs that are alien to those of the larger world. Such institutions can also lead to the brainwashing of their residents and workers, especially when their isolation cuts them off from other views and perspectives against which to measure the ideas and statements of the institution’s leaders, creating an “us against them” mentality. Isolated total institutions can be vulnerable from both within and without.

Finally, the use of a total institution as a setting makes escape difficult or impossible once the horrors begin and puts the courage and resources of the characters to the ultimate test, the penalty for the failing of which is death, and the reward for passing is survival.

A few of the many stories (novels and movies) in which the action takes place in a total institution are:

• Alien (movie, by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, et. al.): The crew of the spaceship Nostromo investigates a signal from the moon of a nearby planet. On the moon, they discover a ruined and abandoned spaceship populated with monstrous aliens, one of which implants a fetus inside a Nostromo crew member, which is born aboard the crew’s vessel, where it rapidly attains adulthood. Total institution = spaceships.



• The Butterfly Revolution (novel, by William Butler): Winston Weyn maintains a diary in which he recounts the experiences he has at High Pines, a summer camp. The boys rebel against the camp leader, Mr. Warren, when he insists that they undertake a butterfly hunt. Taking over, they then also take over Low Pines, the nearby girls’ summer camp. Totalitarianism, serious crimes, and brutality ensue. Total institution = tropical island



• The Green Mile (novel, by Stephen King): A healer is convicted of sexually assaulting and killing two young girls whom he’d tried to cure and is sentenced to death. In the prison, he is tormented by a sadistic guard who ensures that the healer experiences a hideous death in the electric chair. Total institution = prison (and, later, a nursing home).



• It, the Terror From Beyond Space (movie, by Jerome Bixby): In rescuing the sole survivor from an expedition to Mars, a ship picks up a stowaway--the monstrous alien that killed the explorers. Now, it attacks the rescuers, picking them off one by one. Total institution: spaceship.



• Jurassic Park (novel, by Michael Crichton): Scientists use DNA recovered from the blood inside a mosquito preserved in amber to create dinosaurs, which they install in an island resort, but things go hideously wrong. Total institution = island resort.



• The Lord of the Flies (novel, by William Golding): Boys being evacuated during a war are stranded on a tropical island after the airplane that is transporting them is shot down. In an effort to institute order, a conflict arises that causes death and destruction among the boys. Total institution: tropical island. (Note: Stephen King often speaks of how he admires this novel and wishes he had written it.)



• The Relic (Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child): A scientist undergoes a horrific transformation as a result of eating a strange jungle plant and terrorizes the employees and guests of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. Total institution = museum.



• The Resort (Bentley Little): A haunted resort offers more fear and horror than fun in the sun for a vacationing family. Total institution = resort.



• The Shining (novel, by Stephen King) and 1048 (movie based on a short story by Stephen King): Hotels are the scenes for ghostly and demonic terror in this novel and this short story, respectively. Total institution = hotels.



• Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel, by Ray Bradbury): What’s coming is a carnival of horrible secrets and dark powers. Total institution = carnival



• Taps (movie, by Devery Freeman, Robert Mark Kamen, James Lineberger, and Darryl Ponicsan): Rather than allow their military school to be razed and replaced by condominiums, a team of cadets takes over the academy, fighting for their alma mater and its leader’s honor. Total institution = military boarding school.



• The Terror (novel, by Dan Simmons): A pair of ships become icebound in the Atlantic and are harassed by a strange creature that lives among the icebergs. Total institution: ships.

• University (novel, by Bentley Little): A Grecian god returns, wrecking havoc at an American university campus. Total institution = university.

• The Thing from Another World (movie, by Charles Lederer, based on a novella by John W. Campbell, Jr.): An alien shape shifter is discovered in a block of arctic ice; thawed out by scientists, it attacks and kills the staff of a remote research station. Total instution: arctic research station.

Everyday Horrors: Crawlspaces

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Not every house has one, but, for those that do, the crawlspace can be a source of anxiety, or even fear. In some cases, it may be a font of pure, unadulterated terror. Not quite a basement--in fact, not really even part of the house--the crawlspace, as its name implies, makes one crawl, belly down, and vulnerable, in a close, confined space. Already, just thinking about such a situation, causes the hackles to rise. Maybe it’s not necessary, one thinks, to thaw the frozen water pipe under the house or to investigate the strange scratching, clawing sound that seems, when one is seated in the cozy comfort of one’s well-lighted living room, to come from down there.

One of the most frightening aspects of the crawlspace has already been cited--it requires that one crawl, belly down, vulnerable, in a close, confined space in which standing or, in many cases, even sitting, is impossible. The crawlspace is dimly lit, too, by only the flashlight that one has in hand (or mouth), and, dropped--or, perhaps, snatched away--the bulb could shatter, leaving one in utter darkness, with over a ton of house above one, the residence become, perhaps, a tomb. Another disturbing aspect of the crawlspace is that, often, it offers only one way out--the small square or rectangular opening through which one entered. To escape, should escape become necessary, one would have to go back the way that he or she came--and what if the thing--the animal or creature, or monster--is behind one? It’s a safe bet, in a horror story, at least, that whatever’s in the crawlspace with the character will be not only far stronger than he or she, but also much nimbler and sprier. It will be able to dash and dart around inside the narrow space, so that, regardless of the direction a retreating homeowner (or maintenance worker) takes, the thing would already be there, cutting off the escape route.

And, as TV game show barkers are fond of barking, “That’s not all!” Like the basement, the crawlspace has cthuluian associations. Psychologically, it is connected to the Freudian id or the Jungian unconscious, individual and, possibly, collective. In the depths of this underground world, so to speak, there be monsters--the uncivilized, impulses of our animal ancestry, bestial and untamed--and dead bodies--the dark, sometimes sinister thoughts, desires, emotions, temptations, and experiences we have rejected and “buried,” more or less alive and kicking. And, as Xander Harris tells Buffy Summers, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's “Dead Man’s Party” episode, one “can’t just bury things,” because “they’ll come right back to get you.”

The ground upon which one lies, the vulnerable belly exposed to whatever may lie beneath, is a thin skin between the everyday world of the normal and the ordinary, governed by conscience, reason, cultural traditions, laws, and social mores and a hidden, subterranean world of the unknown, the untamed, the uncivilized, and the alien, where anything may lie in wait, albeit, whatever form the buried bodies take, they will almost certainly be hideous, repulsive, and hostile rather than beautiful, attractive, and friendly. At any moment, whatever lurks below may penetrate this thin layer between sanity and madness, reason and absurdity, love and fear, hope and despair. Cut off from family, friends, and society, one is trapped, alone in the dark, in the confines of a space as close and inescapable as the grave. It would be ironic for a residence to be transformed into a tomb, but fate loves irony, and this same transformation has occurred not merely once, but several times.

The lowly crawlspace (sorry, but I couldn’t resist!) has appeared, as a major player, in several movies (and in one of my own short stories). One such film is Crawlspace, which was released in 1986. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) offers a succinct summary of the plot: “A man who runs an apartment house for women is the demented son of a Nazi surgeon who has the house equipped with secret passageways, hidden rooms and torture and murder devices.”

A crawlspace also played a significant role in another movie of the same title, released in 1972. In this one, a homeless youth takes up residence in the crawlspace of a lonely, childless couple who befriended him. When he makes enemies by destroying a store, local residents avenge themselves upon the disturbed youth and the parents whom he’s adopted.

In yet another Crawlspace movie, released in 2000 as part of Pendulum Pictures’ Mental Maniacs DVD set, a sadistic kidnapper, wearing what might be a mask of human flesh, torments first one, and then another, man whom he traps in the crawlspace beneath his house. The second is Mike, who awakens “to find that he is trapped with no way out. A 'phone rings and the games begin. The captor calls himself ‘The Director’ and he claims to be directing a reality show in which Mike's life is at stake. If Mike is alive after three days of mayhem, he will be set free.”

In the horror films to date, crawlspaces have been interpreted primarily as metaphors for helplessness and have been subsumed under the labels of the slasher film, in which a crazed serial killer stalks and slashes nubile teens, and the splatter film, which focuses upon blood, guts, and gore, both of which are sometimes called “torture porn” by critics who find little, if any, socially redeeming value in their exploitation of bloodlust and its effects. The most disturbing aspect of the crawlspace, however--and the one that qualifies it for inclusion as an “Everyday Horror”--is the simple fact that many houses--perhaps yours--feature one of these twilight zones in which the near and dear connect with the distant and the feared.


“Everyday Horrors: Crawlspaces” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.