Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
In
advertisements, the need to escape, Jib Fowles informs the readers of
Mass Advertising as Social
Forecast, is often
figurative, referring to the need to get away from it all for a bit
of rest and relaxation. For this reason, the need to escape is often
associated with pleasure, and it need not be “solitary.” Two or
more people can “escape together into the mountaintops” or to a
resort, or a couple may escape on a romantic getaway designed for
just the two of them.
Of
course, an escape can be literal, too. One can seek to escape from
physical danger or incarceration. The type of escape in horror
fiction may start with the former type of escape, as it does in I
Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998),
and turn into the latter type of escape, or it may begin with a
trapped or imprisoned character seeking to escape from his or her
confines, as in Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The
Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), Hide
and Seek
(2005), or the series of Saw
(2004-present) movies. In horror, after all, the theme is loss. In
the case of horror fiction that appeals to the need for escape,
escape is difficult or impossible, and it is likely to be denied
altogether, although, in rare cases, escape may be permitted.
“The
Pit and the Pendulum”: Poe's short story was inspired by his
reading of an account of Napoleon Bonaparte's general, Antoine
Charles Louis, Comte de Lasalle's, visit to the Palace of the
Inquisition in Toledo, Spain, after his entry into the city. As Kevin
J. Hayes points out in The
Annotated Poe, Poe alters
the sequence of events as they were reported in his source, “Anecdote
towards the History of the Spanish Inquisition,” having the general
arrive after his own story's protagonist has been sentenced to death,
so that the Inquisition's enemy can rescue the condemned prisoner
just before he is killed, thereby preserving his narrative's “tension
and terror.” Poe's story is a relatively rare example of a
protagonist who escapes his horrific fate, thanks to the intervention
of another.
Hide
and Seek: After the suicide of his wife, Allison, psychologist
David Callaway takes his nine-year-old daughter Emily to upstate New
York, hoping the change of scenery will help Emily recover from the
loss of her mother. Instead, Emily is placed in extreme danger: David
has developed dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality
disorder. He now has both his own personality and that of the
murderous “Charlie,” who emerged to murder Allison after David
witnessed her being unfaithful to him during a New year's Eve party.
He himself has blocked the memory of Charlie's murder of Allison and
truly believes she drowned herself in their bathroom.
When David discovers he has never unpacked the boxes in
the study of the house he is renting, despite having been in the room
on multiple previous occasions, he realizes he has another
personality. By now, he has killed again, having pushed a local
woman, Elizabeth, from his daughter's bedroom window, and he kills a
third time when the local sheriff questions him about Elizabeth's
disappearance. His family friend, Dr. Katherine Carson, also a
psychologist, pays a visit, but David shoves her down the basement
stairs, where she sees the sheriff's body. David then initiates a
game of hide and seek with Emily, who escapes from her bedroom, and
hides in the cave in which she first encountered Charlie.
Taking
the sheriff's firearm, Katherine forces her way out of the basement
and discovers David hunting for Emily. After Emily distracts David,
Katherine shoots him, thereby rescuing Emily. The movie provides four
alternate endings. In the first, which is used in the version of the
film shown to United States audiences, Emily, living with Katherine,
seems well adjusted, despite the horrific trauma she has suffered.
However, when she leaves the table, where she has been drawing while
eating her breakfast, to accompany Katherine to school, the camera
shows that she has drawn herself with two heads, suggesting that,
like her father, Emily has developed multiple personality disorder,
in which case she may have escaped her ordeal physically, but she has
not escaped the experience mentally. In another possible ending,
Emily's drawing of herself shows her with only one head,
implying that she does not have multiple personality disorder.
Like the ending shown to U. S. Audiences, alternates
three, four, and five suggest that Emily has developed multiple
personality disorder.
The third ending shows Emily in a bedroom. As Katherine
tucks her in, she assures Emily that she loves her. As Katherine
leaves the room, Emily asks her to leave the light on, but Katherine
says she cannot do so. She shuts the door, which contains a screened
window, and locks it from outside, revealing the bedroom's location
as that of a psychiatric hospital. Emily gets out of bed, starts to
count, and enters the bedroom closet, and grins at her reflection in
the mirror.
The fourth alternate ending is identical to the third,
except that, in this version, Emily does not count.
The fifth possibility starts the same way as the third,
but the bedroom is in Emily's new home, not in a psychiatric ward.
After Katherine tucks Emily into bed and reassures her that she loves
her, Emily gets out of bed to play Hide and Seek with her reflection.
Although
one of the five endings suggests that Emily has escaped, both
physically and psychologically, from her father's murder of her
mother and two other adults and his attempted murder of her, the
existence of the four alternative endings imply that she is
psychologically damaged and may well have developed multiple
personality disorder. If, on the basis alone of the number of
possible endings, we calculate the odds that Emily did, in fact,
psychologically escape her ordeal, her chance of having done so is
only twenty percent—not very good odds.
I
Still Know What You Did last Summer: After
Julie James accompanies her friends to an island resort, the holiday
retreat loses power as a hurricane advances toward the island. Later,
their only remaining means of communication, a two-way radio, is
destroyed, and they are left alone with a killer, a fisherman named
Ben whom Julie and some of her friends had thrown into a lake last
summer. They'd thought they'd killed him when their vehicle, the
driver of which was drunk, struck him on a mountain road.
One
by one, Julie's friends are killed. Only three survive: Julie, her
boyfriend Ray, who joined the party late, after evading an earlier
attempt on his life, and Karla, Julie's Boston roommate. The Coast
Guard rescues them, and Julie marries Ray. While he brushes his
teeth, the bathroom door is shut and locked. Julie, seated on the bed
in their bedroom, sees Ben under the bed. She screams, as he grabs
her with the hook that replaces a long-lost limb, and she is hauled
beneath the bed, her fate remaining a mystery.
Did
Julie escape her past? Although she goes to the island retreat hoping
to forget the painful memories and nightmares associated with her
participation in the events of last summer, Julie encounters Ben
again, as she and her friends are stalked, and Ben kills several of
them. Julie is almost killed herself, but Ray rescues her. The Coast
Guard takes them back to the mainland, and they escape the island and
the hurricane.
Although
she seeks happiness, marrying Ray, Julie is captured again at the end
of the movie by her nemesis, and her husband and protector is locked
in the bathroom. Audience members are not shown Julie's fate, but it
seems she may not have escaped her past, after all. A year after he
was left to die in the lake, Ben has returned to avenge himself, and
he kills again, as he had a year ago. Now that he has captured Julie,
it seems unlikely she will escape the doggedly persistent serial
killer.
Saw
series: The Saw
series of horror movies focus on the lengths to which captive men and
women will go to escape. “John Kramer, also called the 'Jigsaw
Killer' or simply 'Jigsaw' . . . . was introduced briefly in Saw
and developed in more detail in Saw II.
Rather than killing his victims outright, Jigsaw traps them in
situations that he calls 'tests' or 'games' to test their will to
live through physical or psychological torture and believes if they
survive, they will be rehabilitated.”
Ordered
to kill his fellow prisoner, Adam Stanheight, by six o'clock or have
his wife and daughter killed instead, Dr. Lawrence Gordon saws off
his own foot to escape. After cauterizing his wound with a steam
pipe, Gordon leaves Stanheight in a bathroom as he goes to save his
family and obtain assistance for Stanheight, and Kramer makes Gordon
his apprentice as a sort of perverse reward for having survived the
test. In Saw
III,
flashbacks reveal that another of Gordon's apprentices, Amanda Young,
kidnapped Stanheight and murdered him to put him out of his misery.
Other sequels subject other victims to a variety of
other mechanical traps invented by Kramer. Kramer carves out a
jigsaw-shape of flesh from subjects who failed to escape his tests to
show that they lacked the “survival instinct,” a practice which
led the media to refer to him as the “Jigsaw Killer.” To date,
there are eight movies in the series.
Due
to its gory effects, the Saw
series has been severely criticized, with detractors referring to it
as “torture porn.” The series certainly appeals to the need for
escape in an extreme fashion, and it's not for everyone. It does
suggest that the “survival instinct” is such, in some
individuals, at least, that a captive subjected to physical and
psychological torment will do anything to escape, but it also shows
that others will not. Gordon, for example, cuts off his own foot
rather than killing Stanheight and then seeks help for the man he was
ordered to kill.
It
appears that Kramer admires Gordon's courage, if not his altruism,
because he “rewards” the doctor for defying the command he was
given and finding an alternative way to escape without sacrificing
either Stanheight or his own family. Perhaps it was Gordon's
intelligence, as much as his courage, that Kramer admired. In any
case, the fact that Kramer would “reward” Gordon shows that,
despite his own cruelty and monstrous capacity for evil, there
remains the ability, at least, to appreciate certain attributes of
human nature that transcend those of base instincts.
It's
not surprising that the horror genre would include appeals to the
need to escape. What may surprise is its examination of the effects
of callous behavior on surviving victims. These effects include the
development of mental disorders; lifelong guilt, fear, distrust, and
misery; and death, but, on occasion, they also reflect courage,
compassion, and a regard for others that's greater than one's own
need to escape. Horror fiction is about loss, but, as horrific as its
losses are, they are not always complete, and there is the chance
that victims may not only survive, but eventually live at least a
semblance of normal life.
But
first, of course, they have to escape.