Everyday Horrors: Gangs

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Occasionally, as in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, by Jimmy Breslin, gangs are treated with humor. (The police and the New York and Chicago branches of La Cosa Nostra also refer to the midwest and east coast gangs' Los Angeles counterparts as the “Mickey Mouse Mafia.”) Most of the time, though, they’re treated with respect and fear. Although most people don’t think of the Mafia as a gang, considering them, instead, to be members of “organized crime,” they are, of course, a gang--or several loosely associated gangs, actually--by definition. The Hell’s Angels, like other so-called motorcycle clubs, are also gangs. Any organization, big or small (except the IRS and the federal government in general), that uses illegal methods, including extortion, intimidation, violence, and weapons, to effect compliance from victims for any reason is a gang.

According to The Mafia Encyclopedia, 2nd edition, by Carl Sifakis, one of the most violent gangs was the Westies, who lived in, terrorized, and controlled New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. When a Mafia loan shark, Ruby Stein, visited their neighborhood to collect some debts, the Westies murdered him and took over his collections. One member of the gang, Patrick (“Paddy”) Dugan, found this enterprise so lucrative that he continued to rob loan sharks even after the Westies had aligned themselves with the Gambino crime family. His fellow gang members overlooked his peccadilloes in this regard, as did Carlo Gambino, the godfather for whom, ostensibly, the Westies now worked as hired hit men. When Paddy killed a friend of the Westies’ leader, Jimmy Coonan, however, he’d finally gone too far, and Dugan himself was murdered. His body was cut into small pieces and distributed over a large part of the city, a piece here and a piece there, except for his fingers, which Coonan kept in a bag, along with those of the gang’s other victims, to intimidate people and to frustrate the police’s identification of the dead. The Westies had liked Paddy, however, and they honored his life with a wake. They took his decapitated head with them to a tavern, set it atop the bar, and plied it with drinks, even lighting a cigarette for what was left of their friend, placing it between his lips so Paddy--or his head, at least--could enjoy a last smoke. It was only when Coonan met John Gotti, who’d murdered Gambino so that he could take over the crime family that the previous godfather had led, that the Westies’ leader met “a grease ball tougher than we are.”

Given the record of such gangs (and those of many others), it’s no wonder that gangs have appeared as bad guys in several horror stories (mostly TV series or movies, rather than novels).

An early film with the unenviable title I Was a Teenage Vampire brings Dracula’s teenage son to America, where he feeds off the Vandals, a street gang, before coming to an untimely end from a severe case of sunburn as he flees on a motorcycle to the safety of his grave in the local cemetery, but is caught by the rays of the rising sun as his bike crashes into the cemetery’s gates. The Vandals reappear in another movie with the unfortunate title The Teenage Frankenstein Meets the Teenage Werewolf. (At least the studios knew how to market their products to a targeted audience!) In a previous film The Teenage Werewolf, a mad scientist-cum-hypnotist transformed Tony Rivers into a werewolf, but the teen wolf died in a fall. In this sequel, he’s back, a revenant risen from his grave, and he joins the Vandals. The gang attack a hunchback, Gregore Frankenstein, who happens to be a descendant of the original monster maker. Having acquired the remains of his ancestor’s creature, which he keeps in a woods, Gregore revives the monster, and it attacks the Vandals. In the ensuing fight between monster and werewolf, a forest fire is ignited, which consumes the monster while the werewolf escapes to the safety of a river. (See? We told you that teenagers and young adults are dangerous!)

In “Becoming,” an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an outlaw motorcycle gang of vampires arrives in Sunnydale to party and terrorize the local citizenry, having heard that the slayer herself has been slain. (Unknown to them, Buffy’s friend, Willow Rosenberg, a powerful witch, has brought the dead slayer back to life).

A street gang of vampires also stars as the villainous protagonists of The Lost Boys, one of whose members, Michael Emerson, attracted to the gang’s sole female member, Star, drinks blood, which he thinks is wine and is himself transformed into one of the undead. A novel by the same title was written by Craig Shaw Gardner for release with the film. The movie was part horror, part comedy, as its tagline indicates: “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire.”

In Gangs of the Dead, rival Los Angeles street gangs join forces with one another--and the police--to fight off an army of zombies born, so to speak, of an extraterrestrial virus that arrives courtesy of a meteorite. President Ronald Reagan once observed that the threat of war by an extraterrestrial species would unite the warring nations of the earth against a common threat. For street gangs, an army of dead men walking seems to work, too.


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

Alternative Explanations, Part IV: Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Alternative Explanations, Part III: Telekinetic Characters,” we considered ways by which skeptics seek to debunk claims that some people make concerning their ability to move or affect objects simply by the use of mental powers, an act known as telekinesis. In the final part of this series, we’ll consider how your horror story’s skeptical character might challenge the belief that vampires, werewolves, and zombies actually exist.

Vampires are corpses that demons possess and animate, causing them to terrorize the living, upon whose blood they feed, sucking it from their victims’ jugular veins after piercing them with their vampire fangs. Anyone whom the vampire bites also becomes a vampire, an incident that has permitted a mathematician to deliver devastating proof that vampires do not and cannot exist.

According to “Math proves that the Buffy universe harbors no more than 512 vampires,” Costa Efthimiou and Sohang Gandi, authors of Ghosts, Vampires, and Goblins: Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality, vampires do not and cannot exist because, if they did, they would soon “depopulate the earth.” According to the authors, were a vampire to appear on the earth in the year 1600, when the world’s population numbered 536,870,911 people, and this vampire fed upon only one person per month, thereby transforming him or her into a vampire, each of which newly created vampire also fed upon one human per month, transforming him or her into another vampire, the whole human population of the planet would have been transformed into bloodsucking fiends in only thirty months, despite any offset that would be gained by the human birth rate. Therefore, Efthimiou and Gandi conclude:

. . . that vampires cannot exist, since their existence contradicts the existence of human beings. Incidentally, theological proof that we just presented is of a type known as reductio ad absurdum, that is, reduction to the absurd. Another philosophical principal related to our argument is the truism given the elaborate title, the anthropic principle. This states that if something is necessary for human existence, then it must be true since we do exist. In the present case, the nonexistence of vampires is necessary for human existence. Apparently, whomever devised the vampire legend had failed his college algebra and philosophy courses.

Sorry, Buffy Summers, but your career as a “vampire slayer” and the difficult sacrifices it entailed as you sought to defend the world against bloodsucking fiends were totally unnecessary and ridiculous, and you could have had the normal life that you so often claimed to crave. Apparently, you really were nothing more than the paranoid schizophrenic that you were diagnosed to be in one of your television series’ episodes.

Wait a minute! Buffy also fought other paranormal and supernatural threats, including demons, ghosts, werewolves, and zombies. If one or more of these monsters actually exist, maybe she wasn’t completely crazy, after all, and maybe she didn’t waste the best years of her life.

We’ve already dealt with demons, ghosts, and vampires. But what about werewolves and zombies? Might they exist? Somewhere? Somehow?

A werewolf is a animal (or a human) that can switch back and forth from being a human (or an animal) to being an animal (or a human) and is believed to devour humans. (It’s all rather complicated.) Unfortunately, as our spoilsport extraordinaire, The Skeptic’s Dictionary, points out, “there are no documented cases of any human turning into a wolf and back.” The best we can come up with is lycanthropy, a delusion in which its victim believes he’s a wolf, just as a person may believe that he is possessed by demons. Perhaps especially hirsute men have experienced this delusion, adding to the belief that men and wolves are--or, at times, can be--pretty much the same thing. Extreme hairiness does occur, in both men and women (ever heard of the “bearded lady”?), usually as a result of the genetic disorder known as hypertrichosis or such disorders as adrenal virilism, basophilic adenoma of the pituitary, masculinizing ovarian tumors, or Stein-Leventhal syndrome. At least, that’s what your horror story’s skeptical character can suggest to explain the misguided beliefs of others that werewolves are afoot. The Skeptic’s Dictionary article on “werewolves” links to photographs of people who are afflicted with these conditions.

We’re going to conclude our review of paranormal and supernatural phenomena and the explanations that a skeptical character may offer as alternatives to those that claim that these phenomena result from the existence and exercise of mysterious, occult powers by considering the zombie.

According to the drill, zombies are soulless bodies created by voodoo sorcerers. Scientists believe that zombies are actual people who are drugged, kidnapped, buried alive, disinterred, and kept as slave laborers:

The black magic of voodoo sorcerers allegedly consists of chemicals, various poisons (perhaps that of the puffer fish) which immobilize a person for days, as well as hallucinogens administered upon revival. The result is a complacent, paralyzed, or brain damaged creature used by the sorcerers as slaves, viz., the zombies.

The other kind of zombie--the corpse that is revived but without benefit of the soul it once had, seems unlikely (okay, downright impossible) to anyone beyond the age of nine or ten, so if it’s this kind that’s supposed to be running loose through your story’s setting, the skeptical character has every right to cast aspersions upon the view that the antagonists are really and truly revenants. Indeed, his or her failure to do so would be cause to transform this undoubting doubter into a zombie him- or herself.

Sources Cited in the “Alternative Explanations” series.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary
Live Science
Federation of American Scientists
NOVA Online
MythBusters
Ghosts, Vampires, and Goblins: Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality

Poe and King: Two Unlikely Beauties

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Since the term “aesthetics” is generally used in relation to beauty, it may strike one as odd, or even bizarre, to see it associated with horror. A word of explanation is in order.

Structure has beauty. Unity has beauty. Coherence has beauty. Harmony and balance have beauty. A work, even if it treats of the horrifying and the terrifying, is beautiful if it exhibits these qualities. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems show these attributes. Therefore, such narratives as The Raven, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of the Amontillado,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are beautiful. They are works of art. Each word, each image, each figure of speech, and each part of the whole, in each case, builds toward a single effect--fear. Poe means to frighten his readers, and he carefully plots every incident of his story’s action to do just this. In his theory, outlined in “The Philosophy of Composition,” every word has a place in the bigger scheme of things, and every word must be in its place. The fact that his name remains in lights a century after his death is a measure of his success.

In horror fiction, Poe remains the master of masters. In our time, Stephen King is often held up as, well, the king of the horror genre. It’s doubtful that even King himself would claim to be of the same rank as Poe as a literary artist, though, however popular and prolific in output King may be. In fact, he refers to himself as the “literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.” Can it be said, though, that King has an aesthetics of horror? Maybe.

If we regard Aristotle as correct in his judgment that plot is the most important element of narrative, we may charge King with having an aesthetic. King knows how to tell a story, creating and maintaining suspense alongside pace and throwing a curve to his readers at just the right moment to keep them guessing (and reading). If Aristotle was right, King, in plotting his novels, might be said to create things of lasting beauty.

If, in striving for effect, Poe created whole new literary genres, King, in plotting his tales, recreated at least one--the horror genre. He took age-old, moldering themes, such as the vampire, and reenergized them. In bringing the parasitic bloodsuckers from Europe’s Gothic landscapes and installing them in small-town 'Salem's Lot, King not only gave them a local, and an American, home, but he also modernized them, making them, in a willing-suspension-of-disbelief-kind-of-way, believable and, therefore, frightening. King knows that home is not where one hangs one’s hat, but, rather, where one’s heart is, and, by making old world horrors at home in small-town America, he shocked and terrified and repulsed his countrymen, here and now. He also revolutionized the horror genre, which is no small feat in itself.

Home is Eden, King knows, and, so, he brought the serpent back into the garden. He did it by plotting his novels to demonstrate something simple but vital: what threatens one’s local community, one’s hometown, or one’s neighborhood, threatens oneself. That’s what’s scary nowadays, whether the threat takes the form of ancient vampires and werewolves or contemporary shape shifters and extraterrestrial entities beyond human ken.

Of course, some believe that Aristotle is mistaken about plot’s being the most important narrative element, pointing, instead, to character. The creation of memorable and significant literary personages who embody a great and lasting insight into humanity, as Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, or even Scarlett O’Hara, does, is, these critics argue, what counts as great literary art. One Huckleberry Finn or Carrie White is worth any number of plots, they say.

If their point of view is true, King stands, on less certain ground in having developed a horror aesthetic, for, in fact, character doesn’t depend upon horror; stories of all types are peopled, as it were, with characters, many of high artistic quality. Many of Charles Dickens’ novels have little to do with horror as a genre that is represented by Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, King, and the like, but his characters certainly are giants among their peers or, in many cases, hey are peerless.

For many, Henry James solved the problem of plot, raised, on one hand, by Aristotle and of character, raised, on the other hand, by the philosopher’s critics, asserting that the two are but flip sides of the same coin. Action (the incidents of which comprise the plot) represents character, James suggested, just as character determines action. To put it in simpler terms, one is what one does, and what one does is what one is. An alcoholic, for example, is someone who drinks to excess, and someone who drinks to excess is an alcoholic. If James is right, in plotting the action of his novels, King is representing his characters, and his characters, in turn, determine what will happen in his books.

Action, one may quibble, is not the same as plot. Action is what happens; plot is how and why it happens. Action is what a character does; plot is how and why he or she does it. E. M. Forrester (I believe) distinguished between the two with a simple example--or two simple examples, actually. This is an example of action, he said:

The queen died. Then, the king died.

This is an example of plot, he said:

The queen died. Then, the king died of grief.

The addition of the two words “of grief” explain how and why the king died. In the first instance, there is no necessary connection between the incident of the queen’s death and that of the king’s demise. The two incidents are related strictly through chronological sequence: one happens before the other. In the second instance, there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two incidents: the king’s grief, which was caused by the queen’s death, effects his own demise. A plot is a series of causally related incidents, each of which is cause by its antecedent and, in turn, causes its successor to occur.

In King’s fiction, bizarre, horrifying incidents (actions) occur with great regularity, but they don’t occur in a vacuum. They are related by a chain of cause and effect. Moreover, these plots happen in relation to a specific type of character--the man, woman, or child who lives in small-town, modern-day America. In tying together plots that involve strange incidents with today’s small-town residents, King unites past with present, old world with new world, tradition with innovation, childhood with adulthood, monsters with contemporary fears and anxieties. This marriage, whether made in heaven or in the other place, has a structure, a unity, a coherence, a harmony, and a balance that is beautiful to see--and to read. It seems safe to say that King’s horror fiction has an aesthetic; it’s just not lik, e Poe’s.

Creepy Crawlies Quiz

Note: Keep track of your answers so you can check your accuracy!

1. According to math, which monster is impossible?

A. Ghost
B. Vampire
C. Werewolf
D. Zombie

2. Which monster’s true purpose is to carry water away from buildings?

A. Demon
B. Gargoyle
C. Lamia
D. Witch

3. Which monster is created from the use of a toxic drug?

A. Vampire
B. Werewolf
C. Witch
D. Zombie

4. Which of these items were used to frighten away evil spirits?

A. Crystal balls
B. Jack-o-lanterns
C. Halloween masks
D. Ropes

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Christabel is about a(n)

A. Demon
B. Gargoyle
C. Lamia
D. Witch

6. Whose “keen fashion sense” helped her to fight monsters?

A. Buffy Summers
B. Daphne Blake
C. Nancy Drew
D. Prudence, Piper, and Phoebe Halliwell

7. According to ancient Hebrew legends, Adam’s first wife, Lilith, was a(n)

A. Ghost
B. Vampire
C. Witch
D. Zombie

8. Horus is an example of a(n)

A. Lycanthrope
B. Misanthrope
C. Therianthrope
D. Xenothrope

9. Which of these figures is considered an omen of death?

A. Banshee
B. Gorgon
C. Lamia
D. Siren

10. The enemies of the Norse gods were

A. Genies
B. Ghouls
C. Giants
D. Goblins

Click here to check your answers.

Imagining the Monster, Part I

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

Monsters represent that which is unnatural, that which is aberrant and abhorrent. As such, they may symbolize conditions, situations, ideas, or other realities that a society--or humanity as a whole--finds repulsive. Not only do monsters have souls, as it were--the realities that they symbolize--but they also have bodies--the physical forms that writers give them.

John Keats wrote, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter. . . .”

Many writers and critics agree that the same principle is true of monsters. That which we do not see is often much more terrifying than that which we do see. What we don’t see, we must imagine, and our imaginations are much abler to frighten us than things we see. We may defend ourselves from something visible or at least know which way to flee from it. It’s impossible to protect ourselves or to escape from something we cannot see. Moreover, we want to know our enemy. We believe, rightly or wrongly, that being able to confront our foe may help us to discover its weakness. It’s possible, for example, that the Cyclops had limited peripheral vision; therefore, he might be blindsided. If we can see the werewolf, we can shoot it with a silver bullet. Zombies may be frightening, unseen, but when, seen, we realize how slowly they shamble, and we have hope that we may defeat them. Not seeing that which threatens us makes it, in our minds, more frightening.

Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “bomb theory” to explain how suspense differs from shock or “surprise.” In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained his view:

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene [emphasis added]. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.

The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Something similar is true with respect to monsters. When we hear them, but don’t see them; when we hear of them, but don’t see them; when we view the carnage they leave behind them, but don’t see them, suspense builds. The monster becomes increasingly horrible. We build them up in our minds until they are horrible beyond words, horrible beyond depiction. That’s why, often, when we do see the monster, it’s usually disappointing. Remember when, toward the end of It, Stephen King finally lets his protagonists come face to face with the terrible shape shifter that has terrified them (and us) for hundreds of pages, and we learn that its true form resembles nothing more sinister than a gigantic spider? Talk about a letdown! The scene very nearly destroys the whole novel. We imagined nightmarish visions; we are given a spider. (The same is true of the monstrous Shelob, the gigantic spider in The Lord of the Rings.)

It’s better not to show, than to reveal, the monster at the heart of the story. Nevertheless, it’s usually shown at some point near the end of the story, in words in the novel and in images in the movie. Again, usually, it disappoints.

However, there are a few occasions during which the monster, even revealed, manages to terrify--and to delight. An example is the alien in Alien. Based upon paintings by H. R. Giger, who is himself a master of the macabre, the extraterrestrial antagonist that destroys Lt. Ripley’s crew is a truly terrifying specimen of the monstrous. It behooves us to ask ourselves why.

The answer is fairly straightforward. Giger’s monster terrifies because it is alien. It’s unlike anything we’ve encountered, but, at the same time, it suggests many things we do know, all of which are unsettling. It’s part insect, sort of, and part crustacean, kind of, and something mechanical, maybe, with a little worm, or dragon, thrown in, it seems. It may even be part machine. It’s also--dare we say it?--somewhat humanoid. It’s a synthesis of incongruous combinations that cross categories, which, if you’ve read the post on “The Horror of the Incongruous,” you’ll recognize as horrible in itself. It’s also horribly detailed. Giger shows us its every horrifying feature: sharp teeth, elongated dragon’s head, banded ribs, armor-like crustacean exoskeleton, a second mouth inside the primary mouth, an armor-penetrating tongue, fused phalanges, acidic blood and saliva. It’s a walking weapons platform, a total arsenal, and, lizard-like, it can run along walls or ceilings as easily as along floors, and it likes to ambush unsuspecting victims by attacking them from behind. Temperature extremes don’t bother it, and it can survive in a vacuum. Its exoskeletons fully contains its body heat, so it can’t be picked up by heat sensors. In short, this monster is an all-in-one package of terror that's virtually undefeatable. It's the monster-version of the Swiss army knife, the shape shifter given one polymorphous form.

The monster's life cycle is horrifying, too, as it represents a parody of human conception, pregnancy, and gestation. The species’ queen lays an egg that produces a parasitic facehugger. The facehugger attacks a victim, attaching itself to his or her face, and, introducing a tubular proboscis into the victim’s esophagus, implants an alien embryo within the recipient’s chest. Whether the host is male or female doesn’t matter; after accepting some of its host’s characteristic features--bipedalism, for example--the parasitic embryo emerges, ripping its way through its host’s abdomen in a parody of the birth process. The whole conception-pregnancy-gestation process makes women interchangeable with men as mothers, suggests that human reproduction is a parasitic process, and makes birth an act of violence. Understandably, feminists have detected a good deal of misogyny and sexism in the Alien monster. For this reason, as well as those of its alien appearance and abilities, the monster is both fascinating and truly monstrous.

What makes the Alien monster so monstrous? Let’s recap:

• It’s alien from anything we’ve seen before.


• It’s an incongruous synthesis of various creatures, unsettling in themselves.


• It’s shown in great detail.


• Its abilities, like its appearance, is an incongruous synthesis of various other creatures’ capabilities.


• Its life cycle parodies human reproduction processes.
  

Giger’s monster suggests some basic principles that can be used to create other horrifying monsters, which we will take up “Imagining the Monster, Part II,” to be posted later.

Dream Monsters

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

People may disagree as to whether the idea of dream analysis or interpretation has any real value or significance, as such psychologists as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Frederick Perls, and others contend they do, but, even if one determines that the idea is without foundation, he or she may benefit from the work that dream analysts or interpreters have done with regard to defining the symbolic significance of specific dream images, for the associations these researchers have compiled have longstanding parallels in literature and language that doesn’t depend upon psychological theory.

• Alien (extraterrestrial) - unknown parts of the personality
• Angel - moral qualities and values
• Blackbird - bad omen; lack of ambition or motivation
• Blood - life, passion, disappointments
• Cannibal - energy drain upon others
• Castle - recognition; self-esteem
• Cave - unconscious mind
• Caveman - uncivilized, instinctive aspects of the self
• Cemetery - end of a habit or behavior; sadness concerning the death of a loved one
• Corpse - discontinued or repressed aspect of the self; unresponsiveness
• Demon - socially undesirable or unacceptable aspects of the self; negative behaviors
• Devil - temptation to do or to continue doing socially undesirable or unacceptable actions
• Dragon - unbridled passion; wild behavior
• Exorcism - attempt or desire to regain control
• Fog - confusion; worry
• Ghost - aspects of the self of which one is afraid; memories; past deeds; alienation
• Giant - overwhelming obstacle or adversary
• God - perfection; higher self
• Goddess - feminine side (females); fear of women (men)
• Gorilla - extreme or wild behavior
• Grave - unconscious mind; death; feelings about death; uneasiness
• Graveyard - discarded aspects of the self
• Halloween - death
• Haunted house - unresolved childhood trauma
• Idol - false values
• Island - relaxation, comfort, leisure; boring routine; isolation and aloofness
• Lightning - revelation; awakening[ insight; purification; shock
• Mausoleum - illness, death
• Monster - grief, misfortune
• Ogre - self-criticism
• Poltergeist - lack of control
• Rabies - anger, hostility, lack of control
• Rat - doubt, worry, fear
• Rot - wasted opportunity, potential
• Satan - evil, wrongdoing
• Serpent - intelligence, deception, temptation, sexual freedom
• Skeleton - undeveloped potential or opportunity
• Skin - ego defenses; superficiality
• Skull - danger, death, evil
• Spirit - death
• Storm - overwhelming experience or emotion
• Thunder - rage
• Tomb - hidden aspects of the self
• Torture - feelings of victimization or need for punishment
• Vampire - sensuality, sexuality, death, drug addiction, dependency
• Werewolf - posturing, insincerity, hypocrisy
• Witch - destructive power of women
• Zombie - emotional detachment

Why Monsters? Why Metaphors?

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

First, they have presence.

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

Here’s the way that Percy describes the scene:

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

Later, a similar experience happens to Binx:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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