Stephen King: Homophobia? Repressed and Sublimated Homosexuality? We Report; You Decide

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: In this and a few subsequent posts, I summarize and comment upon essays concerning horror fiction that appear in Gender, Language, and Myth, edited by Glenwood Irons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Although some of the claims in these essays seem far-fetched (to me, at least), others appear to have some validity and even some practical application. In any case, readers of Chillers and Thrillers are likely to find that these synopses offer unusual takes on the theory and practice of writing horror fiction.


“The horrors of [Stephen] King’s world,” Robin Woods writes in “Cat and Dog: Teague’s Stephen King Movies,” “are the horrors of our culture writ large, made visible and inescapable” (Gender, Language, and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, edited by Glenwood Irons, 310). If this insight is true (and King’s enormous popularity suggests that it may be), the implications are likely to be horrifying, indeed, for many, for Woods sees, in the horror maestro’s works, four “culturally specific disturbances” that take the forms of “ambivalence about marriage and the family,” “male aggression and masochism,” “homophobia,” and “repressed and sublimated homosexuality” (304-311), the latter two of which are the concerns of this post.

According to Woods, King’s fiction discloses the author’s homophobic attitude, both in the author’s occasional “derogatory reference” to homosexuals or homosexuality (in Firtestarter, a male character “who exactly parallels the little girl’s strange, dangerous and defiantly anti-establishment abilities” is referred to as a “faggot” [306]), but, more often, by way of “association”:

The corruptible pimply fat man in The Stand. . . has been afraid that he might be homosexual; Stillson, the monstrous future president of The Dead Zone who may bring about the end of the world, never goes out with women and has a constant male companion; one of the supreme horrors witnessed by the little boy (in Kubrick’s film by the mother) in The Shining is. . . [a] homosexual [act]; the vampire and his assistant in ‘Salem’s Lot. . . are rumored to be a gay couple (306).

Those who have read King’s novels are apt to agree with Woods’ assessment; King does seem to give vent to homophobic biases in his work, just as he champions his own causes, interests, and beliefs (CNN and liberal politics, for example, in Under the Dome and abortion and feminism in Insomnia), and he isn’t shy about damning organizations, institutions, agencies, and individuals which or whom he finds objectionable, whether they are homosexual men, lesbians, or others. If King is homophobic, as Woods (and King’s own work) suggests, Woods’ insights concerning the causes of homophobia are all the more interesting, although Woods himself is careful to indicate that he is interested, in “Cat and Dog” “in psychoanalyzing a group of texts (and through those texts the tensions and struggles within our culture), not the author as a person” (304).

Sigmund Freud, Woods believes, has conclusively demonstrated that men and women are, from birth (that is, “innately”) capable of responding to, and perhaps enjoying, sex with either their own or the opposite sex (that is, are “bisexual”). However, society demands “that the homosexual side of that bisexuality” be “repressed in order to construct the successfully ‘socialized’ adult.” However, as Freud points out, repressed tendencies are apt to resurface, and the “homosexuality” that adults repress may, meanwhile, be “experienced as a constant, if unconscious threat”--or, in horror fiction, as an inner demon or monster. Woods believes that homophobia arises from an individual’s failure to adequately repress his or her (mostly his) “own bisexuality,” which causes him to act out in violence against either other men or women: “Masculine violence in our culture. . . must be read as the result of the repression of bisexuality. Violence against women: the woman represents the threat of the man’s repressed femininity. Violence against other men: the man represents the threat of the arousal of homosexual desire” (307).

Woods’ definition (or redefinition) of homophobia and his association of it with male violence against both other men and women as representations of the homophobe’s own threatened sense of heterosexual masculinity on the one and his own threatened sense of the feminine aspects of his nature on the other hand are certainly astute; perhaps they are even true. If they are accurate, his hypotheses provide critics of literature in general, and horror fiction in particular, with useful tools of analysis. He applies these observations to King’s fiction, suggesting that “the ‘beautiful [that is “non-sexual”] friendship’ of a man and an adolescent boy” in ‘Salem’s Lot is the means by which “the vampires are finally (though ambiguously) destroyed” in “an extraordinarily precise account of the enactment of repression.” Likewise, Woods argues, “Thinner. . . Can easily be read as a paranoid fantasy about AIDS” (308).

In King’s fiction, Woods argues, “the repressed and its inexorable return” is dramatically set forth in specific, well-defined places or is embodied in particular individuals such as “the Marsten House of ‘Salem’s Lot, the Overlook Hotel of The Shining, the possessed car of Christine, the Micmac burying-ground of Pet Sematary, the gypsies of Thinner,” and, he adds, “the fascination of the novels is clearly the fascination of these potent evocations of the repressed, to which the protagonists and the reader are irresistibly drawn” (311). It is as if these locations and individuals, set off from mainstream society’s arena of affairs and participants, are profane places and impious persons, condemned places and damned people, our inner demons, or shadows (to employ the Jungian term), which we, unable to disown completely, incarcerate in places we mark as off limits or embody in persons we identify as pariahs. When we stumble across such a place or encounter such a person, we meet the inner demons whom we have banished; the repressed returns, but, even then, we recognize these repressed urges and desires as monstrous. They are to be resisted, banished anew, exiled, or destroyed, never embraced. By confining them to places or persons possessed, as it were, we both identify these tendencies and instincts as other than ourselves and as urges that are rightly to be avoided when possible and banished or destroyed when they can no longer be ignored. Had we not cast these parts of our own unconscious into the outer limits of our existence as human beings, we would become our inner demons, and our society would change, perhaps irrevocably.

Woods even offers a picture of the hell that would result should we embrace the monsters in our looking-glasses:

Centrally, it would involve the full recognition and acceptance of constitutional bisexuality, with all the implications and consequences of such an acceptance: the transformation of male and female roles and heterosexual relations, the rethinking of the family, the positive acceptance of homosexual love as natural rather than aberrant, the overthrow of socially constructed norms of masculinity and femininity, the recognition of infantile eroticism (310).

In a word, the consequence of the acceptance of the other within us, of the shadow that is both male and female without being either sex exclusively, would be the chaos of social and cultural nihilism. It is to the brink of this abyss, Woods suggests, that King’s “homophobic” fiction brings his readers, but it is an abyss from which the horror maestro himself balks, unable, at last, to give rein to his inner demons which are, likewise, “the horrors of our culture writ large”:

Yet in the novels, as in the Gothic generally, the energies that give the world its potency can only [sic] be depicted as monstrous: they threaten that normality to which the books believe themselves to be committed. The impasse of the novels is the impasse of our culture. There are roads beyond it, but they lie necessarily outside the Gothic. To travel them would require a total rethinking of the ‘return of the repressed’ in positive terms. Firestarter, the most positive of all King’s novels and the least related to the Gothic genre, suggested that he was about to engage on just such an undertaking, though the subsequent novels have conspicuously withdrawn from it (310).

There are some places too deep and dark, it seems, for even King, and, if his fears are those of “our culture,” too deep and dark for the rest of us, too, which may be just as well, since only the fools among us would be likely to rush in where King fears to tread.

Note: Recently, I discovered a Tumbler blog devoted to citing instances of King's references, in his fiction, to penile erections. There are far too many, it seems, to attribute them to mere coincidence. King appears to be fascinated by phalli--in his fiction, at least. Often, critics have contended, homophobic individuals are secretly fascinated by such matters. Is King homophobic? We report; you decide.

Frazetta: Work That Is Beautiful Even When Horrific

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Artists are imaginative people. Most of us are, but few of us, unless we are artists ourselves, are as imaginative as those who make their livings by exercising--and, in the case of those artists who illustrate horror fiction, perhaps exorcising--their imaginations on a regular, if not routine, basis. In previous posts, we have considered the art of Rene Magritte (a superb surrealist), H. R. Giger (whose biomechanical art was accomplished with airbrushes), and the pen-and-ink illustrations of such Weird Tales artists as Margaret Brundage and Virgil Finlay. In this post, we turn our gaze upon Frank Frazetta, a pioneer in, and master of, contemporary fantasy, science fiction, and (occasionally) horror art. The purpose of cover art, we argue, is to sell the magazines upon which it appears. For the male adolescents who made up most of the readership of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines devoted to horror, scantily clad or nude women, often in perilous situations, accounted for a lot of the images that appeared on the covers. Occasionally--especially when technique outweighed theme--such masters as Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and Julie Bell departed from imperiled, half-naked maidens to depict other themes. Sometimes, a sexual--or a sexualized--undercurrent remained--but the direct appeal of this type of art was the physical and martial prowess of the hero, depicted as a sinewy, usually lone, adventurer who represented a law unto himself and just happened--most of the time, at least--to fight on the side of right. In other words, he was fantasy and horror’s answer to the knight in not-so-shining armor (who later was transfigured into the Western’s laconic sheriff or gunfighter). If the nude or semi-nude damsel in distress represented the type of woman whom the adolescent male (or those adolescent males who read Weird Tales and its ilk, at any rate) wanted to meet, if not necessarily take home to mom, the barbarian as lone-wolf avenger and righter of wrongs represented this reader’s alter ego, the man whom he would like to be or, perhaps, to become. In Frazetta’s artwork, the two archetypical characters--imperiled damsel and anti-heroic rescuer--often were depicted together. In fact, there were often several nude or half-naked damsels in distress, all at the same time, for the hero (or anti-hero) (frequently, a barbarian) to rescue. When Frazetta’s paintings weren’t suggesting to boys that real men rescue women (who, it seems, had a penchant for imperiling themselves), they created a mood that is consistent with mystery, if not always horror. A case in point is his painting, The Moon’s Rapture, the title of which is obviously a pun upon the use of “moon” as a slang term for the buttocks. In the painting, there are two moons--one lunar, the other anatomical. It goes without saying which of the two is the source of the adolescent male’s “rapture.” 

The painting is interesting for more than its subject matter, however, as it demonstrates several features common to Frazetta’s artwork in general. A full moon, not featureless--shaded patches in green, purple, orange, and gray suggest craters--appears in a blue-gray sky, its upper hemisphere veiled, as it were, by the mossy branches of a great tree. The back of the female figure’s head overlaps the bottom arc of the moon, and her right arm is raised as she clutches one of the tree’s branches to support herself as she stares, presumably enraptured, at the moon. Nude, she stands upon one of the thick, serpentine boughs of the tree, one of her ankles crossed over the other, her left arm at her side. Except for the moss-covered, mostly brown and gray limbs in the painting’s lower foreground, the muted blue-gray sky, and the dappled colors that signify the moon’s craters, the only other color in the painting is that of the female’s figure, which, since she is naked, is more extensive than it would be were she clothed. The effect of the darkness across the top of the painting, down its right edge, at its left edge, and at its bottom is to frame the female figure, drawing the viewer’s attention to her body and, since her buttocks are projected back, toward the viewer, as it were, as a result of her stance, focusing the viewer’s concentration upon her derriere. The title’s play on words, The Moon’s Rapture, is hard to miss. As the female figure is enraptured by the moon upon which she gazes, the viewer--likely to me male, since Frazetta illustrated the covers of magazines purchased largely by adolescent males--is enraptured by her own “moon.” This painting associates women and femininity with nature in general and with the moon in particular, as do many myths, legends, and literary traditions. Archetypes serve the painter’s purpose, giving the images a depth that they might not have otherwise, showing women to be forces as enchanting to men as the beauty and mystery of the natural order is, or can be, to women. The Barbarian is typical of Frazetta’s depiction of the lone wolf who fends for himself, seeking vengeance or, more rarely, justice for others (usually an imperiled woman). Lean and mean, the barbarian stands, muscles bulging, his left hand resting upon the hilt of his unsheathed sword, which has penetrated the hill underfoot. His garb is slight, but exhibits his machismo. Pirate fashion, he wears earrings and sports a necklace that appears to have been fashioned of animal fangs or claws. His chest and abdominal muscles are as individually distinct as if they were sculpted from flesh instead of marble, and the wide, leather wristband and matching belt are both decorated with metal studs. An ornate scabbard hangs, empty, at his waist, from which dangles the lengths of a chain. On his right forearm, he wears a simple bracelet. He also wears boots with large cuffs. At first, because of the fiery yellow background against which he, an imposing, dark-haired, sun-darkened figure, stands, and the darkness of the mound upon which he is, as it were, rooted by his sword, it is not apparent that the hill is built not of soil alone but also of the body parts--an arm and a skull are visible--and a battleaxe--of enemies he has vanquished. The fiery yellow sky behind him has an almost subliminal quality as well. After discerning the body parts in the hill, skulls, a castle upon a mountainside, vague suggestions of tree branches, and a bird--an eagle or maybe even a phoenix--emerge, as it were, from the wavering flames, representing, perhaps, the memories of the barbarian and the souls of the dead or both.

At the barbarian’s feet, her flesh of a hue similar to that of the fiery yellow sky, and looking as if she herself is emerging from the hill, a woman, nude but for the armbands that adorn her left biceps, rests her head against the barbarian’s left calf. Has she been rescued from the hands of the dead who lie beneath the victor’s feet? It seems that she is the only spoil of battle that he has seen fit to spare and, therefore, the only one that he regards as having any value. What is important in the barbarian’s world, Frazetta’s portrait of this pagan warrior suggests, is his physical and martial prowess, his memories of vanquished foes (or, it may be, his possession of their spirits), and women (albeit as little more than sex objects that may be acquired as possessions, or as part of the victors’ spoils of battle). Part of the appeal of Frazetta’s work is that it is often based upon these archetypal, if sexist, images of the masculine and the feminine, suggesting that men are loners who wage war with one another, with beasts, and with the occasional monster, exhibiting their strength, stamina, and fighting skills, and, to the notion that, to the victor, go the spoils, including ubiquitous half-naked damsels in distress. In other words, his depictions of men and women fit the idealized, if adolescent, ideas of the sexes that are typical of the readers of the types of magazines upon the covers of which Frazetta’s work was apt to appear. The rest of the appeal of the artist’s illustrations and paintings lies in the superb talent and the accomplished technique with which Frazetta draws and paints. Even when he depicts horror, the result is, in its own peculiar way, a thing of beauty.

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.)

Conversation Partners: Creating Mars and Venus

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

 

In science fiction, humanoid robots were once all androids, albeit without the specific parts that, among humans (and plants and animals), make a body male. In more recent years, as women increasingly enter the ranks of science fiction writers, factories have begun to offer feminine, if not actually female, versions of cyborgs, robots, and other servo-mechanisms of humanoid appearance. Known as fembots or gynoids, these models, like the androids, feature secondary, rather than primary, sexual characteristics, their anatomical curves distinguishing them from their more angular android brothers. However, the ways these feminine humanoids see and interact with the world, including how they converse with others, also often distinguishes them from their masculine counterparts.

A relatively recent book informs us of the true origins of men and women. The former are from Mars, it claims, the latter, from Venus. The book’s origins of the sexes derive, possibly, from the biological signs for male and female. The sign for males is the familiar circle out of the upper right arc of which projects something that looks like an arrow but is supposed to be a spear, just as the circle represents a shield, characterizing men as warriors, belonging to the cult of Ares, or Mars, the god of war. The sign for females is the equally familiar circle from which is suspended, from the nadir of its lower arc, a cross, the whole representing the hand-mirror of the goddess of love, Venus, or Aphrodite. Venus, the symbol seems to suggest, thy name is vanity.

Man, the warrior, and woman, the toilette aficionado--these are the images that correspond to those of the sexes, and, if the work of Deborah Tannen and various sociologists and psychologists is correct, scientific evidence may bear out these rather sexist conceptions of sex and gender, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Xena, the Warrior Princess, notwithstanding.

By knowing the differences in the ways that men and women communicate, a writer may realistically portray conversations between same-sex and opposite-sex male and female characters realistically. In addition, when dramatic situations in which men and women are the speakers occur, these differences in the way that they communicate can lead to the essence of plot itself, story conflict.

According to Tannen’s essay, “Sex, Lies, and Conversation,” boys and girls segregate themselves as youths, boys keeping company with other boys and girls keeping company with other girls. Therefore, separately, the members of each sex teach one another (and, therefore, the men or women that they later become) how to communicate. Viva la difference!

Boys’ groups, Tannen says, are larger and more inclusive than girls’ groups. They’re also hierarchical, with an underdog and a top dog, and conversation among the members of the all-male group tends to be “agonistic,” or warlike, peppered with “ritual challenges.” Conversation is akin to debate, with one boy confronting his fellow with counterarguments. If one of them raises a personal problem as a topic of conversation, his peers are likely to dismiss it as being less important than it seems. Speakers sit “at angles to each other,” only occasionally “glancing at each other,” and leap from topic to topic, rather than focusing for long on any one subject. In public, the males of the species speak to show their knowledge and to fend off the verbal attacks of their peers. However, they don’t like to listen, for, as a holdover from their boyhood days in hierarchical groups, they feel that listening, a seemingly passive role, makes them subordinate to speakers, who play a more apparently active role. They attend silently to the words of others. At home, having nothing to prove and no one to fend off, men tend to speak much less. For them, relationships are based on their relative statuses within the group, and the cement that binds them together is participatory activity, or “doing things together.”

Girls’ groups, Tannen says, are smaller, less inclusive, and more democratic, with members being regarded as equals rather than as greater or lesser subordinates assembled under the authority of a top dog. Their conversation is more sympathetic, intended to “establish rapport.” Rather than confronting a peer with counterarguments, girls are more likely to suggest alternative thoughts, often in the form of non-threatening, or helpful, questions. Personal problems, as topics of feminine conversation, elicit sympathy and solidarity from listeners. Girls maintain almost constant eye contact, looking at one another’s faces directly, and they tend to stay on the same topic for much of their conversation. To indicate that they are listening, girls (and women) often nod their heads and make “listening noises.” In public, afraid that they may offend someone, “spark disagreement, or appear to be showing off,” women tend to speak less, but at home, they are more comfortable in expressing their views, and tend to speak more. For them relationships are founded upon intimacy, and the cement that binds them together is talking.

Knowing these communication secrets of the sexes, writers can portray them realistically as their characters engage in dialogue, but authors can also capitalize upon the misunderstandings and misinterpretations among men and women regarding one another’s conversational behavior, turning these misimpressions into story conflict.

Women, unaware of how and why men listen as they do, believe that men don’t listen to them. Men, misinterpreting women’s “listening noise” as “overreaction or impatience,” consider women overly sensitive or rude. Preferring to hear alternative views expressed as questions rather than as counterarguments, women think men who challenge them directly with other points of view are disloyal, while men believe women simply don’t want to hear any views that differ from their own. Seeing that men are voluble enough in public, women may suppose that their reticence at home shows that their husbands are uninterested in them as conversation partners and that their relationship has become less intimate and may fail. Men may wish that their wives would be more supportive of them in their public stances toward political issues or on current events. Changing the topic, especially when, in doing so, a man involves himself as the new subject of conversation, may make women think that men are indifferent to the woman’s topic and are egoistic. Men may suppose women to be obsessed with a topic and, perhaps, at times, to be narrow minded. Tannen points out that half of marriages end in divorce and that, often, from the woman’s point of view, the cause of the failure of the marriage is “a lack of communication.” Other consequences of these differences in conversational style and technique are that men are often considered insensitive and women as no being assertive enough.

In Erin Brockovich, the protagonist is motivated, at the beginning of the movie, more by her desire to feed and clothe her children than she is by solving a case she uncovers concerning the damage to the health of a community’s residents that a power company’s illicit dumping of a dangerous chemical into the local water supply has caused. She wants the job as an attorney’s legal assistant so she can pay her bills and provide for her children‘s welfare. Later, when she is fired, she uses the facts that she has uncovered about the case as leverage to get her job back, along with a sizeable raise, because, again, as she tells her boss, “I have bills to pay.” Once she is on the case, however, she is dogged in her determination to see that the company does the right thing, paying for its abuses of the residents and the environment. Perhaps it is because she is a mother, concerned with nurturing her children, that she finds the power company’s deeds as reprehensible as she does, for their illegal abuse of the environment is, for her, not only criminal but immoral. It has hurt people, including children. As a woman, she uses investigative techniques that are unavailable to men. When her boss asks her how she expects to gain admittance to the state’s public records concerning the chemicals involved in the case, she replies, “They’re called boobs, Ed.” Erin is quick to accuse her boss of cheating her and of not knowing how to apologize, but, at the end of the film, he increases her share of the money the law firm has won in prosecuting the case, leaving her speechless, before he tells her that she “sucks” at apologizing, just as she had previously told him.

Although Erin Brockovich is not a horror story--at least, not in the same sense as The Toxic Avenger--it capitalizes on the differences in how men and women perceive the world and their respective places in it and on the way that these differences in perception guide and motivate their behavior, including the ways that they speak and listen or, in a word, communicate. Other stories that also capitalize on these differences include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, and, to a lesser extent, Supergirl and Wonder Woman, mostly, in these instances, by the mechanism of role reversal. In the Buffy series, for example, the female characters are empowered and the male characters are, well, emasculated, as it were, although, in their respective conversational styles and techniques, they continue to be the men and women that the boys and girls inside them created them to be. In this regard, at least, in even the eunuch, Mars rules the man.

Everyday Horrors: Giant Animals

copyright 2008 by Gray L. Pullman

Animals can be affectionate, loyal, and companionable. They can be amusing, amazing, and beautiful. They can work hard on our behalf, and even help to rescue people stranded in the wilderness or fight off would-be attackers, robbers, rapists, and murderers. Well, maybe not goldfish so much. On the other hand, they can also be cunning, ferocious, wild, dangerous, and deadly. Unless one of the friendly sort is going to end up first going mad and then going for the throat, however, as Cujo does, or become a victim of the monster, whatever it is, it’s not likely to be of much use to the horror writer, unless the author happens to be Dean Koontz, and loves dogs more than he does Greta (his wife). California has passed a law, it seems, that anyone who lives in Newport Beach, is a novelist, has a golden retriever, and is married to a woman named Greta who willingly takes second place to the dog must include at least one canine character in every novel he writes, and the dog must be above reproach, even if his or her master is not. For others who write in the genre, the fierce and ferocious--and, often, the biggest--animal is more likely to earn a spot in the story’s cast of characters.

In horror fiction, as in (from some men’s standpoint, but seldom women’s) breasts, generally, the bigger, the better. In another post, concerning “The Underbelly of the Bug-eyed Monster Movie,” we’ve already discussed some movies that feature big, bug-eyed monsters (hence the title of that particular post). Quite a few movies, especially in the past, featured such villains, as some do today, and novels, of course, and short stories (and some narrative poems, such as Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Beowulf) too, for that matter) feature giant animals as their monsters of choice. One of the ones that started it all, as far as novels are concerned, is H. G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods, in which a mad scientist develops a food additive that’s even better--way better, in fact--than Wonder Bread in developing strong bones and bodies or whatever Wonder Bread develops. The formula’s even better than Ovaltine!

Stories like these usually relied upon the past (dinosaurs), undiscovered countries or lands of the lost (dinosaurs) or mad scientists (giant experimental plants and animals), atomic radiation (giant plants and animals) or extraterrestrial visitations (alien animals) instead of central casting to supply these threats. However, they needn’t have gone to such trouble or looked so far. Nature, right here and right now, supplies writers with real-life giant animals. True, some are more frightening than others, but, if one is, like Stephen King, willing to gross out if he can’t scare a reader, what some of these giants may lack in the fright department they compensate for in the disgusting department.

Here are a few of the more repulsive, sometimes frightening alternatives Mother Nature has in stock at the moment:

• Camel spiders
• Giant catfish
• Giant rats
• Goliath beetles
• Goliath frogs

Camel spiders anesthetize people and then eat them alive. That’s what some American veterans returning from duty in Iraq, the home of the infamous spiders, claimed, anyway--who’d escaped such a fate--but that was an exaggerated contention in several ways. First, the camel spider isn’t really a spider at all. It’s a solpudgid, which is an arachnid, all right, just not one of the spider family. (Other non-spider arachnids include scorpions, mites, ticks, and Peter Parker.) As a solpudgid, the misnamed camel spider has no venom with which to poison (or even anesthetize) anyone, nor does it have a system by which it could deliver such a toxin, even if it had one to deliver. Still, the camel spider looks diabolical, even deadly, and, in horror fiction, appearances go a long way. The writer can always make up the facts as he or she goes along. If the author wants anesthetizing, or even poisoning, spiders, the author can and will have them. A good writer, especially a writer of horror fiction, never lets the facts get in the way of a good monster.


It might seem that the bewhiskered catfish would make an unlikely horror monster. If there wasn’t at least a glimmer of evil in its lidless, cold eyes, though, do you think it would have come to the attention of so august a body as the National Geographic Society, the same group who showed bare-breasted African women to the innocent schoolboys of 1950 America? Just look at this sucker! It’s nine feet long, and, according to The Society, as its members in good standing are allowed to call it, this fish is “as big as a grizzly bear,” and “tipped the scales at 646 pounds.” This variety of potential cat food is one of “the species known as the Mekong giant catfish.” Put a few teeth inside it, and it could be the next piranha, super-sized.

Africa’s Goliath frog grows to a length of thirteen inches and can weigh as many as seven pounds!

Its yuck factor is correspondingly great for anyone who has frog fear, which, as it turns out, may be more people, male and female, than one thinks. It can’t quite leap tall buildings in a single bound, but it can cover a distance of twenty feet in a single jump. It can live for fifteen years, so it’s capable of revenge, like Grendel’s mother. It lives in Africa, or, more specifically, Cameron’s Sanaga basin. People eat it, rather than the other way around (so who’s the real monsters?) or is sold to a zoo, where, usually, it doesn't do well. However, no self-respecting horror story writer would let a frog of this size go to waste as a potential peril to humankind. No way! Instead, like the non-poisonous, non-carnivorous, non-spider camel spiders, in horror fiction, these babies are going to be depicted as venomous, flesh-eating monsters that, having reproduced faster than their normal rate, for some reason having to do with human stupidity and/or greed, are now threats to humans, unable to subsist any longer on lesser animals such as the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and elephant.


Would a story featuring three-foot-long rats be scary? Duh! Stories involving rats only the size of puppies are frightening; a film or a novel featuring rats the size of Garfield or Odie would be terrifying (bigger generally is scarier). There’s just one thing wrong with such a scenario. Nobody would buy the existence of a rat that big, right? Wrong. The ones in H. G. Wells’ novel, The Food of the Gods, were even bigger, and, besides, there really are three-foot-long rats, just not in your neighborhood--at least, not yet. Of course, there’s no reason that a character in a horror story couldn’t legally (or illegally) import some from New Guinea’s Foja Mountains or they couldn’t be procured by a zoo (or even created in a scientific lab). According to Smithsonian Institution scientist Kristofer Helgen, “"The giant rat,” which weighs up to three pounds, “is about five times the size of a typical city rat," and has no fear of humans.

Another giant among us is the Goliath beetle, which measures about five inches (huge for a bug). It also lives in Africa, and eats human flesh. (Not really. They eat tree sap and fruit in the wild or cat food or dog food in captivity.) They sound like helicopters when they fly, because their bodies are heavily armored. They don’t bother people, but, because humans are naturally squeamish concerning creepy crawlies, they could, especially if they could be induced to swarm for the camera, be pretty good monsters. A writer would probably want to mutate them, though, so they could be transformed into carnivores. That way, they could prefer people meat to Tender Vittles or Kimbles ’n Bits.

Many people would have thought that giant animals, with a few exceptions, such as whales, elephants, and ostriches, are a thing of the past--the distant, prehistoric past--when dinosaurs roamed the planet. The discovery of new giants among us suggests that this is not true. Over four hundred new species have been discovered on Borneo alone since 1996, and Madagascar and South America, as well as the ocean, have yielded others. In King Kong, Carl Denham had to go to the uncharted (that is, imaginary) Skull Island to discover the lost world of the giant ape and surviving dinosaurs, but, with the dicovery of new species, including giants, seemingly every other day, horror writers may need to go no farther than Madagascar, the African continent, Japan, or South America to encounter real, living, breathing monstrosities. Who knows? There may even be one in your backyard, and it may be hungry.

Meanwhile, we can continue to turn to the pages of horror novels and science fiction stories to read about them or watch them wreck havoc on the big screen.

Update (3/21/08)

Over the past year, scientists, poking around in the world’s oceans and rain forests, have announced their discoveries of several new species of animals and of some giants among known species. Among the latest discoveries are giant macroptychaster starfish, measuring two feet across, which were located in New Zealand’s Antarctic Ocean. Other newly found giants include an 11-foot, 844-pound white shark, a 990-pound colossal squid, an Echizen jellyfish larger than a man, and a 23-pound lobster. Scientists aren’t the only ones to encounter these giants. On his farm near Eberswalde, Germany, Karl Szmolinsky breeds 20-pound giant rabbits, like the one he’s holding. More and more, the everyday world is catching up with the imaginary giant creatures of horror, fantasy, and science fiction literature. No doubt, some of these beasties will be tomorrow fiction’s featured creatures, although not, perhaps, the giant bunnies.

“Everyday Horrors: Giant Animals” is part of 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.

A Descent into the Horrors of Extreme Feminism

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Concerning The Descent (2205), it behooves one to ask who is descending and into what, precisely, the characters are descending. The “who” is a team of nubile young women, and the “what” is an underground cavern. Symbolically, a cavern represents the womb, and an underground world suggests the interiority of the person, an interiority that is not normally seen or surveyed—the unconscious mind. The idea of descending, of “going down,” also has, perhaps, a vaguely sexual—and, in the context of an all-female cast, a homosexual, or lesbian—connotation.

Women are going down together, inside a giant womb symbol, just as they are undertaking an exploration of their unconscious minds. Women often regard one another as rivals rather than as friends—or so it is said, at any rate. The Descent builds upon this idea of same-sex rivalry. Although they do encounter strange, fetus-like creatures, they discover, as their relatively superficial friendships falter, that they actually have more to fear from one another than from the monsters as they become as much their own enemies as the adversaries of the beasts that stalk them.

The cast of characters ranges across the spectrum of social roles available to contemporary women, and the women’s varied nationalities and ethnicities suggest that this movie is about all women everywhere, rather than just the five who actually make up the expedition’s party. Juno is the intrepid adventuress; Sarah, a Brit, is the wife and mother; the British Beth, her friend, is her confidante; and the European sisters, Rebecca and Sam (note the masculine name), are, respectively, the timid female and the competent professional woman. The only man in any of the women’s lives, Sarah’s husband, Paul, a role-reversed Mr. Mom who tends to their daughter, Jessica, is out of the picture, as is the child: father and daughter were killed in a car accident following a rafting adventure in which Sarah and her girlfriends participated. Juno, the movie suggests, may be bisexual, for, just before their spelunking expedition begins, she and her team are joined by the reckless and obviously butch Holly, Juno’s friend. Wife-and-mother Sarah and her best friend, Beth, harbor resentment toward Juno, who abandoned them the previous year. Her abandonment of her friends haunts Juno’s dreams, and it is obvious that she feels guilty about her actions.

These dreams also set up the shifting themes of the character’s waking (conscious) and sleeping (unconscious) lives, heralding their descent into their unconscious, where they will confront their deepest, most secret fears, as embodied by the strange fetus-creatures who will hunt them.

The contours of the cave they explore resemble the shape of the womb. Wide at the entrance (vagina), it narrows toward the middle (cervix), and then opens again, into another wider space (uterus, or womb). As the women negotiate their way through the womb-cave, Sarah, the wife and mother, gets stuck and, suffering from claustrophobia, panics. As subtext, her becoming trapped seems to represent pregnancy, which causes a woman to get “stuck,” physically and, to some extent, both emotionally and socially, if not vocationally, as well, for nine months in a process that, for many, epitomizes femininity. Beth, her best friend, plays the role of the midwife, delivering Sarah, but the birth process represented by Beth’s freeing Sarah from the cave’s narrowed passageway goes awry: the womb-cave collapses, burying the women inside a womb-become-a-tomb. Their gender, especially as it is involved in pregnancy, has not only trapped them, but it has also, in fact, buried them alive.

Juno announces that she has duped her friends. In pretending that they would be exploring an already-charted cavern while taking them to an unexplored cave instead, she has betrayed her fellow women. Femininity, represented by the charted cavern, was once familiar and non-threatening, but, now, as represented by an unknown cave, it has become an alien, unknown, and possibly hazardous region. Juno has risked their lives along with her own to realize her ambition to have a cave named for her as a sort of shortcut to a symbolic or surrogate motherhood.

Juno seeks a new way by which women can generate and produce, if not reproduce, except that the way is not new. It is the age-old technological-masculine substitute for women’s natural ability to reproduce life through the feminine-exclusive means of pregnancy and childbirth, as men seek to create material artifacts through technological-masculine means in imitation of, and compensation for, women’s natural-feminine ability to have children. Juno seems to want to usurp these technological-masculine means by asserting her will over the other women and over the womb-cave to which she has brought them for this purpose. In the process, she has endangered the lives of both herself and the other members of the party, ostensibly her friends but really her rivals. None of them sees the other danger—the drooling mouth, a sort of vagina dentata—that appears, briefly, in the foreground of the scene. Playing the role of the midwife a second time, Beth points a way out of the womb-cave: art, in the form of a mural painted by Native Americans (Roseau’s “noble savages”), shows the trapped women a way out of their predicament, depicting a second exit from the womb-cave.

As they continue their descent, Holly, thinking she sees sunlight, rushes along the cavern, heedless of Juno’s command to slow down, and falls, breaking a leg. Lesbianism, with a patina of machismo, as an alternative means of satisfying one’s sexual desires, is crippled, and it hinders women in their explorations of themselves as individuals and of their femininity as women. As the sisterhood tends to their injured comrade, the traditional wife-and mother, Sarah, wanders off, on her own, encountering one of the womb-cave’s misshapen, aborted-fetus-like monsters, which seem to represent her (and her companions’) forsaking of traditional and biological maternal roles. The creatures are an army, it seems, of outraged fetuses or, perhaps, could-have-been fetuses, who were aborted by virtue of the women’s decision to renounce their baby-making capability in favor of pursuing the more traditionally masculine role of explorer. Things quickly go from bad to worse.
The lesbian has been crippled, but now she is killed by one of the creatures, and her ostensible lover, Juno, the leader of the women’s group, struggles with the murderous monster for the remains of the slain woman. The monster, as an aborted fetus, perhaps, represents the traditional role of women or, at least, its outcome, but it is a role that has been thwarted by the women’s will—their choice—to engage in spelunking.

By using a tool—a pickax, representing an artifact of the technological-masculine order—Juno scars the fetus-monster’s face, but it drags Holly’s body off as a second monster attacks Juno. The women’s leader manages to kill her attacker, with the man-made pickax, but she also mortally wounds the timid member of their sisterhood, the wife-and-mother’s best friend, Beth. In denying one’s femininity, an alpha woman like Juno, it appears, can have a negative, even a fatal, effect on the lives of lesser (read, more traditional) women. Feminism, especially in its extreme form, may not be good for all ladies. As Beth begs Juno to help her, Juno, as if confirming the prophetic nature of her earlier nightmares, abandons Beth to her fate. Sarah dreams of her daughter, but, this time, Jessica has the face of one of the aborted-fetus-monsters, the imagery establishing the thematic connection between children (or would-be children) and their abandonment (or abortion).

As if crippling and then killing the renegade woman-lesbian were not enough for the outraged, vengeful fetus-monsters, the creatures fall upon Holly’s corpse, consuming it, as Sarah, rescued by Juno, flees. The women discover that the creatures are blind and rely upon their heightened sense of hearing to hunt their prey.

The masculine-named Sam is embracing her sister, the distraught, timid girly girl, Rebecca; however Sam, emasculated with fear at the sight of a monster, is unable to protect or to defend her sister, and it is up to heroic Juno, armed with the man-made pickax, once again, to save a damsel in distress.

In her retreat from the feeding pit in which the monsters are devouring the remains of the lesbian, Sarah encounters Beth, telling her friend how Juno had abandoned her, and Sarah fulfills Beth’s request that she kill her to put her out of her misery. The wife-mother has killed her midwife, but, it appears, not soon enough, for a child-like monster attacks Sarah, forcing her to kill (abort) the fetus-creature. Nature, through its exercise of the biological imperative, reasserts its will, as another fetus-monster —the slain creature’s mother (or the mother role itself, which has been thwarted by Sarah’s murder of the child)—attacks Sarah.

In fending off the female monster’s attack, Sarah falls into a pool of (menstrual?) blood, where the female monster (maternal instinct) pins her. Using a sharp bone fragment (symbolic, it seems, of the death instinct, which, in Freudian psychology, is opposed to eros, the life instinct), Sarah kills the monster, but its mate, the male of the species, then attacks her. She manages to kill it with the bone fragment as well.

Sam and Rebecca are next to be dispatched by the monsters, before the creatures force Juno to jump into a pit of water. After killing a creature lurking in the water, Juno climbs the side of pit, but loses her grip and slides back into the crater. Sarah, appearing above, grabs her, hauling her out of the depression. It’s obvious from her expression that she scorns Juno for having abandoned Beth to her fate. However, her contempt is forgotten for the moment when they are again attacked by the fetus-creatures. They kill their attackers, and, when Juno is distracted by additional creatures, Sarah stabs Juno in the leg, abandoning her to her fate, as Juno had earlier abandoned Beth.

As the monsters descend upon Juno, Sarah flees, escapes through an exit in the cave, and drives off—or so she thinks. As Juno’s bloodied corpse appears beside her in the car’s passenger seat, she realizes that she is merely daydreaming; her escape was just an illusion, and the exit she thought she’d seen was nothing. She’s fled into a dead-end arm (a Fallopian tube) of the cavern. She thinks of her daughter, who offers her birthday cake. The monsters—fetus-like creatures representing, perhaps, her abandonment of her role as a mother—are heard, descending upon her, as the film ends.

The Descent may be regarded as a repudiation of extreme feminism’s demand that women, to become authentic individuals, abandon the roles of mother and wife, forsaking family and even the childbearing role that nature and biology, no less than society, have assigned to them. This is the lesson that the women learn, too late, from their exploration of their unconscious minds that is represented by the cave, which also doubles as the ultimate symbol of femininity, the womb itself.