Themes in Erotic Horror

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror fiction elicits disgust and terror; erotica, lust and desire. In the former, an antagonist acts violently toward others, often injuring or killing them, usually in imaginative, gory ways. In the latter, an antagonist acts violently or, more often, seductively, toward others, sometimes causing them to act against their own better judgment or against their will. Sometimes, erotica ends in death, just as horror stories occasionally result in an unspeakable pregnancy (for example, as the result of intercourse with a demon or a monster) or an obscene birth (for instance, the birth of a demon child or a monster). The two genres have a lot in common, which is why, perhaps, they are sometimes merged as “erotic horror fiction.”

As the following table suggests, erotic horror fiction (in this post represented by films) often also involves a kinky sexual twist of some kind.

 

What makes these stories horrific isn't their antagonists (a housekeeper, shipwreckers, a possible ghost, vampires, a sorceress, a serial killer, and a piano tuner, among others) or some of the erotic content (masturbation, oral sex, and even sadomasochism, to some extent, are commonly accepted, for example, if not generally promoted). These stories are seen as horrific due to their denial of free will or their corruption of natural reproductive processes. Each perverted act in some way subverts the “true” or natural purpose of the act (reproduction) or violates a participant's right to exercise his or her—mostly her—free will:

Erotic horror stories, in short, show antagonists as victimizing men and (primarily) women by denying victims' the free will to consent to or to refuse sexual intercourse, by substituting non-procreative acts for procreative acts, and by encouraging non-procreative sexual acts or dehumanizing sexual conduct. Therein lies the true horror of these films. Their redeeming value? Some show or suggest that the villains pay dearly for their crimes against human decency and humanity.

See also “Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the Nature of Sin.”

Buber, Bosch, Giger, et. al.: The Face in the Mirror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

H. R. Giger created the artwork upon which Alien’s xenomorphs are based. He also created the bizarre furniture--his chairs, for example, resemble the skeletal abdomens of things that might have been human beings, in their better days--which was featured in nightclubs, mostly in Europe, known as “Giger bars.”

He also created a large body of art--some sculpture, but mostly paintings--using , among other instruments, airbrushes. His work is of the type known as “biomechanical,” fusing the human and the mechanical into something that is both and neither. In most cases, the fusions involve females engaged in bizarre sexual behavior with machines or, less often, machine-men.

He’s mostly a sci fi artist, but his art also contains many horrific elements. To view it is to be disturbed, because his art is, well, disturbing. However, it has value beyond the merely entertaining and (in its own way) aesthetic. His paintings, in particular, can be interpreted as cautionary tales, told in imagery, rather than in words.

The Jewish theologian Martin Buber, in I and Thou, describes two ways by which a person may orient him- or herself to others. One may see the other as a fellow subjectivity, a “thou,” or one may regard all others as being inanimate objects, mere things, or “its.” The former way of relating to others allows love and the many emotions, good and bad, that flow from interpersonal relationships, whereas the latter way permits only a controlling situation in which others are simply means to an end, to be used and discarded at will by the only “thou” there is--oneself. Giger’s art shows the ultimate result of the “I-it” relationship, which reduces people to objects while dehumanizing the “I” who regards everyone else as merely an “it.”

Many of Giger’s painting involve sex of some sort of another, albeit seldom of a reproductive nature. However, there is never any intimacy or love in any of these acts. His cyborgs, mechanical and perfunctory, engage in sex simply for sex’s sake. Mostly, they are emotionless, although they occasionally express lust and rage. Often, the sex seems to involve rape--but, horribly enough, one cannot always be quite certain. The woman-as-machine appears to be being assaulted, suggesting that, despite her “biomechanical” character, she is not quite yet purely an object. Her partial humanity makes her situation even more horrible. Were she not still partially human, the paintings would still be weird, even, somehow, blasphemous, but it would be difficult to say that they are “horrible,” for there would be no violation of the human in them anymore if the woman and the machine were completely and truly fused. There is, still, despite the Industrial Revolution and the abuses of the military-industrial complex, a ghost in the machine, and it is this dualism of the spiritual and the material that makes Giger’s art horrific. In a completely materialistic universe, horror would not be possible, as Giger’s art suggests. In a way--in fact, precisely in this way--Giger’s art is like that of Hieronymus Bosch.

Indeed, some of Bosch’s paintings even depict the merger of man and machine, or the human and the mechanical. However, more of the demons that appear in Bosch’s work are strange hybrids of a human-animal mixture. Bosch lived before the Industrial Revolution provided a more or less systematic and elaborate framework for the framing of human-machine metaphors, so, in his day, people--particularly, sinners--were regarded more as bestial than as mechanical. In Giger’s time--which is to say, our time--the demonic is often seen as being more mechanical than bestial. The same impulse is at work in both metaphors, however. Man becomes demonic by becoming both other than and less than human. An animal-man is no longer a man, just as a machine-man (or, in Giger’s work, a machine-woman) is no longer a man.

C. S. Lewis cautions us that, every day, the choices we make and the actions we take make us a bit more like an angel or a little more like a devil, as the case may be, and that, in this manner, slowly and surely, we are creating the self that we shall be for eternity. Giger’s work, like Bosch’s before his, suggests something of the same thing, except that Giger’s art uses the machine in place of the animal or the demon to warn us of yet another lower form that we may take in denying the spiritual aspects both of ourselves, the “I,” and of the other, the “thou.”

Science fiction and horror writers have, in cruder fashion, perhaps, often told the same sort of cautionary tale. Whereas, in Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary conceives, bears, and finally delivers Satan’s child, in Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed, the protagonist is impregnated by a supercomputer that attains artificial intelligence. In The Terminator, militant machines have taken over, and only a time-traveling cyborg (a half-man, half-machine) can save humans from the world to come. In these cautionary tales (and many others), there’s a common threat, and this threat is the horror against which we are warned. As God created man in his image, so, too, does man create things in his own likeness.

The mechanical humans of Giger’s art are no less human than is Frankenstein’s monster, and the infant born of the Demon Seed’s protagonist is as much the child of humanity as Rosemary’s baby. We are in all things, because we project ourselves into all things, and we have created much of the world in which we live, including, to some degree, ourselves. Whenever, in doing so, we are content to be not only other but also less than we are, we are the monster in the looking-glass. That’s the theme of Buber, of Bosch, of Giger, and of the science fiction and horror fiction in which human beings are only too happy (and miserable) to accept a lesser status in creation than that with which they were created.

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.

Everyday Horrors: Worms

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In Tremors and Dune, they’re the size of trains. Worse yet, they have teeth. And they’re hard--almost impossible--to kill. In death, we become their food. Ugh!

What are they?

Worms, of course.

To scientists, worms are long (okay, elongated), spineless (okay, invertebrate), gushy (okay, soft-bodied) animals, and they’re everywhere--in rivers and lakes and oceans, in the ground, and in plants, animals, and, yes, people--even dead people (well, not really; read on). Some of them, those of the nastier sort, are parasites, too lazy to work for a living, that live off honest, hardworking folk. There are flatworms, roundworms, hookworms, threadworms, bristle worms, and, of course, earthworms. There are also spiny-headed worms, tapeworms, arrow worms, goblet worms, jaw worms, tongue worms, horsehair worms, ribbon worms, velvet worms, peanut worms, and--we’re not making this up--phallus, or penis, worms. The lowly earthworm, like many of its snootier cousins, has been around since the dinosaurs.

Worms eat apples, corn, and other fruits and vegetables. Worms don’t really eat rotten flesh--yum!--they’re brainless wonders, but they’re not that stupid; after all, they do have nerve centers, called ganglia.

According to the Internet article, “Death to Dust. . .,” worms got a bad rap as consumers of corpses because maggots, which were once thought to be worms, because they look like rice, but are really fly larvae, do infest corpses, arriving by air. The flies land on the corpse, if it hasn’t been wrapped or buried, and lay eggs inside the body’s mouth, ears, nose, and any open wounds the corpse may have been considerate enough to have provided for this purpose. Beetles, spiders, mites, and millipedes next visit the remains, to feed on their predecessors or on the corpse itself, and forensic scientists can use insect infestation (or the lack thereof) to help determine when death occurred: “Since the exact feeding pattern varies with a body's location, the time of death, and the climate, forensic entomologists are often able to determine the date of death very accurately-even a decade later.”

The same article cites the “first recorded episode of insects revealing a killer,” which “occurred in thirteenth-century China, where an individual had been slashed to death in a rural village”:

When no one confessed, authorities ordered all of the villagers to lay down their sickles. The murderer was identified when flies swarmed to only his sickle, an apparently clean implement that still retained small traces of the victim's flesh and blood. Insects were also used to identify the killer in England's famous Lydney murder trial, when the time of death, as determined from insect evidence, invalidated the killer's alibi.

Like Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Frank N. Furter, worms are hermaphroditic, but at least some of them can also have regular sex, if they get tired of dating themselves.

To collect worms for bait, some fishermen (and, maybe some fisherwomen as well) “charm” worms by vibrating the ground, which causes them to surface (but not to impale themselves on fishhooks, except, perhaps the hookworms; they’re brainless, sure, but that doesn’t make them stupid--they do have nerve centers, or ganglia, after all.)

Despite Dune’s claims to the contrary, worms don’t really live in the desert (although some do have crystalline teeth like their Dune cousins). They prefer wet soil and will pack up and leave if the earth becomes too dry for their tastes.

The longest worm on record, one source declares, is a bootlace worm, which measured 180 feet, and, according to another article:

The Center for Biological Diversity, Palouse Prairie Foundation, Palouse Audubon Society, and Friends of the Clearwater yesterday took the first step in a lawsuit to protect the giant Palouse earthworm (Driloleirus americanus)--a three-foot-long, spitting worm that is native to parts of Idaho and Washington--under the Endangered Species Act.

Even a giant like this is a far cry from the worms is Dune and Tremors, though. Worms also appear in Bram Stoker’s novel The Lair of the White Worm, Edgar Allan Poe’s poem about the “conqueror worm,” the Harry Potter novels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Beneath You” episode, The X-Files’ “Host” episode, and other science fiction and horror fiction.


“Everyday Horrors: Worms” 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.