Everyday Horrors: Mummies

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Mummies appear in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845); in several horror novels, including Anne Rice’s The Mummy, or Ramses the Dead (1991) and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Book of the Dead (2007); in such movies as The Mummy (1932), The Mummy’s Hand (1949), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964), The Mummy’s Shroud (1966), Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), The Mummy Lives (1993), The Mummy (1999), and The Mummy Returns (2001); and in episodes in television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Inca Mummy Girl” and “Life Serial.”

Mummies--preserved corpses from whom internal organs have been removed and preserved in jars--have been found in many countries, including Chile, China, Egypt, India, and Italy (Sicily and Vatican City), Pakistan, Persia, Peru, and Russia.

When most people think of mummies (which we do all the time, right?), they tend to think of Egyptian mummies. The corpses of important people, usually pharaohs, were deliberately mummified by the ancient Egyptians so as to ensure that the resurrected ka (personality) and ba (life force) had a home in which to live. Were the body not preserved, these vital aspects of the deceased’s soul would be homeless vagrants, doomed to wander the earth.


To mummify a mummy, the internal organs, except for the heart, were removed and stored in canopic jars, or carved and painted funerary urns. These jars were made in the images of four of the Egyptians’ gods, each of whom, it was believed, guarded the organ that the jar in its likeness contained. The man-headed Imsety guarded the liver, the baboon-headed Hapi protected the lungs, the jackal-headed Duamutef looked after the stomach, and the falcon-headed Qebehsenuef watched over the intestines. The heart was left inside the body because it was believed to be the repository of the soul. The brain was relatively unimportant (by ancient Egyptians’ standards), for it was believed only to be the organ that supplied mucus. Therefore, it was smashed and extracted through the nostrils using a hook.

To preserve the body, salts were used to dry and preserve the corpse’s flesh and tissues, and the remains were covered in natron to assist in the dehydration and preservation. The body was then wrapped in linen strips to further protect it, and amulets were provided to ward off threats and other evils. As a finishing touch, the mummy was equipped with false eyes. The tomb was furnished and decorated, and the mouth was opened so that the resurrected body could eat and speak. The mummy was then laid to rest inside a sarcophagus within the burial chamber of its pyramid. The walls of the tomb were inscribed with incantations from the Book of the Dead that the resurrected mummy could chant to gain access to the upper world.

Mummies became merchandise. Ground into powder, they were sold as medicines, paints, and even fertilizer. Mark Twain claimed that mummies were also used as locomotive fuel, although this contention has never been substantiated. The linen in which mummies were wrapped may have been used, during the American Civil War, as a source for paper.

Often, mummies are associated with curses. These curses were often plot vehicles for horror movies. When a grave robber broke into a pyramid to steal a mummy or the jewels with which such corpses were often buried so that the resurrected pharaoh would have a little spending money in the afterlife, the curse was activated, causing much suffering, death, and destruction.


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

Everyday Horrors: Plants

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Plants are our friends. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to breathe--or eat. Only they can convert carbon dioxide and water into chemical energy (sugars and starch) using ultraviolet energy (sunlight). Without them, all animal, including human, life would die. Actually, without them, there would be no life to live or die.

Plants themselves, in fact, are food. Their ripened ovaries are hard to beat when one craves a sweet and succulent treat. Plants are also the source of hundreds of products that we sometimes take for granted, but, without which, we wouldn’t live nearly as well as we’re accustomed to do: paper, lumber, fabrics, fuel, medicines, plastics, dyes, soaps, paints, shampoos, perfumes, and a host of others. Without plants, men wouldn’t be able to bribe women into forgiving them or put them in the mood for romance with the gift of a dozen roses or a bouquet of flowers, either, and, of course, gardens would be rather colorless affairs.

So, what’s so horrible about plants?

Like people, many are good eggs, but, to torture a metaphor, there are a few bad apples among them as well. In most cases, the horrible plants are poisonous. Some are horrible for other reasons, though.

Let’s start with the poisonous ones. According to Live Science, the “Top 10 Poisonous Plants,” in descending order, are:

10. Narcissus
9. Rhododendron
8. Ficus
7. Oleander
6. Chrysanthemum
5. Anthurium
4. Lily-of-the-valley
3. Hydrangea
2. Foxglove
1. Wisteria

In no particular order, for pets, these are the five deadliest plants:

• Azalea
• Castor bean plant
• Lily
• Oleander
• Sago palm

The stinging tree is an interesting plant. Indigenous to tropical rainforests, it has thick, hair-like structures on its leaves and stems that, when brushed against, deliver a painful sting. The tips of the leaves and stems penetrate the skin, in which they break off, releasing a poisonous irritant, the effect of which may last for months. There’s no antidote. However, stick insects, weevils, chrisom lid beetles, and even opossums enjoy the taste of them.

In horror fiction, plants can be dangerous--or even deadly--even when they’re not poisonous. In Dean Koontz’s The Taking, demons use a hellish fungus to help to prepare the earth for conquest. In Stephen King’s “The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verril” segment of Creepshow, an extraterrestrial fertilizer, delivered by the courtesy of a meteorite, causes an alien fungus to overrun everything--and everyone--in its past, Jordy Verril (played by King himself) included. In Seed People, alien seeds turn humans into zombies. The campy Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978) has mutated tomatoes turning into mad killers.

As “Man-eating Plants”points out out, no carnivorous plant is large enough to threaten humans. These plants’ largest victim, according to this article, was a rat that, dead, was found, partially digested, inside a pitcher plant. However, “Man-eating Plants” suggests that the legends of such plants as the one in Little Shop of Horrors might have been inspired by an actual plant, the Amorphophallus titanum, or corpse flower, which is definitely not recommended for milady’s (or yours) bridal bouquet:

Amorphophallus titanum, which is said to be the biggest, smelliest flower in the world, looks like something that could eat a human being. When it blooms it can reach at height over nine feet in height and smells like a mixture of rotting flesh and excrement. . . .

. . . Although the Amorphophallus titanum looks a lot like you would imagine a man-eating plant to look like, and it even smells like somebody is dead inside, it is not carnivorous.

As horrible as man-eating plants might be (were they to exist), intelligent plants might be even more appalling. For a long time, scientists maintained that animals are not able to reason, and philosophers have always excluded them from such abilities, defining humans alone as “thinking reeds” or res cogitans. If animals were to be denied anything more than sentience, plants certainly weren’t likely to be considered potential Nobel laureates any time soon.

However, this bias may be changing. If Professor Stefano Mancuso has anything to say about the issue, it may not be long before plants are his tenured colleagues. He operates the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV) near Florence, Italy, where he hopes to demonstrate that plants are not only intelligent, but are also capable of solving problems. According to Mancuso, “If you define intelligence as the capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach us. Not only are they ‘smart’ in how they grow, adapt and thrive, [but] they [also] do it without neuroses. Intelligence isn't only about having a brain.”

According to “Smarty Plants: Inside the World’s Only Plant-Intelligence Lab,” the laboratory is exploring a variety of research topics: “In addition to studies on the effects of music on vineyards, the center's researchers have also published papers on gravity sensing, plant synapses and long-distance signal transmission in trees.”

Plants have been found to be able to distinguish between siblings and strangers, and, perhaps as xenophobic as people, among them, sap apparently is thicker than water. According to Live Science’s “Plants Recognize Siblings”: “Plants can recognize when they are potted with their siblings or with strangers. . . . When strangers share a pot, they develop a competitive streak, but siblings are more considerate of each other.”

In science fiction, plants have demonstrated intelligence for years. As far back as Dante and Virgil, humans dreamed of communing with greenery. However, the desirability of doing so, at least as far as William Hope Hodgson is concerned, might be questionable. In “The Lands of Lonesomeness” chapter of his novel, The Boats of Glen Caring, “evil trees are prone to wrap their branches round the unwary traveller,” and “human souls are somehow sucked into the trees and then beckon for more to join them.”

Intelligent plants also betray evil designs on humans in Murray Leinster’s “Proxima Centauri,” Clark Ashton Smith’s “Seedling of Mars,” and Raymond Z. Gallun’s “Seeds of the Dusk.” Bizarre, threatening plants also appear in H. G. Wells’ short story, “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”

Until the discovery of the euglena, scientists believed that there was a hard and fast differences between plants and animals. The main difference was that the former could photosynthesize, while the latter could not. The discovery of the euglena changed this view. Like animals, they can move under their own power, by means of a flailing flagellum, engulf and ingest food using a “phagotrophic. . . apparatus,” “sense light using a red pigmented eyespot,” and change color to match their red or green environment. The euglena also has chloroplasts that enable it to do what only plants can do--photosynthesize. So is it a plant or an animal? Neither--and both. It’s a euglena!

Swamp Thing could be the lowly euglena, writ large. He’s a humanoid vegetable or, if one prefers, a vegetative humanoid, who lives in a swamp and, in the 1982 movie named for him, dated Adrienne Barbeau (a. k. a. Alice Cable).

There’s something else eerie about plants. They’re quiet. They loom. They seem to wait, if not to lurk. They appear to be biding their time, awaiting their chance. To do what? We don’t want to know. What may go on inside those leafy branches and green stems? We don’t even want to guess. Plants are so different from us that, in their majestic, grand silence and their seeming indifference to us, they seem, at times, as when the wind is in the treetops, to whisper of plans that may be not as cool and green and comforting as their stoic postures suggest they are.

If science fiction and horror stories featuring plant-monsters teach us anything worthwhile, it’s to listen to Mom and eat our vegetables--before they eat us!

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

Borderlands: Realms of Gold? Okay, Maybe They’re Realms of Pyrite, But They Still Glitter Pretty Well

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

According to the flyleaf of his book Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown, Dr. Mike Dash “studied history at Cambridge University” and is “chief researcher at the Fortean Times, the journal of strange phenomena.” He describes the “Borderlands” of the title of his book as “an enigmatic world where almost anything seems possible.” Although a bizarre place, it is, as Dash describes it, also an inviting one. Consisting of “territories. . . where the known shades into [the] unknown, occurrences can be both terrifying and hilarious, and fiction mutates strangely into fact,” the Borderlands includes “grey areas, though the things that go on there are frequently intensely colorful.”

By their very nature, imaginary lands are intriguing. They’re places that many would like to visit, although, perhaps, they wouldn’t want to live there, which is why many writers, ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary, have created imaginary places. Some are islands, others towns or cities. Quite a few are worlds, and some are worlds within worlds. There are so many imaginary locations, in fact, that a pair of enterprising writers, Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, have written a sort of travel guide to them, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

Some of the more familiar imaginary places include:

• Mount Olympus (Greek mythology)
• Atlantis (Plato’s Timaeus)
• The nine worlds (Norse mythology)
• The five palaces of pleasure (one for each of the physical senses) in William Beckford’s The History of the Caliph Vathek
• Jules Verne’s Lincoln Island (The Mysterious Island)
• William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County
• L. Frank Baum’s Oz
• H. P. Lovecraft’s Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport
• C. S. Lewis’ Narnia
• J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth
• Stephen King’s trio of Maine towns, Castle Rock, Derry, and ‘Salem’s Lot.

There are plenty more!

One such place, which Europeans called “the New World,” really did--and does--exist, although it is not quite as new today as it was in 1492. If you live in North (or, for that matter, Central or South) America, you’re living in it, right now. Although it’s familiar enough today, it was once as strange and wonderful a place as any of which a writer, whether of fantasy, science fiction, horror, or otherwise, ever dreamed.

Dash’s Borderlands are not unknown, he says; in fact, “we have. . . been tracking them for centuries, but they remain” a mysterious landscape “to which existing guidebooks are often inadequate and sometimes dangerously misleading.” A “terra incognita,” its boundaries are fluid, rather than static, and tend to shift and change because of “answers” that “suggest questions,” scientific “anomalies,” revisionist history, and the “schismatics and heretics” or religion. Access to the Borderlands is easy, for its “ordinary doorways . . . stand permanently ajar,” although, travelers are warned, “at such a border crossing, reality and the unreal stand so close together we are not always aware we have moved from one world to another.”

Borderlands is not a physical landscape, but one of the mind, or, more specifically, of the imagination, although, at times, its fancies may be based, however loosely, upon facts. A glance at the book’s index shows the types of flora and fauna, the monuments and museums, and the other points of interest that this strange country offers to those who prefer to take the road less-often traveled. Those who have read the works of Charles Fort or the magazine launched in his memory and honor, The Fortean Times, will be familiar, already, with these sights: aliens, apparitions, Bigfoot, crop circles, demons, dinosaurs, the Flying Dutchman, ghosts, heaven, hell, ley lines, the Loch Ness monster, monsters, near-death experiences, psychic warfare, remote viewing, spontaneous human combustion, Stonehenge, theosophy, UFOs, vampires, Zener cards, and the like.

Dash’s first foray into Borderlands is “Strange Planet,” which, among other mysteries, recounts a fall of red snow in Antarctica. The phenomenon captures the attention of those who are interested in the odd, the curious, and the bizarre, and it is with the words “red snow” that the “Strange Planet” chapter begins.

The next paragraph solves the mystery of the red snow: “The Antarctic whiteness had been stained by penguin droppings, colored red by the shellfish that the birds had eaten.” This is an interesting explanation, but it’s also a bit disappointing. We expected something a little more out of the ordinary than penguins or, more specifically, their “droppings.” Such evidence is grotesque, perhaps, but it’s not especially horrible, even red.

But, wait! There’s more!

Dash explains that a rain in Italy delivered seeds from a tree that grows “only in central Africa and the Caribbean”; that sand, instead of water, rained upon “dusty Baghdad”; and that, in Stroud, Gloucestershire, “rose-colored frogs . . . tumbled from the sky, bouncing off umbrellas and pavements amid townspeople going about their business.” As a result of these anecdotes and others, Dash concludes that the planet earth is a much stranger place that anyone has imagined, even in accounts of strictly imaginary places: “This is a book about strange phenomena,” he alerts us in his second chapter, in case we had any doubts, its purpose to “argue that ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ are inadequate categories when it comes to sifting strange phenomena.”

The rest of his book introduces readers to these “strange phenomena,” from the consideration of which Dash concludes three things: their experience “is utterly subjective,” “there seems to be no such thing as a consistently inexplicable phenomenon,” and “the human mind possesses an inherent sense of wonder” that enriches life and has “a powerful capacity to change lives.”

In “Sonnet: To Science,” Edgar Allan Poe observes that science has demystified the world, driving “the Hamadryad from the wood. . . . the Naiad from her flood,” “the Elfin from the green grass,” and “from me/ The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree.”

A visit to Borderlands such as Dash, and before him Fort, and others, charts for readers allows us to revisit the demon- and divinity-haunted woods of Poe’s sylvan countryside. However, Dash knows that we may be as reluctant to undertake the adventure as Frodo Baggins was to leave the comfort of his cozy Hobbit-hole in the familiar Shire, so, to excite our interest, he uses the metaphor of an exotic, new land on the edge of the known and the unknown, wherein “almost anything seems possible.”

The days of Chapman’s Homer and of John Keats, who waxed poetic concerning the translation, in which the latter poet wrote--

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

--are long gone, it seems.

It’s unfortunate that most people don’t want to undertake a journey simply for the journey’s sake, but, especially nowadays, and especially when the journey is figurative, requiring the reading of a book, such is often the case. Even Christopher Columbus needed more than the opportunity to go to new places and see new things to inspire him to hoist anchor and sail west. He needed to believe that he was undertaking a mission imposed upon him by God and that he would obtain costly spices, or even gold, enough to make his trip not only worth it to his sponsors, but to make himself a wealthy man as well--one, for whom, perhaps, his traveling days would then be forever over.

Dash, Mike. Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2000.

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

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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