"The Last Halloween":

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

The synopsis for The Last Halloween (2014), a short horror film based on the comic book of the same title by Mark Thibodeau, got me: “As they go from house to house, four young trick-or-treaters collect strange treats that could signal the end of Halloween.”

What are the “strange treats”? Why are they given? What do they signify? Why might they “signal the end of Halloween”?

We are introduced to the four trick-or-treaters, a ghost (Jake Goodman), a witch (Zoe Fraser), the Grim Reaper (Drew Davis), and the devil (Brebdan Heard), as they visit the first of the three houses shown in the short.

A knock at the front door of the first house summons a woman in a pink knit cap (Angela Besharah). Without disengaging the chain-lock, she opens her door a crack, peering warily through the gap. “Wait here,” she orders, returning a moment later with the child's “treat”: a can of pet food. “You be careful out there,” the woman cautions her visitor. The ghost accepts the item without protest, and the group of children move on.

At this point, there is only a few hints that something is wrong: the woman's odd behavior, her strange “treat,” and the cheapness of the ghost's costume—a dirty sheet.

Other clues emerge as the film progresses. There are no streetlights. The next house the children visit, a dark, boarded-up ramshackle affair, looks abandoned. Why would the trick-or-treaters waste their time stopping at such a house? Perhaps they are about to play a “trick”?

Only two of the children, Sam the devil and Janet the witch, appear bold enough to knock at the door; both the ghost and the Grim Reaper wait on the sidewalk in front of the property. The face of the homeowner (Julian Richings), a man with pustules on his face, appears in a gap between planks covering the doorway. “Aren't you a little late to be out this young?” he asks, his inverted syntax another clue, as is the condition of his residence, that all is not well in the suburbs. “Especially with the—” he breaks off his thought, gesturing instead, and disappears inside his house, saying he will see what he can find.

Returning, he admits, “It's not much, I'm afraid,” and drops a plastic bat into the devil's plastic pail. Once again, the offering is accepted without complaint. The man tells Sam that he should “manage more than anyone,” since he is “the devil. Lucifer, Beelzebub, The Horned One.” He cackles as his visitors depart.

The adults whom the children visit seem increasingly disturbed. The woman appeared wary, if not paranoid, and her “treat,” a can of pet food, is bizarre, to say the least. However, she is dressed in ordinary attire, the lights are on in her house, and the house itself appears to be in good repair. She is concerned about the children's safety, bidding them to “be careful.”

The second adult has suffered physical harm, and he seems much less mentally stable than the woman. He lives in an abandoned, boarded-up house, without lights, and offers a plastic bat as a “treat.” His speech includes inverted syntax. He alludes to some mysterious incident, and seems to mistake Sam for the actual devil, calling him “Lucifer.” “Beelzebub,” and “The Horned One.”

However, something is off about the children as well. They are not disturbed by the bizarre “treats” they are given, and they are not afraid of visiting a dark, boarded-up, seemingly abandoned house. They accept the odd behavior of the adults as though neither the adults' odd conduct nor their strange gifts are all that unusual.

The third scene is the longest and most detailed. This time, the trick-or-treaters, passing a sign labeled “EVACUATION ZONE,” visit a house behind a tall wrought-iron fence. A bank of floodlights illuminates as their approach to the property activates a motion sensor.

On the wall above a fireplace, rifles are mounted. A fire burns in the fireplace. A made-up cot stands before the fireplace. A man observes images of the children that are delivered to his computer through a closed-circuit television camera. Outside, his own image appears on a monitor, as he tells the children to “go away.” One of the children, her image appearing on his own monitor, responds, “trick or treat.”

A young woman inside the house looks at a bassinet; it is empty except for a teddy bear. The man tells his visitors to leave, warning them that “bad things happen to trespassers.” The woman inside the house looks down, from a second-story, through a lattice of boards; outside, the trick-or-treaters see her watching them. Downstairs, the man, armed, now, with a rifle, calls to the woman, “Kate! Get down here!”

 
The children have not left; they continue to cry “trick or treat,” and the man continues to tell them to leave. Carrying a lantern and coughing into a handkerchief, the woman descends a flight of stairs; calling the man “Jack,” she says that maybe they should admit the children, as they could need help or might be hungry. Watching the monitor, he sees the children depart and tells the woman, Kate (Emily Alatalo), his wife, that they seem to be leaving. She coughs more, showing her husband the bruise on her neck.

Jack (Ron Basch) says they can't take any more chances, as it is not safe to “open the door to anyone anymore.” He argues, further, that the kids “could be infected” or “crazy,” pointing out that “they think it's Halloween.” Kate's reply, “I think it is Halloween,” suggests that it may be either Jake and the kids or Kate who is deluded. Kate, showing Jack the bruise on her neck, implies that nothing can protect them.

Jake checks the monitor; when he turns around, Kate is gone. The front door slams. The ghost trick-or-treater appears in the room, behind Jack. Arming himself with his rifle, which he had set aside, Jack demands to know what the ghost has done with his wife. When the child does not answer, Jack tells him to take food and leave, but the ghost says, “It's too late, Jaaaccckkk.”

Approaching the trick-or-treater, Jack pulls the sheet off the child, only to discover that, beneath it, is an actual ghost (Ali Adatia). The other children, now adults, appear, repeating, “It's too late, Jack.” The child in the devil costume becomes an actual devil (Adrian G. Griffiths), and the other two trick-or-treaters also transform into the figures represented by their respective costumes, those of the Grim Reaper (Alastair Forbes) and the witch (Kristina Uranowski).

As they surround him, the front door opens, and Jack sees Kate, kneeling on the porch. After a moment, she vanishes, Surrounding him, the monsters move in on him, and the Grim Reaper embraces him. “Happy Halloween,” it says.

The children leave the house, in their original costumes, as fires burn in the windows. After one of the fires in an upstairs window explodes, the camera pans up, showing that other houses, for miles around, are also on fire, as are high-rise buildings in the city beyond.

This short does a good job of introducing bizarre elements that become explicable over a period of time, as details accumulate which, when combined, provide a context for interpreting the whole situation of which the individual elements are each but a part. In other words, the introductions of these details are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (the film as a whole) that the audience (following the lead of director Marc Roussel) put together, incident by incident, until the whole picture is discernible and intelligible as a unified and coherent whole.

This initially piecemeal delivery of specific, isolated details also heightens the horrific tone of the film, its mystery, and its suspense. Each incident is disquieting in itself: the wary woman, the madman, and the housebound survivalist are each, in their own ways, disturbing.

As we move from house to house, the domiciles become worse and worse, as do the inhabitants. What appears abnormal (canned pet food for a Halloween “treat,” inverted syntax and facial injuries, a dead or abducted baby, and a young wife wasting away of some disease while her husband and protector slowly loses contact with reality) seems, in the world of the film, to be normal, while that which is normal (trick-or-treating, wearing traditional Halloween costumes, visiting neighborhood houses on Halloween) appears, increasingly, to be abnormal.

The world is upside-down and inside-out, and it's every man, woman, and child for him- or herself. At first, we have no idea what has happened to the suburbanites the children visit. Then, a clue: the “EVACUATION ZONE” sign. There has been an evacuation. Apparently, for whatever reason, the residents who remain in the suburbs have been left behind. Now, they are facing the consequences: paranoia, madness, self-isolation, distrust of others, sickness, and death.

The parallels to the coronoavirus pandemic are striking, although unintended. (The film was released in 2014; the pandemic began in 2020). Neighbors isolate themselves from everyone else, staying in their homes. They are wary, even paranoid. One couple takes extreme measures, hoarding food and taking refuge in their home. 

Not everyone survives: the bassinet is empty, as are many of the houses in the neighborhood. Food seems to be in short supply: the kids' “treats” include canned pet food and a plastic bat. The crisis is not local; it affects other communities, including at least one nearby city, and there has been an organized evacuation of the affected areas. These similarities, of course, make the short even eerier and more disturbing, even if they have no direct relationship to the coronaviruss pandemic.

Just as the coronavirus has brought out the worst in some people—those who hoard essential supplies, engage in price gouging, spit on produce, ignore government directives for minimizing health risks, boast of their luxurious accommodations, and complain about minor inconveniences—the catastrophe that has befallen the communities in The Last Halloween brings out the worst in some of the movie's cast of characters. Jack refuses to open his door to the trick-or-treaters, refuses to help them, refuses to share his horde of food with them, is prepared to kill them. 

The children themselves are transformed into monsters. They are unforgiving toward Jack. They have laid waste to the neighborhood and, the end of the film suggests, to others communities as well. Under the right—or the wrong—circumstances, anyone, the movie implies, could be a Jack, a ghost, a Grim Reaper, a witch, or a devil.

On a positive note, however, it is possible, also, to be generous, even if wary: the woman who gives the ghost a can of her pet food offers something from her larder that she could have eaten herself. The type of the item—pet food—suggests the desperation in which she finds herself: she is so hungry and so low on food supplies that she is willing to eat pet food. Despite such extremity, she is, nevertheless, willing to share what she can. Her act of self-sacrifice, although bizarre, is also heroic. She represents the opposite extreme of Jack, the alternative to his self-centeredness, which excludes any others, except his wife, whom, ironically, he is unable to save.

"Eden": A Femme Fatale in the Homosocial Garden

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Eden (2019) is a short horror film, indeed, lasting approximately six-and-a-half minutes. Three somewhat immature “homies” encounter a femme fatale who looks somewhat like a modern-day vampire. She is extraordinarily strong and quick, and she can open her mouth tremendously wide. Like any other self-respecting femme fatale, she lures male victims with her beauty.

The plot is simple and straightforward:

D. J., Elliott, and Jason, who appear to be slightly drunk, clown with each other as they make their way through dark city streets to Elliot's car. On the way, D. J. (Benjamin Abiola) drops his keys.

In the back seat, D. J. realizes that he doesn't have his keys.

Retracing his steps, he finds them on the sidewalk and pockets them.

In the car, Jason (Bobby Coston) shows Elliott (Charles Brakes III) a photograph on his smartphone: a young woman whose buttocks they admire. Jason tells Elliott that the woman has a sister.

Seeing a young woman (Tayla Drake) at a distance, he offers her a ride. He runs to her, and she slits his throat with a sweep of her nails.

Clutching his throat, he staggers away from her and falls to his knees.

 

In the car, Elliott tells Jason that he's going to “check on D. J.”

On the sidewalk, Elliott sees a trail of blood. He turns and runs back to his car, calling to Jason.

Returning his call, Jason gets out of the car, leaving the door open. He looks frightened as he repeatedly calls Elliott's name.

The car door slams shut behind him. He whirls and takes a couple steps backward.

Turning, he sees the young woman who killed J. D. Her top is covered in J. D.'s blood.

She looks up, smiling. Her mouth, dripping blood, opens impossibly wide.

Elliott's fate remains unknown.

Of course, besides Elliott's fate, the film leaves many other questions unanswered. Who is the predatory woman? What, exactly, is she? Why does she stalk men? Why does she kill them? Why does she feed upon human blood?

There is plenty of room for both plot and character development, but this exercise in filmmaking, in itself, doesn't offer much depth.

The only attempt to involve the action in a theme that transcends the story's action per se is a quotation, apparently invented, which is attributed to an apparently fictitious pontiff, Pope Seymore IV: “Lust of the beauteous garden bait souls of the damned, and only then will they feel the wrath of Eden.”

To begin with, the meaning of the quotation is unclear. “Lust of” suggests that it is the “garden” that lusts and that, perhaps (the rest of the quotation is unintelligible), the garden, to satisfy its lust, “baits souls of the damned.” This reading makes the “garden” the villain and the young men the victims.

How does the garden identify the “souls of the damned?” Or do the “souls” become “damned” simply by virtue of their being baited? In other words, does the garden's baiting of the souls damn them? Alternatively, does the garden's “bait” work solely on souls that are already damned?

In any case, the quotation makes clear that the damned souls experience Eden's “wrath” only after they have been baited by the garden.

 

Of course, the filmmakers may have intended the quotation to begin with the prepositional phrase “lust for,” which situates the lust not in the garden itself, but in those who lust for the garden.

However, even such an attempt as this to infuse the production with depth is awkward. It characterizes beautiful young women as objects; they are flowers in a “beauteous garden,” planted, as it were, to “bait souls of the damned.”

Although, in this reading of the quotation, it is the damned souls' own lust that damns them, the flowers themselves are not entirely innocent; they are the “bait” that excites the men's lust and tempts them to sin, just as the Biblical Eve, in the garden of Eden, tempts Adam to sin. The “flowers,” one of which, metaphorically speaking, Eden appears to be, use their beauty to ensnare men, attracting their lust. In this sense, the “flowers” are no more passive than a Venus fly trap; the women are predators. Therefore, their “wrath” is hard to understand, let alone to justify.

In the Eden short, there is no serpent in the “beauteous garden” to entice the woman who entices J. D. and Jason, unless she is herself both serpent and seductress, a lamia like Lilith, Adam's first wife, according to Jewish folklore.

Perhaps, the filmmakers suggest, there is no need for a serpent as such. Instead, the sexist attitude of the young men makes them vulnerable to the charms of beautiful young women. To some degree, the young men's sexism is informed by the values and the norms of the larger society that nurtured them. The young men's notions of what is proper conduct with regard to women and sex is influenced by the media and by the conventions, customs, traditions, and practices of the patriarchal society in which they live.

Young men are taught, directly and indirectly, that it is acceptable to view women as objects, as “flowers” ripe for the plucking, as commodities that can be bought for the mere offer of a ride, the very offer that J. D. makes to Eden. These attitudes and values and the mores that inculcate them may be the snake in the garden which, in defining roles for young men, also define the complementary roles of young women.

However, Eden is not a typical young woman. She is the predator, rather than the young men's prey. She has turned the tables on her would-be conquerors, making them her victims. The beauty that would normally endanger her becomes a lure by which she snares her male victims. She, a potential victim, becomes the young men's victimizer. If she, rather than the young men, is the predator, it is hard to see how her “wrath” is justified.

Either possibility for reading the quotation, “lust of” or “lust for,” remains problematic. Indeed, if anyone seems worthy of blame, it is the party who entices, not the party who is enticed or, at the very least, both parties are equally to be blamed. Part of the problem derives from the ambiguity of the quotation that is supposed to indicate the theme of the movie, which, of course, is anything but a small error in a work of art.

If anything, the theme of the film seems to be simply that mere attraction to the beauty of the opposite sex can kill a youth. Neither J. D., who offers Eden a ride (possibly for ulterior reasons), nor Elliott, who never encounters Eden during his search for J. D., nor Jason, who simply approaches Eden, does anything to threaten her or in any way acts aggressively toward her. Nevertheless, she kills both J. D. and Jason, and the audience never learns Elliott's fate.

By themselves, the young men are in no danger. They are friends, not foes. They clown with one another, simulating fisticuffs, but they never hurt one another or came close to doing so. Their fighting is a mere pretense, consisting of friendly mock attacks and simulated counterattacks. Separated from one another, they are endangered by the sole member of the opposite sex they encounter on the dark streets.

Eden, the sole female character, is deadly. To be seduced by the charms of the opposite sex is dangerous; in fact, it can be fatal. It is better that men resist feminine beauty in favor of the company of their same-sex friends. Romance involving the opposite sex is dangerous; same-sex friendship is not. Beautiful young women break the bonds between men, disrupting homosocial relationships. Brothers are trustworthy; women are not. These seem to be the ultimate, prepubescent themes, or lessons, of Eden.

Shhh: The Making of Monsters (and Short Horror Films)

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

The equivalent of flash fiction (or, in some cases, short stories), short films have simple, linear plots; minimal characters, and a single conflict. However, the use of symbolism and metaphor can enrich the possible interpretations of many of these exercises in independent filmmaking.

Shhh (2012) stars Sean Michael Kyer as asthmatic, stuttering Guillermo, a young boy beset by a monster, and Ilze Burger, as his teenage sister Helleana. Guillermo draws pictures of monsters, earning Helleana's scorn.

She regards her younger brother as a “freak” and goes out of her way to be snide, insulting Guillermo about his drawings, his apparent incontinence, his stuttering, and whatever else crosses her mind. Lately, he's been cutting off his own hair, a lock or two at a time, and concealing the results under a knit cap.

Although the children share the same wash room, only Guillermo sees the monster. Of hideous appearance, the monster is creepy, but its behavior is rather lame, as the conduct of monsters goes: the goblin-like creature with an extensible, tubular proboscis, eats hair, which explains why Guillermo has been cutting off his own tresses.

Once he faces the monster, feeding it hair from his sister's hairbrush, it disappears, and Guillermo is able to set aside his inhaler, leaving it, with his sister's brush, in the wash room. In bed, he holds his finger to his lips and says “shhh!”

At the end of the picture, half of a drawing that Helleana had torn in half, which shows the monster in attack mode, has been taped to a picture of Helleana who looks terrified as the attacking monster approaches her. In the original drawing, the monster had been attacking Guillermo. By facing down the monster and leaving his sister's hairbrush in the wash room after promising the monster that he could provide more hair for it to eat, Guillermo seems to have substituted Helleana for himself as the monster's prey.

The filmmakers offer several clues concerning the true nature of the monster that confronts Guillermo, most of which relate to the boy's behavior. However, the movie begins with a series of dark drawings, by Guillermo, many of which are devoted to the monster.

The first two pictures depict subjects Guillermo and his relationship with his family:

• He lies supine on the floor, apparently content, sketching Saturn, the sun, and a star. As this picture is displayed, the narrator informs the audience, “This is the tale of an extraordinary child . . . ”

• The next picture shows Dad, Helleana, and Guillermo. Dad tips a bottle to his lips, and Helleana strikes Guillermo repeatedly on the head with a round object. Dad and Helleana look slightly monstrous, while Guillermo looks miserable. The narrator's commentary continues: “ . . . raised in such a way that you would have thought he never smiled . . .”

Several of the next drawings concern the monster:

• Guillermo tells Helleana about a monster in the bathroom. The narrator states, “. . . for every night he fought a lurking fear.”
• As he stands before the toilet, a monster parts the shower curtain, lunging toward the boy. The narrator, something of a poet, it appears, adds, “His passage to the bathroom, [sic] locked away a creature would appear.
• Guillermo loses control of his bladder, a sight that Helleana finds hilarious; she laughs as she points to him, standing in a puddle of his own urine.
• He dared not even wonder [at] the horrors that await,” the narrator advises the audience. The monster leans over Guillermo, its mouth gaping. “The children who defied his terms, he could only imagine their fate.”

The next two drawings focus on Guillermo himself:

• Guillermo holds a hand to his forehead. “And what you wonder were the terms asked of our dear boy.”
• As Guillermo takes a pair of scissors to his head, the narrator answers his own question: “Clumps of hair from off his head, the creature could enjoy.”

The final picture is text: “Shhh . . .” as the movie begins.

During the movie's action, we learn these facts about Guillermo:

• He is neglected (left alone) much of the time.
• He is artistic and imaginative.
• He cuts his hair to feed the monster.
• His sister is emotionally and abusive toward him.
• He stutters.
• He is incontinent.
• He is asthmatic and relies on an inhaler.
• He finds the monster both frightening and disgusting.
• Earlier, when he called to his father to rescue him from Helleana, she put her finger to her lips and commanded, “Shhh!” At the end of the movie, he does the same thing.

To understand the monster, we must understand what Guillermo's behaviors represent.

Consulting psychological theory, we discover that pulling (or, we assume, cutting) and trichophagia, or the compulsive eating of hair (we are also assuming that the monster represents a psychological condition of some sort; as such, it is an inner state, a dimension of the self) is a way of relieving stress, anxiety and loneliness.

 
Although stuttering can have physiological and genetic causes, it can also be caused by “stress in the family,” “problems communicating with others,” and “low self-esteem.”

Urinary incontinence can also be caused by physiological issues, but emotional stress that impairs the fight-or-flight response precipitated by the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine can also cause urinary incontinence.

Although asthma is a physical condition, “research has also shown that the body’s response to stress triggers the immune system and causes the release of certain hormones,” thereby leading “to inflammation within the airways of the lungs, triggering an asthma attack.” His ability to discard his inhaler after overcoming the monster seems to underscore the idea that his asthma attacks are attributable to the severe stress he experiences on a regular basis.

It appears that the alcohol and general unavailability of his father and his sisters' emotional and physical abuse of him accounts, in large measure, for Guillermo's heightened stress. These traumas, which affect a young child, are obviously severe, giving rise not to one expression but to a number of severe symptoms: trichophagia, stuttering, urinary incontinence, and asthma. Possibly, he also has low-self esteem as a result of being neglected and abused.

There seems to be another cause of Guillermo's heightened stress. In none of the pictures he draws does his mother appear. She is neither seen nor heard in the movie, and no one speaks of or otherwise refers to her. The disappearance of the mother, possibly as a result of her demise, could explain not only Guillermo's stress but also the alcoholism of his father and the abusive behavior of his sister. Each in his or her own destructive manner, the surviving family members appear to be attempting, largely unsuccessfully, to cope with the grief and loss of the adult female member of the family.

 The monster appears, then, to be a personification of the stress, low self-esteem, loneliness, and fear that Guillermo experiences as a result of his father's emotional abandonment of him, his father's alcoholism, his sister's emotional and physical abuse of him, and, quite possibly, his mother's “abandonment” of him through her death and the grief he feels for her passing and his loss of her, the presumed nurturer of the family.

The narrator tells the audience that Guillermo is “extraordinary.” What makes him so, the film suggests, is his artistic ability. The dark drawings he creates objectify his fears, allowing him to put into pictures what he may not be able to put into words. He can picture himself contented; he can picture his father's alcoholism and his sister's violence and cruelty; he can picture his helplessness, his humiliation, and his fear.

He can also picture an adversary, the monstrous form upon whom he projects the harsh treatment of his father and his sister; they, as much as his own low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief, are the monster he sees in the bathroom, or the wash room, the place to which he goes to divest himself of waste and dirt, to relive himself and to cleanse himself.

His artistic ability allows him to project an enemy, to imagine an adversary. Having accomplished this feat, he can now devise a way to attack and conquer his foe and all that it stands for, all that it represents. By overcoming the monster, he rids himself of his low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. By gaining confidence in himself, he overcomes his sister's power over him and he does not need his father's love and protection. In vanquishing the monster, he becomes a hero. He does not need his inhaler. He does not need his scissors. He can enjoy, but he does not need, the refuge of his room.

He overcomes the part of the monster that is Helleana by imagining her as the monster's victim. In restoring the drawing she'd ripped in half, he replaced his own image with an image of her as the monster's prey. Henceforth, she is the one who must feel low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. He is no longer the scapegoat that she had made him. Without him in this role, she herself must bear the weight of her own problems, without him as her whipping boy.

Instead of picturing himself as the monster's prey, he escapes this fate by imagining his sister in the role of the monster's victim. She who was his tormentor becomes the tormented, the tortured victim of the monster that she helped to create. His father, meanwhile, is the victim of the monster he embraces, the bottle of whiskey that suppresses the low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief that he feels, even as he feeds it not the hair of his head, but the essence of his soul.

Friedrich Nietzsche warns, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” This cautionary declaration also seems to inform the short film.

In the final analysis, there is more than a bit of the monster in Guillermo, too, for he is willing to sacrifice his own sister to the monster, even going so far as to deliberately leave her hairbrush in the bathroom before telling her just where to go to find it. Then, as he lies in bed and she, presumably having gone to get her brush, begins to scream, he holds a finger to his lips and says “shhh.” There is an emotional abyss as deep, apparently, as that of a sociopath, for he seems to feel no qualms about having sent his sister to the same fate as that which had been his own.

Whether his father and his sister helped to make him the monster he has become, the fact remains that he himself has had a part in the making of the monster, for he has contributed to its creation, both by his own actions and through the exercise of his imagination.

Shhh is not without flaws (what is?). The verse in which the narrator speaks is amateurish, at best, and it's often an unnecessary distraction. The drawings, although well executed, are a bit too didactic. The psychology, although suggested, rather than overtly stated, is alternately implausible and too broad. The horror is tepid.

Nevertheless, the short film, overall, is intriguing and offers a lot to discern, analyze, and appreciate.

The Dramatistic Pentad Plotting Method

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 According to Kenneth Burke, human communication consists of answering six questions, to which, I suggest, a seventh should be added.

 

Burke's questions: Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?

The question I would add: How many? or How much?

Specifically, these questions seem to relate to

Who? = agent, agency

What? = act, force, object, incident

When? = duration, time

Where? = location

How? = method, process, technique

Why? = cause, motive, reason, purpose

How many? or How much? = quantity (in number or quantity, respectively)

To fully describe the basic plot of a short story, a novel, or a movie, each of these questions, as appropriate, should be answered:

Who? Norman Bates

What? murders Marion Crane and Detective Abogast

When?

Where? in the motel he manages and in the house in which he lives

How? by stabbing Marion and pushing Abogast down the stairs

Why? because the personality of his deceased mother orders him to do so

How many? two (murders)

By putting these answers together in a single sentence, an effective synopsis of Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho is obtained:

In response to the command of his deceased mother's internalized personality, Norman Bates, a motel manager, commits two murders, stabbing Marion Crane to death in her room's shower and pushing Detective Abogast down the stairs of the Victorian house in which Norman lives.

This method is not only useful in generating story synopses, but it can also be used to generate plot twists. A writer can introduce an innovation at any point (that is, for any question). For example, let's take an item from USA Today's “News from around the 50 states” column. The original item, concerning Montana, reads:

A federal judge has ruled that the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service must do more to protect Canada lynx from bobcat traps. The Missoulian reports the lawsuit by WildEarth Guardians and Center for Biological Diversity claimed the federal agency is failing to follow a treaty protecting endangered species and not doing enough to stop trappers from capturing the wrong animal. Lynx are classified as a threatened species under the U. S. Endangered Species Act.

First, let's separate the information into our interrogative scheme:

Who? A federal judge

What? ruled that the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service must do more to protect Canada lynx from bobcat traps

When? recently (implied by the fact that the item is a news report)

Where? in Montana

How? follow a treaty protecting endangered species and . . . [do more] to stop trappers from capturing the wrong animal

Why? because Lynx are classified as a threatened species

Now, to introduce a plot twist, we can simply replace one phrase in the answer to a question with another phrase that mentions a bizarre or an unexpected substitution:

Who? A secret court

What? ruled that the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service must do more to protect Canada lynx from bobcat traps

When? recently (implied by the fact that the item is a news report)

Where? in Montana

How? follow a treaty protecting endangered species and . . . [do more] to stop trappers from capturing the wrong animal

Why? because Lynx are classified as a threatened species

or

Who? A federal judge

What? ruled that . . . U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel should shoot people who injure Yetis with bobcat traps.

When? recently (implied by the fact that the item is a news report)

Where? in Montana

How? follow a treaty protecting endangered species and . . . [do more] to stop trappers from capturing the wrong animal

Why? because Lynx are classified as a threatened species

or

Who? A federal judge

What? will rule that the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service must do more to protect Canada lynx from bobcat traps

When? during a future meeting

Where? in Montana

How? follow a treaty protecting endangered species and . . . [do more] to stop trappers from capturing the wrong animal

Why? because Lynx are classified as a threatened species

or

Who? A federal judge

What? ruled that the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service must do more to protect Canada lynx from bobcat traps

When? recently (implied by the fact that the item is a news report)

Where? on Space Station Zebra

How? follow a treaty protecting endangered species and . . . [do more] to stop trappers from capturing the wrong animal

Why? because Lynx are classified as a threatened species

or

Who? A federal judge

What? ruled that the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service must do more to protect Canada lynx from bobcat traps

When? recently (implied by the fact that the item is a news report)

Where? in Montana

How? follow an intergalactic treaty protecting endangered species and . . . [do more] to stop trappers from capturing the wrong animal

Why? because Lynx are classified as a threatened species

or

Who? A federal judge

What? ruled that the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service must do more to protect Canada lynx from bobcat traps

When? recently (implied by the fact that the item is a news report)

Where? in Montana

How? follow a treaty protecting endangered species and . . . [do more] to stop trappers from capturing the wrong animal

Why? because Lynx are classified as a human predators

Personally, I like the “Yetis” substitution the best, which implies not only that the creatures actually exist, but also that they are protected by the federal government because they represent an “endangered species,” a plot that could be developed humorously, perhaps as a satire.

Of course, another possibility also exists: change not just one, but several, of the answers to our questions. (Probably, this is the most effective approach.) Here's an example:

Who? Cryptozoologists

What? recommend that the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service protect Yetis from hunters and trappers

When? recently

Where? throughout the United States and its territories

How? by allowing the creatures to roam free, rather than confining them to particular areas, or “reservations,”

Why? because, free to roam, Yetis, a threatened species, will be better able to defend themselves against human intruders

If, initially, the results of this process seem lame, choose a different news item and start fresh. Ultimately, the process can be rewarding!