The 15 basic Appeals of Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L.Pullman

Jib Fowles helped thousands of people better understand how advertisements, print and otherwise, manipulate viewers using fifteen basic appeals to various desires, emotions, and needs. He characterized five of these needs as “needs to,” eight others are “needs for.” Generally speaking, people can satisfy “needs to” on their own, but they require the participation or, at least, the presence of others to fulfill “needs for.”

Fowles identifies these “needs to”:

The need to aggress.

The need to escape.

The need to feel safe.

The need to nurture.

The need to satisfy curiosity.

The “needs for” are:

The need for aesthetic sensations.

The need for affiliation.

The need for attention.

The need for autonomy.

The need to dominate.

The need for guidance.

The need for prominence.

The need for sex.

The fifteenth basic need is a group, the physiological needs, which include the needs for food, drink, sleep, and so forth.

His essay explains in detail each of these needs and provides several examples of each type of appeal advertisements make in promoting their products.

The same fifteen basic needs make horror novels, short stories, and movies appealing to their readers and viewers. Let's take a look at these needs, in regard to horror novels and movies, in the same order in which Fowles himself discusses these needs in relation to the appeal of advertisements, as we cut back and forth between the two analyses.

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1. The Need for Sex

Only a small percentage of ads appeal to sex, because such an appeal can overwhelm the product being advertised. As Fowles says, “it is too blaring and tends to obliterate product information. Nudity in advertising has the effect of reducing brand recall.” In other words, sex and nudity are distracting, and they are more memorable than the product they supposedly promote.

Whether or not an ad containing nudity or sexual imagery actually evokes the need for sex depends on the context of the nudity or sexual images. Such an ad in Playboy magazine, aimed at men, may be an appeal to the need for sex, but one featuring a scantily dressed young woman and aimed at other young women is more likely an appeal to the need for attention.

2. The Need for Affiliation

The need for affiliation is the need to belong, to be part of a group. In a positive approach, such ads often show a person surrounded by friends or family members whose affection and loyalty are valued. Ads may also appeal to the need for affiliation by taking a negative approach and showing it as absent or as threatened” “If we don't use Scope, we'll have the 'Ugh!' Morning Breath' that causes the male and female models [in the ad] to avert their faces [from one another].” Ads also show the solutions to such problems—the products featured in the ads.

There are “several types of affiliation”: romance, courtship (dating), family togetherness, and friendship. The AT&T telephone ad that encouraged people to “reach out and touch someone” appeals to the need for affiliation.

3. The Need to Nurture.

The need to nurture is the need “to take care of small, defenseless creatures,” such as children and pets. Taking care of children and pets can involve feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, healing, and guiding them. Both men and women have the need to nurture.

4. The Need for Guidance

The need for guidance is the opposite of the need to nurture. These pitches are made by celebrities; fantasy figures (the Green Giant, Betty Crocker, Mr. Goodwrench); authority figures, real and imagined (“When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen”); or icons of “tradition or custom” or of “American history.” Kool-Aid appeals to the need for guidance through tradition, stating, “You loved it [Kool-Aid] as a kid. You trust it as a mother.”

5. The Need to Aggress

Everyone has the need to behave aggressively, to aggress. Ads that appeal to this need must be careful, in doing so, not to alienate consumers so that they do not turn “public opinion . . . against what is being sold.” Jack-in-the-Box offended customers by destroying the company's mascot, the Jack-in-the-box, until the violence was “toned down.”

6. The Need to Achieve

Ads that appeal to this need evoke the need to excel, to “accomplish something difficult” by overcoming “obstacles . . . . surpass others,” and “attain a high standard.” Athletes are often featured in such ads. However, ads may create their own “role models,” as Dewar's Scotch ads do in their profiles of successful people.

Ads based on the need to achieve often use superlatives: “best,” first,” “finest,” to suggest the “need to succeed.” Ads for sales and bargains also belong in this category, because they suggest that one has seized “an opportunity” and come “out ahead of others.”

7. The Need to Dominate

Fowles sees the need to dominate as a “craving to be powerful—perhaps omnipotent.” This need, he suggests, can be associated with “the need to . . . control one's environment' and a desire for “clout.”

Like the other needs, this one is universal, as applicable to women as it is to men.

8. The Need for Prominence.

This need, says Fowles, is related to “the need to be admired and respected, to enjoy prestige and high social status.” Wealth does not have to symbolize prominence, as Fowles points out by referencing the American Express advertisement, in which 'we learn that the prominent person is not so prominent without his American Express card.”

9. The Need for Attention.

Distinguishing the need for attention form the need for prominence, Fowles points out that the former concerns the need to be “looked up to”; the latter, to “the need to be looked at.” he cites a Brooke Shields advertisement in which the actress wears Calvin Klein jeans not so that men will pursue her, but so that she will stand out from other young women.

10. The Need for Autonomy

We tend to want to do things our own way, to be independent and to set our own tasks, according to our own agendas. “ The focus here is upon the independence and integrity of the individual,” Fowles says, and it is opposite to the need for guidance.

11. The Need to Escape.

“Escape” can be actual, literal escape or to figuratively and emotionally escape from the responsibilities and routines of everyday life. The latter type of escape is motivated by a search for pleasure and the freedom to do as we please. The need to escape can include other people besides oneself; a group can escape together as easily as a solitary individual.

12. The Need to Feel Safe

It's only natural to want to feel safe, and advertisements can appeal to this need directly, by showing models who are safe, or indirectly, by showing models who are in danger, because, even when we're at risk, we feel the need to be safe. Product durability often plays upon this need, as do references to natural ingredients.

13. The Need for Aesthetic Sensations.

“Aesthetic” refers to persons, places, or things that are beautiful or otherwise bring pleasure. Everyone has a need to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch beautiful objects, visit beautiful places, meet beautiful people, and dine on delicious food. Anything that satisfies the need for aesthetic sensations can be used to make this type of appeal.

14. The Need to Satisfy Curiosity.

This need involves “a need for information” and addresses people's natural sense of curiosity. In advertisements, Fowles says, “ Trivia, percentages, observations counter to conventional wisdom . . . all help [to] sell products,” and “any advertisement in a question-and-answer format is strumming this need.”

15. Physiological Needs.

Physiological needs are the needs of the body: food, drink, and sleep, among them. Many food advertisements make this basic appeal.

Styles

Fowles also identifies three “styles” that many advertisements employ to influence “the way a basic appeal is presented”: humor, celebrity endorsements, and “time imagery.”

Although humor can backfire, overwhelming the advertisement's message or offending people, “softer appeals” using a humorous approach can be effective.

Celebrity endorsements can backfire when celebrities behave obnoxiously or offend people, but this approach can work well; it allows famous men and women to “introduce” a sponsor's product, using one or more of the basic appeals, such as the need for guidance, the need to achieve, the need for aesthetic sensations, the need for affiliation, and the need to escape.

Time imagery can supply advertisers with historical heroes, traditions, and artwork, appealing to such needs as those for achievement, guidance, aesthetic sensations, affiliation, and escape. Nostalgia, the fond remembrance of times past, is an example of a time imagery approach.

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How does Fowles's analysis pertain to horror fiction? We offer examples in upcoming posts.

Doctors of Death

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

“When a doctor goes wrong, he is the first among criminals.” – Sherlock Holmes, “The Speckled Band”

Some believe Jack the Ripper was a medical doctor, perhaps a surgeon. Other serial killers are known to have practiced medicine, include H. H. Holmes, Harold Shipman, Michael Swango, Marcel Petiot, Shirō Ishii, John Bodkin Adams, Josef Menegle, Robert George Clements, Thomas Neill Cream, Louay Omar Mohammed ai-Taei, Maxim Petrov, and Kermit Gosnell.

As Sherlock Holmes (okay, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) observes, medical doctors make splendid criminals. They have the knowledge, the discipline, and the skill to kill, but they also often present the persona of a caring and humanitarian professional in whose hands patients are well-advised to place not only their trust, but also their lives. In fact, their victims often come to them, as patients who are both physically and emotionally vulnerable. They look upon their doctors as their best hopes for survival. Ironically, “when a doctor goes wrong,” he or she is apt to be just the opposite. Alas, patients sometimes learn too late that their trusted physician or surgeon is, in fact, a cold-blooded killer.

Horror movies have featured their share of diabolical doctors, some of whom are researchers, others of whom are medical practitioners or surgeons. Dr. Jekyll, of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, (1886) appears to be a chemist; Dr. Moreau, of H. G. Wells's novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), is a physiologist and vivisectionist; and Dr. Griffin*, of H. G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man (1897), is an optics researcher. (Mary Shelley's Victor von Frankenstein is not a doctor, but an amateur scientist of sorts. Likewise, Dr. Anton Phibes [of the 1972 movie The Abominable Dr. Phibes] is not a medical doctor; he has degrees in music and theology, one of which is a doctorate.)

Several other novels and movies also feature doctors of one type or another, but the ones we've identified are sufficient for our (or, rather, Sherlock Holmes's) thesis: “When a doctor goes wrong, he is the first among criminals.”

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Dr. Jekyll

In creating the dual character of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson seems to have separated the private person from his persona. The former is the public face, the persona, presented to the world; the latter, the private person, known only to himself (and not entirely known, even then).

All of us are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We have private selves and public selves, and these split aspects of our personalities are not always in synchronization with one another. Privately, we desire and fantasize and, perhaps, in some ways act upon less-than-honorable, or even shameful, impulses and proclivities which, in our public lives, we would never dare to acknowledge, much less entertain or act upon.

We are hypocrites, all—or would be, had society not, in its wisdom, allowed us to a differentiate between our private lives, wherein ignominious and disgraceful thoughts, feelings, and secret behaviors are allowed without penalty, as long as they harm no one, and our public lives, wherein we are expected to conform to the mores, traditions, customs, and laws of civilized society.

Wanting to kill, or even entertaining fantasies about murdering, another person is permissible to us in our private lives, the lives that our counterparts to Mr. Hyde live, but such ideas, emotions, and dreams are strictly forbidden to us in our public lives, the lives of our Dr. Jekyll dopplegangers live.

In crossing the line between the private hell of his personal life and the public life of affected propriety, Stevenson's protagonist committed a horror more horrible than the murders he perpetrated. Stevenson's novel is a cautionary tale: this far, one may go, but not a step farther. The boundary between the vile, secret self and the acceptable persona must be respected at all costs. When it is, murders and other immoral acts are unlikely to occur; the monster within is kept at bay.

Dr. Moreau

As we point out in another post, mixing human and animal perverts both natures, dehumanizing the former while objectifying the latter. Men and women, like animals, are better off as men and women or as animals than they would be as manimals or womanimals. By being hybridized as chimeras, neither human nor animal is improved.

Compared to humans animals are not, by nature, very bright. They live mostly by instinct, unable to comprehend the ways of men and women, whom, according to scientists, they regard as alpha members of the pack of which they themselves are lesser members. Unfortunately, with intelligence comes the capacities for treachery, infidelity, malice aforethought, and all manner of other evils. There are no innocent adults, and even children are often cruel to one another. They do not need teachers; such cruelty comes naturally to them. An animal, especially a domesticated one, is more innocent than any child.

By mixing humans and beasts, as Dr. Moreau did, both are made different and are devalued in the process. Indirectly, through is hybrid creatures, Dr. Moreau causes the deaths of others, but his greater crime is the immorality of vivisection as the means he employs for grafting human beings and animals. His means to his ends set him apart in his villainy, just as does Dr. Jekyll's means to his ends set him apart for the same reason.

Dr. Griffin

Humans depend upon their five senses to perceive the world. Primarily, they depend upon sight. To render oneself or anything else invisible is to eliminate the sense of sight, at least as it concerns the persons or objects made invisible. Invisibility blinds us, and blindness hampers our powers to conduct reconnaissance or surveillance and to protect ourselves and defend others. To confer invisibility upon someone or something is to disable those who are thus deprived sight of the person or thing made invisible.

To use a unique and extraordinarily effective ability against others, leaving them vulnerable and defenseless is tantamount to betrayal. Dr. Griffin's invisibility allows him to accomplish just such an immoral act. Instead of using his power to benefit others, he abuses it, even committing acts of murder. Again, his ends to his means is worse than the deaths he inflicts upon his victims, because these ends set him apart from his peers as not only ruthless but also inhuman.

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Stevenson and Wells, although not, perhaps, in the first rank of literature, many might contend, are, nonetheless, superior to the vast majority of writers of their time or, indeed, of any time. The quality of their writing, its urbane and sophisticated style, the subtlety of their novels' various themes, their superb craftsmanship, their attention to detail, and the unhurried manner of their narratives, in which, most often, structure and function are so perfectly balanced as to appear to be one and the same thing, make their stories of such a character that the morality of the tales are not overwhelmed by the sensationalism of their plots. Directly, or by proxy, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Moreau, and Dr. Griffin are serial murderers. Although their criminal deeds are described in lurid detail, the murders they commit, as extravagant as they are, do not cloud the moral implications of their heinous acts.

Imaginary vs. Imaginative Worlds as They relate to Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In C. S. Lewis: A Life, Alister McGrath points out the distinction that Lewis makes between imaginary and imaginative worlds. For Lewis, the former, McGrath says, depicts a landscape having “no counterpart in reality,” whereas the latter seeks to convey “images adequate to” the depiction of a transcendent “reality.” The worlds of mythology are examples of imaginative worlds, and “the more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability, Lewis says, to “communicate more reality to us.”

McGrath makes it clear that, in discussing imaginative worlds, Lewis does not mean that such worlds—or the works devoted to them—are allegories. They may be interpreted allegorically, but that does not mean that they themselves are allegories. As Lewis explains, his own Chronicles of Narnia can be allegorized, but that “of itself is no proof that it is an allegory.” Instead, his Narnia series, which presents an imaginative world, is a “supposal,” by which he means fiction that supplies possible answers to questions of a transcendent nature. Using Narnia as an example, Lewis writes:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress] represents Despair, he [Aslan] would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours? This is not allegory at all.”

Lewis makes several points:

1. The writer's work asks or implies a question.
2. Although the question is posed in or by a work of fiction, the question relates to an actual event or events in the real world.
3. In the context of its imaginative world, the work poses an answer to the question.
   
   

Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fails these tests and is, indeed, McGrath states, a work about an imaginary, rather than an imaginative, world. The world of Oz has no referent beyond itself. Narnia, by contrast, is shadow of another world which is itself the shadow of yet another world, just as, in Plato's thought, our sense perceptions of phenomena are shadows of the objects in the world and the world is itself a shadow of the transcendent world of perfect Forms.

An illustration of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” pictures a man chained against a wall behind which men carry clay figures. The men hold the figures over their heads, and the upper portions of the figures are higher than the top of the wall against which the man on the other side is chained. A fire burning on a stone shelf of the cave, on the other side of the men, casts the shadows of the objects onto the wall in front of the chained man. Rather than seeing the actual objects—clay figures of a horse, a bull, and a pot—the chained man sees only their shadows. High on one of the cave's walls, a ladder ascends to the world above, where the sun shines in the sky. The objects the men carry are mere copies of the things in the world above—representations of the animals—and the shadows are copies, as it were, of these copies. Only in the unseen world above are the unseen, actual animals (representing, in the allegory, the Forms themselves).

Lewis's Narnia is somewhat like Plato's allegorical cave. The real world is Narnia, where Aslan dwells. Its copy is The Chronicles of Narnia, which recount the events in Narnia. The copy of the copy is our own world, a dim reflection of the imaginative world of the novels, which is, in turn, itself a faint likeness of Aslan's real world. The images that depict the world of the novels are the clay pots in Jung's cave, which represent, but do not truly reflect, the true objects themselves, any more than the objects truly reflect their transcendent Forms. As Lord Digory says, in The Last Battle, “It's all there in Plato.”

In attempting to envision Forms (i. e., in a Christian context, divine realities), Lewis depicts Christ as the lion Aslan, Satan as the White Witch, the fallen, unredeemed world as a frozen wasteland in which Christmas never arrives (until Aslan appears), and the Pevensie children are disciples. As McGrath points out,

Lewis's remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this metanarrative—to get inside the story and feel what it was like to be part of it . . . . The Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story.

Do any horror stories accomplish something similar, creating imaginative worlds wherein the writer's work asks or implies and answers a question related to an actual event or events in the real world? Do any works of horror fiction shadow the true horrors of the real world in such a way that readers can enter their imaginative worlds and “experience” the stories depicting these landscapes? Do any of them give rise to myths? Are any horror stories mythopoeic?

The icons of horror that continue to resonate with readers and moviegoers may indicate which images have particular force in conveying feelings of terror and disgust (probably the two chief elements of horror). Often, these icons appear in literary works, but they are also present in the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. Such icons include demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies, all of which have appeared in novels, short stories, or movies that meet Lewis's criteria, asking or implying a question related to what is (or is, at least, believed by some to be) related to an actual event or events in the real world, and pose answers to the question they pose.

To get just an intimation of the power these images of horror originally held for their audiences, we must try, to the best of our abilities, to envision the world as it was to them and to see, in this context, the supernatural beings they imagined as their enemies.

The world in which such creatures existed was a pre-scientific world wherein there was no well-established association of objective cause and effect. Demons, rather than bacteria, birth defects, viruses, radiation, or the like afflicted people with disease, blindness, or mental illness. They also animated human corpses, using dead bodies, as “vampires,” to drink blood. Demons also empowered witches to perform spectacular feats and wonders. The soul's survival of death enabled the existence of ghosts and zombies.

Today, we might call such a view of “reality” superstitious, but, for the ancients, it was simply the truth, the way things were, reality itself. Against such evils, such remedies as prayers, rituals, incantations were the only recourse which might prevail, and, only then, because God ruled over even the supernatural entities that afflicted humanity.

Horror is, like poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and many other human enterprises, of religious, not secular, origin, and, despite the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Enlightenment, horror continues to tap the primeval aspects of our existence as human beings that religion once addressed and, indeed, continues, for many, to address.

Just as adults retain vestiges of their childhood experience, humanity retains traces of its primordial heritage. In our fiction and in the dark, dim recesses of our ancient selves, demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies continue to horrify us, just as, in times past, they possessed, haunted, stalked, hexed, and vexed our ancestors in the “real world” in which they lived. If you doubt this, spend a few minutes alone in a cemetery by yourself after dark or imagine spending a night alone in the catacombs, among centuries-old corpses and skeletons of the dead.

Then, you will begin to fathom the terrible terror felt by those who believed in things that go bump in the night, and reading Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King will take on a new intensity. In Platonic and mythopoeic terms, their works are, after all, shadows of the shadows of the Real Horrors awaiting us beyond this world.

Inference and Implication as the Language of Film

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

A rule of thumb is that one page of a screenplay equals one minute of screen time. The cost of filming is expensive, so, ideally, each foot of film is vital to the story. It helps to set the scene, establishes the mood, introduces a character, presents a significant conflict, symbolizes or underscores the theme, or otherwise advances the plot or the movie's overall purpose.

Of course, the opening scene* of a motion picture also bears the burden of “hooking” the audience, of capturing their interest, of making them want to see the rest of the movie.

The primary language of film is imagery, the organized sequences of pictures that appear on the screen. Imagery is often supplemented and complemented by sound, including dialogue. The language of film is rich and powerful, primal and rousing, but it is also limited. Written language can tap more than sight and sound; it can get inside readers' minds, evoke (or represent) thought, reflection, and consensus or disagreement between characters (or between characters and readers), as well as characters' and readers' emotions. Although movies may occasionally awaken the mind, motion pictures mostly elicit feelings. They're directed, first and foremost, at the heart.

The language of film—image and sound—is limited in another way as well. It relies almost entirely upon suggestion, or implication. Unless a director resorts to a rather heavy-handed use of exposition, telling audiences, rather than showing them, what something means or how action should be understood, all a movie can do is to show images, have actors comment upon events, and leave it to audiences to put two and two together (and to read between the lines, so to speak) in order to infer the meanings of the images and sounds presented to them. Written narratives can and do use exposition (although they do so less frequently today than in the past). Sometimes exposition is provided for pages at a time. By this means, omniscient narrators go directly inside characters' heads or explain the meanings of incidents, scenes, or, in some cases, entire short stories or novels.

It's important to remember that the language of film requires directors to imply and audiences to infer. With this in mind, let's take a look at the opening scene of a well-known slasher flick.

First, we describe the action shown to us by the camera. Then, in blue font, we provide an inference or two to represent those which are likely to be made by audiences who see and hear each sequence of images. In our examples, viewers mostly see, rather than hear, what follows.
 

Halloween (approximately five minutes of screen time)

As our eyes travel from left to right across the front of a porch, we see the white wall of the front of a clapboard suburban house, the front door, vague human shapes moving behind a window curtain, and a Jack-o-lantern on a porch rail, among dense, dark foliage. The foliage ends, its leaves casting shadows upon the house's wall.

It's Halloween. Who are the people inside the house? What are they doing? Are they residents? Home invaders? Cat burglars?

Inside the house, through the window, we see a young couple. The girl is seated on a couch, the boy sitting beside her. She holds him around the waist, as he kisses her, his hands holding the sides of her head. Hearing something, they pause and listen. The boy lifts a mask to his face, pressing it into the girl's face as he kisses her. She shoves him away, and he removes the mask, grinning at her. We have become—or have been made to become—voyeurs. We watch the young couple make out on the couch.

Whose house are they in? Probably hers. What have they heard? Despite having heard something, their playfulness suggests they're unconcerned about the sound or noise they heard a moment ago.

They embrace, kiss again, and the boy leaps to his feet. The girl joins him, and they leave the room, dashing upstairs together.

The couple probably plan to make love.

Outside, the porch flashes past, from left to right. We see the Jack-o-lantern on the porch rail among dense, dark foliage, the white wall of the front of the clapboard suburban house, two windows fronting the porch—our gaze rises; above the eaves, we see a pair of lit windows on the right; the pair on the left are dark. The light in the windows on the right go out. We are not the only voyeurs. The point of view, resumed a second time, as the observer retraces his or her steps, indicates that there is a watcher present.

The unseen watcher is interested in the lit window of the room into which the young couple appear to have retreated to make love.

We see the porch sweep past, we turn a corner, and we spot the open back door. Entering the kitchen, we see shelves, cabinets, a mixer. A light comes on, and we see the stove; the sink; a vertical rack of dishtowels, an orange one at the front; the tile floor.

The observer has found an entrance to the house and entered the residence. He or she moves through the kitchen.

Because the camera represents the invader's point of view, in watching him or her, we accompany this person.

An arm clad in the sleeve of a camouflage shirt is extended; its hand grips the handle of a butcher's knife, removing it from the drawer. Decorative plates hang on the wall near the stove. To their left, a doorway leads into the dining room: table braced with chairs and set with a linen tablecloth and silver candlesticks bearing long, slender tapers; a side table; a silver tureen on the doily atop the side table; pictures on the wall above the side table. The invader, knife in hand, enters the dining room.

His or her targets are likely to be the young couple making love upstairs.

Another doorway leads into the living room: a television, a rocking chair, a pole lamp, a sofa, a painting on the wall—the same room in which the young couple were necking. 

The invader seems intent on following the path of the young couple. The knife he or she has acquired suggests harm is intended.

Another doorway leads into a hallway, where a staircase banister appears. There's a ceiling lamp, and, on the wall above the staircase, a painting. Near the top of the stairs, a boy, tugging a shirt down his naked torso. He bounds down the stairs—the same boy who was making out with the girl on the couch a few moments ago. At the front door, he pauses, looks back, says goodbye to someone—the girl, we assume. The door closes.

As the invader starts to enter the hallway, the teenage boy who was necking with the girl on the living room couch runs down the stairs, pulling on a shirt. He says goodbye before leaving.

He and the girl have finished making love. He's going home. The girl is alone in the house, unaware of the invader.

Into the hallway and up the stairs, past the painting, into the darkness. At the top of the stairs, a hallway. A right turn. A hand reaches into the hallway to pick up a toy. Clothes and a bag on a bed. The invader does not pursue the boy.

He or she is after the girl.

Our conclusion is borne out by the fact that he climbs the stairs.

At a vanity, the girl, naked but for her panties, brushes her hair. Her bed is rumpled. The girl, sensing she is not alone, turns, shocked and frightened. She covers her breasts, ducking away.

The half-naked girl is startled by the invader's arrival.

As the eye holes of a mask look into the room, at the girl, we see the room and the girl from the invader's point of view.

The intruder is masked.

A flashing knife stabs downward, again and again. The girl falls, lying still on her back.

He or she has killed the girl.

The eye holes look back and forth.

The killer searches the room.

The staircase. The front door, seen through the eye holes.

He or she is going downstairs.

The door opens. Darkness. Night.

The killer is intent upon escape.

A car's headlights. A dark car. A man and a woman exit the vehicle. The man lifts a mask from a boy dressed as a clown and holding a knife—the same knife as stabbed the girl. He blinks. The knife is bloody. The killer is unmasked; we see the action from an objective, omniscient point of view. The killer is a child, dressed as a clown.

As we've made clear, moviemakers are restricted to images and sound; with these tools, they must imply meanings, which audiences must then infer. Short story writers and novelists can describe sights and sounds, but they can also appeal to the senses of touch, smell, and taste. In addition, by using interior monologues and narrative exposition, among other techniques, short story writers and novelists can also directly represent characters' thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other subjective states and qualities, without the need to have readers infer much of anything. What such writers gain is offset by the loss of the directness of communication typical of imagery and sound, which create the impression that events are actually transpiring before the audience's very eyes (and ears). There's always a distance between short story writers or novelists and their readers—the distance of the written word.

There are a few ways by which writers can approximate the directness with which movies communicate with their audiences:

Describe what a camera shows. The camera can be a video recorder, the source of “found footage,” as in The Blair Witch Project, or surveillance cameras that have recorded crimes or otherwise unsettling behavior or events, as in 13 Cameras. Such footage may also be provided by videos taken of vacation trips or by home movies.

Describe the images in a dream as the dream occurs. A Nightmare on Elm Street takes this approach, although, of course, the film shows the dream images directly, rather than describing them. 

If the horror movie also involves science fiction, a person's consciousness, projected as images on a screen, through a brain-computer or other interface, could be described. (This may become an actual reality in the near future!)

Describe the imagery transmitted by a camera mounted on a drone.

Describe what a sniper sees as he or she trails a target through his or her weapon's scope.

None of these techniques will provide the directness that a motion picture camera provides; at best, each is merely an approximation of such directness. Nevertheless, such techniques are likely to make the communication between the writer (or his or her narrator) and readers more direct than it would be otherwise.

* * *

For Edgar Allan Poe, the short story's form is superior to that of the novel, because the former's compact structure, greater unity, and better coherence results in a greater emotional effect on readers than the latter's longer, less unified and less coherent development. In a short story, which, according to The Annotated Poe, Poe defines as taking no longer than an hour to read, all narrative elements contribute to the payoff at the end of the tale, making the story's conclusion, whether that of the comedy's denouement or that of the tragedy's catastrophe, seem inevitable, given what has transpired before it.

According to the Internet Movie database (IMDb), in 2010, feature-length films were, on the average, approximately 130 minutes long (Halloween is 129 minutes long), which is about 2.15 times longer than the optimum length Poe names for the 60-minute short story. Halloween's opening scene lasts about five minutes, which is about 3.9 percent of the movie's overall length. At the same ratio, the comparative length of time for a 60-minute short story would be about 2.34 minutes.

According to Forbes, reading speed increases with education and (presumably) experience, but the “average adult” reads at a rate of about 300 words per minute. In 2.34 minutes, therefore, the average adult reader reads about 702 words, or about 2.81 pages if each 6 x 9-inch printed page bears 250 words) or 2.55 pages (if each 6 x 9-inch printed page bears 275 words). In other words, if we base our calculations on 275 words per page, a short story writer or a novelist has about 2.55 pages, or 701 words, in which to accomplish the task that Halloween's director, John Carpenter, accomplishes in the five minutes of his film's opening scene.

*However, the film's opening scene does not comprise the whole of the movie's beginning, which is significantly longer and more complex. For a more accurate contrast of the differences between cinematographic and linguistic modes of communication, the actual beginning of the movie and the beginning of a short story or a novel should be considered in detail. As defined here, the beginning of a film, short story, or novel, using Gustav Freytag's model of dramatic structure, would consist of the first act, the exposition, which begins with the start of the story and ends with the inciting moment that initiates the rising action, or the second of the five acts of the story, during which the basic conflict is complicated.

For the movie Halloween, the beginning of the story runs to Michael Myers's escape from the sanitarium to which he was confined after stabbing his sister, Judith, to death. His escape, which occurs at about 10 minutes and 41 seconds, or about 8.5 percent, into the 129-minute film. (It is Judith whom he saw, as a boy, making out with her boyfriend in the living room of their home while his parents were away.) By comparison, 8.5 percent of the 166-page novel Halloween, which is based on the movie, equals about 14 pages.