Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Dominate

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

All of us feel the need to dominate others, Jib Fowles notes. Advertisements, he says, appeal to this universal “basic need.” The desire for “clout,” this need is characterized by “the craving to be powerful—perhaps omnipotent”—and it may take the form of a desire to “dominate and control one's environment.”

Although Fowles doesn't mention these other forms specifically, it seems that the “basic need” to dominate would also occur in such endeavors as those involving social, personal, economic, governmental, and technological ends, to name but a few.

Horror fiction, like other genres of literature, often appeals to the need to dominate.

In one of Stephen King's novels, Gerald's Game (1992), men sexually dominate a woman; in another, Misery (1987), a woman physically dominates a man.

Gerald's Game: After Jessie tells her dominant husband, lawyer Gerald Burlingame, she does not want to engage in another session of bondage and discipline with him, he persists, climbing atop her after handcuffing her to the bed, despite her protests. She kicks him, he falls onto the floor, has a heart attack, and dies. Alone in the remote cabin to which they have repaired, and shackled to the bed, Jessie begins to hallucinate, seeing a figure she calls “Space Cowboy” and hearing voices, each a different aspect of herself that she's repressed. The voices help her to better understand her past as a victim of paternal sexual abuse and her present as a wife who is more valued as a trophy than as a human being who's an equal partner in marriage. She has settled for Gerald, despite his emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of her, because he is financially secure. After several attempts at escape, she finally frees herself of the handcuffs by cutting away enough of the skin on one wrist to lubricate her skin with her blood. She pushes the bed to the bureau, retrieving a key with which to unlock the cuffs and free her other hand. However, the blood loss she has suffered causes her to lose consciousness, and, upon awakening, she imagines she is being pursued by the Space Cowboy and wrecks her car. Later, as Jessie is recovering, a nurse tells her that the Space Cowboy is actually a necrophiliac killer, Raymond Andrew Joubert, who was passing through Maine when he came upon her cabin.

A victim of her father, her husband, and a serial killer and necrophile, all of whom abused and dominated her for their own sexual and sadistic purposes, Jessie is a survivor because she is willing to do whatever it takes—repress horrific memories of her past to the extent that she becomes three personalities, rather than one; kill her husband; and evade a killer who had apparently left her to die in the cabin so he could return to have sex with her corpse.

Misery: Romance novelist Paul Sheldon wrecks his car during a blizzard and is rescued by his “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who lives in a remote house in the mountains. Angry that Sheldon has killed his heroine, Misery Chastain, in the last book of the series, Annie keeps him prisoner, demanding he resurrect Misery in a sequel, Misery's Return. He discovers she's a serial killer but isn't aware that she plans to kill them both after reading Misery's Return. After Sheldon finishes his manuscript, he sets it ablaze. (In fact, however, the manuscript is merely a counterfeit of the actual document.) He and Annie struggle until Annie collapses after falling and striking her head on the mantelpiece in his bedroom. The next day, he gets the attention of state police who are seeking her in connection with a trooper she'd killed earlier. At first, they cannot find her body, but it is later discovered in the barn. She'd made her way there to get a chainsaw with which to kill Paul, but died from the injuries she'd sustained in their fight. Paul publishes Misery's Return, before working on a literary novel, planning to launch a new career as a serious author.

The ordeal through which Sheldon goes, suffering emotional and physical abuse at the hands of his psychotic “biggest fan,” is not only a testament to his courage, perseverance, and will to survive, but they are also the reasons that he is able to endure the torment to which he is subjected, escapes, and emerges alive, more or less in one piece. His tenacity also allows him to overcome the alcoholism that plagues him and the writer's block he suffers as a result of his ordeal. By showing the traits of character and will that Sheldon requires to come back from the brutal abuse of a dominant personality, King suggests the way forward for actual individuals who have experienced similar barbarity.

As Fowles observes, dominance doesn't have to be sexual or depend on relationships between men and women. In William Golding's The Lord of the Flies (1954), a novel King says he wishes he'd written, the need to dominate is expressed socially.

Economic dominance occurs in Bentley Little's The Store (1998). A national chain of big-box department stores has virtually taken over the brick-and-mortar retail world. The Store is everywhere. Its ever-expanding growth wipes out mom-and-pop stores, most franchises, and any vendors and suppliers who don't want to meet its terms. Stocking anything anyone could ever want to buy, and selling merchandise at discount prices, The Store is quickly becoming the only place to shop. Its benefits—a huge inventory, low prices, thousands of locations, employment for an army of workers, and taxes to local, state, and federal governments, are as numerous as its operations are vast. However, there's a downside to The Store—and, like its benefits, its negative effects are tremendous.

The Store: Juniper, Arizona, wants The Store, so officials offer tax breaks and other incentives to entice its executives to build one in its community. From the beginning, there are indications that The Store may not be the blessing local politicians believe it will be: dead animals—and a human corpse—at the construction site, black vehicles delivering mysterious merchandise in the middle of the night, and The Store's taking over of the town. Bill Davis senses trouble, and he's uneasy when his daughters become employees of The Store. Night Managers terrorize the staff. Employees disappear. Bizarre merchandise, including a line of dildos and other sex toys, show up on the shelves. Through its economic power, The Store runs roughshod over the lives of employees, customers, townspeople, politicians, vendors, suppliers, and other businesses. Just who is The Store's CEO, Newman, and what does he want to accomplish through his domination of the town—and of the nation?

Sometimes, we forget the true power of money, thinking of power in physical terms, as brute strength, weapons, or military force. However, economics is the basis of every enterprise, especially in capitalistic countries, and its potential for evil, like its potential for good, is tremendous. How is such economic clout to be resisted and overcome? How are individuals, families, communities, and nations to survive against such a powerful economic threat to their autonomy, safety, welfare, and liberty? The need to achieve through economic dominance, Little reminds his readers, is a force to be reckoned with.

Dean Koontz's The Taking(2004) depicts attempt to dominate the environment. 

The Taking: After a torrential downfall of semen-scented rain, a mysterious slime appears overnight, coating buildings, streets, trees, lawns, bushes, and the rest of the landscape. The small town in which Neil and Molly Sloan reside is isolated from the rest of the world as telephone, radio, television, and Internet service fail. The Sloans gather a group of their neighbors. Some among them believe the apocalypse is upon them. The truth is that an advance team of alien scientists have arrived, and they're reverse-terraforming the earth to make it habitable for them in preparation for a massive invasion.

By showing the effects on the environment through the lens of an alien invasion, Koontz provides a fresh look at the effects of pollution and energy waste that societies are inflicting on their own planet, offering an ironic portrayal of some of the effects that continuous neglect and abuse of the planet could have on Earth and its inhabitants, including human beings themselves. It's a harrowing story condemning the dominance of the environment that is underway today, as it has been for generations. 

The story is made all the more unsettling, indeed horrible, because of the actual use of pesticides to control weeds and defoliants to denude vast acreages of plants. 

Developed in the 1970s by Monsanto, Roundup, a “glyphosate-based pesticide,” is today used in more than 160 countries, on a variety of crops, despite controversy concerning whether the product is a carcinogen. 

During the Vietnam War, the United States military used Agent Orange to strip the foliage from “3,100,000 hectares (31,000 km²; 12,000 sq mi)” of forest, in the process exposing millions of Vietnamese people and thousands of U. S. military personnel to the agent, which has been linked to a variety of cancers. The “herbicidal warfare” operations occurred from 1961 to 1971, but their effects continue to cause health problems to the Vietnamese people and to Vietnam veterans. 

Whether the intent has been to protect crops by controlling pests or to defoliate forests during “herbicidal warfare” operations, chemical attempts to dominate the environment have had effects even more chilling than those of which Koontz writes in The Taking, because, unlike his novel's horrors, those that resulted from the use of pesticides and defoliants are real, not imaginary. 

Both King's and Koontz's novels also chronicle the results of attempts by the federal government to dominate society. King's Firestarter (1980) and Koontz's Watchers (1987) depict how ruthless the United States government can be in its quest to use science and technology as instruments of government dominance.

Firestarter: “Charlie” McGee develops telekinesis and the ability to “push,” or make hypnotic suggestions using the power of thought, after her father, Andy, participated as a subject in a clandestine government experiment. Over time, Charlie's powers become enormously powerful. She and Andy are hunted by government agents, including an assassin known as Rainbird, after they escape from the government laboratory, “the Shop.” Eventually, they escape to a cabin in Vermont, but they are subsequently captured and taken to a secret location in northern Virginia. Using their powers, they escape again, destroying the government facility, although Andy is killed. Charlie informs a national publication of her experiences.

Watchers: Travis Cornell, formerly of the Delta Force, stumbles upon a golden retriever and a hulking creature, the outsider, which have escaped from a top-secret government laboratory. The latter is pursuing the former, in an attempt to kill the canine. Because of the retriever's extremely high intelligence, Cornell names the animal “Einstein,” and he and the dog save a woman, Nora Devon, from a sexual predator. They become a trio, pursued by the Outsider, federal agents, and a Russian operative, Vince Nasco, who wants to kill the scientists involved in the experiments that produced Einstein and the Outsider and capture the dog to sell.

What makes these novels truly terrifying is that they address issues that have actually occurred in similar government experiments in which the human rights of test subjects were wantonly violated with impunity. In 1953, during MKUltra, the Central Intelligence Agency administered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to Frank Olson, an army biologist, without his knowledge or consent. As a result, he leaped to his death.

For forty years, from 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Six-hundred-and-twenty-two poor black men, supposedly receiving free medical care, were monitored without being treated for the disease, despite the proof that penicillin could cure them. None of the participants in the study were notified that treatment was being withheld, and none of them consented to the withholding of treatment. Forty of their wives contracted the disease, and nineteen children were born with congenital syphilis.

During Operation Top Hat (1953), the United States Army Chemical Corps deliberately “exposed personnel” to biological and chemical warfare agents, including phosgene, a suffocant; blister agents; and nerve agents, so decontamination methods could be tested.

James Patterson's novel Humans, Bow Down (2017), written with Emily Raymond, focuses upon technological dominance, as do the films the Terminator (1984-present) franchise, Demon Seed (1973), and many others.

Humans,Bow Down: In a war between humans and smart robots, which occurred some time ago, robots were the victors. Now, as the title of the novel suggests, humans have been subjugated to their conquerors. Whenever a robot leader appears, humans are ordered to “bow down,” showing their submission to their dominant masters. When a small band of humans dares to defy their mechanical overlords, there is hope that humans may regain their freedom, but liberty will not come cheaply, if at all.

Terminator: In the future, smart robots rule the Earth, and humans live minimal lives in filth, discomfort, and poverty, until John, the son of Sarah Connor, leads his fellow humans in a war against their brutal conquerors. To prevent this event from happening, the robots send one of their own, The Terminator, into the past to kill Sarah before she can conceive him. However, Sarah is not alone: her son also sends a soldier of the resistance back through time to protect her.

Demon Seed: Dean Koontz's 1973 novel, which was adapted to the big screen under the same title (1977), features Proteus, an artificially intelligent, state-of-the-art computer that plans to impregnate Susan, a wealthy divorcee whose home is controlled by a computer system. After commandeering Susan's home computer system, Proteus imprisons her in her home, in effect putting her under house arrest, and uses hypnosis and subliminal perception on her, interacting physically with her by using “pseudopod” tentacles that Proteus designs and constructs in the nearby university that houses “him.” From their union, a monstrous human-hybrid creature results, their “child,” with which Susan must do battle. 

Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been used to dominate workers and consumers, the economies of both domestic and foreign markets, military forces, politicians, and, indeed, entire political systems. It is only now becoming possible, some believe, for technology to dominate individuals in personal ways, such as by enslaving them or transforming their sex lives through the use of “sexbots” (robots designed as surrogate sex partners). If this proves to be the case, such visions as those presented in Humans,Bow Down, Terminator, and Demon Seed may be closer to realization than many might imagine. 

Although horror and science fiction are both forms of fantasy, writers of each genre have made some fairly horrific speculations about the abuses that stem from the need to dominate others and the environment.

In the past, it seems, more authors were likely to be optimistic about the future effects of present-day personal, social, economic, governmental, and technological efforts to dominate the world. After experiencing such horrors as two world wars, the medical experiments of Josef Mengele, the gassing of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis, the effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and such covert operations by American organizations against their own citizens, as carried out during the Vietnam War, the MKUltra project, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, and Operation Top Hat (to mention only a few), contemporary authors do not seem to share such an optimistic view of the need to dominate, as Gerald's Game, Misery, The Store, The Taking, Firestarter, Watchers, Humans, Bow Down, Terminator, and Demon Seed unanimously suggest.

The need to dominate may be universal among all individuals, but that doesn't mean its practice will necessarily produce beneficial outcomes.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Achieve

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

No one has ever written a horror novel or filmed a horror movie about a protagonist stubbing his or her toe. Horror is about grave loss—loss of limb, loss of life, loss of mind. It is about the loss of family members or friends. It is about the loss of mobility, ability, or health. In this context, the need to achieve receives elevated, often ultimate, significance, but it is directed toward preserving vitally important attributes or, indeed, life itself.

In the movie Silver Bullet, based on Stephen King's novella Cycle of the Werewolf, paraplegic adolescent Marty Coslaw, assisted by his Uncle Red, battles a werewolf. The wolfman has already killed five other residents of Tarker's Mills, Maine: railroad worker Arnie Westrum, would-be suicide Stella Randolph, Mitt Sturmfuller, teenager Brady Sinclair, and bartender Owen Knopfler.

When Uncle Red gives Marty the “Silver Bullet,” a souped-up wheelchair, the boy rides it out to a bridge in a forest, where he sets off fireworks his uncle has given him, attracting the werewolf's attention. Marty evades the werewolf by firing a rocket, which blinds the monster in its left eye. As a result, he escapes with his own life. Using only what is available to him at the moment, his wheelchair and his fireworks, Marty accomplishes his own rescue.

Later, the werewolf attacks Marty, his older sister Jane, and Uncle Red at the Coslaws' home, and Marty uses the silver bullet his uncle has had a local gunsmith make from Jane's silver cross to kill the creature. This time, his daring and the tools at hand—his uncle's pistol and the silver bullet—to save not only himself, but also his sister and his uncle, a greater achievement than his earlier escape from the werewolf, because, now, he has accomplished the rescue of three people instead of just himself.

An even greater achievement occurs in King's novel 'Salem'sLot, when author Ben Mears returns to Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, to write a book about the mysterious Marsten House, which has been bought by Austrian immigrant Kurt Barlow, a vampire who soon transforms several of the townspeople into fellow creatures of the night. Ben, his girlfriend Susan, high school teacher Matt Burke, Mat's physician, Dr. Jimmy Cody, high school student Mark Petrie, and the local Catholic priest, Father Callahan, join forces to fight the vampires taking over their town, and, together, succeed, despite suffering several casualties among their number, in destroying Barlow, before they are driven out of town by the other vampires. Later, Ben and Mark return to town to set a brush fire in a nearby woods, hoping the fire will destroy Jerusalem's Lot and the vampires who live there.

This story, like most of King's pits a small band of courageous, outnumbered friends against a seemingly superior menace. United in brotherly love, the heroes typically overcome the threat against them, delivering their community from the peril the monster or monsters represent. Although Ben and his group are only partly victorious, the novel's epilogue, in which Ben and Mark return to burn down the town, suggest that, ultimately, they are likely to completely achieve their goal of liberating Jerusalem's Lot from the vampires whose numbers might well eventually endanger other towns besides Jerusalem's Lot. Potentially, they could accomplish nothing less than the saving of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives.

Often, the idea of a horror story is more intriguing (to me, at least) than its execution, which may be the reason that I often enjoy horror novels more than I do their film adaptations. It's hard to see on the screen what one can envision in his or her imagination; often, the latter conception is superior to the former. Although the 1957 science fiction horror movie TheMonolith Monsters, based on a story by Jack Arnold and Robert M. Fresco, was never a novel before it became a film, it is a story that's better, in my opinion, in its conception than it is in its execution, an assessment shared by Monthly Film Bulletin, who reckons the movie as having been based on a “promising idea” that was not done justice by its actors or ist screenwriters, Fresco and Norman Jolley.

A crashed meteorite explodes into hundreds of shards, each of which then grows into a monolith when it encounters water and extracts silicon from any organism unlucky enough to make contact with it. The result is the petrification of the organism's tissues. Several victims undergo such a transformation, including geologist Ben Gilbert and schoolgirl Ginny Simpson. As the monoliths reach towering heights, they collapse, creating more fragments which, in turn, grow and fall, advancing upon San Angelo. If they monoliths are not stopped, they threaten not only San Angelo but the entire planet. Fortunately, a silicon injection containing salt has reversed the effects of Ginny's silicon depletion, and scientists realize that saline is the key to halting the monoliths. A dam is blown up, allowing its pent-up water to flood local salt flats, which saves the day for the residents of San Angelo and the world's population.

Since, typically, horror stories are about sustaining catastrophic losses, in this genre, the need to achieve takes the form of preventing or recovering from such losses, showing how an individual or a group, sometimes of ordinary, but heroic individuals, but more often a team of experts, working together for the common good, achieve, frequently at the cost of self-sacrifice, the avoidance, elimination, or recovery from losses of limbs, lives, sanity, mobility, ability, or health. It's difficult to imagine greater achievement, and it is to these heightened forms of achievement that horror fiction appeals in tapping the need to achieve Jib Fowles identifies as universal to humanity.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Aggress

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles, we all have the need to aggress, or to be aggressive. He attributes this need to the pent-up frustrations and tensions of everyday life. Typically, people repress the impulse to act aggressively, as society frowns upon eruptions of violence. We are taught to use our words, rather than our fists (or knives or guns). For advertisers, appeals to the need to aggress can backfire, Fowles warns, causing potential consumers to “turn against what is being sold.” Therefore, advertisements often substitute gestures (a raised middle finger, sarcastic “gibes,” or the insistence of getting “the last word in”).

Horror movie directors don't need to be quite as sensitive to alienating their audiences, although even they are not granted total license. In the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere, Cannibal Holocaust was banned for its extreme violence. The UK and other countries have also banned The Human Centipede, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Cemator, Peeping Tom (aka Le Voyeur), Friday the 13^th, Dead and Buried, The House on the Edge of the Park, The Devils, Just Before Dawn, Antichrist, Nekromantic, I Spit on Your Grave, Saw VI, Hell of the Living Dead, The Return of the Living Dead, Halloween, Land of the Dead, and Evil Dead. Although some of these films were banned for legal reasons (e. g., obscenity), religious (e. g., blasphemy), or political reasons (e. g., unflattering depictions of a particular regime), most were banned because of the extreme violence of their contents. In particular, the slasher film is often cited by feminists and others as misogynistic, sexist, and chauvinistic, since the victims are mostly, if not exclusively, women and the serial killer is almost always a male who kills his prey using a knife or other “phallic” weapon.

On the other side of the coin, critics who defend even extreme violence in cinema and other forms of fiction, such as novels, contend that such displays or descriptions of violence provide an emotional outlet for the impulse to injure or kill, helping people to vent these antisocial and dangerous emotions. Aristotle is one of the earliest critics to argue a similar point in his Poetics's theory that drama promotes catharsis.

Reading horror novels or watching horror movies has been shown to cause physiological responses, such as an increase in respiration and heartbeat, muscle tension, elevated cortisol levels (cortisol is the 'stress hormone”), increased eye movement, a “spike: in adrenaline levels, and a release of dopamine. Most likely, these responses are associated with the fight-or-flight impulse. If we believe that we can eliminate a perceived threat, we will fight; otherwise, we will take flight. Our physiological responses to fear energize and otherwise equip us to take either action.

In a psychological and aesthetic context, some believe that these physiological responses may be a reason that readers and audiences enjoy being frightened. At the same time, theorists believe, readers and audiences are secure in the knowledge that the events unfolding on the page or the screen are purely imaginary, so there is no existential threat to them.

In any case, it seems clear that the appeal of horror fiction lies, in part to its appeal to the need to aggress that everyone feels but, fortunately, few act upon and fewer still to the degree shown in the most violent horror films or described in the pages of the most ferocious horror novels.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Guidance

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles (and psychologist Henry Murray), the need for guidance is universal; everyone experiences it, male and female, young and old—everyone. In promoting their clients' products, advertisements use this basic need, one of the fifteen identified by Fowles, to appeal to potential customers. Since these needs are universal, they pop up, quite frequently, in fiction of all types, including that of the horror genre.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, guidance is provided by two major sources: Buffy's high school's library, a repository of a surprising number of books concerning the paranormal, supernatural, and occult, and her mentor, the Watcher Rupert Giles, himself a human repository of all things metaphysical and mystical. Although the Hellmouth, rather than the Sunnydale High School library, is the plot generator for much of the series, the library's books are often the means of explaining, if not always understanding, the threats the protagonist and her friends face each week.

In Supernatural, the plot generator, the notebook of demon hunters Sam and Dean Winchester's father, John, is also the source of the series's appeal to the need for guidance. Often absent, as he pursues demons and other things that go bump in the night on his own, John later sacrifices his life on behalf of Sam and is killed by the greatest adversary among the demons and other supernatural entities he's hunted. However, his notebook remains a source of knowledge about such threats, often not only describing their origin and nature, but also explaining how to eliminate them. After John's death, his friend, Bobby Singer, himself an experienced demon hunter in his own right, steps in, occasionally, as another source of guidance for the Winchester brothers.

As D. H. Lawrence suggests in his poem “The Snake,” one's culture and education are also “voices” that provide guidance. However, the guidance they provide may not always serve one as well as might be supposed. Such guidance may insist that natural and unconscious sources of wisdom and experience be “killed” as mysterious and potentially dangerous forces (represented, in Lawrence's poem, by the snake). Religion, mythology, philosophy, literature, and, more recently, some forms of psychology, such as Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, are often suggested (although not in “The Snake”) as means of ascertaining, interpreting, and applying such mystical or metaphysical wisdom. The key is that the irrational or the natural must be interpreted in rational terms, often by a trusted intermediary, such as a priest, a philosopher, a poet, or a psychoanalyst. Often, this is the task assigned, in fantasy, to the source of guidance upon which the characters depend.

In horror fiction that includes a science fiction context, the source of guidance is likely to be scientists or researchers. This situation is especially true in regard to the science fiction-horror movies of the 1950s, such as Them!, The Thing from Another World, The Giant Behemoth, The Trollenberg Terror (also known as The Crawling Eye), and The Monolith Monsters, to name a few.

In Them! myrmecologists dispatched by the U. S. Department of Agriculture determine that the giant ants attacking people near Alamagordo, new Mexico, are mutants produced by atomic bomb radiation.

The thing from another world, a biped, appears to be an animal, but scientists examining the tissue from one of its severed arms reveal that the organism is actually a plant.

Scientists determine that the “behemoth” that ravages the greater London metropolitan area was spawned, as it were, by radiation resulting from atomic testing (a major theme of these films) and provide guidance concerning how to kill the creature: subject it to even more radiation to expedite its demise (the creature, the scientists have found, is dying from radiation poisoning).

An astronomer at the Trollenberg observatory explains that mysterious deaths in the vicinity may be connected to an immobile, radioactive cloud hanging over the south face of Switzerland's Mount Trollenberg. Although the cloud, which later moves and splits into four smaller versions of itself, isn't explained in the movie, film critic Leonard Maltin reveals that it's a cloaking device of sorts, which conceals the film's true menaces, “alien invaders.”

After discovering a catatonic girl alive beneath the rubble of her family's farmhouse, doctors determine that she is slowly turning to stone. If the source of her contagion can be discovered, they may be able to save her life. A professor identifies a sample of the stone as having come from a meteorite. The stone is found to have the property of draining silicon from anything it touches. In humans, silicon maintains tissue flexibility. Without it, the girl's body is turning to stone, so she is injected with the element. Researchers discover that the salt in the solution administered to the girl stopped the stone from extracting silicon from her tissues, so a dam is dynamited, allowing local salt flats to be flooded, thereby saving the day for humanity.

Whether the source of guidance is mystical or scientific, horror fiction, whether on the page or the sound stage, often appeals to the need for guidance universal among all human beings. Like other appeals to the fifteen basic needs identified by Fowles, the need for guidance is one of interest to all readers and audiences.

Horror Fiction: The Need to Nurture

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Jib Fowles, adults, male and female alike, have a need to nurture children, animals, and other helpless creatures. In discussing this need, psychologist Henry Murray refers to feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing such dependents.

Horror fiction, like advertising, often taps this basic need, either by showing its neglect or by perverting it. In addition, such fiction frequently depicts the nurture of children or pets as a way to set up the later reversal of such care when a villain disrupts or destroys familial or relationships or relationships based upon friendships or, indeed, kills family members or friends.

In the film Rosemary's Baby (1968), based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel of the same name, Rosemary Woodhouse is raped by Satan after her neighbors, a cult of Satanists, drug her. She believes that her vision of having been raped by the devil was a delusion and that her husband, Guy, is the true father.

After her baby is born, she is told that the child died, but she refuses to believe this and discovers the infant son in her her satanic neighbors' apartment, surrounded by the their fellow members of their cult. She is asked to accept the child as her own, and, reluctantly, she does so, rocking the baby's cradle as she smiles.

This plot involves the need to nurture, a drive so strong, especially when it is combined with the maternal instinct, the movie implies, that it can overcome even the fear and disgust that having delivered a son of Satan inspires. No matter what level of nurture Rosemary provides to her son, the child will not fare well; according to the Bible, her son, the Antichrist, or “the beast from the earth,”will be defeated and cast into hell, wherein he will suffer eternal torment (Rev. 19:19-20).

The plot addresses two questions: who (or whom) is to be nurtured and why?

Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption, which originally appeared in his 1982 collection, Different Seasons, presents, as its subtitle suggests, a perversion of the need to nurture. Having discovered that an elderly German immigrant, Arthur Denker, is a Nazi war criminal, Kurt Dussander, a teenage boy, Todd Bowden, threatens to expose him if Dussander does not recount the atrocities that Dussander committed during the Holocaust.

The need to nurture is perverted in two ways: it is forced upon the nurturer, rather than freely given by him, and it involves teaching about atrocities rather than virtues. It also results in catastrophes, as, separately, Todd and Dussander murder homeless vagrants and Todd shoots a rifle at motorists on a freeway before he is killed by authorities.

King's 1977 novel The Shining also involves the need to nurture, this time addressing it negatively, by denying it to five-year-old Danny Torrance. His father, Jack, an alcoholic subject to fits of rage, broke his son's arm and was fired from his teaching position after assaulting a student. After accepting the position of caretaker of the vast, remote Overlook Hotel, Jack is possessed and, under the influence of a former caretaker's ghost, driven to murder his wife, Wendy, and Danny. 

King acknowledges that his own alcoholism and his anger and frustration concerning his own children's behavior was an inspiration for Jack's character. He also insists that Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel, the 1980 movie The Shining, departed from his novel's theme of a family's “disintegration” and objected to Kubrick's suggesting that Jack is influenced from within, by his own psychological demons, rather than externally, by the ghosts of the haunted hotel.

Scottish broadcast journalist Laura Miller takes issue with King's criticism of Kubrick, pointing out that, in King's novel, Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family, whereas, “in Kubrick’s The Shining, the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It’s a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King’s novel is about domestic violence as a choice.”

King's Point of View

King's Novel	King's Criticism
Theme = family's “disintegration”	Film departs from novel's theme
Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences	Film suggests Jack's own psychological demons cause his downfall

Miller's Criticism of King's Point of View

King's Novel	Kubrick's Film
Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family	Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences
Domestic violence results from Jack's own choices	Domestic violence occurs

In short, Miller argues that King's novel is psychological, rather than theological, in its identification of the cause of the domestic abuse Jack commits, whereas Kubrick's film suggests that Jack's behavior, including his domestic abuse, results from supernatural influences—the opposite of King's own point of view and basis of his criticism of Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel.

King's criticism of Kubrick's film has been inconsistent, with King first damning and later praising the movie. In one comment, he attributes the filmmaker's sometimes “flat” scenes to a failure of imagination and religious faith:

. . . a visceral skeptic [concerning the existence of the supernatural] just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked instead for the evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others. What's basically wrong with Kubrick's version of The Shining is that it's a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little . . . .

Critic Mark Browning suggests the opposite is true: King “feels too much and thinks too little.”

King's criticism of Kubrick and Miller's and Browning's criticism of King's criticism of Kubrick seem to suggest that romanticism tends to promote an emotional and psychological view of the problem of evil, such as King's, while a rationalistic outlook tends to advance a rational and theological or idealistic perspective regarding the existence of evil, such as Kubrick's.

If nothing else, the controversy between King's perceptions of Kubrick's movie and Kubrick's own point of view concerning his film suggest that stories that involve the need to nurture can address much larger issues, such as the romanticism, rationalism, and the nature of both evil and ultimate reality.

King approaches the need to nurture from a different perspective in It.

Not only do many of his adolescent characters lack a nurturing home environment, but one of them in particular, Beverly Marsh, is abused both by her father Alvin, and, later, her husband, Tom Rogan, among other, previous romantic partners. As an eleven-year-old girl, she is a member, with six of male friends of the same age, of the Losers' Club.

The parents of another member, Bill Denbrough, treat him with cold indifference following the death of his younger brother. His stuttering subjects him to the bullying of his classmates.

Benjamin Harrison, another member, is obese, which makes him a target of the same school bullies who torment and attack the other “Losers.” 

Edward Kaspbrak is a victim of “smother love” and his mother's Munchhausen syndrome by proxy; he also suffers psychosomatic asthma. 

Michael Hanion, another “Loser,” is African-American; he is persecuted by bully Henry Bowers because of a feud Bowers's father had with Hanion's father.

Bowers also persecutes Stanley Uris, who's a “Loser” by virtue of his Jewish faith.

As Fowles points out, advertisements can allude to the need to nurture by suggesting its absence. In fiction, children who are portrayed as being in need of feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing are naturally sympathetic to readers, who hope such characters will get the care they need.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Affiliation

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Stephen King's novels are prime examples of horror fiction that appeals to readers' need for affiliation. Many of his books primarily concern an individual child (Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Christine) or a group of individuals, often children (It) who've been rejected by their peers. (Sometimes, as in Under the Dome, 'Salem's Lot, Desperation, and The Regulators, the group consists of both adult and adolescent members.) His recurring theme seems to be that, in humanity's struggles against evil, brotherly love saves the day. When such love is absent, as in Carrie, the ultimate result is catastrophic; when present, as in most of King's novels, the “good guys” triumph.

According to Jib Fowles, whether a person feels included in or excluded by his or her social peers, advertisements which appeal to the need for affiliation are effective. In the former case, an advertisement's “images of companionship are compensation for what Americans privately lack”; in the latter instance, these images are affirmations of their fellowship with others. The same, it would seem, is apt to be true of fiction's portrayal of affiliated characters or the lack thereof in such instances as that of Carrie White.

Affiliation is more complex than it may seem. Quoting psychologist Henry Murray, Fowles writes:

. . . the need for affiliation consists of 24 desires “to draw near and enjoyably cooperate or reciprocate with another; to please and win affection of another; to adhere and remain loyal to a friend.” The manifestations of this motive can be segmented into several different types of affiliation, beginning with romance.

In King's novels, there is little romance; he tends to focus on cooperation, reciprocation, and loyalty, which is more relevant to the adolescent characters typical of his fiction. Even when adults play a relatively important part, as they do in such novels as Desperation, 'Salem's Lot, Under the Dome, and others, there is usually little or no romance between them. His families tend to be dysfunctional, as in Carrie, The Shining, Under the Dome, It, and others. King's main approach to employing the need for affiliation in his novels is friendship. 
 

Dean Koontz's theme is the same as King's: against evil, brotherly love will save the day. Unlike King, however, Koontz populates his fiction mostly with adults. When children are present, they're usually in the charge of an adult, rather than acting on their own, as King's more autonomous adolescents typically are. At least insofar as his earlier work is concerned (I stopped reading Koontz when he trotted out his Odd Thomas series), an alpha male and a damsel in distress are brought together through dangerous circumstances that appear, at first, to stem from different origins but are revealed to have sprung from the same cause, often the malevolent motives of a powerful cabal, government organization, or sociopathic serial killer (Chase, Whispers, The Eyes of Darkness, Midnight, The Good Guy).

Whether through friendships among children rejected by their peers or romance between a couple whom shared dangers unite against a common foe, the fiction of both King and Koontz, respectively, tap the need for affiliation Fowles identities as one of the fifteen such 'basic needs” that unite and motivate people everywhere. These writers' use of this appeal is one of the reasons their fiction is probably routinely on bestsellers' lists.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Sex

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As we saw in the last post (the first in this series), Jib Fowles identifies 15 basic appeals used in advertising. These same appeals, we argue, are frequently employed in horror fiction; indeed, their presence in horror novels and movies accounts for much of the appeal of these types of fiction.

In this post, we'll take a look at the appeal to readers' or viewers' need for sex. The fulfillment of the “needs for,” as opposed to the “needs to” on Fowles's list, require the presence or participation of another person or persons besides oneself. While it is possible to satisfy oneself sexually, by masturbation or other means, to find true sexual fulfillment, one requires a partner (or, some might contend, partners), whether of the male, the female, both, or another gender.

In horror, the need for sex characteristically involves perversion. Since all communication is reducible to seven basic questions, the forms of sexual perversion about which horror writers may write take seven possible types of forms. (A type, as we're using it, means a sexual behavioral set identifiable by shared characteristics.) These types of perversion (i. e., a deviation, corruption, or distortion of the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing) can be subsumed under these questions:

Who?

What?

When?

Where?

How?

Why?

How many? or How much?

We can further refine these questions by associating each of them with specific referents:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)

Let's add a couple more rows, identifying an example of a horror novel or movie that perverts human sexuality by deviating from, corrupting, or distorting the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing involved in sexual behavior:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time, occasion, or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)
Demon Seed (1973 novel; 1977 film)	The Exorcist (1973)	Maleus Maleficarum (1487)*	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])	Alien (1979)	Rosemary's Baby (1967 novel; 1968 film)	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])
A computer becomes a woman's sexual partner.	Regan MacNeil, the possessed girl, masturbates with a crucifix.	A demon, having assumed a female form, spends so long in intercourse with her victim that she absolutely drains him of semen and he thereafter dies.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.	Parasitic pregnancy ends in the fetus's bursting through the human host's abdomen.	After being raped by a demon, Rosemary Wood-house conceives a demonic child.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.

As the above table shows, the same movie may contain two (or more) of these types of sexual perversion: The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils]) contains orgies involving many individuals participating simultaneously in various sex acts; it also takes place in a convent. Likewise, these types of perversions can vary in how they are represented.

For example, a perverse location need not be a geographical place or an architectural space (a convent); it could be an anatomical site, as in Teeth (2008), in which a young woman discovers that she has two sets of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her vagina. Other possible variations? One's partner could be a poltergeist, as in The Entity (1982) (Who?); human corpses, as in the necrophilia scenes in the novel Under the Dome (2009) (What?); or a man transformed into metal kills his girlfriend after his penis becomes a power drill, as in Tetsuo:The Iron Man (1989) (How?).

Writers are limited pretty much only by their imaginations, their sense of morality, their personal taste, and the law of the land. Publishing houses will print and distribute just about anything that promises to make a buck. It seems unlikely, though, that the majority of readers or viewers are likely to have a need for extreme types of sex, even when it occurs in horror stories.

* Although the Malleus Maleficarum is a book—a manual for prosecuting witchcraft trials—rather than a novel or a movie, it contains supposed accounts of demonic sex, one of which suggests such a long-lasting (and fatal) encounter between a succubus and “her” victim, a hermit, that the hermit was completely drained of his semen:

When he [the hermit] was done and had arisen, the demon said to him, “behold what you have done, for I am not a girl or a woman but a demon,” and at once he disappeared from view, while the hermit remained absolutely astonished. And because the demon, with his great power, had withdrawn a very great quantity of semen, the hermit was permanently dried up, so that he died at the end of a month's time.

One can imagine the use of this description of demonic sexual activity as the basis for a terrifying sex scene in a horror novel or movie!

Note: For you may also want to read my post “Note: You may want to read “Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the nature of Sin.”