Gigantic Horrors

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Today, we know that gigantism is caused by the excessive production of the growth hormone somatotropin during puberty, prior to the fusion of the epiphyseal growth plate. Gigantism may also be influenced by the hormone insulin-like growth factor-I, or somatomedic-C. Genetic mutations account for about half the cases of gigantism; various genetic disorders are also associated with the condition.

Wadlow standing next to his father

According to medical science, a giant is any person who is seven feet tall or taller. Some well-known giants include Robert Wadlow (8'11”), who performed for he Ringling Brothers Circus; wrestler Andre the Giant (André René Roussimoff) (7'4”); and Anna Haining Bates (7'11”), a Canadian actress who also performed for the W.W. Cole Circus. More than a few basketball players are also seven feet tall or taller, thereby qualifying as giants, including Shaquille O'Neal (7'1”), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (7'2”).

In pre-scientific literature, giants are depicted as much stronger than ordinary men and women and, the “gentle giant” notwithstanding, are often represented as hostile or cruel.

Goliath, the giant Philistine defeated by David, was 6'9” according to the Dead Sea Scrolls, but he was 9'9” according to the Masoretic Text, which is the authoritative source of the Old Testament.

 Alleged skull of a member of the Biblical Nephilim

Other Biblical giants include the Nephilim, most commonly thought to have been the offspring of demons and mortal women, which, of late, have encouraged several hoaxes pertaining to the alleged discoveries of their skeletal remains.

 

Children of Uranus and Gaia, the Cyclopes were mythical giants, although their height is unrecorded. The best-known Cyclops is the cannibalistic Polyphemus, who consumes four of Odysseus's men. Norse mythology is replete with giants, including Fafner and Fasolt, who seized the goddess Freyja.

One reason that giants frighten is that their size reminds us of our own relative insignificance and vulnerability. Effortlessly, giants could squash us like so many bugs. We would be totally at their mercy, and, if they lack mercy, if they are hostile and cruel, as they are often depicted, especially in horror fiction, then we are clearly at risk of being injured or killed—and possibly even eaten!

Another reason that giants frighten is that, by virtue of their vastly increased size, whatever special or unique abilities they have are also proportionately increased. If a hornet measures about 1.8 inch long, or 45 millimeters, and its stinger is normally 0.24-inch, or six millimeters, long, then a 10-foot-long (3.05-meter) hornet would have a stinger about one foot, three inches (0.4-meter) long!

Some horror movies depict threats from giant animals, including insects. Among such fare are the giant ants of Them! (1954); the giant wasps of The Food of the Gods (1973); which, for good measure, also features giant rats; the giant spiders of Ice Spiders (2007) and Arachnid (2001); the giant mosquitoes of Mosquito (1995); the praying mantis of The Deadly Mantis (1957); and others.

Giant reptiles appear in several horror movies, including Alligator (1980); Freshwater (2016); Anaconda (1997); Boa vs. Python (2004), Crocodile (2000); Curse of the Komodo (2004); Mega Snake (2007); Reptilicus (1961); The Giant Gila Monster (1959); and others.

Another popular giant menace is the ape: the ape of Ape (1976); the gorilla of King Kong (1933); and the gorilla of The Mighty Gorga (1969); the gorilla of Rampage (2018); and others.

Worms, fish, crustaceans, and marine mammals are featured in quite a few horror films: Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957); Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959); the snakehead fish of Frankenfish (2004); the octopus of It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955); and others.

Various dinosaurs, another favorite giant monster, appear in Attack of the Sabretooth (2005); The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953); The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1953), Carnosaur (1993); Dinoshark (2010); King Dinosaur (1955); The Last Dinosaur (1977); Legend of Dinosaurs & Monster Birds (1977); Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus (2010); Planet of Dinosaurs (1977); and others.

Only a few science fiction horror films feature giant humans, among them The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), War of the Colossal Beast (1958), Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958); The Cyclops (1957); and The War of the Gargantuas (1966) among them.

Calling the Shots

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In The Annotated Poe, the observation is made that Edgar Allan Poe's work has suggested storytelling techniques that filmmakers have adopted in dramatizing their scripts:

. . . his influence in the history of cinema has been profound. He has since the early days of motion pictures provided filmmakers with subjects, while influencing the development of cinematic theory and technique (21).

For example, Poe “anticipates the technique of cinematic montage, in which brief shots are joined together to form a sequence that compresses space, time, and information” in order to accelerate “the action of the story, propelling readers towards its climax” (43).

In addition, Poe pioneered the narrative equivalent of alternating close-up shots, distance shots, and extreme close-ups combined with sound effects:

Poe depicts Metzengerstein in close-up (the “agony of his countenance'”, pulls back to show him from a distance (“the convulsive struggling of his frame”), and then supplies an extreme close-up (“his lacerated lips, which were bitten through and through”). The rapid shifting of the images quickens the narrative pace, which the ensuing cacophony of sound—the shriek of Metzengerstein, the clatter of hooves, the roar of the flames, and the shriek of the wind—further intensifies, thus providing a running start for the horse's final bound up the stairs” (34).

There's no reason that the cinema shouldn't return the favor, as short story writers and novelists adopt some of the camera angles that directors and cameramen (and women) have found most effective in filming horror movies.

In doing so, the writer simply adopts the strategy of using description to depict in words what the camera would show in images. In writing, the writer is also the director and the cameraman (or woman); the writer, therefore, calls the shots.

Here are a few examples. (In the descriptions, specific references to characters and situations have been deliberately eliminated in the interests of describing more generic scenes. The video clips are more specific, suggesting how particular writers, actors, directors, and other filmmaking crew members have depicted such situations.)

The extreme closeup is called for when “specific facial expressions” indicate that action “that might scare . . . a character” is about to occur or “has happened.”

Here's the same scene, from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), captured in the “camera” of descriptive writing:

Behind him, above the immense fireplace and its burning log, a mural of stylized girls in triangular skirts adorns the wall. To the left, Art Deco windows are set in the wall, beneath a mounted moose head; a table; chairs; twin candles in matching wall sconces. But decorative features are indistinct, pale, ghostly images, suggestions, more than realities. One's gaze is drawn to and fixated upon him. His high forehead, his winged eyebrows, his staring eyes, his parted lips command absolute attention, allegiance, devotion, as does his stance, exuding confidence and power. As I approach, his features remain the same; he does not blink, does not stir, does not change. Nearer still, and his eyes, his gaze, without altering, expresses, in its stillness and intensity, in its indomitable and unchanging will, in its immutable and insistent being, a demonic essence, at once both terrifying and mesmerizing, inescapable and compelling.

A point-of-view shot captures a character's own visual experience, showing what he or she would see in a particular situation, letting the reader view the scene as character sees the action.

The opening scene of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978):

Movement, a march, a cadence measured and purposeful, past a jack-o-lantern flickering from the fire inside; past dark foliage shapes; past the shadows of leaves upon a wall white in the darkness, to a scene framed by a window: inside a teens locked in an embrace kiss, frantic, until they hear a sound; they break, listening. Then, they run upstairs, excited. Movement, march, cadence, in reverse, back past the leaf-shadows, the dark foliage shapes, the fiery carved pumpkin, to the front yard. Up. The second-story window is illuminated, then dark. Around, through the darkness, to the door through the windows of which shows the kitchen. Enter. Light. Stove. Sink. Open a drawer, remove a knife, huge and sharp of edge and point. Dining room: table, candles, chairs, sideboard, shadow of a chandelier upon a wall. Hallway. Living room: television, rocking chair, sofa, pole lamp. A staircase, leading up. The teenage boy, walking downstairs, exits the front door, closing it behind him. Up the stairs, past a painting, framed and hanging on the wall, into the darkness. Cast-off clothing on the floor: jacket, bra, panties. The corner of a chair. Through a doorway, she sits, naked, the teenage girl, running a brush through her hair. Behind her, the bedding is in disarray, disheveled with the remnants of her lust. She brushes her hair. Turns. Screams, covering her breasts with her hands, modest now. The stabbing of the knife. Her fall, a collision with a dresser and the floor. Down the stairs, through the darkness. Ceiling lights, the foyer's hardwood floor, the door, opening upon deeper darkness and car lights. A man and a woman, hurry through the night, toward the house, their parked car abandoned. The mask is pulled away, and the killer, bloody knife in hand, their eight-year-old son, a clown, is revealed, is born, this Halloween.

The over-the-shoulder shot is used either to suggest that a character is conversing with another character or that another character is following the character shown in the shot. This camera angle focuses on a single character, emphasizing him or her, but implies that one or more other characters, although unseen, are also present. It can also set up a shock; for example, “the character could turn around and look possessed.”

Grace Newman learns something about herself in this scene from The Others (2001):

Seated on the floor, her back to the door, covered in a heavy, white voile veil and bundled in a matching dress, her young daughter, the puppeteer, has gnarly, old hands; an aged face, half-hidden beneath the ectoplasmic veil, attempts to deceive, but the pale, shocked thirty-year-old redhead in the black dress is not deceived: she knows this person, this thing, is not her daughter. The mother chokes the old crone, the impostor, the changeling; yanks the veil from her; and sees—the child in the dress is her daughter, after all. The child stares at her mother in disbelief, in terror: the stranger, her mother, this mad woman who disowned her, has tried to kill her!

The establishing shot, “usually shot at a distance” is 'a wide shot” that sets the scene by showing the site of upcoming action. Such a shot may be devoid of characters; if characters are present, they are merely window dressing, part of the scene itself—unless and until the “camera” (the description) zeroes in on them, picking them out from the crowd.

Stanley Kubrick's establishing shot is the sequence with which The Shining begins, as Jack Torrance drives to the Overlook Hotel:

A dark blue lake, a green island in its midst, parallels a two-lane mountain road meandering, a gray ribbon, or a snake, through a forest thick with shaggy conifers, passing no other cars for miles and miles. Wide, open land stretches away, before the mountains' jagged, snow-covered peaks. The car looks like a toy, as it follows the sweeping grandeur of the terrain. Up a slope, tight against a cliff on the right, a sheer drop-off on the left shored up by a retaining wall, the yellow VW rounds a curve, and the highway seems to open up, wide. Finally, another car, a white limousine—stalled, it seems—is seen; the VW swings past, leaving it behind. Ahead, a tunnel plunges through the mountainside beneath the pines; for a few moments, the VW disappears, then emerges, passes another stopped car, on the left shoulder, continuing to pursue the highway between the towering cliff on the right and the plummeting drop-off on the left. Passing another car—the third in what seems forever—the yellow VW now travels along a stretch of road cut into the steep slope of the mountainside itself; gone, for the moment, are the cliffs; all is mountainside, green with grass and stands, but no forests, of pines. In the distance, craggy mountains loom. Another car, a canoe on top, passes, and then, there is snow on the mountains and the roadside. At the base of a mountain decorated with fields of snow, a hotel sits, immense in itself, but tiny compared to the mountain rearing behind it, into the clear, dark-blue sky. Finally, the yellow VW has arrived.

The wide shot is similar to the establishing shot, but the wide shot focuses on the characters and can lend a sense of depth to the action' all the characters and objects are in focus and perspective, so this shot equalizes rather than highlights characters, objects, and actions.

Another clip from Halloween includes a wide shot:

A young woman in blue denim bell-bottom jeans and a light-blue blouse, hands in pockets, mounts the steps leading from a suburban lawn to a broad porch. At the entrance flanked by windows, she rings the doorbell, leans left to peer into the window, turns, and leaves, back across the porch and down the steps. She crosses the front yard, passes the porch railing and the fiery jack-o-lantern seated there, walks down the side of the house, with her shadow on the wall, and is lost to the darkness. She emerges from the night, approaching the back door, which is open. She hesitates. Steps into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. Passing through dark rooms, she climbs the stairs to the second floor, and is swallowed by the darkness. To her left, at the top of the stairs, light shines around and beneath a closed door. She approaches, down the hallway. Illuminated by ambient light, her face is a picture of curiosity. She opens the door, and her eyes widen. Laid out in the bed, her arms extended so that her corpse forms a cross, a woman lies, dead; a headstone propped behind her, against the head of the bed, reads, “Judith Myers.” A pumpkin, lit by candlelight, grins on the night table beside her. Gasping, the young woman covers her mouth in her hands and backs into the wall behind her. She turns, and the body of a young man, suspended upside-down, swings through the doorway beside her, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. She retreats, and a cabinet door opens to reveal a blonde woman her own age, blouse open, breasts revealed, staring at nothing. She flees into the hallway, crying, distraught and terrified, leaning against another room's doorjamb. A white mask appears in the darkness of the room beside her. The masked man emerges, and a butcher's knife plunges, ripping the sleeve of her blouse. She turns, falls over the staircase railing, onto the steps, and slides down the stairs. The masked man follows, standing at the head of the stairs for a moment, framed by the light of the room behind him, where the two female corpses are posed and the male body is rigged. Not dead, the young woman rises and steps forth, into the darkness.

The high-angle shot looks down on the action, making characters, objects, and settings seem small and insignificant, thus heightening their vulnerability.

Breaking Bad: Crawl Space (2011), directed by Scott Winant, alternates between high-angle shots and low-angle shots. The low-angle shots show a man in a crawlspace; these shots alternate with high-angle shots showing a blonde woman in the house, looking down at him.

A man on his hands and knees tears frantically at a sheet of plastic. He turns over, clutching bundles of cash. A blonde woman peers down at him. He demands to know something. Taken aback, the woman shakes her head. Lying on his back in the crawlspace, he kicks his heels, dislodging dirt, yelling up, through the opening in the floor that connects the crawlspace to the house. She gasps. In the crawlspace, he looks desperate. She closes her eyes, makes a response. He stares up at her, disbelief on his face, as asks more questions. Frightened, she explains. He puts his hands atop his head. She apologizes. He rants, clenching his fists. She kneels, looking down upon him, concerned. He rolls onto his left side, hands covering is face, whimpering. He rolls back onto his back, weeping and sobbing. She looks down, pity on her face, and makes a comment. His wailing turns to laughter, and her rolls onto his left shoulder, then onto his back again. Looking both concerned and frightened, the blonde woman backs away from the opening to the crawlspace, into the hallway. Elsewhere, a woman in dim light paces back and forth as she talks on a cell phone. The blonde walks along a hallway, past the door to a kitchen, and picks up the receiver to a telephone on a kitchen counter accessible from the hallway. She starts to talk, walking away, down the hallway. In the crawlspace, among the bundled cash, the man continues to laugh, as the view of him, framed by the opening to the crawlspace, becomes more and more distant, suggesting he is insignificant, alone, vulnerable, and trapped.

A shot similar to the high-angle shot, the bird's-eye view shot also looks down upon a character. Thanks to the bird's eye view shot, which looks 'straight down . . . usually [at] a setting” or a “place,” a character appears “short and squashed,” which makes this shot “effective in a horror movie” in which a character's movement is being tracked or as an establishing shot.

The low-angle shot is the opposite of the high-angle shot, looking up to another character, object, or aspect of the setting. This shot can suggest a character's lack of power or authority and can indicate confusion and “disorientation.”

The low-angle shots showing the man in the crawlspace alternate with the high-angle shots showing the woman in the house, looking down at him.

A shot similar to the low-angle shot, the worm's eye view shot also looks down upon a character. In the worm's eye view shot, the angle is even lower than that found in the low-angle shot. The angle in the worm's eye view shot is so low that it could be a worm's vision on things. This angle makes “things look tall and mighty” and can show a character “walking around a house” or some other location, without giving away the character's identity.

The canted-angle shot sets a character at a diagonal, tilting him or her, and suggests “imbalance and instability,” especially if it is combined with a point of vie shot. The canted angle shot implies that “something strange is about to happen.”

This example of the canted-angle shot, from Cindy Kaye's Dutch Angle: The Movie (2016) could be described this way:

A closed door at the end of a hallway, like the door frame, the vase of flowers at the in the hallway, near the door, the walls, and the corridor itself, tilt to the left. Another door opens, and a boy leans out. He looks at the door at the end of the hall. He starts toward it. The lights go out. The lights come back on. They blink, off and on, off and on. The boy turns left at the end of the hall. The lights go out. When they come on again, he is walking down the stairs to the first floor. The lights continue to blink off and on. At the bottom of the stairs, he turns left. The lights continue to blink off and on. Through an open doorway, the boy is seen lying prone, on the floor of a chamber that appears to be a dining room: it is furnished with a table and chairs and a cabinet full of dishes, but, there is also a made-up bed in the room. The lights go out; they do not come on again.

By deciding on the elements you want to include in a situation and the envisioning it as a scene, you can write descriptions that have immediacy, drama, unity, and coherence. At the same time, such descriptions will appeal to readers' senses, heightening verisimilitude, and facilitating the identification between the reader and the characters involved in such situations. Such descriptions guarantee that the scene you describe will have characters in conflict, thematic significance, narrative purpose, and interconnection with previous and subsequent scenes as well as a cause-and-effect relationship with other scenes in the plot.

It helps, when writing short stories or novels, to plot them meticulously, even to the storyboarding level that Alfred Hitchcock used in planning his movies' plots and the way action would be presented and appear on the screen. His care about details of audiovisual storytelling are one of the reasons for his great success and the respect he received and continues to receive. Best of all, the techniques he used, one of which was calling the shots well before filming a movie, are available to all storytellers and to storytellers of all kinds.

Horror Story Plot Formulas

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In every horror movie, there is, of course, a protagonist and an antagonist. For convenience, I'm going to refer to them as the monster and the hero. Of course, the monster, both human and non-human, and the “hero” can just as easily be a girl or a woman as a boy or a man.

For there to be a story, there has to be conflict, and the major and most important type of conflict, that between the monster and the hero, results from their encounter. Therefore, they must come together, usually in the first part of the story. Writers have come up with a variety of ways for the monster and the hero to meet, if not greet, one another. These methods of encounter, in turn, help to establish various narrative formulas.

Some of these formulas we might call The Return, The Invasion, The Trespass, The Act of Vengeance, and The Fish Out of Water. Here are the breakdowns of these plots and a few examples of each.

The Return

Beginning

A monster (an ancient evil) awakens or returns.

Middle

The monster becomes active again.

End

By learning the monster's origin or nature, the hero eliminates or neutralizes the monster.

Examples: Summer of Night, It

The Invasion

Beginning

A monster moves into a community foreign to itself.

Middle

The monster becomes active in its new surroundings, behaving as it did in its original habitat.

End

By learning the monster's origin or nature, the hero eliminates or neutralizes the monster.

Examples: Dracula, 'Salem's Lot

The Trespass

Beginning

Trespassers disturb or threaten a monster's habitat.

Middle

The monster defends its turf.

End

The trespassers capture or kill the monster, escape from the monster, or are killed by the monster.

Examples: The Descent, Poltergeist, King Kong, The Thing

The Act of Vengeance

Beginning

The monster or his or her loved one is wronged.

Middle

The monster seeks to avenge him- or herself or a loved one.

End

The monster is imprisoned, killed, or otherwise neutralized or escapes.

Examples: The Abominable Dr. Phibes, I Know What You Did Last Summer, A Nightmare on Elm Street

The Fish Out of Water

Beginning

The hero, relocated to a strange new environment, usually that of the monster, is out of his or her depth.

Middle

The monster, at home in the environment, maintains the upper hand against the hero.

End

The hero kills the monster or escapes or is killed by the monster.

Examples: Open Water, Backcountry, Jaws.

Note: A future post may present other horror story plot formulas.

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The Horror at Martin's Beach

(Original title “The Invisible Monster”)

by Sonia Greene

I have never heard an even approximately adequate explanation of the horror at Martin's Beach. Despite the large number of witnesses, no two accounts agree; and the testimony taken by local authorities contains the most amazing discrepancies. 

 

Perhaps this haziness is natural in view of the unheard-of character of the horror itself, the almost paralytic terror of all who saw it, and the efforts made by the fashionable Wavecrest Inn to hush it up after the publicity created by Prof. Ahon's article "Are Hypnotic Powers Confined to Recognized Humanity?" 
 
Against all these obstacles I am striving to present a coherent version; for I beheld the hideous occurrence, and believe it should be known in view of the appalling possibilities it suggests. Martin's Beach is once more popular as a watering-place, but I shudder when I think of it. Indeed, I cannot look at the ocean at all now without shuddering. 
 
Fate is not always without a sense of drama and climax, hence the terrible happening of August 8, 1922, swiftly followed a period of minor and agreeably wonder-fraught excitement at Martin's Beach. On May 17 the crew of the fishing smack Alma of Gloucester, under Capt. James P. Orne, killed, after a battle of nearly forty hours, a marine monster whose size and aspect produced the greatest possible stir in scientific circles and caused certain Boston naturalists to take every precaution for its taxidermic preservation. 
 
The object was some fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about ten feet in diameter. It was unmistakably a gilled fish in its major affiliations; but with certain curious modifications such as rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet in place of pectoral fins, which prompted the widest speculation. Its extraordinary mouth, its thick and scaly hide, and its single, deep-set eye were wonders scarcely less remarkable than its colossal dimensions; and when the naturalists pronounced it an infant organism, which could not have been hatched more than a few days, public interest mounted to extraordinary heights. 
 
Capt. Orne, with typical Yankee shrewdness, obtained a vessel large enough to hold the object in its hull, and arranged for the exhibition of his prize. With judicious carpentry he prepared what amounted to an excellent marine museum, and, sailing south to the wealthy resort district of Martin's Beach, anchored at the hotel wharf and reaped a harvest of admission fees. 
 
The intrinsic marvelousness of the object, and the importance which it clearly bore in the minds of many scientific visitors from near and far, combined to make it the season's sensation. That it was absolutely unique—unique to a scientifically revolutionary degree—was well understood. The naturalists had shown plainly that it radically differed from the similarly immense fish caught off the Florida coast; that, while it was obviously an inhabitant of almost incredible depths, perhaps thousands of feet, its brain and principal organs indicated a development startlingly vast, and out of all proportion to anything hitherto associated with the fish tribe. 
 
On the morning of July 20 the sensation was increased by the loss of the vessel and its strange treasure. In the storm of the preceding night it had broken from its moorings and vanished forever from the sight of man, carrying with it the guard who had slept aboard despite the threatening weather. Capt. Orne, backed by extensive scientific interests and aided by large numbers of fishing boats from Gloucester, made a thorough and exhaustive searching cruise, but with no result other than the prompting of interest and conversation. By August 7 hope was abandoned, and Capt. Orne had returned to the Wavecrest Inn to wind up his business affairs at Martin's Beach and confer with certain of the scientific men who remained there. The horror came on August 8.

It was in the twilight, when grey sea-birds hovered low near the shore and a rising moon began to make a glittering path across the waters. The scene is important to remember, for every impression counts. On the beach were several strollers and a few late bathers; stragglers from the distant cottage colony that rose modestly on a green hill to the north, or from the adjacent cliff-perched Inn whose imposing towers proclaimed its allegiance to wealth and grandeur. 
 
Well within viewing distance was another set of spectators, the loungers on the Inn's high-ceiled and lantern-lighted veranda, who appeared to be enjoying the dance music from the sumptuous ballroom inside. 
These spectators, who included Capt. Orne and his group of scientific confreres, joined the beach group before the horror progressed far; as did many more from the Inn. Certainly there was no lack of witnesses, confused though their stories be with fear and doubt of what they saw. 
 
There is no exact record of the time the thing began, although a majority say that the fairly round moon was "about a foot" above the low-lying vapors of the horizon. They mention the moon because what they saw seemed subtly connected with it—a sort of stealthy, deliberate, menacing ripple which rolled in from the far skyline along the shimmering lane of reflected moonbeams, yet which seemed to subside before it reached the shore. 
 
Many did not notice this ripple until reminded by later events; but it seems to have been very marked, differing in height and motion from the normal waves around it. Some called it cunning and calculating. And as it died away craftily by the black reefs afar out, there suddenly came belching up out of the glitter-streaked brine a cry of death; a scream of anguish and despair that moved pity even while it mocked it. 
 
First to respond to the cry were the two life guards then on duty; sturdy fellows in white bathing attire, with their calling proclaimed in large red letters across their chests. Accustomed as they were to rescue work, and to the screams of the drowning, they could find nothing familiar in the unearthly ululation; yet with a trained sense of duty they ignored the strangeness and proceeded to follow their usual course. 
 
Hastily seizing an air-cushion, which with its attached coil of rope lay always at hand, one of them ran swiftly along the shore to the scene of the gathering crowd; whence, after whirling it about to gain momentum, he flung the hollow disc far out in the direction from which the sound had come. As the cushion disappeared in the waves, the crowd curiously awaited a sight of the hapless being whose distress had been so great; eager to see the rescue made by the massive rope. 
 
But that rescue was soon acknowledged to be no swift and easy matter; for, pull as they might on the rope, the two muscular guards could not move the object at the other end. Instead, they found that object pulling with equal or even greater force in the very opposite direction, till in a few seconds they were dragged off their feet and into the water by the strange power which had seized on the proffered life-preserver. 
 
One of them, recovering himself, called immediately for help from the crowd on the shore, to whom he flung the remaining coil of rope; and in a moment the guards were seconded by all the hardier men, among whom Capt. Orne was foremost. More than a dozen strong hands were now tugging desperately at the stout line, yet wholly without avail. 
 
Hard as they tugged, the strange force at the other end tugged harder; and since neither side relaxed for an instant, the rope became rigid as steel with the enormous strain. The struggling participants, as well as the spectators, were by this time consumed with curiosity as to the nature of the force in the sea. The idea of a drowning man had long been dismissed; and hints of whales, submarines, monsters, and demons now passed freely around. Where humanity had first led the rescuers, wonder kept them at their task; and they hauled with a grim determination to uncover the mystery. 
 
It being decided at last that a whale must have swallowed the air-cushion, Capt. Orne, as a natural leader, shouted to those on shore that a boat must be obtained in order to approach, harpoon, and land the unseen leviathan. Several men at once prepared to scatter in quest of a suitable craft, while others came to supplant the captain at the straining rope, since his place was logically with whatever boat party might be formed. His own idea of the situation was very broad, and by no means limited to whales, since he had to do with a monster so much stranger. He wondered what might be the acts and manifestations of an adult of the species of which the fifty-foot creature had been the merest infant. 
 
And now there developed with appalling suddenness the crucial fact which changed the entire scene from one of wonder to one of horror, and dazed with fright the assembled band of toilers and onlookers. Capt. Orne, turning to leave his post at the rope, found his hands held in their place with unaccountable strength; and in a moment he realized that he was unable to let go of the rope. His plight was instantly divined, and as each companion tested his own situation the same condition was encountered. The fact could not be denied—every struggler was irresistibly held in some mysterious bondage to the hempen line which was slowly, hideously, and relentlessly pulling them out to sea. 
 
Speechless horror ensued; a horror in which the spectators were petrified to utter inaction and mental chaos. Their complete demoralization is reflected in the conflicting accounts they give, and the sheepish excuses they offer for their seemingly callous inertia. I was one of them, and know. 
 
Even the strugglers, after a few frantic screams and futile groans, succumbed to the paralyzing influence and kept silent and fatalistic in the face of unknown powers. There they stood in the pallid moonlight, blindly pulling against a spectral doom and swaying monotonously backward and forward as the water rose first to their knees, then to their hips. The moon went partly under a cloud, and in the half-light the line of swaying men resembled some sinister and gigantic centipede, writhing in the clutch of a terrible creeping death. 
 
Harder and harder grew the rope, as the tug in both directions increased, and the strands swelled with the undisturbed soaking of the rising waves. Slowly the tide advanced, till the sands so lately peopled by laughing children and whispering lovers were now swallowed by the inexorable flow. The herd of panic-stricken watchers surged blindly backward as the water crept above their feet, while the frightful line of strugglers swayed hideously on, half submerged, and now at a substantial distance from their audience. Silence was complete. 
 
The crowd, having gained a huddling-place beyond reach of the tide, stared in mute fascination; without offering a word of advice or encouragement, or attempting any kind of assistance. There was in the air a nightmare fear of impending evils such as the world had never before known. 
 
Minutes seemed lengthened into hours, and still that human snake of swaying torsos was seen above the fast rising tide. Rhythmically it undulated; slowly, horribly, with the seal of doom upon it. Thicker clouds now passed over the ascending moon, and the glittering path on the waters faded nearly out. 
 
Very dimly writhed the serpentine line of nodding heads, with now and then the livid face of a backward-glancing victim gleaming pale in the darkness. Faster and faster gathered the clouds, till at length their angry rifts shot down sharp tongues of febrile flame. Thunders rolled, softly at first, yet soon increasing to a deafening, maddening intensity. Then came a culminating crash—a shock whose reverberations seemed to shake land and sea alike—and on its heels a cloudburst whose drenching violence overpowered the darkened world as if the heavens themselves had opened to pour forth a vindictive torrent. 
 
The spectators, instinctively acting despite the absence of conscious and coherent thought, now retreated up the cliff steps to the hotel veranda. Rumors had reached the guests inside, so that the refugees found a state of terror nearly equal to their own. I think a few frightened words were uttered, but cannot be sure. 
 
Some, who were staying at the Inn, retired in terror to their rooms; while others remained to watch the fast sinking victims as the line of bobbing heads showed above the mounting waves in the fitful lightning flashes. I recall thinking of those heads, and the bulging eyes they must contain; eyes that might well reflect all the fright, panic, and delirium of a malignant universe—all the sorrow, sin, and misery, blasted hopes and unfulfilled desires, fear, loathing and anguish of the ages since time's beginning; eyes alight with all the soul-racking pain of eternally blazing infernos. 
 
And as I gazed out beyond the heads, my fancy conjured up still another eye; a single eye, equally alight, yet with a purpose so revolting to my brain that the vision soon passed. Held in the clutches of an unknown vise, the line of the damned dragged on; their silent screams and unuttered prayers known only to the demons of the black waves and the night-wind. 
 
There now burst from the infuriate sky such a mad cataclysm of satanic sound that even the former crash seemed dwarfed. Amidst a blinding glare of descending fire the voice of heaven resounded with the blasphemies of hell, and the mingled agony of all the lost reverberated in one apocalyptic, planet-rending peal of Cyclopean din. It was the end of the storm, for with uncanny suddenness the rain ceased and the moon once more cast her pallid beams on a strangely quieted sea. 
 
There was no line of bobbing heads now. The waters were calm and deserted, and broken only by the fading ripples of what seemed to be a whirlpool far out in the path of the moonlight whence the strange cry had first come. But as I looked along that treacherous lane of silvery sheen, with fancy fevered and senses overwrought, there trickled upon my ears from some abysmal sunken waste the faint and sinister echoes of a laugh. 

 

4 O'Clock

by Sonia Greene

About two in the morning I knew it was coming. The great black silences of night's depth told me, and a monstrous cricket, chirping with a persistence too hideous to be unmeaning, made it certain. It is to be at four o'clock—at four in the dusk before dawn, just as he said it would be. I had not fully believed it previously, because the prophecies of vindictive madmen are seldom to be taken with seriousness. Besides, I was not justly to be blamed for what had befallen him at four o'clock on that other morning; that terrible morning whose memory will never leave me. And when, at length, he had died and was buried in the ancient cemetery just across the road from my east windows, I was certain that his curse could not harm me. Had I not seen his lifeless clay securely pinned down by huge shovelfuls of mold? Might I not feel assured that his crumbling bones would be powerless to bring me the doom at a day and an hour so precisely stated? Such, indeed, had been my thoughts until this shocking night itself; this night of incredible chaos, of shattered certainties, and of nameless portents. 

 

I had retired early, hoping fatuously to snatch a few hours of sleep despite the prophecy which haunted me. Now that the time was so close at hand, I found it harder and harder to dismiss the vague fears which had always lain beneath my conscious thoughts. As the cooling sheets soothed my fevered body, I could find nothing to soothe my still more fevered mind; but lay tossing and uneasily awake, trying first one position and then another in a desperate effort to banish with slumber that one damnably insistent notion—that it is to occur at four o'clock.

Was this frightful unrest due to my surroundings; to the fateful locality in which I was sojourning after so many years? Why, I now asked myself bitterly, had I permitted circumstance to place me on this night of all nights, in that well-remembered house and that well-remembered room whose east windows overlook the lonely road and the ancient country cemetery beyond? In my mind’s eye every detail of that unpretentious necropolis rose before me—its white fence, its ghost-like granite shafts, and the hovering auras of those on whom the worms fed. Finally the force of the conception led my vision to depths more remote and more forbidden, and I saw under the neglected grass the silent shapes of the things from which the auras came - the calm sleepers, the rotting things, the things which had twisted frantically in their coffins before sleep came, and the peaceful bones in every stage of disintegration from the complete and coherent skeleton to the huddled handful of dust. Most of all I envied the dust. Then new terror came as my fancy encountered his grave. Into that sepulcher I dared not let my thought stray, and I should have screamed had not something forestalled the malign power that pulled my mental sight. That something was a sudden gust of wind, sprung from nowhere amidst the calm night, which unfastened the shutter of the nearest window, throwing it back with a shivery slam and uncovering to my actual waking glance the antique cemetery itself, brooding spectrally beneath an early morning moon. 

 

I speak of this gust as something merciful, yet know now that it was only transiently and mockingly so. For no sooner had my eyes compassed the moonlight scene than I became aware of a fresh omen, this time too unmistakable to be classed as an empty phantasm, which arose from among the gleaming tombs across the road. Having glanced with instinctive apprehension toward the spot where he lay moldering—a spot cut off from my gaze by the window-frame—I perceived with trepidation the approach of an indescribable something which flowed menacingly from that very direction; a vague, vaporous, formless mass of grayish- white substance or spirit, dull and tenuous as yet, but every moment increasing in awesome and cataclysmic potentiality. Try as I might to dismiss it as a natural meteorological phenomenon, its fearsomely portentous and deliberate character grew upon me amidst new thrills of horror and apprehension; so that I was scarcely unprepared for the definitely purposeful and malevolent culmination which soon occurred. That culmination, bringing with it a hideous symbolic foreshadowing of the end, was equally simple and threatening. The vapor each moment thickened and piled up, assuming at last a half tangible aspect; while the surface toward me gradually became circular in outline, and markedly concave; as it slowly ceased its advance and stood spectrally at the end of the road. And as it stood there, faintly quivering in the damp night air under that unwholesome moon, I saw that its aspect was that of the pallid and gigantic dial of a distorted clock. 

 

Hideous events now followed in demoniac succession. There took shape in the lower right-hand part of the vaporous dial a black and formidable creature, shapeless and only half seen, yet having four prominent claws which reached out greedily at me—claws redolent of noxious fatality in their very contour and location; since they formed too plainly the dreaded outlines, and filled too unmistakably the exact position, of the numeral IV on the quivering dial of doom. Presently the monstrosity stepped or wriggled out of the concave surface of the dial, and began to approach me by some unexplained kind of locomotion. The four talons, long, thin, and straight, were now seen to be tipped by disgusting, thread-like tentacles, each with a vile intelligence of its own, which groped about incessantly, slowly at first, but gradually increasing in velocity until I was nearly driven mad by the sheer dizziness of their motion. And as a crowning horror I began to hear all the subtle and cryptic noises that pierced the intensified night silence; a thousand-fold magnified, and in one voice reminding me of the abhorred hour of four. In vain I tried to pull up the coverlet to shut them out; in vain I tried to drown them with my screams. I was mute and paralyzed, yet agonizingly aware of every unnatural sight and sound in that devastating, moon-cursed stillness. Once I managed to get my head beneath the covers—once when the cricket's shrieking of that hideous phrase, four-o’clock, seemed about to shatter my brain—but that only aggravated the terror, making the roars of that detestable creature strike me like the blows of a titanic sledgehammer. 

 

And now, as I withdrew my tortured head from its fruitless protection, I found augmented diabolism to harass my eyes. Upon the newly painted wall of my apartment, as if called forth by the tentacled monster from the tomb, there danced mockingly before me a myriad company of beings, black, grey, and white, such as only the fancy of the god-stricken might visualize. Some were of infinitesimal smallness; others covered vast areas. In minor details each had a grotesque and horrible individuality, in general outlines they all conformed to the same nightmare pattern despite their vastly varied size. Again I tried to shut out the abnormalities of the night, but vainly as before. The dancing things on the wall waxed and waned in magnitude, approaching and receding as they trod their morbid and menacing measure. And the aspect of each was that of some demon clock-face with one sinister hour always figured thereon - the dreaded, the doom-delivering hour of four. 

 

Baffled in every attempt to shake off the circling and relentless delirium, I glanced once more toward the unshuttered window and beheld again the monster which had come from the grave. Horrible it had been before; indescribable it had now become. The creature, formerly of indeterminate substance, was now formed of red and malignant fire; and waved repulsively its four tentacled claws - unspeakable tongues of living flame. It stared and stared at me out of the blackness; sneeringly, mockingly; now advancing, now retiring. Then, in the tenebrous silence, those four writhing talons of fire beckoned invitingly to their demoniacally dancing counterparts on the walls, and seemed to beat time rhythmically to the shocking saraband till the world was one ghoulishly gyrating vortex of leaping, prancing, gliding, leering, taunting, threatening four o’clocks. 

 

Somewhere, beginning afar off and advancing slowly over the sphinx like sea and the febrile marshes, I heard the early morning wind come soughing; faintly at first, then louder and louder until its unceasing burden flowed as a deluge of whirring, buzzing cacophony bringing always the hideous threat, ‘four o’clock, four o’clock, FOUR O’CLOCK.’ Monotonously it grew from a whimper to a deafening roar, as of a giant cataract, but finally reached a climax and began to subside. As it receded into the distance it left upon my sensitive ears such a vibration as is left by the passing of a swift and ponderous railway train; this, and a stark dread whose intensity gave it something of the tranquility of resignation. 

 

The end is near. All sound and vision have become one vast chaotic maelstrom of lethal, clamorous menace, wherein are fused all the ghastly and unhallowed four o’clocks which have existed since immemorial time began, and all which will exist in eternities to come. The flaming monster is advancing closely now, its charnel tentacles brushing my face and its talons curving hungrily as they grope toward my throat. At last I can see its face through the churning and phosphorescent vapors of the graveyard air, and with devastating pangs I realize that it is in essence an awful, colossal, gargoyle-like caricature of his face—the face of him from whose uneasy grave it has issued. Now I know that my doom is indeed sealed; that the wild threats of the madman were in truth the demon maledictions of a potent fiend, and that my innocence will prove no protection against the malign volition which craves a causeless vengeance. He is determined to pay me with interest for what he suffered at that spectral hour; determined to drag me out of the world into realms which only the mad and the devil-ridden know. 

 

And as amidst the seething of hell’s flames and the tumult of the damned those fiery claws point murderously at my throat, I hear upon the mantel the faint whirring sound of a timepiece; the whirring which tells me that it is about to strike the hour whose name now flows incessantly from the death-like and cavernous throat of the rattling, jeering, croaking grave-monster before me—the accursed, the infernal hour of four o’clock. 

 

Getting to Know Them: H. P. Lovecraft

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Recently, I have begun reading biographical sketches of the masters of horror fiction. (Should you care to join me in this interesting and entertaining pastime, Ranker provides a good list of such authors.)

I read, most recently, about H. P. Lovecraft.

During a period of poverty, he subsisted on nothing more than a loaf of bread, a chunk of cheese and a can of beans.

Throughout his life, he corresponded with a good many people, including writers he mentored through his letters, whose ranks include August Derleth, Donald Wandrei (The Web of Easter Island), and Robert Bloch (Psycho).

As a child, he believed that the gods of ancient Greek mythology were real, while the Judaeo-Christian God was merely a myth (S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence), and he later turned to astrology as his guiding light. Once interested in anatomy (as well as chemistry), his passion for the former ended when he encountered the puzzling topic of the human reproductive system (Joshi).

Throughout his early years, he suffered several bouts of depression and “nervous breakdowns.” Perhaps he feared suffering the same fate as his father Winfield Scott Lovecraft, who was institutionalized when Lovecraft was a youth; it seems that Winfield had been given to doing and saying strange things” prior to his commitment (Joshi).

He married Sonia Greene, whose work as a milliner earned her a good income. After two years, their childless relationship ended, when they separated. Lovecraft's assurance that they were divorced allowed Sonia to marry again, but she discovered, later, that she was, in fact, still married to Lovecraft and, as a result, was guilty of bigamy.

Greene wrote the short stories “The Horror at Martin's Beach” and “4O'Clock.”

He was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Oswald Spengler, Robert W. Chambers, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwood.

According to a variety of critics, his fiction is replete with such themes as forbidden knowledge, otherworldly influences, innate depravity, the rule of fate, threats to civilization, white supremacy, the potentially negative effects of scientism, an emphasis on polytheism, “cosmic indifference,” superstition, and an imaginary and recurrent geography unique to his fiction. He has been criticized for racism, homophobia, misogyny, and parochialism. His writing is not highly regarded by literary critics, although Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Bentley Little, Joe R. Lansdale, Alan Moore, F. Paul Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Neil Gaiman, and others name Lovecraft as a major influence on their own conceptions of horror fiction and their own writing.

Although he lived forever on the brink of absolute poverty, Lovecraft's cosmicism has influenced horror fiction.