Imagining the Monster, Part III

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

In earlier posts, we considered how to create imaginary monsters of the animal variety, but we didn’t touch upon plants. Some stories, such as H. G. Wells' "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid," deal with bizarre plants. However, even stories that are more about insect or animal monsters are creepier if their descriptive passages include verbal depictions of eerie plants.

Again, science comes to the aid of horror, fantasy, and science fiction writers. In cooperation with scientists, artists have created paintings and illustrations that scientists believe portray ancient and prehistoric plants as they appeared long before the developments of camera and film. Writers can refer to them, describing in words what painters and illustrators have, with a little--okay, a lot--of help from botanists and other scientists, presented in images. Even with plants that are more beautiful than bizarre, the results can be truly uncanny, adding an atmosphere of uneasiness and fear, perhaps even horror, to a narrative’s setting and tone. Here are a couple of pictures, the one on the left of the Cooksonia, the one on the right of the Archaeamphora longicervia, which also happens to be the earliest carnivorous plant.

Nature has also come to the aid of the aspiring and established horror writer. Glacial ice is rapidly melting. In the process, according to “Ancient plants exposed,” these mountains of ice have revealed living plants that are believed to be as many as 6,500 years old--“mosses and grasses from a former wetland.” Moreover, as “Jurassic Park Plants” points out, “Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona contains hundreds of acres of perfectly preserved logs from ancient araucariad forests that grew in nearby highlands during the late Triassic Period (over 200 million years ago).” The forest “coexisted with dinosaurs,” the article observes, and, as one might expect, its plants look bizarre to the modern eye. Detailed descriptions of these ancient and prehistoric plants would lend an air of strangeness and disquiet to a story--perfect for the habitat of a monster.

In fact, as Joshua Siskin points out, it’s possible to grow 4,900-year-old plants at home, in one’s own garden: “if you want to connect with these ancient species, you can plant them in any well-drained garden spot or in containers filled with sandy topsoil. They could become your family's heirloom plants, to be passed down from generation to generation.” These plants would give a writer a living, breathing (after a fashion) link to a mysterious past inhabited by organisms that look very different than most of the ones around today. Such a link should be at least as inspiring as a muse.

If one wants nothing more to do than to describe these plants, he or she can leaf through (yes, pun intended) pictures on an Internet web browser, selecting those which appear the most fantastic and strange. Then, all that needs to be done is to describe what is seen.

Of course, as in the case of animal monsters, writers are not bound by what nature has produced, what artists have imagined, or what scientists say is likely or even possible. The imagination can create whatever type of monstrous plants (or animals) it likes. As long as, in the process, a writer doesn’t make a reader’s effort to effect what Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed a “willing suspension of disbelief” impossible, the result could be especially frightening.

In describing plants, we may also want to envision the monstrous plants from the point of view of their victims. In doing so, we might imaginatively enter the anthropomorphized brains of such creatures as houseflies. What, for example, might a fly think of the Venus Fly-Trap? Most likely, its thoughts and feelings would be very different from ours. Instead of finding such a plant “interesting” or “curious,” the fly might see it as something as horrifying and terrifying as an iron maiden or some other human torture device. If a writer can transfer the fly’s sensibility to his or her human protagonist when the main character comes face to flower, leaf, or stem, the effect could be horrible, indeed.

Sources cited:

“Ancient plants exposed”
Joshua Siskin, “In the Garden, Grow Strange Plants At Home”
“Jurassic Park Plants”

Imagining the Monster, Part II

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

We saw, in Part I of “Imagining the Monster,” how H. R. Giger’s design of the extraterrestrial creature in the movie Alien and its sequels uses several strategies to make the creature, sometimes called a xenomorph, especially frightening. The monster is horrifying, in part, because:

• It’s different from anything we’ve seen before.
• It’s an incongruous synthesis of various creatures, unsettling in themselves.
• It’s shown in great detail.
• It’s abilities, like its appearance, is an incongruous synthesis of various other creatures’ capabilities.
• Its life cycle parodies human reproduction processes.

Writers of horror stories can employ some of these same principles in designing the monsters that are to appear in their narratives. For example, we can use other organisms’ senses to envision how the monster experiences its environment--how it sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches.

Let’s take the lowly housefly, for example. It sees the world very differently than people do. According to “The Compound Eye,” a fly’s eye is compound, consisting of thousands of clusters of photoreceptor cells and pigment cells, complete with lens and cornea, known as ommatidia. In effect, each cluster is a miniature eye. Each eye sends a single "picture element" to the fly’s brain. The fly sees a "mosaic image" made up of "a pattern of light and dark dots like the halftone illustrations" in comic books or "newspaper illustrations." The fly’s eyes are excellent "motion detectors": one after another, in succession, the eyes "turn on and off" as the fly tracks moving objects. The resulting "flicker effect" enables the fly to see moving objects more easily than stationary ones. If your monster has a compound eye, it will see much as the housefly sees. Describing what the monster sees will make it seem strange to your reader, increasing its fright factor.

According to “Amazing Animal Senses,“ bats use their radar sense (echolocation) to locate prey (and obstacles), but they can also discern other animals’ body heat from a distance of 16 centimeters. The same article supplies a wealth of other information about insects' and animals' astonishing senses that can help horror writers create eerie and disturbing monsters. Describing how a monster “sees” heat, probably as patterns of red, orange, yellow, white, and blue or green splotches, will make the creature appear strange to readers and, therefore, more frightening. Butterflies taste with their feet; if your monster does likewise, it will be bizarre and disturbing. Not only do honeybees have compound eyes consisting of 5,500 ommatidia each, but they are also equipped with an iron oxide ring inside their abdomens that enables them to detect magnetic fields, which they use to navigate. Bees also taste with chemo receptors (essentially, taste buds) on their jaws, forelegs, and antennae. If your monster’s vision is sharp enough to see prey at a distance of 15,000 feet, it’s as sharp-eyed as the vulture. Chameleon’s eyes (like those of the seahorse) move independently of one another, allowing the lizard to see in two directions at the same time. Catfish can taste about 100 times better than humans. Spiders don’t just have eight legs; many of them have eight eyes as well, enabling them to see much more than people. We could go on and on, but the point is that nature shows us how to create monstrous monsters: simply describe what they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. The result will scare readers half to death.

Alternatively, feel free to create monsters that have no parallel in nature, such as Giger’s xenomorph. Scientists (and science fiction and horror writers) have done just this, speculating as to how organisms might have evolved in adaptation to environments very different than Earth’s. As “Alternative biochemistry” points out, some of their speculations replace the life-supporting carbon atom with the silicon atom, the nitrogen atom, the phosphorous atom, or with such surprising elements as arsenic, chlorine, and sulfur, and have posited ammonia, hydrogen fluoride, methanol, and other chemicals as alternative solvents to water, and, as “Extraterrestrial life” observes, within our own solar system, besides Earth, Saturn, Titan, Venus, Jupiter, Europa, and comets have been proposed as potential habitats for alien life forms such as ammonia-based, floating animals and various types of bacterial or microbial life. The National Geographic’s Internet article “Flying Whales, Other Aliens Theorized by Scientists” explains why scientists believe that life is likely on other planets; their concepts include winged, lizard-like “caped stalkers flying through a pagoda forest.” If you want help in creating your monster, you might refer to the SETI Institute’s primer on how to create imaginary extraterrestrial life, “How Might Life Evolve on Other Worlds.” It includes helpful tips and a handy, dandy chart by which to keep track of the creature’s features, including (and these are the actual labels used in the primer):

• Kind of skin
• Number of openings
• Long or other
• Segments
• Appendages
• Hard parts
• Hard outside parts
• Size
• Feeding cells
• Moving around
• Sensing vibrations
• Chemical senses
• Number of eyes
• Eating
• Plant eater
• Predator
• Defensive structures
• Poison as a defense
• Defensive behaviors
• Reproduction
• Sexual reproduction
• Mating
• Babies

Creators can use a dice as a stand-in for nature, fate, or God to determine, for example, body type, shape, dimensions, and features.

Of course, the giant ameba-like monster in The Blob is always a possibility as well. Simple, but effective.

Sources Cited:

“The Compound Eye”
“Amazing Animal Senses”
“Alternative biochemistry”
“Extraterrestrial life”
“Flying Whales, Other Aliens Theorized by Scientists”
“How Might Life Evolve on Other Worlds”

Imagining the Monster, Part I

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

Monsters represent that which is unnatural, that which is aberrant and abhorrent. As such, they may symbolize conditions, situations, ideas, or other realities that a society--or humanity as a whole--finds repulsive. Not only do monsters have souls, as it were--the realities that they symbolize--but they also have bodies--the physical forms that writers give them.

John Keats wrote, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter. . . .”

Many writers and critics agree that the same principle is true of monsters. That which we do not see is often much more terrifying than that which we do see. What we don’t see, we must imagine, and our imaginations are much abler to frighten us than things we see. We may defend ourselves from something visible or at least know which way to flee from it. It’s impossible to protect ourselves or to escape from something we cannot see. Moreover, we want to know our enemy. We believe, rightly or wrongly, that being able to confront our foe may help us to discover its weakness. It’s possible, for example, that the Cyclops had limited peripheral vision; therefore, he might be blindsided. If we can see the werewolf, we can shoot it with a silver bullet. Zombies may be frightening, unseen, but when, seen, we realize how slowly they shamble, and we have hope that we may defeat them. Not seeing that which threatens us makes it, in our minds, more frightening.

Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “bomb theory” to explain how suspense differs from shock or “surprise.” In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained his view:

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene [emphasis added]. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.

The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Something similar is true with respect to monsters. When we hear them, but don’t see them; when we hear of them, but don’t see them; when we view the carnage they leave behind them, but don’t see them, suspense builds. The monster becomes increasingly horrible. We build them up in our minds until they are horrible beyond words, horrible beyond depiction. That’s why, often, when we do see the monster, it’s usually disappointing. Remember when, toward the end of It, Stephen King finally lets his protagonists come face to face with the terrible shape shifter that has terrified them (and us) for hundreds of pages, and we learn that its true form resembles nothing more sinister than a gigantic spider? Talk about a letdown! The scene very nearly destroys the whole novel. We imagined nightmarish visions; we are given a spider. (The same is true of the monstrous Shelob, the gigantic spider in The Lord of the Rings.)

It’s better not to show, than to reveal, the monster at the heart of the story. Nevertheless, it’s usually shown at some point near the end of the story, in words in the novel and in images in the movie. Again, usually, it disappoints.

However, there are a few occasions during which the monster, even revealed, manages to terrify--and to delight. An example is the alien in Alien. Based upon paintings by H. R. Giger, who is himself a master of the macabre, the extraterrestrial antagonist that destroys Lt. Ripley’s crew is a truly terrifying specimen of the monstrous. It behooves us to ask ourselves why.

The answer is fairly straightforward. Giger’s monster terrifies because it is alien. It’s unlike anything we’ve encountered, but, at the same time, it suggests many things we do know, all of which are unsettling. It’s part insect, sort of, and part crustacean, kind of, and something mechanical, maybe, with a little worm, or dragon, thrown in, it seems. It may even be part machine. It’s also--dare we say it?--somewhat humanoid. It’s a synthesis of incongruous combinations that cross categories, which, if you’ve read the post on “The Horror of the Incongruous,” you’ll recognize as horrible in itself. It’s also horribly detailed. Giger shows us its every horrifying feature: sharp teeth, elongated dragon’s head, banded ribs, armor-like crustacean exoskeleton, a second mouth inside the primary mouth, an armor-penetrating tongue, fused phalanges, acidic blood and saliva. It’s a walking weapons platform, a total arsenal, and, lizard-like, it can run along walls or ceilings as easily as along floors, and it likes to ambush unsuspecting victims by attacking them from behind. Temperature extremes don’t bother it, and it can survive in a vacuum. Its exoskeletons fully contains its body heat, so it can’t be picked up by heat sensors. In short, this monster is an all-in-one package of terror that's virtually undefeatable. It's the monster-version of the Swiss army knife, the shape shifter given one polymorphous form.

The monster's life cycle is horrifying, too, as it represents a parody of human conception, pregnancy, and gestation. The species’ queen lays an egg that produces a parasitic facehugger. The facehugger attacks a victim, attaching itself to his or her face, and, introducing a tubular proboscis into the victim’s esophagus, implants an alien embryo within the recipient’s chest. Whether the host is male or female doesn’t matter; after accepting some of its host’s characteristic features--bipedalism, for example--the parasitic embryo emerges, ripping its way through its host’s abdomen in a parody of the birth process. The whole conception-pregnancy-gestation process makes women interchangeable with men as mothers, suggests that human reproduction is a parasitic process, and makes birth an act of violence. Understandably, feminists have detected a good deal of misogyny and sexism in the Alien monster. For this reason, as well as those of its alien appearance and abilities, the monster is both fascinating and truly monstrous.

What makes the Alien monster so monstrous? Let’s recap:

• It’s alien from anything we’ve seen before.


• It’s an incongruous synthesis of various creatures, unsettling in themselves.


• It’s shown in great detail.


• Its abilities, like its appearance, is an incongruous synthesis of various other creatures’ capabilities.


• Its life cycle parodies human reproduction processes.
  

Giger’s monster suggests some basic principles that can be used to create other horrifying monsters, which we will take up “Imagining the Monster, Part II,” to be posted later.

The Horror of Time and Place

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

The setting of a story is the time, the place, and the cultural milieu in which the narrative's action occurs, and, as such, a setting indicates what a given author (and his or her loyal readers) finds frightening or horrifying. A horror story that's set in the slums of a big city, for example, is apt to feature a monster altogether different from a horror story that's set in a rural area of patchwork farmland or in a small town. What frightens Stephen King, in Bangor, Maine, may not frighten Dean Koontz, in Newport Beach, California. Similarly, what concerns a writer at an earlier age may not concern him or her at a later age, as is clear in the career of Koontz, whose earlier fiction was all about monsters and whose later, more "mature," fiction is more and more about serial killers. His antagonists may be more mundane, but, for the same reason, they're also more believable. Likewise, with Stephen King: his earlier fiction concerned supernatural or paranormal villains who invade or attack small towns. His later fiction is, increasingly, about the interrelationships among adults, as in Bag of Bones and Lisey’s Story, or about one character's development and transformation, as in Rose Madder or The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Lately, both Koontz and King have introduced religious themes in their work as well, most clearly, perhaps in The Taking (Koontz) and Desperation (King). In some cases, at least, their stories’ settings have changed to reflect these changes in their themes. Both have become farther ranging in their fiction, both literally and figuratively, or thematically.

Often, a horror story's setting is isolated. It's isolated for several reasons. First, a remote location intensifies the horror and the fear. A distant, lonely setting frames the action because it separates what is presented in the story from the ordinary events of the larger, mundane world, thereby accentuating them. An isolated setting focuses the reader's attention on what is happening here and nowhere else. At the hands (or word processor) of a skilled writer, such a setting can become downright claustrophobic. Second, a remote setting makes the characters in the story entirely responsible for their own actions. What they do will save them or damn them. They have to gain the knowledge and have the wits, the pluck, and the determination to rescue themselves, to destroy the monster, and to set things right. No one else is going to help them. No one else is going to save them. The remote setting leaves it up to them, and them alone, to save the day. Third, a remote setting isolates the story's characters from the rest of humanity--from culture and history and science and technology and medicine and food and everything else that society and civilization have developed over years and centuries of cooperative interaction. The characters have no recourse to, and no support from, the infrastructure, so to speak, of shared attitudes, beliefs, ideas, and values upon which their society and human civilization itself depend. They're returned to the "state of nature" that so troubles Thomas Hobbes (and Thomas Jefferson).

Of course, some horror fiction takes place in big cities, such as New York, which are far from being far from the maddening crowd. Such settings allow horror writers to identify and to delineate the horrors of such environments, and the monsters that attack the characters in such stories may represent some of the real-life problems that residents of metro- and megalopolises face every day: drug trafficking and addiction, prostitution and the spread of venereal disease, smog, criminal assault, rape, murder, and so forth. A vampire loose in the Big Apple may want to suck the citizenry's confidence in themselves and their fellow men and women as much as he or she wants to suck their lifeblood--in fact, such trust may be their lifeblood.

Anyone who's ever lived in a small town knows how much the residents tend to be, on one hand, nosy enough to keep their neighbors under pretty much constant and continuous surveillance while, on the other hand, exercising an apathy about them that is, in some ways, deeper and more prevalent than the indifference that city slickers are said to display toward one another. It is only those who've never dwelled in Bug Tussle or who are truly naive who might mistake small town residents' superficial friendliness for genuine affection and concern. No (true) story brings home this message more clearly, perhaps, than that of Ed Gein, the man upon whom Psycho's Norman Bates, Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface, and Silence of the Lambs' Buffalo Bill are based. A dependent personality who was brainwashed by his mother, a religious fanatic, to believe that women are evil seductresses intent upon ruining the lives of men and securing the eternal damnation of their souls, Gein was lost when his mother died, leaving him to fend for himself on the isolated farm on which he lived near Plainfield, Wisconsin. Despite several occasions during which Gein acted more than a little odd (saying, for example, that a missing woman wasn't really missing but was "hanging out" at his house--gutted like a deer, as it turns out), Gein's neighbors showed no real interest in him, despite his having lived in Plainfield most of his life. A theme becomes clear in watching or reading biographies of the man who murdered women and robbed female corpses from their graves, wearing their flesh and body parts as masks and costumes: his monstrosity was due, in part, to the apathy of the community in which he lived. (Such indifference has become a theme of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and Dean Koontz.)

To determine what is considered horrible to people, consider the time and the place in which horror stories are set. The theme, often, will offer a clue as to what the people of such times, in such places, feared. There's a reason that King Kong, a gigantic gorilla discovered on an uncharted island that time forgot, terrifies New Yorkers, just as there's a reason that, of all the places on the planet that he could have attacked, Godzilla chose to assault Tokyo, Japan with his radioactive breath. There's a reason, too, that Freddy Kreuger attacks adolescent boys and girls in their sleep and that babysitters are often beset by stalkers. Likewise, scientific laboratories scared Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells, who lived during a time when scientists increasingly began to think that, through applied science--technology, in other words--they could become as gods, ruling the universe. High schools are places of horror for the ostracized and ignored, as Carrie shows us, and, yes, the hills have eyes.