Body Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A type of fiction, known as body horror, is based upon the fear that something may be amiss with one’s body. One may be sick. One may be disfigured. One may have been born with a physical defect. One may give birth to a deformed baby. One may undergo some sort of hideous physical transformation. A number of horror films and literary texts fit this subgenre of horror.

Sometimes, body horror references men's fear of castration and the twin fears of sex, erotophobia (fear of the erotic) and genophobia (fear of sexual intercourse). The motif of the vagina with teeth, or the vagina dentata, is an example. This story has a moral. It's a cautionary tale, warning young men to be wary of having sex with women whom they do not know: not only may such a young man acquire a venereal disease, but he may also suffer a fate worse than John Wayne Bobbitt’s. (At least his wife used a knife!) In one such story, a bestial element is added: the vagina is not itself armed, as it were, with fangs, but is inhabited by a fish with teeth.

The movie Teeth (2007) is based upon the vagina dentata theme: a chaste, innocent young woman, Dawn, discovers that her vagina is equipped with teeth. (The movie’s tagline is “Every rose has its thorns.”)

As the movie’s official website points out:

Looking into, touching or entering the female orifice seems fraught with hidden fears, signified by the confusion of sex with death in overwhelming numbers of male minds and myths. Since vulvas have labia, "lips," many men have believed that behind the lips lie teeth. Christian authorities of the middle ages taught that certain witches, with the help of the moon and magic spells, could grow fangs in their vaginas. They likened women's genitals to the "yawning" mouth of hell.

As odd as it may seem, like many of the other horrors of horror fiction, the vagina dentata motif may also have a factual (and physical) basis. Dr. Dean Edell reports one of his colleague’s experiences: “a gynecologist. . . reported that he actually saw some teeth in a vagina.”

She had a dermatoid cyst, Edell explains:

Dermoid cysts are derived from the outer layers of embryonic skin, and they are
capable of growing hair and teeth and bones, anything that comes from the outer layers of the embryo. They can occur anywhere.

So this woman had one in the pelvic region and the cyst grew teeth, and when it ruptured through the wall where her uterus joins her vagina--there were the teeth.

Edell himself also saw a patient who was a victim of dermoid cystitis: “In my practice once, I saw one in the eyelid."

Science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer wrote a pornographic sci-fi-horror novel, The Image of the Beast, that features a character, Vivienne, with a vagina dentata of sorts. A sharp-toothed snake-like creature, reminiscent of the lamia of Greek mythology, lives inside her womb, devouring various body parts of her male lovers. She appears again in a sequel, Blown: Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind.

The vagina dentata is one of the more shocking examples that show that things can and do go wrong with the body. However, it is certainly not the only example that is horrible, as any number of birth defects, physical abnormalities, genetic anomalies, and medical conditions indicate.

Several other such conditions involve primary or secondary sexual characteristics. Normal human males (with the requisite X-Y chromosome combination) have been born without penises; others have been born without testicles. Human females have been born with multiple nipples (multiple nipples syndrome, or supernumerary nipples) or with multiple, or accessory, breasts (multiple breast syndrome; also called polymastia, supernumerary breasts, and mammae erraticae).

Body horror recognizes that the body is subject to these, and worse, conditions. Even before Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Birthmark” and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” there were stories that demonstrated that, with regard to the body (as is true of the mind and the soul as well), sometimes whatever can go wrong does go wrong.

Beowulf: The Prototypical Monster Killer

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Killed By Death,” an episode of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, Buffy tells a hospitalized boy that monsters do exist, as the boy suspects, but that there is also good news: heroes who slay monsters also exist. In English literature, the prototypical monster killer is Beowulf, the protagonist of the Anglo-Saxon poem that’s named in his honor. As a hero, Beowulf possesses the characteristics that typify such a character:

• He represents a nation or a community.


• He’s willing to risk danger or sacrifice himself for others.


• His actions benefit humanity or a nation.


• He fights for a greater cause.


• He behaves in a chivalrous manner, especially toward women.


• He lives according to the dictates of a social code of conduct.


• He often represents the nobility or upper class.


• He behaves honorably at all times.


• He has a strongly developed sense of right and wrong.


• He’s praised and rewarded by society.

These characteristics are opposite to the traits of personality that typify the anti-hero:

• He represents himself.


• He’s willing to risk danger or to sacrifice himself for wealth or egoistic satisfaction.


• His actions benefit him or only a select few.


• He fights for his own principles.


• Chivalry is dead to him.


• He lives according to his own code of conduct.


• He often represents the middle or the lower class.


• He will let the end justify the means at times.


• He’s often amoral or acts according to a highly individualized moral code.


• He may be condemned or punished by society.

In Beowulf, the monster Grendel and his mother, the descendents of the God-cursed Cain, represent anti-heroes of a sort, and the heroic culture of Beowulf stands in opposition to the anti-heroic culture of the monsters. Two ways of life vie against one another for survival. The pagan society of Beowulf is becoming Christian; it is being Christianized. The society of Grendel and his mother remains not only pagan but also uncivilized, savage, and barbaric. The former society, the poem implies, gives rise to the hero who is concerned about others as well as himself, whereas the latter maintains a narcissistic world view in which only the desires of the self and those whom it values are important. It is this self-centered, anti-heroic world view, Beowulf suggests, which threatens society and is wicked because sinful: Grendel is opposed not only to human civilization, as represented by the Danes he attacks and by their defender, Beowulf the Geat, but also to God, who has cursed the monster’s race and made them exiles in the earth, cut off from human fellowship. Grendel is inspired by his envy for human companionship. It is because he is an outcast who cannot enjoy such friendship that he attacks the Danes. He would destroy that which God has denied to him. His mother is motivated by vengeance, but it is a vengeance restricted to her own offspring; it does not extend to the members of a whole society of her peers.

The prototypical hero serves his community. Those who serve only themselves and their immediate families, by contrast, represent evil threats to community that the hero must confront and vanquish.

Not Everyone Loves A Victim

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

America loves victims. Being a victim excuses one from irresponsibility. Victims receive a free pass that excuses them from responsible behavior and from the consequences of their irresponsible actions. Victimization is a marvelous source of self-pity that helps to perpetuate one’s anger at the world and one’s belief that one is justified in doing whatever one likes, since, after all, one has been victimized. Something unjust has happened; therefore, one is entitled to act in whatever fashion he or she wishes to act.

Horror fiction takes issue with this stance. In horror stories, victims are frequently dispatched without mercy, violently and with finality, or are allowed to survive only to be further victimized, even more horribly, before they’re killed in some hideous manner or another, at an appropriately climactic moment.

In the past, most horror victims have been women, a fact that many feminists attribute to misogyny. There may be some truth to this charge, as witness the declaration of Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Philosophy of Composition”: “The death. . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” However, there may be reasons other than simply misogyny. There may be practical considerations.

In American society, women are permitted to cry unashamedly, for pretty much any reason and under pretty much any circumstances, and they tend to do so with regularity, expressing a wide range of emotions that includes both happiness and sorrow as well as anger and fear. In general, women are allowed--indeed, encouraged--to be more emotionally expressive than men, and, again, they tend to do so. This tendency makes them ideal as emotional indicators. In movies (and, indeed, in literary texts), they show the audience (or the readers) how to feel about a situation. The audience, identifying with them, understands that they should feel the same way about what is happening to the characters as the emotive female character, or the emotional indicator, feels.

Although it is not a horror movie, Tank illustrates the use of this technique. At various moments, as circumstances warrant, Jenilee Harrison’s character, Sarah, traveling inside the tank driven by James Garner’s character, Sgt. Zack Carey, at various moments, expresses anxiety, concern, fear, and exultation. Seeing her convey these emotions, the audience understands that they, too, should feel the same way. She’s the film’s emotional indicator.

The same technique is used to good effect in horror films (and literary narratives), although the emotional range tends to be much more limited, restricted, pretty much, to horror and its related feelings, such as anxiety, fear, revulsion, and terror. (That’s why actresses who appear in horror movies are known as "scream queens.") Because American society allows women a freer exercise of emotion, horror fiction often makes women victims. Stalked by a mad killer, abducted by a lovelorn monster, or hunted or attacked by an unspeakable creature, female victims’ expressions of terror, disgust, and panic inspire the same feelings in audiences and readers.

Women are physically weaker than men. Therefore, chivalry demands that men protect them from threats to life, limb, and sanity. In other words, female characters motivate male characters to risk their lives when, otherwise, the men folk might find it more desirable to exercise the better part of valor. In newsreel footage of one of Bob Hope’s USO shows, he brings out a beautiful female celebrity--Ann-Margaret, perhaps--and says to the assembled troops, “I just wanted to remind you of what you’re fighting for.”

The same principle is behind horror fiction’s employment of the weak, but luscious, female victim. Whether she lives or dies, she’s an inspiration to the fighting man. If she survives, he succeeds. If she dies, he fails. Therefore, her survival (or death) is an indicator of the heroic male character’s success (or failure) as a hero as well. The female victim or potential victim, as the case may be, both inspires the protective male and shows the audience that he’s a winner or a loser, depending upon whether his intervention on her behalf merits her trust. If she lives, her trust was merited; if she dies, it was not. If her protector succeeds, and she lives, he earns the audience’s respect and, if he already has their respect, it increases. If the macho man is to triumph, ultimately, over the monster, his doing so will be more believable because he has been able to defend the life of the potential female victim. If he fails, the audience accepts his failure because, earlier, he was unable to protect the female victim. In either case, the question as to whether the female character will live or die (and whether the male character will win or lose) provides suspense.

Not only do women, as victims, suggest how the audience or the readers should feel, motivate male characters, and indicate the manliness (or lack thereof) of their masculine protectors, but, when they meet their doom, they also heighten the horror of the story. This is probably what Poe had in mind when he stated that “the death. . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” We want to believe that life has purpose, meaning, and value, and that all is not for naught. We want to believe that life is not “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We feel that beauty indicates an interest on the part of the Creator in his creation, for beauty is not a quality that needs to be present in order for the universe to exist and operate. After all, despite the presence of any number of unattractive people, the universe seems to function according to impersonal “laws of nature.” Although most people would not want to do so, we could, if we had to, get by without beauty.

The death of a beautiful woman is a reminder that something we value highly--beauty (and not just beauty of any sort, but beauty in the flesh, or feminine beauty)--is unnecessary, perhaps even accidental. If it’s accidental, rather than bestowed, there may be no Creator. There may be no God. We may be on our own. If so, the world that seems, at times, at least, to be meaningful and purposeful and valuable may be simply absurd. We may be absurd! The death of a beautiful woman reminds us of this possibility. Therefore, the death of a beautiful woman is horrible, both in itself and beyond itself.

Of course, female victims also add a dimension of sexuality to horror stories, which, in the past and, to a large extent, even now, depict the monstrous as being male. The metaphor is simple: monsters (males) = rapists. The exclusive or primary victims of the creature of the black lagoon, King Kong, the xenomorphs in Alien and its sequels, Freddy Kreuger, Michael Myers, and even the devil in The Exorcist (and many other monsters with male appendages) were female rather than male. The implication is that the monsters were interested in women not solely because they’re good screamers. Critics have also seen the monster-as-disguised rapist as being an embodiment of a racist white patriarchal society’s fear of and revulsion toward miscegenation. It was because Rosemary’s baby is a “half-breed” of sorts, such critics contend, that makes him a devil’s child.

The sexualization of the male body that followed the feminist movement resulted in more than the Chippendales. Men became sexual objects. Therefore, they became potential victims of sexual predators. Not only did female high school teachers begin to sexually assault teenage boys, but female monsters began to rape and kill male victims in movies such as Species and Alien and in television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What had formerly been good only for the goose became good for the gander as well, as victimization became an equal opportunity condition. Likewise, the metaphor of monsters (females) = rapists entered the American and the international psyches. Accompanying this development was another role reversal. If men were now acceptable as victims, women were now acceptable as protective heroines. It is not only the male Marines in Alien and its successors who fight against the monster; Lt. Ripley also protects and defends her crew. The only difference is that she succeeds, whereas her male comrades fail.

The male victim is unsettling because of these role reversals. Sex and gender are basic to the human condition, and it is disturbing when assumptions that are taken for granted as being true are challenged or overturned. In a society that has regarded women as weaker and dependent upon men for protection, the depiction of men as weak and dependent upon women for protection runs counter to convention and is, therefore, distressing. Horror fiction capitalizes upon anything that is disturbing, and the use of the male victim provides another means of effecting disquiet that can, with a shove at the right moment, effect horror.

In horror fiction, weakness of any kind--physical, emotional, spiritual, or even of gender identity--is punished swiftly, violently, and, frequently, lethally. The implication that being a victim is not a good thing and that it does not give one immunity from personal responsibility or the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” whether the universe is of divine origin or not, is a censure to the permissiveness of a society that has come to all-but-idolize victims. In horror fiction, one had better not pout and had better not cry, for the Santa Claus who’s coming to town might just be a sociopathic killer in disguise.

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.