The Guide to Supernatural Fiction: A Review (Part II)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In A Guide to Supernatural Literature, Everett F. Bleiler, of Kent State University, identifies six “statements” from which “countless stories can be generated”:

1. A man injures another man (and may be punished).
2. A man rebels against the heimarmene (and may be destroyed).
3. An outlaw power touches upon a man (and may be punished).
4. A good power touches upon a man (and may transform him).
5. A man is caught up and carried along by the heimarmene.
6. A man eases or repairs damage to the heimarmene, thereby helping other men.

He then analyzes each of these “statements,” relating each to his Guide’s “Index of Motives and Situations” (omitted here):

1. A man injures another man (and may be punished).

a. A man commits murder--time gap--punishment by avenging ghost.
b. A man usurps power and oppresses--time passes--punishment by Fate.
c. A man is negligent to others--disturbances--possible resolution by outside party.
d. A man profanes a grave--is haunted by hostile dead--is punished.
e. A man injures another--is punished by avenging powers.

Bleiler also outlines a “special case”: “a man injures another--sets up bad karma--is reincarnated to atone.”

2. A man rebels against the heimarmene (and may be destroyed).

a. A man will not accept death--tries to buy life--is cheated.
b. A man will not accept death--appears after death--may be a nuisance.
c. A man will not accept powerlessness--uses arts--may be punished.
d. A man will not accept his identity--assumes another--is punished.
e. A man acts as a creator--creation gets out of hand. In science fiction, this is motif of the mad scientist.
f. A man affronts the gods--is punished.
g. A man will not accept the deaths of others--awakens them--usually loses.
h. A man will not accept temporary limitations--seeks to remove them--may succeed.

“It would be possible to extend this listing. . . by giving more precise information about the agents, altering the middle events, and varying endings,” Bleiler notes, and to indicate the “community of ideas among the variant situations” he has listed, he expands upon his discussion of situation 3a, ‘A man meets power--a man’s flaw or gives power a hold over him--man is destroyed or threatened’”:

This encounter with the outlaw power has four commons situations, plus several others that are less common. The common situations involve fairies, temptations by the Devil, the hostile dead, and vampires. In each. . . there is a flaw or fault associated with the human that puts him in danger of the outlaw power. In abductions by fairies, the woman must yield sexually to the fairy, which yielding is usually accompanied by some sort of glamour. In temptation by the Devil, the human is usually motivated by greed or lust for power. With the hostile dead, the human is usually trespassing against warning, and is defying a ban. In the vampire story, the victim must give the vampire an initial invitation. As for the ending, the fairy abduction usually ends with the disappearance of the woman. If she returns at all, it is with horrible disfiguration. In the diabolic temptation the Devil almost always wins, and there is little that can be done about the hostile dead. Vampires, however, do permit an escape. Sentence 6 is usually applied, and the human is rescued by outside aid.

3. An outlaw power touches upon a man (and may destroy him).

a. A man meets power--a man’s flaw or gives power a hold over him--man is destroyed or threatened.
b. A man meets power--resists it--may win.
c. A man meets Death--diversions--Death wins.

4. A good power touches upon a man (and may transform him).

a. A man meets power--is victorious--receives gift.
b. A man meets power--is receptive to gnosis--is instructed.
c. A man meets power--has undergone tapas or equivalent--is elevated.

5. A man is caught up and carried along by the heimarmene.

a. Fate needs correction of crime--display--revelation.
b. Ignorance needs correction--death--surmounting of death.
c. Life pattern must be continued on basis or morality--death--path determined.
d. Fate needs correction--sensory limitations removed--adjustment.
e. Ignorance needs correction--man is apt--knowledge imparted.

6. A man eases or repairs damage done to the heimarmene, thereby helping other men.

a. Horrors--invocation of savior--allaying.
b. Disruption--invocation of savior--allaying.
c. Danger threatens--intervention--safety.

“It would be possible to extend this listing. . . by giving more precise information about the agents, altering the middle events, and varying endings,” Bleiler notes, and to indicate the “community of ideas among the variant situations” he has listed, he expands upon his discussion of situation 3a, ‘A man meets power--a man’s flaw or gives power a hold over him--man is destroyed or threatened’”:

This encounter with the outlaw power has four commons situations, plus several others that are less common. The common situations involve fairies, temptations by the Devil, the hostile dead, and vampires. In each. . . there is a flaw or fault associated with the human that puts him in danger of the outlaw power. In abductions by fairies, the woman must yield sexually to the fairy, which yielding is usually accompanied by some sort of glamour. In temptation by the Devil, the human is usually motivated by greed or lust for power. With the hostile dead, the human is usually trespassing against warning, and is defying a ban. In the vampire story, the victim must give the vampire an initial invitation. As for the ending, the fairy abduction usually ends with the disappearance of the woman. If she returns at all, it is with horrible disfiguration. In the diabolic temptation the Devil almost always wins, and there is little that can be done about the hostile dead. Vampires, however, do permit an escape. Sentence 6 is usually applied, and the human is rescued by outside aid.

Bleiler next offers some tips as to how writers may extend or diversify these basic narrative situations. Among these expansion “techniques,” he lists:

. . . duplicating sentence material, interweaving sentences, adding the matter of life, generalizing, rendering more specific, treating figuratively, treating more literally, negating, turning scientific, allegorizing, combining characters, subdividing characters, using offset in various ways, fragmenting, temporally or
geographically. . . .

The bulk of Bleiler’s book is comprised of its “Index of Motifs and Story Types,” in which he lists the recurring themes and topics that the 7,200 stories he considers address. The listing continues for hundreds of pages, but a short list of some of the themes and topics, which Bleiler cross-references to the stories that involve them, suggests the nature of his scheme:

• Abduction, supernatural-by the dead, ghosts, demons, monsters.
• Adam and/or Eve.
• Afterdeath evolution--soul into form of life--necromorphs--reincarnation.
• Age changes--fountain of youth--rejuvenation.
  

An excerpt of an individual entry from the Guide illustrates the general approach to specific discussions and suggests the value and use of his tome: In discussing the film The Thief of Bagdad, Bleiler summarizes the plot: To win the hand of a caliph’s daughter, rivals compete to bring her the “most remarkable gift”: “Props then include a flying carpet, the fruit of life and death, an all-seeing idol’s eye, a cloak of invisibility, a magic rope, a magic casket of wishes.”

His summary allows the reader to see that the basic situation that Bleiler describes is has an important function: it establishes the reason, cause, or motive of the action that follows in the remainder of the story, namely the introduction of the various “props” and the ultimate wining of the contest for its prize, the hand of the caliph’s daughter.

Bleiler’s Guide uses some terminology that may not be familiar to the general reader, even of supernatural, or contranatural, literature:

• Heimarmene: A complex term that suggests one’s personal fate, or karma, but also the universal wheel of fortune, or cosmic destiny. It also suggests the dependency of the one’s character and individual destiny upon the interactions of cosmic forces and events, such as, for instance, the alignment of the stars. One must be in the right time and place, within the great wheel of fortune, to triumph. If, on the other hand, he or she is born, as Hamlet was, when “time is out of joint,” the individual may come to a bad end. Basically, one may think of heimarmene as the rule and operation of fate.
• Tapas: “Tapas” is a Hindu term that means religious austerity. Living the simple, plain life is considered a preparation for the understanding and acceptance of spiritual truths. In Catholicism, something of the spirit of tapas is seen in vows of silence and poverty and in the season of lent and its practices, which include fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter.
• Necromorph: Literally, this word means “death-form,” and may be applied to revenants, such as ghosts, vampires, and zombies as well as to corpses and skeletons.

Bleiler, Everett F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983.

Note: Bleiler is also the author of The Checklist of Science Fiction and Supernatural Fiction. Glen Rock, NY: Firebell Books, 1978, 266 pages.

The Guide to Supernatural Fiction: A Review (Part I)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In the “Preface” to his massive tome, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Everett E. Bleiler of Kent State University, examines approximately 7,200 stories, dating from 1800 to 1960, all of which he has read personally, over a quarter century. As a result, he sees both the mosaics--the individual narratives, drawn from myth, legend, fairy tales, pulp and popular fiction, classic literature, and other sources--and the big picture, the “folklore” of supernatural fiction, as he calls the whole. His massive volume not only identifies the various motifs, or recurring themes and topics of such fiction, offering detailed summaries of most of them, but it also provides insights into parallel treatments of these themes and topics.

Bleiler’s massive, painstaking analysis, synthesis, classification, division, and evaluation of so many thousands of stories from such a vast array of sources enables students, scholars, and writers of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and other forms of speculative fiction, both supernatural, or contranatural, and otherwise, to discern the variety of ways in which the same or similar themes have been treated across time by a diversity of authors. It also shows how the same author, writing about the same motif, treats and develops this motif in several different ways. The synopses of the stories enables readers and researchers, as well as writers, to get the gist, at least, of plots for stories that are out of print, and, as Bleiler points out, are unlikely, in most cases, ever to appear again in print. Using his Guide, interested parties can determine what types of characters appear again and again in such stories, compiling a list of the stock characters and the stereotypical characters that are common to the genre. It also permits its readers to discern patterns in settings, conflicts, and other elements of supernatural fiction.

Bleiler identifies three uses of supernatural literature: primary, secondary, and tertiary. According to his analysis, the primary purpose of supernatural fiction is to provide its readers with “thrills” while appealing to their interest in “supernatural motifs taken literally.” The secondary use of such literature is to serve “as a vehicle for something else: satire, analysis of social relations, probing of guilt and conscience,” and “a search for justice.” The tertiary use of this fiction is its “symbolisation of something otherwise perhaps on the edge of ineffability.”

Occasionally, Bleiler’s word choice seems odd and difficult to understand. For example, what does “supernatural motifs taken literally mean”? Does he intend to indicate, by such a phrase, that these motifs are normally regarded as being figurative or symbolic expressions? Other times, the author could have provided more explanations of some such phrases. What topics, for example, might, without the employment of symbolism be “on the edge of ineffability” and why? These occasionally awkward phrases are unfortunate, but, fortunately, they do not occur very often and, in general, Bleiler accomplishes an uncommon feat among intellectuals: his writing is mostly clear and comprehensible.

Supernatural fiction may use irony, may be symbolic, may be satirical, may be representational without also being symbolic (although it may also be symbolic), is dualistic, allowing the consideration of opposing points of view, is often speculative of other ways of life, is often transformational, and may be humorous. What is common to all these stories is the supernatural, or, as Bleiler prefers, the contranatural, by which he means “a consistent, often studied reversal of a mechanistic universe.”

In his summaries of the many stories he discusses in his Guide, Bleiler sometimes indicates when a particular narrative is ironic, symbolic, satirical, or performs another such duty in addition to their primary, secondary, and tertiary purposes. These pointers are helpful to readers, authors in particular, because they show, again, how various writers of a diverse body of supernatural fiction treat and develop these narrative adjuncts.

Discussing the relationship between stories’ meanings and their cultural contexts, an aspect of stories’ themes, Bleiler suggests that the meaning of a story is lost when the cultural context that informs the story are no longer known and understood. Moreover, the status of a book can change, for this reason, a satire bthecoming understood as an adventure story for adults and, then, later, as a children’s book. This was the fate of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, he maintains.

In the volume’s article concerning “The Phenomenology of Contranatural Fiction,” Bleiler argues that “modern supernatural fiction is ultimately concerned with the impersonal individual and with universals of existence in story abstractions that are sometimes very primitive.”

As mentioned in Chillers and Thrillers post, “Evil Is As Evil Does,” these themes are common in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction and, to a lesser degree, perhaps to the work of such contemporary writers as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Bentley Little. They also appear in the work of many mainstream authors, such as Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, and many others.

He distinguishes between supernatural and contranatural fiction by observing that the former “dealt very largely with beings that were in some way superior to mortals or to living men,” whereas the latter is more concerned with “a world view that is in direct opposition to that of materialism,” and, he says, “My thesis is that modern fiction has erected a mirror world based on direct contradiction to what most of us believe, related through the strong principle of positive negation.” This perspective is discernible in the fiction’s “subject matter. . . man and the universe.” Contranatural fiction, Bleiler maintains, “cares little about man as a social being or as a lesson in biochemistry or psychology” and is “not always concerned with exact geography, with the orderly progression of time, or with the immutable law,” and “instead, things are added to, subtracted from, and modified away from reality.”

It is debatable, perhaps, as to whether “most of us believe” in a dualistic world of spirit and matter rather than a materialistic universe, as Bleiler contends. If anything, the opposite state of affairs seems to be the rule. However, it may be true that many continue, in the words of the FBI’s Special Agent Fox Mulder, to “want to believe” in a spiritual realm that is both immanent and transcendent to the natural world in which matter and energy, as interchangeable expressions of the same basic substance, hold sway, and, in that sense, emotionally rather than rationally, the dualistic world view of the “primitive” is still influential in modern and contemporary human life.

Additions result in an increase of human powers by assigning “a host of paranormal abilities,” to which “evolution can bring further changes.” Contranatural fiction is characterized by “worlds of if, magic lands, unrigorous futures. . . objects that contain manna in themselves” and “manipulative techniques like magic and wish.”

Subtractions, he says, “indicate limitations” such as “loss of personal essence, deprivation of powers, destruction of time and space, new principles of causality of more limited range than the old, and restrictions on man and the gods.” In general, he believes subtractions to be “less important” than additions, but both additions and subtractions to reality are “modifications of the mechanistic universe” which can be “most easily recognized and understood” as antitheses of “the basis of mechanism,” as represented by various statements:

• Man is alone in the universe--there are supernatural beings.
• Man is the most powerful force--there are gods.
• The universe is amoral--there are forces concerned with morality, gods, demons, rewards, punishments.
• The universe is an uncaring place--there are temptations, prayer, faith.
• Death is final--there are ghosts, heavens, hells, reincarnation.
• Change can be effected only by rational means--there is magic. . . .
• Existence is material--there are fairies, vampires, little people of various sorts.
• Essence is inalienable--there are transformations of various sorts, personality interchange, possession, breaking the rule of one man-one personality.
• Reality is closed and separate from things imagined--there are solipsistic universes, entry into literary worlds, characters coming to life.
• The animate and the inanimate are rigidly separated--life may be created, inanimate things may be brought to life.
• Man’s senses have limitations--there are paranormal abilities, dream worlds, foreknowledge.
• According to Bleiler, such additions, subtractions, and modifications to reality result from “psychological factors that lie behind” his “typological scheme--fear and hope, desire and despair, acceptance and wonder.”
• Bleiler believes that, as human knowledge “expands,” so does “contra-knowledge,” and the latter expands more quickly and broadly than the former, since “it is possible to have more than one opposition to a basic idea.”

In Part Two of "The Guide to Supernatural Fiction: A Review," we’ll consider Bleiler’s six statements from which “countless stories can be generated.”

Everyday Horrors: Coffins

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Replica of Abraham Lincoln's Coffin

There’s no pleasant way to get rid of a dead body. Cremation, burial at sea, exposure to the elements and wild animals, burial in the earth, mummification--all these methods and others have been tried, but they all leave something, more or less, to be desired. If one opts for burial in the soil, rather than at sea, he or she will need a coffin, whether of pine or solid gold. Since most people do opt for burial in the soil, coffins are likely to remain everyday horrors. As such, they’re worthy of a post in this series.

Originally, the coffin was simply a simple pine box. Its purpose was simple, too: contain the corpse. Once buried, the coffin, if not the corpse, was soon forgotten. Now, it would be considered gauche, to say the very least, to bury a dearly departed in so simple (and cheap) a box. Nothing less than the finest mahogany, or even bronze, lined with satin or silk, will do. After all, the more expensive the coffin, the more its quality indicates the degree to which the loved one was loved.

Haraldskaer Woman's Coffin

Although many coffins are plain, some are fanciful, shaped like fish, bottles, or guitars, whereas others bear a glass cover that allows a glimpse of the body inside, such as that of the Haraldskaer woman on display in the Church of St. Nicolai in Vejle, Denmark or of S. P. Dinsmoor, the Civil War veteran who built a concrete Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas to showcase his political and religious beliefs.

S. P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden, where his glass-covered cement coffin is displayed, Dinsmoor, inside, looking a bit mouldy

In the nineteenth century, Americans and others were terrified of being buried alive, as Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Premature Burial” suggests, and coffins were equipped with alarms that could be sounded by the coffin’s occupant, in the event that he or she had been mistakenly buried alive. Modern coffins (often called “caskets”) are frequently equipped with features that are supposed to protect the body from bacteria, insects, temperature changes, and other threats, but none do so indefinitely and caskets with air-tight seals actually promote the decay of the body rather than retarding or preventing it. An airtight casket expedites the decomposition of the corpse by bacteria that thrive in an oxygen-free environment.

Among models offered by most casket manufacturers are the 20-gauge steel coffin with or without an airtight gasket; a 16-gauge steel coffin; a stainless-steel coffin; a solid copper coffin, which may or may not attract grave robbers bent upon collecting the metal for resale; a solid bronze coffin ; and hardwood coffins of poplar, oak, maple, cherry, mahogany, and pine. There are also extra-large caskets and Jewish caskets, the male versions of which, presumably, are circumcised. The best value among one supplier’s metal coffins is the Hamilton DCM01, regularly selling at $1,395, but discounted for who-knows-how-long, at a mere $795. It’s a 20-gauge steel coffin, without the airtight seal (what does one expect for a paltry $795?), of sliver color, and has a white crepe interior. The company’s best value in wood coffins is the Montgomery DCTH50, which normally costs $2,195 but is discounted to $1,395. It has a hardwood mahogany finish on the outside and a white crepe interior. The supplier offers a quick course on how to select a coffin, Caskets 101. The course begins with some basic (one might say self-evident) information, and, in bold font, states the disclaimer, “No caskets or vaults protect human remains from decomposition, no matter how much you spend.” Instead, the purpose of the coffin is to serve as “a vehicle to place a loved one in for a ceremony and an interment.” The decomposition of the corpse, Caskets 101 stresses, is “inevitable,” no matter how much or how little one spends on the body's “vehicle.” The course also offers this interesting tidbit, in case student-customers are wondering: “Besides steel caskets, there are copper and bronze caskets. These caskets are measured by the ounce, meaning a 32 Oz. Bronze casket contains 32 ounces of bronze for every square foot of casket.” The purpose of the sealer is to prevent air and water from disturbing the loved one’s eternal rest, but “there is no guarantee that this won’t ever happen.” The course concludes by suggesting the economy of buying directly from a wholesaler: “funeral homes tend to triple the cost of their caskets and sometimes a lot more, we just mark ours up one time. . . . funeral homes can succeed with high markups because most people still buy their caskets from them.”

Many vampire stories, including Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot and Joss Whedon‘s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, feature coffins, as do stories populated with zombies. In The Amityville Horror, George Lutz graciously, if rather oddly, builds coffins for the members of his family. In Homecoming, the war dead rise from their flag-draped coffins to vote. The movie Ed Gein starts with the title character robbing a grave, and, real-life ghoul that he was, Gein actually did rob quite a few graves, both in Plainfield, Wisconsin and in Spirit Land Cemetery, a few miles to the north of his hometown.

As Homecoming suggests, the Veterans Administration will supply an American flag to the next-of-kin of any honorably discharged serviceman or woman, and, incidentally, now allows the Wicca symbol on military headstones. (Other approved emblems include a large variety of Christian crosses, the Buddhist wheel of righteousness, the Jewish Star of David, the angel Moroni, the arrow-and-teepee emblem of the Native American Church of North America, the atheist atom, the Muslim crescent and star, the Hindu religious emblem, and various others.)

At a recent trade show, China introduced the world to a paper coffin, which resembles hardwood, and can be decorated with paintings. It can be easily cremated or buried, and has been used in China for years.

Coffins are also available for pet animals. Some are rectangular pine boxes; others are hardwood miniature versions of adult humans’ coffins, complete with handles on either ides for pallbearers’ use.

“Everyday Horrors: Coffins” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

A Descent into the Horrors of Extreme Feminism

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Concerning The Descent (2205), it behooves one to ask who is descending and into what, precisely, the characters are descending. The “who” is a team of nubile young women, and the “what” is an underground cavern. Symbolically, a cavern represents the womb, and an underground world suggests the interiority of the person, an interiority that is not normally seen or surveyed—the unconscious mind. The idea of descending, of “going down,” also has, perhaps, a vaguely sexual—and, in the context of an all-female cast, a homosexual, or lesbian—connotation.

Women are going down together, inside a giant womb symbol, just as they are undertaking an exploration of their unconscious minds. Women often regard one another as rivals rather than as friends—or so it is said, at any rate. The Descent builds upon this idea of same-sex rivalry. Although they do encounter strange, fetus-like creatures, they discover, as their relatively superficial friendships falter, that they actually have more to fear from one another than from the monsters as they become as much their own enemies as the adversaries of the beasts that stalk them.

The cast of characters ranges across the spectrum of social roles available to contemporary women, and the women’s varied nationalities and ethnicities suggest that this movie is about all women everywhere, rather than just the five who actually make up the expedition’s party. Juno is the intrepid adventuress; Sarah, a Brit, is the wife and mother; the British Beth, her friend, is her confidante; and the European sisters, Rebecca and Sam (note the masculine name), are, respectively, the timid female and the competent professional woman. The only man in any of the women’s lives, Sarah’s husband, Paul, a role-reversed Mr. Mom who tends to their daughter, Jessica, is out of the picture, as is the child: father and daughter were killed in a car accident following a rafting adventure in which Sarah and her girlfriends participated. Juno, the movie suggests, may be bisexual, for, just before their spelunking expedition begins, she and her team are joined by the reckless and obviously butch Holly, Juno’s friend. Wife-and-mother Sarah and her best friend, Beth, harbor resentment toward Juno, who abandoned them the previous year. Her abandonment of her friends haunts Juno’s dreams, and it is obvious that she feels guilty about her actions.

These dreams also set up the shifting themes of the character’s waking (conscious) and sleeping (unconscious) lives, heralding their descent into their unconscious, where they will confront their deepest, most secret fears, as embodied by the strange fetus-creatures who will hunt them.

The contours of the cave they explore resemble the shape of the womb. Wide at the entrance (vagina), it narrows toward the middle (cervix), and then opens again, into another wider space (uterus, or womb). As the women negotiate their way through the womb-cave, Sarah, the wife and mother, gets stuck and, suffering from claustrophobia, panics. As subtext, her becoming trapped seems to represent pregnancy, which causes a woman to get “stuck,” physically and, to some extent, both emotionally and socially, if not vocationally, as well, for nine months in a process that, for many, epitomizes femininity. Beth, her best friend, plays the role of the midwife, delivering Sarah, but the birth process represented by Beth’s freeing Sarah from the cave’s narrowed passageway goes awry: the womb-cave collapses, burying the women inside a womb-become-a-tomb. Their gender, especially as it is involved in pregnancy, has not only trapped them, but it has also, in fact, buried them alive.

Juno announces that she has duped her friends. In pretending that they would be exploring an already-charted cavern while taking them to an unexplored cave instead, she has betrayed her fellow women. Femininity, represented by the charted cavern, was once familiar and non-threatening, but, now, as represented by an unknown cave, it has become an alien, unknown, and possibly hazardous region. Juno has risked their lives along with her own to realize her ambition to have a cave named for her as a sort of shortcut to a symbolic or surrogate motherhood.

Juno seeks a new way by which women can generate and produce, if not reproduce, except that the way is not new. It is the age-old technological-masculine substitute for women’s natural ability to reproduce life through the feminine-exclusive means of pregnancy and childbirth, as men seek to create material artifacts through technological-masculine means in imitation of, and compensation for, women’s natural-feminine ability to have children. Juno seems to want to usurp these technological-masculine means by asserting her will over the other women and over the womb-cave to which she has brought them for this purpose. In the process, she has endangered the lives of both herself and the other members of the party, ostensibly her friends but really her rivals. None of them sees the other danger—the drooling mouth, a sort of vagina dentata—that appears, briefly, in the foreground of the scene. Playing the role of the midwife a second time, Beth points a way out of the womb-cave: art, in the form of a mural painted by Native Americans (Roseau’s “noble savages”), shows the trapped women a way out of their predicament, depicting a second exit from the womb-cave.

As they continue their descent, Holly, thinking she sees sunlight, rushes along the cavern, heedless of Juno’s command to slow down, and falls, breaking a leg. Lesbianism, with a patina of machismo, as an alternative means of satisfying one’s sexual desires, is crippled, and it hinders women in their explorations of themselves as individuals and of their femininity as women. As the sisterhood tends to their injured comrade, the traditional wife-and mother, Sarah, wanders off, on her own, encountering one of the womb-cave’s misshapen, aborted-fetus-like monsters, which seem to represent her (and her companions’) forsaking of traditional and biological maternal roles. The creatures are an army, it seems, of outraged fetuses or, perhaps, could-have-been fetuses, who were aborted by virtue of the women’s decision to renounce their baby-making capability in favor of pursuing the more traditionally masculine role of explorer. Things quickly go from bad to worse.
The lesbian has been crippled, but now she is killed by one of the creatures, and her ostensible lover, Juno, the leader of the women’s group, struggles with the murderous monster for the remains of the slain woman. The monster, as an aborted fetus, perhaps, represents the traditional role of women or, at least, its outcome, but it is a role that has been thwarted by the women’s will—their choice—to engage in spelunking.

By using a tool—a pickax, representing an artifact of the technological-masculine order—Juno scars the fetus-monster’s face, but it drags Holly’s body off as a second monster attacks Juno. The women’s leader manages to kill her attacker, with the man-made pickax, but she also mortally wounds the timid member of their sisterhood, the wife-and-mother’s best friend, Beth. In denying one’s femininity, an alpha woman like Juno, it appears, can have a negative, even a fatal, effect on the lives of lesser (read, more traditional) women. Feminism, especially in its extreme form, may not be good for all ladies. As Beth begs Juno to help her, Juno, as if confirming the prophetic nature of her earlier nightmares, abandons Beth to her fate. Sarah dreams of her daughter, but, this time, Jessica has the face of one of the aborted-fetus-monsters, the imagery establishing the thematic connection between children (or would-be children) and their abandonment (or abortion).

As if crippling and then killing the renegade woman-lesbian were not enough for the outraged, vengeful fetus-monsters, the creatures fall upon Holly’s corpse, consuming it, as Sarah, rescued by Juno, flees. The women discover that the creatures are blind and rely upon their heightened sense of hearing to hunt their prey.

The masculine-named Sam is embracing her sister, the distraught, timid girly girl, Rebecca; however Sam, emasculated with fear at the sight of a monster, is unable to protect or to defend her sister, and it is up to heroic Juno, armed with the man-made pickax, once again, to save a damsel in distress.

In her retreat from the feeding pit in which the monsters are devouring the remains of the lesbian, Sarah encounters Beth, telling her friend how Juno had abandoned her, and Sarah fulfills Beth’s request that she kill her to put her out of her misery. The wife-mother has killed her midwife, but, it appears, not soon enough, for a child-like monster attacks Sarah, forcing her to kill (abort) the fetus-creature. Nature, through its exercise of the biological imperative, reasserts its will, as another fetus-monster —the slain creature’s mother (or the mother role itself, which has been thwarted by Sarah’s murder of the child)—attacks Sarah.

In fending off the female monster’s attack, Sarah falls into a pool of (menstrual?) blood, where the female monster (maternal instinct) pins her. Using a sharp bone fragment (symbolic, it seems, of the death instinct, which, in Freudian psychology, is opposed to eros, the life instinct), Sarah kills the monster, but its mate, the male of the species, then attacks her. She manages to kill it with the bone fragment as well.

Sam and Rebecca are next to be dispatched by the monsters, before the creatures force Juno to jump into a pit of water. After killing a creature lurking in the water, Juno climbs the side of pit, but loses her grip and slides back into the crater. Sarah, appearing above, grabs her, hauling her out of the depression. It’s obvious from her expression that she scorns Juno for having abandoned Beth to her fate. However, her contempt is forgotten for the moment when they are again attacked by the fetus-creatures. They kill their attackers, and, when Juno is distracted by additional creatures, Sarah stabs Juno in the leg, abandoning her to her fate, as Juno had earlier abandoned Beth.

As the monsters descend upon Juno, Sarah flees, escapes through an exit in the cave, and drives off—or so she thinks. As Juno’s bloodied corpse appears beside her in the car’s passenger seat, she realizes that she is merely daydreaming; her escape was just an illusion, and the exit she thought she’d seen was nothing. She’s fled into a dead-end arm (a Fallopian tube) of the cavern. She thinks of her daughter, who offers her birthday cake. The monsters—fetus-like creatures representing, perhaps, her abandonment of her role as a mother—are heard, descending upon her, as the film ends.

The Descent may be regarded as a repudiation of extreme feminism’s demand that women, to become authentic individuals, abandon the roles of mother and wife, forsaking family and even the childbearing role that nature and biology, no less than society, have assigned to them. This is the lesson that the women learn, too late, from their exploration of their unconscious minds that is represented by the cave, which also doubles as the ultimate symbol of femininity, the womb itself.

Everyday Horrors: Crawlspaces

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Not every house has one, but, for those that do, the crawlspace can be a source of anxiety, or even fear. In some cases, it may be a font of pure, unadulterated terror. Not quite a basement--in fact, not really even part of the house--the crawlspace, as its name implies, makes one crawl, belly down, and vulnerable, in a close, confined space. Already, just thinking about such a situation, causes the hackles to rise. Maybe it’s not necessary, one thinks, to thaw the frozen water pipe under the house or to investigate the strange scratching, clawing sound that seems, when one is seated in the cozy comfort of one’s well-lighted living room, to come from down there.

One of the most frightening aspects of the crawlspace has already been cited--it requires that one crawl, belly down, vulnerable, in a close, confined space in which standing or, in many cases, even sitting, is impossible. The crawlspace is dimly lit, too, by only the flashlight that one has in hand (or mouth), and, dropped--or, perhaps, snatched away--the bulb could shatter, leaving one in utter darkness, with over a ton of house above one, the residence become, perhaps, a tomb. Another disturbing aspect of the crawlspace is that, often, it offers only one way out--the small square or rectangular opening through which one entered. To escape, should escape become necessary, one would have to go back the way that he or she came--and what if the thing--the animal or creature, or monster--is behind one? It’s a safe bet, in a horror story, at least, that whatever’s in the crawlspace with the character will be not only far stronger than he or she, but also much nimbler and sprier. It will be able to dash and dart around inside the narrow space, so that, regardless of the direction a retreating homeowner (or maintenance worker) takes, the thing would already be there, cutting off the escape route.

And, as TV game show barkers are fond of barking, “That’s not all!” Like the basement, the crawlspace has cthuluian associations. Psychologically, it is connected to the Freudian id or the Jungian unconscious, individual and, possibly, collective. In the depths of this underground world, so to speak, there be monsters--the uncivilized, impulses of our animal ancestry, bestial and untamed--and dead bodies--the dark, sometimes sinister thoughts, desires, emotions, temptations, and experiences we have rejected and “buried,” more or less alive and kicking. And, as Xander Harris tells Buffy Summers, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's “Dead Man’s Party” episode, one “can’t just bury things,” because “they’ll come right back to get you.”

The ground upon which one lies, the vulnerable belly exposed to whatever may lie beneath, is a thin skin between the everyday world of the normal and the ordinary, governed by conscience, reason, cultural traditions, laws, and social mores and a hidden, subterranean world of the unknown, the untamed, the uncivilized, and the alien, where anything may lie in wait, albeit, whatever form the buried bodies take, they will almost certainly be hideous, repulsive, and hostile rather than beautiful, attractive, and friendly. At any moment, whatever lurks below may penetrate this thin layer between sanity and madness, reason and absurdity, love and fear, hope and despair. Cut off from family, friends, and society, one is trapped, alone in the dark, in the confines of a space as close and inescapable as the grave. It would be ironic for a residence to be transformed into a tomb, but fate loves irony, and this same transformation has occurred not merely once, but several times.

The lowly crawlspace (sorry, but I couldn’t resist!) has appeared, as a major player, in several movies (and in one of my own short stories). One such film is Crawlspace, which was released in 1986. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) offers a succinct summary of the plot: “A man who runs an apartment house for women is the demented son of a Nazi surgeon who has the house equipped with secret passageways, hidden rooms and torture and murder devices.”

A crawlspace also played a significant role in another movie of the same title, released in 1972. In this one, a homeless youth takes up residence in the crawlspace of a lonely, childless couple who befriended him. When he makes enemies by destroying a store, local residents avenge themselves upon the disturbed youth and the parents whom he’s adopted.

In yet another Crawlspace movie, released in 2000 as part of Pendulum Pictures’ Mental Maniacs DVD set, a sadistic kidnapper, wearing what might be a mask of human flesh, torments first one, and then another, man whom he traps in the crawlspace beneath his house. The second is Mike, who awakens “to find that he is trapped with no way out. A 'phone rings and the games begin. The captor calls himself ‘The Director’ and he claims to be directing a reality show in which Mike's life is at stake. If Mike is alive after three days of mayhem, he will be set free.”

In the horror films to date, crawlspaces have been interpreted primarily as metaphors for helplessness and have been subsumed under the labels of the slasher film, in which a crazed serial killer stalks and slashes nubile teens, and the splatter film, which focuses upon blood, guts, and gore, both of which are sometimes called “torture porn” by critics who find little, if any, socially redeeming value in their exploitation of bloodlust and its effects. The most disturbing aspect of the crawlspace, however--and the one that qualifies it for inclusion as an “Everyday Horror”--is the simple fact that many houses--perhaps yours--feature one of these twilight zones in which the near and dear connect with the distant and the feared.


“Everyday Horrors: Crawlspaces” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

Everyday Horrors: Tombstones

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In Tombstone, Arizona’s boot hill cemetery, a headstone bears this epitaph:


Here lies Lester Moore.
He took four slugs from a .44,
No Les
No More.


Frontier towns seemed to enjoy macabre humor--or, perhaps, it was only their undertakers who did. In a graveyard in another such town, an epitaph reads:


Here lies a man named Zeke,
Second fastest draw in Cripple Creek.


An executed sheep stealer’s stone comments:


Here lies the body of
Thomas Kemp
Who lived by wool
And died by hemp.


Of course, people of other times and places also liked such doggerel on theirs (or others’) markers, as these examples attest:


Stranger, tread
This ground with gravity:
Dentist Brown
Is filling his last cavity.


I put my wife beneath this stone
For her repose and my own.


Humorous epitaphs such as these (and there are many others, which apply to those who have departed from every walk of life) may be a form of black humor--wit and its product, witticisms, by which we express absurdity (it seems absurd that we should be born only to die)--or of gallows humor--wit and its byproducts, witticisms, by which we make fun of death and other dire conditions or situations--a sort of verbal whistling in the dark as we pass the cemetery at night.

However, headstones, gravestones, tombstones, or whatever one chooses to call them may have had a different purpose, originally. Notice that these words all have something in common--stone. They might have been used to hold the coffin down and prevent the escape of the corpse, should it, or its spirit, decide to return to haunt the living.

Since the beginning of human history, the living have feared the dead. A decaying corpse suggests, for some (and proves beyond all doubt, for others) that life may come to a bad end, that it is a tragedy rather than a comedy, and that it is absurd, even while lived, if it comes to naught in the end. The best thing to do is to hide the evidence of one’s mortality, and one way to do so is to bury the evidence--and, for good measure, to put a heavy object, such as a stone, atop it. This way, the cities of the living are segregated from the cities of the dead, and the denizens of each may keep company with their own kind.

The Veterans Administration recently approved the inscription of the Wicca five-sided star on deceased veterans' headstones. As one might suppose, the decision has generated quite a controversy.

In horror stories, the dead find the granite or marble stones erected upon their graves no impediment to their desire to rejoin the living. In horror movies, anything is possible, and ghosts, vampires, zombies, and all manner of other revenants, including a dead cat in Stephen King’s Pet Semetary and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Dead Man’s Party” episode, routinely return from the grave, whistle as we may when we pass the graveyard’s wrought-iron gates.


“Everyday Horrors: Tombstones” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

Everyday Horrors: Gargoyles

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Designed as rainspouts, gargoyles are grotesque, often demonic, figures. Their name derives from a French word, gargouille, meaning “gullet,” an onomatopoeia word derived in mimicry of the gargling sound that water makes in the throat. Frequently, rain washed through the figures’ throats and is poured away from the sides of the buildings--usually, cathedrals--upon which they are mounted. There are also chimeras, which are the same as gargoyles except that they fulfill a purely decorative purpose and do not carry rainwater. Architectural and religious features since ancient times, gargoyles were used in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, although most people associate gargoyles with medieval cathedrals. Notre Dame is a famous example. In the United States, the Washington National Cathedral, in the nation’s capitol, is festooned with the grotesque figures, one of which is a likeness of Darth Vader. Princeton’s and several other Ivy League universities’ buildings also include gargoyles as part of their architecture.

Historians vary in their interpretation as to the meaning of these odd figures. Some believe that they were intended to ward off evil, whereas others think that they may have been intended to remind the faithful of the fate of the unrepentant sinner. After all, they were never carved inside the church. They were always perched outside, under eaves or ledges, exiled, as it were, from the fellowship of the faithful, much as Cain’s descendent, Grendel, was exiled from the fellowship of Danish warriors. The gargoyle was an outcast, a pariah. As such, gargoyles could have symbolized damned souls, pressed into labor by God, despite their wickedness, and made to serve the church in their ignominious role as waterspouts.

According to an article concerning “The Gargoyles of Princeton University,” still another theory as to the meaning of gargoyles considered them to be the representations of evil spirits that had been overthrown by the Christian church. They were said to have frozen in stone as they fled from the church. Princeton’s gargoyles, this article explains, symbolize a variety of ideas. One, a blindfolded reader holding an open book in his hands, represents “opening the eyes of those who seek understanding and casting aside the obstructions of prejudice.” However, the article’s author adds, tongue in cheek, “symbolism aside, this figure evokes sympathy from anyone who has ever picked up a book and not understood a word of it.” Another gargoyle, a monkey with a camera, is said to represent “academic endeavor”: he is “playing with technology beyond his understanding,” but the use of which he may learn. Other gargoyles and chimeras on the university’s campus also have an educational spirit, so to speak, and include a flute player, a chained dragon, a football runner, Benjamin Franklin, a dinosaur head, a monkey clown, a literate ape, a man with an open mouth, a goblin with a shell, the head of a football player, the head of a soldier, and a couple taking a joy ride in their automobile.

Like many of the Princeton gargoyles, those who inhabit the exterior surfaces of the Washington Cathedral tend to be humorous rather than somber in spirit. Many represent technological marvels, such as the computer, the astronaut, and robots. Others are depictions of stylized animals, usually of the domesticated rather than the wild variety, or objects from popular culture. One of the more popular of these figures is the one that represents the Star Wars villain, Darth Vader, who was chosen in a nationwide contest, in 1980, in which schoolchildren competed to select designs for the church’s west towers. (Other winners were a raccoon, a girl with pigtails and braces, and a big-tooth man with an umbrella.) The National Cathedral provides a self-guided tour for those who are interested in spotting their gargoyles; one is advised to bring binoculars. The buildings in many cities beside Washington, D. C., also feature gargoyles. The grotesque figures can be seen peering down from ledges, arches, eaves, and other exterior building locations in New York, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere.

Many of the gargoyles that decorate (?) the Cathedral of Notre Dame are animals. Others are human faces or heads. It may be that the gargoyles of Notre Dame and other Christian cathedrals were also tools of religious conversion. As “Historical Base for Gargoyles” points out, Pope Gregory encouraged St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, in Africa, to establish the Catholic faith among the local pagan people by substituting Christian for pagan images and icons, allowing the converts to adjust to their newfound faith slowly as they transferred their devotion to their own religious objects and convictions to those of the church: “"Destroy the idol. Purify the temples with holy water. Set relics there, and let them become temples of the true God. So the people will have no need to change their place of concourse, and, where of old they were wont to sacrifice cattle to demons, thither let them continue to resort on the day of the saint to where the Church is dedicated, and slay their beasts, no longer as a sacrifice but for social meal in honor of Him whom they now worship.” In addition, the images and statues, including the gargoyles, were the visual means of communicating theological truths to the illiterate laity. Times have changed, however, and even the fiercest of these grotesque creatures no longer frightens. In fact, the Notre Dame gargoyles are now available as coloring book images!

“Everyday Horrors: Gargoyles” is the first in a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.