Alternative Explanations, Part I: Demons and Ghosts

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In most horror stories which involve paranormal of supernatural forces or entities--which is to say, most horror stories--there’s a skeptical character whose purpose is to explain--or to explain away--the story’s apparently paranormal or supernatural incidents. To be convincing, such a character should know what he or she is talking about, at least as far as the science used to refute this or that apparent extraordinary incident. This article offers some tips concerning the type of debunker’s knowledge that skeptical characters ought to know and the sources in which the creators of these characters--namely, you--can find such information on tap, alas, not alongside the house brew.

The type of info you’ll need to know depends upon the type of paranormal or supernatural force or entity that is (allegedly) involved. Is it a demon? A ghost? A clairvoyant or a telekinetic person? Someone who’s adept at levitation whom other characters just don’t want hanging around all the time? Vampires? Werewolves? Zombies? An extraterrestrial species? Cthuthlu? Something else entirely?

Let’s take a look at some of the paranormal and supernatural classics and mainstays of the horror genre and the alternative explanations for them.

Okay, demons. First, what are they supposed to be? Evil spirits, right? But spirits of what? Dead animals? Dead people? Hats and shoes? Or are they a breed apart? Biblical traditions maintain that demons are fallen angels--angels, in other words, who rebelled against God, perhaps under the leadership of Satan, and were punished by being cast out of heaven and into hell. From time to time, they may visit the earth to tempt human beings for fun and profit (their victims’ eternal damnation, which would swell the population of hell).

Apparently, demons--or, quite a few of them, anyway--can possess people, and they may do so either individually or in groups. William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist and the movie based upon it are supposedly based upon a true exorcism. The movies The Possession of Emily Rose and Requiem are both allegedly based upon another real-life case. They are interesting to study because each suggests a different approach that the skeptic character in your story could take in debunking the existence of demons--at least those who possess people.

The case upon which The Exorcist is supposedly based is nothing more than the result of exaggerations of the incidents that are alleged to have occurred in the actual case or sheer inventions, some contend. According to “The Real Story Behind the Exorcist,” “virtually all of the gory and sensational details were embellished or made up. Simple spitting became Technicolor, projectile vomiting; (normal) shaking of a bed became thunderous quaking and levitation; the boy’s low growl became a gravelly, Satanic voice.”

The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Requiem rely upon mischaracterizing mental illness and its effects as being demonic possession and its effects, critics argue. Adopting this approach to debunk diagnoses of demonic possession, the horror story’s skeptical character would say that the supposedly possessed person is mentally ill and susceptible to suggestions on the part of the exorcist:

“. . . exorcisms have been (and continue to be) performed, often on emotionally and mentally disturbed people. . . . Most often, exorcisms are done on people of strong religious faith. To the extent that exorcisms ‘work,’ it is primarily due to the power of suggestion and the placebo effect. If you believe you are possessed, and that a given ritual will cleanse you, then it just might.”

Mark Opsasnick’s thorough, detailed debunking, “The Haunted Boy: The Cold, Hard Facts Behind the Story that Inspired The Exorcist,” explains the exaggeration-invention approach to creating demons and demonic possession. The Skeptic’s Dictionary lists it and numerous other books and articles that question, evaluate, and reject spurious claims to demonic possession. (The Skeptic’s Dictionary, by the way, is an excellent basic source for all alternative explanations of allegedly paranormal and supernatural and, indeed, otherworldly, or extraterrestrial, phenomena).

Thus, the horror story’s skeptical character can explain demons and demonic possession by suggesting that demons and demonic possession are concocted out of exaggerations and inventions, the misdiagnoses of mental illness as demonic possession and susceptibility of the apparently possessed religious victim, or both.

What about ghosts? How might our fictional skeptic debunk them and their ghostly deeds? Supposedly, a ghost is the spirit of a dead person. Over the years, ghosts have collected quite a list of characteristics:

• They’re made of ectoplasm.
• Their presence is discernable by psychics.
• They make the air cold because they’re energy magnets, and thermal energy is energy. (One might say that ghosts were once environmental threats, except that, with global warming underway, they may now be ecological heroes.)
• They tend to be rather camera shy, but other equipment seems to register phantom phenomena.
• They sometimes haunt places or people or both with which or whom they were associated in the days of their incarnation, perhaps for revenge or for no other reason that they don’t know they’re dead (hard to imagine) or how to get to the great beyond.
• They can walk through solid objects, such as walls or your Aunt Betty.
• Some, known as poltergeists, are especially noisy and destructive.

What’s our skeptic’s likely answers to such claims? Ghosts may also be products of hallucinations, especially during sleep paralysis. Most ghost stories rely upon anecdotal evidence, which is “always incomplete and selective.” (For a critique of anecdotal evidence, check out “anecdotal [tensional] evidence”.)

According to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, skeptics have found cheesecloth an excellent “ectoplasm” material for use at séances conducted by mediums (sort of psychic midwives), especially if the medium who delivered the ghosts, so to speak, was a woman. Scientific American established a committee to investigate one medium’s psychic abilities, Harvard psychology professor William McDougall summarizing one of his group’s findings: “There is good evidence that "ectoplasm" issues, or did issue on some and probably all occasions [from] one particular 'opening in the anatomy' (i.e., the vagina).” She refused to be strip-searched before séances and would not “perform in tights.” Another skeptic “offers a much simpler explanation for the production of ectoplasm. Have your husband sit next to you during the séance. Make sure he has stuffed his shirt or pants with stuff to slip to you under the table when the lights are out.”

According to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, the big chill that is said to accompany the presence of ghosts is likely to result from drafts of air. Some noise may also be attributed to such ventilation. The activity of mechanical equipment, such as extraction fans, may also create air currents that produce odd sounds. Ghosts supposedly prefer night to day and darkness to light because it’s easier to see them in the dark than in daylight, since their ectoplasm is supposedly see-through. Our skeptic might counter this claim by suggesting another reason for ghosts’ alleged preference for darkness: it’s much easier to deceive others under conditions of darkness, too, than it is in broad daylight or in a well-lighted room.

While few ghosts worthy of the film have appeared on camera, some ghost hunters claim to have caught evidence of them on such equipment as “tape recorders, EMF detectors, video cameras with night vision, metal detectors.” Skeptics might question whether this--or any--equipment has been designed to detect ghosts, noting that, just because such equipment may look scientific, doesn’t mean that it is, and that certainly “tape recorders, EMF detectors, video cameras with night vision, metal detectors.” are not designed to detect the spirits of the deceased. Live Science finds ghost hunters’ supposedly scientific equipment questionable and challenges the claims its users have made concerning the equipment’s detection of ghosts. After pointing out that “the equipment is only as scientific as the person using it,” Benjamin Radford, the author of “The Shady Science of Ghost Hunting,” queried an equipment supplier as to the “scientific rationale. . . behind the equipment he sold” and received this surprisingly candid answer:

“At a haunted location," Cook said, "strong, erratic fluctuating EMFs are commonly found. It seems these energy fields have some definite connection to the presence of ghosts. The exact nature of that connection is still a mystery. However, the anomalous fields are easy to find. Whenever you locate one, a ghost might be present.... any erratic EMF fluctuations you may detect may indicate ghostly activity. . . . There exists no device that can conclusively detect ghosts."

Radford observes, with logic fatal to ghost hunting, “The supposed links between ghosts and electromagnetic fields, low temperatures, radiation, odd photographic images, and so on are based on nothing more than guesses, unproven theories, and wild conjecture. If a device could reliably determine the presence or absence of ghosts, then by definition, ghosts would be proven to exist.”

As Radford points out in the same article, statistics also cast doubt upon ghosts who are said to haunt their murderers: “If murder victims whose killings remains unsolved are truly destined to walk the earth and haunt the living, then we should expect to encounter ghosts nearly everywhere. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, roughly a quarter of all homicides remains unsolved each year,” and “There are about 30,000 homicides in America each year.”

He also questions how it is that ghosts wear clothing: “Do shoes, coats, hats, and belts also have souls? Logically, ghosts should appear naked.”

“On the Subject of Ghosts,” an article by Michael LaPointe, the “laws laid down by Sir Isaac Newton” make it “impossible for a non-physical entity to simultaneously walk upon surfaces and pass through solid objects, such as doors and walls; if a being is applying force to the ground in order to propel themselves, they therefore can’t pass through other solids without falling through the floor.” One has a choice, it seems. He or she can believe the anecdotal evidence of a haunted soul who sees ghosts do such things or the eminent scientist Isaac Newton, who says that neither ghosts nor anything else in the universe can perform such impossible feats. The party with whose claim one sides suggests much about his or her faith, whether it’s in the supernatural or the scientific.

As The Skeptic’s Dictionary points out, poltergeists generally turn out to be not mischievous, noisy nuisances of the spirit world but, rather, flesh-and-blood pranksters of a juvenile nature, whose antics are coupled, perhaps, with “perceptual misinterpretations, e. g., seeing things move that never moved or attributing sounds or movement of inanimate objects to spirits when one can't detect the source” or air drafts and other natural causes.

In one case, a woman named Mrs. Connolly found:

“A imitation fireplace and a couple of chairs overturned in the living room. Such things went on for four days. A building inspector suggested the problem might be coming from the fireplace, so Mrs. Connolly hired someone to put a protective covering over the chimney top. "From that moment on, the objects stayed put". . . . Mrs. Connolly was not a superstitious woman and attributed the events to powerful drafts swirling down the chimney and disturbing objects in their path. When confronted with poltergeist activity one should not rule out such natural factors as drafts of wind.”

Children are the poltergeists in another account of alleged poltergeist activity that is recounted in The Skeptic’s Dictionary:

“William Roll investigated the Resch case and declared it authentic. In 1984, Tina was 14 years old and living in Columbus, Ohio. Newspaper reports testified to her chaotic household where telephones would fly, lamps would swing and fall, all accompanied by loud noises. James Randi also investigated the case and found that Tina was hoaxing her adoptive parents and using the media attention to assist her quest to find her biological parents.

A video camera from a visiting TV crew that was inadvertently left running, recorded Tina cheating by surreptitiously pulling over a lamp while unobserved. The other occurrences were shown to be inventions of the press or highly exaggerated descriptions of quite explainable events. (Randi 1995).”

Even mere forgetfulness can explain the movement of objects by ghosts. People sometimes move an object, such as a set of keys, from one location, such as their bedroom dresser, to another, such as the kitchen counter, and, forgetting having done so, attribute the object’s relocation to the ghost that they believe must be haunting their homes.

But what about well-known accounts of ghostly visitations and haunted houses, such as Amityville? A couple of articles have appeared on the Live Science website that debunk Amityville: “The Truth Behind Amityville” and “The Truth Behind the Amityville Horror.” They’re a bit too involved and lengthy to summarize here; that’s why you’re directed there.

In Part II of “Alternative Explanations,” we’ll consider how your horror story’s skeptical character might debunk claims about other paranormal and supernatural phenomena.

Mad Science

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

There’s been an uneasy alliance between science and the imagination ever since alchemy became chemistry and astrology gave way to astronomy, because science, and its daughter, technology, are, to mix metaphors a bit, double-edged swords. They cut both ways.

On one hand, as Richard Nixon demonstrated to Nikita Khrushchev in the famous “kitchen debates,” science and technology can enrich individuals’ daily lives, making mundane tasks easier and life in general more convenient.

On the other hand, the same body of knowledge that results in washing machines and microwave ovens and personal computers also delivers such monstrosities as machineguns, napalm, and atomic bombs.

With the advent of science fiction, could horror’s use of the mad scientist--or, sometimes, just mad science--and its inventions be far behind? The short answer is, No. Thanks to this hybrid organism, we have such takes as Algernon Blackwood’s “Entrance and Exit,” Christopher Blayre’s “Aalila,” Bernard Capes’ “The Moon Stricken,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Los Amigos Fiasco,” Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Dancing-Partner,” Jack London’s “The Amateur M. D.” and “The Shadow and the Flash,” Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Ablest Man in the World,” “The Man Without a Body,” and “The Senator’s Daughter,” W. C. Morrow’s “The Monster Maker,” Edith Nesbit’s “The Haunted House,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, and H. G. Wells’ “Under the Knife,” to name only a few.

In “The Los Amigos Fiasco,” a condemned man benefits from a town’s attempt to electrocute him. “The Ablest Man in the World” is a cyborg with a clockwork brain. In The Purple Cloud, Adam Jeffson, surviving a global catastrophe after returning home, alone, from an expedition to the arctic, discovers he is the last man alive. Set in 1937, “The Senator’s Daughter” predicts pneumatic tube travel, electric heating, home-printed newspapers, food pills, suspended animation, and other technological marvels that are matched by the social changes he forecasts, which include women’s suffrage and interracial marriage. The surgical patient in “Under the Knife” develops clairvoyance and has a both near-death experience, followed by an out-of-body experience, after his surgeon severs a vein. “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” causes him to learn that science can deliver benefits, such as eternal youth, that may not be all that beneficial.

Interested parties, which may include you, can access these stories at Horror Masters.

Everyday Horrors: Anglerfish

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

What lies beneath? Three-fifths of the earth’s surface is covered with water, and the oceans are deep. Strange, shadowy shapes weave and waver beneath the waves, suggesting fabulous creatures beyond human ken. As well as warnings of boiling seas, the maps of ancient and medieval mariners were crowded with images of mythical sea monsters that sailors swore they’d seen. These strange, misshapen creatures, sometimes of colossal size, greater even than that of the sailing ships from which, allegedly, they were seen, are revealing, if not of nature per se, of human nature, at least, and of the nature of fantasy.

Usually, scientists believe, such creatures have some real-world inspiration, but they are products of fear more than of observation, a part of something mysterious giving rise to something even more baffling and horrible. Exaggeration is often at work, too, in the creation of the serpents of the sea. Attributes are multiplied, enlarged, combined, or, in a few cases, denied. Jules Verne combined a parrot’s beak with an octopus to create the giant squid of which he writes in 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea, and the delta of a river may have given birth to the many-headed Grecian hydra that Hercules and Iolaus slew. Columbus, as we saw in a previous post, may have mistaken manatees for mermaids.

As an American Museum of Natural History piece points out, monsters are also born of misinterpretations, with seaweed being taken for sea serpents and a “deformed blacksnake” having been thought to be a newborn specimen. Moreover, stories told one place are retold in another region, and, often in the retelling, the monsters at their hearts are reformulated and recast, becoming different, at least, if not more hideous and menacing. Before long, there is such a disparity between the original monster and its offspring that any family resemblance is lost, and the two relatives are mistaken for entirely distinct creatures. Sometimes, such monsters are even “manufactured,” purposely, as hoaxes, as the article observes, citing none other than P. T. Barnum as a perpetuator of such a fraud. The showman’s version consisted of a monkey’s head, a fish’s tail, and, perhaps, fish bones and papier-mâché.

However, the world’s oceans, especially at their lowest depths, offers many a strange creature that, with a little modification, might well suggest possibilities for horror story monsters. We’re going to mention only one in this post--the anglerfish, which is known for its method of obtaining prey and its way of reproducing others of its kind.

A moveable fishing rod of sorts grows from their foreheads. It is baited, so to speak, at its tip with an blob of flesh that attracts would-be carnivores of the deep. The anglerfish can wiggle its fleshly fishing rod, called an illicium, in all directions to lure prey close enough to its jaws for the anglerfish to swallow them in a single gulp. The jaws spring into action automatically, by reflex, when the prey brushes its illicium. Some anglerfish are luminescent. Both jaws and stomach can expand so that the anglerfish can swallow prey twice its own size.

Some anglerfish have modified pectoral fins that allow them to “walk” upon the ocean floor, where it conceals itself in the sand or among seaweed. It can change the color of its body to camouflage itself.

Their method of mating is as peculiar as any of the anglerfish’s other characteristic behaviors. When the male reaches maturity, its digestive system degenerates to the point that it is no longer able to feed itself, and it attaches itself to the much larger female’s head, biting into her flesh. The male’s body then releases an enzyme that digests its mouth and the flesh of the female at the site at which the male has attached itself to her, fusing the two sexes so that the female and what is left of the male--eventually nothing but its gonads, or sex organs--share the same blood supply.

There are as many as eighteen families of anglerfish, including humpbacks, monkfish, frogfish, seadevils, footballfish, sea toads, and batfish. Those who have sampled them compare their taste to that of lobster tails.


“Everyday Horrors: Anglerfish” is the 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.

Total Institutions As Horror Story Settings

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A total institution is a world unto itself. It is more or less self-contained and can function pretty much independently, without the need for an inordinate amount of outside assistance or support. These are examples of such institutions, many of which, for reasons we will consider in just a moment, are excellent as settings for horror stories:

• Boarding schools
• Colonies
• Circuses and carnivals
• Dude ranches
• Labor and logging camps
• Hospitals, medical and psychiatric
• Hotels
• Managed-care facilities and nursing homes
• Military and certain other government installations
• Monasteries and nunneries
• Museums and art galleries
• Prisons and reform schools
• Religious cult facilities
• Religious retreats
• Resorts
• Ships and submarines
• Spaceships or space stations
• Summer camps
• Universities

These locations supply much of their own casts of characters. A boarding school will be populated by administrators, students, support staff, and teachers. They may be visited, occasionally, by parents. Dude ranches will feature administrators, guests, riding instructors, and support staff. Hotels will include managers, desk clerks, bellhops and other support staff, including cooks and bartenders, and, of course, guests. Managed-care facilities and nursing homes will be peopled with an activities director, nurses, orderlies, managers, and patients. Family members, doctors, and government officials may visit such facilities on occasion. Military installations will include officers and enlisted personnel and some civilian support staff and may be visited on occasion by other military and civilian personnel, such as government officials, media personnel, and scientists or other experts. Prisons include guards, prisoners, support staff (such as a doctor and nurses), and wardens. Resorts include many of the same personnel as are featured at such other total institutions as hotels and dude ranches. Summer camps feature administrators, camp counselors, support staff, and campers. Parents may visit the camps as well, usually at the beginning and the end of the season. Universities are populated by administrators, professors, students, and a variety of support personnel such as secretaries, cooks, custodians, maintenance personnel, landscapers, and security and police forces. Such personnel can become characters in a horror story that takes place in a total institution.

A total institution can be remote from the rest of civilization. Even those that are in or near cities are, by their very nature as total institutions, set off from the larger community. In most cases, their isolation cuts them--and their residents and workers--off from the organizations and systems of the larger world, such as large-scale medical support, firefighting capabilities, law enforcement and military forces, educational institutions, power companies, repair services, grocery stores, gasoline supplies, and so forth, making them, over time, vulnerable on many levels. These institutions also cut off their residents and workers from the cultural belief system that supports daily life. Over a long period of time, the people in such places could revert to a primitive state or set up a society of their own that is based on values and beliefs that are alien to those of the larger world. Such institutions can also lead to the brainwashing of their residents and workers, especially when their isolation cuts them off from other views and perspectives against which to measure the ideas and statements of the institution’s leaders, creating an “us against them” mentality. Isolated total institutions can be vulnerable from both within and without.

Finally, the use of a total institution as a setting makes escape difficult or impossible once the horrors begin and puts the courage and resources of the characters to the ultimate test, the penalty for the failing of which is death, and the reward for passing is survival.

A few of the many stories (novels and movies) in which the action takes place in a total institution are:

• Alien (movie, by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, et. al.): The crew of the spaceship Nostromo investigates a signal from the moon of a nearby planet. On the moon, they discover a ruined and abandoned spaceship populated with monstrous aliens, one of which implants a fetus inside a Nostromo crew member, which is born aboard the crew’s vessel, where it rapidly attains adulthood. Total institution = spaceships.



• The Butterfly Revolution (novel, by William Butler): Winston Weyn maintains a diary in which he recounts the experiences he has at High Pines, a summer camp. The boys rebel against the camp leader, Mr. Warren, when he insists that they undertake a butterfly hunt. Taking over, they then also take over Low Pines, the nearby girls’ summer camp. Totalitarianism, serious crimes, and brutality ensue. Total institution = tropical island



• The Green Mile (novel, by Stephen King): A healer is convicted of sexually assaulting and killing two young girls whom he’d tried to cure and is sentenced to death. In the prison, he is tormented by a sadistic guard who ensures that the healer experiences a hideous death in the electric chair. Total institution = prison (and, later, a nursing home).



• It, the Terror From Beyond Space (movie, by Jerome Bixby): In rescuing the sole survivor from an expedition to Mars, a ship picks up a stowaway--the monstrous alien that killed the explorers. Now, it attacks the rescuers, picking them off one by one. Total institution: spaceship.



• Jurassic Park (novel, by Michael Crichton): Scientists use DNA recovered from the blood inside a mosquito preserved in amber to create dinosaurs, which they install in an island resort, but things go hideously wrong. Total institution = island resort.



• The Lord of the Flies (novel, by William Golding): Boys being evacuated during a war are stranded on a tropical island after the airplane that is transporting them is shot down. In an effort to institute order, a conflict arises that causes death and destruction among the boys. Total institution: tropical island. (Note: Stephen King often speaks of how he admires this novel and wishes he had written it.)



• The Relic (Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child): A scientist undergoes a horrific transformation as a result of eating a strange jungle plant and terrorizes the employees and guests of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. Total institution = museum.



• The Resort (Bentley Little): A haunted resort offers more fear and horror than fun in the sun for a vacationing family. Total institution = resort.



• The Shining (novel, by Stephen King) and 1048 (movie based on a short story by Stephen King): Hotels are the scenes for ghostly and demonic terror in this novel and this short story, respectively. Total institution = hotels.



• Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel, by Ray Bradbury): What’s coming is a carnival of horrible secrets and dark powers. Total institution = carnival



• Taps (movie, by Devery Freeman, Robert Mark Kamen, James Lineberger, and Darryl Ponicsan): Rather than allow their military school to be razed and replaced by condominiums, a team of cadets takes over the academy, fighting for their alma mater and its leader’s honor. Total institution = military boarding school.



• The Terror (novel, by Dan Simmons): A pair of ships become icebound in the Atlantic and are harassed by a strange creature that lives among the icebergs. Total institution: ships.

• University (novel, by Bentley Little): A Grecian god returns, wrecking havoc at an American university campus. Total institution = university.

• The Thing from Another World (movie, by Charles Lederer, based on a novella by John W. Campbell, Jr.): An alien shape shifter is discovered in a block of arctic ice; thawed out by scientists, it attacks and kills the staff of a remote research station. Total instution: arctic research station.

Everyday Horrors: Frogs

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “What’s My Line, Part I,” an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow Rosenberg, during an all-night research session in the Sunnydale High School library, falls asleep. When the librarian, Rupert Giles, awakens her, she mutters something about tadpoles. When he looks puzzled, Willow explains, “I have frog fear.” She’s not alone.

God himself used frogs to terrify his enemy, the pharaoh of Egypt who was holding Moses and the ancient Israelites captive: “And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs” (Ex. 8:2).

What’s so frightening about frogs?

Bible commentaries find plenty to say on the topic:

Concerning Exodus 8:2, quoted above, the Geneva Study Bible observes, “There is nothing so weak that God cannot use it to overcome the greatest power of man,” while the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary comments that “Those animals, though the natural spawn of the river, and therefore objects familiar to the people, were on this occasion miraculously multiplied to an amazing extent, and it is probable that the ova of the frogs, which had been previously deposited in the mire and marshes, were miraculously brought to perfection at once.”
Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary on God’s plague of frogs is not quite as concise as the previous two:

Pharaoh is plagued with frogs; their vast numbers made them sore plagues to the Egyptians. God could have plagued Egypt with lions, or bears, or wolves, or with birds of prey, but he chose to do it by these despicable creatures. God, when he pleases, can arm the smallest parts of the creation against us. He thereby humbled Pharaoh. They should neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep in quiet; but wherever they were, they should be troubled by the frogs. God's curse upon a man will pursue him wherever he goes, and lie heavy upon him whatever he does. Pharaoh gave way under this plague. He promises that he will let the people go. Those who bid defiance to God and prayer, first or last, will be made to see their need of both. But when Pharaoh saw there was respite, he hardened his heart. Till the heart is renewed by the grace of God, the thoughts made by affliction do not abide; the convictions wear off, and the promises that were given are forgotten. Till the state of the air is changed, what thaws in the sun will freeze again in the shade.

But what if you're not Jewish or Christian? What's so frightening about frogs if you're an atheist or a member of another faith?

They’re slimy! Okay, they’re not--at least, not all of them are. Frogs need moist skin and, since they don’t stay in the water all the time, they have a skin coating that keeps them moist. For quite a few people, slime is icky. A lot of folks are both disgusted by it and afraid of it. It’s different and it’s yucky and there’s no telling what might be in it that makes it slimy and yucky and icky.

Frogs cause warts--and they do it by urinating on their handlers! Okay, they don’t, not really. Viruses cause warts, and they’re usually transmitted by other people, not by frogs. But, again, perception is truth for those who won’t do their homework.

They’re poisonous! We’re not going to deny it: some are. In fact, blue poison dart frogs, as their name implies, exist for no other reason than to supply the poison for the blowgun darts that some South American tribes use. According to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, their diet (in the wild, at least) is the source of their poison. They eat such delicacies as “ants, termites. . . beetles, and other. . . insects.” However, in captivity, they’re “fed fruit flies and baby crickets” that are fortified with various vitamins and minerals and, as a result, are themselves “completely non-toxic.” Usually, the poison frogs are brightly colored. (Posion dart frogs may also be red and blue, strawberry, golden, green and black, and other colors.) The bright colors are warning signs that shout, STAY AWAY. Those animals, including people, who don’t are sometimes the victims of these frogs, but, even then, the poison’s usually only enough to make a body sick, not to kill him or her.

Besides, according to psychologists, frog fear isn’t based on reason. It’s irrational. It’s a phobia. Shrinks claim that people fear frogs because they’ve associated them with some sort of traumatic event in which they--the people and the frogs--were involved, probably in the dim past. A rather extreme example is an incident in which a person developed frog fear is that of a woman who ran over several frogs while mowing her lawn.

For those who want their frog fear to sound a little less irrational and a little more clinical, there’s a Latin name for it that confers dignity and culture to the phobia (for those who believe that Latin is a dignified and cultured, if dead, language, at least). The term is ranidaphobia. An alterative term is batrachophobia. The latter term can also apply to the fear of other amphibians, including Newt Gingrich. Folks whose phobia is specific to toads suffer from bufonophobia.

People who fear frogs should stay away from the Goliath frog, for sure!


“Everyday Horrors: Frogs” 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.

Rene Magritte: The Horror of the Surreal

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Rene Magritte (1898-1967) was a Belgian surrealist whose bizarre, but often humorous, paintings do not seem, at first, to depict images that a viewer might regard as horrifying. However, a second look suggests that his paintings often do suggest elements of horror. The horrific in his work derives from his own idiosyncratic application of surrealism’s challenge to common-sense realism and the categories of existence and understanding that support this worldview.

We have eyes, but we do not see, because, most of the time, we take ourselves and the world around us for granted. We feel that we have learned enough about the subjective and the objective, the fantastic and the real, to make sense of things in general and to draw valid inferences and to make sound assumptions about things about which we don’t know as much. As long as we can find the similarities and the differences between the two, we believe that we can make the necessary leaps of inference.

Art is metaphorical by nature, suggesting, always, that one thing is also another or, at least, is, in some way, like another. Using Freudian terminology, the other may be called the "latent content" (i. e., an attitude, a belief, a concern, an emotion, an image, a motif, an object, a sensation, a value), to which the "manifest content"--the literal, superficial, or direct image--is juxtaposed. Usually, the manifest content is familiar to us; the latent, unusual.

Many of Magritte’s works play upon the dichotomies of subjectivity and objectivity and of fantasy and reality. In everyday experience, the subjective usually aligns with the fantastic and the objective with the real, but Magritte sometimes turns the tables upon the tendency to associate these categories in these ways, so that, instead, the subjective corresponds with the real and the objective with the fantastic. His point in doing so seems to be to indicate that categories, whatever they might be, are invented, not natural, and are, therefore, to some degree, arbitrary and subject to change or misinterpretation.

People do not perceive reality the same way; their perceptions and their interpretations are a form of art, and the question, especially for surrealists, as to whether art is, or can be, representational is open ended. One of Magritte’s paintings, La Clairvoyance, seems to have been created to express just this point. An artist (Magritte himself?), seated at his easel, observes a bird’s egg. However, he paints not the egg that he studies, but its eventual potential result--a bird in flight. Where one sees what is, another, looking at the same thing, may see, instead, what could be. The former sees being; the latter, becoming. An egg is more than an egg; it is what the egg represents in the mind of its perceiver.

In another of his paintings, Attempting the Impossible, a male artist (again resembling Magritte), dressed in a brown suit and holding a palette onto which only a few colors have been dispensed, is painting the upper arm of a three-dimensional nude female figure whose countenance closely resembles the artist’s own. She stands in a posed attitude, rather stiffly, head high, staring straight ahead, her weight upon her right foot, her completed right arm along her side. Her left leg is slightly bent at the knee, its foot resting upon its toes. She has the look of the professional model, but, one wonders, might she be more? Could she also be the artist’s feminine aspect, or anima? If so, in creating her, is he not also creating part of himself? If she is also his model, in creating her, is he also not creating the subject of his work, giving shape--even life--to his art? Where does the self and the other begin and end? The figure’s left arm is incomplete. In fact, the artist has only begun to paint its upper extremity. The viewer has no idea what the painter will paint as he continues to portray his model. Will her arm lie alongside her other flank, as its mate does? Will it gesture? It could choke the artist to death. Absurd? Magritte is a surrealist, one must remember, for whom anything is possible. This painting seems to reflect the truth that both the viewer and the artist, together, create the meaning of a piece of art, for what the artist encodes with his paint and brushes and canvas, the viewer must decode according to his or her own beliefs, views, attitudes, and feelings. An unfinished painting allows any number of possibilities, and, again, people do not perceive reality the same way; perceptions and interpretations are a form of art, and the question as to whether art is, or can be, representational is open ended. Therefore, the model in progress could, upon her completion. choke the artist to death or do nothing more than continue to pose.

The ideas suggested by Magritte’s paintings--that reality and fantasy are not necessarily always separate and immutable polarities and that subjectivity and objectivity may, at times, become confused or even blend, both with themselves and with the real and the fantastic--can be amusing, but a little thought suggests that these ideas can also be horrifying. They can be terrifying. Moreover, if these categories are more fluid than supposed, might not others be, also? There may be a much finer line--or no line at all--between sane and insane, kind and cruel, life and death, heaven and hell. If one polarity can be negated or fused, even temporarily, why couldn’t all other polarities also be negated or fused? And, if they can be negated or fused temporarily, why can’t they be negated or fused permanently? There is an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to Magritte’s work, and it, like Lewis Carroll’s novel, has a disturbing as well as a charming aspect.

Many of Magritte’s paintings are landscapes (bizarre landscapes, to be sure), but many others are portraits, always more or less (usually more) off kilter. The depiction of landscapes is a shorthand way of depicting the objective, if not always the real; the painting of personal portraits is a shorthand way of depicting the subjective, if not always the subjective. Let’s tale a look at an example of each.

In Blank Check, a horsewoman is seen riding through a woods. As she passes through a stand of trees, she and her horse are segmented. The front of the horse overlaps a tree, as it would appear to do in passing in front of the tree. However, the next segment of its body, is missing. Where the animal’s shoulder and thigh should be, only background foliage and grass can be seen. Then, the midsection of the horse, upon which the woman sits, and its lower left hind leg appear, overlapping the next tree, but its knee is shown against an empty space occupied by background foliage. The right rear leg of the horse and its rear end are shown as they would normally appear, against the backdrop of a third tree. It is as if, in passing the stand of trees, the horse and rider are sliced by the landscape into segments, some of which overlap foreground, and others background, elements of the scene. The painting is something of an optical illusion that, in playing with perception and reality, comments upon them both, suggesting, once again, that the dichotomies between subject and object and fantastic and real are sometimes tenuous at best.

In another painting, The Collective Invention, a strange hybrid creature has washed ashore. The upper half is that of a fish, while the lower portion, from the waist down, is a woman. The image is so bizarre that it takes the viewer a moment to realize that it is an inversion of a more familiar figure--that of the mermaid, whose upper body, to the waist, is that of a woman and whose lower body is that of a fish. The mermaid may be bizarre in her own way, but she doesn’t seem quite as bizarre as Magritte’s fish-woman. The reason for this seems to be that the mermaid retains the woman’s face, or identity, and there is, within her head, a human brain. In other words, the figure retains the essence of humanity. Magritte’s painting of his fish-woman, on the contrary, retains the essence of the animal or, one could argue, represents the sexual aspect of the human as its essence, since the figure does not include face and brain, retaining, instead, the woman’s legs, buttocks, and genitals instead as the human parts of the hybrid’s anatomy. Once again, Magritte suggests the ambiguity and, above all, the arbitrary nature of the categories we create to order perception and experience and to make them, and the knowledge derived from them, manageable and meaningful. The world need not be as we represent it to be and, in fact, could easily be the opposite.

Surrealism is not representational. It only seems to be, at times, and, even then, only in part and for a moment. A closer look shows the dissolution of the subjective-objective and the fantastic-real polarities. On second thought, the neat categories of existence, which are products of consciousness and communication as much as of reason and science, may not be all that neat. Magritte’s art provides this second look at experience as it is generally perceived and understood. His paintings make viewers look again at their perceptions and understandings of themselves and the world (which result from their common-sense realism). Therein lies the horror of the surreal in general and of Magritte’s work in particular. In the final analysis, the world, both the inner and the outer, are imaginary and fluid, which is the reason, it seems, that Magritte said, concerning his work:

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

For another article in this blog that discusses the horror that can result from violating categories of perceprual and understanding, visit "The Horror of the Incongruous."

Conversation Partners: Creating Mars and Venus

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

 

In science fiction, humanoid robots were once all androids, albeit without the specific parts that, among humans (and plants and animals), make a body male. In more recent years, as women increasingly enter the ranks of science fiction writers, factories have begun to offer feminine, if not actually female, versions of cyborgs, robots, and other servo-mechanisms of humanoid appearance. Known as fembots or gynoids, these models, like the androids, feature secondary, rather than primary, sexual characteristics, their anatomical curves distinguishing them from their more angular android brothers. However, the ways these feminine humanoids see and interact with the world, including how they converse with others, also often distinguishes them from their masculine counterparts.

A relatively recent book informs us of the true origins of men and women. The former are from Mars, it claims, the latter, from Venus. The book’s origins of the sexes derive, possibly, from the biological signs for male and female. The sign for males is the familiar circle out of the upper right arc of which projects something that looks like an arrow but is supposed to be a spear, just as the circle represents a shield, characterizing men as warriors, belonging to the cult of Ares, or Mars, the god of war. The sign for females is the equally familiar circle from which is suspended, from the nadir of its lower arc, a cross, the whole representing the hand-mirror of the goddess of love, Venus, or Aphrodite. Venus, the symbol seems to suggest, thy name is vanity.

Man, the warrior, and woman, the toilette aficionado--these are the images that correspond to those of the sexes, and, if the work of Deborah Tannen and various sociologists and psychologists is correct, scientific evidence may bear out these rather sexist conceptions of sex and gender, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Xena, the Warrior Princess, notwithstanding.

By knowing the differences in the ways that men and women communicate, a writer may realistically portray conversations between same-sex and opposite-sex male and female characters realistically. In addition, when dramatic situations in which men and women are the speakers occur, these differences in the way that they communicate can lead to the essence of plot itself, story conflict.

According to Tannen’s essay, “Sex, Lies, and Conversation,” boys and girls segregate themselves as youths, boys keeping company with other boys and girls keeping company with other girls. Therefore, separately, the members of each sex teach one another (and, therefore, the men or women that they later become) how to communicate. Viva la difference!

Boys’ groups, Tannen says, are larger and more inclusive than girls’ groups. They’re also hierarchical, with an underdog and a top dog, and conversation among the members of the all-male group tends to be “agonistic,” or warlike, peppered with “ritual challenges.” Conversation is akin to debate, with one boy confronting his fellow with counterarguments. If one of them raises a personal problem as a topic of conversation, his peers are likely to dismiss it as being less important than it seems. Speakers sit “at angles to each other,” only occasionally “glancing at each other,” and leap from topic to topic, rather than focusing for long on any one subject. In public, the males of the species speak to show their knowledge and to fend off the verbal attacks of their peers. However, they don’t like to listen, for, as a holdover from their boyhood days in hierarchical groups, they feel that listening, a seemingly passive role, makes them subordinate to speakers, who play a more apparently active role. They attend silently to the words of others. At home, having nothing to prove and no one to fend off, men tend to speak much less. For them, relationships are based on their relative statuses within the group, and the cement that binds them together is participatory activity, or “doing things together.”

Girls’ groups, Tannen says, are smaller, less inclusive, and more democratic, with members being regarded as equals rather than as greater or lesser subordinates assembled under the authority of a top dog. Their conversation is more sympathetic, intended to “establish rapport.” Rather than confronting a peer with counterarguments, girls are more likely to suggest alternative thoughts, often in the form of non-threatening, or helpful, questions. Personal problems, as topics of feminine conversation, elicit sympathy and solidarity from listeners. Girls maintain almost constant eye contact, looking at one another’s faces directly, and they tend to stay on the same topic for much of their conversation. To indicate that they are listening, girls (and women) often nod their heads and make “listening noises.” In public, afraid that they may offend someone, “spark disagreement, or appear to be showing off,” women tend to speak less, but at home, they are more comfortable in expressing their views, and tend to speak more. For them relationships are founded upon intimacy, and the cement that binds them together is talking.

Knowing these communication secrets of the sexes, writers can portray them realistically as their characters engage in dialogue, but authors can also capitalize upon the misunderstandings and misinterpretations among men and women regarding one another’s conversational behavior, turning these misimpressions into story conflict.

Women, unaware of how and why men listen as they do, believe that men don’t listen to them. Men, misinterpreting women’s “listening noise” as “overreaction or impatience,” consider women overly sensitive or rude. Preferring to hear alternative views expressed as questions rather than as counterarguments, women think men who challenge them directly with other points of view are disloyal, while men believe women simply don’t want to hear any views that differ from their own. Seeing that men are voluble enough in public, women may suppose that their reticence at home shows that their husbands are uninterested in them as conversation partners and that their relationship has become less intimate and may fail. Men may wish that their wives would be more supportive of them in their public stances toward political issues or on current events. Changing the topic, especially when, in doing so, a man involves himself as the new subject of conversation, may make women think that men are indifferent to the woman’s topic and are egoistic. Men may suppose women to be obsessed with a topic and, perhaps, at times, to be narrow minded. Tannen points out that half of marriages end in divorce and that, often, from the woman’s point of view, the cause of the failure of the marriage is “a lack of communication.” Other consequences of these differences in conversational style and technique are that men are often considered insensitive and women as no being assertive enough.

In Erin Brockovich, the protagonist is motivated, at the beginning of the movie, more by her desire to feed and clothe her children than she is by solving a case she uncovers concerning the damage to the health of a community’s residents that a power company’s illicit dumping of a dangerous chemical into the local water supply has caused. She wants the job as an attorney’s legal assistant so she can pay her bills and provide for her children‘s welfare. Later, when she is fired, she uses the facts that she has uncovered about the case as leverage to get her job back, along with a sizeable raise, because, again, as she tells her boss, “I have bills to pay.” Once she is on the case, however, she is dogged in her determination to see that the company does the right thing, paying for its abuses of the residents and the environment. Perhaps it is because she is a mother, concerned with nurturing her children, that she finds the power company’s deeds as reprehensible as she does, for their illegal abuse of the environment is, for her, not only criminal but immoral. It has hurt people, including children. As a woman, she uses investigative techniques that are unavailable to men. When her boss asks her how she expects to gain admittance to the state’s public records concerning the chemicals involved in the case, she replies, “They’re called boobs, Ed.” Erin is quick to accuse her boss of cheating her and of not knowing how to apologize, but, at the end of the film, he increases her share of the money the law firm has won in prosecuting the case, leaving her speechless, before he tells her that she “sucks” at apologizing, just as she had previously told him.

Although Erin Brockovich is not a horror story--at least, not in the same sense as The Toxic Avenger--it capitalizes on the differences in how men and women perceive the world and their respective places in it and on the way that these differences in perception guide and motivate their behavior, including the ways that they speak and listen or, in a word, communicate. Other stories that also capitalize on these differences include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, and, to a lesser extent, Supergirl and Wonder Woman, mostly, in these instances, by the mechanism of role reversal. In the Buffy series, for example, the female characters are empowered and the male characters are, well, emasculated, as it were, although, in their respective conversational styles and techniques, they continue to be the men and women that the boys and girls inside them created them to be. In this regard, at least, in even the eunuch, Mars rules the man.