Femme Fatales

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman started it all. Or maybe it was Lilith or the lamia. Or the bride of Frankenstein.

Actually, it’s probably impossible to say just which female character became the world’s first female monster, but the ladies have proven that she can be the deadlier of the species when she’s of a mind to be. In fact, in Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia argues that civilization is a result of men’s attempt to resist the overwhelming influence and control of humanity’s chthonian nature, as represented by woman as Mother Nature (which is roughly the same, one might add, as that which Biblical writers are pleased to refer to as the “flesh,” which is eternally opposed to the spirit and often calls one to take a nasty fall. It should be understood that the “flesh” does not mean simply the sexual aspects of men and women but, rather, all that is implied by their immanent and temporal nature or their mortality.)

As we have argued in a previous post, horror fiction is all about significant loss and our attempts to survive it. There are many, many such types of such loss, some personal, some psychological, some social, and some theological. The greatest loss of all, perhaps, is that of life itself. Can death be survived? Most religions insist that it can, and some horror stories suggest the same. Of course, one’s position on such a matter, whether pro or con, is one of faith, for the world, if any, that lies beyond this earthly, mortal realm is an “undiscovered country from whose borne no one has returned.”

One type of loss of which horror fiction treats is the loss of order. Order can be the result of a formal political process in which laws are codified and enforced by a police or military force or, less often, of an informal social process in which unwritten laws are transmitted from one generation to the next and enforced by the stigma of the tribe. In other words, order among men and women is a product, so to speak, of law or of tradition. In many horror stories, such social control, such regulation of behavior, such organization of society, including the roles that men and women play within their larger groups, is either set aside or, more frequently, cast down, as Moses, in a fit of rage, cast down the stone tables upon which God had carved the Ten Commandments. Sometimes, horror fiction inverts order; it turns insides out and upsides down.

In the animal world, the males are the pretty ones. This state of affairs is inverted among humans, where men are not only stronger than women but are also smart enough to know it and to use their superior physical strength to their advantage, one effect of which is to make women compete among themselves for their attention. It may be argued that, ultimately, women gain control of the situation, in marriages at least, although most societies are now patriarchic and are likely to remain so, at least for the foreseeable future. Therefore, to assert themselves, women have had to adopt stratagems that allow men the pretense, at least, of being in charge and in control. Allowing men the ego salve of being the dominant “partners” in the marital relationship, women rule, largely because they are pretty (or, more crassly, but accurately, sexy), and they take great pains and spend small fortunes to stay that way.

Men, it may be suggested, symbolize strength, whereas women represent beauty. What if women’s figurative significance were inverted, though, some horror stories have asked, and they were understood, even if for but a moment, as suggesting strength rather, or more, than beauty? The answer, in a word, writers of such literature imply, is a monster.

Equipped with the strength to subject men to their will and to dominate them individually and collectively, woman would become not seductive Eve but demonic Lilith. She’d become Pandora, the lamia, the gorgon, a fury, a she-mantis, a reptilian thing covered in scales, a female Frankenstein’s monster, a fifty-foot woman on an estrogen-fueled rampage, a blood-sucking fiend, la belle sans merci. She would become a femme fatale.

Some movies and books depict women as monsters, females as femme fatales. Such movies and books suggest their creators’ reasons (or lack thereof) for fearing the women whom they depict as monsters. Most such creators are men. Whether their fears are representative of their whole sex is debatable, but their qualms and uncertainties, at least, reflect how some members of the male sex have viewed the opposite sex. (The classics of Western literature that feature female monsters, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, The Metamorphoses and other sources of Greek and Roman mythology, European fairy tales, Beowulf, Christabel, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and others, are worthy of even more consideration, but they are not the topics of this post; here, we are concerned more with movies.)

What, then, do movies that feature female creatures suggest about women (or the moviemakers’ ideas about women)? Let’s consider a few of the more notable films to have threatened audiences with the dangerous doings of femme fatales:

• The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman
• Species
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Teeth
  

In Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), Nancy Archer is mad as hell, and she’s not going to take it anymore after her two-timing husband, Harry, having inherited $50 million, abandons her for another woman, Honey Parker. After a close encounter with visiting extraterrestrials, she is radiated, which makes her huge, and she kills Honey before reclaiming her wayward hubby. As she carries him through the streets, as if he were nothing more than a live doll, the police shoot an electrical transformer as she passes it, and she and Harry are both electrocuted. This movie’s horror derives from the fear that a wronged woman may exact vengeance and suggests that infidelity is a much larger problem (literally) than it may appear to the man who perpetrates it, since it is more than a merely physical or sexual betrayal, which can have an emotionally and, indeed, existentially devastating and destructive effect on both marriage partners, the victim as well as the victimizer.

In the original movie’s remake (1993), the femme fatale has come a long way, baby, and her growth represents her emancipation from chauvinistic and patriarchal dominance, and the aliens who increase her size also imprison her husband until he can be convinced of the errors of his sexist ways.


Read from a male’s point of view, Species (1995) seems to depict women, in the guise of sexual predator (a role more often associated with men than with women). As such, women dehumanize men, seeing them (as men too often view women) as merely sex objects upon whom their own sexual needs may be satisfied. The product of an alien human hybridization experiment, Sil is both extraterrestrial and human. She’s also bent upon motherhood, and there are no candy or flowers in her courtship designs. There is just her beguiling appearance, with which she lures her prey, and her superior physical strength, which she uses to force herself upon them. Procreation is her purpose, and rape is her means to this end. Men are nothing to her but walking, talking sperm banks, and she can do without the walking and the talking very well, thank you. She rejects by killing those whom she finds unworthy of, or threatening, to her, and, after she finally mates successfully, she and her offspring are killed by the team of government scientists and military personnel who have been tracking her. The patriarchy, although threatened by their Galatea, resume the upper hand.


In her role as sexual predator, Sil is somewhat like Faith, a character in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). A sort of female Nietzschean superman, Faith has physical strength that far exceeds that of any man, and she uses it to satisfy her desires, sexual and otherwise, without regard to their effects, emotional or otherwise, on her victims. A love-him-and-leave-him sort of girl, she summarizes her philosophy succinctly, saying, “Get some, and get gone.” In “getting some,” she nearly kills Xander Harris, an ordinary teenage boy, after fornicating with him, but she is stopped by the timely arrival of Angel, a male vampire with a soul. That her views are horrible to the patriarchic society in which she lives is indicated by the more traditional, if rather liberated, lifestyle of her counterpart, the titular Buffy Summers, who is also possessed of superhuman strength but prefers to nail her lovers according to the much more traditional, socially acceptable rules that lesser women have been taught to use in the mating game. Buffy’s manner of dating and courtship highlight the aberrance of Faith’s sexual behavior and Faith’s nature as both a rogue vampire slayer and a femme fatale.


Teeth (2007) confronts viewers with an age-old fear among men--that of the castrating woman. In this film, the vagina of Dawn, the teenage cannibalistic protagonist, is equipped with teeth that respond to her anger or rage, biting off the genitals of a would-be rapist; those of a boy who had seemed to care about her but bedded her only so that he could brag about having done so to his adolescent friends, having bet with them that he could seduce Dawn; and those of her stepbrother, who’d hoped to have sex with her before their father ruined his hopes by marrying Dawn‘s mother. After these snacks, Dawn leaves town, finding self-confidence in her power to defend herself, and smiles at the elderly man who has stopped to give her a ride when, locking her inside his car, he insists that she have sex with him.

In the context of this film, the femme fatale is not a predator, but, rather, a young woman who is uniquely able to protect herself. She evens the playing field, so to speak, by being more than merely able to fend off unwanted advances or even intended sexual assaults. The organ which, in feminist thought, allows men to dominate women, becomes, in Teeth, the instrument, so to speak, of both liberation and vengeance. Talk about poetic justice! Women, who have been sexually assaulted by men, now have a means of defending themselves and of exacting a suitably ironic revenge upon would-be rapists or boyfriends who won’t take no for an answer. No doubt, some feminists believe that the makers of this movie corrected an error in nature’s or God’s work, equipping women with the very weapon they needed--a sort of dental chastity belt with (real) teeth--to be employed or not at the owner’s discretion.

The femme fatales we have considered in this post are not so much scary in themselves as they are scary to the men who watch them, for they represent what women would be like were they to act as men behave, as sexual predators who seek men only as a means to satisfy their own lusts. By turning the tables, as it were, on men, these movies’ femme fatales show men what it is like to be considered sex objects who are accounted as nothing more than things to be brutalized at will and discarded thereafter as having had their only value depleted.

To deny one his or her humanity is a horrible and monstrous thing, these films suggest, and the one who does so is a monster. Monsters may rampage for a time (every monster has its day), but, sooner or later, it will be exposed, understood, and, usually, terminated. Are these studies in feminine angst and rage reflections of men’s guilty consciences? Are they symbolic projections of rape fantasies? Are they nothing more than reinforcements--or, possibly, reassurances--of men’s superior status in nature and in society (as understood by the men who write and produce such films, of course)? All of the above? None of the above?

By turning the tables on men as sexual predators, movies like The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman show that sexual betrayal not only hurts the victim but also can have repercussions for the victimizer, since infidelity is destructive to both parties and to the marital relationship itself; Species and Buffy the Vampire Slayer show what it’s like, from the female’s perspective, to be the prey of such attackers; and Teeth, portraying women as able protectors of their own virtue, suggests that women are not irreducible to their body parts and that any man who attempts to dehumanize women by regarding them as mere sex objects may learn that he, as much as she, can be reduced to mere objectivity--in his case, by being deprived of the very type of organs that he insists are the only parts of women that are desirable by, and valuable to, men. After all, if he has no genitals of his own, hers are likely to become a lot less important to him. Femme fatales convey the message that women are not merely sex objects whose purpose it is to serve--or service--men and that they deserve dignity and respect. If they are ill treated, these movies suggest further, vengeance, of a poetically just sort, is sure to follow. After all, “hell hath no vengeance like a woman scorned,” and the disrespect of a person’s humanity is, perhaps, the very zenith (or nadir) of disdain.

The Academy: Learning from the Masters, Part 2

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In part one of “The Academy: Learning from the Masters,” we explored how Bentley Little juxtaposes the normal, the natural, and the rational with the paranormal and the supernatural throughout his novel, The Academy, allowing (until the final resolution of the narrative’s conflict), a dual understanding of its incidents. We argued that the idea that everything could happen as a result of the natural and could be rational prevents readers from rejecting the situations as unlikely from the beginning and, by the story’s end, allows them, perhaps, to accept that they are, in fact, paranormal or supernatural. We also suggested that the juxtaposition also creates, maintains, and heightens suspense and fear and that Little, like other horror writers, recognizes that horror is personal, and, in his fiction, he makes it personal for his characters, relating it to their past or present experiences and to their future aspirations.

In this post, we are going to explore another technique that Little and other horror writers typically employ to create, maintain, and heighten suspense and horror: the presentation of experience from the viewpoint of the prey or the intended victim. A good example of this technique occurs in chapter nine of the novel, as a student arrives at Tyler High School to participate in a session of the student council, of which she is a member:

Myla took the key out of the ignition, shutting off the radio, causing the lit dashboard to go black. The world was suddenly silent. Getting out of the van, she locked the vehicle’s doors. She wished she’d brought a flashlight. There was one somewhere in the van that her mom kept there for emergencies, but she didn’t know exactly where it was, and she didn’t have time to look for it. She was already late (97).

There’s more to the description, but let’s pause for a moment and analyze it so far. The first two sentences function well together, the first delineating an incident that is typical of teenagers--listening to the radio as they drive a parent’s car. Teens usually like to turn up the volume, so, in reading this paragraph, many readers would be apt to imagine the radio to have been loud, even blaring. Therefore, when Myla turns off the engine, the resulting silence would be deafening, so to speak, and it might well seem that the whole “world was suddenly silent.” Going from loud music to a “world” of silence in a mere instant--the amount of time it would take for the driver to shut off the ignition--would be dramatic in itself, and it changes the tone of all that went before and all that follows this sentence. In such complete silence, especially after such loud sound, there might be an element of menace. It is normal behavior to lock one’s vehicle after exiting it, but locking doors also suggests the need to take precautions to ensure one’s safety. The use of the word “emergency,” in reference to the flashlight, also plants the idea that Myla may be abut to have an emergency of her own. She is a character in a horror novel, after all. As a teenage girl making her way from her parked, locked car in the darkness, Myla is vulnerable, but she is made more so by the fact that she is “late already” to her destination and “doesn’t have time” to search for the flashlight, because hurrying makes one less cautious than he or she might otherwise be and suggests that Myla’s thoughts might be elsewhere, focused upon her being late and, perhaps, upon whatever task she is executing. We, the readers, are on the scene, somewhere, as observers, and what we see is disquieting; we are afraid for Myla, about whom we have a premonition that all may not go well for her.

The first paragraph focuses upon Myla’s sense of sight (and her thoughts). The next paragraph describes her sense of hearing and her sense of sight. In addition, it describes her emotions:

Myla stepped over the curb, starting down the walkway that led into the center of campus. She didn’t like the echoing sounds her footsteps made on the cement or the way that indistinct lighting from within the quad ahead of her made the surrounding trees and buildings look unfamiliar and threatening.

By hearing through Myla’s ears and seeing though her eyes and by getting inside her heart, at her emotions, and inside her head, at her thoughts, Little’s omniscient narrator has made his story’s suspense (if not yet its horror) personal. It is not something that the reader merely imagines, but it is something that is seen and heard and believed and felt from within a character with whom the reader, for the nonce, at least, identifies. The familiar campus is alien to her, and her echoing footsteps suggest to her, perhaps, that there are others in the area. Their footsteps could be among her own, lost in their echoes. Someone could be stalking her. She feels threatened, and, the next sentence informs us, “she quickened her pace.” A moment later, she sees “a small dark form rush past the front of the library” and she runs. By making the suspense personal, Little has ratcheted up the tension.

Myla makes it safely inside, to participate in a decidedly odd session of the student council. The paragraphs were just a teaser, were they? Yes and no. They did tease, making us think that something was going to happen to poor Myla--something bad, something horrible. When nothing bad did happen, we breathed a sigh of relief, but, while she was crossing the dark campus, frightened at the shadows, sounds, and sights she heard and saw along the way, we bonded with her. Now, when something terrible does happen to her, it will affect us all the more strongly, because we have come to care, however much, for Myla. We didn’t want anything horrible to happen to her, and it didn’t.

Not this time.

But it might--and probably will--next time.

By presenting the action from the point of view of the prey or potential victim, Little gains his reader’s sympathy. If next he presents her injury or death from her point of view, we will be all the more horrified than we would have been had, in seeing her for the first time, as she is injured or killed, we otherwise would be. Seeing the action presented from the potential victim’s point of view makes us, the readers, potential victims, too. We become more than mere observers; we become the prey.

The Academy: Learning from the Masters

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Although Bentley Little has been taken to task, and rightly so, for the poor ways in which his novels typically end (not with a roar, unfortunately, but with a whimper), and his short stories and novels are often nothing more than a series of meaningless, although bizarre and horrifying, incidents or situations, he remains a talented writer who is especially adept at creating, maintaining, and heightening suspense. Despite his difficulty in suggesting causal relationships among the incidents of his story’s action and his trouble in sustaining a single narrative effect, he remains, because of his considerable strengths in other areas, a master of the horror genre who, as such, has much to teach the aspiring writer. We’ll look at one of his strengths in this post, just as we have considered some of his weaknesses in previous posts.

As we have pointed out elsewhere, a convention in horror stories is to offset a sense of the paranormal or the supernatural with the normal or the natural. This double perspective in horror stories allows either a natural interpretation or a supernatural reading of the bizarre incidents and situations that take place in the story.

H. G. Wells’ short story, “The Red Room,” which appears in the left column, is a good example. Is the room in the castle haunted or are the rumors of ghosts results of a natural cause? The castle’s caretakers are convinced that the chamber is, indeed, haunted, but the young narrator-protagonist has come to spend the night in the room to prove that it is not. (Stephen King’s “1408” is a contemporary version of the classic tale, as is the movie of the same title, which is based upon King’s narrative.)

Obviously, to maintain this dichotomy, the things that take place in the tale must be open to either type of interpretation; they must be understandable from the basis of faith in the paranormal or supernatural and from the basis of skepticism about the same. This is not easy to accomplish, especially without recourse to a rather heavy-handed use of ambiguity. The ability to accomplish this feat is the mark of a master, and Little does so with great facility.

He goes above and beyond the call of merely setting up the dual point of view by a few ambiguous descriptions that could be taken, as it were, either way--that is, as suggesting the effects of paranormal or supernatural causes or natural ones. In most chapters, he includes a scene which, on each page, contains at least one sentence, paragraph, or passage that suggests this twofold possibility of understanding.

Usually, this juxtaposition of the normal and the paranormal or the natural and the supernatural suggests that whatever seemingly paranormal or supernatural incident is happening may be the result merely of a character’s own feelings or thoughts. As he continues to present these juxtapositions, however, Little increasingly suggests that it is not merely someone’s way of looking at or feeling about his or her environment but something in--or, perhaps, behind--the appearances that is the cause of the uncanny and the eerie incidents that the character begins or continues to experience.

In the prologue to The Academy, Little writes:

. . . Kurt . . . . looked toward the classrooms.

Something was wrong.

There was a chain-link fence blocking off the buildings in an effort to prevent vandalism. Behind the fence, he could see closed classroom doors and windows shaded by off-white institutional blinds. The sight of the shut-down school had made him feel happy last year, but now it made him feel uneasy. Even the field and the blacktop basketball courts put him on edge, their emptiness somehow emphasizing the fact that the two of them [Kurt and his friend Van] were all alone here.

And no one would know if something happened to them (2).

Little tucks explanations (identified by me by the use of bold font) into the sentences to attribute natural causes to the unusual incidents, and his inclusion of the reason for the building of the fence suggests that the characters’ world is one of reason and sanity--a suggestion that will soon be toppled:

. . . Kurt . . . . looked toward the classrooms.

Something was wrong.

There was a chain-link fence blocking off the buildings in an effort to prevent vandalism. Behind the fence, he could see closed classroom doors and windows shaded by off-white institutional blinds. The sight of the shut-down school had made him feel happy last year, but now it made him feel uneasy. Even the field and the blacktop basketball courts put him on edge, their emptiness somehow emphasizing the fact that the two of them [Kurt and his friend Van] were all alone here.

And no one would know if something happened to them [bold added] (2).

On the next page, Kurt discerns something else, but it moves so swiftly that he’s unsure of what he’s seen; again, Little deftly tucks in an explanation that offers a natural cause for the incident (indicated by the bold font):

. . . Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a motion, a furtive shadow the size of a skinny girl that darted between two of the buildings so quickly that he was not sure it was even there (3).

Embarrassed by his seemingly unfounded fear, Kurt hopes to persuade his friend to leave their high school’s basketball court. As he ponders the issue, he and Van seem top come under a strange sort of attack:

Too embarrassed to let Van know that he was scared, Kurt stood there for a moment while his friend dribbled around the court and made a layup [sic]. He still wasn’t sure why he was scared, but he was, and despite the fact that it was the middle of the day, and hot and sunny to boot, the fear seemed to be
intensifying. He moved beneath a tree for the shade, leaning his back against the trunk, trying to think of a way to get his friend to leave.

A nut fell from the tree and hit him on the top of the head, bouncing to the ground. . . . The damn thing felt more like a rock than a nut . . .

Another nut came speeding down and hit his forearm, a round red bruise appearing instantly on the skin (4-5).

The fact that not one or two, but three, acorns fall (or are thrown) at him suggests that their fall is more than simply an accident or a coincidence, as do the heft and the force of the nuts and their immediate effect on their victim (“a round red bruise appearing instantly on the skin”). (Anyone who has ever had an acorn fall on him or her from a tree knows that, ordinarily, they don’t feel like a rock or ordinarily leave a bruise, especially not an “instant” one.)

Kurt tells Van it’s time for them to leave, but, oddly, Van reacts with “real hostility in his voice,” leaving Kurt mystified as to “where it had come from or what had brought it on.” As Van resumes shooting baskets, the rebounding ball seems to attack him, as the acorns had seemed to assault Kurt. When Van still refuses to leave the court, Kurt walks away. The narrator tells the reader, ending the prologue on an ominous note, “It was the last time he ever saw his friend” (5).

These repeated suggestions that there may be more than meets the eye behind apparently normal and natural incidents and situations helps to create and maintain suspense, as does Little’s very effective strategy of ending many of his chapters on an eerie, mysterious, or ominous note (a cliffhanger, but one that includes an element of the eerie and, possibly, the paranormal or the supernatural). As the story continues, it seems less and less likely that the increasingly bizarre incidents and situations can be explained as resulting from normal and natural causes and more and more likely that only a paranormal or a supernatural cause can account for them.

By the time the reader reaches chapter three of the novel, he or she will have pretty much decided that there is something beyond the ordinary going on at the charter school. The custodial staff is afraid to work the night shift: “It’s not that we don’t like to work,” Carlos tells his supervisor, Enrique. “We just don’t want to work here. At night” (30). Some of the janitors have reported odd, even eerie, events, and some of them believe that the school is haunted.

They notice that the school is different, too: “Something had happened to the school over the summer” (31). For one thing, “it seemed as if all over the school the illumination was dimmer than it had been before summer,” but, again, Little’s character--in this case, the custodian named Carlos--attributes the apparently dimmer lights to an understandable cause (although he isn’t convinced by his own explanation): “He tried to tell himself that it was intentional, part of an effort to save electricity and cut down on energy expenses but he couldn’t make himself believe it” (32).

Carlos’ doubt undercuts the reader’s tendency to attribute the story’s unusual goings-on to natural and rational causes. However, the reader will want to hedge his or her bets, just as Carlos does, in the event that the bizarre incidents do turn out to have a natural or rational explanation, as it would be embarrassing to discover that, all along, the events had, in fact, resulted from natural or intentional grounds.

Sometimes, Little starts an ominous passage by having his narrator tell the reader, directly, that something is amiss. He did so in the earlier passage about the vacant classrooms behind the chain-link fence that Kurt saw from the basketball court, and he does so, again, in this chapter, as Carlos hears voices coming from the girls’ locker room, which, at this time of night, should be deserted:

. . . Something was wrong tonight [bold added].

There were voices coming from the locker room and there weren’t supposed to be. Any summer practice ended hours ago, and at this time of the evening, the PE department should have been as silent as a tomb (35).

The repetition of the sentence “something was wrong” makes readers recall the earlier scene when something else was also “wrong,” and the use of two male names which sound similar--”Kurt” and “Carlos”--helps to tie the earlier scene to this one, in which something else is likewise “wrong.”

It’s something of a cliché to point out that people, more often than not, tend to think in clichés. Language itself, someone has said, is a “tissue of faded metaphors.” We speak, as we think, in such “faded,” or dead, metaphors, constantly relating one thing--frequently a thought, a perception, or a feeling, but also inanimate objects and even other people--to something else. In the passage quoted above, Carlos associates the should-be silence of the locker room to the quiet of a tomb, and, of course, “silent as a tomb” is a well-worn cliché. Therefore, the thought seems natural, because it is, in fact, commonplace. However, Little’s use of the metaphor also allows him to characterize the incident he’s describing as one that is eerie (because tombs are not only silent but are also creepy). The transition between the clichéd thought and Carlos’ feelings is almost inevitable, and Little capitalizes upon it by offering, once again, the possibility of a rational explanation for the mysterious and frightening sounds that the janitor hears in the girls’ locker room after hours. This extended explanation, in fact, illustrates perfectly how horror writers typically simultaneously suggest both a natural or a rational and a paranormal or a supernatural cause of the story’s bizarre incidents or circumstances. Notice, however, that Little tilts the reader’s interpretation toward the paranormal or supernatural explanation by characterizing Carlos’ attempt to explain--or to explain away--his perceptions as a rationalization rather than as reasoning and by adding the rhetorical question, at the end of the passage, “But he didn’t think so, did he?”:

. . . Something was wrong tonight.

There were voices coming from the locker room and there weren’t supposed to be. Any summer practice ended hours ago, and at this time of the evening, the PE department should have been as silent as a tomb.

Tomb.

. . . Why had he thought of that word?

Carlos shivered. Sound could do weird things here in the PE department, he rationalized. The big echoey [sic] gym with its exposed beams and high ceiling, the tiled bunker like [sic] showers, even the coaches’ offices with their windowed half walls, all distorted the resonance of voices and often made the sound as though they were coming from a room or section of building that they were not. So while there wasn’t supposed to be anyone in here at this hour, it was entirely possible that one of the coaches had left a radio on in an office or something. There could be a perfectly innocent explanation for the fact that he heard people talking in the girls’ locker room [bold added].

But he didn’t think so, did he?

No (35-36).

Having offered a rational (or rationalized) explanation for what could be a paranormal or a supernatural incident, Little next exaggerates the “voices” the janitor hears, turning them into the “moans and yelps, grunts and gasps” of participants in an apparent orgy in progress, which includes “other sounds as well, disturbing sounds, and male laughter that was harsh, cruel, and far too loud” (36). Associating the sounds of the “harsh, cruel” laughter of the males with his abusive father, Carlos actually encounters him as he investigates the locker room, and he flees from the apparition, nearly knocking over his partner, Raakem, who has been working in a different part of the school and who looks as if he has also just fled from something horrific. By having more than one character experience and report bizarre, uncanny incidents, Little adds a veneer of verisimilitude to these experiences.

Typically, the natural or rational explanation follows the suggested paranormal or supernatural cause of the bizarre events, almost as if the reference to the natural or the rational grounds is a corrective to superstition or magical thinking concerning the dubious presumptive agency of occult powers. Later in the novel, Little reverses this typical order, offering a motive for an apparent threat by the school’s principal (“You will never graduate. . . . I’ll make sure of that”) that is both irrational and immoral, if not illegal, but is also non-violent, only to follow it with a much more unlikely and downright insane motive that portends not merely violence, but also death:

Ed found that his hands were shaking. What exactly did she mean by that remark? That she was going to make sure he didn’t have enough credits to graduate?

Or that she was going to make sure he was dead before his senior year?
(128)

Like a true master of the macabre, Little continues this juxtaposition of the normal, the natural, and the rational with the paranormal and the supernatural throughout his novel, allowing (until the final resolution of the narrative’s conflict), a dual understanding of its incidents. The idea that everything could happen as a result of the natural and could be rational prevents readers from rejecting the situations as unlikely from the beginning and, by the story’s end, allows them, perhaps, to accept that they are, in fact, paranormal or supernatural. The juxtaposition also creates, maintains, and heightens suspense and fear. Like Shirley Jackson and others, Little also recognizes that horror is personal, and, in his fiction, he makes it personal for his characters, relating it to their past or present experiences and to their future aspirations.

Teleology and Horror

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The evolution of hair, of eyes, of noses, of mouths, of sex and the sexes--these are fascinating topics, and they point, each one, to sometimes disturbing, sometimes revolting, but always fascinating, moments in which something original arose out of nature or creation, usually in response to a need. But in anticipation of a need to come?

Impossible, one might suppose--but what if evolution isn’t blind; what if it’s an instrument of an all-knowing, all-seeing God? In other words, what if evolution is teleological? (The very word “teleology,” of course, itself breeds horror among atheistic evolutionists, in whose number Charles Darwin did not, by the way, count himself any more than did the Catholic theologian and evolutionist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.)

Teleology, in relation to evolution, suggests that organisms develop along lines that are purposeful and goal-directed. Teleologists argue that, rather than being determined by its environment and the stimuli that it provides, the organism and its organs are determined by its (and their) purpose. For example, people have physical senses because they need to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell; they don’t sense things because they have senses.


The view of metaphysical naturalism that atheistic evolutionists hold and the view of ontogenesis that teleologists hold have moral implications concerning minerals, plants, animals, and humans. The former assumes that organisms are what they are and that they are neither good nor evil nor better nor worse than one another. The latter view is often the basis for the concept of lesser and greater organisms which each have a correspondingly lower or higher place in the cosmic chain of being. To personalize these views, one might say that Lucretius and Aldous Huxley hold the former view and that Aristotle and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin hold the latter view.

Nothing in the body is made in order that we may use it. What happens to exist is the cause of its use. -- Lucretius. (In other words, function follows form)

Nature adapts the organ to the function, and not the function to the organ. -- Aristotle. (In other words, form follows function.)

These contrasting views of evolution frequently fuel speculative fiction, especially the science fiction branch of it, but they have also occasionally driven horror fiction, especially if one holds, as it seems easy enough to do, that human beings are natural organisms that have evolved to a point that is sufficient for them to begin, through such means as agricultural hybridization, eugenics, genetic engineering, and cloning, to direct evolution, for even adherents of metaphysical naturalism must find it difficult to deny any possibility of purposeful and goal-directed activity to human behavior in its entirety. We have become the gods that nature, perhaps blindly, or that God, with forethought, intended, us to become, and we are now capable, to whatever limited and clumsy degree, of determining the direction and the purpose of nature, as many a horror story involving the experimental procedures of mad scientists have indicated.

If Harry Harrison’s Deathworld trilogy is an example of the function-follows-form theory of evolution (the whole planet and everything in it has evolved to survive at the expense of all other plants and animals), the Terminator film series (especially the original) is an example of the form-follows-function theory of evolution (cyborgs have been created to seek and kill a specific individual and anyone or anything else that gets it its way, and they even build themselves). Both result in scary worlds in which one is apt to end up dead. Which method of execution seems scarier may come down to two questions:

1. Would you rather be killed by a natural, organic monstrosity that responds to the stimulus of your presence by killing you or by a technological monstrosity that kills you because it’s programmed to do so?
2. Is there an intelligence operating the universe (that is, nature) behind the scenes, so to speak and, if so, is this intelligence gracious or cruel, loving or malevolent?

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Little Red Riding Hood: “Grandma! What big teeth you have!” Wolf: “The better to eat you with, my dear!”

Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, originated the phrase “the survival of the fittest,” making evolution a sort of game in which the winner is the organism or the species of organisms (depending upon one’s view concerning whether the ultimate survivor will be an individual or a species) that eliminates all competitors. The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson coined the phrase “nature red in tooth and claw.” From Spencer’s point of view (and Tennyson’s), it’s a jungle out there. It’s a wonder that it wasn’t one of them, rather than Harry Harrison, who wrote the sci fi Deathworld trilogy, in which a planet’s wildlife develops with no other purpose than to kill or to be killed. Spencer’s (and Tennyson’s) view of evolution is a convenient basis for horror (and science fiction) stories, regardless of whether, from scientific and philosophical points of view, it’s true. However, the views of another early evolutionist are, perhaps, even more useful to horror and science fiction writers.

The puma: scary!

For most scientists, evolution is a case of function follows form. In other words, we have ears; therefore, we hear. By the way, their theory answers, once and for all, it would seem, the philosophical koan which asks whether a tree, falling in a forest in which no one is present, makes a sound. No. (There are no ears to hear.)

But what if Aristotle, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Jean-Baptiste Lemarck are right? What if evolution is really a case of form following function and we developed ears purposely so that we could hear? In a word, what if evolution is teleological rather than accidental?

 

Lemarck, once very popular among his peers, has since, like Lucifer, fallen from favor among the host of Darwinian evolutionists and has been cast into their version of hell (extinction). However, his views are interesting and pertinent to horror writers who are always searching for relatively plausible (all right, not absolutely unbelievable) ways to explain the monsters with which they populate the pages and film footage of their stories. And they seem, in some quarters, poised to return. Therefore, in the interests of the theory and practice of horror fiction, we’ll explore Lemarck’s theory--in summary fashion, of course. Then, we’ll consider a few possible applications of his theory to horror and science fiction.

 

He believed, and taught others to believe (but with possibly little lasting effect) that an organism can pass acquired characteristics on to their offspring. The characteristics thus transmitted from parent to offspring are necessary or helpful in promoting the species’ (and the individuals’) survival. The classic example of his theory is the giraffe’s neck. Needing to graze the leaves of trees, the animal continually stretched its neck until, eventually, the neck elongated and was genetically transmitted to its offspring.

 

Two principles govern Lemarckian thought: use it or lose it (unused characteristics are tossed while useful ones are acquired and retained) and family heirlooms, in the form of ancestors’ traits, are passed down through the generations. His view explains not only giraffes, followers claim, but athletes and thinkers and beautiful people, among others, for athletes have the physical prowess their athletic ancestors developed, thinkers the well-developed brains of their forebears, and beautiful people the aesthetically pleasing features their near and distant relatives share (or shared) with them. It’s not so good, perhaps, in explaining the continued existence of ninety-eight-pound weaklings, idiots, and the physically repugnant except to say that they are on their way out; their days are numbered. However, a little innovative thinking can, perhaps, discover a need for such otherwise undesirable traits and, thereby, save them from the damnation of eternal extinction.

 

According to later proponents of Lemarck’s views, unused organs and other structures likewise perish over time, becoming weaker and weaker until, eventually, they vanish. One might cite the appendix and the coccyx, or tailbone, as examples of vanishing organs, and some would include, among other body parts, the little fingers and toes. The surviving characteristics are then passed on to the kids. Environmental changes introduce new needs, and, as a result, the organism’s behavior changes, leading to the eventual acquisition of altered organs and characteristics which are then passed on to junior.

Tyranosaur: scarier!

 

Harvard University’s William McDougall and Ivan Pavlov were both Lemarckian scientists. On the bases of their research, they believed that acquired characteristics--rats’ learned ability to navigate mazes and similar skills--were passed on to the offspring of the animals that originally acquired them. Other scientists, including Ted Steele, Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, and John Cairns, have also observed behaviors at the cellular and microscopic levels that they attribute to a Lemarckian sort of genetics.

 

What are the implications of Lemarkian evolution theory for horror (and sci fi) writers? We can think of a few, and you can probably think of a slew.

Serial killers shouldn’t have children, for one thing, because the facility for killing other people that they’ve acquired from long and frequent practice is an acquired trait that they could pass on to their children. We don’t need a Ted Bundy, Jr. or a little John Wayne Gacy. One was plenty.

 

Ugliness might be helpful in some situations. It may not be handy in getting a date on Saturday night, but it could be useful in frightening away potential threats, which is why we wear Halloween masks and costumes and why mothers-in-law and other animals exhibit what scientists call “threat displays,” erecting their hair, expanding their muscles and chests, opening their mouths, and rearing onto their hind legs. The ugliest among us might still be with us because their ugliness is useful to their survival and to that of their children. Maybe they can’t compete in other ways, through intelligence, good looks, or by being a sycophant. They use their ugliness, so they don’t lose it. If so, might that not explain monsters? Few creatures are uglier than a gorgon, the extraterrestrials of Predator and Alien, or the monsters in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction.

 

We should be careful concerning what we’re doing to our environment, because, if we change it enough or in the wrong way, the planet could become a breeding ground for new and improved, but not necessarily pleasant, behaviors which, in turn, could result in the development of dreadful organs and characteristics that are passed from mommy and daddy mutant to baby mutant. In such a modified environment, a nocturnal individual or group of individuals, finding daytime activity risky or just not worth the effort, might enter a catatonic state until nightfall and, faced with the need to acquire blood quickly and readily as a source of nutrients, it might develop fangs and come out at dark to suck the blood of Paris Hilton and other late-night partygoers. Viola! Thanks to Lemarckian evolutionary theory, vampires would no longer be merely fictitious beings (except, perhaps, for the undead and immortality issues).

 

Since advertising is based upon supplying needs, real or perceived, we might wonder what generations of commercials concerning perfume, beer, fashion, and the like are making of us and our children and who, besides business leaders, might be behind such campaigns and why. Are ads changing our cognitive environment? Are they identifying or creating needs that are not only lucrative, but also antisocial and harmful to society in general? 

 

There’s a wealth of conspiracy theory-driven fiction here, it seems, with an array of possible culprits and motives. In a world in which form and function both follow need, anything is possible, especially if we include perceived as well as actual needs, and nature, already red in tooth and claw, might become red in maw as well.

Anthology Ideas

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

There are probably as many ways to come up with an anthology idea as there are editors who come up with anthology ideas. In the brief head notes to his stories in his own anthology of twice-told tales, The Collection, Bentley Little mentions a few of them. For any who imagined that the innards of the publishing industry are as confused and messy as those of a dissected high school biology class frog, his comments on the matter suggest that such cynics are pretty much right on the money.

The ecology movement gave rise to the notion for one anthology: The Earth Strikes Back was to be a collection of tales concerning “the negative effects of pollution, overpopulation, and deforestation” upon the planet, or so Little supposed, at least, “judging by the title of the book.”

Another anthology, Cold Blood, was also to be centered on a “theme” and its stories were to have been written to “specific guidelines.”

A third anthology was to have included “stories based on titles the editor provided,” all of which “were. . . clichéd horror images.” This one, Little says, “never came to pass.”

According to Stephanie Bond, author of “Much Ado About Anthologies,” these collections “are assembled in various ways,” sometimes as the result of a group proposal by several authors, sometimes at the suggestion of an editor, sometimes as a way to test the marketability of an idea, and sometimes to capitalize upon a specific author’s unusual success. Usually, they come together because “editors formulate ideas for anthologies to fill holes they perceive in the market.”

I submitted a story for an anthology myself. It (the anthology, but my story also) concerned animals. My story was accepted, but I declined the invitation, because it was to have appeared in an electronic magazine and the editor wanted to pay via PayPal. I prefer payments by check, the old-fashioned way.

Anthologies have a common theme, of course, provided by a timely or evergreen topic, a holiday, an intriguing situation, or any other reasonably good excuse for a score or more (or fewer) stories by the same or different authors of the same genre.

Horror movies have also gone the anthology route. Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye and Creepshow are only two among many. Most follow the simple convention of sandwiching three of four short movies between an opening prologue that sets up the theme to be followed and an epilogue that rounds out the series and provides an appropriate sense of closure.

Shirley Jackson: Learning from the Masters

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In an early scene of the movie Rose Red, its author, Stephen King, playing the role of a pizza deliveryman, announces his delivery of a “fully loaded” pie for “Jackson.” The line is King’s tribute to the author of The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, who also wrote the famous horror story “The Lottery.” (Rose Red is a takeoff--some might say a rip-off--of Jackson’s Haunting.)

What can the aspiring (or professional) horror writer learn from Jackson’s take on the fiction of fear? Quite a bit.

Like most writers, she writes what she knows. She begins many of her stories by recalling a situation or an incident that frightened her. In a letter she wrote, but never mailed, to the poet Howard Nemerov, she confesses, “I . . . consolidate a situation where I was afraid and. . . work from there.” Like King, Bentley Little, and other masters of the genre, Jackson finds the horrific, the eerie, and the dreadful in common, ordinary events and circumstances. She had, one might say, a highly developed sense of horror, just as the better comedians have a highly developed sense of humor.

Her discerning eye saw the dreadful and the appalling in people, places, and things that others tend to take for granted, accepting or rejecting without a second thought or, perhaps, any thought at all. In such activities as a communal lottery, a couple going about their daily business, the chores associated with marriage and motherhood, and college experiences, she found inspiration for six novels (The Road Through the Wall [1948], Hangman [1951], The Bird’s Nest [1954], The Sundial [1958], The Haunting of Hill House [1959], and We Have Always Lived in the Castle [1962]), three short story collections (The Lottery and Other Stories [1949], Come Along With Me [1968], and Just an Ordinary Day [1996]), and several other works for children and non-fiction publications.

Just as such contemporary horror writers such as Little, Dean Koontz, and H. P. Lovecraft locate the horrific in apathy, Jackson, like Little and King, finds it under the rock, so to speak, of everydayness. It is the malaise of the routine, the ordinary, the usual that destroys the mind and slays the soul. (For King, it is more a threat to one’s community, or hometown--an extension, as we have observed in other posts, of one’s own home.)


After marrying Stanley Edgar Hyman, she resided in Vermont, “in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life”--an environment well in keeping with the ordinariness that infuses her fiction.

Interestingly, the houses in her stories are often more interesting (and sinister) than the stories’ characters. The opening to The Haunting of Hill House is justifiably famous:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

As a Wikipedia article points out, the same is true of the house that appears in The Sundial:

A less obvious but nonetheless imposing character in the novel is the Halloran house itself. Built by a man who came into great wealth late in his life, the house is lavish to the point of garishness, and the endless details of the grounds and interiors are carefully described by Jackson until they overwhelm both characters and reader alike. One of these details is the titular sundial, which stands like an asymmetrical eyesore in the middle of the mathematically perfect grounds and bears the legend “WHAT IS THIS WORLD?” (a quote from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in “The Knight's Tale”). Jackson herself was fond of joking of an “architectural gene” that cropped up in her family once every few generations, and the house presented in The Sundial might foreshadow the infamous Hill House in The Haunting of Hill House. In both Hill House and Sundial, there are many striking similarities between the two houses: both Hill House and Halloran House were built by husbands as gifts for wives who died shortly before or shortly after seeing the house for the first time, and both houses become the source of conflict between various family members who disputed the house's ownership. The “mathematically perfect” grounds and the jarring sundial might remind readers again of Hill House, where all the floors and walls are said to be slightly off-centre. Halloran House, while never openly “haunted” in the sense that Hill House claimed to be, is the site of at least two ghostly visitations.

The tendency to invoke the ominous character of everyday objects is a convention in the horror genre, and women writers frequently attribute such a quality to houses and to domestic objects. One thinks, for example, of Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ “The Yellow Wallpaper” and of the house in which the apparent death of her husband prompts a revelation in the protagonist concerning her personal plight in “The Story of an Hour.”

It is possible, given Jackson’s statement that she starts her stories with “a situation where I was afraid and. . . work[s] from there” that her agoraphobia was a source of her interest in depicting sinister houses. Typically, an person who suffers from agoraphobia finds comfort in familiar surroundings, especially their homes, and are loathe to leave these sanctuaries of safety and security. What if one’s sanctuary should turn upon one, betraying one--perhaps even, in a manner of speaking, stalking one? The result could be The Haunting of Hill House, The Sundial, or We Have Always Lived in the Castle. At least, Sigmund Freud might entertain such notions. If we were to go so far as to take a leaf from those who believe in the efficacy of dream analysis (whose number numbers not only psychoanalysts of the Freudian stripe but others as well), and consider the house a symbol of the body, many of Jackson’s works might even be considered, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” examples of body horror.

It seems possible, too, that Jackson found the multi-tasking, or more specifically, the multiple roles of modern women to be a potential source of stories of the uncanny and the bizarre. In “Shirley Jackson: Delight in What I Fear,” Paula Guran points out that there is something almost schizophrenic about the many roles that contemporary women perform: “We're all expected to be multiple personalities these days. Nurturing mom, supportive wife, hard driving on the job and carpool driving off. Or maybe we can create a great soufflé while whipping up a new novel. If we've opted for a family we have to somehow be several people at once.” She points out, furthermore (as Chillers and Thrillers also points out, taking a different approach, in an earlier post) that “Writers often feed their creativity through several coexisting personalities.” (The mother who can’t balance the demands of these conflicting roles has recently become a stereotype in contemporary horror fiction, recognizable in King’s Carrie, Robert McCammon’s Mine!, Robert Bloch’s Psycho, and, of course, she originally appeared in ancient myth as such characters as the furies, the gorgons, the lamia, and the sirens.

So, what have we learned from our consideration of Shirley Jackson as a master of contemporary horror fiction? Quite a bit:

• Relive the fear, using it as the basis for creating a horror story.
• Find the terror in everyday situations and incidents.
• Don’t overlook the opportunities for horror that exist in one’s own phobias, if one is fortunate enough to acquire any such “irrational” fears.
• For hints of the horrific, look to the conflicts generated by the familial, social, and other roles that one is compelled to play.
• Seek the horrific in the things, as well as the persons and places, associated with the familial, social, and other roles that one is compelled to play: any may inspire a story that makes readers’ hair stand on end and pimples their flesh with goose bumps.
• Understand the horror of betrayal by the people--or places or things--that one holds nearest and dearest to one’s heart (and remember that no one, no place, and nothing is really safe).
• Know that even Mom (and her apple pie), emptied of the good or seasoned with madness and taken to extremes, can be truly terrifying.
• Realize that horror, like evil itself, is not only natural, social, psychological, and theological in nature, but that it is, above all, personal and should be taken personally.