Anaphoric Allusions

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Kenneth Burke

No matter how we parse it, evil comes from but two sources (internal or external) and consists of only two types (natural or supernatural). (It may be suggested that there is a third type of evil, namely, paranormal, but a little reflection makes it clear that, by definition, paranormal phenomena are also natural, rather than supernatural, incidents; when their effect is injurious or damaging, they are, from a human perspective, also evil.) Misery, it would seem, is not nearly as “manifold,” as Edgar Allan Poe’s “Berenice” would have us to believe.

In Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror, Dennis R. Perry reminds his readers that Kenneth Burke

. . . listed several sources of the sublime, including power (fear of a superior force), difficulty (extremely complex predicament), obscurity (darkness, fogginess, confusion producing a sense of isolation and helplessness), and privation (isolation, silence, solitude, darkness) (12).

(In reference to horror fiction, “sublime” may be defined as “awe-inspiring,” “astonishing,” or as producing a sense of the uncanny, which includes experiencing a sense of terror; think Rudolph Otto.)

Certainly, Burke’s analysis is insightful and useful to writers of horror fiction, and it seems to expand (although it does not, really) the categories of evil phenomena we listed earlier. Perhaps what Burke’s explanation accomplishes, more than anything, is to characterize the elements of the sublime, or, as we call them here, the types of evil phenomena.

Having suggested the sources, the types, and the character of evil phenomena, we now turn our attention to the ways by which writers of this genre of fiction can, through the use of a limited number of synonyms, reinforce and perhaps even heighten the horrific character of a monster. (There are many other, more sophisticated and subtle ways to accomplish this same objective, of course, such as the use of literary allusions, metaphors, similes, images, irony, and so forth, but, in this post, we concentrate on one of the simplest means of reinforcing and highlighting the character of the monster.)

There may be a few others, but, listed alphabetically, these are the synonyms that come most readily to the mind, perhaps, as means by which to refer to an antecedent term that represents a monster of some kind:

animal, beast, being, demon, entity, fiend, grotesque, imp, it, monster, predator, thing

To this list of basic synonyms may be added one or two more unusual, hyphenated compound adjectives: “hell-beast” and “hell-spawn.” Stephen King (and no doubt others) has created an interesting spin-off, as it were, on the use of such compounds, the first part of which is comprised of the character’s name and the second part of which is made up of the noun “thing,” introducing the compound itself with the definite article “the.” Having forgotten King’s character, “Gary” is hereby substituted, by way of illustrating King’s technique: “the Gary-thing.”

Alfred Hitchcock

Although short, our list gives us simple, but effective, ways to smuggle in associations between our monster, whatever it is, and the fierce or bestial attributes of various other entities, thereby extending, in shorthand fashion, the ongoing sense of the monster’s monstrosity. Of course, some synonyms will be more appropriate to the type of monster stalking our story’s protagonist (and, vicariously, our reader as well) than others would be, and the author should give due consideration to the suitability and aptness of potential synonyms.

For example, if the monster is a natural force, “it” would be fitting, whereas “being” or “entity” would not be suitable, as a synonym. However, if the force were also sentient or intelligent, perhaps “being” or “entity” could be appropriate as a synonym for the monster. Paradoxically, “it” or “thing” might be appropriate even for a human being, suggesting that the person has devolved or otherwise been dehumanized and is more a monster, now, than the man or woman that he or she once was.

Edgar Allan Poe

It helps, too, to have described the monster in terms of the characteristics of the creature to which it will later be related before using a synonym to refer back to the monster thus described. For example, if, later in a sentence, paragraph, chapter, or book, an author uses the word “animal” or “beast” to refer to a monster that he or she has previously described, the effectiveness of the use of such a synonym is heightened if, when the monster was first described, it was characterized as having “sharp teeth,” “fangs,” “claws,” “talons,” “scales,” “wings,” and so forth, for the subsequent allusion to it as an “animal” or a “beast” will then be sufficient to recall to the reader these characteristics of the monster.

The use of nouns and adjectives to refer back to a monster that has been previously introduced and described may seem a slight matter, but, in the final analysis, a writer’s style, which consists, in large part, of his or her deliberate choice of this word or phrase over that, is what separates an author like Edgar Allan Poe from a lesser writer--or, as Mark Twain put it, lightning from the lightning bug, and horror, like all other genres of fiction, is built of words and the choices authors make in using them.

Source

Perry, Dennis. Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2003. Print.

Famous Writers and Director’s Quotes, With More or Less Direct Application to the Theory and Practice of Writing Horror

Ambrose Bierce

• Edible--good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
• Impiety--your irreverence toward my deity.
• Mad--affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
• Ocean--a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man--who has no gills.
• Politeness--the most acceptable hypocrisy.
• Pray--to ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
• Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
• The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
• There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
• To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
• When you doubt, abstain.

Ray Bradbury

• Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it. First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
• The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance--the idea that anything is possible.
• Touch a scientist and you touch a child.
• We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

John Carpenter

• Evil hiding among us is an ancient theme.
• To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
• What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.

G. K. Chesterton

• A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
• A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
• All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
• An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
• Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
• Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
• Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
• Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
• Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
• Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
• It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
• If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
• Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
• Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a mustache.
• Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
• Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
• Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
• The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
• The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
• The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
• The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
• The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
• The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
• The simplification of anything is always sensational.
• The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
• The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
• The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
• Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
• There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
• Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
• When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
• With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

Wes Craven

• A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren't so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?
• I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally.
• The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
• All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
• Easy reading is damn hard writing.
• Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
• Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
• The founders of a new colony, whatever utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
• We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
• What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

Alfred Hitchcock

• Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
• Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
• The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
• The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.
• There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Stephen King

• I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
• It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.
• No, it's not a very good story--its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
• We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

Dean Koontz

• A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.
• Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate.
• Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.
• Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.
• I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.
• I have been reading Stephen King since Carrie and hope to read him for many years to come.
• I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence--I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.
• I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.
• If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored.
• Never, never try to scope the market.
• Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
• Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
• The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.
• Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
• We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another.
• The idea of true evil has been blown away.
• What we do as a society is seek simple answers.
• When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

C. S. Lewis

• An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
• Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
• Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
• Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
• If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
• If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
• Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
• Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
• Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
• The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
• The safest road to hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
• The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
• We are what we believe we are.
• What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Joyce Carol Oates

• If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
• Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
• Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
• Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Flannery O’Connor

• All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
• I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
• I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
• It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
• Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
• The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
• The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
• To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
• When in Rome, do as you have done in Milledgeville.

Edgar Allan Poe

• Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
• I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
• I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
• It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
• The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
• The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
• They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
• Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Anne Rice

• Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.
• First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
• I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.
• I'm always asking questions.
• I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.
• Re-telling the Christian story is the essence of my vocation. That has been going on since the Evangelists in one form or another.
• The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.
• The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.
• Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.
• We're frightened of what makes us different.

Steven Spielberg

• All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.
• I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.
• I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.
• You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project.
• Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

H. G. Wells

• Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
• Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.Some people bear three kinds of trouble--the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.
• The past is but the past of a beginning.
• There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
• What really matters is what you do with what you have.
• You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Building Horror and Suspense Tobe Hooper’s Way, Part 2

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper, John Kenneth Muir explains some of the narrative and symbolic devices that Hooper uses in his film, Invaders From Mars (1986) to build horror and suspense.

According to Muir, Hooper is “quite expert at using the background and foregrounds of shots to convey important, frightening information” (109). In support of his contention, Muir offers a couple of especially instructive examples, worth quoting in their entirety:

Tobe Hooper’s use of film language in Invaders From Mars is the most impressive it’s been since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His always-on-the-prowl camera not only records David’s nightmare of alien invasion, [but] it [also] successfully expresses his situation, his mood, and his feelings of isolation. The opening shot of the movie, that of David and his Dad [sic] lying flat on their backs in the grass, stargazing, should be a peaceful, idyllic one. Instead, forecasting the horror to come, the high[-]angle perspective (always the harbinger of doom in the cinematic lexicon) grows increasingly disturbed. As the camera nears its objects, it commences a fast spin, rolling over and over as it nears David and his Dad [sic]. This spin reveals that David Gardner’s world is about to be turned upside down, and that below the surface of perfect suburbia, trouble exists.

Throughout the film, Hooper’s well-placed camera continues to express the plight of the film’s dreaming protagonist. On the school playground, David is farmed inside a metal jungle jim [sic], a surrogate jail cell of sorts, and the message is clear: he’s trapped like a caged animal. Of all the children on the playground, only Davis is “trapped” in this fashion, simultaneously indicating his special status (as the star of his own dream) as well as his knowledge of his isolation. Later, David is literally surrounded by cages, by stuffed, mounted animals in miniature cages in his teacher’s van, and the blocking is very much the same, expressing the identical point: this is a nightmare David cannot escape from. Instead of relying on art design, [William Cameron] Menzies [the director of the original film of which Hooper’s version is a remake] staged many shots, nay entire sequences, in minimalist oversized sets to achieve similar results: feelings of entrapment and isolation. Instead of relying on art design, Hooper falls back on his thorough understanding of film grammar, mise en scene and cutting (108-109).

Writers of short stories and novels, it may be argued, do not have the resources at hand that filmmakers do, and, even if they had, their medium is pen, ink, and paper (or, more likely, a computerized word processor and printer). What good, therefore, does it do the short story writer or the novelist to examine the narrative techniques of movie directors and cameramen? The short answer is that it’s not only possible, but desirable, to learn artistic techniques from as many artists as possible, without undue concern as to their form or genre, always with an eye as to how to adapt their methods to one’s own work. After all, filmmakers have certainly helped themselves generously to quite a few literary techniques as well as to the methods of other artists, visual, plastic, musical, and otherwise.

Instead of a camera, the writer has description. Description, it may be truly be said, is the writer’s camera. Using its powers, he or she can create symbolic images, just as Hooper does, with his spinning camera and high-angle camera perspective, and images of the Jungle Jim and the caged animals. (A literary master of such technique is Stephen Crane; consider his use of symbolic imagery in The Red Badge of Courage, for example, in which he describes the clearing in a forest near a battlefield in terms of a cathedral.) What a writer can learn, more specifically than merely the use of symbolic imagery, created through description, to express theme, convey a character’s emotion, suggest the narrative‘s tone, or to effect foreshadowing, perhaps, is what Muir points out concerning Hooper’s employment of mise en scene’s blocking out of the critical elements of a scene so as to exploit the background and the foreground of each separate shot. Before writing a scene, an author should write out, in a few sentences, as specifically as possible, the answers to such questions as:

1. What is the purpose of this scene?
2. Can a special perspective (camera angle, as it were) be used to heighten the reader’s interest and to emphasize key information (or maybe to shift the reader’s focus away from a bit of information--a clue, for example, in a murder mystery) in the scene?
3. What should the scene’s lighting be? Should it be direct, indirect, partial, full, from above, below, from one side or the other, from behind? (Anyone who has ever held a flashlight below his or her chin in an otherwise dark room knows what valuable tricks light can play in creating horror, fear, or suspense.)
4. What properties (“props”) should the scene include, and why? To what use should they be put?
5. What link is there between this scene and its predecessor, and what link is there between it and the next scene?
6. What colors will be used to describe the characters’ hair, eyes, clothes, the “props,” and other items contained in the scene?

In other words, start to think off scenes not as so many words on a page, sandwiched between other segments of words on other pages, but as an image (or a series of connected images) within the continuous flow of many other, related images which, together, tell a unified, coherent, and meaningful story. At the same time, though, consider how the scene can best perform its function, or purpose, within the whole of which it is a part, using symbolism, irony, composition, and other elements, both narrative and visual.

The result will be a more artistically told story, and a story that is apt to be taken more seriously. At times, it is enough, perhaps, to tell a story, but it is always better to tell a story well.

Building Horror and Suspense Tobe Hooper’s Way

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper, John Kenneth Muir explains some of the narrative and symbolic devices that Hooper uses in his film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), to build horror and suspense. First, Muir says, Hooper sets the tone of the film by using symbolic images that suggest that the world exists within an indifferent, or even hostile, universe in which human life is not only meaningless but also endangered. A corpse is shown, posed as if it were a work of art (55). Then, Hooper shows “close-ups of violent eruptions on the surface of our sun,” the red shade of which “belies a kind of anger,” the whole image implying, again, that “the universe is disordered, anarchic, even cruel.” Indeed, the sun and the moon may represent the eyes of the “cosmos,” suggesting that the cosmos is “watching from a distance” (56). One might even wonder if the heavenly orbs might suggest that God is observing the bizarre and hideous actions that transpire in the film. If so, the God who watches such horrors is obviously not a loving God, but a voyeur who is something along the lines of a sadist. A third image is that of armadillo road kill. It is important to observe that the armadillo “is overturned, upside down,” because such a position, Muir points out, “is a long-time signifier of death in the language of the cinema” (56). This image accomplishes a double task, Muir says. First, it reinforces the idea that “the ordered universe has become topsy-turvy” because although “the highway is a symbol of man’s intelligence and his need to connect one place to another,” the presence of the dead armadillo suggests that “above and beyond man’s sense of self-imposed order (the road), is the overriding chaos of the universe” (56). Second, the image of the dead armadillo heralds a similar image of a homeless man, “signifying. . . the death and horror to come”:

Not long after the shot of the armadillo, a drink is seen in the cemetery to be lying in the same position as the road kill. . . . In fact, this is the film’s second “armadillo” shot: the drunk’s face is upside down in the frame too, out of order, signifying again the death and horror to come (56).

So far, three images have conspired, so to speak, to indicate that the world exists within an indifferent, or even hostile, universe in which human life is not only meaningless but also endangered. Next, sound--or, more specifically--music is used to further underscore the universe’s cosmic indifference to humanity:

The music in the film. . . is distinctly unpleasant, all cymbal crashes and echoes; highly discordant and jarring. There is no lyrical theme running through the music, no recognizable leitmotif, only a jumble of ugly, seemingly random sounds strung together. Like the eruptions on the surface of the sun, the music reflects the absence of equilibrium, sanity, reason, and order in the universe” (56).

This sense of an unintelligible, meaningless, and possibly hostile universe comes across even more clearly when there is, as it were, a “theme” or “leitmotif” to man-made sounds, such as, for example, the news report to which one of the film’s characters is listening at the moment that he is struck and killed by a passing truck while he is busy reliving himself into a cup while standing at the edge of the road. The report is full of seemingly random events of a “discomforting” character, which, taken together, indicate “a disordered, uncaring universe” (57). Having used both images and sound to symbolize such cosmic indifference to humanity, Hooper now turns his film’s attention to its characters, eliminating, from the very outset, first the group of victims’ “alpha male,” followed, in short order, by the elimination of the second male, which leads the female character on her own, with “no ‘male’ figure to cling to at all” (57-58). Hooper ratchets up the film’s horror and suspense by refusing to grant the character’s experiences any meaning; what happens to them--and, vicariously, to the audience, has no cognitive or epistemological significance; they learn nothing from it. Therefore, their experience is without value:

He denies his viewers the critical act of learning. . . . an audience usually learns important facts from the story’s structure or through the expositional dialogue of the main characters. . . . Knowledge does not pass from one protagonist to the next and no acts are explained or even rationalized. . . . They are killed without learning anything. . . and so the audience doesn’t learn anything either (58).

The failure to explain the bizarre, violent incidents lends the film verisimilitude, Muir suggests, because, in moviegoers’ own lives, similar events transpire, without readymade answers (58). By setting up a series of expectations on the parts of both his characters and the audience and then frustrating or “overturning” them, Hooper maintains the horror, the randomness, and the suspense of his movie’s action, Muir adds: “They go to the gas station expecting gas, but it’s out of gas. They go to the swimming hole expecting water, but it’s dry. They go to the friendly looking farmhouse down the lane expecting help but find only insanity and death” (58). Likewise, the characters are dwarfed by their surroundings, which suggests that they are of comparatively little significance whose lives are often on the verge of extinction, whether they are aware of their danger or not:

Hooper takes special pains to accentuate the vastness of the universe around his young characters. . . . Hooper sees [them] much as those very characters view the spiders in the web or the cows locked away in the slaughterhouses. They’re little, meaningless creatures, running around in their lives with a sort of tunnel vision, unable to see that they inhabit a much larger and terribly frightening domain. As human beings, we. . . do a hundred “normal” and “routine” things . . . while unaware that a tornado could be approaching, or that a serial killer could be roaming the very neighborhood where we live. But we impose a false sense of order (and hence security) in our everyday existence and Tobe Hooper’s modus operandi is to strip all that away. . . . We‘re victims of a universe that unfolds randomly (59-60).

According to Muir, Hooper is not necessarily an atheist. It could be that “the universe has a plan”; it’s just that “humans don’t know what it is, or even if they’re important to it” (60), a point that Hooper underscores through imagery, camera angles, and his characters’ dialogue:

Under the uncaring eye of the distant sun, Jerry’s van picks up the Hitchhiker. . . . Under a giant blue sky, the Hitchhiker [one of the film’s antagonists] and the van itself might as well be ants on a hill or cows in the slaughterhouse. . . . Hooper and cinematographer [Daniel] Pearl make inventive use of the low angle perspective. . . . [to reveal] the inherent hierarchy (or disorder) of the universe. High above his oblivious characters stand outer space, suns, and galaxies. And those cosmic entities could not care less that five teens are about to meet their makers in a backwater corner of some place called Texas.

The film’s dialogue reinforces many of these themes (60).

The film’s central antagonist, the cannibalistic, transvestite, serial killer name Leatherface, is himself an embodiment of Hooper’s view of the universe as an uncaring, hostile place: “Ultimately, the very nature of Leatherface’s villainy is a prominent part of Hooper’s thesis about the universe, too.” For example, “he doesn’t want to have sex with the lovely Sally.” Instead, as if she were nothing more than a cow in a slaughterhouse, “where her grandfather once worked,” Leatherface would rather slaughter and eat Sally and wear her face as a mask (60).

The sole survivor, Sally survives merely by chance: she “happens to get a break, to escape the crazies and make it to the road beyond the farmhouse but none of that is part of a design or intentional strategy on her part. It’s just the law of averages” (66); the universe remains impartial in its indifference to all humanity. Moreover, as Muir points out, Sally’s escape may not have left her unscathed emotionally: “her sanity is in serious question at the end of Chain Saw” (66). Finally, Hooper uses even seemingly random business and road signs to reinforce his movie’s horror and suspense:

Also interesting is Hooper’s appropriate use of signage at just the right times to provide the audience with subconscious clues about the horror to come. At the gas station, there is a sign reading “Gulf,” quite an appropriate brand for a half-way place between two regions, in this case the normal and the insane. Shortly thereafter, another sign reads “STOP” as the protagonists near the old Franklin place, a visual warning that is ultimately ignored (67).

It should be obvious that Hooper is a consummate director of horror films, adept in the use of symbolic imagery, instrumental music, the denial of thematic meaning to his characters’ experiences, frustrated expectations, irony, size discrepancies between characters and their vast surroundings, dialogue, business and road signs, and other forms of non-verbal communication to suggest both horror and suspense. Any storyteller, whether of film or literary fiction, interested in the horror genre would do well to study the techniques of such a master. Fortunately, Muir’s study of precisely this topic, in Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre, helps one to do just this.