Perspective and Setting: An Overlap of Cinematographic and Literary Technique

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In Film Narratology, Peter Verstraten explains how, in adopting the perspective of the birds as they sweep down from the sky to attack the residents of Bodega Bay, California, Alfred Hitchcock forces The Birds audience to “reflect on the sadist in ourselves” (122).

Other films require us to see ourselves from the victims’ point of view, thereby presumably encouraging us to consider the masochistic element of our personalities. The infamous shower scene in Psycho is a notable example: it puts the audience in the shower with Marion Crane, letting us see the curtain as it is torn aside and the knife’s blade as it flashes toward us.

Indeed, one might argue that the shower scene is sadomasochistic, alternating between the perspective of the murderer and the perspective of the murdered, so that, in effect, we become suicidal, the killer and the killer of, and the killed by, ourselves.

Some stories create suspense by including a killer among a team of investigators as they seek clues and argue theories as to how a murder may have been committed or who may have committed it, with the killer, perhaps, offering his or her own ideas concerning the topic. In her nonfiction book, The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule includes an alternative version of this perspective by including serial killer Ted Bundy among the university students who discuss a mass murder on their campus. Bundy disagrees with their view of the crime and the killer. One of the students considers the murderer “a lunatic” who is “probably lying low as the police investigation accelerated.” Bundy disagrees: “No. . . this was a professional job; the man has done it before. He’s probably long gone by now” (344). Bundy, typically, is telling a half-truth. He, the killer, has definitely “done it before,” but he is far from “long gone”; he is in the midst of the students with whom he debates the issue. His presence is an eerie and disturbing incident among many other such incidents.

In Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema’s “Making Up Monsters: Set and Costume Design in Horror Films,” Tamao Nakahara explains how, in Psycho, “décor becomes the narrative’s organising [sic] image” (141):

In the film‘s trailer, Hitchcock makes a point to associate the killer, Norman Bates. . . with his safe have and with the birds he sews up: “his favorite spot was the little parlour [sic] behind his office in the motel. . . . I suppose you’d call this his hideaway. His hobby as you see was taxidermy. A crow here. . . an owl there”. During the scene in which Norman invites his future victim, Marion Crane. . . into the parlour [sic] for supper, he is visually defined by the way that the frame unites him with the various stuffed birds in the room. As the shots and shot-reverse-shots alternate between Norman and Marion during their conversation, the camera remains generally in the same position for all of Marion’s shots, while those for Norman change angles to frame him with one bird and then another in the set design. While the conversation is light, the camera shows Norman from the waist up to the right of a dresser with a couple of small birds. As soon as the topic of “mother” is broached, the camera angle changes to show him in a low angle medium shot in front of two paintings (one of a nude) and two menacing spread-winged birds near the ceiling--an image that suggests Norman’s conflicted feelings of sexual arousal and self-censure for that arousal. Finally, when Marion suggests putting Norman’s mother away in an institution, the enraged Norman is shown in close-up flanked by two birds abutting against his ears. As if to provide a wall ornament for each mood and emotion, Norman’s sanctuary, and his behaviour [sic] in it, hints at his multiple personalities (142-143).

Although, as Verstraten observes, “the narrative techniques and stylistic procedures in cinema are inevitably fundamentally different than those in literature (or those in comics, music, painting, sculpture, and theater, to name but a few),” and, in some cases, the twain between these “techniques and. . . procedures” in one medium will never meet those of another medium, there are narrative and stylistic techniques that do, in part, overlap, such as do (to some extent) both point of view (in both media) and set design (in cinema) and description (in literature), from which both cinematographic and literary artists can, and should, learn from on another.

Sources

Nakahara, Tamao. "Making Up Monsters: Set and Costume Design in Horror Films." Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, 2010: Print.

Rule, Ann. The Stranger Beside Me: The Shocking Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy. New York: Pocket Books, 2009. Print.

Verstraten, Peter. Film Narratology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Print.

Horror from the Mouths of Babes

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

One, two,

Freddy’s coming for you!
Three, four,
Better lock the door.
Five, six,
Get a crucifix.
Seven, eight,
Better stay up late.
Nine, ten,
Never sleep again. . . .

A Nightmare on Elm Street opens with innocent children singing this haunting rhyme as they skip rope.

Stephen King’s novel The Tommyknockers is based upon another poignant and horrific verse, the third and fourth lines of King himself wrote:

Late last night and the night before,
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
I want to go out, don't know if I can,
'Cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.

“Hush,” an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, also features a nursery rhyme-like ditty:

These songs are eerie and unsettling, disturbing and creepy. One reason that they are distressing is that they are sung by children. In one case, the children are playing; they are skipping rope. Their play is a reminder of their youth. Their voices are high and sweet, pure and natural. However, the lyrics to the ditties they sing are anything but sweet and innocent; they are vile and wicked--or, at least, they refer to wicked acts, to someone who is stalking or hunting a victim, to the need to lock oneself behind a door, the need to seek divine assistance or protection, the need to maintain nightlong vigilance (A Nightmare on Elm Street); to remain at home rather than to go outside (The Tommyknockers); the need to remain silent, to lock oneself inside one’s house, and the need to say nothing even to one’s own mother, possibly lest “The Gentlemen,” who are “coming by,” likewise harm her (“The Gentlemen”). This juxtaposition of innocence and wickedness is itself alone troubling. However the inclusion of nursery rhymes concerning such brutal action as the verses describe is also unsettling for other reasons.

Can't even shout, can't even cry,
The Gentleman are coming by.
Looking in windows, knocking on doors,
They need to take seven and they might take yours.
Can't call mom, can't say the word,
You're going to die screaming but you won't be heard.

How is it that the children who sing such songs have an awareness of the atrocious deeds about which they warn their listeners? Were they victims? Do they know others who were victims? Were they eyewitnesses to the attacks and visitations they describe? Since these songs are not traditional nursery rhymes, they seem to imply first-hand or close secondhand knowledge.

The sings are creepy, too, because they seem to imply a deadly inevitability. Whether it’s Freddy who’s “coming for you” or the Tommyknockers who are “knocking at the door” or The Gentlemen who “need to take seven,” it seems that they are relentless, that they will keep coming, no matter what, and that, sooner or later (probably sooner), they will succeed. They will kill, mutilate, eviscerate. Nothing, these songs suggest, can stop them, whether it’s locking one’s windows and doors, arming oneself with a crucifix, staying awake all night, remaining home rather than venturing out, shouting, crying out, or calling one’s mother. Freddy, the Tommyknockers, and the Gentlemen will succeed in carrying out their violence and murder no matter what one does to thwart them.

Moreover, the words of these rhymes threaten the listener (and, therefore, the moviegoer or the reader him- or herself) directly, employing the second person: “Freddy’s coming for you” and “They need to take seven, and they may take yours.”

Almost as an afterthought, one realizes that these ditties also function on a practical level, advising the moviegoer of the movies’ basic storylines as the songs, at the same time, acquaint viewers with the film’s genre.

"Psycho" and "The Birds": The Reason They Endure

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Looking back at some of the “classic” horror movies of the forties, fifties, and sixties, it’s difficult to determine just what (and why) these films were considered frightening. This difficulty applies even to such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds.

Maybe I can get some insight into this matter by considering some of these movies’ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. This site awards Psycho (1960) a 99% “fresh” rating, meaning that 99 percent of the site’s reviews award it a favorable review. What is the bases of these favorable reviews?

One critic views the movie as a trailblazer.

Another critic considers it “shocking.”

A third opines that “Alfred Hitchcock should be credited with making the first slasher film” and thereby providing the “template” for future films of this type.

Still another commentator regards the movie as being “more analyzed” than any other.

According to another pundit, the film is “impressive” in having been well crafted.

Another critic seems to attribute the movie’s success to Janet Leigh’s attractiveness and taste in brassieres: “Janet Leigh, stalking around in pointy brassieres, making bird-gestures, and flirting with the coprophobic Perkins, is one of cinema's most deliciously perverse pleasures.”

One authority claims the film’s popularity derives from several of its scenes: “The music, the setting, the shower scene, the mother in the cellar... everything about this iconic film has passed into cinema history. “

How about the film’s “manipulation of audience identification” and “style”? One critic sees these attributes as being largely responsible for the movie’s enduring appeal.

None of these comments seem all that insightful concerning Psycho’s attractiveness to moviegoers over half a century.

What about Rotten Tomatoes’ take on the lasting popularity of another horror film by Hitchcock, namely The Birds (1963)? The website labels this movie 95% “fresh,” with reviewers offering the following comments concerning the film:

“The only thing dated is the special effects. The suspense holds up well.”

“Although not as horrifically shocking as ‘Psycho,’ [sic] ‘The Birds’ [sic] is a more sophisticated film, and represents a high watermark [sic] in the prolific career of a true maestro of cinema.”

“Alfred Hitchcock's most abstract film (1963), and perhaps his subtlest, still yielding new meanings and inflections after a dozen or more viewings.”

“More novelty than spectacle, but overall a chilling exercise in nihilistic terror.”

“Still a dream come true after you've met enough Californians.”

“It's fierce and Freudian as well as great cinematic fun, with ample fodder for the amateur psychologist following up on Hitch's tortuous involvement with his leading ladies.”

“Inventive classic.”

Are these reviewers’ comments any more helpful in establishing this film’s almost half-a-century-long appeal? You decide.

For my part, I have a simple, but, I think, affective, explanation for these movie’s continuing appeal. They were filmed in more innocent times, before the multiplicity of media sources and choices, when the concept of the serial killer was fairly new and the crimes of Ed Gein, upon whom Norman Bates is based, were both contemporary, shocking millions across the country and around the world, thanks to the news and to Robert Bloch’s novel. (The term “serial killer” was not coined until the 1970s, Wikipedia tells us, and Psycho was released in 1960.) In other words, for the relatively innocent audiences of the day, Norman Bates represented a new kind of bogeyman--the transvestite momma’s boy-become-killer whose penchant for helpless young women made every young woman a potential victim of similar homicidal maniacs. Why does the movie continue to appeal to the more jaded audiences of today? I think it does so because of its nostalgic nature, hearkening back, as it does, to a day in which relatively innocent audiences were confronted with a new type of bogeyman.

How, then, do I explain the original and the continuing popularity of The Birds? I think that it represents society’s unconscious fear that something will go wrong. What, precisely, will go wrong, when it will go wrong, and why it will go wrong are unknown and, perhaps, unknowable. They are also, strangely enough, unimportant. What matters is the uneasy, the disquieting, the unsettling and vague notion, the inkling, the hunch, the gut feeling, the intuition that something, sooner or later, is going to happen, something that probably makes no sense and has no business happening, something as absurd as it horrific--and catastrophic: the end of time, the end of the world, the apocalypse that mystics have predicted, again and again, off and on for centuries and millennia. In other words, The Birds symbolizes the haunting suspicion that we don’t really quite deserve the bounty of riches with which we’ve been blessed and that, someday, harpies of some sort, will be sent to us from above to harass and punish us, stripping away the blessings and destroying the bounty. In Hitchcock’s film, the harpies are birds of all kinds, coming, it seems, from everywhere, attacking Bodega Bay, California today and, tomorrow, the world. . . .

Shirley Jackson: Horror as a Slice of Life

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

I am reading The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson, and, as I do so, I am struck, again and again, by the strong similarity between her style and that of Flannery O’Connor’s. There is a directness to their sentences, a no-nonsense, straightforward cadence that marches resolutely forward, even as it describes and narrates unlikely stories typically involving grotesque characters. Despite the improbable tales and the fantastic characters, Jackson’s narratives are frequently slice-of-life stories, or narratives that involve mere segments of their characters’ lives without exposition, with little overt action, with minimal conflict, and with an inconclusive denouement. Her stories start in media res, characterizing their protagonists and antagonists as they go, seemingly on the fly. The incongruity, and, often, the irony, that results from this bare-bones approach in which realistic portrayal is juxtaposed to, or is the vehicle for, the grotesque and eccentric, is jarring. To get a sense of the meaning of any of Jackson’s stories, one must reread them, usually several times. The reward for one’s time and effort, however, is well worth the trouble.

Since most of her stories start, progress, and end the same way, an analysis of one is a sufficient introduction to Jackson’s method. I choose to illustrate her approach with an examination of “Trial By Combat,” which originally appeared, in 1944, in The New Yorker.

The plot is deceptively simple. Emily Johnson, a young woman working in New York City, while her husband is away in the Army, possibly at war, lives in a rooming house, where, during the past two weeks of her six-weeks’ residence to date, she begins to notice that someone is pilfering her belongings. Handkerchiefs, costume jewelry, perfume, and “a set of china dogs” have disappeared from her room.

One day, when she is returning to her room from the roof, where she has been sunning herself, she sees “someone come out of her room and go down the stairs,” and Emily recognizes her “visitor” as her downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Allen. (It is “an old house,”wherein the tenants’ skeleton keys fit one another’s, as well as their own, rooms.) Emily goes to Mrs. Allen’s room, where the two women have a cordial conversation about their respective husbands and their fondness for flowers and plants before Emily makes oblique references to someone’s having come repeatedly into her room and pilfered her belongings, declaring that the trespassing and theft “has to stop” or she will be obliged to “do something about it.”

Emily sees that Mrs. Allen’s room is almost identical to her own in its furnishings: “the same narrow bed with the tan cover, the same maple dresser and armchair; the closet. . . on the opposite side of the room, but [with] the window. . . in the same relative position” (42). Although Mrs. Allen is twice her own age, the widow’s late husband, “dead for nearly five years,” was a soldier. The couple was childless, although photographs of “several” children cluster about his photograph, his “nephews and nieces,” Mrs. Allen explains. When Emily expresses her fondness for flowers as a means of brightening her room, lamenting that they “fade so quickly,” Mrs. Allen tells her that she can prolong their color by adding an aspirin to the water so that “they last much longer” and “make a room look
. . . friendly.”

Despite her visit to Mrs. Allen’s room, the thefts continue: “The following evening, when Emily came home from work, a pair of cheap earrings was gone, along with two packages of cigarettes which had been in her dresser drawer” (45). Emily responds to these additional thefts by calling in sick to work and biding her time in her room until she hears Mrs. Allen go downstairs, at which point Emily goes to the elderly lady’s room. After looking “for a moment at the picture of Mrs. Allen’s husband,” Emily opens the top drawer of the widow’s dresser and finds her own belongings inside: “Her handkerchiefs were there, in a neat, small pile, and next to them the cigarettes and the earrings. In one corner the little china dog was sitting” (46).

Mrs. Allen returns, catching Emily in the act of rifling her drawers. And Emily tells herself, “now turn around and tell her,” but instead of accusing the widow of having stolen her belongings, Emily says that “I had a terrible headache and I came down to borrow some aspirin. . . . and when I found you were out I thought surely you wouldn’t mind if I borrowed some aspirin” (47). Mrs. Allen accepts Emily’s explanation, gives her the aspirin, and tells her that “I’ll run up later today. . . just to see how you feel” (47).

Much of the meaning of this seemingly simple, six-page story is derived from what is left unsaid rather than from what is directly stated. The similarities between Emily and Mrs. Allen bind them together. The widow is almost an older version of the protagonist, an embodiment of Emily’s own future. They both live in a rooming house, in Spartanly furnished, nearly identical rooms. Their husbands are both away--Emily’s in the Army, Mrs. Allen’s a soldier taken by death, perhaps (the story’s title suggests) as a casualty of war. They seem lonely (Mrs. Allen’s only “companion” is the Woman’s Home Companion she is reading when Emily visits her, and the widow tells the younger woman, “It’s so seldom one meets anyone really. . .nice. . . in a place like this” [42]).

The flowers and plants they purchase to “brighten up” their rooms and make them seem friendlier also suggest the loneliness and barrenness of their lives, as does Mrs. Allen’s (and, indeed, Emily’s own) childlessness, which is emphasized by the children’s photographs clustered around the dead soldier’s photograph, as if his nephews and nieces were his and Mrs. Allen’s surrogate children. As the story’s title indicates, both women have endured a “trial by combat,” and it is the commonality of their experience that appears to draw them to one another.

They lead pitiful lives, but their empathy allows them to pity each other. Moreover, both women are lonely and confide in one another that they have been eager to meet one another, which suggests that, in their misery, they seek company: “I’ve seen you, of course, several times,” Mrs. Allen tells Emily, “and thought how pleasant you looked.” Emily replies, “I’ve wanted to meet you, too” (42). Their common plight allows Emily to overlook Mrs. Allen’s thefts and to conspire with her in pretending that they are nothing more than neighbors, or even friends, not strangers, who are concerned about one another’s health and well being.

There seems to be a darker, somewhat horrific subtext to this story, too. It may be that Mrs. Allen practices a sort of symbolic cannibalism. Her kleptomania seems to be an attempt to secure for herself some of Emily’s “nice” and “pleasant” circumstances. By taking items that belong to Emily, the older widow seems intent upon becoming like Emily, at least in part, by performing a ritual similar to that of ancient and medieval warriors who ate the hearts of their vanquished foes in order to take into themselves their enemies’ courage and military prowess by literally ingesting the presumed seats of their souls. If such an interpretation is accepted (admittedly, it is controversial), the implication of Emily’s observation, addressed to Mrs. Allen, “You’ve made yours [i. e., Mrs. Allen’s room] look much nicer than mine” and Mrs. Allen’s rejoinder, “I’ve been here for three years. . . . You’ve only been here a month or so, haven’t you?” much more significant--and macabre--than this dialogue might seem otherwise. Has Mrs. Allen been stealing from other tenants’ rooms for “three years”? Are her thefts the reason that her room looks “much nicer” than Emily’s, and will Emily, who has already trespassed upon Mrs. Allen’s room, as Mrs. Allen has trespassed upon Emily’s, likewise become a kleptomaniac, whose thefts improve the appearance of her room, making it “nicer,” brighter looking, and friendlier? Will Mrs. Allen’s ways become Emily’s ways? Will the widow become the mentor and Emily the apprentice in cannibalizing the lives of other tenants, as it were, by stealing bits and pieces from their neighbors’ lives?

“Trial By Combat” is a much eerier story than the text which meets the reader’s eye, because its subtext opens itself to unusual, even grotesque, interpretations, largely because of the technique that Jackson employs in writing slice-of-life stories involving mere segments of their characters’ lives, told without exposition, with little overt action, with minimal conflict, and with an inconclusive denouement. Writers, aspiring or professional, can learn a lot by apprenticing themselves to such a master as Shirley Jackson, author of “The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House (which is one of the inspirations for Stephen King’s television miniseries Rose Red), and many other haunting tales.


Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. Print.

The Ted Dilemma: Is Evil a Matter or Nature or Nurture, Determinism or Free Will?

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes life is more horrible than horror fiction. In The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule demonstrates the truth of this observation in recounting a nightmare she had as she tried to come to terms with the apparent guilt of her friend, Ted Bundy:

I found myself in a large parking lot, with cars backing out and racing away. One of the cars ran over an infant, injuring it terribly, and I grabbed it up, knowing it was up to me to save it. I had to get to a hospital, but no one would help. I carried the baby, wrapped almost entirely in a gray blanket, into a car rental agency. They had plenty of cares, but they looked at the baby in my arms and refused to rent me one. I tried to get an ambulance, but the attendants turned away. Finally, in desperation, I found a wagon--a child’s wagon--and I put the injured infant in it, pulling it behind me for miles until I found an emergency room.

I carried the baby, running, up to the desk. The admitting nurse glanced at the bundle in my arms. “No, we will not treat it.”

“But it’s alive! It’s going to die if you don’t do something.”

“It’s better. Let it die. It will do no one any good to treat it.”

The nurse, the doctors, everyone, turned and moved away from me and the bleeding baby.

And then I looked down at it. It was not an innocent baby; it was a demon. Even as I held it, it sunk its teeth into my hand and bit me (240-241).

This is the end of her dream. It is horrific. It seems mysterious, too. A baby that’s not a baby, but a demon--what could such imagery mean? Rule is certain that she knows. The baby symbolizes innocence, the demon (its true self), evil: evil is masquerading as innocence, or as she informs her readers: “I did not have to be a Freudian scholar to understand my dream; it was all too clear. Had I been trying to save a monster, trying to protect something or someone who was too dangerous and evil to survive?”(240-241).

To describe Bundy as a monster is an understatement. According to Wikipedia, the law student confessed to thirty murders, but may have committed as many as a hundred, and his modus operandi wasn’t merely cruel; it was savage: “Bundy would bludgeon his victims, then strangle them to death. He also engaged in rape and necrophilia” (“Ted Bundy”). His youngest victim, Floridian Kimberly Leach, was only twelve years old. If the brutality of his crimes, the sexual perversions he committed, and the slaying of a preteen girl are not enough to manifest the evil that was Ted Bundy (and, of course, they are), then his own words, chilling to the bone, concerning morality certainly are:

Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself--what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself--that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any ‘reason’ to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring--the strength of character--to throw off its shackles. . . . I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable ‘value judgment’ that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure that I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me–after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.

At about the time of the rise of modern psychology, which is often identified with the work of Wilhelm Wundt, who established the school of experimental psychology at Leipzig University in 1879, more than a decade before Sigmund Freud launched his ill-fated psychoanalysis, Edgar Allan Poe became one of the earliest, if not the earliest, modern writer to include madmen in his stories instead of inhuman monsters. Many other writers of horror fiction have since followed suit, and the human monster is one of today’s most popular types. One of the most widely known contemporary examples is Thomas Harris’ Hannibal (“The Cannibal”) Lecter (Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal).

Perhaps, as they age, aficionados of horror fiction become more interested in human monsters like Bundy than in fantastic creatures such as demons, werewolves, and zombies, recognizing that the true monsters are those in the mirror. Certainly, as the authors of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Monster Book point out, there is no lack of variety for such human fiends, a category of the monstrous that includes not only serial killers, but also Adolf Hitler, murderers, rapists, “monsters and abusers, drug trade predators, the heartless and shallow, and even the bitter, belittling monsters,” concluding “there are so many people whose behavior is unnatural or inhuman that we need go no further” than human nature itself “to find our monsters” (360). Joss Whedon, the creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series seems to agree. It is people, he confesses, who “terrify” him more than anything else (330).

Among the many more traditional (that is, inhuman) monsters that appear on Buffy the Vampire Slayer are a number of human monsters, as the authors of The Monster Book point out, including Billy Fordham (“Lie to Me”), “the Kiddie League baseball coach” (“Nightmares”), Ted Buchanan (“Ted”), Frawley, Frederick, and Hans (“Homecoming”), Tucker (“The Prom”), Coach Marin and Nurse Greenleigh (“Go Fish”), “the lunch lady” (“Earshot”), Kyle, Tor, Rhonda, and Heidi (“The Pack”), “the demon-worshiping fraternity brothers” (“Reptile Boy”), Eric Gittleson (“Some Assembly Required”), Pete Clarner (“Beauty and the Beasts”), Gwendolyn Post (“Revelations”), Maggie Walsh (several episodes), and Jack (“Beer Bad”) (361-362).

There are a number of theories as to what causes human monsters. Are they born and bred or are they made? Is it nature or nurture? Perhaps it is a combination both of genetics and environment. Another way to ask the same question is to pose it as a philosophical issue: is evil behavior determined or does it result from the exercise of free will? The authors of The Monster Book favor nurture (or, perhaps, the lack of it) over nature, arguing that “abnormal brain chemistry may account for certain psychopathic and sociopathic behavior, but most human monsters are not born that way; they are made into what they are by circumstances, by experience and example” (363).

Buffy’s executive story editor and writer Douglas Petrie even offers an etiology for the evil of one of the show’s long-standing human monsters, the rogue slayer Faith. The causes of her monstrosity are parental neglect; feelings of isolation, loneliness, and alienation; and an inability to “compete” against Buffy, but, at bottom, Petrie suggests, the "key" to understanding the wickedness of Faith is her “pain”: “The whole key to Faith is that she is in pain. . . . She’s so lonely and so desperate, and all her toughness comes out of trying to cover that. That’s what monsters are made of.” Her pain, however, he intimates, comes out of her lack of the relationships she would like to have: “You’ve always got a carrot you can dangle in front of her. Mrs. Post was the mother she never had. Buffy and her friends are the best friends she never had. The Mayor is the dad she never had. So she’s always looking for a family and always coming up short and making these horrible choices, and it drove her insane” (368). Primarily, Faith’s monstrosity, then, results from her abuse by her family and by society in general, by the way she has been treated--or, rather, mistreated--but it is also a result of her “horrible choices.” Evil is caused, in Petrie’s estimation, by societal abuse and the exercise of the abused person’s own free will. Secondarily, nature might also have a part to play in human monsters’ origin and development, Petrie seems to admit, tossing in, as if for good measure, the observation, concerning Faith, “Plus I think she was missing a couple of screws to begin with. ‘If you don’t love me, you will fear me’ seems to be her m. o. [modus operandi]” (368).

Paradoxically, Whedon and Petrie appear to disagree with respect to how they view threats represented by human monsters. Whedon admits that “people scare him,” the authors of The Monster Book reveal. “Terrify is the actual word he uses” (330). Petrie, on the other hand, in discussing the rogue slayer Faith, a human monster in her own right, says, “she’s not a stable girl, but a fun one” (368). In their commentary upon human monsters, the book’s authors resolve this paradox, perhaps, when they argue that, because of the number and variety of actual human monsters among us, fictional ones seem to be unnecessary:

There are so many people whose behavior is unnatural or inhuman that we need go no further to find our monsters. We don’t really need vampires or werewolves.

Or do we?

In a world where such real, visceral horrors are so disturbingly commonplace, horrors on the screen or the page may be more comforting than terrifying. We can close the book. We can turn of the television when the show is over. We have control. But in the real world, the show is never over. Nothing is more disturbing or monstrous than that (360-361).

That’s not a bad rationale for the genre.

Leftover Plots, Part V

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Plot Generator XY112G

One way to come up with ideas for short stories and novels is to steal--I mean, borrow--them from other writers. I write of this practice in earlier posts, “Leftover Plots,” parts I through IV. Those articles are more general than this one (and, possibly, future ones, which will focus specifically on the works of horror fiction’s current bad boy par excellence, Stephen King.

I’m not really going to tell anyone how to steal from King (or anybody else, for that matter), of course, because (a) stealing is wrong and ( b) plagiarism can be costly, to one’s reputation as well as to one’s purse.

However, ideas (like titles) cannot be copyrighted. They are free to anyone and everyone, which is why, for example, The Lost World (1925), Jurassic Park (1993), and 10,000 Years B. C. (2008) (or, for that matter, The Land Before Time [1988]), and many, many more movies about either dinosaurs or dinosaurs in conflict with human beings have been made. No doubt, many another will follow.

Often, horror writers throw off ideas for short stories and even other novels in the novels and screenplays that they write. The concepts sometimes fall like sparks from the tail of a fiery comet (or, at least, comets of the type that we generally see in science fiction movies and tend to imagine in the theaters of our minds). King’s novel, Desperation, suggests a few ideas that could become the bases for additional short stories or, perhaps, even novels. Others of his many works offer similar suggestions.

One of these ideas, the one that appeals most to me, is that of someone’s discovery of idols that might or might not be like the images of the false gods that King depicts in Desperation. If one devoted his or her story to only one (or a few) idols, their properties, and the results of human interaction with them, he or she would be apt to write a short story, but were he or she to consider a number of these false gods, their characteristics, and their effects on those who make contact with them, he or she might well produce a narrative of novel, or even epic, scope.

One’s development of this idea would, of course, have to be one’s own; otherwise, borrowing an idea would, in fact, likely become stealing a treatment of such an idea, or, in a word, plagiarism.

In his novel, King depicts his idols as being like “some kind of stone artifact,” and they have a decidedly sexual effect upon those who make contact with them, as Cynthia discovers when she touches one of the idols with “a tentative finger” and “her hips jerked forward as if she’d gotten an electric shock and her pelvis banged into the edge of a table,” making her blush (254-255). King’s omniscient narrator then describes the idol in more detail, indicating that it has an animal shape:

It was a rendering of what might have been a wolf or a coyote, and although it was crude, it had enough power to make them both forget, at least for a few seconds, that they were standing sixty feet from the leftovers of a mass murder. The beast’s head was twisted at a strange angle (a somehow hungry angle), and its eyeballs appeared to be starting out of their sockets in utter fury. Its snout was wildly out of proportion to its body--almost the snout of an alligator--and it was split open to show a jagged array of teeth. The statue, if that is what it was, had been broken off just below the chest. There were stumps of forelegs, but that was all. The stone was pitted and eroded with age. It was glittery n places, too, like the rocks collected in one of the Dandux baskets. . . .

“Look at its tongue,” Cynthia said in a strange, dreaming voice.

“What about it?’ [Steve asks]

“It’s a snake” (255).

The narrator’s description is vivid and detailed, allowing the reader to visualize the artifact readily, which makes the idol seem both more bizarre and, paradoxically, more realistic than it would be had the storyteller merely glossed over the strange artifact with a few adjectives or descriptive phrases.

The idols can make those who touch them experience orgasms; can make them forget their surroundings; and, readers learn a few pages later, can have a devastating effect upon their self-esteem. As Cynthia later tells Steve, when she touched the idol, “it seemed like I remembered every rotten thing that ever happened to me in my life,” and, she admits, its touch made her think of “sex. . . the dirtier the better” (318). Moreover, contact with the idols can spur its victims into acting upon these lusts, as both Cynthia and Steve find out soon enough.

There are other idols than the image of the wolf or the coyote:

He thought at first that there were three odd-looking charms lying in her open palm--the sort of thing girls sometimes wore dangling from their bracelets. But they were too big, too heavy. Not charms, but carvings, stone carvings, each about two inches long. One was a snake. The second was a buzzard with one wing chipped off. Mad, bulging eyes stared out at him from beneath its bald dome. The third was a rat on its hind legs. They all looked pitted and ancient (480).

The artifacts are obviously images of gods or demons, as they have inexplicable, supernatural effects upon those who come into contact with them. At the same time, however, they are tangible; they are material; they have concrete form. Made of stone, they are subject to the long-term effects of natural forces; they erode: they are “pitted and eroded with age,” and they appear “ancient.” Moreover, they can be “broken,” “chipped” and, presumably, destroyed. They have powerful effects upon the humans who make contact with them, but the artifacts are not invulnerable. The

Were another writer to write about such statues, he or she would have to do so in such a way as to make them his or her own creations, with properties different from those whitish King ascribes to his, and with effects that also differ from those that King’s false gods have upon those with whom the carvings come into contact. There are various ways to accomplish this task, which are better left to each individual to determine for him- or herself.

Another idea that spins off, so to speak, King’s novel is the creation of demons out of the whole cloth of one’s imagination rather than to embody such evil spirits on the basis of research concerning demonology. King’s demon is a spirit from another dimension, utterly dependent for incarnation upon possessing the bodies of other, corporeal beings, such as humans or animals. However, the demon’s metabolism is extremely fast, and it soon wears out the body of its host, so that it must possess another and another. His possession results in the deaths of the possessed, whose bodies thereafter enlarge, possibly in response to the greater demands upon the organs of Tak’s greater metabolic rate. Tak is able to exercise control over animals and insects through a power similar to telepathy. He is also able to project his power into the stone idols, or can tahs, that various characters discover in Desperation. When he possesses a human being, the body’s senses, strength, and natural abilities are heightened, although Tak can also perceive phenomena by other, extrasensory means, as when he is aware of the presence of a nameplate inside the Carvers’ recreational vehicle without entering the vehicle of looking through any of its windows (“Tak [Stephen King],” Wikipedia).

By imaging one’s demon (perhaps on the basis of one’s own inner demons or the problems and issues that best society), one is pretty much guaranteed an original creation. This approach is as wide open as one’s own ability to think outside the box of tradition. Where King creates Tak, you or I might create Tik or Paddywack in the same fashion, by using our own imagination or our knowledge of social problems, past or present, to envisioned to embody our own concepts of the demonic, creating one or more demons in our own image and likeness as a result, as King apparently did in writing of the idols in his novel.

Another provocative consideration is what might happen to animals that survive Tak’s telepathic influence? Would their exposure to the demon’s mind have a long-lasting, or even permanent, effect upon them, and, if so, what, exactly, might the animals change? Perhaps they would become monstrous versions of their previous selves, retaining the enhancements of their natural abilities that they experienced as Tak’s cognitive thralls. Would big game hunters ally themselves with demonologists or scientists to hunt down these demonic beasts and capture or kill them?

At the end of the novel, not much remains of the town of Desperation, but what if it--or, rather, another small town, elsewhere, that has experienced a similar catastrophe--remember, be inspired to borrow, not to steal, and make other writers’ ideas your own--were to be rebuilt? With its horrific past, could new horrors occur to the community’s children or grandchildren, a generation or two after the original calamity? King’s novel It suggests that such could easily be the case.

Could the demonic entity that destroyed your first town return to destroy another community? The answer is in King’s simultaneous, mirror-image release of a twin novel, The Regulators, which features many of the same characters as appear in Desperation, but living wholly different lives in a wholly different community.

Other of King’s noels suggest other ideas for additional stories or novels, which, possibly, I will consider in future posts, although not necessarily in a continuous order.

What Sort of Man Reads "Playboy"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

For half a century, Playboy magazine has defined its targeted audience in a page devoted to fashion and style, the contents of which answer the rhetorical question, “What sort of man reads Playboy?” According to this page, the Playboy reader is urbane, stylish, wealthy, single, and literate. He’s handsome, loves women, drives a convertible sports car, attends college (unless he’s already graduated), smokes cigars, drinks brandy, and has a thing for sweaters. Advertisers took note of this description, running full-page, full-color ads that pitched just such products to the bunny-loving sophisticate.

Until Penthouse debuted, focusing its appeal on the blue-collar worker, Esquire was one of Playboy’s biggest competitors. It focused mostly on fashion and literature, publishing fiction by such literary luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Terry Southern. It also included some cheesecake art, including pinup art by George Petty (the “Petty Girls”) and Alberto Vargas (the “Vargas Girls”). Like Playboy and Penthouse, Esquire was chauvinistic and sexist, but popular among teenage and young adult males.

Women liked these magazines, too, for a different reason. Those who succeeded in appearing in their nude “pictorials” or as centerfolds were often exposed to opportunities in modeling or even acting, and quite a few celebrities owe their careers to appearances in such magazines, Playboy in particular. Being the subject of a pictorial or a centerfold was equivalent to having society stamp its seal of approval upon a young woman’s beauty and sexuality, making her, even more than a Miss America winner, a glamour girl.

Knowing the significance of artifacts of popular culture allows writers to characterize their characters simply by alluding to these objects, using them as props in a manner similar to that of product placement, which is the deliberate inclusion, in a conspicuous location, of a product in a filmed movie or television scene, in exchange for remuneration from its maker. For example, a character on a television situation comedy, or sitcom, might open his or her refrigerator door, thereby providing viewers a glimpse of the interior, well stocked with Pepsi, Coca-Cola, or some other soft drink.

Here’s an example of how an allusion to Playboy could be used to characterize a woman of fading youth and beauty:

The magazine cover showed Susan Willis naked, in all her glory--well, not quite all her glory; the set decorator had placed a caladium in a strategic location--lying languorously upon her desk, surrounded by the accoutrements of her vocation: a typewriter, a Dictaphone, a Rolodex, manila folders, and a calendar with a circled date. The photograph’s caption read, “Don’t forget to show her your appreciation on Secretary’s Day!” The implication, of course, was that the boss was having an affair with his personal secretary. Corny, Susan had thought, even twenty years ago, when her image had adorned the cover of the world’s most popular men’s magazine, thereby authenticating her beauty and confirming her sexuality, or “glamour,” as the industry had called that attribute in those days. Susan had tried hard, over the intervening years, to maintain that figure and that face, and, thanks to dieting, exercise, and a bit of nip and tuck, had mostly succeeded. She was a handsome woman at thirty eight. She’d never again be the glamorous girl she’d been then, though, except in the blown-up, framed photograph of that long-ago cover.

Magazines and other products have spent thousands, even millions, of dollars in marketing research to identify and analyze their customers and consumers in general. By analyzing their advertisements, a writer has a good idea of “what sort of man reads Playboy,” what sort of woman reads Good Housekeeping or Ms.; drinks Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Southern Comfort, or Jack Daniels; drives a Volvo, Toyota, or Rolls Royce; enrolls his or her children in a private school; and so on. By alluding to these products in a story, of the horror genre or otherwise, writers have a shorthand means of characterizing their characters. Of course, there should be additional characterization, through the characters’ dialogue and actions, but a reference to Playboy, Rolls Royce, Saab, or Chef Boyardee is a quick way to establish the basic tastes, values, and even, at times, mindset of characters.

Dean Koontz does so in his novels, although his allusions are to products and cultural artifacts that his typical reader is unlikely to be acquainted with. Stephen King, who once described his own style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries,” alludes to icons that are more in the domain of popular culture, letting his readers know that the author is one of their own (even if, as a multimillionaire he is not anymore). In the first three chapters of Desperation alone, King makes these references to popular culture:

• Acura
• Caprice
• Sam Browne
• Daisy canned ham
• Bonny Raitt
• Smokey Bear
• Conoco
• Rollerblades
• Marlboro Man
• Grateful Dead
• Smiley-face keychain

Many others occur throughout the remainder of the 690-page novel.

While it is true that an author can overuse such allusions (and King probably tends to do so, not only in Desperation, but also in most of his other books and, indeed, short stories), a judicious use of such references, whether to high culture, low culture, or something between the two, is a handy, dandy way of inviting a particular type of reader into one’s fictional world and, at the same time, characterizing the dramatic personae who live and breathe and have their being in this imaginary world.