Image and Imagination

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Like many who are interested in horror fiction, I occasionally indulge myself by perusing online images linked to such search terms as “horror,” “eerie,” “scary,” and so forth. For those of us who are twisted enough to enjoy such sights, viewing such images can be not only fun (I know, I know; I’ve already admitted I’m twisted!), but also informative, even educational.

One image is that of a young woman. She wears black (or, perhaps, she is naked--it’s hard to tell, because only her face, neck, and upper chest show; she is otherwise lost in, or swallowed up by, darkness--and her skin is not only pale, but also reflective: indeed, she seems to radiate the light that shines upon her, illuminating those portions of her body that I’ve mentioned, but leaving most of her figure invisible in the darkness.

Moreover, the flesh of her upper chest seems to be alive with internal light, as if she glows from within. Her eyes are dark, and she wears a slight, mysterious smile rather like that of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. A scar is etched down her forehead, from just above her eyebrow to midway down her cheek, but the scar is not red: it is black, like her hair, her eyes, and her dress (if, indeed, she is dressed), as if she bleeds black, rather than crimson, blood, a suggestion of her innate depravity, perhaps. She seems evil, despite her youth and beauty, as if she is inwardly corrupt. The image is suggestive, posing many questions that could lead to a plot, to other characters, to a conflict, to a setting, and to a theme--in short, to a story that is both horrible to read and to contemplate. The journalist’s questions should get the imaginative writer started: Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?

The next image is full of eyes.  There are eleven of them, all feminine, with long, lustrous lashes and a glittering gaze, floating, as it seems, against a fiery background of yellow and orange, black and white. They stare, intensely, at the viewer, returning gaze for gaze. At the center of the picture, a pair of eyes, complete with the suggestion, at least, of knitted eyebrows, stares forth from the digital canvass, commanding the viewer’s attention; the presence of a strategically positioned diamond shape and of a ridge of material that resembles steel more than it does bone suggest the skeletal remnant of a nose. There is malevolence in her gaze. Filaments of light float and twist in the air, unifying the floating eyes, but there is no context for the vision, so that, collectively, the eyes seem to suggest madness. 

The subject, about whom nothing is knowable but that she is female and apparently beautiful, strikes one as mad; perhaps the multiplicity of eyes implies a fragmented consciousness, shattered perceptions of reality, and a distorted view of the world. If so, the true source of her horror is internal, not external (except insofar as she may confuse the objective with her own subjectivity). Again, this image raises more questions than it supplies answers, producing a wealth--or, at least, a welter--of possibilities for exploration and explication, and, as before, the journalist’s questions may lead the imaginative writer to a story based upon the ideas and feelings that this image may inspire.

Not all images are created equal, of course, and one must exercise discrimination in his or her perusal of the many pictures of horror that are available online. One, for example, although interesting in itself, perhaps, is too puerile to be suggestive of a situation greater than itself--and, therefore, great enough, it may be, for a story.  It shows a skull flanked by jack-o-lanterns; the eye sockets of the death’s-head glow red, as do the mesh strands that serve as the image’s backdrop. There is the suggestion that the skull and the pumpkins are caught in a web of some kind and that along may come a spider, but such intimations are not enough for a horror story and do not raise possibilities for anyone to pursue in fiction or otherwise; they are, at best, merely decorative.

The problem of the skull and pumpkins raises an important question: what must an image accomplish in order to be useful to a writer of horror fiction? What quality or qualities must it possess? What must it evoke in the writer’s imagination?

The journalist’s questions are clues. Who? refers to an agent (if an individual) or to an agency (if an institution), and, of course, to the agent’s or agency’s motive and, probably, to his, her, or its values, feelings, thoughts, and even world view. What? alludes to the situation and the series of incidents or events that have brought the agent or the agency to this point of the action and to the series of events or incidents that are likely to result from both this initial situation and the agent’s or the agency’s actions in response to it. When? and Where? point to time and place, or setting--the story’s physical location and its cultural milieu. How? addresses the behavior of the characters, especially insofar as they are the causes and effects of various situations, actions, and reactions. Why? relates to both the characters’ motives and to the story’s theme. These are the elements common to all fiction, horror stories included, and it is these, therefore, that a truly inspirational image of horror will pose to the thoughtful and imaginative viewer, especially if he or she is--or hopes to be--a writer of imaginative fiction, of the horror genre or otherwise. An image that is capable of suggesting such elements is an evocative--and useful--one, indeed.

Sex and Horror, Part 4

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

The werewolf doesn’t figure large in Jason Colavito’s Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, in part, perhaps, because, as a horror icon, the werewolf was never as popular as such other monsters as vampires, witches, demons, and ghosts. In most werewolf fiction, the beast’s origins are seldom explained except to say that his existence is said to be due to a person’s having been bitten by a werewolf. Where the first werewolf came from, no one seems to know for sure or, if someone does, he or she isn’t saying.

The very mystery of the wolf is itself intriguing, for, often, the less we know concerning a person, place, or thing, the more interesting he, she, or it seems to us. The lore of the werewolf is sparse. A bite transforms someone into the monster. The beast transforms at the onset of the full moon (and, indeed, perhaps is transformed by this moon). It prowls by night, seeking whom it shall devour. Only silver bullets are fatal to it. Some werewolves have been the servants, but never the pets, of vampires.

Colavito makes reference to vampires’ keeping of werewolves as servants, as is the case in The Return of the Vampire, a 1944 film in which Bella Lugosi plays “a vampire” who “holds sway over a servant he has turned into a vampire”:

The vampire is Armand Tesla, who was once an eighteenth-century scientist but whose mastery o science led him to become an undead vampire. . . . Tesla re-enslaves his werewolf and uses his powers to stalk the family of Lady Jane Ainsley. . . .

. . . But Lady Jane uses psychology to reason with the werewolf, whom she rescued from lycanthropy once before. When a Nazi bomb knocks out Tesla, the werewolf drags the body into the sunlight, where the vampire melts away, freeing him from Tesla’s control (210-211).

Although Colavito doesn’t discuss the symbolic significance of this monster, it’s a fairly safe bet that the werewolf represents the animal nature of human beings. He is the beast within all of us, the animal that struggles to be free. From a scientific point of view, human beings are, after all, themselves animals of a higher order, perhaps, than the so-called lesser animals, the lions and tigers and bears, oh, my, and werewolves, like lamia, centaurs, minotaurs, sphinxes, mermaids, and other human-animal hybrids, represent the connection that human beings share with other predators.

Christians may accept the existence of demons, witches, and even ghosts, but most would be likely to draw the line at accepting the existence of werewolves. Such creatures, they would probably argue, are merely imaginary.

At best, werewolves represent a secular depiction of the animal instincts and impulses that human beings are said, from an evolutionary point of view, to have more or less repressed in the interests of civilization, culture, and society. They embody, in their shaggy forms, passions unrestrained, and may suggest an abandonment of the spiritual in pursuit of an unadulterated indulgence of the fleshly appetites, and, therefore, a denial, implicit or otherwise, of the soul

Moreover, werewolves are predators. They embody “nature red in tooth and claw,” suggesting that the world really is a jungle wherein species survive only if they are the fittest of their kind. As animals, werewolves are powerful and fierce and hard to beat. However, as humans, werewolves, one might be tempted to suppose, leave a lot to be desired. Aren’t they all but brainless, with fetid breath, terrible table manners, and worse etiquette? Aren’t they but brutes, pure and simple, reminders of what, perhaps, our forebears were, millennia ago, and what we may, should we devolve, be once again? So might men and women, as higher animals, suppose, but human beings are not allowed even this conceit, for, as The Return of the Vampire makes clear, these beast-men can reason, act in their own best interests, and even exact revenge against their cruel, but supposed, betters. Stronger, with greater stamina, and ferocious, werewolves are also capable of thinking and of forming beneficial relationships with others while punishing adversaries.

For Christians, there is no such animal. Instead, the equivalent might be an animated corpse--not a zombie per se, nor a mummy, nor a vampire--but someone more akin to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient mariner or Adam after the fall, a person who is spiritually dead. In other words, someone very like modern men and women, more dead than alive and completely without tail or fangs or fur.

But a werewolf? For Christians, there’s no such animal. Or is there?

According to some accounts, God Himself might punish sinners by transforming them into wolves, and some of those whom the church excommunicated were believed to become werewolves. Likewise, saints could curse men and women, transforming them into werewolves (“Werewolf,” Wikipedia). However, such accounts are relatively sparse. For the most part, werewolves are and remain secular creatures more akin to evolutionary theory than to theological doctrine.

If, in psychoanalysis, the superego substitutes for the moral commandments of God (or, alternatively, for heaven or righteousness), the ego for the free will exercised by human beings (or, alternatively, earth or corrupted virtue) , and the id for the devil (or, alternatively, hell or sin), the fate of those whom God curses by transforming them into werewolves seems to represent, in a Freudian reading, a psychotic obsession with sex and death, or eros and thanatos, the life instinct and the death instinct. The werewolf is a creature that is immersed in his or her own animal nature, in his or her own id, in his or her own sexuality. He or she is a figure half alive and half dead, just as he or she is a figure half human and half animal.

In the Christian reading of the same figure, the werewolf is a figure of the damned sinner, whom God has cast into the hell of him- or herself, cursed forever to remain the beastly, unrepentant sinner he or she has become, most likely long before God placed the lycanthropic curse upon his dying soul.


Note: In Part 5 of “Sex and Horror,” I will consider another icon of the genre, that of the witch.

Academy Award-Winning Horror Films, 1931 - 2007

These horror films won Academy Awards:

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931): Best Actor in a Leading Role, Fredric March

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945): Best Cinematography, Black and White, Harry Stradling, Sr.
 

An American Werewolf in London (1981): Best Achievement in Makeup, Rick Baker

 
Rosemary’s Baby (1983): Best Supporting Actress, Ruth Gordon

 
The Exorcist (1983): Best Sound, Robert Knudson and Best Adapted Screenplay, William Peter Blatty

Aliens (1986): Best Visual Effects, Robert Stotak, Stan Winston, John Richardson, and Suzanne M. Benson and Best Sound Effects Editing, Don Sharpe

The Silence of the Lambs (1991): Best Picture, Best Actress, Jody Foster, Best Actor, Anthony Hopkins, Best Director, Jonathan Demme, and Best Adapted Screenplay, Ted Tally

Jurassic Park (1993); Best Visual Effects, Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, Phil Tippett and Michael Lantieri, Best Sound Mixing, Gary Summers, Gary Rydstrom, Shawn Murphy, Ron Judkins, and Best Sound Editing, Gary Rydstrom and Richard Hymns

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007): Best Art Direction, Dante Ferretti

Sex and Horror, Part 3

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

From a Freudian point of view, ghosts often appear to represent sexual repression. They are appetites that, although suppressed, refuse to be banished and tend to haunt those whom they afflict, returning again and again to trouble and disturb those upon whom they would assert themselves. Such is the case--or may be the case, at any rate--with regard to Henry James’ classic novel, The Turn of the Screw, in which it is debatable as to whether the story’s apparitions are in fact specters or figments of the governess’ own mind. In Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, Jason Colavito lays out the dichotomy of the novel's criticism (and its resolution) in succinct fashion:

Scholars are divided in their opinion of what “really” happened in The Turn of the Screw, falling into two camps. One holds that the story is a tale of a ghostly haunting, taking at face value the governess’s story. The other camp believes the governess insane and that the story is the record of her hallucinations and madness. Edmund Wilson, the eminent twentieth century critic, inaugurated this school of thought in a 1938 essay calling for an explicitly Freudian reading of the novel in which the governess is treated as a “neurotic case of sex repression.” By this reading, the towers of Bly House are phallic symbols, and the governess is acting out repressed sexual rage at the patriarchy, as represented by Miles and his (absent) uncle. As Willie van Peer and Ewout van der Camp have noted, however, these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive and can both be true. In fact, the Freudian interpretation is quite clever but forgets that fiction is, well, fictional, and therefore can play by its own rules. In the world of The Turn of the Screw it may just be that Freudian interpretations are the false reality and ghosts are the truth that Freudian theories unfairly obscure. Since it is a novel, and not an autobiography, we can never know (136).

From a Christian point of view, ghosts are real (in a post-resurrection appearance to His disciples, Jesus assures them that He is not a ghost). Some regard them as the souls of departed (that is, dead) persons who are allowed to tarry on Earth for a time before continuing their journey to heaven (or possibly to hell). Others contend that ghosts are really demons in disguise. While the former may attempt to warn unbelievers of the consequences of their unbelief, the latter may seek to deceive the living and draw them away from God. (The nature of the ghost of Hamlet's father--as actual ghost or as demon in disguise--and its motives are questions that have considerable importance to the plot of Hamlet.) In either case, ghosts are considered potentially dangerous, and Christians are forbidden to summon them. (There may be reason to believe that the ghost who appears in Hamlet may be a demon in disguise, rather than the soul of the prince’s slain father).

Accordingly, the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw may be the souls of the deceased spirits of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, former servants who had had a sexual affair with one another while in the employ of the uncle of the two children, Miles and Flora, who has entrusted their care to the governess. The governess supposes that the ghosts may have sexually molested one or both of the children, but the novel is ambiguous; it could be that she herself is obsessed with the children’s sexuality and is tempted to molest them, blaming her compulsions upon the supernatural specters that she imagines she sees. Alternatively, the ghosts may be demons who have disguised themselves as ghosts in order to deceive the governess and draw her away from God. However, she never seems to be overtly or especially religious, or, for that matter, Christian.

There is a second possibility for a Christian interpretation of the story, that of Robert Heilman, who argues, in “The Turn of the Screw as Poem,” namely, that--

The story is virtually a morality play, involving the typical conflict of divine and demonic agents fighting for the soul of Everyman. The garden at Bly is the Garden of Eden; Miles and Flora are Adam and Eve in a state of prelapsarian innocence; Quint corresponds to folklore descriptions of the Devil; the governess is both an angel sent from God and a Christ-like mediator. By the end of the story, the Fall has occurred, but at the last minute the governess exorcises the demon from Miles’s soul and thereby saves him. Other apparitionist critics have expanded and rounded out this interpretation; the only character left unaccounted for is Miss Jessel, who too often is seen as merely the artistic counterpart to Quint. Miss Jessel, as cohort of Satan, is probably the Lilith in the Judaeo-Kabbalistic tradition who united with Adam and brought forth the race of demons, imps, and fairies (Rictor Norton, “Henry James's The Turn of the Screw,” Gay History and Literature, 1971, 1999, updated 20 June 2008).

Either interpretation, the Freudian or the Christian, makes of the novel both more and less than it seems to be in itself, for the story, capable of prompting both interpretations (and others), makes sense from both points of view but exhausts them rather than being exhausted by them. As usual, it seems that the way by which one interprets literature indicates at least as much about the interpreter as it does the interpreted. For Freudians, the story is about sex, because all things are reducible to sex. For Christians, the same story is about sin and redemption, because the world itself is a product of creation, sin, and redemption.

For me, it is clear that the Christian understanding of the story is richer and more complex than the psychoanalytical one, for life is more than sex and requires, to be appreciated properly, a world view that embraces both spirit and flesh (and both eternity and time) rather than simply the erotic impulse and its effects. The Freudian interpretation is reductive and simplistic; the Christian, expansive and intricate--rather like The Turn of the Screw (and life) itself.

In Knowing Fear, Colavito also discusses Richard Matheson’s novel, Hell House, a sort of revitalization of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in which a team of paranormal investigators led by a scientist named Dr. Barrett descend upon a reputedly haunted house to ascertain whether it is actually haunted. The investigation is financed by “a dying millionaire,” Rolf Randolph Deutsch, who seeks assurance, in the existence of ghosts, should their presence in “the old Belasco mansion” be proven, of life after death (297).

It is clear that the spirits in the novel represent sexual lust, for, as Colavito points out, they are “decadent Jazz Age ghosts whose debauchery and sexual excess corrupted them into evil.” Their leader was “Emeric Belasco, the house’s builder and leader of the debauchery.” However, it was through the application of both science, and not sorcery alone, that Belasco corrupted his guests:

Belasco, it transpires, was a genius who studied deeply of the sciences and the dark arts, including the occult, and used his powers to mentally dominate his guests and turn them toward sensuality and destruction as part of his experiments and almost anthropological studies in evil. Under his auspices, men and women became like animals. . . and the guests killed and ate one another as they reveled in freedom and joy (298).

Dr. Barrett “is a skeptic about spiritualism,” attributing the Dionysian activity of the supposed ghosts to “energy” derived from “unconscious human powers.” In the course of the investigation, the investigators are sexually molested and assaulted by the spirits in the house, or, as Dr. Barrett contends, as a result of “the unconscious minds of the psychics” he employs and the telekinetic attacks they launch. For their part “the psychics believe Belasco’s shade is controlling a number of ghosts who commit the assaults” (298).

The novel’s resolution indicates that it is Belasco himself, “who survived death to continue his experiments in evil,” and Dr. Barrett’s weapon against the “electromagnetic radiation emitted from the [human] body” does its trick so that “Belasco’s power fades away,” suggesting, Colavito says, that the novel’s author intends the story’s theme to be that “the faith-based world of the mediums’ belief must bow before science”; their powers seem, after all, to have been grounded in physical, rather than spiritual, reality, products of “electromagnetic radiation,” and not demonic activity: “in the end even the most horrible of supernatural nightmares is reducible to natural law” (299).

There seems to be one major flaw in Matheson’s argument. His resolution remains ambiguous as to which force, Dr. Barrett’s scientific materialism or Dr. Belasco’s metaphysical dualism, is stronger--or, for that matter, ultimately true--for, as Colavito points out, the former’s triumph against the latter notwithstanding, Belasco’s continued existence after death indicates that “Dr. Barrett’s theories are wrong” and that “personality does survive death.” Therefore, although Dr. Barrett was able to shut down Dr. Belasco’s evil experiment by using his “Reversor, a gigantic machine that uses electricity to cleanse a space of . . . electromagnetic radiation,” the machine wouldn’t have been needed at all had Dr. Belasco not survived death and proved, thereby, that ghosts are, in fact, real. Therefore, it might be argued, Belasco’s use of both scientific materialism (as represented by his studies “of the sciences” and his conduct of “experiments and almost anthropological studies in evil”) and metaphysical dualism (as represented by his use of the “dark arts, including the occult”) indicate that he, not the materialistic Dr. Barrett, was right concerning his belief in the realities of both matter and spirit. In spite of his own efforts to dismiss a belief in ghosts as naïve, it is the belief in materialism that, the story indicates, is the truly naïve point of view regarding the nature of reality.

The ghosts of Matheson’s novel are both physical and spiritual, like the universe itself, which is precisely the view, concerning the nature of reality, that Christian thought itself argues. Ironically, Matheson’s novel seems to prove what it sets out to invalidate. Not only are the ghosts--or ghost, actually, for “the entities in the house” turn out to be “in fact but one--Emeric Belasco himself”--the source of the mischief, but they are also proof of the ability of the human soul to survive physical death (299). The ghost in the novel is himself a rather reluctant apologist, of sorts, for the Christian view of reality as consisting of both the physical and the spiritual.



Note: In Part 4 of “Sex and Death,” I will take a look at another horror icon, that of the werewolf.