Copyright
2018 by Gary L. Pullman
The last of the
fifteen basic needs Jib Fowles identifies in Mass Advertising
as Social Forecast are the
set of physiological needs, such as eating, sleeping, and drinking.
(Although these needs include the need for sex, Fowles treats sex
separately.)
In
restaurants' advertisements, Fowles observes, “The
art of photographing food and drink is so advanced . . . the crab
meat in the Red Lobster restaurant ads can start us salivating, the
Quarterpounder can almost be smelled, the liquor in the glass glows
invitingly imbibe, these ads scream.”
Horror
fiction is quite that obsessed with depicting food and drink, and the
fare which this genre's short stories, novels, and movies features,
which includes such delicacies as human flesh and blood, isn't nearly
as delectable as crab meat and beef.
Horror
often obtains its effects by perverting the normal order of things.
By depicting substances that society prohibits people from eating or
drinking as food or beverages, horror fiction generates fear and
disgust. A reader or moviegoer is not apt to fear eating beef or pork
and vegetables or drinking wine, milk, or a soft drink, because
society recognizes and accepts these items as legitimate foods (with
the exception of vegans and vegetarians, for whom such products,
regarded as food or drink, might well be regarded with horror).
Although
cannibalism has been practiced in extreme situations by members
technologically advanced societies, as during the ill-fated Donner
expedition, and until relatively recent times by certain tribes, in
general, the consumption of human flesh and blood is not only taboo
but also regarded as abhorrent. Consequently, describing or depicting
cannibal tribes or families indulging in this practice evokes horror
among readers or viewers. Indeed, horror movies involving cannibalism
have been roundly censored or banned outright by numerous countries.
One in particular, Cannibal
Holocaust
(1980) was banned
at one time or another in Iceland, New Zealand, and Singapore.
Nevertheless,
cannibalism has been featured in over
330 films, many of them in the horror genre, including, most
recently, The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
(2006) and the Wrong
Turn series
of films (2003-2014).
Vampires
thrive on blood, often imbibing it directly from the wounds their
fangs open in the necks of their human prey. The undead are a staple
among horror story villains, appearing in such novels as John William
Polidori's The
Vampyre
(1819), Varney
the Vampire
(1847), Alexandre Dumas's The
Pale Lady
(1849), Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla
(1872), Bram Stoker's Dracula
(1897), Richard Matheson's I
Am Legend
(1954), Stephen King's 'Salem's
Lot
(1975), Anne Rice's Interview
with the Vampire
(1976), Whitley Strieber's The
Hunger
(1981), Paul Wilson's The
Keep
(1981), Robert McCammon's They
Thirst
(1981), John Skipp and Craig Spector's The
Light at the End
(1986), Poppy Z. Brite's Lost
Souls
(1992), and many others. In addition, such heavyweights as Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (Christabel
[1816])
and Lord Byron (The
Giaour
[1813]) penned narrative poems featuring vampires, and nearly fifty
series
of novels concerning vampires have been published.
In
horror fiction, the appeal of physiological needs can also be
perverted by the manner in which such foods are produced and the
cost—in the coin of moral decadence, social degeneration, physical
suffering, and emotional trauma—of producing them. Here are a
couple of examples.
Soylent
Green (1973) takes place in
the wake of worldwide ecological decline, overpopulation, and
unemployment. People rely on Soylent Green, green wafers produced
from “high-energy plankton” harvested from the ocean. When
Detective Frank Thorn of the New York Police Department investigates
the murder of his friend, Police Analyst Solomon “Sol” Roth, he
discovers that the wafers are no longer made from plankton, but from
human corpses. At the end of the film, having been wounded during a
fight with Sol's killer, the police analyst's bodyguard, tab
Fielding, and others, as he is being taken away on a stretcher, Thorn
cries, “Soylent Green is people!”
The
Stuff
(1985), part science fiction, part satire, and part horror film, is
based on director Larry Cohen's
original story, which, he says, was inspired by his distaste for “the
consumerism and corporate greed found in our country and the damaging
products that were being sold.” In particular, he says, he was
concerned about both “foods being pulled off the market because
they were hazardous to people’s health” and by “the sheer
volume of junk food we consume every day.” In the movie, a
delicious, no-calorie, addictive white substance pours out of the
ground. Miners discover it and market it, and American consumers
can't get enough of The Stuff. Unfortunately, the substance is alive,
and it's a parasite. Taking over its hosts' brains, it reduces them
to a zombie-like state and consumes them from within. At the end of
the film, The Stuff's owners are forced to eat their product, as FBI
agent David “Mo” Rutherford asks, “Are you eating it,
or is it eating you?”
Horror novels
and movies have also appealed to the need for sleep. The movie
Invasion of
the Body Snatchers
(1956) and Stephen King's novel Insomnia
(1994) are two memorable examples.
Adapted
from Jack Finney's 1954 science fiction novel The
Body Snatchers, the 1956 half-science fiction, half-horror
movie classic, Invasion of the
Body Snatchers, features extraterrestrial seed pods that
duplicate and replace humans while the victims sleep. The “invasion”
spreads from town to town, until Dr. Hill, a psychiatrist, alerts
authorities, who seek to contain the invasion.
According to film
critic Leonard Maltin, critics generally regard the movie as an
allegory for the U. S. Senate's hearings on communism under Senator
Joseph McCarthy during the late 1940s and 1950s. According to this
view, the sleep during which the invaders act could symbolize
unawareness of or indifference to dangerous social and political
realities or blindness to one's own paranoia about dehumanizing
social and political forces more powerful than oneself.
In
Insomnia,
retiree Ralph Roberts develops insomnia. Sleeping less and less each
night, he begins to see auras around people and “little bald
doctors,” becoming convinced that the “doctors” actually exist,
albeit in another dimension. In this alternate universe, two cosmic
patterns, The Purpose and The Random govern affairs, the “doctors”
working for The Purpose to murder people when “their time” to die
is at hand. With Ed Deepneau as his agent,
The Crimson King, an inhabitant of the other dimension, seeks to
disrupt the equilibrium between The Purpose and The Random. Roberts,
recruited by The Purpose, battles Deepneau. Amid the details of the
confused and confusing plot, King targets anti-abortion protesters.
The novel is pretty much another of King's many chaotic messes, and
it's hard to understand how the book was nominated for a 1994 Bram
Stoker Award (or maybe not; see my series
of posts on the award.) In King's novel, sleep—or maybe it's
sleep deprivation—becomes something like an altered state of
consciousness.
Physiological
needs have long supplied horror authors and filmmakers with a number
of topics related to food, drink, and sleep, and it's likely that
this set of needs will continue to do so, long into the future.