Religious and Scientific Accounts of Sex Demons

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Eros and Evil, R. E. L. Masters theorizes that the accounts of sex with demons that women often provided during medieval witchcraft trials, frequently while they were undergoing torture, included sexual practices that, until fairly recently, were considered unnatural and perverse. Indeed, Masters further suggests, contemporary pornography provides a release by which many of today's sexually repressed readers find release for their own pent-up passions.

For writers who enjoy offering their readers a choice as to whether the supposedly supernatural events in their stories actually are supernatural or are really nothing more than unusual natural events, science offers some ideas as to how some apparently supernatural events may be explained in rational, natural, or scientific terms; at the same time, however, readers who believe that there may be a supernatural order of existence transcendent to this world (or universe) also have recourse to the supernatural explanation of the same events.

For example, sex demons appear in several films and in a few written works (poems, short stories, and novels) as well. Incubi (singular “incubus”) are male demons who have sex with human females (or who could do so, at least); succubi or succubae (singular “succubus”) are female demons who have sex with human males (or who could do so, at least).

In The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, Barbara G. Walker traces the origin of incubi to the feminization of the demonic among ancient Greeks, suggesting that incubi represent “men's fears of sexual inadequacy, since the demons were said to give [women] more pleasure than their husbands did” (241). Originally, incubi were “priests” who presided over the “womb chamber” with which each temple was equipped. By spending the night in this chamber, “people in search of enlightenment or healing could 'incubate' . . . in anticipation of a spiritual rebirth or vision.” When Christianity became the dominant religion in the Middle East and elsewhere, these priests were transformed into “incubi,” or “demons who seduced women” (260).

A well-known example of an incubus is the entity, who appears in The Entity.

A familiar instance of a succubus is the woman whom Jack Torrance (The Shining) sees in a suite of the Overlook Hotel. However, many other films and books include sex demons, especially those of the succubus type. (Hollie Horror lists many movies featuring sex demons of both varieties, complete with posters, plot summaries, and trailers.)

Mark Blanton's art often depicts incubi, in the form known to ancient Greeks as satyrs, engaged in activities with mortal women of a nature that, in today's parlance, would definitely be considered not safe for work (NSFW).

Lilith

The Greek myths of satyrs, he said, were examples of incubi. Such sex demons can be considered to be fallen angels who mate with mortal women. This view might have developed from an account of such a creature in The Epic of Gilgamesh and from the Biblical reference to “giants in the earth,” who were thought, by St. Augustine, to have been the offspring of incubi (the fallen “sons of God”) and mortal women (“the daughters of men”). Also, in Jewish folklore, Adam's first wife, Lilith, became a succubus after leaving Adam, and then had intercourse with the archangel Samael. “The daughters of Lilith,” Walker says, were “interpreted as demonic succubae.”

Thomas Aquinas and Augustine

St. Thomas Aquinas, however, disagrees with Augustine on this point, holding that such sex demons merely “assumed” bodies and used sperm that they had collected from men with whom they'd previously had intercourse as incubi to fertilize women to whom they appeared as succubi. (Yes, demon sex is complicated!)

Science offers a different explanation for such sex demons. Both the incubi and the succubi, according to the scientific view, might be caused by sleep paralysis, and, in men, nocturnal emissions may suggest the sexual component of the delusion.

The Skeptic's Dictionary offers a summary of sleep paralysis and how the condition might inspire a belief in one's having been visited by a sex demon (or, for that matter, extraterrestrials):

The condition is characterized by being unable to move or speak. It is often associated with a feeling that there is some sort of presence, a feeling which often arouses fear but is also accompanied by an inability to cry out. The paralysis may last only a few seconds. The experience may involve visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations. The description of the symptoms of sleep paralysis is similar to the description many alien abductees give in recounting their abduction experiences. Sleep paralysis is thought by some to account for not only many alien abduction delusions, but also ghost sightings and delusions involving paranormal or supernatural experiences (e. g., incubus and succubus).

By allowing the possibility of a natural and a supernatural explanation for the same bizarre phenomenon and leaving it to their readers to decide on the explanation they prefer, horror writers can let their readers have their sex demon or their hallucination, as they see fit, and, at the same time, enrich the possibilities for their stories, resting assured that the sex demons (and their behavior) are both strange and horrific, whatever the explanation a reader adopts.

(By the way, Tzvetan Todorov offers an insightful discussion of these alternative sources of explanation, the scientific, or natural, and the supernatural, but uses the terms “uncanny” for phenomena that are explained scientifically and the term “marvelous for phenomena that are explained with recourse to the supernatural. Phenomena that cannot be resolved as either uncanny or marvelous, he says, remain “fantastic.”)

Damsels (and Villains) in Distress

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman 

 

Horror movies often put characters in compromising situations—circumstances or conditions in which they are, for one reason or another, vulnerable, if not, indeed, helpless. Often, these characters are young women, both because many devotees of the genre are young men and because people, in general (at least according to horror maestro Edgar Allan Poe), find “the death of a beautiful woman the most poetic woman . . . unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” (“The Philosophy of Composition”).

Writers employ an array of devices to render their damsels in distress vulnerable or helpless, including, among others, youth and inexperience (Carrietta White of Stephen King's Carrie), being disabled (Marty Coslaw of Dan Attias's film adaptation of Stephen King's Silver Bullet), being injured (Paul Sheldon of Rob Reiner's adaptation of Stephen King's Misery), being unconscious (Nancy Thompson of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street), having an overly active imagination (the narrator of H. G. Wells's “The Red Room”), having sex (Tobey of Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth), being lost in unfamiliar surroundings (the Carter family of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes), being confused (Emily Callaway of John Polson's Hide and Seek), and having a debilitating condition (Berenice in Edgar Allan Poe's “Berenice” and the narrator in his “The Premature Burial”).

Such conditions not only render a victim or a potential victim vulnerable or helpless, but these circumstances also make the characters in jeopardy sympathetic to readers or moviegoers. To be stalked and injured or killed is, of course, terrifying in itself, but to be hunted and attacked while one is inexperienced, disabled, injured, unconscious, in flagrante delicto, lost and disoriented, confused, or suffering from a debilitating condition only adds to the sense of panic readers and moviegoers experience on behalf of potential or actual victims.

Making a character vulnerable or helpless through circumstances, conditions, or situations isn't the only way that writers of horror heighten suspense. They can also create villains who are so unusual or who suffer from such extreme conditions themselves that their own compromising situations make them uncontrollable. Some of the ways that writers use to accomplish this end include making their villains psychotic (Jack Torrance of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining), making them possessed by the devil or demons (Regan MacNeil of William Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist), and showing them to be confused (Grace Stewart of Alejandro Amenabar's The Others). Of course, there are also the two traditional standbys: making the villain an extraterrestrial (Sil of Roger Donaldson's Species) or of supernatural origin (the ghost in Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist).

A Literary Critic Offers Some Tips for Writing Powerful Horror Stories, Part II

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Shock Value; How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (2011), Jason Zinoman offers some insights concerning John Carpenter's 1978 film Halloween.

Jason Zinoman

The movie is an example of what I refer to as an invasion movie, which I define as the invasion of an idyllic community by a corrupting, external evil (think, as a prototype, The Garden of Eden): “Halloween begins,” Zinoman writes, “with a decidedly normal, safe environment, an idyllic middle-class suburb” (178). During the course of the movie, this “familiar” setting and its “ordinary” character “turns into something ambiguous, confusing, and repulsive,” as “middle-class suburbia is [shown to be] the home of unexplainable evil” (208). However, the suburbs is not the only familiar and ordinary environment in such movies; others include “the beach, the hospital, the bedroom, the prom, the highway,” and “right next door” (208).

At the beginning of the movie, the camera views the action from the perspective of “the predator,” as the audience sees what the invisible intruder sees, but the point of view then alternates back and forth, between “the predator” and the “victim” (180). To differentiate the audience from the killer, the director, John Carpenter, shows them the killer's “knife,” which “reminds us that our perspective,” as members of the audience, “is not the same as that of the killer” (180).

Zinoman provides a couple of theories as to why female characters are more often victimized (and killed) than are their male counterparts, including the greater perceived vulnerability of female characters and the established tradition of the presence of a damsel in distress.

“The pleasures of horror are more masochistic than sadistic,” he claims (181), which may be another reason for the tendency of horror movies to feature female characters as their victims. By identifying with the film's victims, rather than with its predator, the audience vicariously becomes victims themselves; if they are males, it would seem (although Zinoman does not say this) that they are also, to some extent, feminized, seeing female surrogates of themselves as vulnerable, weak, ineffective, and helpless. However, viewers, male and female alike, presumably, would also learn, through the survival of the so-called Final Girl, that young women can also be survivors, provided that they possess the personality traits it takes to go toe-to-toe with a monster and win.

Zinoman seems more interested in the nature (or lack thereof) of modern monsters than he does in the implied feminization of male audience members. He contrasts monsters past with monsters present. The former, he suggests, was “a stand-in for some anxiety, political, social, or cultural,” but the latter represent something else entirely.

For example, Zinoman contends, “[Michael] Myers doesn't represent anything . . . Myers doesn't represent the cold calculus of scientific progress or a religious conception of evil” (181), the two sources, traditionally, that are used to explain the monstrous. In the past, the monster has usually been a freak of nature (giant ants or a hostile extraterrestrial life form) (or a freak of the scientific lab [Frankenstein's monster or Mr. Hyde] or a freak, as it were, of the supernatural [the devil or a vampire).

The “New Horror” that was spawned by the likes of Dan O'Bannon, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin, and others, on the other hand, is the face of nothingness. Myers is “defined,” Zinoman says, by “the absence of meaning”; it is “by emptying out all the details from the character [that] Carpenter” creates a monster that contains nothing, a monster of the void, who acts without meaning, without purpose, and “has no motive” (182-183).

Although Zinoman often provides food for thought, he is, at times, a bit Emersonian in his tantalizing vagueness and fails to follow up on some of his intriguing insights, such as the effects of sadism as a perspective and, indeed, a technique of the cinema and his insight that the presence of female characters as victims may tend to feminize male members of the audience. Both ideas are stimulating and rich in possibilities, but they are largely undeveloped. Nevertheless, after Shock Value, readers won't be the same moviegoers they were before they encountered Zinoman's highly interesting and suggestive study of “New Horror.”

A Literary Critic Offers Some Tips for Writing Powerful Horror Stories

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, Jason Zinoman offers some interesting, although rather dated, observations: the book was published in 2011. Many of his observations could serve as guidelines to apprentices who are interested in writing a horror novel (or movie).

Jason Zinoman

For instance, Zinoman, in discussing Rosemary's Baby, points out that the film is “about issues that people could relate to—the nervousness of entering the real estate market; struggling in a faltering, sexless marriage; and the yearning, desperate search for fame (11-12). In fact, he says, the movie is “about the perils of domesticity” (14).

In addition, Zinoman declares, Roman Polanski “made the movie strictly from Rosemary's perspective and maintained that it must always be possible for “all the supernatural elements on it to be a series of coincidences” (21), so that “the suspense hinges on finding out whether the bizarre things happening . . . are real or the product of delusion” (21).

Throughout Shock Value, Zinoman insists that the cause of the bizarre incidents is best left unexplained and emphasizes the unseen, offstage incident as preferable to the seen, onstage incident in maintaining suspense. In fact, “in addition to the virtue of the unknown, the setting of an indistinct mood, and . . . rooting the magical or supernatural in a palpable realism” are “powerful ideas” (63).

Initially, horror movies were viewed as providing the audience with a catharsis (76), which 'assumes the audience identifies with the victims,” but Alfred Hitchcock helped to revolutionize this accepted view of the nature of horror films when he put “the audience on side of the killer in Psycho and repeatedly in the position of the voyeur.”

This twist causes the audience to identify “with killers,” rather than with their victims. As a result, it has been argued, this shift in perspective no longer allowed a catharsis for viewers; instead, it allowed “audiences to express their repressed sinful thoughts through the monster” (77). The monster became a surrogate scapegoat upon whom viewers could project their own lusts for violence, blood, murder, and mayhem. The movies, once masochistic, became sadistic (77).

Due to his upbringing in a home in which a strict evangelical faith was practiced, Wes Craven was more sensitive to “the allure of self-sacrifice” than many other filmmakers, Zinoman suggests. Craven understood that churchgoers went to church “not merely” to escape “pain,” but also to heroically “confront it,” which provided them a sense of “triumph” over evil (77). A horror movie could provide the same sort of experience, vicariously, for “a secular audience looking for the pleasure of masochism” (77).

Zinoman cites several films that accomplish just this task. Writing of The Last House on the Left, he states:

In a godless world without redemption [this film] . . . includes no struggle with faith. instead, senseless evil inspires just more senseless evil, adding up to a nihilism that invites no happy endings (79).

Religion and horror are alike, the author suggests: both induce feelings of “awe” as people are “shocked by their own helplessness,” but religion and horror differ by how they handle people's experience of awe: “religion helps you cope with this feeling. Horror exploits it” (92)

From Zinoman's observations, we can derive these story-writing tips:

• Make sure that the readers (or audience) can relate to the “issues” with which the story is concerned.
• Tell the story (or film the movie) from the main character's point of view.
• Maintain the possibility of both a natural and a supernatural explanation for the “bizarre” incidents that occur in the story.
• If a story is intended to evoke readers' or viewers' masochistic interests, focus on the main character's point of view; if the story is meant to arouse readers' or viewers' sadistic impulses, focus on the monster's perspective.
• After challenging the protagonist's faith, a religious story is apt to restore it through self-sacrifice that leads to redemption; a secular story is likely to end in nihilism, represented by anarchy and chaos.
• Whether a story is religious or secular in nature, it should maintain the possibility of either a natural interpretation or a supernatural explanation.

Zinoman also has some intriguing insights concerning John Carpenter's Halloween, but we'll save them for a future post.