Horror Again (and Again): Increasing Your Audience by Using Universal Themes

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Diogenes the Cynic observed that it is impossible to step twice into the same river. The writer Tom Wolfe said we can't go home again. George Santayana proclaimed that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” A more colloquial expression of the same thought is “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Horror fiction tends to repeat itself.

In his Republic, Plato mentions the Ring of Gyges, an artifact the wearing of which is supposed to render one invisible. Invisibility, whether it is effected through a ring or by supposedly scientific means, has become a staple of both horror fiction and science fiction. Ambrose Bierce's “damned thing” is an invisible creature, just as H. G. Wells's invisible man is, well, an invisible man. More recently, invisibility is featured in The Invisible Man (2000), a combination science fiction-horror film “in which a woman believes she is being stalked by her abusive and wealthy boyfriend, even after his apparent suicide,” until she “deduces that he has acquired the ability to become invisible.”

A vast number of short stories, novels, and movies are based on the premise that human beings can be hunted like any other animal. One of the first stories of this type, if not, indeed, the original story, is Richard Cornell's 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” (aka “The Hounds of Zariff”), wherein “a big-game hunter from New York City . . . falls off a yacht and swims to what seems to be an abandoned and isolated island in the Caribbean [Sea], where he is hunted by a Russian aristocrat.” This same theme is reprised yet again in the 2020 movie The Hunt, in which twelve strangers are gathered as prey for a hunting party, and in the 2015 film Final Girl, in which a group of sadistic young men stalk a young woman through a forest, intent upon hunting her down and killing her.

The idea that the door to a locked room should not be opened (sometimes the opening of the door is explicitly forbidden) is as old, at least, as the story of Bluebeard, who allows his newlywed wife to open any door in his palace but one. When she defies his order, horror ensues. The idea of the forbidden room reappears in The Skeleton Key (2005). In this film, horror also results when Caroline opens the attic of the house in which she acts as a caregiver to Ben, an elderly bedridden gentleman who has suffered a stroke. Although she has not been expressly forbidden to open the attic, the fact that the skeleton key she is given does not open the attic's door suggests that Caroline is not intended to have access to it.

Many other examples can be given of horror movies that recycle themes that have already been used many times before. Of course, each time, the repetition changes some elements, omits others, adds still others, presents a new twist, or otherwise diverges at least a little from the stories that have used the same theme before it. Such changes keep the motif fresh (or, perhaps, seemingly fresh).

Why, besides convenience and obvious box office or sales appeal, do short stories, novels, and movies recycle past themes?

Advertising executive Jib Fowles offers one possible explanation. He wrote that advertisers typically appeal to one or more of fifteen basic needs that everyone has. Among these needs are the need to dominate. Invisibility confers the ability to manipulate and control other people more so than almost any other power. Invisibility blinds by stripping away our sight—but selectively. We can see all things but the one thing that matters most in a dangerous situation—the danger itself, our invisible adversary. We become helpless to resist, which heightens both our fear and our vulnerability, making it easy for the invisible foe to dominate us.

At the same time, from the hunter's point of view, stories in which human beings are hunted as prey appeal to the basic need to agress (as almost all horror stories do) and the need to dominate. From the perspective of the hunted, these stories appeal to the need to escape and the need to feel safe. (Paradoxically, according to Fowles, advertisements can appeal to needs by thwarting them.)

The expression “curiosity killed the cat” is exemplified in many movies, including The Skeleton Key. Often, such cautionary tales remind us, being nosy about other people's business can be costly—perhaps even fatal.

Fowles's observations about basic human needs goes a long way to explain the universal appeal—and, therefore, the recycling—of such themes as invisibility, hunting humans, and the lure of the forbidden, but there are probably other reasons for the repetition of these themes in horror stories.

How much do we trust others? Would we trust someone we couldn't see? Someone who could watch us unseen, who could alter our environment without our knowledge, even in our presence? Someone who could hear—or see—everything we did in private? We might not trust even a good friend under such circumstances. Now, imagine that the unseen person is an enemy intent upon harming or killing us! Stripped of sight, we are helpless and vulnerable.

Dehumanization might explain the appeal of stories involving the hunting of human beings. Although we are, from a biological point of view, animals, we don't like to think of ourselves as such. We prefer to think that there is a difference between animals and human beings. We'd rather imagine ourselves as the Bible characterizes us, as being “a little below the angels” (Hebrews 2:7) or as Hamlet describes us: “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! / how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how / express and admirable! in action how like an angel! / in apprehension how like a god . . . !” If we must think of ourselves as animals, we should consider ourselves, at least, to be, as Hamlet says, “the paragon of animals.” Most peoples, especially in our own day, regard cannibalism as not only a criminal act but also as a moral outrage. People should not be hunted, whether for sport or for food. Stories in which human beings are hunted are, therefore, regarded as horrific; the very theme itself makes such narratives or dramas horror stories.

We are curious by nature, which can be a good attribute. Science, for example, is built upon curiosity. However, the attempt to satisfy curiosity can also lead to danger or even death. Why, we might ask ourselves, before charging in where angels fear to tread, is this room locked? What sort of valuables does the locked door protect? Treasure? Secrets too dark and dangerous to be exposed? Crimes or sins unimaginable? What skeletons lie in wait within this closet, this chamber, this attic, this basement, or this wing of the house? Or, perhaps, the door is locked not to keep us out but to keep someone—or some thing—from escaping!

Another film in which a forbidden space awaits behind a locked door.

A locked room creates a private space, a space reserved, a space off limits to everyone but the holder of the key or keys. A locked room as much as commands, “Keep Out!” A locked room as much as warns, “No Trespassing!” A locked room is a forbidden space. A locked room prompts questions, evokes curiosity. A locked room is temptation. All such impulses are familiar to all men and women and, indeed, children. A locked room story has universal appeal.

Repeated themes often indicate universal concerns, needs, fears, or impulses. Depending on how such themes are handled, their inclusion as the bases of additional horror stories, whether in print or on film, can appeal to a wide audience. They could result in a bestseller or a blockbuster.

Maybe.

Zombies: A Questionable Scientific Explanation

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

For a while, back in the 1980s, people believed that science had an explanation for zombies.

 

Clairvius Narcisse, in fact, was one himself.

He had been transformed into one of the living dead through the use of the pufferfish's venom tetrodotoxin and Datura, a plant poison that causes respiratory depression, arrhythmias, hallucinations, psychosis, and even death (Guerico, Gino Del (1986) “The Secrets of Haiti's Living Dead,” Harvard Magazine (Jan/Feb) 31-37. Reprinted in Anthropology Annual Editions 1987/88 188-191).

At least, such was the claim of Harvard-educated anthropologist Wade Davis, who explained all in his 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow. Wade claimed that cultural beliefs, combined with the effects of tetrodotoxin and Datura, convinced men like Narcisse that they had died and been brought back to life by voodoo practitioners who then controlled them.

According to The Serpent and the Rainbow, “zombie powder” (tetrodotoxin) kept victims in a state of “mental” slavery, and produced “the initial death and resurrection that convinced the victims and those who knew them that they had become zombies.”

After their “deaths,” the victims were buried, exhumed, and then “enslaved as brain-damaged zombies.”

Narcisse and other zombies were then kept compliant through the administration of “regular doses of” Datura, “which produces amnesia, delirium, and suggestibility.”

Zombies were no longer merely horror story characters; they were real, and Wade had shown just how they were created.

Or so people thought, until scientists could find only little, if any, tetrodotoxin in samples of the zombie powder that Davis provided. In addition, some of Davis's colleagues took issue with his claim that zombies could be kept “in a state of pharmacologically induced trance for many years.” However, both Wade himself and other scientists defend his claims on various grounds.

For fiction writers, the truth or falsity of Wade's explanation is less relevant than it would be to anthropologists and other scientists. For example, Renfield's Syndrome is known to be a hoax meant, by its creator, as a parody of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) that is the Bible, so to speak, of the professions of psychology and psychiatry. 

Nevertheless, this supposed syndrome is still referenced as an authoritative, medically supported condition when it suits the purposes of a horror author to pretend that it is so. The same use can be put to Wade's pharmacological-cultural explanation of zombification when horror writers find that Wade's explanation advances their own narrative ends.

Nevertheless, writers should know that the anthropologist's views have been challenged and are not accepted by all of his peers. At best, his explanation seems questionable.

On the plus side, Wade's book was adapted to the screen as a pretty good horror flick.

Werewolves: Three Scientific Explanations

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Chillers and Thrillers has devoted quite a bit of space to several articles on Tzvetan Todorov's insightful analysis of the literary fantastic. At this point, despite the oversimplification that results, we can say, for Todorov, the fantastic usually resolves itself into the explained and the unexplained. The former he calls “uncanny”; the latter, “marvelous.” Only when there is no resolution, one way or another, does the fantastic remain fantastic.

In our first post in this series, “Ghosts: A Half-Dozen Explanations,” we include a few examples of each type of story.

We also noted that, to write such a story, an author must allow either of two understandings of the action: either reason or science can explain the phenomena, bizarre though they may, as natural events or the strange phenomena are beyond explanation and, as such, may actually be of an otherworldly or supernatural origin. The tension between these two alternatives creates and maintains suspense. It is only when the story shows that the action is natural (explicable by reason or science) or supernatural (inexplicable by reason or science) that the story itself is no longer fantastic, but either uncanny or marvelous, respectively.

It helps, therefore, to know how scientists explain seemingly fantastic phenomena, such as (for example) ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies.

Werewolves are, like most beasts, especially hairy. Sometimes, so do human beings, due to hypertrichosis, a genetic disorder that results in the covering of the face and body in thick hair resembling an animal's fur. Before genetics was understood (about the turn of the twentieth century), this condition could have led people to believe that victims of hypertrichosis were men or women who'd transformed into wolves—in other words, werewolves (in Old English, “wer” means “man” and “wulf” means “wolf”).

Porphyria, a condition mentioned in a previous post, could have contributed to people's belief, in earlier times, in werewolves: the condition “is characterized by extreme sensitivity to light (thus encouraging its victims to only go out at night), seizures, anxiety, and other symptoms.” (Often, scenes of people transforming into werewolves include behavior that closely resembles seizures, as does this scene from the movie The Howling [1977].)

A medical condition known as clinical lycanthropy is more about the mind that the body: it causes its victims to believe that they are werewolves, which, in turn, causes them to act accordingly. Serial killer Peter Stubbe is a case in point. He believed he owned “a belt of wolfskin that allowed him to change into a wolf.” His confessions to his murders were extracted under torture, as his “flesh was . . . ripped out with hot pincers and his limbs [were] crushed with stones.”

Once again, scientific accounts of the werewolf phenomenon offer suggestions about characters, including therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, police officers and detectives, medical doctors and specialists, and even torturers. In addition, the offices of these personnel might occur as settings in some scenes, but, depending on the century in which a story is set, settings might also feature dungeons, torture chambers, prisons, or mental asylums. Of course, forests are a virtual certainty with regard to the settings of such stories.

There have been many movies about werewolves, including Silver Bullet (1985), which is based on Stephen King's 1983 novella Cycle of the Werewolf. Such imaginary beasts have also been popular with well-known short story authors, Robert Louis Stevenson (“Olalla” [1887]), Algernon Blackwood (“The Camp of the Dog” [1908]), Bram Stoker (“Dracula's Guest” [1914)], and Robert E. Howard (“Wolfshead” [1968]). Alexander Dumas wrote a novella on the subject, The Wolf-Leader (1857), and Guy Endore penned a novel, The Werewolf of Paris (1933). (There's even a werewolf romance subgenre!)

 Studying these stories will show readers how such writers give new blood, so to speak, to a truly ancient horror trope.

In our next post, we'll take a peek at what science says about zombies.

Vampires:Three Scientific Explanations

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Chillers and Thrillers has devoted quite a bit of space to several articles on Tzvetan Todorov's insightful analysis of the literary fantastic. At this point, despite the oversimplification that results, we can say, for Todorov, the fantastic usually resolves itself into the explained and the unexplained. The former he calls “uncanny”; the latter, “marvelous.” Only when there is no resolution, one way or another, does the fantastic remain fantastic.

In our first post in this series, “Ghosts: A Half-Dozen Explanations,” we include a few examples of each type of story.

We also noted that, to write such a story, an author must allow either of two understandings of the action: either reason or science can explain the phenomena, bizarre though they may, as natural events or the strange phenomena are beyond explanation and, as such, may actually be of an otherworldly or supernatural origin. The tension between these two alternatives creates and maintains suspense. It is only when the story shows that the action is natural (explicable by reason or science) or supernatural (inexplicable by reason or science) that the story itself is no longer fantastic, but either uncanny or marvelous, respectively.

It helps, therefore, to know how scientists explain seemingly fantastic phenomena, such as (for example) ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies.

First, “Vampires: Fact, Fiction, and Folklore” explains why human vampirism is unlikely: imbibing blood on a regular basis would probably result in the imbiber's development “of haemochromatosis (iron overdose),” which is apt to lead to such serious health problems as damage to the nervous system and the liver. Drinking blood for a living is not advised, to say the least!

Another interesting refutation of human vampirism is mathematical in nature: If, at the end of a month, a vampire transforms a victim into a second vampire, and they both then transform two more people into vampires at the end of the next month, and so on, in two and a half years, everybody would be a vampire, and there would be no humans left to supply the blood the bloodsuckers need to survive. (Math can be pretty scary stuff!)

Although actual human vampires do not exist (or, at least, there is no proof that human corpses can be possessed by demons and go about their day “undead,” without eventually rotting, subsisting only on the blood of their living brethern—“Happy Meals with legs,” as Spike, a vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, calls his human hosts)—it is true that some people claim to be vampires; they may even truly believe that they are vampires.

They aren't. Here's why.

Porphyria may explain the belief, by some, in human vampirism. This condition causes sensitivity to light due to “irregularities in the production of heme, a chemical in the blood,” which produces “toxins” that erode “the lips and gums,” creating a “corpse-like, fanged appearance.”

Another explanation for the belief in human vampirism is found in some of the effects of tuberculosis. This disease causes pale skin, an aversion to sunlight, and the coughing up of blood due to lung damage. The highly contagious disease easily spreads from one person to another, a fact which might explain the belief that vampirism can be “transmitted” from vampire to victim through a bite.

Catalepsy, which causes victims to become rigid and immobile, was sometimes mistaken, in times past, for death, as it is in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories “The Premature Burial” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

There's also Renfield's syndrome, or clinical vampirism, an obsession with drinking blood. People who suffer from this psychological malady believe that drinking blood is beneficial to their health. The condition is marked by stages. First, a prepubescent child is sexually excited by blood or by consuming blood. Next, at puberty, the child begins to indulge in sexual fantasies concerning the consumption of blood and starts to devour his or her own blood; practicing autovampirism. Finally, the child preys upon animals or, perhaps, other human beings.

Sounds about as reasonable as anything in Freud, right?

And it is, which is to say, Renfield's Syndrome is 100-percent fake. Clinical psychologist Richard Noll invented Renfield's Syndrome as a parody of the psychobabble characteristic of the psychiatric and psychological professions' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

In doing so, Noll seems to have inspired his colleague, Katherine Ramsland, who is a professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, to invent her own “diagnosis,” “vampire personality disorder (VPD)” for her book The Science of Vampires.

And now we know how psychology is actually practiced, behind the scenes.

For more background reading (i. e., “research”) regarding social vampirism, check out “The people who drink blood.”

As is the case with ghosts, scientific explanations of vampirism suggest both fictional settings and characters.

Let's start with characters. Phlebotomists might be advisable, as might therapists, psychologists, or psychiatrists. (A writer might even toss in a mathematician or two.) There's certainly a place for a general practitioner and a few specialists, such as a hematologist, a neurologist, a pulmonologist, and maybe a dermatologist. There could even be a journalist or an author writing a series of articles or a book on vampirism. The police might be involved as well.

Obvious settings, for scenes if not entire stories, are laboratories; offices of therapists, psychologists, or psychiatrists; medical doctors' offices; mental institutions; and, possibly, jails or prisons.

Of course, thinking outside the box is often one of the things that distinguishes a writer like Poe from other authors of horror fiction. For him, a man aboard a ship is one of his victims of catalepsy, a berth on the ship the victim's actual resting place, and the grave in which he believes he's been buried alive an effect of his nightmares. Writers should be aware of their colleagues' treatments of themes and tropes, but they should also conceive of new treatments, perspectives, and approaches.

In our next post, we'll take a peek at what science says about werewolves.