Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Sex

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As we saw in the last post (the first in this series), Jib Fowles identifies 15 basic appeals used in advertising. These same appeals, we argue, are frequently employed in horror fiction; indeed, their presence in horror novels and movies accounts for much of the appeal of these types of fiction.

In this post, we'll take a look at the appeal to readers' or viewers' need for sex. The fulfillment of the “needs for,” as opposed to the “needs to” on Fowles's list, require the presence or participation of another person or persons besides oneself. While it is possible to satisfy oneself sexually, by masturbation or other means, to find true sexual fulfillment, one requires a partner (or, some might contend, partners), whether of the male, the female, both, or another gender.

In horror, the need for sex characteristically involves perversion. Since all communication is reducible to seven basic questions, the forms of sexual perversion about which horror writers may write take seven possible types of forms. (A type, as we're using it, means a sexual behavioral set identifiable by shared characteristics.) These types of perversion (i. e., a deviation, corruption, or distortion of the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing) can be subsumed under these questions:

Who?

What?

When?

Where?

How?

Why?

How many? or How much?

We can further refine these questions by associating each of them with specific referents:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)

Let's add a couple more rows, identifying an example of a horror novel or movie that perverts human sexuality by deviating from, corrupting, or distorting the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing involved in sexual behavior:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time, occasion, or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)
Demon Seed (1973 novel; 1977 film)	The Exorcist (1973)	Maleus Maleficarum (1487)*	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])	Alien (1979)	Rosemary's Baby (1967 novel; 1968 film)	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])
A computer becomes a woman's sexual partner.	Regan MacNeil, the possessed girl, masturbates with a crucifix.	A demon, having assumed a female form, spends so long in intercourse with her victim that she absolutely drains him of semen and he thereafter dies.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.	Parasitic pregnancy ends in the fetus's bursting through the human host's abdomen.	After being raped by a demon, Rosemary Wood-house conceives a demonic child.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.

As the above table shows, the same movie may contain two (or more) of these types of sexual perversion: The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils]) contains orgies involving many individuals participating simultaneously in various sex acts; it also takes place in a convent. Likewise, these types of perversions can vary in how they are represented.

For example, a perverse location need not be a geographical place or an architectural space (a convent); it could be an anatomical site, as in Teeth (2008), in which a young woman discovers that she has two sets of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her vagina. Other possible variations? One's partner could be a poltergeist, as in The Entity (1982) (Who?); human corpses, as in the necrophilia scenes in the novel Under the Dome (2009) (What?); or a man transformed into metal kills his girlfriend after his penis becomes a power drill, as in Tetsuo:The Iron Man (1989) (How?).

Writers are limited pretty much only by their imaginations, their sense of morality, their personal taste, and the law of the land. Publishing houses will print and distribute just about anything that promises to make a buck. It seems unlikely, though, that the majority of readers or viewers are likely to have a need for extreme types of sex, even when it occurs in horror stories.

* Although the Malleus Maleficarum is a book—a manual for prosecuting witchcraft trials—rather than a novel or a movie, it contains supposed accounts of demonic sex, one of which suggests such a long-lasting (and fatal) encounter between a succubus and “her” victim, a hermit, that the hermit was completely drained of his semen:

When he [the hermit] was done and had arisen, the demon said to him, “behold what you have done, for I am not a girl or a woman but a demon,” and at once he disappeared from view, while the hermit remained absolutely astonished. And because the demon, with his great power, had withdrawn a very great quantity of semen, the hermit was permanently dried up, so that he died at the end of a month's time.

One can imagine the use of this description of demonic sexual activity as the basis for a terrifying sex scene in a horror novel or movie!

Note: For you may also want to read my post “Note: You may want to read “Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the nature of Sin.”