Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Feel Safe

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

One of the basic needs to which advertisements often appeal, according to communications professor Jib Fowles, is the need to feel safe. “We naturally want to do whatever it takes to stave off threats to our well-being, and to our families,'” he points out. Like many of the other basic needs, this one, involving the “instinct of self-preservation,” can take several forms. Advertisements based upon this appeal may address concerns about financial security, product durability, and personal health. Of course, the need to feel safe is also one of horror fiction's primary appeals.

But, if we read carefully what Fowles has written, we see that he speaks (or writes) not of the need to be safe, but of the need to feel safe. There is quite a difference between the two. In reality, no matter how much we may prepare, there is no way to be 100 percent safe 100 percent of the time—or any time at all. Even as I am writing this or you are reading this, one or both of us could be struck down by anything from a stray bullet to a falling meteorite or an errant bolt of lightning.

More mundane causes of death and destruction are always at hand, too, such as bacteria, viruses, and plagues. The real world may not throw vampires and werewolves at us, and we probably don't really need to worry about voodoo and magic, but, even without such monsters and forces, ours is a truly dangerous world at all times.

One reason we forget about the dangers that abound is that we have erected fairly reliable defenses against many of them. We employ military and police forces; meteorologists and astronomers watch the skies; scientists and researchers, as well as doctors and nurses (and the good folk at the Centers for Disease Control), wage war against dangerous microbes. Firefighters and emergency medical technicians rescue us from infernos and repair the injuries we suffer from car crashes. I could go on (and on), but I think we'd all agree that, as a society, we've done a good job of shoring up our defenses.

 

English: Vampire killing kit at Mercer Museum, PA.

Русский: Набор для убийства вампиров (Музей Мерсера, Пенсильвания, США)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vampire_killing_kit_(Mercer_Museum).jpg

Generally, that's as true in horror fiction as it is in life (or in life as we like to imagine it, at least). In horror fiction, there are remedies against vampires (crucifixes, garlic, holy water, and wooden stakes) and werewolves (silver bullets). If witches practice black magic, other sorcerers defend against their hexes with white magic: Dormammu may exist, but so does Dr. Strange. No matter the type or the power of evil, there is a more powerful force for good.

An early movie, part science fiction and part horror, offers one of the most memorable examples of the appeal to the need to feel safe. Released in 1933, King Kong shows us that, whether among island natives or due to the technology of the early 20^th century, there were means of not only feeling safe, but of being safe against a 30-foot-tall gorilla.

On Skull Island, the villagers erected a tall, sturdy wall (think of Fowles's observations about product durability) to keep Kong out of their village, and, to placate him, they periodically provide a sacrifice for him. (It seems the wall protects them from Kong, but, as viewers soon discover, the perception of safety is unfounded. Still, the wall makes the natives feel safe.)

When actress Ann Darrow is abducted by the big ape, she's rescued by the intrepid crew of the Venture, who manage, at the cost of the lives of several of their number, to best both a Stegosaurus and a Brontosaurus before rescuing Ann. (To be fair, Kong also does his share to protect Ann, killing both a Tyrannosaurus and a Pteranodon, before pursuing Ann's rescuers back through the jungle to the villager's compound).

Empowered by his feelings for Ann, perhaps, Kong breaks through the gate in the wall surrounding the village, but he is brought down with a gas bomb hurled at him by filmmaker Carl Denham. Technology to the rescue!

In New York City, Kong escapes from a Broadway theater, where Denham has put him on display as “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” Ann is present, but, removed to a room on an upper floor of a hotel, she is safe from the beast—or so everyone believes.

Kong climbs the exterior of the building, seizing Ann, and flees, wrecking havoc along the way. He seeks high ground, as it were, by scaling the Empire State Building, where, technology to the rescue again, he is killed by gunfire from attacking airplanes.

Denham remarks, “It was Beauty killed the Beast.” In fact, however, the audience's need to feel safe is likely the reason that Kong succumbs to the defenses humanity has erected against the various kinds of potential calamity.

King Kong fails to destroy humanity (although he directly or indirectly kills his fair share of us). Like many threats, he is an external one. Edgar Allan Poe made the internal monster, the psychotic killer, a popular villain of horror fiction, who remains a force with which to reckoned as much today as he or she was in Poe's time. For such villains, Psycho (1960) is probably the quintessential horror film.

Norman Bates, who, like Leatherface of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, is based upon grave robber and murderer Ed Gein, manages an out-of the-way motel. He lives with his mother, who finds women to be contemptible, sordid creatures and wants her son to have nothing to do with them. When Norman is attracted to Marion Crane, a secretary who absconds with her employer's money, Mother swings into action, wielding a knife as Marion showers in her room at the Bates Motel.

Mother is Norman's alter ego, as it turns out, and, when he is arrested, Mother is no longer a threat. Unfortunately, by then, “she” has killed both Marion and Private investigator Milton Arbogast, who comes to the motel (and visits Norman's house, which overlooks the motor lodge), seeking Marion after she goes on the lam.

At the end of the movie, a psychiatrist reassures the audience that, although Norman is certainly frightening and dangerous, his particular problem—he has an alternate personality—is not a mystery, but a known and understood condition. Although Mother is now in complete control of Norman, he can be confined and treated. Psychiatry, aided by the criminal justice system, can protect the public. Knowledge confers the power needed to prevent Mother from ever harming anyone again. It is not technology, this time, but epistemology (and a prison or a mental institution) that comes to the rescue of society.

Indeed, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the holy book of psychology and psychiatry, has charted the depths of this condition; the signs and symptoms are well established, although the causes and the means of treatment of the disorder are not (yet) as well defined. Nevertheless, the DSM-5's clinical language, like its claims of knowledge and understanding, are enough, perhaps, to calm the fears of those who want to feel safe.

Psychology and psychiatry may not be as certain as medicine, but they're better than nothing. Maybe. Without them, we'd have about as much protection from the menace of mad killers as Prince Prospero and his guests enjoyed in Poe's short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” and, as we may recall, their walled abbey, their desperate drinking, their wild dancing, and their fevered merriment did not stand between them and their demise, courtesy of The Red Death.