Horror Fiction: The Appeal to the Need to Escape

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In advertisements, the need to escape, Jib Fowles informs the readers of Mass Advertising as Social Forecast, is often figurative, referring to the need to get away from it all for a bit of rest and relaxation. For this reason, the need to escape is often associated with pleasure, and it need not be “solitary.” Two or more people can “escape together into the mountaintops” or to a resort, or a couple may escape on a romantic getaway designed for just the two of them.

Of course, an escape can be literal, too. One can seek to escape from physical danger or incarceration. The type of escape in horror fiction may start with the former type of escape, as it does in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), and turn into the latter type of escape, or it may begin with a trapped or imprisoned character seeking to escape from his or her confines, as in Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), Hide and Seek (2005), or the series of Saw (2004-present) movies. In horror, after all, the theme is loss. In the case of horror fiction that appeals to the need for escape, escape is difficult or impossible, and it is likely to be denied altogether, although, in rare cases, escape may be permitted.

“The Pit and the Pendulum”: Poe's short story was inspired by his reading of an account of Napoleon Bonaparte's general, Antoine Charles Louis, Comte de Lasalle's, visit to the Palace of the Inquisition in Toledo, Spain, after his entry into the city. As Kevin J. Hayes points out in The Annotated Poe, Poe alters the sequence of events as they were reported in his source, “Anecdote towards the History of the Spanish Inquisition,” having the general arrive after his own story's protagonist has been sentenced to death, so that the Inquisition's enemy can rescue the condemned prisoner just before he is killed, thereby preserving his narrative's “tension and terror.” Poe's story is a relatively rare example of a protagonist who escapes his horrific fate, thanks to the intervention of another.

Hide and Seek: After the suicide of his wife, Allison, psychologist David Callaway takes his nine-year-old daughter Emily to upstate New York, hoping the change of scenery will help Emily recover from the loss of her mother. Instead, Emily is placed in extreme danger: David has developed dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality disorder. He now has both his own personality and that of the murderous “Charlie,” who emerged to murder Allison after David witnessed her being unfaithful to him during a New year's Eve party. He himself has blocked the memory of Charlie's murder of Allison and truly believes she drowned herself in their bathroom.

When David discovers he has never unpacked the boxes in the study of the house he is renting, despite having been in the room on multiple previous occasions, he realizes he has another personality. By now, he has killed again, having pushed a local woman, Elizabeth, from his daughter's bedroom window, and he kills a third time when the local sheriff questions him about Elizabeth's disappearance. His family friend, Dr. Katherine Carson, also a psychologist, pays a visit, but David shoves her down the basement stairs, where she sees the sheriff's body. David then initiates a game of hide and seek with Emily, who escapes from her bedroom, and hides in the cave in which she first encountered Charlie.

Taking the sheriff's firearm, Katherine forces her way out of the basement and discovers David hunting for Emily. After Emily distracts David, Katherine shoots him, thereby rescuing Emily. The movie provides four alternate endings. In the first, which is used in the version of the film shown to United States audiences, Emily, living with Katherine, seems well adjusted, despite the horrific trauma she has suffered. However, when she leaves the table, where she has been drawing while eating her breakfast, to accompany Katherine to school, the camera shows that she has drawn herself with two heads, suggesting that, like her father, Emily has developed multiple personality disorder, in which case she may have escaped her ordeal physically, but she has not escaped the experience mentally. In another possible ending,

Emily's drawing of herself shows her with only one head, implying that she does not have multiple personality disorder.

Like the ending shown to U. S. Audiences, alternates three, four, and five suggest that Emily has developed multiple personality disorder.

The third ending shows Emily in a bedroom. As Katherine tucks her in, she assures Emily that she loves her. As Katherine leaves the room, Emily asks her to leave the light on, but Katherine says she cannot do so. She shuts the door, which contains a screened window, and locks it from outside, revealing the bedroom's location as that of a psychiatric hospital. Emily gets out of bed, starts to count, and enters the bedroom closet, and grins at her reflection in the mirror.

The fourth alternate ending is identical to the third, except that, in this version, Emily does not count.

The fifth possibility starts the same way as the third, but the bedroom is in Emily's new home, not in a psychiatric ward. After Katherine tucks Emily into bed and reassures her that she loves her, Emily gets out of bed to play Hide and Seek with her reflection.

Although one of the five endings suggests that Emily has escaped, both physically and psychologically, from her father's murder of her mother and two other adults and his attempted murder of her, the existence of the four alternative endings imply that she is psychologically damaged and may well have developed multiple personality disorder. If, on the basis alone of the number of possible endings, we calculate the odds that Emily did, in fact, psychologically escape her ordeal, her chance of having done so is only twenty percent—not very good odds.

I Still Know What You Did last Summer: After Julie James accompanies her friends to an island resort, the holiday retreat loses power as a hurricane advances toward the island. Later, their only remaining means of communication, a two-way radio, is destroyed, and they are left alone with a killer, a fisherman named Ben whom Julie and some of her friends had thrown into a lake last summer. They'd thought they'd killed him when their vehicle, the driver of which was drunk, struck him on a mountain road.

One by one, Julie's friends are killed. Only three survive: Julie, her boyfriend Ray, who joined the party late, after evading an earlier attempt on his life, and Karla, Julie's Boston roommate. The Coast Guard rescues them, and Julie marries Ray. While he brushes his teeth, the bathroom door is shut and locked. Julie, seated on the bed in their bedroom, sees Ben under the bed. She screams, as he grabs her with the hook that replaces a long-lost limb, and she is hauled beneath the bed, her fate remaining a mystery.

Did Julie escape her past? Although she goes to the island retreat hoping to forget the painful memories and nightmares associated with her participation in the events of last summer, Julie encounters Ben again, as she and her friends are stalked, and Ben kills several of them. Julie is almost killed herself, but Ray rescues her. The Coast Guard takes them back to the mainland, and they escape the island and the hurricane.

Although she seeks happiness, marrying Ray, Julie is captured again at the end of the movie by her nemesis, and her husband and protector is locked in the bathroom. Audience members are not shown Julie's fate, but it seems she may not have escaped her past, after all. A year after he was left to die in the lake, Ben has returned to avenge himself, and he kills again, as he had a year ago. Now that he has captured Julie, it seems unlikely she will escape the doggedly persistent serial killer.

Saw series: The Saw series of horror movies focus on the lengths to which captive men and women will go to escape. “John Kramer, also called the 'Jigsaw Killer' or simply 'Jigsaw' . . . . was introduced briefly in Saw and developed in more detail in Saw II. Rather than killing his victims outright, Jigsaw traps them in situations that he calls 'tests' or 'games' to test their will to live through physical or psychological torture and believes if they survive, they will be rehabilitated.”

Ordered to kill his fellow prisoner, Adam Stanheight, by six o'clock or have his wife and daughter killed instead, Dr. Lawrence Gordon saws off his own foot to escape. After cauterizing his wound with a steam pipe, Gordon leaves Stanheight in a bathroom as he goes to save his family and obtain assistance for Stanheight, and Kramer makes Gordon his apprentice as a sort of perverse reward for having survived the test. In Saw III, flashbacks reveal that another of Gordon's apprentices, Amanda Young, kidnapped Stanheight and murdered him to put him out of his misery.

Other sequels subject other victims to a variety of other mechanical traps invented by Kramer. Kramer carves out a jigsaw-shape of flesh from subjects who failed to escape his tests to show that they lacked the “survival instinct,” a practice which led the media to refer to him as the “Jigsaw Killer.” To date, there are eight movies in the series.

Due to its gory effects, the Saw series has been severely criticized, with detractors referring to it as “torture porn.” The series certainly appeals to the need for escape in an extreme fashion, and it's not for everyone. It does suggest that the “survival instinct” is such, in some individuals, at least, that a captive subjected to physical and psychological torment will do anything to escape, but it also shows that others will not. Gordon, for example, cuts off his own foot rather than killing Stanheight and then seeks help for the man he was ordered to kill.

It appears that Kramer admires Gordon's courage, if not his altruism, because he “rewards” the doctor for defying the command he was given and finding an alternative way to escape without sacrificing either Stanheight or his own family. Perhaps it was Gordon's intelligence, as much as his courage, that Kramer admired. In any case, the fact that Kramer would “reward” Gordon shows that, despite his own cruelty and monstrous capacity for evil, there remains the ability, at least, to appreciate certain attributes of human nature that transcend those of base instincts.

It's not surprising that the horror genre would include appeals to the need to escape. What may surprise is its examination of the effects of callous behavior on surviving victims. These effects include the development of mental disorders; lifelong guilt, fear, distrust, and misery; and death, but, on occasion, they also reflect courage, compassion, and a regard for others that's greater than one's own need to escape. Horror fiction is about loss, but, as horrific as its losses are, they are not always complete, and there is the chance that victims may not only survive, but eventually live at least a semblance of normal life.

But first, of course, they have to escape.