Edgar Allan Poe and the Advent of the Psychological-Moral Horror Story

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Edgar Allan Poe created the modern detective story and the modern horror story, and popularized human villains who suffered from various mental disorders. The psychotic or sociopathic killer was a new monster. He or she (in Poe, always a male character) located the source of evil “not in the stars,” to paraphrase William Shakespeare, “but in ourselves.” With Poe, evil became internal and psychological, not external and supernatural. Many readers find such villains far more frightening than demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches, and other such monsters, because threats posed by psychotic or sociopathic “monsters” are more believable and one may actually encounter them in “real life.”

The notion that demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and witches won't be encountered in “real life” marks a metaphysical change in the Western weltanshauung, or worldview, wherein the supernatural is no longer considered a viable dimension of reality. Of course, authors of horror stories continue to populate their fiction with such creatures, but, to entertain the notion of their existence, readers and moviegoers must, more and more, adopt the attitude of “suspended disbelief” of which Samuel Taylor Coleridge first wrote in Biographia Literaria (1817). In short, to entertain the idea of the existence of such monsters, one must pretend that they are real, that they exist, at least for the duration of the story one is reading or the movie one is watching.

When it comes to victims who commit evil due to the mental disorders they suffer, suspended disbelief is not necessary—at least, not to the degree it is necessary to enjoy a tale of the supernatural—because such mental states do exist, and those unfortunate enough to suffer from one or more of them do behave in dangerous, erratic ways.

If we state this principle in the terms set forth by Tzvetan Todorov, we would say that there are no longer truly tales of the marvelous, nor is fantastic literature, strictly speaking, any longer possible. Stories may depict bizarre incidents, strange settings, and deranged characters, but these elements will be effects not of supernatural beings or forces (for none exist), but of mental illness. They may be uncanny, but they are not and cannot be marvelous, any more than they can be fantastic, because, they have no supernatural origin or cause; they are caused by natural, if bizarre, states of mind; they can be explained scientifically.

Todorov's tripartite paradigm applied to ancient and medieval texts, but it does not apply to modern literature or film, because there is nothing fantastic that is resolvable as either marvelous or uncanny. There is only the ordinary, or everyday, and the uncanny, or strange but explicable. Only fantastic stories (of which type, horror is a subgenre), set in the ancient world or during the Middle Ages can be fantastic in Todorov's sense; only such stories can be viewed as marvelous (extraordinary but inexplicable in natural or scientific terms) or as uncanny (extraordinary but explicable in natural or scientific terms).

If we judge H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” and Stephen King's short story “1408,” by our own, present-day worldview, which is basically materialistic, Wells's earlier narrative is “correct” in its rejection of the fantastic and the marvelous, while King's story is “incorrect” in its suggestion that the incidents which occur in the supposedly haunted hotel room are, in fact, supernatural events, for, according to our modern view of the world, there ae no such things as either ghosts or demons; therefore, the room couldn't be haunted by either; therefore, the room is not haunted; therefore, to explain the narrator's perceptions and beliefs, we must adopt the view that he is insane: his perceptions are the results of hallucinations. Wells's explanation of the incidents which occur in his story's supposedly haunted “red room” concur with our modern view of the world, for the narrator concludes that only his own terror caused him to misinterpret what he saw in the room: the room was haunted by his own fear, not by ghosts.

This shift in weltanshauung, which has occurred not only among the intellectual elite, but also among the majority of the millions of the Western world's population, have but one implication. Unless a story is set in the ancient world or the Middle Ages, it can identify only “inner demons,” or mental disorders, the “fault” that “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” In other words, there is now but one source of “evil,” the actions of a disordered mental state. The only monster is the madman or the madwoman. All horror stories set in modern times can investigate only this source of immorality, or of what was once called “evil.” Horror fiction, like other forms of literature, has only two sources and two concerns: the psychological and the ethical, or moral. Judgment of their literary value, more and more, will be based on these criteria.

Writers (and critics), it's probably a good idea to dust off the latest copy of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM) and lay in a good supply of books on ethics.