Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Satisfy Curiosity

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

“Human beings,” communications professor Jib Fowles note, “are curious by nature, interested in the world around them, and intrigued by tidbits of knowledge and new developments.” In adverting, such appeals are often satisfied by the information that advertisements deliver. Unless a product is new to the market, the item advertised is usually already familiar to the advertisement's audience. In this case, the information such advertisements convey is likely to be about some “improvement” to the product, an increase in its size, or the addition of a new ingredient.

In horror fiction, the person, place, or thing about which curiosity is excited is apt to be unfamiliar to readers or moviegoers. In horror fiction, the anomalous makes us curious. We want to know about someone, someplace, or something because it is abnormal, aberrant, deviant, atypical, bizarre, singular, strange, or weird. Human cognition and experience is reducible to six categories, each of which relates to a specific question or set of questions: who?, what?, when?, where?, how?, why?, and how much? or how many? (quantity in number or volume). 

Each of these categories and related questions is further associated with a real-world, or existential, referent: why?, with an agent or an agency; what?, with an action or an object; when?, with time or duration; where?, with location; how?, with method, process, or technique; why?, with cause, motive, purpose, or meaning; how many? with quantity in number; and how much?, with quantity in volume. All six categories relate to cognitive element, identity.

A table neatly summarizes these relationships:

Question	Existential Referent	Cognitive Element
Who?	Agent or agency	Identity
What?	Action or object	Identity
When?	Time or duration	Identity
Where?	Location	Identity
How?	Method, process, or technique	Identity
Why?	Cause, motive, purpose, or meaning	Identity
How many? How much?	Quantity (in number or volume)	Identity

It is with regard to these categories that curiosity is aroused, either by ignorance or by the appearance of the anomalous or the extraordinary (or, most often, by the combination of the two). In other words, in horror fiction (as in life), questions about the identities of agents or agencies, actions or objects, times or duration, locations, methods, processes, techniques, causes, motives, purposes, meanings, and quantities make us curious.

As we discovered in a previous post, the suppression of knowledge about the origin or nature of an entity, a force, or another kind of phenomenon maintains mystery and suspense. It also maintains curiosity, of course. Since we've already covered this ground, let's focus on the other major cause of curiosity, the appearance itself of the anomalous or the extraordinary.

We're familiar with this figure of ancient Greek mythology, although it was doubtlessly astonishing enough to us the first time we made her acquaintance, which brings up a point: all things are extraordinary the first time that we encounter them. Often, they can be made extraordinary again, by transforming them in some way:

Unless we're experts in a particular field of inquiry, many of the phenomena that are familiar to the experts will be new—and, therefore, unfamiliar—to us, as laypersons. I'd never seen this creature before (or so I'd thought), but zoologists have, and when they identified it as a turtle without a shell, I realized I have seen the animal before, just not without its shell. The mystery was solved, but, in the process, the extraordinary became ordinary (sort of).

As Edgar Allan Poe said (and showed, many times in his own work), by combining old forms in new ways, an author creates new visions of reality and suggests fresh perspectives on our lives. In the process, writers (and other artists) also evoke readers' or audiences' curiosity and appeal to their need to satisfy this curiosity.

Plenty of horror stories and movies appeal to reader's or viewers' need to satisfy their curiosity. We'll limit our discussion to just three of them: H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room,” the film adaptation of Stephen King's short story “1408,” and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 movie Psycho (1960).

Having absconded with her boss's money instead of depositing it in the bank, Marion Crane is forced by a storm to stop at an out-of-the-way motel. She waits in her car, but no one in the office comes outside to assist her, so she dashes inside, only to find the office empty. Going outside again, she notices a light on in a second-story window of a Victorian house on a hill overlooking the motel. Seeing a woman walk past the window, she returns to her car and honks her horn. A young man hastens from the house, down three flights of stairs, and crosses the parking lot, inviting Marion into the motel's office, where she registers while he makes small talk about the decline in the motel's business after the new highway bypassed the motor lodge.

The sight of the house, large and imposing, that looks down on the motel, emphasizes the Victorian residence as a presence. Overseeing all that takes place within its purview, it sees all, knows all, at least in relation to its manager, Norman Bates. Literally looking down on him, the house also represents the judgment of his mother, the dominant personality he has created within his disordered mind. His every action, thought, and emotion is controlled by Mother, who makes her disdain for Marion and women in general known and soon puts an end to any possibility that Norman will be able to develop a romantic relationship with Marion (not that this seems at all likely).

By showing the audience not just a house, but this house—large, imposing, dark, and located on a hill high above the motel Norman manages—Hitchcock excites his viewers' curiosity. As the movie progresses and the audience learns more about this abode, their curiosity, although partly satisfied, is further aroused, as new mysteries are revealed. Why, for example, is there an outline of a body in the mattress of the bed in Norman's mother's bedroom? What other dark secrets does the house hold?

In dreams, some believe, houses symbolize the human personality. The attic is the intellect, the basement the unconscious. The bedroom represents sexuality; the kitchen, domesticity and nourishment; the dining room, appetites; the living room, personal interests. If one follows adopts such suggestions, applying them to the characters in Hitchcock's film and the incidents that transpire because of their actions, the film may take a new level of psychological complexity, although many would reject such an interpretation as unscientific and speculative. In any case, the house is certainly a symbolic presence that exerts a malevolent influence on the thoughts, emotions, and actions of its residents, Norman, and his “Mother”—and it certainly evokes and sustains the audiences need to satisfy their curiosity.

Stephen King's 1999 short story “1408,” and the 2007 motion picture of the same title based on it, are, in effect, reversals of H. G. Wells's 1894 short story, “The Red Room.” In all three stories, the protagonist (Mike Enslin in King's story and the movie adaptation of it and an unnamed young man in Wells's story) are warned multiple times in the strongest terms not to go through with their intention of investigating the supernatural events that have allegedly occurred in a hotel (King) and a castle (Wells). In each story, the protagonist is skeptical of the existence of supernatural entities. Disregarding the warnings not to investigate, both Enslin and Wells's protagonist stay overnight, putting the reports of supernatural activity to the test.

The multiple, fervent warnings arouse readers' and viewers' curiosity, as does the question of whether the protagonists' respective investigations will prove or disprove the allegations that the places they investigate are haunted.

In King's story and the film adaptation of it, Enslin discovers that a supernatural presence, ghostly or demonic, haunts the hotel room in which he stayed, barely surviving the experience, whereas Wells's protagonist finds that only his own fear, which has caused his imagination to run away with him, haunts the castle chamber in which he'd spent the night.

According to literary critic Tzevetan Todorov, fantastic literature tends to resolve the issue of whether narrative events are supernatural by either affirming or denying this proposition. If science can explain the events, they are no longer fantastic, but uncanny; otherwise, the events are marvelous. Whereas Wells's story suggests that the events his protagonist experienced are uncanny (the are explainable as the results of an imagination overly excited by fear), King's story and the film based on it both suggest that science cannot explain the incidents that Enslin experienced, so they are no longer fantastic, but marvelous. Thus, in this sense, King's story is a reversal of Wells's tale.

One more point needs to be highlighted. Fowles does not say that most advertisements appeal to people's curiosity. He says that they appeal to people's need to satisfy their curiosity, mostly by becoming informed, i. e., by being educated, about an advertised product or a service. The appeal to the need to satisfy curiosity is a means of generating suspense, which will keep readers reading or viewers viewing as they anticipate the moment at which all shall be made known and the mystery of the nature or the origin of the phenomenon the story's characters have encountered is resolved.