Horror Fiction: The Appeal of Physiological Needs

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

The last of the fifteen basic needs Jib Fowles identifies in Mass Advertising as Social Forecast are the set of physiological needs, such as eating, sleeping, and drinking. (Although these needs include the need for sex, Fowles treats sex separately.)

In restaurants' advertisements, Fowles observes, “The art of photographing food and drink is so advanced . . . the crab meat in the Red Lobster restaurant ads can start us salivating, the Quarterpounder can almost be smelled, the liquor in the glass glows invitingly imbibe, these ads scream.”

Horror fiction is quite that obsessed with depicting food and drink, and the fare which this genre's short stories, novels, and movies features, which includes such delicacies as human flesh and blood, isn't nearly as delectable as crab meat and beef.

Horror often obtains its effects by perverting the normal order of things. By depicting substances that society prohibits people from eating or drinking as food or beverages, horror fiction generates fear and disgust. A reader or moviegoer is not apt to fear eating beef or pork and vegetables or drinking wine, milk, or a soft drink, because society recognizes and accepts these items as legitimate foods (with the exception of vegans and vegetarians, for whom such products, regarded as food or drink, might well be regarded with horror).

Although cannibalism has been practiced in extreme situations by members technologically advanced societies, as during the ill-fated Donner expedition, and until relatively recent times by certain tribes, in general, the consumption of human flesh and blood is not only taboo but also regarded as abhorrent. Consequently, describing or depicting cannibal tribes or families indulging in this practice evokes horror among readers or viewers. Indeed, horror movies involving cannibalism have been roundly censored or banned outright by numerous countries. One in particular, Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was banned at one time or another in Iceland, New Zealand, and Singapore.

Nevertheless, cannibalism has been featured in over 330 films, many of them in the horror genre, including, most recently, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) and the Wrong Turn series of films (2003-2014).

Vampires thrive on blood, often imbibing it directly from the wounds their fangs open in the necks of their human prey. The undead are a staple among horror story villains, appearing in such novels as John William Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), Varney the Vampire (1847), Alexandre Dumas's The Pale Lady (1849), Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot (1975), Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976), Whitley Strieber's The Hunger (1981), Paul Wilson's The Keep (1981), Robert McCammon's They Thirst (1981), John Skipp and Craig Spector's The Light at the End (1986), Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls (1992), and many others. In addition, such heavyweights as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Christabel [1816]) and Lord Byron (The Giaour [1813]) penned narrative poems featuring vampires, and nearly fifty series of novels concerning vampires have been published.

In horror fiction, the appeal of physiological needs can also be perverted by the manner in which such foods are produced and the cost—in the coin of moral decadence, social degeneration, physical suffering, and emotional trauma—of producing them. Here are a couple of examples.

Soylent Green (1973) takes place in the wake of worldwide ecological decline, overpopulation, and unemployment. People rely on Soylent Green, green wafers produced from “high-energy plankton” harvested from the ocean. When Detective Frank Thorn of the New York Police Department investigates the murder of his friend, Police Analyst Solomon “Sol” Roth, he discovers that the wafers are no longer made from plankton, but from human corpses. At the end of the film, having been wounded during a fight with Sol's killer, the police analyst's bodyguard, tab Fielding, and others, as he is being taken away on a stretcher, Thorn cries, “Soylent Green is people!”

The Stuff (1985), part science fiction, part satire, and part horror film, is based on director Larry Cohen's original story, which, he says, was inspired by his distaste for “the consumerism and corporate greed found in our country and the damaging products that were being sold.” In particular, he says, he was concerned about both “foods being pulled off the market because they were hazardous to people’s health” and by “the sheer volume of junk food we consume every day.” In the movie, a delicious, no-calorie, addictive white substance pours out of the ground. Miners discover it and market it, and American consumers can't get enough of The Stuff. Unfortunately, the substance is alive, and it's a parasite. Taking over its hosts' brains, it reduces them to a zombie-like state and consumes them from within. At the end of the film, The Stuff's owners are forced to eat their product, as FBI agent David “Mo” Rutherford asks, “Are you eating it, or is it eating you?”

Horror novels and movies have also appealed to the need for sleep. The movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Stephen King's novel Insomnia (1994) are two memorable examples.

Adapted from Jack Finney's 1954 science fiction novel The Body Snatchers, the 1956 half-science fiction, half-horror movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, features extraterrestrial seed pods that duplicate and replace humans while the victims sleep. The “invasion” spreads from town to town, until Dr. Hill, a psychiatrist, alerts authorities, who seek to contain the invasion. 

According to film critic Leonard Maltin, critics generally regard the movie as an allegory for the U. S. Senate's hearings on communism under Senator Joseph McCarthy during the late 1940s and 1950s. According to this view, the sleep during which the invaders act could symbolize unawareness of or indifference to dangerous social and political realities or blindness to one's own paranoia about dehumanizing social and political forces more powerful than oneself.

In Insomnia, retiree Ralph Roberts develops insomnia. Sleeping less and less each night, he begins to see auras around people and “little bald doctors,” becoming convinced that the “doctors” actually exist, albeit in another dimension. In this alternate universe, two cosmic patterns, The Purpose and The Random govern affairs, the “doctors” working for The Purpose to murder people when “their time” to die is at hand. With Ed Deepneau as his agent, The Crimson King, an inhabitant of the other dimension, seeks to disrupt the equilibrium between The Purpose and The Random. Roberts, recruited by The Purpose, battles Deepneau. Amid the details of the confused and confusing plot, King targets anti-abortion protesters. The novel is pretty much another of King's many chaotic messes, and it's hard to understand how the book was nominated for a 1994 Bram Stoker Award (or maybe not; see my series of posts on the award.) In King's novel, sleep—or maybe it's sleep deprivation—becomes something like an altered state of consciousness.

Physiological needs have long supplied horror authors and filmmakers with a number of topics related to food, drink, and sleep, and it's likely that this set of needs will continue to do so, long into the future.