Horror Movies Are Mysteries, Too

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Many horror stories are mysteries which typically follow a well-established format:

1. An unknown monster is killing people.
2. Often, as the killings continue, the protagonist, sometimes aided by friends or others, investigates; intelligence is gathered, clues are solved.
3. The monster is identified; it is known.
4. Knowledge about the monster is used to neutralize or eliminate it.
5. The status quo returns.

 

This same formula can apply to plagues:

1. An unknown disease is killing people.
2. Often, as the killings continue, the protagonist, sometimes aided by friends or others, investigates; intelligence is gathered, clues are solved.
3. The pathogen is identified; it is known.
4. Knowledge about the pathogen is used to neutralize or eliminate it.
5. The status quo returns.

 

Of course, many a detective story also follows this path:

1. An unknown murderer is killing people.
2. Often, as the killings continue, the protagonist, sometimes aided by friends or others, investigates; intelligence is gathered, clues are solved.
3. The murderer is identified; it is known.
4. Knowledge about the murderer is used to neutralize or eliminate him or her.
5. The status quo returns.
   
   
   
   
   

Where does variation come into play? The same variables that make the structure of fairy tales, as this structure is defined by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale, makes the particulars fresh and intriguing, despite the sameness of the underlying formula's structure.

What is the monster? How is he, she, or it different than others of his, her, or its kind? Physically different? Emotionally different? Behaviorally different? Volitionally different? What motivates it?

Whom are the victims? Why are they targeted? How does the monster kill them?

Where do the killings occur? Why here and now, rather than elsewhere at another time?

What theme does the story suggest, and how does it do so?

A dictionary definition can help us to answer the question, What is the monster?

A dictionary definition does two things: it classifies, or groups, and it distinguishes, or differentiates. First, a dictionary definition tells to which group the term being defined belongs. What type of person, place, or thing is it? Then, a dictionary definition explains how it differs from the other members of its group. The group is the genus; the differences, the differentia.

Monster (n.): an imaginary creature (genus) that is typically large, ugly, and frightening (differentia).

 In what way is your monster “large”? Height? Length? Weight? Strength? Intelligence? Tall? Godzilla fills the bill. Long? What about the worms in Tremors? Heavy? The Blob! Strong? There's a reason King Kong was king of the jungle on Skull Island. Intelligent? The computer in Demon Seed or, for that matter, the extraterrestrial of Species sure turned out to be to die for.

What makes your monster “ugly”? Appearance (but be specific)? Behavior? (but, again, be specific)? Lack of emotion or twisted emotions? Other (specificity counts, always!)? Although Michael Myers, of Halloween, wasn't a bad-looking guy—some say he looks a lot like William Shatner, in fact—his penchant for murdering randy teens and sexually aroused young adults made him a lot less attractive, to be sure.

Why is your monster frightening? It's hard to defeat, perhaps? It has amazing powers, maybe? It is absolutely relentless, possibly? It is supernatural or otherworldly? Other (specificity counts, always!)? The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, like the alien in Alien, had all these characteristics and more.

The same process applies to other characters, such as the protagonist, victims, experts, warriors or soldiers . . . . How do they differ from everybody else's? What makes yours unique? The expert in The Sixth Sense, the psychiatrist, differs from his peers (or most of them, at any rate) by his being dead.

A setting should be integral to the story's plot, of course. If it is, it can be used not only to frighten—it's a spooky place, after all—but also to symbolize, to suggest, and to reveal, even as it conceals. In The Descent, for example, the caverns through which the female spelunkers spelunk may symbolize the female reproductive system itself; the cave-creatures they encounter, their aborted fetuses. On the literal level, the underground passages also add to the characters—and the audience's—claustrophobia.

 

Plug your own versions of these characters and an appropriate setting of your own into the horror-movie-as-a-mystery formula and you, too, can offer a new wrinkle to the subgenre.

Mental Disorders and Ilnesses Will, Like Murder, Out

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Throughout the 1960s, a trend in horror movies is the human “monster.” Often the victim of a significant mental disorder or a mental illness of some kind, the “monster” frequently preys upon his or her peers: he or she is “one of us” without being one of us. Therefore, the monster seems even more terrifying, since victims have no sense of the monster's monstrosity: he or she seems just like everyone else.

Examples abound, including Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom (1960), Nightmare (1963), The Sadist (1963), and Straight-Jacket (1964).

Survivors include a sister and her boyfriend (Psycho) and a neighbor (Peeping Tom). In this subgenre of the horror film, survivors tend to be few and far between, as do heroes. A woman searching for her sister, who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and her boyfriend and a naive, but sincere, young woman who has befriended a psychotic neighbor have the right stuff: courage, loyalty, and love, in the sister's case; friendliness and compassion, in the neighbor's case. Do they survive because of these qualities, or are they simply lucky? By leaving such a question in viewers' minds, these films are unsettling: perhaps our fates do not depend on our behavior, but on pure, dumb luck.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is so familiar it need not be summarized. Anthony Perkins, as the mad transvestite killer Norman Bates, who, half the time believes he's his dead mother, provides a stand-out performance, as does his first victim, Janet Leigh, as Marion Crane. Hitchcock gives his audience some hints about Bates's state of mind: Bates's nervousness and evasiveness, the birds he's stuffed and mounted as an amateur taxidermist, his statement that “sometimes, we all go a little mad,” and his admission that he is under his mother's control. Such clues, however, don't seem to register with Crane, as they do with Detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam). (Nevertheless, both Crane and Abogast are killed.)

Peeping Tom features a camera operator's assistant, Mark Lewis, whose sideline is photographing scantily clad or nude women for a his local porn dealer and whose pastime is filming the young women he kills to capture their expressions as they are faced with their own imminent murders for a documentary work-in-progress.

Between sessions with his camera, he enjoys replaying his victims' screams as he watches their terror in the comfort of his home. The movie's back story suggests that Lewis was himself victimized by his father, a psychiatrist who subjected his son to bizarre experiments during the boy's childhood. In the last moments of the film, he becomes his own final victim.

Nightmare keeps audiences guessing. Janet sees her mother kill her father. Her mother is institutionalized. At the finishing school at which she stays, Janet has nightmares about a woman in white (her mother). A teacher takes her home, but her guardian, Henry Baxter, is not there, so the teacher leaves Janet in the care of Grace, a nurse-companion whom Henry has hired.

Janet's nightmares continue, and she is sedated when Henry returns home. When Henry's wife comes home, Janet mistakes her for the woman in her nightmare and stabs her to death, after which she is institutionalized.

Grace, who has been masquerading as the woman in white in Janet's “nightmares,” marries Henry, with whom she has conspired to deceive Janet into believing she was experiencing nightmares. Suspecting that Henry seeks to drive her mad, Grace stabs him to death, thinking the police will suspect Janet, who, Grace believes, has escaped from the institution. However, Janet has not escaped, so Grace is arrested and charged with Henry's murder.

Besides Janet's mother, who else is mad? Janet? Grace? Both?

 

An everyday incident turns into a nightmare of pain and suffering when a trio's car breaks down near a combination gas station-junkyard and a pair of sadistic serial killers on the run from the police turn up. The Sadist is horrific not only because of the acts of sadism the killers commit against their victims, but also because it shows how an ordinary inconvenience can be transformed, without reason or justification, into an orgy of violence and misery, just like (snap) that.

As in Nightmare, Straight-Jacket pits a daughter against one of her parents. This time, however, it's the youngster, Lucy, who's the villain. Her mother, Carol, hoping to marry a wealthy married man whose parents Lucy has alienated following her return home from the mental institution to which she'd been confined after murdering her husband and his mistress, commits murders, hoping Lucy will be blamed, going so far as to disguise herself as her daughter as she does so. However, despite the dead bodies, things don't go exactly as either Carol or Lucy hoped.

Although a bit far-fetched, each of these films generates suspense and fright by showing what troubles troubled characters can cause, for themselves as well as for others. Except for the murderous couple in The Sadist, the villains are everyday people—mothers, daughters, a camera operator's assistant, a motel proprietor—who happen to suffer from significant mental disorders or illnesses.

Because they are relatives or neighbors or business owners, they catch their victims with their guards down, as any of us might be caught off guard by similar human monsters disguised as fellow citizens. That is their greatest source of terror in a time in which society seemed, for many, turned upside-down and parents and children were caught not only in a generation gap, but also in a cultural war in which, for parents, society might seem to be coming apart at the seams and, for their children, tradition was a thing of the past in more ways than one.

These films frighten as much for their subtexts as they do for their violence. It may be, as Bates observes, that, “sometimes, we all go a little mad.” We just don't want to be the person who does, nor do we want to be the victim of the one who does.

Freaks of Nature (and Applied Science)

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movies of the 1950s often feature bizarre freaks of nature, in the films' titles as well as in the movies themselves: The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), giant ants (Them!) (1954), Godzilla (1954), Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), Tarantula! (1955), The Mole People (1956), Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), The Alligator People (1959), The Wasp Woman (1959), The Return of the Fly (1959), and on and on . . . and on.

Victims include scientists' assistants, the expedition ship's crew members, and scientists, (The Creature from the Black Lagoon); a store owner, a state trooper, an FBI agent and most of his family (Them!), ships' crews, islanders, and residents of Tokyo (Godzilla), a diver (Monster from the Ocean Floor), a scientists and a laboratory assistant (Tarantula!), an archaeologist (The Mole People), an adulteress and her lover (Attack of the Giant Leeches), a hermit handyman and a newlywed bridegroom (The Alligator People), a cosmetics company owner (The Wasp Woman), a spy, and a scientist (The Return of the Fly).

Although some victims are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, others are attacked because, as investigators or scientists, they play integral roles in the campaigns to stop the monsters or support such individuals, as the ships crews and lab assistants do. They are troops, as it were, in the perpetual war of science vs. nature.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon succumbs to massive gunfire. Sub-machine guns and flamethrowers dispatch the giant ants in Them! Godzilla is asphyxiated by a secret weapon that destroys oxygen molecules. A napalm attack, courtesy of a squadron of Air Force fighters, kills the giant tarantula of Tarantula. The Mole People find it difficult to withstand the debilitating effects of natural sunlight. Dynamite explosions end the menace of giant leeches. A faceful of carbolic acid and blunt trauma from a fall from a height is too much for the wasp woman. The Return of the Fly's human fly reverts to being only a human after the process that transformed him into a human fly is reversed. Only the fate of the alligator people is ambiguous.

These films suggest that freaks of nature are overcome—that is, annihilated—in one of two ways. Nature kills them, or they are destroyed by an application of human technology. While the Mole People are subdued by nature, the Creature of the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, the giant tarantula, the giant leeches, and the human fly are destroyed by human technology. The wasp woman is destroyed by both human technology (carbolic acid) and nature (gravity).

Interestingly, these films' freaks of nature are the spawn both of nature itself and of human technology. More often than not, the latter both produces and destroys these freaks. The theme of these movies seems to be that, yes, technology can backfire—it can produce monsters—but so can nature itself. In either case, though, technology can be counted on to destroy monsters, whether they are of natural or technological origin (or both). Through technology, even when meddling with nature itself causes monstrous results, science saves!

Scientists may not be gods. They err, because, well, to err is to be human. But they also know how to fix their mistakes. That's not ideal, these films imply, but it's the best we can do, and being a demi-god isn't half bad.

The Humor of Horror (Or Is It the Horror of Humor?), Part 3

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Besides Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams, a third cartoonist who often finds humor in horror (or horror in humor) is James Thurber.

Thurber's cartoons often rely on implication. His artwork and captions, working together, suggest a conclusion, which Thurber leaves to his readers to infer. Thus, his work is one part of a two-way communication between himself, as artist, and his reader. Of course, in most instances, Thurber is pretty clear about the conclusion to be drawn.

His female figures often dwarf his male figures, suggesting the way his men—often husbands—see their wives. Henpecked, the submissive male characters are timid; they are careful not to offend or annoy their bigger, dominant spouses, women who could crush them by their sheer size alone.

In one cartoon, a large woman is seated on a couch with a much smaller male figure. She looks demure, with her hands folded on her lap, as she looks down at the little man beside her (whose posture makes it appear that he is about to bolt from her presence). Smiling, but looking directly at him, with a gaze that suggests the possibility of danger, if not madness, declares, “If you can keep a secret, I'll tell you how my husband died.”

Despite the fact that the body of the man beside her is turned—he has to look over his shoulder to maintain eye contact with her—and he looks as though he is about to flee for his life, his closeness to her suggests he might be a suitor, one who, perhaps, is having second thoughts about becoming involved with her. If so, is she asserting her dominance over him now, by delivering an indirect threat against his life. If she murdered her husband, as her maniacal leer and her possession of a secret concerning the cause of his death suggests, perhaps she is suggesting that the same fate could await him, should he attempt to assert his will in their relationship.

Role reversal, once again, suggests a horror that might not be apparent, the secret terror that may lie at the heart of a relationship in which one person asserts absolute dominance over another under the ever-present threat of death.

Another of Thurber's cartoons has an existentialist bent. Engaged, presumably, in a rat race, finely dressed men and women rush past each other, in opposite directions, without exchanging so much as a glance, a smile, or a greeting. Behind them, in back of a wrought-iron fence, the “DESTINATIONS” mentioned in the cartoon's caption await them in a cemetery whose headstones bear common names, such as “Bill,” “Mary,” and “Jones” or, in the distance, are altogether illegible and, therefore, anonymous. The cartoon almost begs the question, What value does life—and ambition—have when it ends in death?

Finding humor in opposites, especially those as significant as life and death or purpose and meaninglessness, can be an effective means of unearthing horror.

The Humor of Horror (Or Is It the Horror of Humor?), Part 2

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Charles Addams bases most of his cartoons on a family of monsters that not only look human, but also often act like ordinary, typical people. The humor of his work derives, in large part, from his depiction of ordinary human behavior as being, in some way, eccentric, grotesque, or outrageous. Often, however, there is an additional element that makes a particular cartoon in his oeuvre unique.

Sometimes, only a thin line separates fantasy from reality. For example, despite steady scientific progress and technological innovations such as space satellites, computers, and the Internet, many people, even today, embrace an essentially medieval worldview. The possibility, in fiction, if nowhere else, of both supernatural and natural states of existence allows the opportunity for what Tzvetan Todorov calls the “fantastic,” the “marvelous,” and the “uncanny.”

According to Todorov, the fantastic exists only if seemingly inexplicable phenomena remain inexplicable—that is, if they cannot be resolved as being either marvelous or uncanny. A phenomenon is marvelous if it defies rational and scientific explanation; it is uncanny if, although strange, it can be explained by either reason or science. For example, some contend that Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw is fantastic, while H. G. Wells's short story is uncanny and Stephen King's short story “1408” is marvelous.

Whether Addams was aware of Todorov's paradigm or not, his drawing of stone gargoyles atop a balcony's wall and the shock of a woman who, gazing upward while her companions photograph the carved monsters, sees the shadow of a flying gargoyle on the wall above, fits perfectly into Todorov's scheme. Into the world of the ordinary, the marvelous appears, for the statue cannot be explained as one of the gargoyles on the wall. Its shape does not match any of those of the statues, none of the statues is detached from the wall, and the shadow is so situated that no unseen statue among the others could cast it. Therefore, the existence of the statues cannot itself explain the presence of the shadow. In Todorov's terms, the cartoon seems implies a marvelous resolution of the apparently fantastic.

Another of Addams's cartoons reflects the criticism of the homogenized sameness of some suburban housing tracts that Malvina Reynolds popular song “Little Boxes” also satirizes:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

According to Charles H. Smith and Nancy Schimmel, Pete Seeger Reynolds said, “as she drove through Daly City, . . . Bud, take the wheel. I feel a song coming on.”

However, Addams's cartoon suggests more. The houses, indeed, “look just the same” as one another, but the residents differ considerably—and strangely. Each is bizarre but individual; each is “different” in his or her own way, yet each is regarded as normal by both him- or herself and by his or her spouse and child. Each also appears content and confident and seems to have positive self-esteem.

The first figure, at the left of the drawing, initially catches the viewer's attention, which is not surprising, since he is the largest and we are taught, in the United States, among other nations, to read from left to right. Once we notice his difference—or differences (he has three eyes, two noses, and two mouths—we may turn our gaze to the others who, like him, seem to be off to work, as their wives and children (one each to a couple), standing at their respective doorsteps, bid them farewell.

The second figure is portly. Doffing his hat, as the first figure does, he turns to face his family. His wife smiles and waves; his son waves. The gentleman wears a sports jacket, tie, and slacks, but his feet are bare, revealing sharp, pointed toes that match those of his sharp, pointed fingers.

The third figure is tiny, but game; undaunted by the rolled newspaper under his arm, which is half his own size, he looks over his shoulder, as he waves goodbye to his normal-size wife and son, who wave back.

Next, an obese man performs the same action as his neighbors, waving at his family as he departs for his day at work.

The next figure is a human octopus, with eight arms and no legs. As he shuffles down his walk, he doffs his hat to his wife and child, his wife returning his wave.

The final figure shown in the cartoon is tall and extremely thin, and he doesn't look back at his wife and child as he makes his way out of their front yard, but he has doffed his hat.

Although all the houses are identical, down to the tapered conical shrubs flanking their front doors, as are all the wives and children, the male residents differ a good deal from one another. Their wives and children seem to be exhausted by their roles; they are not individual persons but, each and all, The Wife and The Child. The horror of the cartoon comes from the sameness of the domestic lives the women and children—and, yes, the men—live. Despite the fact that the male characters are distinguished by their appearance, they live much the same lives as their wives, who look identical to one another.

The way of life, in identical houses on identical lots, and the identical papers carried by the men, who, despite their apparent individuality, live in the same type of houses, dress in a similar costume of coat, tie, slacks, and (except in the case of the figure with the sharp, pointed feet and the octopus man) shoes are what makes the characters in the cartoon as much the same as their houses and their families. A strict conformity to standard mores and social expectations are the horrors that have made everyone the same, even when significant differences exist, at least superficially.

Repetition is the technique that reveals the theme of Addams's cartoon. In and of itself, some find repetition eerie, especially when its reiterations seem unending. When such repetition is combined with a hard-and-fast conformity to rigid social conventions, its demonstration of the effects of such dehumanization is horrific, indeed, despite the humorous situation Addams's cartoon depicts. 

A third Addams cartoon exhibits a bit of ethnocentricity, the valuing of a another culture by the standards of one's own culture.

As a party of four black men wearing loincloths sit or stand about a huge cauldron at the edge of a bamboo forest in the background, one of them stirring its contents with a stick, a woman of their tribe, naked but for a string of beads around her neck, bends forward at the waist to offer a white man in khakis a bowl of food, presumably from the cauldron. A shelf below the thatched roof of a nearby hut displays four human skulls, seeming to suggest that the tribe are cannibals. Her guest grimaces in disgust, refusing to accept the bowl, which prompts the woman to say, as a parent might remonstrate with a stubborn and unreasonable child, “How do you know you don't like it if you won't even try it?”

The cartoon's readers may also find the idea of eating human flesh to be repulsive for the same reason that the disgusted man to whom the bowl is offered does. He need not sample the food to find it objectionable; he accepts his own culture's taboo against cannibalism as justified. In short, he finds human flesh, as food, obnoxious on principle. There is no need to “try” the dish to determine whether he would enjoy it.

From the native woman's perspective, her guest is being childish. She finds his position to be unreasonable. Experience, she suggests, should be the test of approval or disapproval. From her standpoint, he should “try” the meal; from his, eating human flesh is simply unthinkable.

By juxtaposing the standards of conduct dictated by two societies that differ sharply from one another, Addams suggests that some horrors are horrible only because taboos make them so. If one were a member of the woman's culture, he or she would find her guest's refusal to even “try” the dish she offers him—an affront to her people's hospitality—as rude as it is incomprehensible. If a member of his culture, one would find her offer of such a meal unenlightened at best and as horrific in any case.

As seen from the perspective of the man in khakis, the humor of the cartoon depends upon the reader's acceptance of the Western taboo against cannibalism, which makes the woman's chiding of him, as if he were a child, humorous because of the patent incongruity of it.

In a second reading of the cartoon, its humor depends upon seeing the guest, a grown man, acting in a petulant, childish, rude, and thoroughly unreasonable manner. If there is nothing intrinsically wrong with eating human flesh, he is the stubborn, unreasonable child she thinks he is.

Finally, the cartoon can also be seen as a satirical comment on the nature of morality itself, if morality is viewed as relative and ethnocentric, rather than as absolute and universal.

Erotic Horror, Japanese Style

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Japanese horror films include themes that, foreign to American audiences, seem not only original and daring in concept, but also bizarre in their presentations of such themes.

It may be that, in some cases, the originality of themes and the grotesque imagery in which these themes find expression stem, in part, from Japanese erotica, which is, from a Western standpoint, also seen as being unusually creative and outlandish. Not only does Japanese erotica include “tentacle sex” between sea creatures and women, which is often, but not always, non-consensual in nature and contains an element of bestiality, but sex between men and women is apt to include practices with which Westerners are more or less unfamiliar, the depictions of some of which have resulted in criminal prosecutions in the United States (Violence Against Women in Pornography by Walter DeKeseredy and Marilyn Corsianos, 33).

One Japanese erotic horror film, Empire of the Senses (1976), is based on the “true story of Sada Abe,” whose sadomasochistic relationship with Kichizo Isgida, a married man, reached its climax with “his death and castration during sex.” Perhaps Sada might have gotten away with the murder had she not been so unwise as to carry her victim's severed “penis in her kimono sash,” a practice which resulted in her arrest (Introduction to Japanese Horror Film by Colette Balman, 22).

Paradoxically, although Japanese erotica also excludes any depiction of pubic hair, genitals, or sexual penetration (70), it is much less concerned about the exhibition of semen. According to Balman, Japanese horror films are as likely to feature male victims as these movies are to feature female victims. She offers, as an example, Entrails of a Virgin (1986), in which Asaoka, “pursued by the enraged Kazuyo, is choked to death as a large hook wielded by the monster lifts him into the air and copious amounts of viscous fluid—the monster's semen—gush into the water nearby” (159).

Thematically, tentacled monsters were a theme in painting before they became a theme on film. The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, an 1814 erotic woodcut by Hokusai, shows a supine woman receiving oral sex from an octopus while one of its tentacles probes her mouth. Text that accompanies the woodcut indicates that the woman enjoys the octopus's aggressive behavior and its use of the suction cups on its eight arms.

The tentacles of a cuttlefish, jellyfish, octopus, squid, and other tentacled creatures of the deep are strange by virtue of their possession of multiple arms, the better with which to please their human lovers. These appendages are long, strong, flexible, and equipped with suckers that are capable of rotating “in any direction”; lengthening, or elongating, “to twice . . . [their] normal length,” experiencing intense “touch sensitivity” and walking “an item along an arm simply by moving the sucker.”

As Hokusai's woodcut clearly shows, tentacles are also capable of probing cavities, oral and otherwise. A tentacled creature, in fact, can perform several sexual acts simultaneously, a fact which might make them desirable partners, despite their hideous appearance.

There is, of course, also the element of taboo. Bestiality is a practice that is generally condemned by most societies. Engaging in sex with a tentacled marine monster violates this taboo, adding the spice of performing a forbidden act to the erotic nature of the behavior itself.

Several American horror movies have also included tentacled menaces:

• It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) (octopus)
• Tentacles (1977) (octopus)
• The Beast (1996) (squid)
• Octopus (2000) (octopus)
• Octopus 2 (2001) (octopus)
• Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (2006) (kraken)
• Monster (2008) (octopus)
• Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus (2009) (octopus)
• Grabbers (2012) (alien)
• The Creature Below (2016) (octopus)

What eliminates the threat posed by these tentacled terrors?

• It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) (octopus): torpedo (technology)
• Tentacles (1977) (octopus): killer whales (natural predators)
• The Beast (1996) (squid): fuel explosion (technology)
• Octopus (2000) (octopus) (nothing)
• Octopus 2 (2001) (octopus)
• Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (2006) (kraken) (shot with machine gun) (technology)
• Monster (2008) (octopus) (?)
• Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus (2009) (octopus) (shark)
• Grabbers (2012) (alien) (explosives) (technology)
• The Creature Below (2016) (octopus)
  
  

Although these films don't have overt sexual imagery, the subtext created by Hokusai's woodcut and by the works of other artists whose work has featured tentacle erotica is certainly a subtext in some of them. Perhaps one reason for the appeal of tentacle monsters, whether in an erotic subtext or otherwise, is their symbolic significance, as phallic symbols.

Félicien Rops

Just as Hokusai's woodcut inspired a theme that appears in Japanese erotic horror films, it also inspired such other artists as Western painters Félicien Rops, Auguste Rodin, Louis Aucoc, Fernand Khnopff, Martin van Maele, and Pablo Picasso “Tentacles of love and death: from Hokusai to Picasso” by Ricard Bru, 55-71).

The Humor of Horror (Or Is It the Horror of Humor?), Part 1

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movies often include a humorous scene or two, ostensibly as a means of relieving the tension that results from sustained, intensifying suspense. Frequently of the black humor type, such visual jokes are intended, perhaps, to refocus both the teller and the listener on the normal, the customary or traditional, the everyday, rather than on the abnormal, the non-traditional, or the extraordinary.

Alfred Hitchcock presents Psycho's audience with a humorous scene after Norman Bates kills Marion Crane. He has loaded her corpse and meager possessions into her car and pushed it into a lake to dispose of the evidence of his crime. As Norman looks on, the car begins to sink. It continues to slip deeper and deeper into the water, but, then, abruptly, it stops, only partly submerged, and Norman's expression, partly anticipation, partly glee, up to this point also suddenly changes, to one of not only worry but also panic.

Unless the car fully sinks, he himself (and his “mother”) will sink, as his charade is exposed and he is confined to a mental asylum or a prison for his “mother's” dastardly deed. At the last moment, the car does, in fact, completely submerge, and Norman looks relieved. He has gotten away with murder, after all, it seems. The television series Dirty Little Liars provides its audience with plenty of black humor, much of it through its allusions to such Hitchcock films as Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, and others.

Finding the humor amid horror is a difficult task. If done clumsily, the use of humor to alleviate tension can backfire on the author. In times of hyper-sensitivity and political correctness, it is especially important not to offend readers' sensibilities, even in horror fiction. However, looking to cartoonists whose work involves the macabre can offer some pointers for effective use of black humor, although writers should use them at their own risk.

One such cartoonist is Gahan Wilson, many of whose works appeared in Playboy magazine over a period of years. Most of them include a gruesome twist. For example, most of us do not fear optometrists. We go to them voluntarily, trusting ourselves to their care, believing them, as men and women of medicine, to have our welfare at heart and in mind. It is the violation of this trust by a mad doctor that underlies the ghoulish humor of this cartoon:

In reading the eye chart, we assume the role of the patient; we are trusting, unaware, and helpless as we read of the optometrist's intention to kill us. As we read the chart, the letters tend to blur, reminding those of us whose vision isn't perfect (many of us, alas, who are of the patient's age), suggesting the additional horror that, even with our fate spelled out for us, unable to read the writing on the wall, we are in danger of being killed where we sit, unaware of our fate until it is too late.

This cartoon offers us a technique widely used in horror movies (and, less often, in novels): have the viewer (or the reader) assume (or, more often, identify with) the role of the helpless victim.

In this cartoon, Wilson shows the absurdity of a popular pastime, a supposed “sport” in which armed men kill animals that have no chance against their killers. In the cartoon, the hunter's hubris has led him to kill every animal he and his friend have encountered, as the presence of blood-splattered snow and the friend's ironic comment suggest: “Congratulations, Baer—I think you've wiped out the species!”

Naming the shooter Baer doubles the cartoon's irony, since the name sounds like “bear.” Like a bear, Baer is a predator. Unlike a bear, however, Baer kills for “sport,” not survival, killing every animal he encounters. His smug, slightly crazed look suggests that he is insane, which, in turn, suggests that hunting, at least the way he practices it, is also insane.

This cartoon's technique is to exaggerate a commonplace activity to reveal the absurdity of the pastime and those who participate in it.

Many horror movie plots, novels, and short stories take place in isolated settings. This cartoon is also set in such a locale. A small eatery in the middle of nowhere, near a two-lane blacktop next to bare mountains possibly in Alaska or the Yukon, judging by the aurora borealis seen in the night sky, bears bright signs on its rooftop and exterior walls: “EAT.” As a gigantic monster of vague, gelatin-like form, crawls over a ridge, toward the roadside cafe, one employee, the cook, possibly, says to another, the waiter, perhaps, “My God—do you suppose it can read?”

This cartoon turns the tables on humanity. It's all right to be a carnivore, Wilson seems to suggest, as long as we are the carnivores. To be the eater rather than the eaten is all well and good, but if the roles are reversed, the horror of the eat-or-be-eaten world is exposed. With apologies to Socrates, in some cases, it seems, the unexamined life may be worth living.

Role reversal is another way that cartoonists like Wilson reveal the horror inherent in everyday practices that we take for granted.

A study of other Wilson cartoons reveals other techniques for showing the horror in everyday situations and practices, but, in our next post, let's take a look at the work of Charles Addams, another artist known for disclosing the humorous within the horrific.

Writing Blurbs That Sell

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Tomasz Opasinski, a fifteen-year veteran of movie poster design, a movie poster focuses “on the movie's main plot twist.”

In developing summaries designed to sell their books, writers can do the same thing. Indeed, they should follow Hollywood's example and point their readers toward their own story's “main plot twist” because Hollywood spends considerable money in testing the effectiveness of this approach.

As Opasinski points out, “Poster design is increasingly driven by empirical research, not artistic intuition.” This research involves tagging “the tone and content of posters with keywords” and then tracking which keywords “performed well in the past on similar movies.”

Most writers don't have the financial resources to hire social scientists to conduct original research, so how can writers learn what keywords work for their genre? The solution is simple and effective, but entails a bit of “research” on the writer's part.

Using a web image browser (I like Bing myself), type something like “horror movie posters” (you might also include a time frame, such as “2020” or “2010 through 2020,”) You can also enhance your search term by specifying a subgenre or a particular theme: “horror movie posters 2020 forest setting.” Results are apt to be a bit general, despite the use of such qualifying terms, but it's a start.

Now, a pad and pen beside you (or an open word processing program before you), keep track of words in the movie posters' taglines that are used more than once (and preferably several times). Your resulting list should give you the keywords that researchers have blessed as effective. Use as many of these keywords as possible (and as relevant) in your own story's blurb. (You might practice on familiar movies, writing new [and improved] blurbs for classics such as Frankenstein or The Mummy.)

A poster, Opasinski says must sell a movie within “one or two seconds.” For that reason, in addition to pointing potential audience members toward the film's “major twist,” leaving “them wanting more” and using research-validated keywords, Opasinski says, poster designers also focus on a single “icon” and the use of conflict, both visual and emotional.

Although Opasinski doesn't define “icon,” presumably he uses it in its traditional, denotative sense, as “a sign whose form directly reflects the thing it signifies.” For him, it appears, the leaning bridge over which Tom Cruise, as Jack Harper, walks in the poster Opasinski designed is the “icon” he selected to sell the film. Its meaning is intended to symbolize the protagonist's survival of the catastrophe represented by the “ruined bridge.” It is this moment, presumably, that Opasinski sees as the movie's “first major twist.” He relies on it to sell potential audience members on seeing the film; his poster has led them here, leaving “them wanting more.”

Opasinski says studios provide the keywords that appear on the poster, so we may assume that the copywriter employed them in the poster's tagline, “Earth is a memory worth fighting for.” Earth is home to everyone; the word “memory” suggests that it is of the past. If it has not ended altogether (which, the poster suggests, it has not), it is in some way significantly altered. Perhaps it is to the memory of the Earth as it was, before the catastrophic event, that the tagline alludes, although it's unclear how such a state of existence, now lost, can be “fought for,” unless such fighting involves revenge.

From Opasiniski's observations about his art, we learn several principles to keep in mind as we develop the blurb to sell our own stories:

1. Select a “single icon” that represents the story's “main plot twist” and the protagonist's emotional conflict.
2. Keep the blurb as short as possible, and do the targeted readers' thinking for them. (The summary should suggest the theme of the story.)
3. Use research-based keywords to describe the book's plot.