Shhh: The Making of Monsters (and Short Horror Films)

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

The equivalent of flash fiction (or, in some cases, short stories), short films have simple, linear plots; minimal characters, and a single conflict. However, the use of symbolism and metaphor can enrich the possible interpretations of many of these exercises in independent filmmaking.

Shhh (2012) stars Sean Michael Kyer as asthmatic, stuttering Guillermo, a young boy beset by a monster, and Ilze Burger, as his teenage sister Helleana. Guillermo draws pictures of monsters, earning Helleana's scorn.

She regards her younger brother as a “freak” and goes out of her way to be snide, insulting Guillermo about his drawings, his apparent incontinence, his stuttering, and whatever else crosses her mind. Lately, he's been cutting off his own hair, a lock or two at a time, and concealing the results under a knit cap.

Although the children share the same wash room, only Guillermo sees the monster. Of hideous appearance, the monster is creepy, but its behavior is rather lame, as the conduct of monsters goes: the goblin-like creature with an extensible, tubular proboscis, eats hair, which explains why Guillermo has been cutting off his own tresses.

Once he faces the monster, feeding it hair from his sister's hairbrush, it disappears, and Guillermo is able to set aside his inhaler, leaving it, with his sister's brush, in the wash room. In bed, he holds his finger to his lips and says “shhh!”

At the end of the picture, half of a drawing that Helleana had torn in half, which shows the monster in attack mode, has been taped to a picture of Helleana who looks terrified as the attacking monster approaches her. In the original drawing, the monster had been attacking Guillermo. By facing down the monster and leaving his sister's hairbrush in the wash room after promising the monster that he could provide more hair for it to eat, Guillermo seems to have substituted Helleana for himself as the monster's prey.

The filmmakers offer several clues concerning the true nature of the monster that confronts Guillermo, most of which relate to the boy's behavior. However, the movie begins with a series of dark drawings, by Guillermo, many of which are devoted to the monster.

The first two pictures depict subjects Guillermo and his relationship with his family:

• He lies supine on the floor, apparently content, sketching Saturn, the sun, and a star. As this picture is displayed, the narrator informs the audience, “This is the tale of an extraordinary child . . . ”

• The next picture shows Dad, Helleana, and Guillermo. Dad tips a bottle to his lips, and Helleana strikes Guillermo repeatedly on the head with a round object. Dad and Helleana look slightly monstrous, while Guillermo looks miserable. The narrator's commentary continues: “ . . . raised in such a way that you would have thought he never smiled . . .”

Several of the next drawings concern the monster:

• Guillermo tells Helleana about a monster in the bathroom. The narrator states, “. . . for every night he fought a lurking fear.”
• As he stands before the toilet, a monster parts the shower curtain, lunging toward the boy. The narrator, something of a poet, it appears, adds, “His passage to the bathroom, [sic] locked away a creature would appear.
• Guillermo loses control of his bladder, a sight that Helleana finds hilarious; she laughs as she points to him, standing in a puddle of his own urine.
• He dared not even wonder [at] the horrors that await,” the narrator advises the audience. The monster leans over Guillermo, its mouth gaping. “The children who defied his terms, he could only imagine their fate.”

The next two drawings focus on Guillermo himself:

• Guillermo holds a hand to his forehead. “And what you wonder were the terms asked of our dear boy.”
• As Guillermo takes a pair of scissors to his head, the narrator answers his own question: “Clumps of hair from off his head, the creature could enjoy.”

The final picture is text: “Shhh . . .” as the movie begins.

During the movie's action, we learn these facts about Guillermo:

• He is neglected (left alone) much of the time.
• He is artistic and imaginative.
• He cuts his hair to feed the monster.
• His sister is emotionally and abusive toward him.
• He stutters.
• He is incontinent.
• He is asthmatic and relies on an inhaler.
• He finds the monster both frightening and disgusting.
• Earlier, when he called to his father to rescue him from Helleana, she put her finger to her lips and commanded, “Shhh!” At the end of the movie, he does the same thing.

To understand the monster, we must understand what Guillermo's behaviors represent.

Consulting psychological theory, we discover that pulling (or, we assume, cutting) and trichophagia, or the compulsive eating of hair (we are also assuming that the monster represents a psychological condition of some sort; as such, it is an inner state, a dimension of the self) is a way of relieving stress, anxiety and loneliness.

 
Although stuttering can have physiological and genetic causes, it can also be caused by “stress in the family,” “problems communicating with others,” and “low self-esteem.”

Urinary incontinence can also be caused by physiological issues, but emotional stress that impairs the fight-or-flight response precipitated by the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine can also cause urinary incontinence.

Although asthma is a physical condition, “research has also shown that the body’s response to stress triggers the immune system and causes the release of certain hormones,” thereby leading “to inflammation within the airways of the lungs, triggering an asthma attack.” His ability to discard his inhaler after overcoming the monster seems to underscore the idea that his asthma attacks are attributable to the severe stress he experiences on a regular basis.

It appears that the alcohol and general unavailability of his father and his sisters' emotional and physical abuse of him accounts, in large measure, for Guillermo's heightened stress. These traumas, which affect a young child, are obviously severe, giving rise not to one expression but to a number of severe symptoms: trichophagia, stuttering, urinary incontinence, and asthma. Possibly, he also has low-self esteem as a result of being neglected and abused.

There seems to be another cause of Guillermo's heightened stress. In none of the pictures he draws does his mother appear. She is neither seen nor heard in the movie, and no one speaks of or otherwise refers to her. The disappearance of the mother, possibly as a result of her demise, could explain not only Guillermo's stress but also the alcoholism of his father and the abusive behavior of his sister. Each in his or her own destructive manner, the surviving family members appear to be attempting, largely unsuccessfully, to cope with the grief and loss of the adult female member of the family.

 The monster appears, then, to be a personification of the stress, low self-esteem, loneliness, and fear that Guillermo experiences as a result of his father's emotional abandonment of him, his father's alcoholism, his sister's emotional and physical abuse of him, and, quite possibly, his mother's “abandonment” of him through her death and the grief he feels for her passing and his loss of her, the presumed nurturer of the family.

The narrator tells the audience that Guillermo is “extraordinary.” What makes him so, the film suggests, is his artistic ability. The dark drawings he creates objectify his fears, allowing him to put into pictures what he may not be able to put into words. He can picture himself contented; he can picture his father's alcoholism and his sister's violence and cruelty; he can picture his helplessness, his humiliation, and his fear.

He can also picture an adversary, the monstrous form upon whom he projects the harsh treatment of his father and his sister; they, as much as his own low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief, are the monster he sees in the bathroom, or the wash room, the place to which he goes to divest himself of waste and dirt, to relive himself and to cleanse himself.

His artistic ability allows him to project an enemy, to imagine an adversary. Having accomplished this feat, he can now devise a way to attack and conquer his foe and all that it stands for, all that it represents. By overcoming the monster, he rids himself of his low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. By gaining confidence in himself, he overcomes his sister's power over him and he does not need his father's love and protection. In vanquishing the monster, he becomes a hero. He does not need his inhaler. He does not need his scissors. He can enjoy, but he does not need, the refuge of his room.

He overcomes the part of the monster that is Helleana by imagining her as the monster's victim. In restoring the drawing she'd ripped in half, he replaced his own image with an image of her as the monster's prey. Henceforth, she is the one who must feel low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. He is no longer the scapegoat that she had made him. Without him in this role, she herself must bear the weight of her own problems, without him as her whipping boy.

Instead of picturing himself as the monster's prey, he escapes this fate by imagining his sister in the role of the monster's victim. She who was his tormentor becomes the tormented, the tortured victim of the monster that she helped to create. His father, meanwhile, is the victim of the monster he embraces, the bottle of whiskey that suppresses the low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief that he feels, even as he feeds it not the hair of his head, but the essence of his soul.

Friedrich Nietzsche warns, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” This cautionary declaration also seems to inform the short film.

In the final analysis, there is more than a bit of the monster in Guillermo, too, for he is willing to sacrifice his own sister to the monster, even going so far as to deliberately leave her hairbrush in the bathroom before telling her just where to go to find it. Then, as he lies in bed and she, presumably having gone to get her brush, begins to scream, he holds a finger to his lips and says “shhh.” There is an emotional abyss as deep, apparently, as that of a sociopath, for he seems to feel no qualms about having sent his sister to the same fate as that which had been his own.

Whether his father and his sister helped to make him the monster he has become, the fact remains that he himself has had a part in the making of the monster, for he has contributed to its creation, both by his own actions and through the exercise of his imagination.

Shhh is not without flaws (what is?). The verse in which the narrator speaks is amateurish, at best, and it's often an unnecessary distraction. The drawings, although well executed, are a bit too didactic. The psychology, although suggested, rather than overtly stated, is alternately implausible and too broad. The horror is tepid.

Nevertheless, the short film, overall, is intriguing and offers a lot to discern, analyze, and appreciate.