Plotting Board, Part 6

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

With a Little Bit of Bloomin' Luck

Our belief (or relative belief) in the influences of certain phenomena, including our feelings and attitudes, often affect our thoughts and our overt behavior, even when we deny that such is the case. In The X-Files, Mulder is frequently guided by his belief in the existence of paranormal phenomena, while his partner, Scully, is often led by her skepticism.

Other phenomena, real and imagined, also affect the characters, one of which, as VanDerWerff points out, is the concept of luck. “We all sort ourselves . . . into the categories of 'lucky people' and 'unlucky people'” (323), he suggests. FBI agents Mulder and Scully are no exceptions, which allows the series's episode “The Goldberg Variation” to explore “the ideas of luck” as “a giant system you pay into, then make withdrawals from” (323). By exploring other commonly held beliefs, communal or individual, writers acquire many ways to develop plots for short stories and novels, just as TV and movie writers do.

Religious fanaticism, as represented by a snake-handling cult in The X-Files episode “Signs and Wonders” is another example. According to VanDerWerff, the exploration of power of fanaticism to shape and manipulate religious fanatics has a lot to do with “the lure of complete commitment, of surrendering oneself to someone who claims to know all the answers” (328). It's an idea for plotting as contemporary and terrifying as Allison Mack's alleged involvement in the NXIVM cult, which, again, allegedly, included her branding other women as her and her master's property. (Religious fanaticism also has quite an influence on Pilgrim a character in the Punisher series.)

Such ideas as blessings and curses, optimistic and pessimistic attitudes, biases and prejudices, fetishes and phobias, the supernatural and the otherworldly, to name but a few such influences, also permit such stories as H. G. Wells's “Pollock and the Porroh Man,” “The Red Room,” and “The Apple”; Ray Bradbury's “Skeleton”; the effects of idols in Stephen King's Desperation; Rod Serling's “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”; Shirley Jackson's “Just an ordinary Day”; and W. W. Jacobs's “The Monkey's Paw,” to name but a few.

(Seemingly) Alternate Solutions

As Handlen notes in his commentary on “The Amazing Maleeni” episode of The X-Files, one way to spin a plot while maintaining suspense is to present a mystery which has—or at least seems to have—multiple possible solutions. As the characters (or readers) discover the solution they've figured out isn't the solution at all, they continue to pursue leads or watch (or read), hoping their next deduction may prove correct, only (hopefully) to be frustrated yet again, until, finally, the true, one-and-only solution is presented, by either Mulder or Scully, naturally:

“Several times through the episode, our heroes believe they've solved the case only to come up empty-handed. The result is something that continually pulls us forward along with Mulder and Scully, promising new and greater mysteries with each new discovery” (326).

Ask the BIG QUESTIONS

Plots can be generated by simply asking the BIG QUESTIONS, as the “Sein und Zeit” (“Being and Time”) episode of The X-Files does. This installment, Handlen and VanDerWerff imply, asks what might happen to a character whose “very belief system” is “eradicated before his eyes” (330).

This is such a compelling question that its very asking is enough to make anyone want to stay tuned (or keep reading, as the case may be). It also parallels such events in the lives of historical figures and, indeed, the men and women of everyday life. What became of Jefferson Davis, the man, after the Civil War ended in the South's defeat? What did the ordinary Roman think and do after the Empire fell (or the average Brit, for that matter, after the fall of the British Empire)? What does one do the day after he or she has lost his or her entire family in a tragic accident? What happens to the citizens of a nation after the fall of their country? History records some of the answers, but never all.

The question that “Sein und Zeit” asks, implicitly, is what happens to Fox Mulder when his “very belief system [is] eradicated before his eyes”? The second part of this story is presented in the next episode of the series, “Closure.” BIG QUESTIONS, it's obvious, lead to longer plots. They also generate immediate and profound interest on the part of their audiences.

NEXT: A bit more.

Title and Caption: The Horror of the Evocative

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, the titles and captions of horror movie posters are suggestive. They're enticing. They invite their viewers' minds to wander, to speculate, to imagine—and, of course, we imagine much worse things, much worse monsters, than those even the most talented special effects wizards and screenwriters are apt to show us. There's no substitute, when it comes to fear, for the human imagination itself, as H. G. Wells implies in his masterful short story “The Red Room.”

But this post isn't about short stories or novels or horror movies. It's about the suggestiveness of words combined with images, which together explain nothing, state little, and evoke much.

The poster for Dark Was the Night evokes terror, the fear of the unknown, both with its title (notice the use of the past tense), which refers to “dark” and “night,” which can be understood both literally and figuratively, suggesting both nocturnal hours and evil, and the poster's caption, “Evil's Roots Run Deep. . . .”

The text is accompanied by an image of a man wearing a uniform, probably that of a local police department, alone in a forest. Alone, he holds a flashlight in one hand, a rifle in the other, the tool parallel to the weapon. Technology and nature are thus symbolically juxtaposed.

But there is another juxtaposition, too: that of man and beast. Despite his flashlight and his rifle—despite his technological advantages—the hunter has become the hunted, his prey, a gigantic creature that looks simultaneously both fleshly and earthborn, has become the hunter. The creature, which may or may not have a head (if it does, it is low, below chest level, as if the creature crouches, although its body appears to be erect), is behind the human. In the wilderness, technology has its limits; in the forest primeval, engineering and its effects count but little, if at all.

The poster suggests that, in hunting the creature of the woods, the human may, in fact, be hunting himself, or the beast within himself, for its placement suggests that it could be rising from the man, a shadowy figure as much flesh and blood as leaf and dirt. It is the beast within, his on bestial nature, perhaps, that the man hunts, and it is this bestial element of himself which hunts him.

The poster recalls Friedrich Nietzsche's warning, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” This idea of the beast within is reinforced by the letter “i” in “Night,” which is an image of a stunted tree, its branches superimposed upon the limbs of the forest's trees, its roots forming a clawed hand reaching down, into the portrait of man and beast.

By explaining nothing, but evoking much, the poster invites viewers to form their own explanations, to make the text and image mean whatever they think or want them to mean. In this sense, movie posters become Rorschach inkblots or a sort, by which, in projecting one's own thoughts and feelings upon the poster, viewers identify the monster in themselves (just as I myself have done, no doubt, in explaining such posters as Rorschach tests).

A review of the movie shows a few of my interpretations of the poster's significance are false in terms of what actually happens in the film. However, there is a lawman—two in fact: Deputy Donny Saunders and Sheriff Paul Shields, and technology is represented by the tools the victims, a group of loggers, use, who do encounter a monster. The movie makes plain some of the monster's characteristics and behaviors: it snatches the local townspeople's cattle, so, presumably, it's a carnivore, and it “leaves hoof prints in the dirt” and “scratch marks on metals,” suggesting it has powerful, sharp claws.

What about my supposition that the monster arises from the lawman (or from human beings in general)? A couple of the characters suffer from chronic guilt concerning a child for whose lose they blame themselves, but the film doesn't play on their guilt as a symbolic “root” of the monster and the evil it does; instead, New York Times critic Andy Webster points out, it's a sort of “ecologically minded demon that’s some kind of godless instrument of the Devil,” as is suggested by the “tree dweller['s] . . . fighting encroaching overdevelopment on its habitat (attacking those who don’t 'respect the land,' says a part-Shawnee bartender)” and its subsequent attack upon “huddled citizens seeking refuge in a church, as if to assault their faith.”

For Webster, this implicit explanation of the creature's motives, if not its nature, doesn't work well: Even in a horror movie, that’s hard to believe. ” My own idea, that the lawman's own character is the source in which the monster is rooted, seems a better explanation. It worked well for Robert Louis Stevenson, after all.

The creature seems to remain mysterious, although some suggest it might be the devil or a demon, and one reviewer sees it as a contemporary version of Spring-heeled Jack, “as similar creature” that terrorized the population of Devon, England, in the mid 1800s. This same creature, “or something similar,” apparently “made its way to America,” where it became “known as the Jersey Devil.”

Both creatures have interesting (and varied) histories, but neither seems to have arisen, Mr. Hyde fashion, out of their human, Dr. Jekyll, counterparts, so, here, my imagination doesn't dovetail with the movie's plot, but, then, the imagination often doesn't, which is one reason, perhaps, that we often say the imagination provides images not only different from, but superior to, many a movie and, for that matter, many a monster.

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.

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.

Doctors of Death

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

“When a doctor goes wrong, he is the first among criminals.” – Sherlock Holmes, “The Speckled Band”

Some believe Jack the Ripper was a medical doctor, perhaps a surgeon. Other serial killers are known to have practiced medicine, include H. H. Holmes, Harold Shipman, Michael Swango, Marcel Petiot, Shirō Ishii, John Bodkin Adams, Josef Menegle, Robert George Clements, Thomas Neill Cream, Louay Omar Mohammed ai-Taei, Maxim Petrov, and Kermit Gosnell.

As Sherlock Holmes (okay, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) observes, medical doctors make splendid criminals. They have the knowledge, the discipline, and the skill to kill, but they also often present the persona of a caring and humanitarian professional in whose hands patients are well-advised to place not only their trust, but also their lives. In fact, their victims often come to them, as patients who are both physically and emotionally vulnerable. They look upon their doctors as their best hopes for survival. Ironically, “when a doctor goes wrong,” he or she is apt to be just the opposite. Alas, patients sometimes learn too late that their trusted physician or surgeon is, in fact, a cold-blooded killer.

Horror movies have featured their share of diabolical doctors, some of whom are researchers, others of whom are medical practitioners or surgeons. Dr. Jekyll, of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, (1886) appears to be a chemist; Dr. Moreau, of H. G. Wells's novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), is a physiologist and vivisectionist; and Dr. Griffin*, of H. G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man (1897), is an optics researcher. (Mary Shelley's Victor von Frankenstein is not a doctor, but an amateur scientist of sorts. Likewise, Dr. Anton Phibes [of the 1972 movie The Abominable Dr. Phibes] is not a medical doctor; he has degrees in music and theology, one of which is a doctorate.)

Several other novels and movies also feature doctors of one type or another, but the ones we've identified are sufficient for our (or, rather, Sherlock Holmes's) thesis: “When a doctor goes wrong, he is the first among criminals.”

* * *

Dr. Jekyll

In creating the dual character of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson seems to have separated the private person from his persona. The former is the public face, the persona, presented to the world; the latter, the private person, known only to himself (and not entirely known, even then).

All of us are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We have private selves and public selves, and these split aspects of our personalities are not always in synchronization with one another. Privately, we desire and fantasize and, perhaps, in some ways act upon less-than-honorable, or even shameful, impulses and proclivities which, in our public lives, we would never dare to acknowledge, much less entertain or act upon.

We are hypocrites, all—or would be, had society not, in its wisdom, allowed us to a differentiate between our private lives, wherein ignominious and disgraceful thoughts, feelings, and secret behaviors are allowed without penalty, as long as they harm no one, and our public lives, wherein we are expected to conform to the mores, traditions, customs, and laws of civilized society.

Wanting to kill, or even entertaining fantasies about murdering, another person is permissible to us in our private lives, the lives that our counterparts to Mr. Hyde live, but such ideas, emotions, and dreams are strictly forbidden to us in our public lives, the lives of our Dr. Jekyll dopplegangers live.

In crossing the line between the private hell of his personal life and the public life of affected propriety, Stevenson's protagonist committed a horror more horrible than the murders he perpetrated. Stevenson's novel is a cautionary tale: this far, one may go, but not a step farther. The boundary between the vile, secret self and the acceptable persona must be respected at all costs. When it is, murders and other immoral acts are unlikely to occur; the monster within is kept at bay.

Dr. Moreau

As we point out in another post, mixing human and animal perverts both natures, dehumanizing the former while objectifying the latter. Men and women, like animals, are better off as men and women or as animals than they would be as manimals or womanimals. By being hybridized as chimeras, neither human nor animal is improved.

Compared to humans animals are not, by nature, very bright. They live mostly by instinct, unable to comprehend the ways of men and women, whom, according to scientists, they regard as alpha members of the pack of which they themselves are lesser members. Unfortunately, with intelligence comes the capacities for treachery, infidelity, malice aforethought, and all manner of other evils. There are no innocent adults, and even children are often cruel to one another. They do not need teachers; such cruelty comes naturally to them. An animal, especially a domesticated one, is more innocent than any child.

By mixing humans and beasts, as Dr. Moreau did, both are made different and are devalued in the process. Indirectly, through is hybrid creatures, Dr. Moreau causes the deaths of others, but his greater crime is the immorality of vivisection as the means he employs for grafting human beings and animals. His means to his ends set him apart in his villainy, just as does Dr. Jekyll's means to his ends set him apart for the same reason.

Dr. Griffin

Humans depend upon their five senses to perceive the world. Primarily, they depend upon sight. To render oneself or anything else invisible is to eliminate the sense of sight, at least as it concerns the persons or objects made invisible. Invisibility blinds us, and blindness hampers our powers to conduct reconnaissance or surveillance and to protect ourselves and defend others. To confer invisibility upon someone or something is to disable those who are thus deprived sight of the person or thing made invisible.

To use a unique and extraordinarily effective ability against others, leaving them vulnerable and defenseless is tantamount to betrayal. Dr. Griffin's invisibility allows him to accomplish just such an immoral act. Instead of using his power to benefit others, he abuses it, even committing acts of murder. Again, his ends to his means is worse than the deaths he inflicts upon his victims, because these ends set him apart from his peers as not only ruthless but also inhuman.

* * *

Stevenson and Wells, although not, perhaps, in the first rank of literature, many might contend, are, nonetheless, superior to the vast majority of writers of their time or, indeed, of any time. The quality of their writing, its urbane and sophisticated style, the subtlety of their novels' various themes, their superb craftsmanship, their attention to detail, and the unhurried manner of their narratives, in which, most often, structure and function are so perfectly balanced as to appear to be one and the same thing, make their stories of such a character that the morality of the tales are not overwhelmed by the sensationalism of their plots. Directly, or by proxy, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Moreau, and Dr. Griffin are serial murderers. Although their criminal deeds are described in lurid detail, the murders they commit, as extravagant as they are, do not cloud the moral implications of their heinous acts.

The Horror of Hybrid Creatures

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) remake starring Donald Sutherland takes an eerie turn when a dog with a man's face makes its—his?—appearance on the screen. Offhand, I don't remember what accounts for this strange human-bestial hybrid, but, according to a synopsis of the film, “Matthew and Elizabeth are exposed as human when” Elizabeth screams “upon seeing a mutant dog with a human face, the result of . . . . a mutagenic effect” which caused the assimilation of “both Harry and the dog into a composite organism.”

Such special effects were relatively new at the time, and the human-canine “composite organism” looked especially bizarre on film. Of course, such hybrids have a long history. Ancient mythology, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, and otherwise, frequently includes such creatures as the sirens (bird women and, later, fish women), lamias (snake men and women), harpies (women with eagles' wings), gorgons (women with snakes for hair), satyrs (goat men), centaurs (horse men), sphinxes (lions with human heads), and many others.

Some hybrids consist of human bodies with animal heads (the jackal-headed Anubis, the cat-headed Bastet, the elephant-headed Ganesha, the frog-headed Hequet, the falcon-headed Horus and Monthu, the ram-headed Khnum, the cobra-headed Meretseger, the crocodile-headed Sobek, the ibis-headed Thoth, and the boar-headed Varaha, to name but a few).

Other hybrids are anthropomorphic creatures with added animal parts, including the wings of birds (angels), insects (fairies), or bats (the dragon Hatuibwari); birds' legs (Lilitu) dogs' legs (Adlet), or other animals' legs; and cows' horns (Hathor) or stags' antlers Pashupati). To their anthropomorphic forms, some hybrids add even more animal parts, as many as three, four, five, or even more, from diverse species. For example, the Japanese Baku has an elephant's head, a rhinoceros's eyes, a tiger's legs, a bear's body, and an ox's tail.

One reason such creatures are horrific is that they represent exceptions to the taxonomy, or classification system, scientists use to classify organisms. For scientists (and the vast majority of laypersons), there is a clear-cut demarcation, or boundary line, between human beings (the only extant members of the subtribe Hominina) and non-human animals. When such boundaries are crossed, as they are, or would be, with human-animal hybrids, not only confusion results, but so does the idea that humans are somehow superior to “lesser” (non-human) animals. To insist on a difference between human beings and non-human animals is to maintain the superiority of the former over the latter. If humans are nothing more than an animal, every non-human animal is equal to humans in status and importance. There can be no hierarchy, such as that which was established by medieval Christianity's doctrine of the divinely established “great chain of being,” the basis, like God's decree, in Genesis 1:26, that “man” should “have dominion” over the earth and its fauna:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Rather than being the image of God, and “the crown of creation,” humans would be just another member of the animal kingdom.

The taboo against bestiality is probably intended to safeguard the qualitative difference between humans and nonhuman animals. The fact that, although not universal, this taboo is widely in effect across the globe, with offenders subject to death or incarceration in some cases, suggests how insistent the separation between the categories of human and nonhuman continue to be. In horror fiction, it is the violation of this separation, the boundary between human and nonhuman animals that the violation represents, that is horrific, which is why the dog-faced hybrid in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is eerie, even today, despite the less-than-spectacular (by today's standards) special effects that produced it.

Other movies (and novels) that mix both science fiction and horror, as they do man (or woman) and nonhuman animals, include H. G. Wells's novel 1896 The Island of Dr. Moreau, the 1932 movie Island of Lost Souls, the 1986 movie The Fly, the 2009 film Splice, and the 2001 movie Dagon.

"The Cone": Style, Sentence by Sentence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” Wells is a master of style. He makes every word count toward the creation of the final effect he designs his stories to create. Style, as Jonathan Swift defines it, is “proper words in their proper places.” Mark Twain, like other writers, agrees that “the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” AlfredHitchcock says something similar concerning images, the lexicon of film. It is not any single image that matters, he says, but the way in which they are assembled to evoke thought and feeling. On the importance of style, a science fiction writer, a satirist, a humorist, and a master of suspense agree, as does any serious writer or producer. Style is not a small thing; it is everything, for it shapes and invigorates everything: character, including dialogue, action, plot, setting, theme.

With a single phrase or sentence, Wells often accomplishes several narrative or rhetorical purposes at once in his exemplary short story, “The Cone,” as he does in his other tales. The story is a true tour de force, the literary equivalent of expressionistic and surreal paintings, but, as I discuss this aspect of the story in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” there's no need to repeat it here. Instead, I will concentrate on the effects, literary and rhetorical, he achieves by several phrases and sentences in “The Cone.”

At the outset of the story, his omniscient narrator comments, “They [Mrs Horrocks and the artist Raut] sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there.” This sentence accomplishes three things:

1. It suggests that the air is not “fresher” near the open window, because it is not “fresh” anywhere.
2. The fact that they are “trying to fancy” fresh air near the window means that they are not succeeding. The open window admits no fresh air; like their attempt to imagine fresher air, the open window is a mere prop and, therefore, a failure.
3. The illicit couple's attempt to “fancy the air was fresher” characterizes them. In the face of a reality they find unpleasant, they imagine their circumstances are different. They seek to impose their own preferences upon the world, adjusting what is to what is suitable to them. In this, the sentence's use of “attempt” suggests, they also fail.

Wells gets much out of other phrases, too. In the story's fifth paragraph, his narrator describes an approaching train: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed” not only shows the passing of the cars, but also makes readers count them as they go past: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks.” The counting helps to make the paragraph active, but it also reinforces the number of cars in the train. The ironworks, we think, is a busy, productive place. In the same sentence, the narrator adds that the cars “were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel,” causing readers to imagine each car being “extinguished” as it enters the tunnel's “throat.” This description includes one of the many personifications Wells uses to bring his ironworks to life as an active, vengeful, and menacing entity.

For Raut, the ironworks represents “Gehenna,” meaning “a place of burning, torment, or misery,” or, “(in Judaism and the New Testament, Hell).” The ironworks is impertinent, daring to belch “fire and dust into the face of heaven.” Raut's words suggest that the ironworks is an affront to God Himself, an impious, wicked hell the very existence of which is an insult to heaven. “Fire and dust,” the insults, as it were, which the hellish ironworks belch “into the face of heaven,” are later juxtaposed to the Biblical phrase “pillars of cloud” and “pillars of fire” in which God appears to Moses and the Israelites as He guides them across the desert after their escape from pharaoh: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” (Exodus 13:21). The substitution of “fire” for the more eloquent phrase “pillars of fire” and of sullying “dust” for the more elegant expression “a pillar of a cloud” degrades the poetic language of the Bible, substituting crass terminology for its elevated diction. While Raut accuses the ironworks of insulting God, it is he, through his paraphrases of scripture, who actually does so.

In two clever sentences, Wells creates a sort of reverse-personification. His omniscient narrator describes blast furnaces, which stand “heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron,” as if they are hearts full of passion and rage; Horrocks himself, as their manager, is the mind, or soul, that controls these savage breasts. His “seething” passions and the “incessant turmoil of [the] flames” of his rage are the vengeful hearts that will burn Raut alive. 

 

Throughout descriptions of the ironworks, Wells's omniscent narrator uses phrases suggestive of violence, blood, death, and hell to depict the ironworks, the scene of Raut's eventual demise: “ghostly stunted beehive shapes,” “a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts,” “fitful flames,” “hammer beat heavily,” “palpating red stuff,” “blood-red reflections,” “succession of ghosts,” “blood-red vapour as red and hot as sun,” “white as death,” “fire writhing in the pit,” “sulphurous vapor,” “boil the blood,” and “hot suffocating flame.”

References to Gehenna, “the pit,” “pillars of cloud by day,” “pillars of fire by night,” “sin,” “sulphorous vapor” and “God” give the story a Biblical, if not an expressly Christian, context, as does Horrocks's horror at what he has done when “his sanity returned to him,” following his apparent crime of passion and he observes the effect of his vengeance, the sobbing, “inhuman, monstrous creature” that had been Raut. However, this context is undercut by Raut's reference to Jove and the omniscient narrator's allusion to “half-naked Titans.” Not only does the adulterous behavior of Raut and Mrs. Horrocks and Horrocks's seeking of vengeance against Raut suggest that religion is, for them, merely conventional, rather than sincere and devout, but Raut's use of the expression “by Jove,” like the omniscient narrator's employment of the phrase “half-naked Titans,” also implies that none of the characters is religious. Whether Horrocks' own plea to God at the end of the story is genuine or merely an expression of his horror at the sight of what he has done is open to question.

Through his conscious and deliberate selections of words and constructions of phrases throughout “The Cone,” Wells creates and maintains a style that is not only appropriate to his tale, but one which complements it at every turn, creating ironic contradictions; movement and pace; a religious context; complex characterization through allusions and personification; a sense of violence, blood, death, and hell; doubt concerning the characters' true devotion to the religious faith that is implied by the story's allusions to religious themes and theological concepts; and, overall, the unity of effect that produces a seemingly inevitable resolution of the story's central conflict. Wells' style delivers a great deal, largely thanks to his deliberate use of language—“proper words in their proper places”—a and to his own inimitable artistic genius.