Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
No one has ever
written a horror novel or filmed a horror movie about a protagonist
stubbing his or her toe. Horror is about grave loss—loss of limb,
loss of life, loss of mind. It is about the loss of family members or
friends. It is about the loss of mobility, ability, or health. In
this context, the need to achieve receives elevated, often ultimate,
significance, but it is directed toward preserving vitally important
attributes or, indeed, life itself.
In the movie Silver Bullet, based on Stephen King's novella Cycle of the Werewolf, paraplegic adolescent Marty Coslaw, assisted by his Uncle Red, battles a werewolf. The wolfman has already killed five other residents of Tarker's Mills, Maine: railroad worker Arnie Westrum, would-be suicide Stella Randolph, Mitt Sturmfuller, teenager Brady Sinclair, and bartender Owen Knopfler.
In the movie Silver Bullet, based on Stephen King's novella Cycle of the Werewolf, paraplegic adolescent Marty Coslaw, assisted by his Uncle Red, battles a werewolf. The wolfman has already killed five other residents of Tarker's Mills, Maine: railroad worker Arnie Westrum, would-be suicide Stella Randolph, Mitt Sturmfuller, teenager Brady Sinclair, and bartender Owen Knopfler.
When
Uncle Red gives Marty the “Silver Bullet,” a souped-up
wheelchair, the boy rides it out to a bridge in a forest, where he
sets off fireworks his uncle has given him, attracting the werewolf's
attention. Marty evades the werewolf by firing a rocket, which blinds
the monster in its left eye. As a result, he escapes with his own
life. Using only what is available to him at the moment, his
wheelchair and his fireworks, Marty accomplishes his own rescue.
Later, the werewolf attacks Marty, his older sister Jane, and Uncle Red at the Coslaws' home, and Marty uses the silver bullet his uncle has had a local gunsmith make from Jane's silver cross to kill the creature. This time, his daring and the tools at hand—his uncle's pistol and the silver bullet—to save not only himself, but also his sister and his uncle, a greater achievement than his earlier escape from the werewolf, because, now, he has accomplished the rescue of three people instead of just himself.
An
even greater achievement occurs in King's novel 'Salem'sLot, when
author Ben Mears returns to Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, to write a book
about the mysterious Marsten House, which has been bought by Austrian
immigrant Kurt Barlow, a vampire who soon transforms several of the
townspeople into fellow creatures of the night. Ben, his girlfriend
Susan, high school teacher Matt Burke, Mat's physician, Dr. Jimmy
Cody, high school student Mark Petrie, and the local Catholic priest,
Father Callahan, join forces to fight the vampires taking over their
town, and, together, succeed, despite suffering several casualties
among their number, in destroying Barlow, before they are driven out
of town by the other vampires. Later, Ben and Mark return to town to
set a brush fire in a nearby woods, hoping the fire will destroy
Jerusalem's Lot and the vampires who live there.
This
story, like most of King's pits a small band of courageous,
outnumbered friends against a seemingly superior menace. United in
brotherly love, the heroes typically overcome the threat against
them, delivering their community from the peril the monster or
monsters represent. Although Ben and his group are only partly
victorious, the novel's epilogue, in which Ben and Mark return to
burn down the town, suggest that, ultimately, they are likely to
completely achieve their goal of liberating Jerusalem's Lot from the
vampires whose numbers might well eventually endanger other towns
besides Jerusalem's Lot. Potentially, they could accomplish nothing
less than the saving of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives.
Often, the idea of a horror story is more intriguing (to me, at least) than its execution, which may be the reason that I often enjoy horror novels more than I do their film adaptations. It's hard to see on the screen what one can envision in his or her imagination; often, the latter conception is superior to the former. Although the 1957 science fiction horror movie TheMonolith Monsters, based on a story by Jack Arnold and Robert M. Fresco, was never a novel before it became a film, it is a story that's better, in my opinion, in its conception than it is in its execution, an assessment shared by Monthly Film Bulletin, who reckons the movie as having been based on a “promising idea” that was not done justice by its actors or ist screenwriters, Fresco and Norman Jolley.
A
crashed meteorite explodes into hundreds of shards, each of which
then grows into a monolith when it encounters water and extracts
silicon from any organism unlucky enough to make contact with it. The
result is the petrification of the organism's tissues. Several
victims undergo such a transformation, including geologist Ben
Gilbert and schoolgirl Ginny Simpson. As the monoliths reach towering
heights, they collapse, creating more fragments which, in turn, grow
and fall, advancing upon San Angelo. If they monoliths are not
stopped, they threaten not only San Angelo but the entire planet.
Fortunately, a silicon injection containing salt has reversed the
effects of Ginny's silicon depletion, and scientists realize that
saline is the key to halting the monoliths. A dam is blown up,
allowing its pent-up water to flood local salt flats, which saves the
day for the residents of San Angelo and the world's population.
Since,
typically, horror stories are about sustaining catastrophic losses,
in this genre, the need to achieve takes the form of preventing or
recovering from such losses, showing how an individual or a group,
sometimes of ordinary, but heroic individuals, but more often a team
of experts, working together for the common good, achieve, frequently
at the cost of self-sacrifice, the avoidance, elimination, or
recovery from losses of limbs, lives, sanity, mobility, ability, or
health. It's difficult to imagine greater achievement, and it is to
these heightened forms of achievement that horror fiction appeals in
tapping the need to achieve Jib Fowles identifies as universal to humanity.