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.

A Monster Scale

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman, author of Good with a Gun

One way to energize a genre of fiction is to introduce into it a hierarchy, or some other type of analytical or descriptive scheme, that is commonly used in a different type of narrative literature.

As Don Lincoln, author of Alien Universe: Extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and in the Cosmos, observes, science fiction employs the scale “popularized” in J. Allen Hynek's “1972 book The UFO Experience,” which identifies three types, or “kinds,” of “close encounters” with extraterrestrial spacecraft or beings:

1st Kind	2nd Kind	3rd Kind
UFO sighting	UFO sighting supported by “physical evidence”	Encounter with alien beings

These original “kinds” of “close encounters” have been extended, says Lincoln, by four other types, although these additional levels “are “not universally accepted”:

4th Kind	5th Kind	6th Kind	7th Kind
“Abduction with retained memory”	“Regular conversations”	“An encounter” resulting in a human's “death or injury”	“Human/extraterrestrial mating that produces an offspring, often called a 'star child'”

Although hybrid horror-science fiction narratives or dramas sometimes include extraterrestrial beings (e. g., Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and such films as Alien, The Thing from Another World, and Invaders from Mars), space aliens are primarily a staple of sci fi fiction. Monsters, on the other hand, are more often antagonists in horror fiction. Hynek's scale, and its extension, provide a means of re-imagining monsters:

1st Kind	2nd Kind	3rd Kind
Monster sighting	Monster sighting supported by “physical evidence”	Encounter with monster(s)

4th Kind	5th Kind	6th Kind	7th Kind
Monster's abduction recalled (or recovered through the discovery of a lost film or video)	Periodic communications with the monster, vocally or otherwise (e. g., through mental telepathy)	“An encounter” with the monster which results in a human's “death or injury”	Human/monster mating resulting in a hybrid progeny

Many of these types of “close encounters” with monsters have already been depicted in horror novels, short stories, or movies. There have been many sightings of monsters, as in Frank Peretti's 2006 novel Monster; encounters with monsters (as in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein), periodic communications with the monster (as in Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with a Vampire), encounters with monsters that end in human's deaths (so many there's no need to cite an example), and even matings between women and monsters that result in births of hybrid human-monster children (as in Ira Levine's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby).

However, an imaginative use of this extended scale of “close encounters” with monsters, rather than with aliens—which, it could be argued, represented simply another type of monster) can still introduce innovations into the horror genre. For example, the scale could be used to structure a novel or, for that matter a heptalogy, or series of seven works, each of which is inspired by one of the seven types of “close encounters” with monsters listed in the “monster scale” adapted from Hynek's hierarchy.

What's So Monstrous About Monsters?

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

What makes a creature monstrous?

That's a question with which artists and writers) have contended for centuries. As a result, there are quite a few visions, visual and literary, of the monstrous. In this post, we'll consider a few examples of the former, as we examine a few ancient, medieval, and modern examples of monsters, as artists have envisioned them.

Since ancient times, the unknown has been one source of the idea of the monstrous. Many of these monsters, the likenesses of which are passed down to us in pictures, sculptures, and poetry, from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and elsewhere, are hybrids, mixing characteristics of both human beings and the so-called lower animals. Included among these creatures are such monsters as centaurs, hermaphrodites, lamia, minotaurs, and sirens, to mention but a few.

Other monsters are of gigantic scale, are missing an organ, an appendage, or another feature: the cyclops is a prime example, both of a gargantuan figure and of one who is missing an organ, having, as he or she does, only one eye. Another well-known specimen is the monopod, which was also known as the sciapod, skiapod, or skiapode, who appear in Aristophanes's The Birds (414 BC), in Pliny the Elder's Natural History (79), and St. Augustine's City of God (426).

In a few monsters, traits or organs were multiplied. Cerberus had three heads; hydra, many.

Often, ancient monsters inhabited remote places. The fact that they lived far away made an encounter with one of them unlikely, because long-distance travel was rare for ordinary people, except, in some cases, soldiers. For the same reason, oceans were often represented the homes of mysterious creatures, many of whom were of gigantic size and strange appearance. Examples include the the biblical Behemoth, the Norse Midgard Serpent, and Scylla and Charybdis.

Our brief survey of ancient monsters suggests many often exhibit these one or more of these characteristics:

• Mix human and animal characteristics
• Are gigantic in size
• Are missing one or more organs or traits
• Have one or more extra organs or traits
• Reside in distant locations

In Judaism and, later, in Christianity, monsters were no longer simply natural phenomena; they were created by God, for divine purposes. For example, hermaphrodites were tokens of his wrath; their births were warnings of God's fury concerning the conduct of particular communities and of the divine punishment that would occur if such behavior continued. Likewise, the gods of earlier religions were subsumed by Christianity, pagan deities becoming demons in Christian theology.

Throughout the Middle Ages, many monsters were drawn from the same sources: ancient and Christian accounts of these fascinating, terrible creatures, although, now, all familiar monsters were interpreted from the Christian perspective, with pagan monsters assuming demonic significance.

New additions to the ranks of the monstrous came from travels abroad or from pagan European tribes, before their conversions to the Christian faith. Of course, Christianity also supplied several monsters of its own, most significantly, Satan and the Antichrist.

Once Christianity became the religion of most, if not all, of the Western world, it united peoples from various tribes and cultures, becoming the unum round which e pluribus found its center. As polytheism gave way to monotheism and pagan faiths were replaced by one catholic, or universal faith (at least as the Western world is concerned), ideas about the nature of the monstrous changed, even as they merged under the authority and direction of Christian belief, authority, doctrine, and practice. Satan, demons, witches and sorcerers, heretics, and others who became victims of the Inquisition were the new monsters, common to all.

In modern times, the monstrous, as a concept, has taken on psychological significance, as the demons of hell become inner, or personal, demons, which is to say, personifications of individual human beings' unbridled impulses and animal instincts: aggression, lust, and the like. Especially in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the monstrous becomes primarily psychological, rather than cultural or theological per se. Alongside ancient and medieval monsters, we now have the narrator-protagonist of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the vengeance-minded jester of “Hop-Frog,” and the obsessive-compulsive protagonist of “Berenice.”

Monsters are of only two origins: natural or supernatural. (“Paranormal” is merely a term designating natural phenomena which are, as yet, scientifically inexplicable, and psychological monsters, like extraterrestrial monstrosities, are of natural origin.)

But what makes monsters monstrous?

There are a number of theories. Some say monsters are monstrous because they represent actual, existential threats. The werewolf, for example, symbolizes the beast within the human; the madman a person whose behavior is unrestrained by reason. Such monsters are the bane of the rationalist's existence (and aren't we all, at least occasionally, rationalists?) They suggest the Enlightenment, though it undoubtedly happened, might have occurred in vain.

Others contend that monsters are monstrous because they suggest the threat of the unknown and, perhaps, the unfathomable. According to this view, monsters are only monstrous as long as they origin or nature remains unknown. Once the nature of the creature in Ambrose Bierce's “The Damned Thing” is understood (it is of a color outside the range of human perception and, therefore, invisible), it is no longer monstrous (although it remains both terrible and dangerous). Such monsters are epistemological threats or, at least, insecurities. If knowledge is power, ignorance is impotence (and, often, impotence is helplessness).

Monsters who occupy a rung higher in The Great Chain of Being than our own rung on the celestial ladder are theological threats. God defeated Satan, casting him and his followers out of heaven, but, even if we are created in God's image, we don't have his omnipotence; our fight with the devil or with demons, as both The Exorcist and The Exorcism of Emily Rose show us, is not an even match, nor is it one that we, by ourselves, without divine aid, are able to win.

Christianity, it seems, is in abeyance; its influence over the multitudes of the western world appears to have diminished. As a result, paganism has resurfaced, and with it, the old monsters are, once again, venturing out of the darkness to which they were banished by reason and faith, as the current popularity of vampires, witches, demons, and other such ancient monsters attests. Side by side with them, though, the monsters of Christian faith continue to exist. The psychological monster, the madman, in his (or her) various guises, including those of the serial killer (Ben Willis, of I Know What You Did Last Summer), the sadistic sociopath (Jigsaw, of the Saw franchise), the psychotic murderer (Norman Bates, of Psycho), the mad scientist (Dr. Moreau, of The Island of Dr. Moreau), and the overzealous fan (Annie Wilkes, of Misery) has, more recently, joined them.

What monsters might the future spawn? What fears will they embody? What means shall overcome them? These, alas, are questions only time will answer, if they turn out to be answerable at all.

Monsters in Our Midst

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In horror fiction, monsters originate from only a handful of sources:

• Natural
  • Physiological (e. g., mutation or birth defect)
  • Natural catastrophe
  • Human
    • Psychological
    • Social
    • Scientific/Technological
• Supernatural
  • Angelic/Demonic
  • Divine

Within this framework, the specific contents of these categories change, sometimes vanishing (at least for a time) or being replaced by newer understandings of the concept of the monstrous.

For example, among the ancients, hermaphrodites were considered omens from God. Signs of his displeasure, humans with both male and female sex organs were viewed as warnings form God. Their existence bespoke His wrath and the punishment that He would soon visit upon his sinful people.

Today, hermaphrodism is understood as an effect of male hormones, an adrenal glans disorder, or aromatase deficiency. In other words, the condition results from natural, not supernatural, causes. In male-to-female or female-to-male transgender transgender cases, the cause of gender dysphoria is corrected through hormone therapy, gender-confirmation surgery, and other surgical or medical procedures. Its cause is psychological; its remedy is medical and surgical.

With the change in the understanding of the causes of hermaphroditism and transgender conditions, intersex individuals are seldom cast as “monsters” in contemporary horror fiction, and, when they are cast as such, as in Sleepaway Camp (1983), critics, like much of the general public, movie-going and otherwise, are offended by such representations.

Likewise, zombies, as they are depicted today, more often result from radiation, mental disorders, pathogens, or accidents during scientific experiments than from voodoo or magic. These fundamental changes, both in the way we view the world and the basis of epistemology, have led to changes in the nature and origin of the zombie.

In short, the category of horror “monster,” which once included hermaphrodites as omens of God's displeasure and imminent wrath, are now more frequently seen as having experienced a hormonal or glandular problem or as having experienced gender dysphoria. Their conditions are caused by physiological or psychological, not supernatural or divine, agencies. Zombies, likewise, have been given a natural, rather than a supernatural, origin.

Frequently, horror movie monsters are seen as representing metaphors for political, social, or cultural events typical of particular time periods:

Godzilla (1954) has been seen as representing the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Them! (1954) ends with a caution about the dangers of “the Atomic Age,” as myrmecologist Dr. Harold Medford warns, “When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.”

The 1966 science fiction-horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which people were replaced with alien look-alikes, has been regarded as an allegory for both McCarthyism and communism.

Some critics regard The Fly (1986) as a metaphor for AIDS, although director David Cronenberg said he intended the horror movie to be a metaphor for “aging and death.”

Although no horror movie seems to sum up more recent decades, a film in which political figures instigate armies of ordinary citizens to go to war against one another might be just the type of film to symbolize the current state of affairs in the United States, wherein Antifa and Democratic protesters, encouraged and emboldened by otherworldly or demonic, hypnotic versions of Senator Maxine Waters, who exalts the public confrontation of individuals who disagree with her party, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who claims civility is impossible between Democrats and those who oppose them, attack their opponents in the street, confront political appointees during meals in public restaurants, disrupt Senate hearings, and attack the Supreme Court Building, eventually precipitating a war that endangers the entire country. Such an allegorical film, called, perhaps, Demonic Uprising would certainly capture the spirit of our age.

Horror: The Contributions of Personification and Dehumanization

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movie monsters often have offensive capabilities modeled upon those with which nature has equipped terrestrial animals. Sil, Species's female alien-human hybrid created through a synthesis of alien and human deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), is a case in point. An extended description of her appearance and her abilities shows that, despite her human characteristics, she is, at heart, much more alien than human:

Her human form is, in truth, merely a disguise and her true alien form is an exotic, sensual, alien mockery of the human form. Her form is chitinous and reptilian, somewhat reminiscent of the creatures from the film Alien, but still humanoid in appearance. Her “hair” is a mass of prehensile tentacles which are slicked back behind her head. She possesses two sets of teeth with the internal set being razor sharp. Her breasts, rather than storing fat or mammary glands, instead store long, slimy tentacles which emerge from her “nipples.” She can use her breast-tentacles as weapons but they are also used in her amorous mating ritual (as shown in the second film). Sil has long sharp spines up her back that she can retract and extend at will. These seem to be utilized as a weapon in Species 2 by Eve. Last but not least, Sil's infamous tongue. Her long tongue is tipped with sharp spines and is her primary defense mechanism (or weapon). When threatened, she can simple impale her aggressor with her tongue. This "kiss of death" is shown in each of the franchise's films at least once. Sil’s alien form is also capable of holding its breath underwater for an extended period (“Sil's Appearance”).

A conglomeration of insect, reptile, mollusk, feline or bird, and human, Sil possesses anatomical weapons that resemble those of the shark (her “two sets of teeth”), the octopus (her “prehensile tentacles”), spiny lizards (the sharp spines on her back), and cats or birds (her barbed tongue). In biological terms, she is more than simply a hybrid, or cross-bred organism; she is, in fact, a chimera, “an organism or tissue that contains at least two different sets of DNA.”

The surrealist artist H. R. Giger, who helped to develop the designs for Sil, the original of which, for her tongue, was festooned with shark's teeth, said, “My original idea was for a death kiss in which Sil forces her lethal tongue down her lover's throat, and pulls it out tearing his insides out with it. It was not to smash through the skull as in the final film.” From the beginning, Giger envisioned Sil's tongue as an anatomical weapon: “My original idea was for a death kiss in which Sil forces her lethal tongue down her lover's throat, and pulls it out tearing his insides out with it. It was not to smash through the skull as in the final film, exactly as it was done in Alien and Alien3.”

Giger also designed the spines that project from Sil's back, “hair with flaming tips,” breast tentacles, and “claw[-]like nails.” Oh, yes—she would be fire-resistant as well. Although he wasn't satisfied by the way his designs were incorporated, sometimes in an altered fashion, in the film, without his creative ideas, the movie would have been as original and as, well, surreal.

Before his work on Species, Giger also designed the Alien alien that has come to be known, unofficially, as the xenomorph. The creature's five-stage “life cycle” (Ovomorph, Facehugger, Chestburster, adult, and Queen) is elaborate and reminiscent, to some extent, of that of “wasps of the Chalcidoidea and Ichneumonoidea families, which lay their eggs on live prey that are then consumed by the hatching larvae.”

A mobile ovary with finger-like appendages and a phallic proboscis, the Facehugger attaches itself to its host's face after emerging from an egg laid by the Queen. After incapacitating its host with “a cynose-based paralytic chemical,” the Facehugger uses its proboscis to implant the creature's egg (formed during the first stage of the alien's life cycle) in its victim's chest. It then detaches itself, “crawls away and dies.” (While it's still attached, its “acidic blood prevents” its removal.)

The attachment of the Facehugger to its victim's face and its subsequent death are somewhat reminiscent of the fate of the male anglerfish, except that it attaches itself to the larger female, withering away until it becomes nothing more than a pair of testicles.

This stage of the xenomorph's “life cycle,” some contend, is a parody of the human reproductive process, substituting rape by means of something akin to oral sex for penile-vaginal intercourse performed in a context of mutual love and respect. (Alien is not recommended by feminists.)

The implanted egg is not only parasitic, but also tumorous in its growth, and it's like a virus, commandeering the host's body to use the host's DNA and other “biological material” to develop its own body, which includes assuming some of the host's own “physical traits [e. g., bipedalism] via a process known as the DNA Reflex.” Once the egg develops into a Chestbuster, it bursts through the abdomen of its host and flees, rapidly increasing in size until, within mere hours, it reaches its adult dimensions.

In short, Giger's design for the xenomorph's “life cycle” envisions reproduction as a monstrous process involving sodomy, rape, parasitism, infection, disease, and death. In his view, sex is not lovemaking, but rape combined with sexual perversion, which leads to death as well as birth, and may substitute a male host's abdomen for the uterus: the fetal Chestbuster erupts from the chest; it does not emerge from the womb. Sex, as Giger envisions it, isn't merely messy; it is itself a confusing and contradictory mess devoid of love and respect, involving violence, invasion, parasitism, infection, and disease.

Daniel D. Snyder sees the xenomorph as representing “obvious distortions of the standard human physique.” Although I'm not sure what he has in mind by “the standard human physique,” his observations are, otherwise, intriguing. Giger's alien, Snyder says, “is a filthy, primal parasite whose very survival is contingent on it's [sic] continued rape and exploitation of other species.” As such, Snyder believes the xenomorph reflects the Darwinistic struggle to survive not only by adaptation, but also through the reproduction of the species, or as Snyder himself puts it, “the cold, mechanical struggle to survive.”

He sees in Giger's monstrous vision of sex, an experience that can cause “pain” and death, and a fusion, in the xenomorph's phallic form, or “phallus and . . monster” that suggests “that thing between your legs [if one happens to be male] is also an instrument of evil.” The monstrous creature of Alien is not ourselves, exactly, but “a penis come to life [and] running amok.” As such, it is also somehow “our own weapon [turned] against us” to show “the terror of what we do to each other and the creatures we torture and exploit every day as a matter of simple survival.”

While Snyder may go a bit over the top with his xenomorphy-as-exploiting-human “run amok,” his understanding of the xenomorph's phallicism is certainly on target, as I have likewise suggested, and the creature's complex, perverse “life cycle” obviously does parody, if not critique, sexual reproduction in general.

In such monsters as Sil and the xenomorph, both personification and dehumanization are at work simultaneously, as they often are when non-human organisms or objects are given human characteristics or abilities and human beings are regarded as less than human. A mermaid is a woman—in part—but she is also a fish—in part. That's why the mermaid is extraordinary and, it must be admitted, not only eldritch, but also horrible.

By increasing or decreasing the quality of a person, an animal, or a thing, we alter it. We transform it, so that it is no longer itself. Whether, in doing so, we make it more or less than it as before, we have meddled with its identity and its essential character. We have played God, creating Sil, or the xenomorph, or whatever in our own image and likeness. That which we have changed remains changed, as does it nature, its existence, and, if it is sentient or intelligent, its experience. Where “man-made monsters” are concerned, this is the true and lasting horror, the horror of Pygmalion and Prometheus and Frankenstein: the creator becomes more monstrous than his or her creation.

Like the bat, a pit viper (the bushmaster, copperhead, and rattlesnake, among others) is equipped with a heat-seeking organ located between its eyes. This organ helps the snake to “accurately aim its strike at its warm-blooded prey.” (The bat uses its heat-seeking organ to locate blood.) Not only the chameleon and other lizards, but also plenty of other animals, including insects, fish, birds, and mammals, use various forms of camouflage, as do soldiers, to conceal themselves from predators. Insects have green blood. So does Papau New Guinea's green-blooded skink. But blood doesn't exist only in red and green; some species of octopi have blue blood, and the ocellated icefish has clear blood. Although, as far as I know, no animals have luminescent blood, many of them, including lightning bugs, or fireflies, glowworms, Jellyfish, and anglerfish, to name a few, are bioluminescent.

The alien creature in the Predator movie (1987) senses body heat, can camouflage itself (using a cloaking device, rather than natural means), and has luminescent green blood. Its traits and abilities are extraordinary, but they're not unique. Appearing in, or exhibited by, a biped creature of humanoid shape, these traits and abilities do seem novel, however, making the extraterrestrial marauder seem to be truly out of this world. They make the monster seem more nonhuman, even as its bipedalism, use of tools, and thinking ability make it seem not altogether unlike its human prey. Again, the monster is both enhanced by personification and degraded by dehumanization. The combined personification and objectification of the creature makes it seem uncanny and, therefore, all the more horrible and frightening.

Villages Under Attack

Copyright by Gary L. Pullman

In Godzilla (1954), a radioactive, fire-breathing, dragon-like monster attacks Tokyo. After being transported to New York City, King Kong attacks The Big Apple. Other creatures, gigantic and otherwise, have likewise run amok in other big cities. In The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), an escaped Tyrannosaurus rex attacks San Diego. To be a resident of any such metropolis at the time of an attack by such monsters would, indeed, be terrifying.

Big cities aren't usually isolated from the assistance that police, medical personnel, firefighters, and other emergency services provide, and they are often homes to a variety of experts upon whose knowledge and experience endangered citizens can rely. In fact, since, typically, big cities are served by airports, railroads, interstate highways, and, sometimes, ports, the deployment of military troops is often quick and easy. Such cities as Tokyo, New York, and San Diego may suffer some loss of life and damage, but, in the end, it's likely that the likes of Godzilla, King Kong, and T-rex are going down and staying down.

Villages, which lack the size, population, infrastructure, technological assets, expertise, and protective firepower of large cities and are often isolated in difficult-to-reach terrain are a different story altogether. If a gigantic monster—or a monster of any size—were to attack, I'd rather take my chances in a big city than a village, any day.

Beginning of the End (1957, clearly shows how a small town, Ludlow, Illinois, fares—or fared—against the attack of gigantic monsters—in this case, radioactive mutant grasshoppers. Apparently before it could sound an alarm, Ludlow was annihilated. Its entire population of 150 residents, who are nowhere to be found, are presumed to be dead. The only clue to what happened to Ludlow's townspeople is the barrenness of the surrounding farmlands, which look as though their crops were devoured by a swarm of locusts.

The monstrous grasshoppers do not fare well when their swarm attacks Chicago. Botanist Dr. Ed Wainwright has gathered intelligence concerning the attackers. He knows locusts have eaten radioactive grain stored in a nearby silo, and he has heard of mysterious incidents in nearby communities. When he discovers the gigantic grasshoppers, he realizes that they have devoured the region's crops and are now seeking human prey. He provides the expertise that the United States military forces need to exterminate the grasshoppers. An electronic mating call is devised from test-tone oscillators, and the warm-blooded predators are lured to Lake Michigan, where the cold water incapacitates them, and they drown.

Unlike Ludlow, Chicago survives, because it is a large city that can provide the scientific and military resources needed to eliminate the threat posed by the gigantic, predatory grasshoppers.

The Black Scorpion (1957) is similar to Beginning of the End in its contrast of a helpless village the residents of which are attacked and injured or killed by gigantic insects—the scorpions to which the film's title alludes—while a big city is saved from the predators' threat of mass destruction. Troops under the command of Major Cosio arrive in the Mexican town, San Lorenzo, to provide disaster relief in the aftermath of a nearby volcano's eruption. However, their soldiers' weapons prove ineffective against the gigantic scorpions, and the villagers remain unprotected. Military might, this movie suggests, is not enough; it must be applied in a fashion made possible only by scientists or other experts.

Fortunately for the humans whose lives are at stake, the largest of the gigantic scorpions kills the others. Now, it is up to Dr. Velasco, an etymologist, to determine an effective way to destroy the remaining scorpion. It is only after he provides the information necessary to destroy the insects, as the scorpions approach Mexico City, that the military can stop them. Using meat as bait, Velasco and his team lure the insect into a stadium, and the army attacks it with larger, more lethal weapons, such as tanks and helicopters, than those that were used by Major Cosio's men. Nevertheless, the tactic fails, and it is only when geologist Dr. Hank Scott fires a spear attached to an electric cable into the scorpion's throat—its only vulnerable spot—and electrocutes the gigantic insect that the predator is killed and Mexico City is saved.

Unlike the village of San Lorenzo, Mexico City provided such assets as a stadium, military aircraft and tanks, and the combined expertise of an etymologist and a pair of geologists, Scott and Dr. Arturo Ramos. Scientific knowledge combined with military might and the architecture of the big city were enough, combined, to defeat the scorpion.

Some other horror movies in which monsters attack villages include The Birds (1963), The Blob (1958), Carnosaur (1993), Earth vs. the Spider (1958), Iron Invader (2011), Manticore (2005), The Mist (2007), Monster from Green Hell (1957), Tremors (1990), and Wyvern (2009).

Horror Fiction: Myths and Monsters

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

During a freshman-level course in composition, I had my students write an essay analyzing a print advertisement, such as they could find in a popular magazine or online. I included movie posters among print advertisements, giving them the option of writing about them if they wanted to do so. Many chose the magazine ads, but some opted for the posters. Among the latter group was a student who chose a poster advertising Steven Spielberg's E. T. the Extraterrestrial (1982), starring Dee Wallace, Henry Thomas, and Drew Barrymore.

The poster shows E. T.'s fingertip making contact with Elliot's fingertip. At the point of connection, a star of light forms inside a purple circle. The poster's background shows the universe bedecked with stars and galaxies. Below, part of the Earth's globe displays Africa and points east. The title of the poster is “His Adventure on Earth.” The oceans, like the heavens, are black. Below the hands of alien and earthling, between heaven and earth, the poster's text reads:

He is afraid.

He is totally alone.

He is 3,000,000 million light years from home.

After the student shared his thoughts about the poster's design and the ideas and feelings communicated by its images and text, I mentioned to him the poster's allusion to the scene Michelangelo had painted on the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. My student was unaware of both the allusion and its referent, the painting itself, so I suggested his research of his topic should include this material.

This anecdote makes a point: all of us are unaware of one thing or another; what is common knowledge to one is new to another. As the author of Cultural Literacy observes, our understanding is based, to a large degree, upon our knowledge of our culture, which, in the Western world, includes the history and literature of the ancient, medieval, and modern nations and peoples upon which our own contemporary culture is founded: Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Europeans, and others. To the extent that we lack such knowledge, our understanding is diminished. As Marcus Mosiah-Garvey, Jr., says, “A people without a knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.”

Without an awareness of, and a familiarity with, Michelangelo's painting of God's creation of man, the E. T. movie poster's allusion to this earlier work and the meaning it conveys would have been lost on my student. His understanding and appreciation of the poster's own artistry would, as a result, have been reduced, as would his insight into the linguistic and cultural “layers” of the poster and of the film it represents.

One of the basic mediums of expression among ancient peoples is myth. A myth is a story that encapsulates a human experience in timeless and widespread, if not universal, significance. Such a story can be applied to various situations across time. For example, the myth involving Pygmalion and Galatea, in which the sculptor attempts to create the “Perfect Woman”—or, rather, his idea of the Perfect Woman—is given new significance by George Bernard Shaw. In his play, Pygmalion, Professor Henry Higgins transforms Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl with a Cockney accent, into a lady by teaching her elocution, outfitting her in fashionable attire, and instructing her in the manners of polite society. Class, his play suggests, is more a matter of appearance and behavior than of lineage. (His play is also the basis of the movie of the same title, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller; the musical My Fair Lady starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn; and the teen comedy She's All That, starring Freddie Prinze, Jr., and Rachael Leigh Cook ).

Not only has the Pygmalion and Ganymede myth inspired several movies, but it could also be applied to the fashion industry. Most designers are men, but they create clothing for women, suggesting, thereby, what the “perfect” (or, at lest, the fashionable) lady wears. Of course, the “look” changes periodically; otherwise, there would be no need for the fashion industry. Such changes are no problem: models, like mannequins and the clothing both wear, can be replaced at will, just as the ideal woman, as fashion designers shape her, changes, the flat-chested “flapper” giving way to the hourglass woman with conical breasts, who, in turn, was replaced by the slender, statuesque version of perfect womanhood years later. In fashion, woman's name is not only vanity, but also mutability.

Over the years, the social status of the Perfect Woman changes as well, as do the roles she plays. Until 1920, American women were not allowed to vote. During World War II, for the first time, it was acceptable for women to work full-time outside the home and to perform labor that their husbands did, before the men went away to war. In 2015, women were allowed to serve in military occupational specialties directly related to combat. Galatea, the Perfect Woman, couldn't vote; then, she could and did; next, she was allowed into the workplace; most recently, she has become eligible to fight alongside men on the battlefield. The Perfect Woman is as changeable socially as she is aesthetically.

The Perfect Woman has also changed sexually. Once, she was seen as a dangerous and amoral temptress, a siren, and as a cruel, vindictive monster, a harpy; later, she was cast as a virgin for the protection of whose honor chivalrous male champions would gladly fight and die. Still later, she regained her sexuality, becoming a pitiless, cruel, but beautiful and desirable, belle dame sans merci, or vamp. Now, she is the equal of men, both socially and sexually, able to take as many lovers as she wishes and to terminate any pregnancy she deems undesirable. As men's concepts of womanhood changes, the Perfect Woman changes, and other, lesser, flesh-and-blood women emulate her example.

Like the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, all other myths are likewise timeless templates upon which contemporary examples may be constructed. While each reiteration may bear the stamp of its own particular innovation, it also remains a work based on the original mold.

Like most other genres of literature, horror fiction is often inspired by myths. As the subtitle of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, suggests, her protagonist is not truly a Pygmalion figure; rather, he is “The Modern Prometheus.” The mythical Prometheus, a Titan, created man from clay. Then, defying the will of the gods, he stole fire, giving it to mankind, for which offense he was punished. Bound to a rock, he endured the agony of having Zeus, in the form of an eagle, consume his liver, the seat of the emotions (or what, now, in this sense, we'd call the heart). Overnight, Prometheus's liver would be renewed, and the eagle would descend again to devour the organ. In one version of the story, the Titan's punishment is eternal, whereas, in another version, he is eventually rescued by Herakles (Roman, Hercules).

Unlike Prometheus, however, Frankenstein is not much of a creator. His “man” is far from perfect. Comprised of bits and pieces of revitalized, sewn-together corpses, the creature is more of a monstrous parody of men. (The fact that the monster is more sensitive and humane than his creator suggests Frankenstein's own comparatively inferior sensitivity and humanity.) The “fire” that Prometheus bestowed upon mankind becomes, in Shelley's novel, the lightning by which life is imparted to the body stitched together from the parts of human corpses. Whereas Prometheus endures torment as a result of his hubris, Frankenstein pays for his “ambition” with his life and the loss, forever, of his suicidal monster. Not all gifts are acceptable to the gods—or to God.

A number of other horror novels and movies are based on the eternal ideas communicated through various myths, and some of these works, in turn, suggest later ones based on similar themes.