Purposeful, Frightening Scenes

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The largest part of a story is an act. Acts are made up of scenes. Scenes, in turn, are made up of incidents.

A good analogy is to think of an act as a chapter, a scene as a paragraph, and an incident as a sentence. Using this analogy, we can say that the first act of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho, is comprised of the following scenes (our designation of the scenes is our own; the transcript of the screenplay we consulted as the basis for the summary does not divide the action into scenes):

1. In a Phoenix, Arizona, hotel room, during her lunch break, Marion Crane and Sam Loomis discuss their frustration at wanting to marry one another but being unable to do so because of the heavy financial drain caused by Sam’s alimony payments to his ex-wife and his payment of his deceased father’s outstanding debts.


2. Marion returns to work at Lowery Real Estate and learns that her employer, Mr. Lowery, is also late returning from lunch. As she chats with Caroline, a clerk, Mr. Lowery enters with a client, Mr. Cassidy, who’s had one drink too many. Mr. Lowery asks Marion to bring a deed into his office. Showing Marion a picture of his daughter, who’s to marry tomorrow, Cassidy makes a pass at Marion, but she deflects his flirtation. Then, he shows her the $40,000 in cash he’s brought to buy a house as his daughter’s wedding present. After Mr. Cassidy goes into his office, Mr. Lowery tells Marion to deposit the cash in the bank; he will get his client to write him a check for the money instead on Monday, when Mr. Cassidy is sober. Marion takes the deed into Mr. Lowery’s office and, complaining of a headache, asks permission to go home after depositing the money at the bank.


3. Instead of depositing the money, Marion has gone home, where, having packed a suitcase, she dresses. She steals the bank deposit.


4. As she drives through the city, she hears Sam’s voice greeting her upon her arrival and sees Mr. Lowery and Mr. Cassidy, exchanging waves with her befuddled employer.


5. She continues to drive until night falls. Tired, she pulls off the road to sleep. She is awakened by a highway patrolman, who makes note of her license plate number. After she returns to the road, the patrolman follows her.


6. Because the patrolman has her license plate number, she fears that he will connect her car with the money she’s stolen, once the theft is reported, so she trades in her car for a different model with different license plates.


7. As she drives away, Marion imagines the highway patrolman talking to California Charlie, the car salesman, about her. Because she has acted suspiciously, the patrolman is likely to want to examine the sales papers, she thinks. She then imagines conversations between Mr. Lowery and Caroline, between him and Marion’s sister, and between him and Mr. Lowery, in which they figure out that she has absconded with the bank deposit.


8. As a downpour begins, Marion sees a neon sign announcing “Bate’s Motel, Vacancy.” She stops to rent a room, but no one is tending the office. She sees a Victorian house atop a hill, in the front of an upstairs window of which the silhouette of a female figure moves past an illuminated window shade.


9. Returning to her car, she honks, and, a little later, a young man joins her. As they exchange small talk, Norman telling her that all the rooms are vacant, the new interstate having bypassed the motel. The motel is relatively isolated, the nearest town, Fairvale, being 15 miles away. Norman returns to the house atop the hill to prepare a dinner for them.


10. Marion hides the stolen money in a newspaper cradled in a magazine rack in her room. From the house on the hill, she hears Norman arguing with an elderly woman, who says, “I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in here for supper--by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds!”


11. Norman brings a tray of food, suggesting that he and Marion share it in his office. The office is decorated with stuffed birds, a result of Norman’s hobby as a taxidermist. Norman tells Marion that he’s trapped by having to care for his aged mother, who’s mentally ill after her husband died when Norman was five and a lover (before suffering a violent death) talked her into building the motel. Marion’s suggestion that Norman commit his mother to an asylum angers him. After he calms down, Marion returns to her room, saying she’s driving back to Phoenix the next day to try to extract herself from “a private trap” she’d “stepped into” there. In parting, Marion slips, telling Norman her real name, and he sees that, on the register, she’s signed under the assumed name of “Marie Samuels.”


12. Norman peeps through a hole in the wall and sees Marion undressing in the bathroom.


13. He retreats to the house atop the hill, sulking in the kitchen.


14. In her room, Marion calculates the money she’s spent and will have to repay, flushes this potentially incriminating evidence down the toilet, and takes a shower. As she showers, a woman wielding a knife stabs her repeatedly, killing her.

According to our analysis, each of the above sentences is an incident of the story’s plot. Together, one or more of these incidents make up a scene. (Note: a scene involves conflict regarding at least one character--and usually two or more characters--and, often, dialogue, and it moves the story forward in a specific way, according to a predetermine purpose). In regard to horror stories, we might add that a scene also should scare the audience whenever possible.) Several scenes, in turn, make up an act.


As we indicated in a previous post, dramas (and other types of narratives, such as novels), often consist of five acts: (1) exposition, ending with an inciting moment that sets the (2) rising action in motion, leading to a (3) turning point, or climax, which gives way to the (4) falling action, which leads to (5) a resolution (if the story is a comedy) or to a catastrophe (if the story is a tragedy). (We won’t repeat our discussion of dramatic structure in detail in this post, but if you haven’t read it or don’t remember the details, you should refresh your memory by rereading “XXX.”)


As we have summarized the first act of Psycho, the first scene of this act consists of one incident:

In a Phoenix, Arizona, hotel room, during her lunch break, Marion Crane and Sam Loomis discuss their frustration at wanting to marry one another but being unable to do so because of the heavy financial drain caused by Sam’s alimony payments to his ex-wife and his payment of his deceased father’s outstanding debts.

The second scene of this act also consists of seven incidents:

Marion returns to work at Lowery Real Estate and learns that her employer, Mr. Lowery, is also late returning from lunch. As she chats with Caroline, a clerk, Mr. Lowery enters with a client, Mr. Cassidy, who’s had one drink too many. Mr. Lowery asks Marion to bring a deed into his office. Showing Marion a picture of his daughter, who’s to marry tomorrow, Cassidy makes a pass at Marion, but she deflects his flirtation. Then, he shows her the $40,000 in cash he’s brought to buy a house as his daughter’s wedding present. After Mr. Cassidy goes into his office, Mr. Lowery tells Marion to deposit the cash in the bank; he will get his client to write him a check for the money instead on Monday, when Mr. Cassidy is sober. Marion takes the deed into Mr. Lowery’s office and, complaining of a headache, asks permission to go home after depositing the money at the bank.

The third scene of this act is made up of one incident:

Instead of depositing the money, Marion has gone home, where, having packed a suitcase, she dresses. She steals the bank deposit.

Two incidents make up the fourth scene (each is underlined in its own color to better distinguish the two):

As she drives through the city, she hears Sam’s voice greeting her upon her arrival in California. She sees Mr. Lowery and Mr. Cassidy, exchanging waves with her befuddled employer.

The fifth scene is comprised of four incidents (each shown in a different color for emphasis):

She continues to drive until night falls. Tired, she pulls off the road to sleep. She is awakened by a highway patrolman, who makes note of her license plate number. After she returns to the road, the patrolman follows her.

Scene six consists of one incident:

Because the patrolman has her license plate number, she fears that he will connect her car with the money she’s stolen, once the theft is reported, so she trades in her car for a different model with different license plates.

The seventh scene is comprised of three incidents (each of which is underlined in a different color for emphasis):

As she drives away, Marion imagines the highway patrolman talking to California Charlie, the car salesman, about her. Because she has acted suspiciously, the patrolman is likely to want to examine the sales papers, she thinks. She then imagines conversations between Mr. Lowery and Caroline, between him and Marion’s sister, and between him and Mr. Lowery, in which they figure out that she has absconded with the bank deposit.

Three incidents make up scene eight (and are underlined in different colors to better distinguish each of them:

As a downpour begins, Marion sees a neon sign announcing “Bate’s Motel, Vacancy.” She stops to rent a room, but no one is tending the office. She sees a Victorian house atop a hill, in the front of an upstairs window of which the silhouette of a female figure moves past an illuminated window shade.

The ninth scene? Four incidents (again, each in its own color):

Returning to her car, she honks, and, a little later, a young man joins her. As they exchange small talk, Norman telling her that all the rooms are vacant, the new interstate having bypassed the motel. The motel is relatively isolated, the nearest town, Fairvale, being 15 miles away. Norman returns to the house atop the hill to prepare a dinner for them.

Scene 10 is made up of two incidents (colored individually):

Marion hides the stolen money in a newspaper cradled in a magazine rack in her room. From the house on the hill, she hears Norman arguing with an elderly woman, who says, “I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in here for supper--by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds!”

Different colors indicate that scene 11 contains incidents:

Norman brings a tray of food, suggesting that he and Marion share it in his office. The office is decorated with stuffed birds, a result of Norman’s hobby as a taxidermist. Norman tells Marion that he’s trapped by having to care for his aged mother, who’s mentally ill after her husband died when Norman was five and a lover (before suffering a violent death) talked her into building the motel. Marion’s suggestion that Norman commit his mother to an asylum angers him. After he calms down, Marion returns to her room, saying she’s driving back to Phoenix the next day to try to extract herself from “a private trap” she’d “stepped into” there. In parting, Marion slips, telling Norman her real name, and he sees that, on the register, she’s signed under the assumed name of “Marie Samuels.”

Scene 12 = one incident:

Norman peeps through a hole in the wall and sees Marion undressing in the bathroom.

Scene 13 = one incident:

He retreats to the house atop the hill, sulking in the kitchen.

Scene 14 is made up of two incidents (shown, again, in distinguishing colors):

In her room, Marion calculates the money she’s spent and will have to repay, flushes this potentially incriminating evidence down the toilet, and takes a shower. As she
showers, a woman wielding a knife stabs her repeatedly, killing her.

We said that each scene should advance the story in some way, so let's see how each of the four opening scenes of Psycho do so:

1. In a Phoenix, Arizona, hotel room, during her lunch break, Marion Crane and Sam Loomis discuss their frustration at wanting to marry one another but being unable to do so because of the heavy financial drain caused by Sam’s alimony payments to his ex-wife and his payment of his deceased father’s outstanding debts. (This scene provides the antagonist’s motivation.)


2. Marion returns to work at Lowery Real Estate and learns that her employer, Mr. Lowery, is also late returning from lunch. As she chats with Caroline, a clerk, Mr. Lowery enters with a client, Mr. Cassidy, who’s had one drink too many. Mr. Lowery asks Marion to bring a deed into his office. Showing Marion a picture of his daughter, who’s to marry tomorrow, Cassidy makes a pass at Marion, but she deflects his flirtation. Then, he shows her the $40,000 in cash he’s brought to buy a house as his daughter’s wedding present. After Mr. Cassidy goes into his office, Mr. Lowery tells Marion to deposit the cash in the bank; he will get his client to write him a check for the money instead on Monday, when Mr. Cassidy is sober. Marion takes the deed into Mr. Lowery’s office and, complaining of a headache, asks permission to go home after depositing the money at the bank. (This scene sets up the next one, creating the situation that allows Marion to commit a crime.)


3. Instead of depositing the money, Marion has gone home, where, having packed a suitcase, she dresses. She steals the bank deposit. (This scene shows the antagonist perform an action--commit a crime; she forces herself, by her own behavior, to leave her job and her home, and to leave town, never to return; her crime makes her less sympathetic, or entirely unsympathetic, to audience.)


4. As she drives through the city, she hears Sam’s voice greeting her upon her arrival and sees Mr. Lowery and Mr. Cassidy, exchanging waves with her befuddled employer. (This scene restores some sympathy for Marion, showing her to have a conscience, but it also allows her a chance to reconsider her scheme and to forego stealing the money. When she goes through with the crime, the audience may feel that she is weak, rather than evil.)


5. Scenes 5, 6, and 7 force Marion’s hand, and her attempts to thwart justice also makes her even more unsympathetic to the audience: She continues to drive until night falls. Tired, she pulls off the road to sleep. She is awakened by a highway patrolman, who makes note of her license plate number. After she returns to the road, the patrolman follows her.


6. Because the patrolman has her license plate number, she fears that he will connect her car with the money she’s stolen, once the theft is reported, so she trades in her car for a different model with different license plates.


7. As she drives away, Marion imagines the highway patrolman talking to California Charlie, the car salesman, about her. Because she has acted suspiciously, the patrolman is likely to want to examine the sales papers, she thinks. She then imagines conversations between Mr. Lowery and Caroline, between him and Marion’s sister, and between him and Mr. Lowery, in which they figure out that she as absconded with the bank deposit.


8. As a downpour begins, Marion sees a neon sign announcing “Bate’s Motel, Vacancy.” She stops to rent a room, but no one is tending the office. She sees a Victorian house atop a hill, in the front of an upstairs window of which the silhouette of a female figure moves past an illuminated window shade. (This scene offers Marion a respite from the physical storm and from the storm of her emotions--the guilt and fear she feels--and introduces the idea that a woman lives in the house at the top of the hill that overlooks Bates Motel.)


9. Returning to her car, she honks, and, a little later, a young man joins her. As they exchange small talk, shy, awkward Norman telling her that all the rooms are vacant, the new interstate having bypassed the motel. The motel is relatively isolated, the nearest town, Fairvale, being 15 miles away. Norman returns to the house atop the hill to prepare a dinner for them. (This scene brings the movie’s antagonist face to face with its protagonist and shows Norman to be a shy and awkward young man who, although attracted to the opposite sex, is uncomfortable in the presence of women.)


10. Marion hides the stolen money in a newspaper cradled in a magazine rack in her room. From the house on the hill, she hears Norman arguing with an elderly woman, who says, “I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in here for supper--by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds!” (This scene shows the conflict between Norman and his mother--up to this point, the audience has only heard of it, not overheard it.)


11. Norman brings a tray of food, suggesting that he and Marion share it in his office. The office is decorated with stuffed birds, a result of Norman’s hobby as a taxidermist. Norman tells Marion that he’s trapped by having to care for his aged mother, who’s mentally ill after her husband died when Norman was five and a lover (before suffering a violent death) talked her into building the motel. Marion’s suggestion that Norman commit his mother to an asylum angers him. After he calms down, Marion returns to her room, saying she’s driving back to Phoenix the next day to try to extract herself from “a private trap” she’d “stepped into” there. In parting, Marion slips, telling Norman her real name, and he sees that, on the register, she’s signed under the assumed name of “Marie Samuels.” (This scene provides the background information that Norman knows how to stuff dead bodies, further develops the conflict between Norman and his mother, further characterizes Norman--the audience sees him as strange, understands that he feels “trapped” by his circumstances, shows he’s quick to anger, suggests he has a psychologically unhealthy relationship with his mother--intimates that violence has occurred in the past--in the death of Norman’s mother’s lover--makes Marion somewhat more sympathetic--because she has decided to try to make matters right concerning her theft of the money--and allows Norman to see that his suspicion that Marion is running from something is accurate, since she has signed in under an assumed name.)


12. Norman peeps through a hole in the wall and sees Marion undressing in the bathroom. (This scene shows that Norman is a voyeur.)


13. He retreats to the house atop the hill, sulking in the kitchen. (This scene shows that Marion is conflicted concerning Marion and the sexuality that her nudity represents.)


14. In her room, Marion calculates the money she’s spent and will have to repay, flushes this potentially incriminating evidence down the toilet, and takes a shower. As she showers, a woman wielding a knife stabs her repeatedly, killing her. (This scene restores a large measure of the audience’s sympathy for Marion, showing her as repentant, but ends with the story’s inciting moment as the protagonist, Norman Bates, commits a crime that will result in his ultimate undoing.)

We said that, in a horror movie, scenes must also frighten whenever possible. What’s frightening about the four scenes we identified as making up the first act of this film?

Even when a scene accomplishes a definite, predetermined purpose--motivating a character, for example--it can, and should, in horror stories, frighten the audience. Therefore, a horror story writer must discern what is horrific, implicitly or explicitly, about each of our plot’s incidents. Not every scene, especially of the earlier ones, frightens viewers, but several do, the types of fears varying, as do their intensities, building toward the shower scene’s climactic terror:

• We fear that Marion may do something rash.
• When she does so, we fear that Marion may get caught.
• When she does not, we fear that Marion may get arrested.
• We fear that Norman may not be trustworthy and, in fact, may be mentally unstable.
• We fear that Marion may be raped.
• We fear that Marion will be killed (which, of course, she is).

Since this has been a fairly long post, let’s summarize its key points:

• The largest part of a story is an act. Acts are made up of scenes. Scenes, in turn, are made up of incidents.
• A scene involves conflict regarding at least one character--and usually two or more characters--and, often, dialogue, and it moves the story forward in a specific way, according to a predetermine purpose. In regard to horror stories, we might add that a scene also should scare the audience whenever possible.
• Various ways in which the scenes in Psycho move the story forward are to motivate characters; to set up subsequent scenes; to establish points of no return that force a character to continue to behave according to a specific course of action; to characterize the protagonist, the antagonist, or another character; to establish or heighten conflict within or between characters; and to provide background (expository) information about the story’s characters or situations.
• A drama often consists of five acts: (1) exposition, ending with an inciting moment that sets the (2) rising action in motion, leading to a (3) turning point, or climax, which gives way to the (4) falling action, which leads to (5) a resolution (if the story is a comedy) or to a catastrophe (if the story is a tragedy).

Note: The summary of Psycho is based upon the screenplay, available at Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Everyday Horrors: Abandoned Houses

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

When we were boys, my younger brother and I, roaming the neighborhood, or “exploring,” as we preferred to think of such meanderings, came across an abandoned house. Naturally, such an edifice requires investigation. After all, it may well be haunted.

In a way, as it turns out, perhaps it was haunted.

Let me explain.

The lawn--well, really there was no lawn, not in any real sense of the word. Instead, there were clumps of weeds and tall grass. By “tall,” I’m talking waist high--to a man, not a boy. Broken flagstones led toward the rickety, sagging porch, in the middle of which was the entrance door. Some of the windows had been broken out, no doubt by the neighborhood’s idle, adolescent artillerymen’s launching of gravel missiles. Some windows lacked shutters, and some had them. The ones that remained hung at an angle as often as not. What paint remained upon the exterior walls of the two-story clapboard house was peeling worse than a three-day-old sunburn.

With some trepidation, and exchanging glances every other step of the way, we approached the house.

It wouldn’t hurt to take a quick look inside, we assured ourselves. If we saw anything amiss--ghosts, for example--we could always trust to our Keds to save us.

We crossed the creaking porch to the door. It opened easily, without, as far as I recall, a screech or a groan, displaying empty rooms, bare floors, and walls in need of cleaning as much as paint. The floors were littered with shards of glass, torn fragments of yellowed newspapers, and empty bottles and cans. The place was spooky as hell, but, as far as we could tell, it wasn’t haunted.

We’d entered the house at its living room, it seemed, and, after a cursory examination of its littered floor, bare walls, and discolored ceiling, we entered a back hallway up from which ran a flight of stairs guarded by a handrail, some of the were missing, perhaps for a long, long time. The stairs were littered with similar debris--paint peelings and chips, newspaper, and empty containers. We followed the steps up, to the second floor. Its rooms were similar to the living room--bare, dirty, and littered with dust, trash, and discarded bottles and cans. None of the windows had curtains or drapes, and several of the panes of glass had been broken or cracked by stones thrown by boys who found courage more compatible with distance than with actual trespassing.

We’d seen most of the house, and our exploration of the abandoned domicile hadn’t rewarded us with so much as a broken picture frame or a smashed TV set. Still, we might as well see the rest of the place before we took our leave.

Descending the stairs, we opened a door upon a dark, steep set of wooden steps that led into the cool, dark interior of the house’s basement. There was no way we were going down there. We hastily closed the door and moved on.


Rounding a corner, we stepped into the horror of the kitchen.

What was horrific about it was the plate of still-steaming pork and beans, the red-tinged tines of the pitchfork leaning against the wall, beside the table, and the dead dog with the gaping wound in its side lying on the floor near the pitchfork. The steaming beans told us that someone was nearby--maybe the same someone who’d killed the dog. We looked at one another, and, without a word, reached the consensus that we should run for our lives, which we did.

We ran home and informed our mother of the canine death scene we’d left behind, but she wasn’t disposed to believe us, chalking up our story to boyhood imaginations run wild.

To this day, though, my brother and I recall our adventure in the abandoned house, except that, when we recite the adventure, we usually refer to the residence not as an abandoned abode, but as a haunted house.

Abandoned houses are eerie. They’re spooky. They look as if they might be haunted, even if they are not. Having given the matter some thought, I think I know at least one reason that they often appear to be sinister, if not, indeed, haunted. Symbolically, houses represent ourselves. Their material structure represent our bodies, and the various rooms, as a good dream dictionary indicates, are stand-ins for various aspects of our personalities. An abandoned body is a dead body. An abandoned house, as a symbol of the self, suggests that one’s self--one’s spirit or soul--is dead, and if aspects of the soul, as represented by the rooms of the house are bare, soiled, littered, and dilapidated, the corresponding aspects of ourselves are also empty, unclean, and decrepit--perhaps even mad.

An abandoned house is, or can be, a perfect setting for a horror story, because such a place, as a symbol of oneself, allows a writer to peer into the attic (the conscious mind), the basement (the subconscious mind), and any of the floors and rooms between, suggesting, through symbol, metaphor, and other means of figurative and indirect communication, various dreadful states of human and personal existence. In fact, such a place is the setting of one of my own stories, in which the protagonist, an intrepid explorer much like my younger brother and I were in our earlier incarnations who, unfortunately for him, comes to a much worse end than we did, learning too late that, while home may be where the heart is, this organ is better kept inside the chest cavity than upon the mantle piece. Other writers of horror, using the same type of setting, will have different lessons to teach, but, in the fiction of fear, most such instruction is apt to include considerable pain and loss.

Abandoned houses are best left untenanted--and unexplored.

"Abandoned Houses" is one of the posts in Chillers and Thrillers' ongoing series of "Everyday Horrors."

Julie Bell: "Hard Curves, Soft as Steel"

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

According to the existentialists among us, by themselves, neither objects nor people mean anything. We invest them, as we do the world itself, with whatever meaning we assign to them, even if this meaning changes from time to time and from place to place. Nature is our mask and costume, the many disguises we wear. We are protean, and our spirits possess all persons, places, and things. Although she's primarily a fantasy artist, former bodybuilder and present wife of fellow artist Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell sometimes includes the grotesque, the monstrous, and the horrific in her work, showing her fans these possibilities within existence, human and otherwise.

Pertaining to the nature and role of women in such a context, what lessons may we glean from Bell’s art?

First, the women in her art are invariably glamorous and beautiful. They are often scantily clad or nude, a state of dress (or undress) which emphasizes their feminine attributes.

Second, Bell’s idea of womanhood is not maternal; she is not interested in depicting woman as Madonna. Woman, according to Bell, is not a worker, nor is she a servant. She is not here to cook, to clean, or to serve in a subservient position to men.

She is sometimes a warrior, incongruously attired in a bikini and armed with a sword (her true weapon, and her real armor, are her womanly charms); more often, she is a force of nature who is seen in the company of predatory beasts or birds of prey, such as snakes, hawks, or tigers, and she is unperturbed, even in the presence of monsters. At times, she is seen as having domesticated dragons or other grotesque beasts.

Third, Bell's woman embraces the otherness of the male and of male sexuality. In Bell’s art, the snake, a phallic symbol, has a terrible aspect to it (or its head, as the repository of its reptilian intelligence, does, at least). Nevertheless, the serpent is also often depicted as being not only without the armor of its scales, with an utterly smooth hide, but it is also depicted as golden (and, therefore, valuable, since gold suggests value). In its presence, Bell’s woman is not frightened, but is positively at ease with this symbol of masculine potency.

Bell’s femme fatales are at ease with nature, too. They’re able to bait their own hooks and to fish alone for their supper. They can be deadly. They can even be muscular, or buff, but they remain feminine and lovely, despite their hard bodies and their willingness to injure, destroy, or kill. They are, in a word, androgynous--physically, they are feminine, but spiritually, they are masculine--a man’s spirit (but with greater emotional sensitivity than is common among males) living, as it were, in women’s flesh. The titles of a pair of books concerning Bell’s art, Hard Curves and Soft as Steel, sum up the image that the artist’s work projects of womanhood. In the art of Vallejo and Frank Frazetta, men are often heroic figures whose daring deeds and fantastic feats include, more often than not, the rescue of a damsel in distress. In Bell’s work, such a woman rarely, if ever, exists. Women are well able to take care of themselves, thank you very much.


Sometimes, Bell’s woman is even merged with nature, as when she is portrayed as a bare-breasted female centaur or as a mermaid. In most of her work, men are absent altogether, but when a man is shown, Bell’s woman is his equal.

In fantasy art, Bell’s women anticipate the feminine heroes such as Alien’s Lieutenant Ripley, Xena the Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the slasher film’s last girl (the sole survivor who manages to defeat the monster after it has killed everyone else, males included).


Her message--and the message of Ripley, Xena, Buffy, and the last girl--seems clear. The new feminine icon is still curvy, sexy, glamorous, and lovely, but her spirit is more masculine than feminine (as gender is understood in traditional, or sexist, terms). Having forged her own independence as an individual, woman, Bell’s art insists, is entitled to become all things that males have always been: adventurers, explorers, hunters, fishers, rescuers, scouts, warriors, and, in short, heroes--or, rather, heroines. They have developed a protean nature, if not a protean form. After all, despite all the traditionally male attributes of spirit, heart, and mind, Bell’s woman remains quintessentially feminine. Contemporary horror, like contemporary fantasy art, suggests that there is a little more “man” in today’s woman, but this increased masculinity does not equate with a decrease in femininity, as it is represented physically. There is the outer woman and the inner woman, and the two need not be the same.

A Note on Bell's husband and fellow artist, Boris Vallejo:

Peruvian artist Boris Vallejo, who often signs his work simply “Boris,” draws and paints art that is similar in theme and execution to that of his wife and model, Julie Bell, and to the work of their fellow fantasy artist, Frank Frazetta. Much of Vallejo's work, in other words, is of a fantastic or an erotic nature (sometimes both), although, at times, it touches upon the supernatural and the horrific as well.

After emigrating to the United States in 1964, Vallejo became well known for his illustrations of Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan, and Doc Savage, successes which led to further commercial art assignments, critical acclaim, and a wide following of fans. His work includes many movie posters, advertising such motion pictures as Barbarella (1968), National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), and many others.

Frazetta: Work That Is Beautiful Even When Horrific

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Artists are imaginative people. Most of us are, but few of us, unless we are artists ourselves, are as imaginative as those who make their livings by exercising--and, in the case of those artists who illustrate horror fiction, perhaps exorcising--their imaginations on a regular, if not routine, basis. In previous posts, we have considered the art of Rene Magritte (a superb surrealist), H. R. Giger (whose biomechanical art was accomplished with airbrushes), and the pen-and-ink illustrations of such Weird Tales artists as Margaret Brundage and Virgil Finlay. In this post, we turn our gaze upon Frank Frazetta, a pioneer in, and master of, contemporary fantasy, science fiction, and (occasionally) horror art. The purpose of cover art, we argue, is to sell the magazines upon which it appears. For the male adolescents who made up most of the readership of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines devoted to horror, scantily clad or nude women, often in perilous situations, accounted for a lot of the images that appeared on the covers. Occasionally--especially when technique outweighed theme--such masters as Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and Julie Bell departed from imperiled, half-naked maidens to depict other themes. Sometimes, a sexual--or a sexualized--undercurrent remained--but the direct appeal of this type of art was the physical and martial prowess of the hero, depicted as a sinewy, usually lone, adventurer who represented a law unto himself and just happened--most of the time, at least--to fight on the side of right. In other words, he was fantasy and horror’s answer to the knight in not-so-shining armor (who later was transfigured into the Western’s laconic sheriff or gunfighter). If the nude or semi-nude damsel in distress represented the type of woman whom the adolescent male (or those adolescent males who read Weird Tales and its ilk, at any rate) wanted to meet, if not necessarily take home to mom, the barbarian as lone-wolf avenger and righter of wrongs represented this reader’s alter ego, the man whom he would like to be or, perhaps, to become. In Frazetta’s artwork, the two archetypical characters--imperiled damsel and anti-heroic rescuer--often were depicted together. In fact, there were often several nude or half-naked damsels in distress, all at the same time, for the hero (or anti-hero) (frequently, a barbarian) to rescue. When Frazetta’s paintings weren’t suggesting to boys that real men rescue women (who, it seems, had a penchant for imperiling themselves), they created a mood that is consistent with mystery, if not always horror. A case in point is his painting, The Moon’s Rapture, the title of which is obviously a pun upon the use of “moon” as a slang term for the buttocks. In the painting, there are two moons--one lunar, the other anatomical. It goes without saying which of the two is the source of the adolescent male’s “rapture.” 

The painting is interesting for more than its subject matter, however, as it demonstrates several features common to Frazetta’s artwork in general. A full moon, not featureless--shaded patches in green, purple, orange, and gray suggest craters--appears in a blue-gray sky, its upper hemisphere veiled, as it were, by the mossy branches of a great tree. The back of the female figure’s head overlaps the bottom arc of the moon, and her right arm is raised as she clutches one of the tree’s branches to support herself as she stares, presumably enraptured, at the moon. Nude, she stands upon one of the thick, serpentine boughs of the tree, one of her ankles crossed over the other, her left arm at her side. Except for the moss-covered, mostly brown and gray limbs in the painting’s lower foreground, the muted blue-gray sky, and the dappled colors that signify the moon’s craters, the only other color in the painting is that of the female’s figure, which, since she is naked, is more extensive than it would be were she clothed. The effect of the darkness across the top of the painting, down its right edge, at its left edge, and at its bottom is to frame the female figure, drawing the viewer’s attention to her body and, since her buttocks are projected back, toward the viewer, as it were, as a result of her stance, focusing the viewer’s concentration upon her derriere. The title’s play on words, The Moon’s Rapture, is hard to miss. As the female figure is enraptured by the moon upon which she gazes, the viewer--likely to me male, since Frazetta illustrated the covers of magazines purchased largely by adolescent males--is enraptured by her own “moon.” This painting associates women and femininity with nature in general and with the moon in particular, as do many myths, legends, and literary traditions. Archetypes serve the painter’s purpose, giving the images a depth that they might not have otherwise, showing women to be forces as enchanting to men as the beauty and mystery of the natural order is, or can be, to women. The Barbarian is typical of Frazetta’s depiction of the lone wolf who fends for himself, seeking vengeance or, more rarely, justice for others (usually an imperiled woman). Lean and mean, the barbarian stands, muscles bulging, his left hand resting upon the hilt of his unsheathed sword, which has penetrated the hill underfoot. His garb is slight, but exhibits his machismo. Pirate fashion, he wears earrings and sports a necklace that appears to have been fashioned of animal fangs or claws. His chest and abdominal muscles are as individually distinct as if they were sculpted from flesh instead of marble, and the wide, leather wristband and matching belt are both decorated with metal studs. An ornate scabbard hangs, empty, at his waist, from which dangles the lengths of a chain. On his right forearm, he wears a simple bracelet. He also wears boots with large cuffs. At first, because of the fiery yellow background against which he, an imposing, dark-haired, sun-darkened figure, stands, and the darkness of the mound upon which he is, as it were, rooted by his sword, it is not apparent that the hill is built not of soil alone but also of the body parts--an arm and a skull are visible--and a battleaxe--of enemies he has vanquished. The fiery yellow sky behind him has an almost subliminal quality as well. After discerning the body parts in the hill, skulls, a castle upon a mountainside, vague suggestions of tree branches, and a bird--an eagle or maybe even a phoenix--emerge, as it were, from the wavering flames, representing, perhaps, the memories of the barbarian and the souls of the dead or both.

At the barbarian’s feet, her flesh of a hue similar to that of the fiery yellow sky, and looking as if she herself is emerging from the hill, a woman, nude but for the armbands that adorn her left biceps, rests her head against the barbarian’s left calf. Has she been rescued from the hands of the dead who lie beneath the victor’s feet? It seems that she is the only spoil of battle that he has seen fit to spare and, therefore, the only one that he regards as having any value. What is important in the barbarian’s world, Frazetta’s portrait of this pagan warrior suggests, is his physical and martial prowess, his memories of vanquished foes (or, it may be, his possession of their spirits), and women (albeit as little more than sex objects that may be acquired as possessions, or as part of the victors’ spoils of battle). Part of the appeal of Frazetta’s work is that it is often based upon these archetypal, if sexist, images of the masculine and the feminine, suggesting that men are loners who wage war with one another, with beasts, and with the occasional monster, exhibiting their strength, stamina, and fighting skills, and, to the notion that, to the victor, go the spoils, including ubiquitous half-naked damsels in distress. In other words, his depictions of men and women fit the idealized, if adolescent, ideas of the sexes that are typical of the readers of the types of magazines upon the covers of which Frazetta’s work was apt to appear. The rest of the appeal of the artist’s illustrations and paintings lies in the superb talent and the accomplished technique with which Frazetta draws and paints. Even when he depicts horror, the result is, in its own peculiar way, a thing of beauty.