Horror Fiction: The Appeal to the Need for Attention

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Animal predators are attracted by sights, sounds, and scents.

Predators' eyes face forward, providing them with binocular vision. The view of one eye overlaps with that of the other eye, allowing a predator to judge the distance to prey and “how fast its prey is moving.” In predators equipped with more than one set of eyes—spiders, for example, which have “clusters of six to eight eyes”—use some of its eyes to “form the image” of its prey, other eyes to “estimate distance, and still others [of its eyes] to detect motion.” Nocturnal predators, both terrestrial and marine, are equipped with 'special mirror-like structures in the back[s] of their eyes,” which provide them with night vision.

Not only do predators have excellent sight, but they also possess superb hearing: “In mammals, external ear flaps can be swiveled forward or backward in order to pinpoint the direction of a sound. The ears of bats are often highly specialized, with strange shapes that help catch the echoes of the calls they make as they fly.” However, some predators don't have to have ears to hear their prey; they perceive vibrations by feeling them in their bodies.

Some predators can smell prey from a mile off, while others can sniff out buried food. Such predators may use their amazing sense of smell to track the prey they hunt.

Their extremely sharp senses of sight, hearing, and smell make predators formidable adversaries, but prey animals have evolved defenses against these hunters, including camouflage, toxic chemicals, and mimicry.

Animals that use chemical toxins are often brightly colored. Their brilliant hues warn other animals, including predators, that seeking to eat them could be a dangerous, perhaps fatal, mistake.

The “coloration, marking patterns,” or general appearance of a prey animal or insect can make them resemble something else, such camouflage lending them the appearance of a leaf or twig or another animal or insect, including toxic plants or animals. 

Mimicry “is similar to camouflage, but in mimicry.” except that the model is generally a similar organism rather than a static part of the background environment.” The common types of mimicry are Batesian mimicry and Mullerian mimicry. In the former, “an edible mimic resembles” one that tastes foul or is poisonous.” in Mullerian mimicry, by contrast, “two (or more) distasteful or poisonous organisms resemble each other.” While only the mimic benefits from Batesian mimicry, “both species benefit” from the latter type of mimicry, “because a predator who learns to avoid one species will most likely avoid the other, too.”

Often, horror fiction appeals to the need for attention by either affirming this need (that is, by showing it as being satisfied) or (far more often) in a negative manner, by denying its satisfaction or by showing that its fulfillment leads to disastrous consequences.

In horror fiction, the need for attention takes many forms, but, no matter which form it takes, it typically leads to misfortune or death.

In many horror movies, the need for attention is exhibited (literally) in characters' shedding their clothes. Nudity certainly attracts attention, quickly and easily, especially if men are present. (Research shows that men tend to respond more strongly to visual, women to tactile, cues.)

Fowles distinguishes between nudity as an appeal to the need for sex and nudity as an appeal to the need for attention. Partly, the nature of the appeal is a matter of context. Who is naked, a man or a woman, and at whom is his or her nakedness directed, at the same or the opposite sex? In general, if a nude woman's image is directed at women, it is probably designed to appeal to the need for attention. However, if a nude female model appears in a sexual context, with a nude male model, the appeal is apt to be to the audience's need for sex. The same is true in reverse: if a nude man's image is directed at men, it is probably designed to appeal to the need for attention. However, if a nude male model appears in a sexual context, with a nude female model, the appeal is apt to be to the audience's need for sex: 

. . . the Jordache ads with the lithe, blouse-less female astride a similarly clad male is clearly an appeal to the audience's sexual drives, but the same cannot be said about Brooke Shields in the Calvin Klein commercials. Directed at young women and their credit-card carrying mothers, the image of Miss Shields instead invokes the need to be looked at. Buy Calvins and you'll be the center of much attention, just as Brooke is, the ads imply; they do not primarily inveigle their target audience's need for sexual intercourse.

In horror movies, nudity is sometimes a prelude to sex, but whether it is or not, disrobing (like sex) is likely to lead to something much less pleasant than romance—namely violence or death at the hands of the villain, who's frequently a psychopathic murderer (Psycho), a supernatural serial killer (Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street), or a monster or an alien (Species). In horror movies, a few moments of nudity also provide a distraction that, contrasting with the gore to come, makes violent death seem all the more horrific. (It's also apt to sell more movie tickets.) 

Although nudity is frequently featured in horror movies and is definitely related to the predator's sense of sight, it's not the only way characters seek attention, and, as in regard to the predator's sense of sight, some of the ways characters want to become the center of things align, ironically, with the predator's sense of smell or hearing.

According to vampire lore, the undead are able to smell blood even when it is inside a stopped bottle. In fact, vampire hunters sometimes turned this ability against the predators using a process known as “bottling.” According to

Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, blood was poured into a bottle, which was stopped with a cork, sealing wax, and a saint's picture. “Left where the vampire will be able to smell the blood,” the bottle lured the vampire into taking “its invisible form” and entering the bottle, whereupon it was corked and sealed with wax and a saint's image and flung into a fire. The bottle would shatter, releasing the vampire into the fire, which would destroy the vampire. In Anne Rice's novel, Interview with the Vampire, as in other works of such fiction, the undead likewise can smell blood. 

A Quiet Place is a contemporary horror movie that exposes the dangers posed by an extraterrestrial alien with phenomenally good hearing. When we are frightened by a predator, it's natural to scream so as to alert others of the presence of danger, either so that they can assist us or so that they can avoid the menace. However, this need for attention—or, more precisely, this need to draw attention—becomes, ironically, itself a danger. By sounding an alarm, we could attract the attention of the alien, which has hypersensitive hearing and respond to any sound or noise by attacking its source. Thus, to express, or to give voice to, the need for attention in this way is to invite violence, pain, and probable death. 

The movie poster for Alien also suggests that a need that usually facilitates survival can also endanger it. The poster's caption reads: “In space no one can hear you scream.” The unspoken subtext seems to be “scream all you want.” In space, one is not only isolated, cut off from the organizations and institutions that could aid one's survival—police, medical experts and practitioners, military personnel, fire and rescue teams—but one is also in a vacuum, through which sound waves cannot travel. As Jonathan Strickland explains:

Sound waves can travel only through matter. Since there's almost no matter in interstellar space, sound can't travel through it. The distance between particles is so great that they would never collide with each other. Even if you could get a front seat for the explosion of the [Star Wars] Death Star, you wouldn't hear anything at all.

 

As Fowles points out, advertisers appeal to the fifteen basic needs universal to all humankind in two ways, either positively, addressing or depicting their satisfaction, or negatively, by denying the satisfaction of such needs. In either case, an appeal is made to the need. Horror novels and movies do the same, evoking the need for attention either by showing it's satisfaction (by allowing villains [and audiences] a glimpse of bare flesh, for example), or by frustrating this need (by requiring its repression or by preventing it altogether, both on the penalty of death).

However the need for attention is addressed, this need is often one to which horror novels and movies, like other genres of popular fiction, appeals, and this appeal is another reason for its box office success.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Prominence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles, we all need to feel “admired and respected, to enjoy prestige and high social status.” Such a need is represented by “distinction” and by being of high social rank. Although prominence may not include wealth, a prominent person is apt to be perceived as “classy.” In short, to be prominent is to stand out from the crowd.

In horror fiction, which characters stand out and why?

The heroes of horror stories seldom come readily to mind, but the villains are memorable:

Movie or Novel	Villain	Hero
A Nightmare on Elm Street (movie)	Freddy Krueger	Nancy Thompson
Desperation (novel)	Tak	David Carver
Frankenstein (novel)	Monster	Dr. Victor Frankenstein
Halloween (movie)	Michael Myers	Laurie Strode
Paradise Lost (poem)	Satan	God
Psycho (movie)	Norman Bates	Lila Crane and Sam Loomis
The Silence of the Lambs (movie)	Hannibal Lecter	Clarice Starling

Horror stories belong to the villains, even though they are often overcome by the hero or heroes at the end of the novel or movie in which they are featured. The villains make things happen; the heroes, until the end (and sometimes even then) mostly react. This observation applies to literature as old as John Milton's Paradise Lost, for which, both William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley contend, Satan is the true hero of the epic, a point of view I address in my urban fantasy novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt. The protagonist, Raven Westbrook, a turncoat witch, is discussing God's seeming indifference to the evils she and her rescuer, government agent Lloyd Edwards:

“One of the things I remember about reading the poem . . . is that the accepted criticism of the day regarded Satan as the true hero of the poem. He was made unforgettable, these critic claimed, while God was given such short shrift that he was, at best, a marginal character.”

“That's the way it seems today, too, sometimes. God keeps a low profile.”

“I said God seemed all the more impressive to me because he didn't appear directly in the epic. Readers heard allusions of God, in the dialogue of other, lesser characters, but God himself, as you put it, seemed to keep a low profile, as if he himself needn't deign to confront the evil that Satan represented.”

Raven considered his words. “Wow. I get that. What did the professor say?”

Lloyd chuckled. “I don't think he knew what to say, really. He didn't expect any thinking outside the box of received criticism. He admitted the possibility of such a point of view and, without endorsing it, moved on to the next point.”

Why do horror villains typically stand out more than the heroes who defeat them? One reason seems to be that they represent behavior, or even a way of life, that, fortunately, is alien to most of us. As a rule, we don't; stalk and kill young people who are sexually active; we cannot possess other people; we don't create monsters in scientific laboratories; we're not out to kill our sisters; we don't challenge the rule of God; we don't mount and stuff our dead mothers or kill in their names; we're not so wise to the ways of the criminal mind that we can instruct FBI agents as to how to hunt serial killers. Characters who can and do accomplish such diabolical feats are fascinating to us.

On a deeper level, characters the likes of Freddy Kruger, Tak, Frankenstein's monster, Michael Myers, Satan, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter allow us, vicariously, to see life through their eyes, to become them, in our imaginations, for a time, doing what they do. Except for sociopaths, readers and moviegoers have the capacities to empathize and sympathize, to walk a mile in another person's shoes, to get inside someone else's head, to identify with even the most vile and disgusting, heartless, cruel, and evil villains without, we hope, becoming them ourselves, although Friedrich Nietzsche, suggested we may endanger ourselves by such actions: “when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Memorable villains are Evil, with a capital “E.” There is nothing, or very little, they will not do in the interests of obtaining their own goals, whether they seek another victim, victory of God, the creation of life itself, or escape from themselves through their adoption of another personality. Because of the magnitude of their evil, as it is represented in the horrible deeds they commit, they stand out.

Finally, there is at least one other reason that such characters attain prominence: their hubris, or excessive pride, the extreme arrogance which results from their unwarranted self-regard and the self-egoistic centering of the universe upon themselves. All that matters to them are their own desires. They who are merely men (or, far less often, women) would be gods. This is the basic motivation of all bigger-than-life villains. It is the sin of Adam and Eve. As Satan tells the first couple, concerning God's prohibition of their eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God had but the fruit of the tree off limits because “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). It is the sin that leads to Lucifer's downfall:

For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:/ I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High./ Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit (Isaiah 14:14-16).

It is the sin, too, of Freddy Kruger, Tak, Frankenstein's monster, Michael Myers, Satan, Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, and the other prominent villains of horror fiction. It may also the sin of such actual villains as Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Ghadafi, and other serial killers and dictators. Herein lies the true horror and terror of the most prominent villains, both of fiction and of history.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Dominate

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

All of us feel the need to dominate others, Jib Fowles notes. Advertisements, he says, appeal to this universal “basic need.” The desire for “clout,” this need is characterized by “the craving to be powerful—perhaps omnipotent”—and it may take the form of a desire to “dominate and control one's environment.”

Although Fowles doesn't mention these other forms specifically, it seems that the “basic need” to dominate would also occur in such endeavors as those involving social, personal, economic, governmental, and technological ends, to name but a few.

Horror fiction, like other genres of literature, often appeals to the need to dominate.

In one of Stephen King's novels, Gerald's Game (1992), men sexually dominate a woman; in another, Misery (1987), a woman physically dominates a man.

Gerald's Game: After Jessie tells her dominant husband, lawyer Gerald Burlingame, she does not want to engage in another session of bondage and discipline with him, he persists, climbing atop her after handcuffing her to the bed, despite her protests. She kicks him, he falls onto the floor, has a heart attack, and dies. Alone in the remote cabin to which they have repaired, and shackled to the bed, Jessie begins to hallucinate, seeing a figure she calls “Space Cowboy” and hearing voices, each a different aspect of herself that she's repressed. The voices help her to better understand her past as a victim of paternal sexual abuse and her present as a wife who is more valued as a trophy than as a human being who's an equal partner in marriage. She has settled for Gerald, despite his emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of her, because he is financially secure. After several attempts at escape, she finally frees herself of the handcuffs by cutting away enough of the skin on one wrist to lubricate her skin with her blood. She pushes the bed to the bureau, retrieving a key with which to unlock the cuffs and free her other hand. However, the blood loss she has suffered causes her to lose consciousness, and, upon awakening, she imagines she is being pursued by the Space Cowboy and wrecks her car. Later, as Jessie is recovering, a nurse tells her that the Space Cowboy is actually a necrophiliac killer, Raymond Andrew Joubert, who was passing through Maine when he came upon her cabin.

A victim of her father, her husband, and a serial killer and necrophile, all of whom abused and dominated her for their own sexual and sadistic purposes, Jessie is a survivor because she is willing to do whatever it takes—repress horrific memories of her past to the extent that she becomes three personalities, rather than one; kill her husband; and evade a killer who had apparently left her to die in the cabin so he could return to have sex with her corpse.

Misery: Romance novelist Paul Sheldon wrecks his car during a blizzard and is rescued by his “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who lives in a remote house in the mountains. Angry that Sheldon has killed his heroine, Misery Chastain, in the last book of the series, Annie keeps him prisoner, demanding he resurrect Misery in a sequel, Misery's Return. He discovers she's a serial killer but isn't aware that she plans to kill them both after reading Misery's Return. After Sheldon finishes his manuscript, he sets it ablaze. (In fact, however, the manuscript is merely a counterfeit of the actual document.) He and Annie struggle until Annie collapses after falling and striking her head on the mantelpiece in his bedroom. The next day, he gets the attention of state police who are seeking her in connection with a trooper she'd killed earlier. At first, they cannot find her body, but it is later discovered in the barn. She'd made her way there to get a chainsaw with which to kill Paul, but died from the injuries she'd sustained in their fight. Paul publishes Misery's Return, before working on a literary novel, planning to launch a new career as a serious author.

The ordeal through which Sheldon goes, suffering emotional and physical abuse at the hands of his psychotic “biggest fan,” is not only a testament to his courage, perseverance, and will to survive, but they are also the reasons that he is able to endure the torment to which he is subjected, escapes, and emerges alive, more or less in one piece. His tenacity also allows him to overcome the alcoholism that plagues him and the writer's block he suffers as a result of his ordeal. By showing the traits of character and will that Sheldon requires to come back from the brutal abuse of a dominant personality, King suggests the way forward for actual individuals who have experienced similar barbarity.

As Fowles observes, dominance doesn't have to be sexual or depend on relationships between men and women. In William Golding's The Lord of the Flies (1954), a novel King says he wishes he'd written, the need to dominate is expressed socially.

Economic dominance occurs in Bentley Little's The Store (1998). A national chain of big-box department stores has virtually taken over the brick-and-mortar retail world. The Store is everywhere. Its ever-expanding growth wipes out mom-and-pop stores, most franchises, and any vendors and suppliers who don't want to meet its terms. Stocking anything anyone could ever want to buy, and selling merchandise at discount prices, The Store is quickly becoming the only place to shop. Its benefits—a huge inventory, low prices, thousands of locations, employment for an army of workers, and taxes to local, state, and federal governments, are as numerous as its operations are vast. However, there's a downside to The Store—and, like its benefits, its negative effects are tremendous.

The Store: Juniper, Arizona, wants The Store, so officials offer tax breaks and other incentives to entice its executives to build one in its community. From the beginning, there are indications that The Store may not be the blessing local politicians believe it will be: dead animals—and a human corpse—at the construction site, black vehicles delivering mysterious merchandise in the middle of the night, and The Store's taking over of the town. Bill Davis senses trouble, and he's uneasy when his daughters become employees of The Store. Night Managers terrorize the staff. Employees disappear. Bizarre merchandise, including a line of dildos and other sex toys, show up on the shelves. Through its economic power, The Store runs roughshod over the lives of employees, customers, townspeople, politicians, vendors, suppliers, and other businesses. Just who is The Store's CEO, Newman, and what does he want to accomplish through his domination of the town—and of the nation?

Sometimes, we forget the true power of money, thinking of power in physical terms, as brute strength, weapons, or military force. However, economics is the basis of every enterprise, especially in capitalistic countries, and its potential for evil, like its potential for good, is tremendous. How is such economic clout to be resisted and overcome? How are individuals, families, communities, and nations to survive against such a powerful economic threat to their autonomy, safety, welfare, and liberty? The need to achieve through economic dominance, Little reminds his readers, is a force to be reckoned with.

Dean Koontz's The Taking(2004) depicts attempt to dominate the environment. 

The Taking: After a torrential downfall of semen-scented rain, a mysterious slime appears overnight, coating buildings, streets, trees, lawns, bushes, and the rest of the landscape. The small town in which Neil and Molly Sloan reside is isolated from the rest of the world as telephone, radio, television, and Internet service fail. The Sloans gather a group of their neighbors. Some among them believe the apocalypse is upon them. The truth is that an advance team of alien scientists have arrived, and they're reverse-terraforming the earth to make it habitable for them in preparation for a massive invasion.

By showing the effects on the environment through the lens of an alien invasion, Koontz provides a fresh look at the effects of pollution and energy waste that societies are inflicting on their own planet, offering an ironic portrayal of some of the effects that continuous neglect and abuse of the planet could have on Earth and its inhabitants, including human beings themselves. It's a harrowing story condemning the dominance of the environment that is underway today, as it has been for generations. 

The story is made all the more unsettling, indeed horrible, because of the actual use of pesticides to control weeds and defoliants to denude vast acreages of plants. 

Developed in the 1970s by Monsanto, Roundup, a “glyphosate-based pesticide,” is today used in more than 160 countries, on a variety of crops, despite controversy concerning whether the product is a carcinogen. 

During the Vietnam War, the United States military used Agent Orange to strip the foliage from “3,100,000 hectares (31,000 km²; 12,000 sq mi)” of forest, in the process exposing millions of Vietnamese people and thousands of U. S. military personnel to the agent, which has been linked to a variety of cancers. The “herbicidal warfare” operations occurred from 1961 to 1971, but their effects continue to cause health problems to the Vietnamese people and to Vietnam veterans. 

Whether the intent has been to protect crops by controlling pests or to defoliate forests during “herbicidal warfare” operations, chemical attempts to dominate the environment have had effects even more chilling than those of which Koontz writes in The Taking, because, unlike his novel's horrors, those that resulted from the use of pesticides and defoliants are real, not imaginary. 

Both King's and Koontz's novels also chronicle the results of attempts by the federal government to dominate society. King's Firestarter (1980) and Koontz's Watchers (1987) depict how ruthless the United States government can be in its quest to use science and technology as instruments of government dominance.

Firestarter: “Charlie” McGee develops telekinesis and the ability to “push,” or make hypnotic suggestions using the power of thought, after her father, Andy, participated as a subject in a clandestine government experiment. Over time, Charlie's powers become enormously powerful. She and Andy are hunted by government agents, including an assassin known as Rainbird, after they escape from the government laboratory, “the Shop.” Eventually, they escape to a cabin in Vermont, but they are subsequently captured and taken to a secret location in northern Virginia. Using their powers, they escape again, destroying the government facility, although Andy is killed. Charlie informs a national publication of her experiences.

Watchers: Travis Cornell, formerly of the Delta Force, stumbles upon a golden retriever and a hulking creature, the outsider, which have escaped from a top-secret government laboratory. The latter is pursuing the former, in an attempt to kill the canine. Because of the retriever's extremely high intelligence, Cornell names the animal “Einstein,” and he and the dog save a woman, Nora Devon, from a sexual predator. They become a trio, pursued by the Outsider, federal agents, and a Russian operative, Vince Nasco, who wants to kill the scientists involved in the experiments that produced Einstein and the Outsider and capture the dog to sell.

What makes these novels truly terrifying is that they address issues that have actually occurred in similar government experiments in which the human rights of test subjects were wantonly violated with impunity. In 1953, during MKUltra, the Central Intelligence Agency administered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to Frank Olson, an army biologist, without his knowledge or consent. As a result, he leaped to his death.

For forty years, from 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Six-hundred-and-twenty-two poor black men, supposedly receiving free medical care, were monitored without being treated for the disease, despite the proof that penicillin could cure them. None of the participants in the study were notified that treatment was being withheld, and none of them consented to the withholding of treatment. Forty of their wives contracted the disease, and nineteen children were born with congenital syphilis.

During Operation Top Hat (1953), the United States Army Chemical Corps deliberately “exposed personnel” to biological and chemical warfare agents, including phosgene, a suffocant; blister agents; and nerve agents, so decontamination methods could be tested.

James Patterson's novel Humans, Bow Down (2017), written with Emily Raymond, focuses upon technological dominance, as do the films the Terminator (1984-present) franchise, Demon Seed (1973), and many others.

Humans,Bow Down: In a war between humans and smart robots, which occurred some time ago, robots were the victors. Now, as the title of the novel suggests, humans have been subjugated to their conquerors. Whenever a robot leader appears, humans are ordered to “bow down,” showing their submission to their dominant masters. When a small band of humans dares to defy their mechanical overlords, there is hope that humans may regain their freedom, but liberty will not come cheaply, if at all.

Terminator: In the future, smart robots rule the Earth, and humans live minimal lives in filth, discomfort, and poverty, until John, the son of Sarah Connor, leads his fellow humans in a war against their brutal conquerors. To prevent this event from happening, the robots send one of their own, The Terminator, into the past to kill Sarah before she can conceive him. However, Sarah is not alone: her son also sends a soldier of the resistance back through time to protect her.

Demon Seed: Dean Koontz's 1973 novel, which was adapted to the big screen under the same title (1977), features Proteus, an artificially intelligent, state-of-the-art computer that plans to impregnate Susan, a wealthy divorcee whose home is controlled by a computer system. After commandeering Susan's home computer system, Proteus imprisons her in her home, in effect putting her under house arrest, and uses hypnosis and subliminal perception on her, interacting physically with her by using “pseudopod” tentacles that Proteus designs and constructs in the nearby university that houses “him.” From their union, a monstrous human-hybrid creature results, their “child,” with which Susan must do battle. 

Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been used to dominate workers and consumers, the economies of both domestic and foreign markets, military forces, politicians, and, indeed, entire political systems. It is only now becoming possible, some believe, for technology to dominate individuals in personal ways, such as by enslaving them or transforming their sex lives through the use of “sexbots” (robots designed as surrogate sex partners). If this proves to be the case, such visions as those presented in Humans,Bow Down, Terminator, and Demon Seed may be closer to realization than many might imagine. 

Although horror and science fiction are both forms of fantasy, writers of each genre have made some fairly horrific speculations about the abuses that stem from the need to dominate others and the environment.

In the past, it seems, more authors were likely to be optimistic about the future effects of present-day personal, social, economic, governmental, and technological efforts to dominate the world. After experiencing such horrors as two world wars, the medical experiments of Josef Mengele, the gassing of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis, the effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and such covert operations by American organizations against their own citizens, as carried out during the Vietnam War, the MKUltra project, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, and Operation Top Hat (to mention only a few), contemporary authors do not seem to share such an optimistic view of the need to dominate, as Gerald's Game, Misery, The Store, The Taking, Firestarter, Watchers, Humans, Bow Down, Terminator, and Demon Seed unanimously suggest.

The need to dominate may be universal among all individuals, but that doesn't mean its practice will necessarily produce beneficial outcomes.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Achieve

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.

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.