Doctors of Death

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Dr. Jekyll

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Moreau

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

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

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

Dr. Griffin

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

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

* * *

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

Imaginary vs. Imaginative Worlds as They relate to Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In C. S. Lewis: A Life, Alister McGrath points out the distinction that Lewis makes between imaginary and imaginative worlds. For Lewis, the former, McGrath says, depicts a landscape having “no counterpart in reality,” whereas the latter seeks to convey “images adequate to” the depiction of a transcendent “reality.” The worlds of mythology are examples of imaginative worlds, and “the more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability, Lewis says, to “communicate more reality to us.”

McGrath makes it clear that, in discussing imaginative worlds, Lewis does not mean that such worlds—or the works devoted to them—are allegories. They may be interpreted allegorically, but that does not mean that they themselves are allegories. As Lewis explains, his own Chronicles of Narnia can be allegorized, but that “of itself is no proof that it is an allegory.” Instead, his Narnia series, which presents an imaginative world, is a “supposal,” by which he means fiction that supplies possible answers to questions of a transcendent nature. Using Narnia as an example, Lewis writes:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress] represents Despair, he [Aslan] would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours? This is not allegory at all.”

Lewis makes several points:

1. The writer's work asks or implies a question.
2. Although the question is posed in or by a work of fiction, the question relates to an actual event or events in the real world.
3. In the context of its imaginative world, the work poses an answer to the question.
   
   

Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fails these tests and is, indeed, McGrath states, a work about an imaginary, rather than an imaginative, world. The world of Oz has no referent beyond itself. Narnia, by contrast, is shadow of another world which is itself the shadow of yet another world, just as, in Plato's thought, our sense perceptions of phenomena are shadows of the objects in the world and the world is itself a shadow of the transcendent world of perfect Forms.

An illustration of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” pictures a man chained against a wall behind which men carry clay figures. The men hold the figures over their heads, and the upper portions of the figures are higher than the top of the wall against which the man on the other side is chained. A fire burning on a stone shelf of the cave, on the other side of the men, casts the shadows of the objects onto the wall in front of the chained man. Rather than seeing the actual objects—clay figures of a horse, a bull, and a pot—the chained man sees only their shadows. High on one of the cave's walls, a ladder ascends to the world above, where the sun shines in the sky. The objects the men carry are mere copies of the things in the world above—representations of the animals—and the shadows are copies, as it were, of these copies. Only in the unseen world above are the unseen, actual animals (representing, in the allegory, the Forms themselves).

Lewis's Narnia is somewhat like Plato's allegorical cave. The real world is Narnia, where Aslan dwells. Its copy is The Chronicles of Narnia, which recount the events in Narnia. The copy of the copy is our own world, a dim reflection of the imaginative world of the novels, which is, in turn, itself a faint likeness of Aslan's real world. The images that depict the world of the novels are the clay pots in Jung's cave, which represent, but do not truly reflect, the true objects themselves, any more than the objects truly reflect their transcendent Forms. As Lord Digory says, in The Last Battle, “It's all there in Plato.”

In attempting to envision Forms (i. e., in a Christian context, divine realities), Lewis depicts Christ as the lion Aslan, Satan as the White Witch, the fallen, unredeemed world as a frozen wasteland in which Christmas never arrives (until Aslan appears), and the Pevensie children are disciples. As McGrath points out,

Lewis's remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this metanarrative—to get inside the story and feel what it was like to be part of it . . . . The Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story.

Do any horror stories accomplish something similar, creating imaginative worlds wherein the writer's work asks or implies and answers a question related to an actual event or events in the real world? Do any works of horror fiction shadow the true horrors of the real world in such a way that readers can enter their imaginative worlds and “experience” the stories depicting these landscapes? Do any of them give rise to myths? Are any horror stories mythopoeic?

The icons of horror that continue to resonate with readers and moviegoers may indicate which images have particular force in conveying feelings of terror and disgust (probably the two chief elements of horror). Often, these icons appear in literary works, but they are also present in the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. Such icons include demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies, all of which have appeared in novels, short stories, or movies that meet Lewis's criteria, asking or implying a question related to what is (or is, at least, believed by some to be) related to an actual event or events in the real world, and pose answers to the question they pose.

To get just an intimation of the power these images of horror originally held for their audiences, we must try, to the best of our abilities, to envision the world as it was to them and to see, in this context, the supernatural beings they imagined as their enemies.

The world in which such creatures existed was a pre-scientific world wherein there was no well-established association of objective cause and effect. Demons, rather than bacteria, birth defects, viruses, radiation, or the like afflicted people with disease, blindness, or mental illness. They also animated human corpses, using dead bodies, as “vampires,” to drink blood. Demons also empowered witches to perform spectacular feats and wonders. The soul's survival of death enabled the existence of ghosts and zombies.

Today, we might call such a view of “reality” superstitious, but, for the ancients, it was simply the truth, the way things were, reality itself. Against such evils, such remedies as prayers, rituals, incantations were the only recourse which might prevail, and, only then, because God ruled over even the supernatural entities that afflicted humanity.

Horror is, like poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and many other human enterprises, of religious, not secular, origin, and, despite the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Enlightenment, horror continues to tap the primeval aspects of our existence as human beings that religion once addressed and, indeed, continues, for many, to address.

Just as adults retain vestiges of their childhood experience, humanity retains traces of its primordial heritage. In our fiction and in the dark, dim recesses of our ancient selves, demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies continue to horrify us, just as, in times past, they possessed, haunted, stalked, hexed, and vexed our ancestors in the “real world” in which they lived. If you doubt this, spend a few minutes alone in a cemetery by yourself after dark or imagine spending a night alone in the catacombs, among centuries-old corpses and skeletons of the dead.

Then, you will begin to fathom the terrible terror felt by those who believed in things that go bump in the night, and reading Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King will take on a new intensity. In Platonic and mythopoeic terms, their works are, after all, shadows of the shadows of the Real Horrors awaiting us beyond this world.

Inference and Implication as the Language of Film

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

A rule of thumb is that one page of a screenplay equals one minute of screen time. The cost of filming is expensive, so, ideally, each foot of film is vital to the story. It helps to set the scene, establishes the mood, introduces a character, presents a significant conflict, symbolizes or underscores the theme, or otherwise advances the plot or the movie's overall purpose.

Of course, the opening scene* of a motion picture also bears the burden of “hooking” the audience, of capturing their interest, of making them want to see the rest of the movie.

The primary language of film is imagery, the organized sequences of pictures that appear on the screen. Imagery is often supplemented and complemented by sound, including dialogue. The language of film is rich and powerful, primal and rousing, but it is also limited. Written language can tap more than sight and sound; it can get inside readers' minds, evoke (or represent) thought, reflection, and consensus or disagreement between characters (or between characters and readers), as well as characters' and readers' emotions. Although movies may occasionally awaken the mind, motion pictures mostly elicit feelings. They're directed, first and foremost, at the heart.

The language of film—image and sound—is limited in another way as well. It relies almost entirely upon suggestion, or implication. Unless a director resorts to a rather heavy-handed use of exposition, telling audiences, rather than showing them, what something means or how action should be understood, all a movie can do is to show images, have actors comment upon events, and leave it to audiences to put two and two together (and to read between the lines, so to speak) in order to infer the meanings of the images and sounds presented to them. Written narratives can and do use exposition (although they do so less frequently today than in the past). Sometimes exposition is provided for pages at a time. By this means, omniscient narrators go directly inside characters' heads or explain the meanings of incidents, scenes, or, in some cases, entire short stories or novels.

It's important to remember that the language of film requires directors to imply and audiences to infer. With this in mind, let's take a look at the opening scene of a well-known slasher flick.

First, we describe the action shown to us by the camera. Then, in blue font, we provide an inference or two to represent those which are likely to be made by audiences who see and hear each sequence of images. In our examples, viewers mostly see, rather than hear, what follows.
 

Halloween (approximately five minutes of screen time)

As our eyes travel from left to right across the front of a porch, we see the white wall of the front of a clapboard suburban house, the front door, vague human shapes moving behind a window curtain, and a Jack-o-lantern on a porch rail, among dense, dark foliage. The foliage ends, its leaves casting shadows upon the house's wall.

It's Halloween. Who are the people inside the house? What are they doing? Are they residents? Home invaders? Cat burglars?

Inside the house, through the window, we see a young couple. The girl is seated on a couch, the boy sitting beside her. She holds him around the waist, as he kisses her, his hands holding the sides of her head. Hearing something, they pause and listen. The boy lifts a mask to his face, pressing it into the girl's face as he kisses her. She shoves him away, and he removes the mask, grinning at her. We have become—or have been made to become—voyeurs. We watch the young couple make out on the couch.

Whose house are they in? Probably hers. What have they heard? Despite having heard something, their playfulness suggests they're unconcerned about the sound or noise they heard a moment ago.

They embrace, kiss again, and the boy leaps to his feet. The girl joins him, and they leave the room, dashing upstairs together.

The couple probably plan to make love.

Outside, the porch flashes past, from left to right. We see the Jack-o-lantern on the porch rail among dense, dark foliage, the white wall of the front of the clapboard suburban house, two windows fronting the porch—our gaze rises; above the eaves, we see a pair of lit windows on the right; the pair on the left are dark. The light in the windows on the right go out. We are not the only voyeurs. The point of view, resumed a second time, as the observer retraces his or her steps, indicates that there is a watcher present.

The unseen watcher is interested in the lit window of the room into which the young couple appear to have retreated to make love.

We see the porch sweep past, we turn a corner, and we spot the open back door. Entering the kitchen, we see shelves, cabinets, a mixer. A light comes on, and we see the stove; the sink; a vertical rack of dishtowels, an orange one at the front; the tile floor.

The observer has found an entrance to the house and entered the residence. He or she moves through the kitchen.

Because the camera represents the invader's point of view, in watching him or her, we accompany this person.

An arm clad in the sleeve of a camouflage shirt is extended; its hand grips the handle of a butcher's knife, removing it from the drawer. Decorative plates hang on the wall near the stove. To their left, a doorway leads into the dining room: table braced with chairs and set with a linen tablecloth and silver candlesticks bearing long, slender tapers; a side table; a silver tureen on the doily atop the side table; pictures on the wall above the side table. The invader, knife in hand, enters the dining room.

His or her targets are likely to be the young couple making love upstairs.

Another doorway leads into the living room: a television, a rocking chair, a pole lamp, a sofa, a painting on the wall—the same room in which the young couple were necking. 

The invader seems intent on following the path of the young couple. The knife he or she has acquired suggests harm is intended.

Another doorway leads into a hallway, where a staircase banister appears. There's a ceiling lamp, and, on the wall above the staircase, a painting. Near the top of the stairs, a boy, tugging a shirt down his naked torso. He bounds down the stairs—the same boy who was making out with the girl on the couch a few moments ago. At the front door, he pauses, looks back, says goodbye to someone—the girl, we assume. The door closes.

As the invader starts to enter the hallway, the teenage boy who was necking with the girl on the living room couch runs down the stairs, pulling on a shirt. He says goodbye before leaving.

He and the girl have finished making love. He's going home. The girl is alone in the house, unaware of the invader.

Into the hallway and up the stairs, past the painting, into the darkness. At the top of the stairs, a hallway. A right turn. A hand reaches into the hallway to pick up a toy. Clothes and a bag on a bed. The invader does not pursue the boy.

He or she is after the girl.

Our conclusion is borne out by the fact that he climbs the stairs.

At a vanity, the girl, naked but for her panties, brushes her hair. Her bed is rumpled. The girl, sensing she is not alone, turns, shocked and frightened. She covers her breasts, ducking away.

The half-naked girl is startled by the invader's arrival.

As the eye holes of a mask look into the room, at the girl, we see the room and the girl from the invader's point of view.

The intruder is masked.

A flashing knife stabs downward, again and again. The girl falls, lying still on her back.

He or she has killed the girl.

The eye holes look back and forth.

The killer searches the room.

The staircase. The front door, seen through the eye holes.

He or she is going downstairs.

The door opens. Darkness. Night.

The killer is intent upon escape.

A car's headlights. A dark car. A man and a woman exit the vehicle. The man lifts a mask from a boy dressed as a clown and holding a knife—the same knife as stabbed the girl. He blinks. The knife is bloody. The killer is unmasked; we see the action from an objective, omniscient point of view. The killer is a child, dressed as a clown.

As we've made clear, moviemakers are restricted to images and sound; with these tools, they must imply meanings, which audiences must then infer. Short story writers and novelists can describe sights and sounds, but they can also appeal to the senses of touch, smell, and taste. In addition, by using interior monologues and narrative exposition, among other techniques, short story writers and novelists can also directly represent characters' thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other subjective states and qualities, without the need to have readers infer much of anything. What such writers gain is offset by the loss of the directness of communication typical of imagery and sound, which create the impression that events are actually transpiring before the audience's very eyes (and ears). There's always a distance between short story writers or novelists and their readers—the distance of the written word.

There are a few ways by which writers can approximate the directness with which movies communicate with their audiences:

Describe what a camera shows. The camera can be a video recorder, the source of “found footage,” as in The Blair Witch Project, or surveillance cameras that have recorded crimes or otherwise unsettling behavior or events, as in 13 Cameras. Such footage may also be provided by videos taken of vacation trips or by home movies.

Describe the images in a dream as the dream occurs. A Nightmare on Elm Street takes this approach, although, of course, the film shows the dream images directly, rather than describing them. 

If the horror movie also involves science fiction, a person's consciousness, projected as images on a screen, through a brain-computer or other interface, could be described. (This may become an actual reality in the near future!)

Describe the imagery transmitted by a camera mounted on a drone.

Describe what a sniper sees as he or she trails a target through his or her weapon's scope.

None of these techniques will provide the directness that a motion picture camera provides; at best, each is merely an approximation of such directness. Nevertheless, such techniques are likely to make the communication between the writer (or his or her narrator) and readers more direct than it would be otherwise.

* * *

For Edgar Allan Poe, the short story's form is superior to that of the novel, because the former's compact structure, greater unity, and better coherence results in a greater emotional effect on readers than the latter's longer, less unified and less coherent development. In a short story, which, according to The Annotated Poe, Poe defines as taking no longer than an hour to read, all narrative elements contribute to the payoff at the end of the tale, making the story's conclusion, whether that of the comedy's denouement or that of the tragedy's catastrophe, seem inevitable, given what has transpired before it.

According to the Internet Movie database (IMDb), in 2010, feature-length films were, on the average, approximately 130 minutes long (Halloween is 129 minutes long), which is about 2.15 times longer than the optimum length Poe names for the 60-minute short story. Halloween's opening scene lasts about five minutes, which is about 3.9 percent of the movie's overall length. At the same ratio, the comparative length of time for a 60-minute short story would be about 2.34 minutes.

According to Forbes, reading speed increases with education and (presumably) experience, but the “average adult” reads at a rate of about 300 words per minute. In 2.34 minutes, therefore, the average adult reader reads about 702 words, or about 2.81 pages if each 6 x 9-inch printed page bears 250 words) or 2.55 pages (if each 6 x 9-inch printed page bears 275 words). In other words, if we base our calculations on 275 words per page, a short story writer or a novelist has about 2.55 pages, or 701 words, in which to accomplish the task that Halloween's director, John Carpenter, accomplishes in the five minutes of his film's opening scene.

*However, the film's opening scene does not comprise the whole of the movie's beginning, which is significantly longer and more complex. For a more accurate contrast of the differences between cinematographic and linguistic modes of communication, the actual beginning of the movie and the beginning of a short story or a novel should be considered in detail. As defined here, the beginning of a film, short story, or novel, using Gustav Freytag's model of dramatic structure, would consist of the first act, the exposition, which begins with the start of the story and ends with the inciting moment that initiates the rising action, or the second of the five acts of the story, during which the basic conflict is complicated.

For the movie Halloween, the beginning of the story runs to Michael Myers's escape from the sanitarium to which he was confined after stabbing his sister, Judith, to death. His escape, which occurs at about 10 minutes and 41 seconds, or about 8.5 percent, into the 129-minute film. (It is Judith whom he saw, as a boy, making out with her boyfriend in the living room of their home while his parents were away.) By comparison, 8.5 percent of the 166-page novel Halloween, which is based on the movie, equals about 14 pages.

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.