Humor and Horror: An Unlikely Mix

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Jib Fowles, a professor of communications at the University of Houston, wrote several books on advertising. In Mass Advertising as Social Forecast, he lists the fifteen “basic needs” to which advertisements often appeal in promoting goods and services. In addition, he identifies three “stylistic features” of ads that influence “the way a basic appeal is presented”: humor, celebrities, and images of the past and present. This post concerns how horror novels and movies use humor as a way to enhance horror.

A good example of the unlikely mix of humor and horror occurs in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic, Psycho. After Norman Bates's alter ego, “Mother,” murders Marion Crane, a guest at the Bates Motel, he disposes of her body by placing it in the trunk of her car and pushing the automobile into a nearby pond. As he looks on, eating seeds or nuts, the vehicle begins to sink. When it's half-submerged, the car seems to settle, as it stops sinking. Bates looks horrified. He glances to his right, looks back at the car, then darts his gaze to his left. As he next looks at the automobile, it begins to sink again. Bates hazards a slight smile. The car vanishes completely, the water converging over its roof. It is altogether lost to sight. Bates's smile broadens. He has succeeded in covering up “Mother's” crime.

The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer also mixes horror with humor. Examples abound; here are a few:

In the episode “Helpless,” The Council of Watchers deliberately strips Buffy Summers of her supernatural powers so she can be “tested” in a confrontation with Kralik, a psychotic vampire who kidnaps Buffy's mother, Joyce. At one point, Buffy has trouble opening a jar of peanut butter. Her friend, Xander Harris, who's often overlooked because of his lack of superhuman abilities, seizes the opportunity to show his superior strength, as he smugly offers to open the jar for her. However, he humiliates himself instead, when, after several attempts, he is unable to open the jar, and his attempt to impress Buffy backfires.

In an encounter with Count Dracula, in “Buffy vs. Dracula,” Buffy dispatches the vampire with a wooden stake, causing him to burst into dust; a few moments later, smoke swirls, as he reappears, as good—or evil—as new. She dispatches him a second time. “Don't you think I watch your movies?” she asks. “You always come back.” When Dracula attempts a second comeback, as she waits, stake in hand, she warns him, “I'm standing right here,” at which point, the swirling smoke vanishes.

Buffy episodes are metaphors for the experiences that young adults often undergo. One such episode, “Living Conditions,” finds its humor in the metaphor itself, which likens the experience of sharing a dorm room with another person, whose interests and personality are nothing like one's own, to living with a demon. Almost everything one roommate does annoys the other. Buffy doesn't like Kathy's cutting her toenails in their room, she doesn't appreciate her taste in music, and she disapproves of her roommate's Celine Dion poster. Kathy doesn't like Buffy's desire to sleep with a window open, her gadding about campus, or her carelessness about leaving her chewed gum on shared surfaces. Buffy doesn't accept Kathy's suggestion that they each pay for their own respective telephone calls, nor does she like Kathy's labeling of the food items in their shared refrigerator or her borrowing clothes without permission.

In Psycho, the humor springs from two sources: situational irony and Bates's (i. e., actor Anthony Perkins's) reactions to the situation. The irony results from the unexpected apparent overturn of Bates's intentions, as the car containing Marion's body seems to come to rest before it's entirely submerged. As a result, instead of concealing the evidence of “Mother's” crime, the car, remaining not only visible but in the middle of the pond, would call attention to itself, and investigators would soon find Marion's corpse. Bates's shock and worry, followed by his relief and satisfaction, expressed through his nervousness, his fear of being discovered (suggested by his glancing about), and his smiles, show the emotions he feels as his plan is first threatened and then succeeds.

The humor of Xander's comeuppance, as he attempts to display his superior masculine strength as he helps the “helpless” vampire slayer, who normally possesses many times the might of even the strongest man, backfires, stems from the deflation of his smug attitude and his chauvinism. It is one of several examples of humor in Buffy that is based on deflating unbecoming character traits.

“Dracula vs. Buffy” parodies the trope of the returning villain. In many horror movies, the menacing character returns, despite having been killed, sometimes in particularly brutal, seemingly definitive, ways. Michael Meyers, the antagonist of the Halloween series of films, returns, as does A Nightmare on Elm Street's franchise villain, Freddy Krueger. In some cases, as in Buffy's own “Bad Eggs,” something remains through which the monster's offspring may return. The humor of “Dracula vs. Buffy” relies on viewers' familiarity with the trope and their recognition that it is being spoofed.

“LivingConditions” exaggerates the conflicts that arise between people who have different, if not opposing, attitudes, beliefs, habits, interests, perceptions, principles, and lifestyles. As roommates, Buffy and Kathy are an odd couple whose differences, thanks to the influence of the Hellmouth, finally escalate to violence.

Although for some horror fiction fans, touches of humor can enhance horror the way salt, added to sweet treats, heightens the taste of sugar, too much humor or its use at the wrong time can be detrimental to the story's effect, and it takes an experienced writer to mix humor with horror in such a way as to add to, rather than to subtract from, the story as a whole. Both Hitchcock and Buffy's creator, Joss Whedon, are able to pull it off. 

As Fowles warns with regard to the use of humor in advertising, humor must be used cautiously. “Humor can be treacherous,” Fowles cautions, “because it can get out of hand and smother the product information.” It can also overwhelm the horror of a horror novel or movie.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of Physiological Needs

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

The last of the fifteen basic needs Jib Fowles identifies in Mass Advertising as Social Forecast are the set of physiological needs, such as eating, sleeping, and drinking. (Although these needs include the need for sex, Fowles treats sex separately.)

In restaurants' advertisements, Fowles observes, “The art of photographing food and drink is so advanced . . . the crab meat in the Red Lobster restaurant ads can start us salivating, the Quarterpounder can almost be smelled, the liquor in the glass glows invitingly imbibe, these ads scream.”

Horror fiction is quite that obsessed with depicting food and drink, and the fare which this genre's short stories, novels, and movies features, which includes such delicacies as human flesh and blood, isn't nearly as delectable as crab meat and beef.

Horror often obtains its effects by perverting the normal order of things. By depicting substances that society prohibits people from eating or drinking as food or beverages, horror fiction generates fear and disgust. A reader or moviegoer is not apt to fear eating beef or pork and vegetables or drinking wine, milk, or a soft drink, because society recognizes and accepts these items as legitimate foods (with the exception of vegans and vegetarians, for whom such products, regarded as food or drink, might well be regarded with horror).

Although cannibalism has been practiced in extreme situations by members technologically advanced societies, as during the ill-fated Donner expedition, and until relatively recent times by certain tribes, in general, the consumption of human flesh and blood is not only taboo but also regarded as abhorrent. Consequently, describing or depicting cannibal tribes or families indulging in this practice evokes horror among readers or viewers. Indeed, horror movies involving cannibalism have been roundly censored or banned outright by numerous countries. One in particular, Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was banned at one time or another in Iceland, New Zealand, and Singapore.

Nevertheless, cannibalism has been featured in over 330 films, many of them in the horror genre, including, most recently, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) and the Wrong Turn series of films (2003-2014).

Vampires thrive on blood, often imbibing it directly from the wounds their fangs open in the necks of their human prey. The undead are a staple among horror story villains, appearing in such novels as John William Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), Varney the Vampire (1847), Alexandre Dumas's The Pale Lady (1849), Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot (1975), Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976), Whitley Strieber's The Hunger (1981), Paul Wilson's The Keep (1981), Robert McCammon's They Thirst (1981), John Skipp and Craig Spector's The Light at the End (1986), Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls (1992), and many others. In addition, such heavyweights as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Christabel [1816]) and Lord Byron (The Giaour [1813]) penned narrative poems featuring vampires, and nearly fifty series of novels concerning vampires have been published.

In horror fiction, the appeal of physiological needs can also be perverted by the manner in which such foods are produced and the cost—in the coin of moral decadence, social degeneration, physical suffering, and emotional trauma—of producing them. Here are a couple of examples.

Soylent Green (1973) takes place in the wake of worldwide ecological decline, overpopulation, and unemployment. People rely on Soylent Green, green wafers produced from “high-energy plankton” harvested from the ocean. When Detective Frank Thorn of the New York Police Department investigates the murder of his friend, Police Analyst Solomon “Sol” Roth, he discovers that the wafers are no longer made from plankton, but from human corpses. At the end of the film, having been wounded during a fight with Sol's killer, the police analyst's bodyguard, tab Fielding, and others, as he is being taken away on a stretcher, Thorn cries, “Soylent Green is people!”

The Stuff (1985), part science fiction, part satire, and part horror film, is based on director Larry Cohen's original story, which, he says, was inspired by his distaste for “the consumerism and corporate greed found in our country and the damaging products that were being sold.” In particular, he says, he was concerned about both “foods being pulled off the market because they were hazardous to people’s health” and by “the sheer volume of junk food we consume every day.” In the movie, a delicious, no-calorie, addictive white substance pours out of the ground. Miners discover it and market it, and American consumers can't get enough of The Stuff. Unfortunately, the substance is alive, and it's a parasite. Taking over its hosts' brains, it reduces them to a zombie-like state and consumes them from within. At the end of the film, The Stuff's owners are forced to eat their product, as FBI agent David “Mo” Rutherford asks, “Are you eating it, or is it eating you?”

Horror novels and movies have also appealed to the need for sleep. The movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Stephen King's novel Insomnia (1994) are two memorable examples.

Adapted from Jack Finney's 1954 science fiction novel The Body Snatchers, the 1956 half-science fiction, half-horror movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, features extraterrestrial seed pods that duplicate and replace humans while the victims sleep. The “invasion” spreads from town to town, until Dr. Hill, a psychiatrist, alerts authorities, who seek to contain the invasion. 

According to film critic Leonard Maltin, critics generally regard the movie as an allegory for the U. S. Senate's hearings on communism under Senator Joseph McCarthy during the late 1940s and 1950s. According to this view, the sleep during which the invaders act could symbolize unawareness of or indifference to dangerous social and political realities or blindness to one's own paranoia about dehumanizing social and political forces more powerful than oneself.

In Insomnia, retiree Ralph Roberts develops insomnia. Sleeping less and less each night, he begins to see auras around people and “little bald doctors,” becoming convinced that the “doctors” actually exist, albeit in another dimension. In this alternate universe, two cosmic patterns, The Purpose and The Random govern affairs, the “doctors” working for The Purpose to murder people when “their time” to die is at hand. With Ed Deepneau as his agent, The Crimson King, an inhabitant of the other dimension, seeks to disrupt the equilibrium between The Purpose and The Random. Roberts, recruited by The Purpose, battles Deepneau. Amid the details of the confused and confusing plot, King targets anti-abortion protesters. The novel is pretty much another of King's many chaotic messes, and it's hard to understand how the book was nominated for a 1994 Bram Stoker Award (or maybe not; see my series of posts on the award.) In King's novel, sleep—or maybe it's sleep deprivation—becomes something like an altered state of consciousness.

Physiological needs have long supplied horror authors and filmmakers with a number of topics related to food, drink, and sleep, and it's likely that this set of needs will continue to do so, long into the future.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Satisfy Curiosity

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

“Human beings,” communications professor Jib Fowles note, “are curious by nature, interested in the world around them, and intrigued by tidbits of knowledge and new developments.” In adverting, such appeals are often satisfied by the information that advertisements deliver. Unless a product is new to the market, the item advertised is usually already familiar to the advertisement's audience. In this case, the information such advertisements convey is likely to be about some “improvement” to the product, an increase in its size, or the addition of a new ingredient.

In horror fiction, the person, place, or thing about which curiosity is excited is apt to be unfamiliar to readers or moviegoers. In horror fiction, the anomalous makes us curious. We want to know about someone, someplace, or something because it is abnormal, aberrant, deviant, atypical, bizarre, singular, strange, or weird. Human cognition and experience is reducible to six categories, each of which relates to a specific question or set of questions: who?, what?, when?, where?, how?, why?, and how much? or how many? (quantity in number or volume). 

Each of these categories and related questions is further associated with a real-world, or existential, referent: why?, with an agent or an agency; what?, with an action or an object; when?, with time or duration; where?, with location; how?, with method, process, or technique; why?, with cause, motive, purpose, or meaning; how many? with quantity in number; and how much?, with quantity in volume. All six categories relate to cognitive element, identity.

A table neatly summarizes these relationships:

Question	Existential Referent	Cognitive Element
Who?	Agent or agency	Identity
What?	Action or object	Identity
When?	Time or duration	Identity
Where?	Location	Identity
How?	Method, process, or technique	Identity
Why?	Cause, motive, purpose, or meaning	Identity
How many? How much?	Quantity (in number or volume)	Identity

It is with regard to these categories that curiosity is aroused, either by ignorance or by the appearance of the anomalous or the extraordinary (or, most often, by the combination of the two). In other words, in horror fiction (as in life), questions about the identities of agents or agencies, actions or objects, times or duration, locations, methods, processes, techniques, causes, motives, purposes, meanings, and quantities make us curious.

As we discovered in a previous post, the suppression of knowledge about the origin or nature of an entity, a force, or another kind of phenomenon maintains mystery and suspense. It also maintains curiosity, of course. Since we've already covered this ground, let's focus on the other major cause of curiosity, the appearance itself of the anomalous or the extraordinary.

We're familiar with this figure of ancient Greek mythology, although it was doubtlessly astonishing enough to us the first time we made her acquaintance, which brings up a point: all things are extraordinary the first time that we encounter them. Often, they can be made extraordinary again, by transforming them in some way:

Unless we're experts in a particular field of inquiry, many of the phenomena that are familiar to the experts will be new—and, therefore, unfamiliar—to us, as laypersons. I'd never seen this creature before (or so I'd thought), but zoologists have, and when they identified it as a turtle without a shell, I realized I have seen the animal before, just not without its shell. The mystery was solved, but, in the process, the extraordinary became ordinary (sort of).

As Edgar Allan Poe said (and showed, many times in his own work), by combining old forms in new ways, an author creates new visions of reality and suggests fresh perspectives on our lives. In the process, writers (and other artists) also evoke readers' or audiences' curiosity and appeal to their need to satisfy this curiosity.

Plenty of horror stories and movies appeal to reader's or viewers' need to satisfy their curiosity. We'll limit our discussion to just three of them: H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room,” the film adaptation of Stephen King's short story “1408,” and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 movie Psycho (1960).

Having absconded with her boss's money instead of depositing it in the bank, Marion Crane is forced by a storm to stop at an out-of-the-way motel. She waits in her car, but no one in the office comes outside to assist her, so she dashes inside, only to find the office empty. Going outside again, she notices a light on in a second-story window of a Victorian house on a hill overlooking the motel. Seeing a woman walk past the window, she returns to her car and honks her horn. A young man hastens from the house, down three flights of stairs, and crosses the parking lot, inviting Marion into the motel's office, where she registers while he makes small talk about the decline in the motel's business after the new highway bypassed the motor lodge.

The sight of the house, large and imposing, that looks down on the motel, emphasizes the Victorian residence as a presence. Overseeing all that takes place within its purview, it sees all, knows all, at least in relation to its manager, Norman Bates. Literally looking down on him, the house also represents the judgment of his mother, the dominant personality he has created within his disordered mind. His every action, thought, and emotion is controlled by Mother, who makes her disdain for Marion and women in general known and soon puts an end to any possibility that Norman will be able to develop a romantic relationship with Marion (not that this seems at all likely).

By showing the audience not just a house, but this house—large, imposing, dark, and located on a hill high above the motel Norman manages—Hitchcock excites his viewers' curiosity. As the movie progresses and the audience learns more about this abode, their curiosity, although partly satisfied, is further aroused, as new mysteries are revealed. Why, for example, is there an outline of a body in the mattress of the bed in Norman's mother's bedroom? What other dark secrets does the house hold?

In dreams, some believe, houses symbolize the human personality. The attic is the intellect, the basement the unconscious. The bedroom represents sexuality; the kitchen, domesticity and nourishment; the dining room, appetites; the living room, personal interests. If one follows adopts such suggestions, applying them to the characters in Hitchcock's film and the incidents that transpire because of their actions, the film may take a new level of psychological complexity, although many would reject such an interpretation as unscientific and speculative. In any case, the house is certainly a symbolic presence that exerts a malevolent influence on the thoughts, emotions, and actions of its residents, Norman, and his “Mother”—and it certainly evokes and sustains the audiences need to satisfy their curiosity.

Stephen King's 1999 short story “1408,” and the 2007 motion picture of the same title based on it, are, in effect, reversals of H. G. Wells's 1894 short story, “The Red Room.” In all three stories, the protagonist (Mike Enslin in King's story and the movie adaptation of it and an unnamed young man in Wells's story) are warned multiple times in the strongest terms not to go through with their intention of investigating the supernatural events that have allegedly occurred in a hotel (King) and a castle (Wells). In each story, the protagonist is skeptical of the existence of supernatural entities. Disregarding the warnings not to investigate, both Enslin and Wells's protagonist stay overnight, putting the reports of supernatural activity to the test.

The multiple, fervent warnings arouse readers' and viewers' curiosity, as does the question of whether the protagonists' respective investigations will prove or disprove the allegations that the places they investigate are haunted.

In King's story and the film adaptation of it, Enslin discovers that a supernatural presence, ghostly or demonic, haunts the hotel room in which he stayed, barely surviving the experience, whereas Wells's protagonist finds that only his own fear, which has caused his imagination to run away with him, haunts the castle chamber in which he'd spent the night.

According to literary critic Tzevetan Todorov, fantastic literature tends to resolve the issue of whether narrative events are supernatural by either affirming or denying this proposition. If science can explain the events, they are no longer fantastic, but uncanny; otherwise, the events are marvelous. Whereas Wells's story suggests that the events his protagonist experienced are uncanny (the are explainable as the results of an imagination overly excited by fear), King's story and the film based on it both suggest that science cannot explain the incidents that Enslin experienced, so they are no longer fantastic, but marvelous. Thus, in this sense, King's story is a reversal of Wells's tale.

One more point needs to be highlighted. Fowles does not say that most advertisements appeal to people's curiosity. He says that they appeal to people's need to satisfy their curiosity, mostly by becoming informed, i. e., by being educated, about an advertised product or a service. The appeal to the need to satisfy curiosity is a means of generating suspense, which will keep readers reading or viewers viewing as they anticipate the moment at which all shall be made known and the mystery of the nature or the origin of the phenomenon the story's characters have encountered is resolved.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Aesthetic Sensations

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles, almost every advertisement has “an undeniable aesthetic component.” Often, the appeal to the need for aesthetic sensations is accomplished through visual means, through “photography or filming or drawing,” Fowles notes, but adds that every other aspect of the advertisement is also carefully chosen to contribute to the overall effect, including the type and the layout.

Edgar Allan Poe, in a different context, argues something similar. To create a singular, unified effect, or emotional payoff, Poe writes in “The Philosophy of Composition,” the author of a narrative literary work must direct every element of the composition toward the story's conclusion. Character, plot, setting, style, theme—all must contribute to the story's effect, so that its conclusion appears to be the inevitable outcome of all that has preceded it. There is beauty in such a deliberate and thoroughly consistent, precise series of causes and effects, Poe implies.

Poe also had something to say about the aesthetics of literary art. For him, not only beauty, but also ugliness, could be a source of pleasure. As Kevin J. Hayes notes, in The Annotated Poe, the author of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, argues that “Poe . . . built the grotesque into his critical theory. Beauty and deformity could be combined in original ways to create art” (8).

Since ancient times, philosophers have struggled to define and clarify the concept of beauty. Aesthetics, as a discipline, was born neither of literature nor of advertising; it is one of the five branches of philosophy, the others of which are epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and ontology. The article “Aesthetics” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that the term “may be defined narrowly as the theory of beauty, or more broadly as that together with the philosophy of art.” Some of the features and problems of aesthetics with which philosophers have dealt and with which they continue to deal are such “aesthetic concepts” as beauty and sublimity; “aesthetic value” in which such characteristics as symmetry, uniformity, and intensity, truth or “aptness,” universality or “partiality,” and knowledge or “non-cognitivism” come under consideration; the role of the audience in determining the constituents of the aesthetic experience; and the elements of “aesthetic attitudes” (e. g., “disinterested attention” and the degree of “distance” between the aesthetic object and its audience); the creators' “intentions” as artists and how their experiences may have contributed to their creations of art.

One of the more interesting matters of controversy concerning the aesthetics of art discussed in “Aesthetics” is perhaps the section concerning “Definitions of Art”:

Up to the “de-definition” period [beginning about the middle of the twentieth century, with the work of Morris Weitz], definitions of art fell broadly into three types, relating to representation, expression, and form. The dominance of representation as a central concept in art lasted from before Plato’s time to around the end of the eighteenth century. Of course, representational art is still to be found to this day, but it is no longer pre-eminent in the way it once was. Plato first formulated the idea by saying that art is mimesis, and, for instance, Bateaux in the eighteenth century followed him, when saying: “Poetry exists only by imitation. It is the same thing with painting, dance and music; nothing is real in their works, everything is imagined, painted, copied, artificial. It is what makes their essential character as opposed to nature.”

With the rise of the Romantic Movement, circa 1800-1850, “the concept of expression became more prominent,” and, in “the twentieth century, the main focus shifted towards abstraction and the appreciation of form,” but “response theories of art were particularly popular during the Logical Positivist period in philosophy, that is, around the 1920s and 1930s,” when “Science was . . . contrasted sharply with Poetry, . . . the former being supposedly concerned with our rational mind, the latter with our irrational emotions.” More recently, communication theorists, emphasizing audience, artwork, and artist, focused on the transmission of “aesthetic emotion” between artist and audience by way of the artist's work, often employing the analogy of art as “a form of language” with a syntax and grammar of its own (“Aesthetics”).

Finally, the “Aesthetics” article considers the nature of art objects themselves. The discussion distinguishes tokens, or examples, of objects and types of objects. In the alphabetical sequence “ABACDEC,” for instance, there are seven tokens and five types. “Realizations” of ideas for art objects are tokens; “but ideas are types.” An artist creates tokens, but “particulars are made” from a “recipe” provided by the artist. For example, a choreographer creates a dance, but the dancer makes it; an architect creates a blueprint; a builder makes the house; a script-writer creates a script; actors make the film. In the same way, Leonardo created Mona Lisa, but print makers make it (in the form of prints). This line of thought, however, takes no account of the artist's community and the social context in which he or she works:

. . . The major difficulty with this kind of theory is that any novelty has to be judged externally in terms of the artist’s social place amongst other workers in the field, as Jack Glickman has shown. Certainly, if it is to be an original idea, the artist cannot know beforehand what the outcome of the creative process will be. But others might have had the same idea before, and if the outcome was known already, then the idea thought up was not original in the appropriate sense. Thus the artist will not be credited with ownership in such cases. Creation is not a process, but a public achievement: it is a matter of breaking the tape ahead of others in a certain race.

 

Several of my own short stories, as collected in volume one and volume two of Sinister Stories: Tales of the Fantastic, Marvelous, and Uncanny, illustrate some of the concerns of aestheticians.

Today, the Western world's concept of feminine beauty is being challenged as ethnocentric and racist in its emphases upon characteristics typical of Caucasian women. However, some of the attributes singled out as beautiful in regard to the feminine face can be ascribed to women of any race. Symmetry, uniformity, and intensity, for example, can be applied to women across the globe. The question then becomes whether women whose features lack such qualities to one degree or another are more or less beautiful (or ugly). Another way to examine the issue is to ask whether a woman must “fit” the socially accepted or traditional idea of beauty in order to be beautiful.

“A Complete Makeover” examines these questions. Aging star Penelope Sweet is losing her fan base. She's receives fewer and fewer calls from her agent, Louie, as her popularity fades. Lately, she was asked to “star” in a commercial—about a wrinkle crème. Insulted, she'd turned it down, as she had Louie's suggestion that she revitalize her career by accepting nude roles. Now, Louie was advising her to submit to plastic surgery. After distressing news from her accountant concerning her precarious financial situation, Penelope reconsiders her agent's advice and decides “a little nip and tick couldn’t hurt.” Although Penelope decides to have “a complete makeover,” her luck doesn't change until she contacts her friend Guido, who's “connected” to the “Chicago mob” and asks him for “a favor.” This story shows the influence that traditional concepts of feminine beauty have on the American consumer—in this case, moviegoers—and the people—in this case, an actress—who provide aesthetic sensations associated with beauty. Penelope's career was built upon her beauty as much as her talent, it seems, and, as her beauty fades with age, her career suffers to the point that she is at risk of losing everything for which she's worked. It is only by obtaining “a favor” from a mobster that she may make a comeback.

In different ways, in both “A Complete Makeover” and “The Engine of Pain,” people (i. e., fictional characters) become art objects. Dehumanized and objectified, they are exhibited as if they were nothing more than mannequins in museum or art displays. In the latter story, a tour guide for The Museum of Cruel and Unusual Punishments offers Les, a visitor, a “private tour” of a closed wing after the museum closes and the other visitors have left. He's astonished and disturbed to find that several of the mannequins seem more than just life-like: the wax “skin” of one feels like human flesh, and the wig of another feels like human hair. Sharon tells Les she's a sadist, and he's surprised to find himself following her commands. He lies upon a slab, and she secures him in place with leather straps. She then inserts a balloon into his urethra, inflating it as she tells him, “The pain will get worse and worse . . . until you want to die. Scream all you like. No one will hear you.” When Les asks why she selected him, she explains,

“All day, I’ve looked for the perfect mannequin for this exhibit, and you were it. Young, handsome, virile―a real stud. You’ll make a great mannequin. James Dean said it best―die young and leave a good-looking corpse. That’s just what I have planned for you, except I prefer to think of my corpses as mannequins.”

In “Engine of Pain,” people are reduced to museum “mannequins”; in “The Art of the Avant-garde,” photographer Jerry Mason keeps the interests of his voyeuristic BDSM clients in mind as he photographs Betty Burke, a beautiful model, insisting that she lie inside a coffin on a mortuary set. He closes the lid on her and locks it, allowing her to expire as he shoots photographs of her through the custom-made coffin's glass lid. Later, her death verified and her corpse matched to the model who appears in his photographs, Jerry will make a fortune from “the world’s first and only snuff products.” As he confides to her corpse, “To the BSDM crowd who will buy the calendar, no art is more avant-garde than snuff pictures.”

Both stories' victims are types, or examples, of the idea of a dehumanized and objectified person, human beings reduced to objects of art. (In Poe's fiction and poetry, this type recurs, possibly because Poe regarded “the death of a beautiful woman as unquestionably the most poetical topic [or idea] in the world.”)

Another way to think of the relationship of type to idea is to consider the former an example of the definition of a term, and the definition, or meaning, of the word as constituting an idea. For example, if “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground” defines the idea of a tree, specific types of this definition are its examples: apples, beeches, chestnuts, dogwoods, elms, figs, gingkos, hickories, and so forth.

Horror arises when a type seems to contradict the idea that the type supposedly exemplifies. The Euglena is a type (i. e., an example) of this notion, or idea, that taxonomic contradictions horrify us. The microscopic organism has chloroplasts, which enable it to photosynthesize, as a plant does. At the same time, however, it can move under its own power, thanks to its flagellum, and it can obtain nourishment by consuming other organisms, as an animal does. It has abilities of both plants and animals, which defies the once-neat kingdoms of Plantae and Animalia. It is both part plant and animal, yet, at the same time, neither fully plant nor animal. As the seventh edition of Biology, edited by Eldra P. Solomon, Linda R. Berg, and Diana W. Martin, points out, the Euglena “has been classified at various time as in the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom” because its peculiar abilities don't fully match those of other specimens in either kingdom.

True, the microscopic Euglena itself doesn't necessarily horrify us, but that's not my claim; my assertion is that the idea of taxonomic contradictions horrifies us. That's not to say that, under the right set of conditions, a creature similar to the Euglena might well horrify us in and of itself, as a type, rather than as an idea. Were we to meet DC Comics's Swamp Thing or Marvel Comics's Man-Thing face to face, it's exceedingly likely that we would be horrified, and what are they but gigantic Euglenas who are smarter than your average swamp lily? It is just this manipulation of forms, this combination of existing materials in new ways that Poe regarded as the basis of creativity and may be the reason he believed that the aesthetics of art should include not only the concept of beautiful, but that of “deformity' as well.