Horror Movies' Allusive Posters

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In promoting their horror films, several studios have relied upon posters which allude to other works of art. For example, a poster for The Descent is similar to the 1954 black-and-white photograph produced by surrealistic painter Salvador Dali and photographer Philippe Halsman in which several nude female models pose in such a way that, collectively, their bodies resemble a human skull. The result is In Voluptas Mors (Voluptuous Death).

The juxtaposition of beautiful nude women with an image of death (the skull they form) is striking in its contrast. More than nude men, nude women symbolize life, for it is they who conceive, bear, and deliver children, thus ensuring the survival of the human species. In having such vessels of life, so to speak, form an image of death, is Dali suggesting the ultimate futility of human life? Is he implying that beauty, sex, pregnancy, and birth are meaningless in the face of death? Alternatively, maybe he is indicating that, in the face (almost literally) of death, sex is humanity's only hope, tenuous as that hope may be.

It's informative, too, to think of what is missing from the photograph. The attributes of the models are intact—in them, as individuals. However, in the image of death that they form as a group, the skull is stripped of hair, of skin, and of a face. Gone are the eyes, the nose, the ears, and the lips. Gone, too, presumably, is the brain inside the cranium. What is left is bone and the negative spaces of the eye sockets and the places at which the other facial features once reposed. Stripped of the organs of sense—the eyes, ears, nose, lips, and skin—the skull is insensible, a mere thing, its objectivity total. Humanity, as represented in the women who form the skull, is reduced to bone.

Were we to ask Dali which of these meanings In Voluptas Mors is intended, he would likely reply, “Yes,” meaning that all these possible interpretations are correct (and, no doubt, many others).

Surrealism is about opening—or reopening—the doors of perception, about increasing the possibilities of understanding, about offering the world to us, new and undiscovered. How, though, might The Descent's allusion to this iconic painting be intended?

If the cave into which the female spelunkers descend is regarded as the womb and their expedition into the underworld an exploration of femininity (gender) and womanhood (female sexuality), these explorers, for whom their excursion does not go well, form the bones of the skull; their bodies, although still flesh and blood, bear the stamps of humanity—heads, complete with facial features and organs of perception; hair; skin; limbs; breasts; genitals; and buttocks, as well as internal organs—they are yet, at the same time, parts of an image of death, and a death that has occurred long enough ago to have reduced the remains to bone.

Paradoxically, they are literally alive, but figuratively dead, like the LIFE-IN-DEATH figure that haunts Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Although the filmmakers (or poster-makers) may not have had this allusion consciously in mind, the live female nudes whose bodies compose the skull on the poster that pro,motes the film appear to have the same sort of symbolic value as Coleridge's Death-in-Life. In Voluptas Mors also appears in a movie poster promoting The Silence of the Lambs. Its use of the photograph, which appears on the back of the head of the Death's-head Hawkmoth that covers Clarisse Starling's (Jodie Foster's) mouth, is assigned a fairly prosaic significance, according to “some,” who interpret the image to refer to nothing more than the seven “victims in the movie.” Something similar may be true, at the most basic level, of the women-as-skull poster that promotes The Descent. The female spelunkers may be represented symbolically by the models on the film's poster.

What, then, do I think The Descent's allusion to In Voluptas Mors represents? I have provided some clues in this post, and I provide others in my previous post concerning The Descent. In the final analysis, though, what matters is what the individual him- or herself who is confronted with such allusions makes of them, for, often, one's interpretations of a work of art, literary or otherwise, is equally (or more) about him- or herself as it is about the work of art. Dali would probably agree with this statement, as he would with most other takes on his art. Concerning The Descent, the poster probably creates as many possible meanings as there are interpreters, which may be a good thing.

Dali would likely think so.

In the next few posts, I'll consider a few more horror movies' allusive posters. In doing so, my commentaries will be a bit more explicit—most of the time.

Setting: More Than Merely Time and Place

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In horror stories, as in other types of fiction, setting may be, and often is, more than merely time and space. A setting may provide a situation, evoke atmosphere, supply a context, suggest a character's inner world, or imply a metaphor.

In Luis Llosa's Anaconda (1997), the Amazonian rain forest provides the situation upon which the film's plot is based: the search of a documentary film crew for the Shirishamas, a lost tribe, which is replaced by their hunt, under the leadership of Paul Serone, a Paraguayan snake hunter, for a giant anaconda. The documentary film crew's expedition, which is hijacked by Serone, allows the plot of Llosa's movie's to unfold in a new direction, one involving horror and suspense far beyond that which the documentary crew might otherwise have encountered, including murder, humans being used as live bait, and multiple attacks (most fatal) by the giant reptile.

Alejandro Amenábar's 2001 film, The Others, takes place immediately after World War II. With her young children, Anne and Nicholas, Grace Stewart has retreated to a remote country house on one of the Channel Islands. She hires a trio of caretakers who mysteriously appear, seemingly out of nowhere. Soon after, Grace and her children discover that the house is haunted—or so it appears. Throughout their stay, Grace orders her servants, Bertha Mills, Edmund Tuttle, and Lydia, to keep the curtains drawn; her children, she explains, suffer from photosensitivity and cannot bear direct sunlight.

The darkness, like the heavy fog that often obscures the yard and the woods beyond the estate, create an atmosphere of dread. Symbolically, the darkness may represent ignorance (specifically, that of Grace and her children concerning their true state of existence); the fog, confusion and an inability to understand clearly; and the woods, the wilderness of nature, both human and otherwise. These elements of the setting, like the large house in which mysterious events transpire, create a disturbing atmosphere that adds to the movie's horror and suspense.

The vast Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) provides a context for the film. The isolated hotel represents the emotional distance that the caretaker and would-be novelist Jack Torrance maintains between himself and others, including his wife Wendy and their son Danny, just as the cold weather, the ice, the snow, and the drifting fog represent Jack's cold nature. His emotional coldness isolates him from himself and from those whom he claims to love. Although, outwardly, he can appear to be an amiable person, as he does during his interview, he is, in fact, a deeply disturbed man who's given to rage and violence.

The hotel's rambling corridors, its many closed doors, and its emptiness, like the remote, isolated landscape surrounding it, provide the context that allow viewers to understand Jack's true character as someone who is irrational. Outwardly, he, like the Overlook Hotel, seems sane and stable; inside, both the hotel and its caretaker are mad and anything but stable. The hallways seem to lead in all directions, but go nowhere, returning back upon themselves; the closed doors to the rooms are locked, providing no access; the vast, empty chambers available to Jack and his family echo with their footsteps. The hotel and Jack mirror one another so well that it's difficult, if not impossible, to say for certain whether the hotel is haunted or its “ghosts” are hallucinations produced by Jack's own madness.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Edgar Allan Poe's remote mansion doubles as an outward representation or expression of the inner world of Roderick Usher's tormented mind. Its fall, at the end of the story, reflects the “fall” of Usher into madness, although his insanity clearly occurs some time earlier, perhaps before the incidents of the story itself take place, as his madness causes many of these incidents. Poe himself suggests that Usher's madness precedes the incidents of the story; his narrator's description of a disturbing crack in the front wall of the house reads:

Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

As Kevin J. Hayes, the editor of The Annotated Poe, points out, “Many readers note the corollary between this barely perceptible but nonetheless worrisome fissure and Roderick Usher's broken, increasingly unstable mind. They are a source of considerable tension in the story” (99).

Even the furnishings of the house, Hayes observes, suggest a relationship between the House of Usher and Usher himself: “Roderick's weird, creepy painting of an underground vault, illuminated by a sourceless light, offers a glimpse into the terrible, frightening terminus—madness or despair—into which the artist has fallen.”

It is Usher, of course, who commits the insane act of entombing his sister Madeline alive in the house's family tomb, but it is inside the house that Usher commits this despicable deed. Throughout the story, the house and its estate depict the inner world of their owner's mind, a mind “fallen” into the madness that besets it.

As pointed out in a previous post, the cave explored by the characters of Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005) is a metaphor for the uterus. In descending into the womb-like cave, the feminist female spelunkers are exploring their sexual selves, exploring womanhood itself, but female sexuality and womanhood as they are viewed through the lens of extreme feminism:

The contours of the cave they explore resemble the shape of the womb. Wide at the entrance (vagina), it narrows toward the middle (cervix), and then opens again, into another wider space (uterus, or womb). As the women negotiate their way through the womb-cave, Sarah, the wife and mother, gets stuck and, suffering from claustrophobia, panics. As subtext, her becoming trapped seems to represent pregnancy, which causes a woman to get “stuck,” physically and, to some extent, both emotionally and socially, if not vocationally, as well, for nine months in a process that, for many, epitomizes femininity. Beth, her best friend, plays the role of the midwife, delivering Sarah, but the birth process represented by Beth’s freeing Sarah from the cave’s narrowed passageway goes awry: the womb-cave collapses, burying the women inside a womb-become-a-tomb. Their gender, especially as it is involved in pregnancy, has not only trapped them, but it has also, in fact, buried them alive.

Since this metaphor is explored in detail in the previous post, there's no need to revisit it further in this post.

Clearly, setting need not be limited merely to representing a particular place at a specific moment in time. Skillfully employed, setting can represent or evoke, among other things, a situation, an atmosphere, a context, a character's inner world, or a metaphor.

The Effects of Loss as a Paradigm of Literary Criticism for Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror fiction is a literature of loss. The losses, of course, are significant: no one has ever written a novel or produced a film about a character stubbing his toe.

Often, the losses are physical (a loss of ability or a loss of limb) or personal (a loss of freedom or a loss of dignity).

However, losses may also be psychological, or emotional (a loss of identity or a loss of sanity). 

Likewise, losses may be social (a loss of kinship or a loss of family members or friends).

Other losses may be spiritual (a loss of faith or a loss of salvation). The losses depicted in horror fiction result from a variety of causes, but they are established, most often, through particular situations or specific settings.

A loss introduces a type of change, physical, personal, psychological, social, religious, or otherwise. Often, a preliminary loss, significant in itself, is a prelude to another, greater, perhaps vital, loss—for example, death. A loss may also be a test of love, of faith, or of a relationship.

Literary criticism based upon the loss suffered by the main character (and, to a lesser degree, other characters) must begin by identifying the particular loss that the protagonist has suffered. What type of loss occurred? When and where did the loss occur? Why did the loss occur? How does the loss change the character? (Most horror stories largely ignore the last question, although the question of what caused the loss to occur may, on occasion, be more important than any of the other questions.)

In other words, in a critical analysis of a horror story, whether it takes place upon the page or the soundstage, should be applied to all the elements of fiction. (The answer to the question “HOW?” typically represents the story's turning point, or climax. Often, it helps to start the “WHY?” answer with the infinitive “to.” if an element is unimportant in summarizing the story, it can be omitted.) 

Here are a few examples.

Question	Answer
WHO lost?	Carietta (“Carrie”) White
WHAT was lost?	dignity
WHEN did the loss occur?
WHERE did the loss occur?	her high school prom
HOW did the loss occur?	pigs' blood is dumped on her
WHY did the loss occur?	to humiliate her

Carrie (novel) by Stephen King

After identifying each element in relation to the question regarding the loss suffered by the protagonist, write a single sentence that summarizes the plot. In doing so, the order of the answers may be rearranged:

Carrie White loses her dignity when bullies dump pigs' blood on her to humiliate her at her high school prom.

Then, in another single sentence, explain how the protagonist's loss changed him or her:

Carrie dies after she avenges herself against her tormentors.

Question	Answer
WHO lost?	Carietta (“Carrie”) White
WHAT was lost?	dignity
WHEN did the loss occur?
WHERE did the loss occur?	her high school prom
HOW did the loss occur?	pigs' blood is dumped on her
WHY did the loss occur?	to humiliate her

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

A narrator is arrested when he hallucinates after murdering an old man in his home to rid himself of his victim's “evil eye.”

Unable to escape his guilty conscience, the narrator suffers psychological torment.

(Note: Although it seems that the narrator loses his sanity in the story, he does not; he has lost his sanity before the story begins; it is his freedom that he loses when the police arrest him.)

Question	Answer
WHO lost?	Nancy Thompson
WHAT was lost?	friends
WHEN did the loss occur?
WHERE did the loss occur?	hometown
HOW did the loss occur?	attacks by Freddy Krueger, a supernatural killer
WHY did the loss occur?	to avenge his death at the hands of his victim's parents

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Nancy Thompson loses her friends to attacks by Freddy Krueger, a supernatural killer, who murders his victims to avenge his own death at their parents' hands.

Nancy survives Krueger's attacks, but she is traumatized by her experience, even as she lives with guilt for her involvement in the attempted murder of her stalker.

Question	Answer
WHO lost?	Norman Bates
WHAT was lost?	identity
WHEN did the loss occur?
WHERE did the loss occur?	Bates Motel and house
HOW did the loss occur?	arrest for murdering Marion Crane and private detective Milton Arbogast
WHY did the loss occur?	to avenge his death at the hands of his victim's parents

Psycho (movie)

Norman Bates loses his identity, becoming his “mother,” after he murders Marion Crane after she checks into the Bates Motel so he cannot have a relationship with her and murders private detective Milton Arbogast to prevent him from discovering the truth about Marion's disappearance.
 

Norman ceases to exist as himself, becoming completely absorbed by his alternate personality.

Question	Answer
WHO lost?	Julie James
WHAT was lost?	friends; security
WHEN did the loss occur?
WHERE did the loss occur?	hometown
HOW did the loss occur?	murders by intended murder victim
WHY did the loss occur?	to avenge himself against the victim's attempt to murder him

I Know What You Did Last Summer (movie)

Julie James loses her friends and her security after their intended murder victim kills them and threatens her to avenge himself.

Julie lives in constant fear of being killed at any moment.

As these examples suggest, the theme of horror fiction is the effects of loss.

A few of the other many types of loss that may occur in horror fiction, their effects, and their contexts include:

Type of Loss	Possible Effects	Context
Perception (i. e., blindness, deafness, tactile insensitivity, inability to smell, inability to taste)	helplessness; loss of self-confidence; timidity	situation or setting
Ability (e. g., mobility) (i. e., being bound, incarcerated, or trapped)	helplessness; loss of self-confidence; timidity	situation or setting
Assistance (i. e. emergency services), as a result of being isolated	helplessness; loss of self-confidence; timidity	situation or setting
Effectiveness (e. g., an amputation or a broken limb)	vulnerability; loss of self-confidence; timidity	situation
Sanity	vulnerability; confusion; poor judgment	situation
Control (e. g., as a result of demonic possession or being a patient)	autonomy; independence; confidence	situation
Family or friends	emotional and social support	situation

Edgar Allan Poe and the Advent of the Psychological-Moral Horror Story

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Edgar Allan Poe created the modern detective story and the modern horror story, and popularized human villains who suffered from various mental disorders. The psychotic or sociopathic killer was a new monster. He or she (in Poe, always a male character) located the source of evil “not in the stars,” to paraphrase William Shakespeare, “but in ourselves.” With Poe, evil became internal and psychological, not external and supernatural. Many readers find such villains far more frightening than demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches, and other such monsters, because threats posed by psychotic or sociopathic “monsters” are more believable and one may actually encounter them in “real life.”

The notion that demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and witches won't be encountered in “real life” marks a metaphysical change in the Western weltanshauung, or worldview, wherein the supernatural is no longer considered a viable dimension of reality. Of course, authors of horror stories continue to populate their fiction with such creatures, but, to entertain the notion of their existence, readers and moviegoers must, more and more, adopt the attitude of “suspended disbelief” of which Samuel Taylor Coleridge first wrote in Biographia Literaria (1817). In short, to entertain the idea of the existence of such monsters, one must pretend that they are real, that they exist, at least for the duration of the story one is reading or the movie one is watching.

When it comes to victims who commit evil due to the mental disorders they suffer, suspended disbelief is not necessary—at least, not to the degree it is necessary to enjoy a tale of the supernatural—because such mental states do exist, and those unfortunate enough to suffer from one or more of them do behave in dangerous, erratic ways.

If we state this principle in the terms set forth by Tzvetan Todorov, we would say that there are no longer truly tales of the marvelous, nor is fantastic literature, strictly speaking, any longer possible. Stories may depict bizarre incidents, strange settings, and deranged characters, but these elements will be effects not of supernatural beings or forces (for none exist), but of mental illness. They may be uncanny, but they are not and cannot be marvelous, any more than they can be fantastic, because, they have no supernatural origin or cause; they are caused by natural, if bizarre, states of mind; they can be explained scientifically.

Todorov's tripartite paradigm applied to ancient and medieval texts, but it does not apply to modern literature or film, because there is nothing fantastic that is resolvable as either marvelous or uncanny. There is only the ordinary, or everyday, and the uncanny, or strange but explicable. Only fantastic stories (of which type, horror is a subgenre), set in the ancient world or during the Middle Ages can be fantastic in Todorov's sense; only such stories can be viewed as marvelous (extraordinary but inexplicable in natural or scientific terms) or as uncanny (extraordinary but explicable in natural or scientific terms).

If we judge H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” and Stephen King's short story “1408,” by our own, present-day worldview, which is basically materialistic, Wells's earlier narrative is “correct” in its rejection of the fantastic and the marvelous, while King's story is “incorrect” in its suggestion that the incidents which occur in the supposedly haunted hotel room are, in fact, supernatural events, for, according to our modern view of the world, there ae no such things as either ghosts or demons; therefore, the room couldn't be haunted by either; therefore, the room is not haunted; therefore, to explain the narrator's perceptions and beliefs, we must adopt the view that he is insane: his perceptions are the results of hallucinations. Wells's explanation of the incidents which occur in his story's supposedly haunted “red room” concur with our modern view of the world, for the narrator concludes that only his own terror caused him to misinterpret what he saw in the room: the room was haunted by his own fear, not by ghosts.

This shift in weltanshauung, which has occurred not only among the intellectual elite, but also among the majority of the millions of the Western world's population, have but one implication. Unless a story is set in the ancient world or the Middle Ages, it can identify only “inner demons,” or mental disorders, the “fault” that “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” In other words, there is now but one source of “evil,” the actions of a disordered mental state. The only monster is the madman or the madwoman. All horror stories set in modern times can investigate only this source of immorality, or of what was once called “evil.” Horror fiction, like other forms of literature, has only two sources and two concerns: the psychological and the ethical, or moral. Judgment of their literary value, more and more, will be based on these criteria.

Writers (and critics), it's probably a good idea to dust off the latest copy of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM) and lay in a good supply of books on ethics.