copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman
In earlier posts, we considered how to create imaginary monsters of the animal variety, but we didn’t touch upon plants. Some stories, such as H. G. Wells' "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid," deal with bizarre plants. However, even stories that are more about insect or animal monsters are creepier if their descriptive passages include verbal depictions of eerie plants.
Again, science comes to the aid of horror, fantasy, and science fiction writers. In cooperation with scientists, artists have created paintings and illustrations that scientists believe portray ancient and prehistoric plants as they appeared long before the developments of camera and film. Writers can refer to them, describing in words what painters and illustrators have, with a little--okay, a lot--of help from botanists and other scientists, presented in images. Even with plants that are more beautiful than bizarre, the results can be truly uncanny, adding an atmosphere of uneasiness and fear, perhaps even horror, to a narrative’s setting and tone. Here are a couple of pictures, the one on the left of the Cooksonia, the one on the right of the Archaeamphora longicervia, which also happens to be the earliest carnivorous plant.
Again, science comes to the aid of horror, fantasy, and science fiction writers. In cooperation with scientists, artists have created paintings and illustrations that scientists believe portray ancient and prehistoric plants as they appeared long before the developments of camera and film. Writers can refer to them, describing in words what painters and illustrators have, with a little--okay, a lot--of help from botanists and other scientists, presented in images. Even with plants that are more beautiful than bizarre, the results can be truly uncanny, adding an atmosphere of uneasiness and fear, perhaps even horror, to a narrative’s setting and tone. Here are a couple of pictures, the one on the left of the Cooksonia, the one on the right of the Archaeamphora longicervia, which also happens to be the earliest carnivorous plant.
Nature has also come to the aid of the aspiring and established horror writer. Glacial ice is rapidly melting. In the process, according to “Ancient plants exposed,” these mountains of ice have revealed living plants that are believed to be as many as 6,500 years old--“mosses and grasses from a former wetland.” Moreover, as “Jurassic Park Plants” points out, “Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona contains hundreds of acres of perfectly preserved logs from ancient araucariad forests that grew in nearby highlands during the late Triassic Period (over 200 million years ago).” The forest “coexisted with dinosaurs,” the article observes, and, as one might expect, its plants look bizarre to the modern eye. Detailed descriptions of these ancient and prehistoric plants would lend an air of strangeness and disquiet to a story--perfect for the habitat of a monster.
In fact, as Joshua Siskin points out, it’s possible to grow 4,900-year-old plants at home, in one’s own garden: “if you want to connect with these ancient species, you can plant them in any well-drained garden spot or in containers filled with sandy topsoil. They could become your family's heirloom plants, to be passed down from generation to generation.” These plants would give a writer a living, breathing (after a fashion) link to a mysterious past inhabited by organisms that look very different than most of the ones around today. Such a link should be at least as inspiring as a muse.
If one wants nothing more to do than to describe these plants, he or she can leaf through (yes, pun intended) pictures on an Internet web browser, selecting those which appear the most fantastic and strange. Then, all that needs to be done is to describe what is seen.
Of course, as in the case of animal monsters, writers are not bound by what nature has produced, what artists have imagined, or what scientists say is likely or even possible. The imagination can create whatever type of monstrous plants (or animals) it likes. As long as, in the process, a writer doesn’t make a reader’s effort to effect what Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed a “willing suspension of disbelief” impossible, the result could be especially frightening.
In describing plants, we may also want to envision the monstrous plants from the point of view of their victims. In doing so, we might imaginatively enter the anthropomorphized brains of such creatures as houseflies. What, for example, might a fly think of the Venus Fly-Trap? Most likely, its thoughts and feelings would be very different from ours. Instead of finding such a plant “interesting” or “curious,” the fly might see it as something as horrifying and terrifying as an iron maiden or some other human torture device. If a writer can transfer the fly’s sensibility to his or her human protagonist when the main character comes face to flower, leaf, or stem, the effect could be horrible, indeed.
Sources cited:
“Ancient plants exposed”
Joshua Siskin, “In the Garden, Grow Strange Plants At Home”
“Jurassic Park Plants”
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