Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman
A careful analysis of the storylines of motion pictures, novels, narrative poems, and short stories in the horror genre discloses recurring plot motifs, or formulae. Here are the final of our list of a baker’s dozen (plus one) of them, each of which is complete with one or more examples to get you started on the compilation and maintenance of your own list of such plot patterns.
1. Find the ugly within or among the beautiful. We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
2. Develop a continuing theme. We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
3. Enact revenge. We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
4. Rescue a damsel in distress. We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
5. Find the strange in the familiar. We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
6. Bring up the past (and relate it to the present). We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
7. Conduct an experiment. We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
8. Invade paradise. We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
9. Dig up that which has been buried (repressed). We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
10. Bite the hand that feeds you (betrayal). We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
11. Uncover a secret. We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
12. Threaten the near and the dear. We discussed this strategy in a previous post.
13. Explore unfamiliar surroundings. From their earliest days, human beings have been driven by a need to know. There is a quality about the unfamiliar, the mysterious, and the unknown that more than merely attracts people’s attention; it compels them to investigate, to explore, and to study. We want to know other things because our knowledge and our appreciation (or, at least, our understanding) of them helps to extend ourselves. The more we know, the more we become, containing, eventually, multitudes, as Walt Whitman suggests, and, even then, as both Soren Kierkegaard and Emily Dickinson, each in his or her own way, declare, we ourselves are left over--and left hungry--a partial void that can never be completely filled. It is this impulse to investigate, to explore, and to study that makes travelers of us all, whether in a literal or figurative sense. We travel, like Hernando Cortez, through actual worlds, or like John Keats, through “realms of gold.” Writers of horror choose to visit the stranger, more frightening and repulsive of such worlds and realms. One such movie that does so, both literally and figuratively, is The Thing From Another World (1951), which mixes horror with science fiction as a team of scientists and support personnel, conducting research at a remote outpost in the arctic, stumble upon an extraterrestrial creature encased in ice. Being scientists, they recover the specimen and take it to their laboratory, where, eventually, it thaws, terrorizing the tiny community. Dogs attack the creature, biting off one of its arms, and the thawing limb is revived by the dog’s blood. The scientists discover that the creature is a plant, despite its humanoid appearance, and one of them, Dr. Carrington, seeks to grow more of its kind by sprinkling seedlings removed from the arm with plasma he takes from the compound’s infirmary. Interestingly, Dr. Carrington believes that he can reason with the plant, but the Air Force personnel who guard the station hold the view that it is hostile toward humans and must be destroyed, especially since it needs blood to sustain its own existence and they are the creature’s only source of this vital nutrient. They finally end the creature’s threat by electrocuting it after Dr. Carrington’s last-minute appeal to the creature’s reason fails, showing that the skeptical military men, not the trusting scientist, were right in their assessment of the creature’s nature and intentions. In The Terror, Dan Simmons takes his readers on an exploration of the arctic aboard Her Majesty’s ship the Terror. The ship becomes stranded in the ice, and its starving crew resort to cannibalism; at the same time, a monster begins to kill and devour the crew members, thereby increasing the trapped sailors’ terror. In Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne offers an earlier science fiction novel that is based upon the exploration of an unknown locale--the center of the Earth itself. Although a science fiction story, it includes some elements of horror. The protagonist, Professor Linderbrock, leads a team of scientists down the interior of an Icelandic volcano, where they observe many wonders, the fiercest of which are the dinosaurs that have survived extinction in the subterranean world and giant insects and animals--and a prehistoric man or humanoid creature, all of which they avoid. Their way out of the underground world is blocked, but they set off an explosion that unleashes a torrent of water that buoys them out of the volcano. It is only after their escape that they realize that their travels inside the earth and the flood of waters that carried them through the subterranean environment has relocated them to Italy. Many other stories, in the science fiction genre, the horror genre, and other genres, also employ storylines that are based upon an exploration of unfamiliar surroundings.
14. Bring down the house. This storyline depends upon the destruction or the status quo. As Carlos Fuentes observes, “Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.” Stephen King, likewise, declares, “Terror. . . often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment: that things are in the unmaking.” The primordial prototype of this storyline is that in which Satan, in the guise of the serpent, tempts Eve to partake of the forbidden fruit and, in this act and in the same act, committed by Adam, afterward, brings about the fall and spiritual death of humanity and their own exile from paradise. Almost every horror story is built upon this foundation, so it seems unnecessary to offer any specific examples; every horror story is itself an instance of the erosion or sudden cessation of the order that is implicit in social, political, religious, moral, cultural, and other values and institutions that, collectively, constitute the structure and organization--in short, the order--that is prerequisite to chaos, and it is the restoration of this order, or some semblance of it, however temporal and tenuous, that forms the resolution of virtually every horror story, past, present, and, it seems inevitably
No comments:
Post a Comment