Showing posts with label Dracula. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dracula. Show all posts

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Horror Story Plot Formulas

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman


In every horror movie, there is, of course, a protagonist and an antagonist. For convenience, I'm going to refer to them as the monster and the hero. Of course, the monster, both human and non-human, and the “hero” can just as easily be a girl or a woman as a boy or a man.


For there to be a story, there has to be conflict, and the major and most important type of conflict, that between the monster and the hero, results from their encounter. Therefore, they must come together, usually in the first part of the story. Writers have come up with a variety of ways for the monster and the hero to meet, if not greet, one another. These methods of encounter, in turn, help to establish various narrative formulas.

Some of these formulas we might call The Return, The Invasion, The Trespass, The Act of Vengeance, and The Fish Out of Water. Here are the breakdowns of these plots and a few examples of each.


The Return

Beginning
A monster (an ancient evil) awakens or returns.
Middle
The monster becomes active again.
End
By learning the monster's origin or nature, the hero eliminates or neutralizes the monster.

Examples: Summer of Night, It


The Invasion

Beginning
A monster moves into a community foreign to itself.
Middle
The monster becomes active in its new surroundings, behaving as it did in its original habitat.
End
By learning the monster's origin or nature, the hero eliminates or neutralizes the monster.

Examples: Dracula, 'Salem's Lot


The Trespass

Beginning
Trespassers disturb or threaten a monster's habitat.
Middle
The monster defends its turf.
End
The trespassers capture or kill the monster, escape from the monster, or are killed by the monster.

Examples: The Descent, Poltergeist, King Kong, The Thing


The Act of Vengeance

Beginning
The monster or his or her loved one is wronged.
Middle
The monster seeks to avenge him- or herself or a loved one.
End
The monster is imprisoned, killed, or otherwise neutralized or escapes.

Examples: The Abominable Dr. Phibes, I Know What You Did Last Summer, A Nightmare on Elm Street


The Fish Out of Water

Beginning
The hero, relocated to a strange new environment, usually that of the monster, is out of his or her depth.
Middle
The monster, at home in the environment, maintains the upper hand against the hero.
End
The hero kills the monster or escapes or is killed by the monster.

Examples: Open Water, Backcountry, Jaws.

Note: A future post may present other horror story plot formulas.

Saturday, September 8, 2018

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.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Monsters of the New Depression


Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

If critics are right about the times in which we live spawning the monsters who inhabit our waking nightmares, the horror stories which appear both in print and on film, then, considering the economic downturn in which we (and the rest of the world) find ourselves, which is of a near-Depression magnitude and promises to get even worse (the CEO of Walmart predicts runaway inflation in June, 2011), we can look to the 1930s for an idea as to what form the monsters of the near future may assume.

The Great Depression began in 1929 and lasted about ten years. The current one began about 2008 and has lasted, to date, about two years. Although politicians promise us that things will get better, largely because of the measures that the administrations of George W. Bush, in its final hours, and Barack Obama have taken, economists and other pundits are not so sure. Many experts advise us to fasten our seatbelts and hold on tightly, for we’re in for a long and extremely bumpy ride.

Many of the movie monsters of the 1930s are those which, today, we call “classic”: Dracula, Frankenstein’s “creature,” the mummy, freaks, King Kong,

Many of these movies were filmed in exotic lands (Transylvania, Egypt, Skull Island) that took moviegoers away, for an hour and a half or so, from their real-life, real-world troubles and immersed them in faraway fantasy worlds in which the struggle was not with the woeful economy but with celluloid menaces that, in the end, were almost always routed or destroyed.

The monsters, however, were also symbolic, almost subliminal, manifestations of the existential crises that audiences faced.


Dracula sucked blood, as the Depression drained one’s economic lifeblood.


Frankenstein, a mad scientist, was a stand-in of sorts, perhaps, for the economists, or financial wizards, who manipulated the nation, trying to revive the dying people as Frankenstein tried to bring to life an assortment of dead body parts. The economist had had about as much success, in the public’s eyes, as the fictional scientist, creating, instead of a revived and healthy financial people, a deformed and hideous parody of a prosperous citizenry.


The Tutankhamen Exhibition toured the world during the years of the Great Depression. According to the lore of the mummy, the Egyptologists who desecrated the tomb and stole the remains of the adolescent pharaoh brought down upon themselves an ancient curse. Brought back to life by the accidental recitation of a spell, the mummy seeks the reincarnation of his true love, but is, instead, reduced to ashes, the way that filmgoers’ hopes for a reunion with their once-economically secure lives were reduced to ashes by the failed economy.


Compared to the pre-Depression days of the Roaring Twenties, when life was (or, in retrospect, at least, seemed to have been) easy, with money in plentiful supply and booze flowing through speakeasies, the grim, poverty-ridden environment of the Depression seemed unreal or surreal, and men and women saw themselves as “freaks,” deformed in body and soul, in heart and mind, by the severely depressed economy. Chaos seemed to reign, within and without, as if they were human oddities who lived lives as bleak and shadowy and pathetic as those of the unfortunate “freaks” exhibited by carnival sideshows.


King Kong embodied a long-lost--indeed, a prehistoric--past never known to human beings other than the natives of Skull Island, where the great ape lived among dinosaurs in a land that time had forgotten. Spawned as much, perhaps, by Darwinian evolutionary theory as by hard times, the beast, nevertheless, was hunted down by filmmaker Carl Denham during the Depression, a point made more clear, perhaps in the 2005 remake directed by Peter Jackson. The hard times in which the characters live motivate them to take risks that, in better days, they might have passed on. Denham hopes the documentary he plans to film concerning the mysterious Skull Island will avert bankruptcy (as the 1933 film did for RKO Radio Pictures), and his ingénue Ann Darrow accompanies him on his quest because, an out-of-work aspiring actress, she has been forced to seek her sustenance among street vendors, stealing apples from their carts. Unfortunately, Denham’s scheme fails, as so many business ventures during the decade of the Great Depression failed, and his, Darrow’s, and his other associates’ financial welfare is left in doubt at the film’s end, as King Kong, shot full of holes by the nation’s fledgling Air Force, lies dead in the streets of new York City, having fallen from his precarious perch atop the Empire State Building, a symbol of the towering success of capitalism and democracy.

Other movie monsters of the 1930s include Mr. Hyde, of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), the ghoul, the invisible man, the werewolf, the daughters of both Dracula and the devil, and the bride of Frankenstein’s creature.


The specific faces and forms of the horrors beings spawned by the contemporary economic depression are unlikely to be identical to those spawned by the Great Depression of the 1930s, but, if the Great Depression’s celluloid creatures exemplify the types of monsters we may expect to meet--parasitic bloodsuckers, cadaverous creatures, the walking dead, grotesquely deformed “freaks,” and primordial beasts--we are in for a rough time of it, to be sure!

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Heightened Horrors--and Heroes: Ourselves, Writ Large

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Watching children watching cartoons that contain moments which, to their audience, are frightening reveal that youngsters are often frightened by much the same things as oldsters: sudden attacks, distorted faces and figures, eerie sounds, and the like. One cannot plan to defend oneself against sudden attacks. A distorted face or figure suggests that something terrible may have happened to another person and that something just as terrible could therefore happen to oneself. Eerie sounds suggest the unfamiliar, and that which is unknown may be fraught with menace. In “Killed By Death,” vampire slayer Buffy Summers assures the children in a hospital in which youngsters are dying (and are possibly being killed) at an alarming rate that she knows, as they do, that monsters, but, she declares, there are those who fight monsters, too, and that she is one.


Children are not reassured by promises that the monsters they fear--the monsters in the closet or under the bed--are not real, but imaginary, because kids don’t yet have enough of a handle on the world to tightly compartmentalize “real” and “unreal,” or “imaginary”; the wall between these realms in thin, and, sometimes, the fantastic bleeds through, into the real world. Therefore, Buffy gains credibility by admitting to the kids to whom she speaks that the monsters they fear are real. Because she is believable about this concern, her declaration that she, a hero who fights monsters, is also real is also believable to the children.


In the real world, adults know that monsters are real, too: there are serial killers, rapists, and thieves. There are backbiters and toadies--and even politicians. But there are heroes, too, who fight these monsters: cops and firefighters and emergency medical technicians and soldiers and everyday men and women who are willing to risk their own lives to save others who are in trouble and need help. The everyday hero, however, is too mundane to celebrate for more than a day or two. Horror fiction (like other literary genres) create villains who are larger than life--Pennywise the Clown, Dracula, Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, Der Kinderstod--so that there can be larger-than -life heroes, both extraordinary and ordinary--the Losers, Count Van Helsing, Sam Loomis, Clarice Starling, Buffy Summers.

The phrase “head and shoulders above the crowd” derives from the custom of ancient Greek and Roman sculptors of indicating heroism by creating statues of heroic individuals that were a head length taller than the statues of ordinary mortals. The ordinary figure, ancient artists determined, is equal to seven and a half head lengths; therefore, the statue of a heroic individual would be eight and a half head lengths in stature. In a similar way, writers make both villains and heroes larger than life, so that they embody, in a heightened manner, the villainous and the heroic in ordinary men; the villains and heroes of horror (and other genres) are ourselves, writ large.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

"The Judge's House": An Example of Gothic Technique

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


Bram Stoker, the author of the novel Dracula and the short story “Dracula‘s Guest,” also wrote many horrific short stories other than “Dracula‘s Guest,” one of which is “The Judge’s House,” which, having fallen into the public domain, may be read, free, on several websites.
 
“The Judge’s House” is the subject of this post. However, before turning our attention to it, a few words concerning its author and the story in general seem to be in order.
 
Stoker, who as born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1847, died in London, England, in 1912. Between these fateful years, he wrote not only Dracula, which secured his literary fame, but also ten other novels and numerous short stories, yet, except for Dracula (and more as a character than as a work of fiction), he is largely unknown and underappreciated.
 
According to Michael Kelahan’s “Introduction” to Dracula’s Guest & Other Tales of Horror (New York, NY: Fall River Press, 2010), Stoker graduated “with honors in mathematics” from Trinity College, in which he enrolled “at age seventeen.” (The protagonist of “The Judge’s House” is a mathematics student, too, possibly at Cambridge University.) A ghost story, “The Judge’s House” is (like H. G. Wells’s “The Red Room,”) a study in Gothic technique, the use of setting to create suspense, and the application of a particular narrative formulathat of the horror taleto a work of fiction. It is these pointstechnique, suspense, and formulathat I propose to discuss as I summarize Stoker’s haunting tale.
 
To differentiate my comments from my summary of Stoker’s story, I include my comments in red font.
 
The story begins with protagonist Malcolm Malcolmson’s intentional isolation of himself from both his friends and “friends’ friends,” the better to devote himself to his preparation for an upcoming mathematics examination. To this end, he travels for three days, to Benchurch, where he rents an out-of-the-way, uninhabited Jacobean residence that appears “more a fortified house than an ordinary dwelling.” The house has stood idle for “a term of years,” with the result that it has acquired an unpleasant reputation, or “absurd prejudice.”
 
A ploy of the horror writer is to refer to an unsettling or unsavory reputation regarding a supposed place of evil, as Stoker does here. The servants in H. G. Wells’ short story “The Red Room” likewise declare that the castle that the protagonist visits is said to be haunted, and they give credence to the rumors, believing them to be true. In the movie based upon Stephen King’s short story, “1408,” the hotel’s manager also warns the protagonist (numerous times) that the room in which he wants to spend the night is haunted. In all three cases, the cautions fall upon deaf ears, as is, again, the traditional response (or non-response) of the main character to such warnings. Of course, such statements are a means of foreshadowing: through them, the author has all but promised the reader that something terrible will happen soon.
 
Asking the advice of the inn’s landlady, Mrs. Witham, as to what “stores and provisions” he is apt to need during his proposed three-months’ stay, he horrifies her by announcing his intention of staying in “the Judge’s house,” which, she assures him, was home to a “judge who was held in great terror on account of his harsh sentences” and confesses that she would not stay in the house for even “one hour,” even for “all the money in Drinkwater’s Bank.”
 
Many tales of haunted houses associate the domicile with past evil or with a previous owner, such as the judge, who committed despicable acts or atrocities. The suggestion of such associations is that the past evil or previous owner is somehow the cause of the present evil.
 
The servants in Wells’ story also tell their guest that there is no way that they would stay in the haunted room and plead with him not to do so, either, just as Mrs. Witham suggests to Malcolm that renting the judge’s house is ill-advised. Such counsel is another of the haunted house conventions, and it is as operative in contemporary tales as it was in Gothic literature.
 
The student tells her that, although her concern touches him, she need not worry about him, because he will have no time to worry about “mysterious ‘somethings,’ and his work is of too exact and prosaic a kind to allow his having any corner in his mind for mysteries of any kind.”
 
Typically, the protagonist is a hardheaded realist and thoroughgoing skeptic. Often, he or she is a scientist. A mathematician is an appropriate alternative, and, we should remember, Stoker himself was a student of mathematics during his college days.
 
Malcolm takes up residence in the house’s enormous dining room, where Mrs. Witham, a charwoman named Mrs. Dempster, and “several men and boys” set him up with furniture and provisions, Mrs. Witham suggesting that he put a screen around his “bed at night,” to ward off chilly draughts of air, although she herself would be too afraid of the “things” that might “put their heads round the sides, or over the top” to spy upon her as she slept. Her talk so disturbs her that she flees the house, much to Mrs. Dempster’s disdain. Unlike the inn’s landlady, the charwoman is, she says, unafraid of “all the bogies in the kingdom.”
 
Mrs. Witham is characterized as a superstitious person, prone to fear even imaginary “bogies,” as her opposite, or foil, the skeptical Mrs. Dempster refers to things that go bump in the night. Her foolish fears suggest that, perhaps, Malcolm is right to be skeptical about the reputation of the judge’s house. Perhaps we should be skeptical as well.
 
Mrs. Dempster’s own bravery derives, she suggests, from her knowledge that apparent “bogies” are really nothing more than natural phenomena that are misunderstood or unidentified:
 
“I’ll tell you what it is, sir,” she said; “bogies is all kinds and sorts of thingsexcept bogies! Rats and mice, and beetles; and creaky doors, and loose slates, and broken panes, and stiff drawer handles, that stay out when you pull them and then fall down in the middle of the night.”
Mrs. Dempster is much of the same mind concerning “bogies” as Malcolm, and, as a recipient of charity who is forbidden, upon the pain of the loss of her benefits, from sleeping anywhere other than the home that has been provided for her, free of charge, she has good reason to refuse to stay the night at the judge’s house. However, her situation may seem a bit too convenient to readers. Although true, her reason for not spending the night in the isolated house prevents her from witnessing or, worse, experiencing any of the phenomena that allegedly occur on the premises at night. She can, in short, afford her skepticism, for it costs her nothing and need not be put to the test.
 
Moreover, her doubt adds another element to Stoker’s story that is typical of its genre, which is that incidents that are alleged to be supernatural must be explainable, in principle, at least, by reference to natural causes so that it is possible to read the same story from two perspectivesthe natural and the supernaturalat the same time.
 
After the charwoman cleans the house and lays Malcolm’s meal, she returns home, leaving the student to his studies. He prepares for the examination until eleven o’clock at night, when he pauses to stoke the fire and make some tea. As he enjoys the beverage, he hears “for the first time what a noise the rats” are “making.” He supposes that the rats have been quiet until now because they’d been intimidated by his presence and the fire, but have since grown accustomed to both and are “now disporting themselves as” is “their wont.” Sure enough, as he finds later, in examining the room more closely, there are rats in the walls: “Here and there as he went round he saw some crack or hole blocked for a moment by the face of a rat with bright eyes glittering in the light” of his lamp. What impresses him most, however, is the “great alarm bell on the roof,” which Mrs. Witham had mentioned to him previously, in passing: it is suspended “in a corner of the room on the right-hand side of the fireplace.”
 
The presence of rats, especially following Mrs. Dempster’s earlier declaration that “bogies is all kinds and sorts of thingsexcept bogies”“rats and mice” included, provides a natural explanation for seemingly otherworldly incidents as an alternative to a belief in the supernatural.
 
Returning to his studies, Malcolm forgets the rats, the alarm bell rope, and everything else, until, hours later, he is disturbed by the sudden cessation of the noise of the rats in the walls. He is even more disturbed to see “on the great high-backed carved oak chair by the right side of the fireplace. . . an enormous rat, steadily glaring at him.” When he pretends to throw something at the rodent, it amazes him by refusing to budge and, instead, displays “its great white teeth angrily. . . its cruel eyes” shining “in the lamplight with an added vindictiveness.” Unfortunately, when Malcolm rushes at the animal with a poker, “to kill it,” the rat retreats “up the rope of the alarm bell,” escaping, and setting off a “noisy scampering of the rats in the wainscot.”
 
Were the rat of a normal size, it wouldn’t be nearly as intimidating as the “enormous one,” and Stoker’s anthropomorphic description of the rodent’s gaze as implying that the animal feels various emotionsall negative, of courseprepares readers for the narrator’s suggestion, later on, that the huge rat may, in fact, be associated withor may even bethe judge himself.
 
Malcolm goes to sleep just before dawn and is dead to the world until Mrs. Dempster’s preparation of his breakfast awakens him. He goes for a walk, to study his books in a pleasant wood, stopping by the inn to say hello to Mrs. Witham on his way back to the judge’s house. When he tells her of the enormous rat, she refers to it as the devil, which Malcolm finds so amusing that he laughs, causing the elderly woman herself to chuckle as well.
 
Mrs. Witham’s half-serious, half-joking identification of the huge rat with the devil suggests another possible true identity for the rodent, besides that of the late judge, even though both Malcolm and she laugh at the absurdity of her suggestion. Readers may chuckle, too, or even roll their eyes; still, through Mrs. Witham’s statement, Stoker has suggested the possibility of a much greater source of evil, Satan himself, thereby elevating the suspense of the tale with but a few exchanges of dialogue between the main character and one of his new acquaintances, the inn’s landlady.
 
That evening, the rats’ commotion and noise is greater than it had been the previous evening. As on the previous night, the rats later become suddenly silent and Malcolm is disturbed to see the “enormous rat” staring at him again, “with baleful eyes,” from the “old high-backed carved oak chair beside the fireplace.” This time, the student throws a textbook at the rodent, but it doesn’t flee until he runs at it with the poker, at which point it scampers, again, “up the rope of the alarm bell,” its escape seeming to occasion “the renewal of the noise made by the general rat community.”
 
In most horror stories, the bizarre events of the action take place at night or, at least, in the dark, and Stoker’s haunted house story is no exception. Again, the reference to the rats allows a natural explanation for seemingly supernatural events. Notice, too, Stoker’s repetitions of similar events during successive days and nights. Most horror stories, past and present, offer some variation or other upon this strategy, repeating, with minor variations, one or more uncanny or fantastic incidents, or a series of such incidents, to heighten suspense while, at the same time, creating verisimilitude (or seeking to do so) by rendering the extraordinary ordinaryor at least familiarthrough the recurrence of these incidents.
 
Thinking that he will trap the rat, Malcolm arranges his equipment so that it will disclose the spot through which the rodent disappears and then returns, again, to his studies:
Accordingly he lit another lamp and placed it so that it would shine well into the right-hand corner of the wall by the fireplace. Then he got all the books he had with him, and placed them handy to throw at the vermin. Finally he lifted the rope of the alarm bell and placed the end of it on the table, fixing the extreme end under the lamp. As he handled it he could not help noticing how pliable it was, especially for so strong a rope, and one not in use. “You could hang a man with it,” he thought to himself. When his preparations were made he looked around and said complacently:
 
“There now, my friend, I think we shall learn something of you this time!”
As I point out in other of my posts, the turning point of many horror stories occurs as the protagonist learns the origin or the nature of the threat that he faces. Through Malcolm’s talking to himself, Stoker suggests the nature of the turning point in this story and suggests, also, that it will hinge upon discovery or revelation.
 
When the sound of the rats again abruptly ends, Malcolm looks up to see the huge rat again, throws several books at it, and finally drives it off. The rodent retreats, Malcolm sees, through a hole in one of the paintings on the wall. Examining which books he threw at the rat to identify which tome caused it to withdraw, he sees that it was none of his mathematical treatises, but a holy book:
He picked up the books one by one, commenting on them as he lifted them. “Conic Sections he does not mind, nor Cycloidal Oscillations, nor the Principia, nor Quaternions, nor Thermodynamics. Now for the book that fetched him!” Malcolms took it up and looked at it. As he did he started, and a sudden pallor overspread his face. He looked around uneasily and shivered slightly, as he murmured to himself:
 
“The Bible my mother gave me! What an odd coincidence.”
Indirectly, by pointing out through his narrator, that it is the Bible, and not human beings’ own rational faculties, as symbolized by the mathematics textbooks in the protagonists’ posession, that drives the gigantic rat from the room, Stoker indirectly endorses the mystic’s point of view over that of the common-sense realist. Mathematics had not the power to banish the apparently supernatural villain, but the Bible, which contains a decidedly supernatural and, from a naturalistic standpoint, fantastic, worldview, exorcises the demon, so to speak. Although there is a bit of humor in Stoker’s description of the books, there may also be a suggestion that his readers would do well not to dismiss the otherworldly worldviews of religious and metaphysical or mystical sources of wisdom.  (At the same time, maintaining the tension between possible natural and supernatural explanations for the extraordinary incidents that take placeor appear to take placein the story, the protagonist suggests that the Bible's frightening away the rat might be merely "an odd coincidence.")
 
After sleeping, Malcolm returns to his studies, paying Mrs. Witham another visit in the afternoon, finding her in the company of a gentleman identified to him as Dr. Thornhill, who admits to having come in answer to Mrs. Witham’s request that he see and advise the student. Malcolm is to avoid late nights and limit his tea intake. The physician also tells his patient that the rope up which the enormous rat runs is actually “the very rope which the hangman used for all of the victims of the Judge’s judicial rancor!” After Malcolm leaves, the doctor informs Mrs. Witham that he had deliberately planted the image of the hangman’s rope in his patient’s mind so that, should Malcolm suffer “some strange fright or hallucination,” he will use the rope to sound the alarm so that he may be assisted. He predicts that the student will sound the alarm this very night.
 
The reference to the hangman brings another element of eeriness to the book, and the doctor’s advice that Malcolm limit the amount of tea that he consumes provides another possible natural explanation for the protagonist’s apparently extraordinary experiences at the judge’s house: too much caffeine.
 
Back at the Judge’s house, Malcolm returns to his studies, and all is well until a storm begins to rage, causing the rope attached to the roof alarm to rise and fall and reminding the student of Dr. Thornhill’s declaration that the rope was the one that “the hangman used for victims of the Judge’s judicial rancor.”
 
Reminders to characters are, of course, reminders to readers as well, and such reminders maintain, if and when they do not also actually heighten, suspense by bringing to readers’ conscious awareness to threads of the narrative that have been woven into the story in previous scenes. Again, the judge is characterized as irrational and as motivated not by a belief in justice but by “rancor.”
 
As Malcolm considers who might have been hanged on the judge’s orders, the enormous rat again descends the rope, “glaring at him steadily.” It swiftly retreats, stirring the other rats in hiding to commotion, and Malcolm is reminded that he has “not investigated the lair of the rat or looked at the pictures, as he had intended.” He lights a lamp and conducts his investigation. What he sees first startles, then frightens, him:
 
At the first glance [at the painting with the hole in it through which the large rat had vanished] he started back so suddenly that he almost dropped the lamp, and a deadly pallor overspread his face. His knees shook, and heavy drops of sweat came on his forehead, and he trembled like an aspen.
The reappearances of the larger-than-life rat are coupled with advancements of the story’s plot, serving as reminders to Malcolm to undertake actions that he has previously decided, but has since forgotten, to take. Earlier, the rat’s appearance reminded him to seek its avenue of escape; now, its appearance reminds him to “investigate the lair of the rat.” By coupling the rat’s multiple appearances with the protagonist’s forgotten intentions, Stoker prevents the rodent’s reappearances from becoming tedious to the reader, seeming, as they do, to serve a purpose; indeed, one begins, perhaps, to wonder whether the rat’s arrivals and departures are entirely coincidental or may be directed by unseen powers, even, perhaps, the ghost of the judge in whose house Malcolm has taken up temporary residence.
 
Gathering his nerve, he inspects the picture again, and sees that the painting is a portrait of the hanging judge, whose “face was strong and merciless, evil, crafty, and vindictive, with a sensual mouth, a hooked nose of ruddy colour, and shaped like the beak of a bird of prey. The rest of the face was a cadaverous colour,” and “the eyes were of peculiar brilliance and with a terribly malignant expression.” The eyes disturb Malcolm, for, in them, he sees “the very counterpart to the eyes of the great rat.” Malcolm returns his attention to the painting:
 
The Judge was seated in a great high-backed carved oak chair, on the right-hand side of a great stone fireplace where, in the corner, rope hung down from the ceiling, its end lying coiled on the floor.
If the eyes are the mirrors of the soul, those of the rat, as a creature that lacks a soul, must seem terrible indeed, and alien. Again, the rat is linked to the judge, for in the stare of the rat Malcolm imagines the gaze of the judge.
 
Understanding that the picture represents “the scene of the room” as it presently stands, Malcolm is “awestruck,” and, feeling as if someone is “behind him,” looks “over the corner of the fireplace” and sees the enormous rat “in the Judge’s arm-chair, with the rope hanging behind,” staring at the student “with the Judge’s baleful eyes, now intensified and with a fiendish glare.”
 
He drops the lamp, which seems to awaken him, as it were, from his trance-like state, and, as he attends to the lamp, he calms himself. After a drink of brandy, he is able to return to his studies. Another sudden silence makes him aware of the sound of “the creaking of the rope,” and he witnesses the huge rat gnawing through the rope, which, as it falls to the floor, severed, makes Malcolm aware that his ability to summon “the outer world to his assistance” has now been “cut off.”
 
Up to this point, Malcolm has, by choice, isolated himself from others; now, his isolation is forced, his free will in the matter giving way to determinism and the fear that such loss of control (or apparent control) often entails. Moreover, Malcolm is unable to summon assistance (and readers can be quite sure that, sooner, rather than later, the protagonist is going to require it).
 
Angry, Malcolm throws a book at the rat, but the rodent drops to the floor and flees. The student decides to hunt for the animal and, removing the shade from his lamp, illuminates a greater extent of the room, including its “upper part.” The light reveals a sight that terrifies the student:
 
In the centre of the picture was a great irregular patch of brown canvas, as fresh as when it was stretched on the frame. The background was as before, with chair and chimney-corner and rope, but the figure of the Judge had disappeared.
 
At this point, unless Malcolm is hallucinating, any purely natural explanation for the incidents that he has witnessed firsthand and at length is impossible. Therefore, readers must assume, the story must be regarded as supernatural, for this incident is truly marvelous. Indeed, it may turn upon so supernatural a phenomenon as metempsychosis, a sort of reincarnation, wherein a human soul is reincarnated in the form of another living organism (as in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Metzengerstein,” for example).
 
Liberated, as it were, from the painting, the judge now occupies the room’s “great high-backed carved oak chair” and wears his judicial robes and “a black cap,” which he dons at the stroke of midnight. Rising from his chair, the judge retrieves the severed rope, fashioning one of its ends into a noose. Cutting off Malcolm’s path to the door and his escape through it, the judge attempts to toss the noose over the student’s head, but Malcolm manages, many times, to avoid it.
 
As the judge relentlessly pursues him, rats swarm the portion of the rope that yet hangs from the ceiling, their numbers and weight causing the roof alarm to sound. However, the “sound was but a tiny one.” Nevertheless, it enrages the judge, and he seizes Malcolm, who is now paralyzed with dread; secures the noose about the student’s neck; lifts him onto the great “oak chair”; ties the free end of the severed rope to the portion that yet hangs from the ceiling; and then pulls away the chair upon which he had stood Malcolm.
 
Marvel follows upon marvel now, as the judge, absent from his portrait, appears, apparently as a ghost, in the selfsame chair that Malcolm has beheld since moving into the dining room of the judge‘s house. With each new wonder, it becomes easier and easier to accept the premise that this tale involves the supernatural, after all, the protagonists’ and Mrs. Dempster’s skepticism notwithstandingand just in time for the ending of the tale!
 
Previously, the story has intimated that the rope might be that of a hangman, and readers have heard, several times, characterizations of the judge as evil and cruel. Now, these hints and foreshadowing of the true nature of the rope and of the judge come together as the judge’s ghost becomes the protagonist’s executioner.
 
The action of the rats on the rope sets the “alarm bell” pealing, summoning a “crowd,” led by Dr. Thornhill. They break through the door and find, “at the end of the rope of the great alarm bell. . . the body of the student,” hanging, “and on the face of the Judge in the picture. . . a malignant smile.”
 
The reader is left in the dark, so to speak, as to what the “crowd” will make of the sight they witness, although it is likely that, among them, will be both believers in the supernatural and skeptics concerning its existence so that the cause of the student’s hanging, whether as the result of his suicide caused, perhaps, by an overactive imagination fueled by the isolated and macabre surroundings in which he was living, or his murder by a malicious ghost, will remain forever a mystery. In either case, the incident is likely to add to the house’s unsavory reputation, or “absurd prejudice.” This ending preserves the tension between natural and supernatural explanations, although, for the reader, natural explanations seem impossible, considering the incidents that he or she has, as it were, witnessed firsthand.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Quick Tip: Make Your Villains Both Timely and Timeless, Both Particular and Universal

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman



The nature of a monster is determined partly by the sociopolitical and cultural milieu of its time. It is also determined, in part, by the group of individuals for whom it is an embodiment of one or another fear. For example, the Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel and the Dracula who appears in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer share the same name and, ostensibly, at least, the same aristocratic and historical backgrounds, but the medieval Dracula is an altogether different vampire than his modern counterpart. Likewise, the invisible man, a scientist named Griffin, who appears in H. G. Wells’ novel, is motivated first by an ambition to make a name for himself, then by theft, and finally by revenge for his old mentor’s betrayal of him, whereas the invisible teenage girl, Marcie Ross, in the “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” episode of Buffy is motivated strictly by revenge : she wants to settle the score with those of her fellow students who have ignored or ridiculed her throughout her school years.

The monster, in other words, reflects the background of its times. Writers retool their villainous fiends and ogres so that they are representatives of the periods that help to spawn them. Since Buffy is a bildungsroman, or a story concerning “the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character,” as Yahoo! Education’s dictionary feature defines this term, its monsters tend to reflect the moral, emotional, and philosophical problems and issues that typically confront teenagers and young adults. As the series creator, Joss Whedon, himself puts it, “The show is designed to . . . work on the mythic structure of a hero’s journey. Just to reframe that as the growth of an adolescent girl. . . . The things she has to go through--losing her virginity, dying and coming back to life--are meant to be mythic, and yet they’re meant to be extremely personal” (The Monster Book viii)

Dreams are a good source for obtaining customized monsters. Because no two individuals are the same, their dreams will differ from one another, even when they are about the same general topic, such as vampires or ghosts, and each individual dreamer will project his or her own attitudes, beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and values onto the monsters that he or she creates in his or her dreams. In other words, such nightmarish creatures will reflect the anxieties, insecurities, fears, and worries of the man, woman, boy, or girl who creates these monsters. If monsters are projections of unconscious feelings, they must and will differ with respect to the particular unconscious in which they are rooted and from which they arise. Therefore, in this sense, they will be novel and original.

As individuals, though, no one exists in a vacuum. As John Donne wrote, no one is “an island.” In countless ways, each day we affect one another, as our common culture, language, and society suggests. Therefore, the monsters that any one of us creates in his or her nightmares, while rooted in and arising from his or her own unconscious mind, is also rooted in and arises from the common experience of his or her nation, culture, and species. The monsters that we make are both particular and universal. They are timely when we apply them to our own time and the current events of our day; yet, they also remain timeless, because the hopes and fears of humanity are not those of any particular time and place, but of all times and all places.

Nevertheless, by letting ourselves be inspired, and even guided, to some extent, by, our nightmares, we can render the representations and reflections of our own personal fears and those of our own particular day and age in such a way that the worn and tattered monster is retooled and renewed yet again. . . and again.

Friday, May 14, 2010

from The Dark Descent

Today’s post carries no byline because it’s really a summary of observations by David G. Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent (Tor, NY, 1987), which he makes in his introduction to the anthology of creepy short stories by such authors as Stephen King, John Collier, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Harlan Ellison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Charles L. Grant, Thomas M. Disch, Theodore Sturgeon, Clive Barker, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Tanith Lee, Flanner O’Connor, Ramsey Campbell, Henry James, Gene Wolfe, Charles Dickens, Joyce Carol Oates, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Algernon Blackwood, Philip K. Dick, and other names worth the dropping, to wit:

[Horror stories] clustered around the principle of a real or fake intrusion of the supernatural into the natural world, an intrusion which arouses fear (4-5).

It is Lovecraft’s essay that provides the keystone upon which any architecture of horror must be built: atmosphere. . . . What this means is that you can experience true horror in, potentially, any work of fiction, be it a western, a contemporary gothic, science fiction, [or] mystery. . . . as long as the atmosphere follows. This means that horror is free of the supernatural (5).

Hartwell includes a quotation of David Aylward:

To them [those who don’t read horror] it is a kind of pornography, inducing horripilation instead of erection. And the reader who appears to relish such sensations--why, he’s an emotional masochist. . . (Revenge of the Past, as quoted in The Dark Descent, 5-6).
Hartwell resumes his own voice, arguing his ideas on his topic:

[Edmund Wilson] sees. . . literature as evolving in a linear fashion into fantasies of the psyche removed entirely from supernatural trappings. Any audience interested in these trappings is regressive. He sees no value to a modern reader in obsolete fiction (7).

As horror has evolved in this century, it has grown significantly in the areas of “the morbidities of the psyche” and fantasies of “a world in which, prosaic though it is, we can find no firm foothold on reality (7).
Hartwell includes a quotation of Jean-Paul Sartre:

In order to achieve the fantastic, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to portray extraordinary things. . . . Either it [the fantastic] does not exist at all, or else it extends throughout the universe.. . (The Fantastic Considered as a Language, as quoted in The Dark Descent, 7-8).
Hartwell resumes his own voice, arguing his ideas on his topic:

Contemporary horror occurs in three streams. . .: 1. moral allegorical [,] 2. psychological metaphor [, and] 3. fantastic. These modes are not mutually exclusive, but usually a matter of emphasis (8).

[Moral allegories] are characteristically supernatural fiction, most usually about the intrusion of evil into consensus reality. . . . These arte the stories of children possessed by demons, of haunting by evil ghosts from the past. . . stories of bad places (where evil persists from past times), of witchcraft and satanism. . . . They are often written by lapsed Christians, who have lost their firm belief in good but still have a discomforting belief in evil. Stories in this stream imply or state the Manichean universe (8).

In speaking of stories and novels in this first stream, we are speaking of the most popular form of horror fiction today, the commercial bestseller lineage of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, and a majority of the works of Stephen King. . . . This stream is the center of category horror publishing (8-9).

The second group of horror stories, stories of aberrant human psychology embodied metaphorically, may be either purely supernatural, such as Dracula, or purely psychological, such as Robert Bloch’s Psycho. What characterizes them as a group is the monster at the center. . .--an overtly abnormal human or creature, from whose acts and on account of whose being the horror arises (9).

Stories of the third stream have at their center ambiguity as to the nature of reality, and it is this very ambiguity that generates the horrific effects. Often this is an overtly supernatural (or certainly abnormal) occurrence, but we know of it only by
allusion. Often, essential elements are left undescribed so that, for instance, we do not know whether there was really a ghost or not. But the difference is not merely supernatural versus psychological explanation: third stream stories lack any explanation that makes sense in everyday reality--we don’t know, and that doubt disturbs us, horrifies us. This is the fiction to which Sartre’s analysis alludes, the fantastic. At its extreme form, from Kafka to the present, it blends indistinguishably with magic realism, the surreal, the absurd, all the fictions that confront reality through paradoxical distance. It is the fiction of radical doubt. . . . In the contemporary field it is a major current (10).

Third stream stories tend to cross all category lines but usually they do not use the conventional supernatural as a distancing device (10).

At the end of a horror story, the reader is left with a new perception of the nature of reality. In the moral allegory strain, the point seems to be that this is what reality was and has been all along (i.. e., literally a world in which supernatural forces are at work) only you couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize it. Psychological metaphor stories basically use the intrusion of abnormality to release repressed or unarticulated psychological states. In her book, Powers of Horror, critic Julia Kristeva says that horror deals with material just on the edge of repression but not entirely repressed and inaccessible. Stories from our second stream use the heightening effect of the monstrously abnormal to achieve this release. Third stream stories maintain the pretense of everyday reality only to annihilate it, leaving us with another world entirely, one in which we are disturbingly imprisoned. It is in perceiving the changed reality and its nature that the pleasure and the illumination of third stream stories lies. . . . The mass horror audience is not much taken with third stream stories. . .
Because they modify the emotional jolt (10-11).
Hartwell includes a quotation of George Stade, which originally appeared in The New York Times (October 27, 1985):

Although the manifest images of horror fiction are legion, their latent meanings are few.
He also offers a quotation of Stephen King:
I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out (Danse Macabre).

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Quick Tip: The Importance of Setting

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In “‘Closer Than an Eye’: The Interconnections of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Colin N. Manlove does a great job of reminding his readers of the importance of the setting to a story. “The Gothic novel,” he writes, “usually employs as its setting some remote land, castle, tarn or wilderness: but here [in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde] the hideous events take place in the midst of the relatively populated streets of London. . . because the purpose of this novel is to show the dark side of one peculiar man’s respectable and citified self.” Moreover, the setting, common to both the novel’s protagonist and the other residents of the city, show him to be of the same sort as they; “they are seen in some way to share in his situation. . . . All in the story tread the same streets, inhabit the same fog” (The Dark Fantastic, 3). In the same article, Manlove points out the way that Robert Louis Stevenson creates, through description, a link between his main character and a row of buildings along a street:

The street of shops looks outward to a public; it is concerned with putting on a fine front and drawing people in. The building that juts forward has only an unopened door, no windows, and neither bell nor knocker on the door. Its preoccupation is with exclusion. . . . Yet it is part of the street, even if it is not integrated with it and thrusts its way forward. Both the street and the house are personified: the street drives a thriving trade, the shop fronts invite “like rows of smiling saleswomen” and veil their more florid charms on Sundays. The “sinister block of building. . . thrust[s] forth its gable on the street,” had “a blind forehead of discoloured wall” and bears “the marks of negligence in every feature.” It is not much of a leap to see the shops as suggestive of the respectable, ambitious civil area of mind--in short, all that Jekyll is to seem to be . . (6).
Chillers and Thrillers’ articles have likewise stressed the effectiveness of appropriate settings to horror, one example of which is the essay concerning Bram Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest.”

Monday, November 3, 2008

Do Not Pass “Go”; Do Not Collect $200: Monster Board Games

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

When one tires of Monopoly and Scrabble, there’s always the death and destruction of the diabolically creepy horror board game. They may make better Halloween presents than Christmas gifts, but, should Santa need a stocking stuffer, your wee ones could enjoy receiving one of these ghoulish games.


Arkham Horror (Fantasy Flight Games): H. P. Lovecraft provides the town and the mythos. Bizarre incidents occur in the town that Lovecraft made, heralding a horrific catastrophe; Lovecraft’s Old Ones are the culprits, and all that stands between them and the end of the world are the game’s players, a team of investigators, numbering between one and eight, who are twelve years old or older and who can spare two to three hours--not much time when one considers the height of the stakes involved: the fate of the world awaits the throw of the dice.

Gateways open upon other areas of the town, and, if too many open at once, look out! An alien will enter the scene, wrecking havoc. Therefore, it’s a good idea to close the gates! Unfortunately, to do so, the players themselves must enter these same portals and be teleported to--well, somewhere else.

An interesting addition to this game is its extension, Dunwich Horror (also manufactured by Fantasy Night Games), which supplies a game board for another Lovecraft town, Dunwich, which is a short distance from Arkham and is beset by its own mystical and macabre problems. The play is similar, but the rules have changed. Similar games from the same maker are the additional Arkham Horror Expansion games Kingsport Horror (based on yet another of the fictional towns that Lovecraft invented), Curse of the Dark Pharaoh, and The Black Goat of the Woods.

There is also Zombie Town: players’ neighborhood have gone to the zombies, who rise from their graves in the cemetery in the middle of the community, and no help is forthcoming; it’s up to each player to scrounge up the makeshift weapons he or she needs to survive for the ten days’ duration of play, by which time the neighborhood will be overrun by zombies, some of whom will be one’s next-door neighbors! Isn’t this the same premise of The Beverly Hillbillies?


For younger players, All Wound Up: Escape from the Cemetery (Twilight Creations) is a fun alternative, in which the pieces are, as the game’s title suggests, wind-up zombie toys. Players are allowed to wind their avatars so many times, depending upon their play, as they race in various directions to be the first to reach the cemetery’s front gate. Two to four players, eight to adult, can participate in the mayhem.


Dracula (Rio Grande Games/Kosmos) is based upon Bram Stoker’s novel, and sets Dr. van Helsing the unenviable task of locating the coffins of the undead while his nemesis, Count Dracula himself, seeks five new victims. Play lasts about half an hour, can be joined by two who are twelve or older and have sound hearts, if not sound minds, and contains such contents as the game board, cards, figures, barriers, energy cubes, and a rulebook, which, appropriately enough, come in a box. This is one you can really sink your teeth into! (Sorry; couldn’t resist.)


There are lots of other games in the horror genre waiting to take a bite out of your favorite goblin this Christmas; some are apt to be harder to find than others, and a few may be out of production altogether (but there’s always eBay):
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Susan Prescot Games)
  • Dracula’s Revenge (Human Head Studios/Green Ronin Publishing)
  • Frankenstein’s Children (Human Head Studios)
  • Vampire: Prince of the City
  • When Darkness Comes: The Awakening Game Board (Twilight Creations)
  • Munchkin Bites (Steve Jackson Games)
  • Betrayal at the House on the Hill (Avalon Hill)
  • Ghosts (Milton Bradley)
  • The Great Brain Robbery (Cheapass Games)
  • Minion Hunter (Games Designers Workshop/Dark Conspiracy)
  • Which Witch? (Milton Bradley)

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Masters of the Macabre

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Genre fiction focuses upon the conveyance of one emotion. For science fiction, according to C. S. Lewis, the emotion is wonder, whereas, Edgar Allan Poe implies, horror fiction, as the genre’s name suggests, evokes horror. Why readers would want to be frightened out of their wits is taken up in another post, “Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear.” Other genres inspire other emotions, but this post is concerned simply with naming names--that is, with identifying authors who have written works of horror fiction. Many mined the mother lode of horror; others panned for the gold only once or twice. In every respect, though, each of the authors listed has written at least one satisfying poem, short story, novel, play, or motion picture that delves into fear, and, in this regard, may be considered a master of the macabre. When a writer has written many works in the genre, only his or her name is listed; when the author has written only one or two instances of the fiction of fear (or a truly seminal work* in the field), the title of the work is also listed. Some of the names on our roster are likely to surprise those for whom horror fiction is not one’s daily bread. We thought of listing the names chronologically, by sex, by the stature of the author’s literary reputation, by the volume of works that he or she wrote in the horror genre, and in various other ways, but decided, at last, upon an alphabetical listing.

  • Adam, Richard, The Girl in a Swing
  • Andrews, V. C.
  • Anson, Jay, The Amityville Horror
  • Barker, Clive
  • Beaumont, Charles
  • Benchley, Peter, Jaws
  • Bierce, Ambrose
  • Blackwood, Algernon

William Peter Blatty

  • Blatty, William Peter, The Exorcist (seminal)
  • Bloch, Robert, Psycho (seminal)

Robert Bloch

  • Bradbury, Ray, Something Wicked This Way Comes
  • Brandner, Gary, The Howling
  • Brite, Poppy Z.
  • Browning, Robert
  • Campbell, Ramsey
  • Clark, Mary Higgins
  • Clegg, Douglas
  • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel (seminal)
  • Dante, Alighieri, The Inferno
  • De Felitta, Frank, Audrey Rose
  • Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, “The Signalman”
  • Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
  • Du Maurier, Daphne, The Birds (seminal)
  • Duncan, Lois, I Know What You Did Last Summer
  • Eddy, Jr., C. M.
  • Ehrlich, Max, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud
  • Faulkner, William, “A Rose for Emily”
  • Farris, John
  • Finney, Jack, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  • Fowles, John, The Collector
  • Gilbert, Stephen
  • Golding, William, Lord of the Flies

Nathaniel Hawthorne

  • Hawthorne, Nathaniel (seminal)
  • Irving, Washington, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
  • Jackson, Shirley, The Haunting of Hill House (seminal), “The Lottery”
  • Jacobs, W. W., “The Monkey’s Paw”
  • James, Henry, “The Turn of the Screw”
  • James, M. R.
  • Kafka, Franz, The Metamorphosis
  • Keene, Brian

Stephen King

  • King, Stephen (seminal)
  • Koontz, Dean (seminal)
  • Laimo, Michael
  • Le Fanu, Sheridan
  • Levin, Ira, Rosemary’s Baby (seminal)
  • Ligotti, Thomas
  • Little, Bentley
  • Lovecraft, H. P. (seminal)
  • Machen, Arthur
  • Marasco, Robert, Burnt Offerings
  • Matheson, Richard
  • McCammon, Robert
  • Milton, John, Paradise Lost
  • Oates, Joyce Carol

Flannery O'Connor

  • O’Connor, Flannery (seminal)
  • Onion, Oliver, “The Beckoning Fair One”
  • Peck, Richard, Are You Alone in the House?
  • Peretti, Frank E. (seminal)
  • Perkins, Charlotte, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
  • Pike, Christopher

Edgar Allan Poe

  • Poe, Edgar Allan, Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque (seminal)
  • Polidori, John William, The Vampyre
  • Preston, Douglas and Lincoln Child
  • Price, E. Hoffman
  • Quinn, Seabury
  • Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho
  • Rice, Anne
  • Rollins, James
  • Saul, John
  • Shakespeare, William, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet (seminal)
  • Shan, Darren

Mary Shelley

  • Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (seminal)
  • Simmons, Dan
  • Smith, Clark Ashton

Robert Louis Stevenson

  • Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (seminal)
  • Stine, R. L.

Bram Stoker

  • Stoker, Bram, Dracula (seminal)
  • Straub, Peter
  • Tem, Steve and Melanie
  • Tryon, Thomas
  • Twain, Mark, “A Ghost Story” (seminal)
  • Van Vogt, A. E., “The Black Destroyer”
  • Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Faust
  • Wakefield, H. Russell
  • Wallace, Edgar, King Kong (seminal)
  • Walpole, Horace, The Castle or Otranto (seminal)

H. G. Wells

  • Wells, H. G. (seminal)
  • Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (seminal)
  • Wilson, Colin
  • Wordsworth, William, the “Lucy” poems
  • Wyndham, John, The Village of the Damned (seminal)

* Although what one considers to be a "seminal work" is apt to be controversial, the term as it is used in this post is attributed to literary works that have had a lasting importance upon the horror genre or that proved innovative in having established a new direction for succeeding works in the same genre or in expanding its subject matter.

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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