Horror, Past and Present

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Jib Fowles, professor emeritus of communications at the University of Houston, three “stylistic features” influence the presentation of the fifteen “basic needs” he identifies in Mass Advertising as Social Forecast: “humor . . . celebrities . . . [and] time imagery, past and future.” History, traditions, and nostalgia, he says, are rich sources of such imagery, often tying in with such basic needs as the need to achieve, the need for guidance, the need for aesthetic sensations, and the need for guidance. This post discusses the use of past and future imagery in horror fiction.

Typically, imagery of the past and future are featured, mainly for two reasons.

Certain horror stories fit a five-part plot paradigm:

1. A relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting is explored.
2. A series of bizarre incidents occur.
3. The protagonist learns the cause of these incidents.
4. Armed with this knowledge, he or she eliminates the source of the bizarre incidents.
5. The status quo returns.

In presenting images of the past and future, the relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting of the present is explored. Stephen King adopts this approach in 'Salem's Lot, as readers follow a newspaper delivery boy through the town as he negotiates his route, the narrator offering comments upon the residents of the community. Not only does this approach describe the normal routines of everyday life in 'Salem's Lot, but it also allows King to introduce both his novel's setting and a good number of the characters who will appear in his story.

In motion pictures, novels, and short stories alike, as opposed to the still images which occur in print advertisements, time is fluid, rather than static. The present is always becoming the past, just as the future is always slipping into the present and then into the past. In movies, time is a stream, not a puddle.

In 'Salem's Lot, as the action is described, the scene occurs in the present, but, of course, as the story progresses, this opening scene has occurred in the past.

In addition to using past-future imagery to show the relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting of the present, horror fiction also often uses imagery of the past and the future to imply cause-and-effect relationships between present and past events. This use of such imagery is widespread in horror novels and movies, as it is in every other narrative and dramatic genre.

Pyscho starts with imagery of the present, as the audience is introduced to Marion Crane, who, having absconded with her employer's money, is forced by a downpour to rent a room at the out-of-the-way Bates Motel. She attracts the attention of motel keeper Norman Bates, which arouses his mother's ire, and she stabs Crane to death as the motel guest takes a shower in her room. Bates cleans up the murder scene and disposes of Crane's body.

In a future scene, near the end of the movie, the audience learns that, in the past (i. e., before the events shown in the movie), Bates developed a split personality as a result of his mother's psychotic emotional manipulation of her son. She'd projected her own sexual insecurities onto her Bates, whom she punishes, even after her death, as a personality whom he's internalized to the point of dressing, speaking, and acting as she did, as, in his mind, he becomes her. In a sense, it's she who committed Crane's murder (and that of a detective investigating Crane's disappearance); Bates covers up “her' crimes, an accessory after the fact.

Although psychologists continue to debate the true nature of Bates's mental illness (as though he were a real person), the murderer upon whom he is based, Ed Gein, was described, by the psychologists and psychiatrists who examined Gein, as a “schizophrenic” and a “sexual psychopath” who suffered from an 'abnormally magnified attachment to his mother.” After his arrest, Gein was ruled “legally insane” and spent the rest of his life in mental institutions, first Wisconsin's Central State Hospital and then the Mendota Mental Institute in Madison.

Michael Myers, the “Shape” in the Halloween film franchise, is psychotic as well, claiming to hear voices which command him to “hate people.” He dreams of centuries-old incidents that took place during the Celtic feast of Samhain, during which “a disfigured fifteen-year-old boy named Enda who, after being rejected by his true love Deirdre, brutally murdered her . . . on what would later be called Halloween night.”

In the original movie's opening scene, as present events unfold, Myers murders his older sister, Judith, while she has sex with her boyfriend, Danny, instead of babysitting Michael.

Later, (i. e., in the future) his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, seems to believe that Michael is a sociopath full of “evil”:

I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left: no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this . . . six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and . . . the blackest eyes—the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply . . . evil.

The odd “diagnosis,” part psychological, part theological, and grounded in a strange mix of social science and religion, captures Loomis's own inability to account for the boy's murderous ways. In the case of Myers, the psychiatric expert, reviewing his patient's past, seems unable, in the present, to explain the nature or origin of Myers's psychopathology.

Some of the moviemakers associated with the franchise seem to have understood Myers better than Dr. Loomis. Daniel Farrands, who wrote The Curse of Michael Myers, regards the character as a sexually repressed, incestuous “deviant” who, in having killed Judith and in killing other women who resemble his older sister, seeks to murder her again and again. However, unable to stop at this point, because of Myers's seeming ability to return from the dead, Farrands also describes Myers as somehow “supernatural.”

Rob Zombie focused on the development of Myers's psychopathic personality disorder, including the boy's penchant for torturing animals, one of the three factors, according to psychiatrist J. M. Macdonald, indicate violent tendencies which could be related to repeated criminal offenses, such as serial murder. (The other two factors are arson and bedwetting, or enuresis.) When two or all three factors appear, Macdonald considers them to indicate such violent tendencies. However, Macdonald's theory is controversial, some researchers suggesting it is more indicative of past parental neglect or abuse, and John Carpenter, who created the Halloween franchise, directing the original, 1978 film.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the science fiction and horror genres were sometimes combined as gigantic insects, animals, monsters, or aliens threatened the earth. Scientists were the true heroes of these movies, because it was their knowledge that empowered the protagonists to hunt down and destroy or otherwise neutralize the menaces. In these movies, the present typically showed the predatory or invasive creatures' attacks. As the stories unfolded, however, these present moments became past incidents, as the “new” present showed how scientists discovered the origin or nature of the threat and the means to eliminate it. Armed with this knowledge, the movies' protagonists then defeated the attackers and saved the planet.

One example of such a film is The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. At the outset of the film, the audience learns that an experimental explosion of an atomic bomb north of the Arctic Circle has awakened a 200-foot-long carnivore, the Rhedosaurus. Scientists later speculate (i. e., in a subsequent, “future” scene) that the animal, moving south along the Canadian-US eastern seaboard, is returning to the site at which fossils of its species were first located. Army troops' attempts to kill the beast are ineffective, although a rocket burns a hole through the predator's throat, causing it to retreat into the ocean. During its flight into the sea, its blood infects the population of New York City with a deadly disease. Unable to kill the dinosaur with an explosion or by fire, without further spreading its disease, the military fires a radioactive isotope into its wound, and the poisoned Rhedosaurus dies.

The use of imagery of the past and present appeals to several of the basic needs Fowles identifies, including the need to satisfy curiosity, the need to escape, the need to feel safe, and the need for guidance. It seems highly likely that such appeals attract horror movie audiences and horror novel readers as much they do consumers who peruse the print advertisements in which these same appeals are evoked.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Prominence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles, we all need to feel “admired and respected, to enjoy prestige and high social status.” Such a need is represented by “distinction” and by being of high social rank. Although prominence may not include wealth, a prominent person is apt to be perceived as “classy.” In short, to be prominent is to stand out from the crowd.

In horror fiction, which characters stand out and why?

The heroes of horror stories seldom come readily to mind, but the villains are memorable:

Movie or Novel	Villain	Hero
A Nightmare on Elm Street (movie)	Freddy Krueger	Nancy Thompson
Desperation (novel)	Tak	David Carver
Frankenstein (novel)	Monster	Dr. Victor Frankenstein
Halloween (movie)	Michael Myers	Laurie Strode
Paradise Lost (poem)	Satan	God
Psycho (movie)	Norman Bates	Lila Crane and Sam Loomis
The Silence of the Lambs (movie)	Hannibal Lecter	Clarice Starling

Horror stories belong to the villains, even though they are often overcome by the hero or heroes at the end of the novel or movie in which they are featured. The villains make things happen; the heroes, until the end (and sometimes even then) mostly react. This observation applies to literature as old as John Milton's Paradise Lost, for which, both William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley contend, Satan is the true hero of the epic, a point of view I address in my urban fantasy novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt. The protagonist, Raven Westbrook, a turncoat witch, is discussing God's seeming indifference to the evils she and her rescuer, government agent Lloyd Edwards:

“One of the things I remember about reading the poem . . . is that the accepted criticism of the day regarded Satan as the true hero of the poem. He was made unforgettable, these critic claimed, while God was given such short shrift that he was, at best, a marginal character.”

“That's the way it seems today, too, sometimes. God keeps a low profile.”

“I said God seemed all the more impressive to me because he didn't appear directly in the epic. Readers heard allusions of God, in the dialogue of other, lesser characters, but God himself, as you put it, seemed to keep a low profile, as if he himself needn't deign to confront the evil that Satan represented.”

Raven considered his words. “Wow. I get that. What did the professor say?”

Lloyd chuckled. “I don't think he knew what to say, really. He didn't expect any thinking outside the box of received criticism. He admitted the possibility of such a point of view and, without endorsing it, moved on to the next point.”

Why do horror villains typically stand out more than the heroes who defeat them? One reason seems to be that they represent behavior, or even a way of life, that, fortunately, is alien to most of us. As a rule, we don't; stalk and kill young people who are sexually active; we cannot possess other people; we don't create monsters in scientific laboratories; we're not out to kill our sisters; we don't challenge the rule of God; we don't mount and stuff our dead mothers or kill in their names; we're not so wise to the ways of the criminal mind that we can instruct FBI agents as to how to hunt serial killers. Characters who can and do accomplish such diabolical feats are fascinating to us.

On a deeper level, characters the likes of Freddy Kruger, Tak, Frankenstein's monster, Michael Myers, Satan, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter allow us, vicariously, to see life through their eyes, to become them, in our imaginations, for a time, doing what they do. Except for sociopaths, readers and moviegoers have the capacities to empathize and sympathize, to walk a mile in another person's shoes, to get inside someone else's head, to identify with even the most vile and disgusting, heartless, cruel, and evil villains without, we hope, becoming them ourselves, although Friedrich Nietzsche, suggested we may endanger ourselves by such actions: “when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Memorable villains are Evil, with a capital “E.” There is nothing, or very little, they will not do in the interests of obtaining their own goals, whether they seek another victim, victory of God, the creation of life itself, or escape from themselves through their adoption of another personality. Because of the magnitude of their evil, as it is represented in the horrible deeds they commit, they stand out.

Finally, there is at least one other reason that such characters attain prominence: their hubris, or excessive pride, the extreme arrogance which results from their unwarranted self-regard and the self-egoistic centering of the universe upon themselves. All that matters to them are their own desires. They who are merely men (or, far less often, women) would be gods. This is the basic motivation of all bigger-than-life villains. It is the sin of Adam and Eve. As Satan tells the first couple, concerning God's prohibition of their eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God had but the fruit of the tree off limits because “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). It is the sin that leads to Lucifer's downfall:

For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:/ I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High./ Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit (Isaiah 14:14-16).

It is the sin, too, of Freddy Kruger, Tak, Frankenstein's monster, Michael Myers, Satan, Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, and the other prominent villains of horror fiction. It may also the sin of such actual villains as Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Ghadafi, and other serial killers and dictators. Herein lies the true horror and terror of the most prominent villains, both of fiction and of history.

The Horror of the Incongruous

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

When something is deemed incongruous, it is (if not amusing) often horrifying. We are not shocked or appalled by the sight of a centaur, a mermaid, a minotaur, or a satyr, largely because, although grotesque, they have become familiar to us. However, the dog with the human head that appears briefly in the remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a truly horrifying image. We’ve never been confronted with such a sight; consequently, we are shocked and repulsed by the sight of the canine body with the human head--and face. At one time, of course, the centaur, the mermaid, the minotaur, and the satyr were, likewise, horrifying creatures.

That which we deem to be unseemly, indecorous, unsuitable, inappropriate, or incongruous, we consider unfitting--but unfit for what? For our neat existential categories, in which all things must be either mineral, plant, or animal. In a world in which a plant must be a plant and an animal must be an animal, there’s no room for a Swamp-Thing. In a world in which an animal must be an animal and a human being must be a human being, there’s no place for a dog with a human head. We want our categories neat and tight. When they’re not, we react with shock and revulsion, with fear and trembling, preparing to fight or to take flight. Often, when we are in the presence of the incongruous, we are in the presence of the horrible, the terrible, the disgusting, and the fearsome.

There are many such intersections. Adolescents intersect childhood and adulthood. If they are female, they intersect girlhood and womanhood; if male, boyhood and manhood. As anyone who’s survived this period knows, adolescence--the teenage years--is fraught with horror. Many horror films capitalize on teen angst, setting their stories in high schools. Another intersection (point of incongruity) is that of the animal-human, as we have seen, which gives rise not only to the fantastic half-animal, half-human creatures of ancient mythology, Greek, Egyptian, and otherwise, but also to such horror staples as werewolves. Once-beautiful, disfigured women intersect beauty and ugliness. Cripples, especially amputees, intersect wholeness and injury, just as victims of plagues intersect health and sickness. Ghosts and other revenants, including vampires and zombies, intersect the worlds of the living and the dead. Seemingly normal men, such as Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, or John Wayne Gacy, like Norman Bates, intersect sanity and madness.

Like Bifrost, the rainbow Bridge of Norse mythology, such points of incongruity unite two worlds, or polar opposites. One is normal or acceptable; the other is abnormal or improper. Unlike Bifrost, however, these points of intersection are themselves considered undesirable, repelling rather than attracting travelers. Why? They upset the applecart. They blur the categories we’ve established that divide and subdivide our world and our experience, thereby calling into question our understanding of both our environment and ourselves--in short, nature itself. If we don’t know as much as we thought we knew about the universe, maybe we don’t really comprehend it at all. If there are “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of” in our “philosophy,” as Hamlet tells Horatio, perhaps the cosmos is an alien place. It may indifferent to human beings and their fate, as H. P. Lovecraft suggests, or it may even be hostile to us, as H. G. Wells and others have implied.

If we understand the universe, we are at home in it. If we don’t understand it, we are less at home in it. Maybe we are not at all at home in it. It’s hard to feel at ease and comfortable when one is always looking over one’s shoulder for a lamia or an alien life form that might not be recognizable to us as intelligent, or even as alive--until it’s too late. That’s the horror of the incongruous, of that which doesn’t quite fit our view of things, our understanding of how things are and are ‘sposed to be.

Writing the Murder Mystery

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Typically, the story starts in media res, with the discovery of a body. Early on, perhaps in the second chapter, the detective is introduced. He or she is often slightly eccentric, unassuming, and of superior intellect, although he or she may disguise his or her intellectual superiority in various ways. During the course of the investigation, the detective discovers various clues and red herrings as he or she examines evidence and unofficially deposes suspects. Finally, the detective learns how and why the murderer committed the crime, identifies the killer, and an arrest is made.

To plot the story, the writer may begin with character (the killer, the victim, the detective, or a supporting character, such as a suspect or an eye witness); with scene (the when and the where of the murder); with the crime and its commission; with the motive (or motives) for the murder; or with the means by which the murder was committed. Eventually, all six of the following questions should be answered in a single sentence:

Who?
What?
When?
Where?
How?
Why?

Here are three examples, one fictional and two actual (but the actual ones could be fictionalized as novels or movies)*:

Adrian Monk [who] fingers a Mexican coroner [who] as the culprit who faked the cause of death (midair drowning) [what] of a parachutist [who] in order to lure the consulting detective south of the border so he (the coroner) could engineer Monk’s death [why] after Monk had tarnished the coroner’s professional reputation [when].

Three years ago [when], Casey Anthony [who] (allegedly) kills [what] her three-year-old daughter Calley [who] by drugging and asphyxiating her [how] in Orlando, Florida [where], so she (Casey) [who] can resume her carefree, single, party girl lifestyle [why].

After his mother dies [when], Ed Gein [who] shoots [what] Bernice Worden [who] in her hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin [where], so he can use her body as food, clothing, and decorations [why].

*Actually, Gein has been the subject of a movie, Ed Gein (2000), starring Steve Railsback and Carrie Snodgress and directed by Chuck Parello.

Dinner Parties

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

One way to devise plots is to picture people sharing a meal at a restaurant. The diners could be a man and a woman, two men, or two women. Something as simple as the sex of the diners may suggest storylines. A man and a woman could be involved in a romance; two men could be business rivals; two women could be lifelong friends. Any number of other diners is fair game, too, of course. In fiction, what binds a relationship together, whether the nature of the relationship is, for example, one of romance, rivalry, or friendship, is conflict. As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren point out in Understanding Fiction, “no conflict, no story.”

More than two can dine together at the same table. The addition of a third diner complicates the plot. The number of combinations of characters increases from three (two men, a man and a woman, two men, or two women) to six: a man and two women, a woman and two men, two men and a woman, two women and a man, three men, or three women. What’s on the menu? As always, conflict. Once again, in some cases, the combination of diners itself may suggest the nature of the conflict itself in which the diners are involved.

For example, let’s say that our combination of diners consists of one man and two women. I intend the dining scenario to be an analogy. The restaurant = the setting; the diners = the characters. The menu = the conflict. What the diners say and do during their meal = the dialogue and the action, respectively. The whole dining experience = the story. However, in this example, involving one man and two women, the setting could be an actual restaurant and the characters actual diners.

Imagine that the story starts with just two of the characters, Alex and Beth, present. However, three places have been set, because, as Beth informs Alex, she has invited someone else to join them. Perhaps she is vague about the other person’s identity, referring to him or her as “an old friend” or “a mutual acquaintance.” The occasion of the meal might be the celebration of Alex’s and Beth’s anniversary. They might recall the times that they have shared as a married couple--those that were amusing, challenging, enjoyable, adventurous, and romantic. Their reminiscences might include the times they have shared with their children over the years of their marriage.

Toward the end of their meal, Alex might profess his deep and abiding love for Beth, just before the couple is joined by the mysterious third party whom Beth has invited to join them--Alex’s second wife, Cynthia. Alex is a bigamist, and both Beth and Cynthia, having discovered their mutual husband’s secret, have agreed to confront him together concerning his matrimonial betrayals.

The idea for this story is based on the life of Charles Kuralt (1934-1997). A television journalist, Kuralt is best known, perhaps, for his distinguished career with CBS, and especially for his series On the Road with Charles Kuralt, which aired as segments of The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. He traveled the nation, filming sentimental and nostalgic interviews with everyday Americans, offering viewers a sort of Norman Rockwell vision of the country and its citizens that proved immensely popular with viewers and earned him two Peabody Awards. After he died, however, it came to light that Kuralt had, in effect, had two marriages, one legitimate and the other the result of common law, and had had children by both wives:

But two years after his death, Kuralt's personal reputation came under scrutiny when a decades-long companionship with a Montana woman named Pat Baker was made public. Kuralt apparently had a second, "shadow" family with Baker while his wife lived in New York City and his daughters from a previous marriage lived on the eastern seaboard. Baker asserted that the house in Montana had been willed to her, a position upheld by the Montana Supreme Court (“Charles Kuralt,” Wikipedia).

The journalist’s actual life, it was clear, had been at odds with the homespun, morally upright subject matter of his series, and his reputation never recovered from the bigamist lifestyle that he had led.

Kuralt’s victims--his two wives--never met over dinner, with or without him, but the possibility of their having done so could inspire a story such as the one that I envision here. Again, such characters need not meet in a restaurant. The confrontation might take place in a less hospitable and far more dangerous environment, the two women having conspired to kill their two-timing husband after confronting him about his years-long infidelities. The analogy of dinner as a story is intended as a way of setting the stage, not the table.

In using this technique, a writer should also assign a vocation to each of his or her characters. Giving those who attend the dinner party different vocations could, in and of itself, suggest interesting possibilities for plot, character, and conflict. There are quite a few possible combinations even when three characters share the same general vocation. For example, three business rivals might each be the chief executive officer, or CEO, of his or her respective company, with one attempting a hostile takeover of his rivals’ businesses; the three may wish to establish an illegal monopoly by secretly fixing prices for the goods or services that they provide; the trio may be conspiring to “steal” the natural resources of an emerging nation; the threesome may be in cahoots against a foreign government’s attempts to control their market through tariffs or even military means. . . . the list goes on and on.

Once a writer has worked out the appetizer, the entrée, and the desserts of the story’s menu, the story itself can begin, possibly in media res, as, say, an army of mercenaries attacks a South American nation guarding the rain forest habitat of the rare species of plant that a pharmaceutical company needs (and can obtain nowhere else) for a new drug that cures the disease of the writer’s choice. At first, the mercenaries, wearing the uniforms of an adjacent nation, might be taken for actual troops of the neighboring state. As a result, war could loom between the two countries. Perhaps this was the real goal of the mercenaries’ attack. The companies financing their paramilitary operation might have wanted to instigate a protracted war against the two countries so that their own collection of the plant they need could proceed apace as the nation whose resources they are plundering is occupied with the war it is waging with its “aggressor.” The story would progress from this point, perhaps after another “dinner” among the business executives or other parties to stimulate ideas for further plot development.

The same process (a dinner between a couple or among a group of parties) can work as well for horror as for any other genre of fiction. Grave robbery was once big business. Fresh corpses were in high demand among medical schools whose professors wanted to use actual cadavers for dissection in anatomy classes despite religious and sociopolitical prohibitions upon such uses of the dead. There was a demand for dead bodies, both male and female, but no supply--until enterprising grave robbers stepped forward, pickaxe and shovel in hand to fill in--or, I should say, to uncover--the gap. Now that such sanctions have ended and men and women donate their bodies to medical school students to slice and dice--posthumously, of course--grave robbery has gone out of fashion, pretty much, even among desperadoes.

There are a few exceptions, though. Imagine Ed Gein, Jack Hughes and “Big Jim” Kennally, and Molly and Clayton Daniels having g dinner together. Entrepreneurial madmen that they were, they might find some reasons for digging up the dead even when there isn’t a large demand for their, uh, services. In fact, they actually did find reasons for doing so. Gein robbed graves so he could skin female corpses and wear their flesh as masks, vests, and leggings. After Molly came up with the idea, Clayton dug up a woman’s body to use as a stand-in for his own, and they set the corpse afire inside his car in an ill-fated attempt to fake Clayton’s own death. Hughes and Kennally conspired to steal the body of President Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. Even when a market doesn’t exist for one’s goods or services, the enterprising individual can create one, even if the market consists of only him- or herself or an aggrieved nation.

Dinner parties needn’t be moribund affairs. In fact, imaginary ones can suggest endless ideas for stories that, once conceived, can be developed in numerous ways that have nothing to do with appetizers, entrees, and desserts and everything to do with characters, conflict, and suspense.

Quick Tip: Setting as Character

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Our surroundings, to a large extent, reflect who we are. After all, when one has reached the point that he or she can choose décor and furnishings that he or she prefers rather than can afford, a homeowner is apt to select items that he or she likes. For example, according to an article in USA Today, writer “Dean Koontz’s home office is filled with things he treasures.”

What might an author who has written in such genres as horror, science fiction, and action-adventure thrillers “treasure”? Koontz is reported to appreciate and enjoy not only “family photos,” but also “Japanese scroll paintings, a collection of art-deco Bakelite radios,” and, of course, “a dog bed in the corner for his [latest] golden retriever.” His “24,000-square foot” residence, which was “inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, is “notched into a hillside” overlooking Newport Beach, California, where it exudes a “Zen-like atmosphere,” despite Koontz’s own Roman Catholic faith.

According to the USA Today article, Koontz’s home “includes numerous. . . rooms of vast proportions including a 20-seat movie theater; a wine cellar that can hold 2,000 bottles; an elevator; a state-of-the-art gym; two pools; [and] a custom-designed library.” Oh, yes, it also has three bedrooms.

Koontz admits that his house is a “horrible indulgence,” one which derives, he believes, from the poverty and deprivation of his childhood, which resulted from “his cruel, ne’er-do-well alcoholic father, who physically and emotionally abused Koontz and his mother.”

Beneath the immaculate beauty and serenity of Koontz’s dream house--foundational to it, one might say--is the ugliness and brutality of his youth. However, Koontz has made much of the wealth that has financed his mansion by reprising the role of “his cruel, ne’er-do-well alcoholic father” in the guise of the many villainous psychopaths and sociopaths who serve as his novels’ antagonists. It may not be a house which is built upon blood money, but it is a residence--and a very comfortable one, at that--which is built upon Koontz’s own childhood trauma and suffering.

One’s home may or may not be a castle or even a mansion, but even the “shack” in which Koontz says he grew up (“a shabby four-room house,” USA Today tells us, which “did not have a bathroom until he was 12”) may suggest a good deal about the person who lives there. Just as the house that Koontz built as an adult exhibits his success, both as a writer and as a man, so does the “shack” in which he lived as a boy suggest the squalor and misery of his life, then, as the child of the “cruel, ne’er-do-well alcoholic father, who physically and emotionally abused Koontz and his mother.”

It also suggests the environmental forces which, along with one’s genetic inheritance, helps to shape and mold the child, who, as William Wordsworth tells us, “is the father of the man.” In Koontz’s case, his deplorable childhood catapulted him to fame and fortune, rather than to infamy and poverty and to love, rather than hatred, for his fellow man (and, of course, golden retrievers). Koontz’s success is a testament to the greatness of his heart.

Among Ed Gein's "treasures"

Such is not always the case, of course. Ed Gein, the basis for such characters as Psycho’s Norman Bates, Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, is a case in point. Gein’s mother was a stern, disapproving religious fanatic who could have been (but was not) the model that Stephen King used for Carrie White’s mother. While she was yet alive, to physically and emotionally abuse her son, the farmhouse in which Ed lived, with her and (until their deaths), his father (who was, like Koontz’s father, a “cruel, ne’er-do-well alcoholic father, who physically and emotionally abused” Gein “and his mother”) was fairly neat and orderly. However, Gein’s father died, and then Gein, it is believed, murdered his elder brother, leaving him alone with his mother in the remote farmhouse near Plainfield, Wisconsin, where whatever was festering inside Gein developed into a full-blown psychosis characterized by schizophrenia.

Following the death of Gein’s mother, the farmhouse became a horrific parody of its former self, with Gein decorating the walls with masks cut from the faces of the dead bodies he exhumed. He used human skulls for soup bowls. He upholstered chairs with human skin. He adorned the posts of his bed with his victims’ skulls. There were other horrors, too: noses, pieces of human bone, human heads, salted labia, refrigerated organs, lips on a string.

A grave robber, Gein, who was also both a transvestite and an aspiring transsexual, dressed in a vest that sported a female cadaver’s breasts, leggings of flesh, and a mask that had once been the face of one of the 40 dead women he’d exhumed from local cemeteries between 1947 and 1952.

The “house of horrors,” as Gein’s residence became known, was not the only site on the farm that displayed the horrors of its resident’s madness. The shed out back contained a decapitated female corpse that, split down the abdomen, from throat to pubes, was “dressed out” like a “deer, as John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker observe in their 1988 study, Obsession: The FBI's Legendary Profiler Probes the Psyches of Killers, Rapists, and Stalkers and Their Victims and Tells How to Fight Back (367–368).

One of the differences between Koontz and Gein was certainly their mothers. According to Koontz, his mother sought to protect him from his father, often taking the brunt of his physical abuse to protect her son from her husband’s drunken violence, and she showed her son the love that his father denied him. An uncle was also a father figure in Koontz’s life, providing an example, Koontz confesses, of how a man should act.

Gein’s mother was not protective or loving. Instead, she herself was cruel and abusive, and there was no man in Gein’s life from whom he could learn the lessons in manhood that Koontz learned from his uncle. Sadly, the community didn’t pay Gein much mind, except when his neighbors had use for a handyman or Gein was purchasing supplies from one of their stores. Another difference between Koontz and Gein, of course, lies in the temperaments and characters of the men, Koontz and Gein, themselves--in their genetics, yes, but, also, it seems, in their souls.

Ed Gein's "House of Horrors"

This difference, perhaps the critical one, is mysterious and, it may be, inexplicable. Nevertheless, such mysteries themselves can inspire tales of terror, as Koontz points out in How to Write Best-Selling Fiction (1981). Explaining to readers how his ideas for stories are sometimes teased out by his writing a series of narrative hooks (“gripping opening” paragraphs or sentences), Koontz cites the following as the one that inspired him to write A Voice in the Night:

“You ever killed anything?” Roy asked.

He let his imagination play with the sentence, and, Koontz says, “for reasons I can’t explain, I decided that Roy was a boy of about fourteen,” and, before long, he’d roughed out a two-page outline of his novel, after which, he says, “within minutes I knew I was writing a novel about the frightening duality of human nature, about the capacity for good and the capacity for evil, both of which exist in every man and woman” (66-68). His was a familiar storyline, for it was one he’d seen played out before him by his virtuous mother and sadistic father every day of his childhood.

Even when a home is not a house, but a hotel, for instance, as the Overlook Hotel becomes for Jack Torrance and his family, wife Wendy and son Danny. Like Koontz’s father and many of his novels’ own antagonists (and like Gein’s father), Torrance is also a sadistic alcoholic failure. In fact, it is violent temper that has cost him his previous position as a teacher at a preparatory school and the reason that he must accept the job of becoming the Overlook Hotel’s winter caretaker that is offered to him at the outset of the novel. The fact that his behavior has resulted in his family’s displacement from their home and their relocation to a hotel seems to symbolize the spiritual homelessness to which Torrance has subjected not only himself but his wife and child as well and the tenuousness of their lives, both as individuals and as a family. Of course, things deteriorate even more, going from bad to worse in short order, as, no doubt, King’s own childhood did when his father abandoned him, his older brother, and his mother to poverty and hardship when King was two years old.

In Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, Tony Williams argues that The Exorcist’s Regan MacNeil “misses her absent father” and “resents” her mother’s “involvement with. . . Burke Dennings,” whose “foul-mouthed, sexually explicit nature influences her” (107). The family’s Georgetown townhouse suggests that Regan’s mother, Chris, an actress, seeks the good life, as it is defined by the materialistic, rather predatory society in which she lives, even at the expense of her daughter’s welfare and happiness, making Regan ripe pickings for the devil who will soon possess her, causing the preadolescent girl to act out some of the “sexually explicit” behavior about which Dennings speaks. In this case, the affluent, well-appointed townhouse of the up-and-coming actress contrasts sharply with the cost of such affluence which is born by the homeowner’s daughter.

Likewise, “Flowers in the Attic depicts family misfortunes following [the] father’s death and their arrival at Foxworth Hall, the domain of their maternal grandparents,” Williams observes: “Speaking of Foxworth Hall as ‘grandfather’s house,’ she [Cathy Dollanganger] recounts the domain’s effect on her, ‘I always remember even my first impression was one of fear and wonder. . . lost childhood, innocence shattered and all our dreams destroyed by what we would find,’” and her older brother Corey “immediately recognizes” the house “as a domain of witches and monsters.” The children are right, for they are soon imprisoned in the attic, where their only source of light is “sunshine through a barred window” (264-265).

Marion Crane, of Psycho, wants the domestic bliss of simple everydayness, as represented, in her dreams, by her own “house with my mother’s picture on the wall and my sister helping me to broil a big steak for the three of us”; instead, she gets Norman Bates, dressed up like his dead mother, dead animals stuffed and mounted on the wall of the Bates Motel office, and a knife in her shower. The harsh reality of her life (lived on the lam after absconding with her employer’s money to finance a life with her married boyfriend) is far removed from the one of her dreams, a point which is hard to miss, with her blood swirling down the drain in her shabby room at the dilapidated Bates Motel.

The absence of the father or the presence of a cruel and abusive father are only some of the themes that may result from childhood, and, as the example of Ed Gein (and Carrie White) indicate, the mother can be as culpable as the father in abusing his or her parental responsibilities. Whatever the theme, however, setting has, in the form of residences, often mirrored, and, indeed, has sometimes symbolized, the state of residents’ minds. It has done so since Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (and before), and it is likely to be a handy convention for implying the same sort of abusive pasts, madness, and mayhem that continues to produce unsettling, even horrifying, effects in the present.

Your own character, whether he or she is the story’s protagonist or antagonist, may not live in the “shack” in which Koontz grew up or the “house of horrors” that Gein’s residence became, but it should be distinctive and, more importantly, it should mirror, or even symbolize, his or her past or present mental state and, perhaps, suggest the forces that helped, for better or for worse, shape the man or woman he or she is today. So, next time you’re considering your story’s setting, ask yourself where your characters live and what their houses look like, inside and out. Make sure that setting reflects character, the way it often does in everyday life.

The Monster’s Lair: Setting As Psychology

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

The monster’s lair is the antithesis of home sweet home. It is the home turned inside out and upside down. For most people, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. A refuge from the callous indifference of others, from petty tyrants with petty agendas, from malicious coworkers who will do anything to get ahead (as they conceive the climbing of corporate and social ladders to represent), and a place where one can, without apology or pretense, be one’s true self, unmasked and undressed, home has long been the closest thing to paradise left on earth. The monster’s lair destroys all that is home, concerting it into a hell on earth wherein monsters, not loved ones, dwell.


As is often the case with horror fiction, Beowulf, which, in many ways, is the prototypical horror story, provides a superb example of the monster’s lair as the antithesis of home sweet home. A foil, as it were, to the Danish warriors’ mead hall, Heorot, Grendel’s lair is remote. It is isolated. It occupies land that is inhospitable and undesirable. The Danes’ hall, on the other hand, is central to the community, a place of camaraderie, a place where each warrior is respected and accepted by his peers.

Grendel, a descendant of the exiled, murderous Cain, lives apart from human society. A monster who is sometimes described as a demon and sometimes as a troll, he is fierce, fearsome, fearless, and ferocious. He is quick and powerful, and he is motivated by his envy of the fellowship of the Danes, from which he and his kith and kin have been excluded. Ostracism and banishment have taken their toll upon his soul, and he seeks to avenge his having been denied even the possibility of society and friendship by taking from the Danes that which they (and God) have denied to him.

The Danes, on the other hand, live in a society that is based upon courage, strength, fellowship, kinship, and a sharing of the spoils of war taken in victorious battle. Headed by a king, the Danish society operates by sharing the wealth captured from defeated tribes; in return for a share of the spoils of war, the Danish warriors, or thanes, are loyal to their liege. Therefore, their society is as much based upon sharing wealth as it is upon the attributes of the warrior, a warriors’ code, and the bonds of family relationships and friendships. The sharing of the wealth allows all fighting men a stake in the fortunes and the affairs of their state and, as such, is a symbol of respect and honor extended by the king to his followers who make it possible for his kingdom to exist and for him to acquire booty through battle against neighboring, hostile tribes.

The characters’ beliefs and behaviors reflect their treatment by others. Grendel, who is ostracized, becomes vengeful and murderous; the Danes, who enjoy fellowship among themselves, are loyal and sociable and supportive--at least to one another. Exile is the basis of Grendel’s anti-social destructiveness; family and friendship are the bases of the Danes’ sociability, constructiveness, and culture.

The poem describes both Grendel’s lair and Heorot; the descriptions themselves demonstrate the vast differences in monstrous Grendel’s stark, barren haunt and the bright, warm hall of mead in which the Danes enjoy friendship and fellowship.


Grendel’s abode is described in the following lines of the poem, when Beowulf, having killed Grendel earlier, now enters the monster’s lair to fight his vanquished foe’s mother:

. . . They dwell apart
among wolves on the hills, on windswept crags
and treacherous keshes, where cold streams
pour down the mountain and disappear
under mist and moorland.

A few miles from here
a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
the water burns. And the mere bottom
has never been sounded by the sons of men.
On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:
the hart in flight from pursuing hounds
will turn to face them with firm-set horns
and die in the wood rather than dive
beneath its surface. That is no good place.
When wind blows up and stormy weather
makes clouds scud and the skies weep,
out of its depths a dirty surge
Is pitched towards the heavens. . . .

[Beowulf] . . . discovered the dismal wood.
mountain trees growing out at an
angle above gray stones: the bloodshot water
surged underneath. . . .

. . . The water was infested
with all kinds of reptiles. There were writhing sea-dragons
and monsters slouching on slopes by the cliff,
serpents and wild things such as those that often
surface at dawn to roam the sail-road
and doom the voyage. Down they plunged,
lashing in anger at the loud call
of the battle-bugle. An arrow from the bow
of the great Geat-chief got one of them
as he surged to the surface. . . .

. . . [Beowulf] dived into the heaving
depths of the lake. It was the best part of a day
before he could see the solid bottom.

. . . A bewildering horde
came at him from the depths, droves of sea-beasts
who attacked with tusks and tore at his chain-mail
in a ghastly onslaught. The gallant man
could see he had entered some hellish turn-hole
and yet the water there did not work against him
because the hall-roofing held off
the force of the current. . . .

The lair is also described in a prose version of the poem:

They occupy a secret land, wolf-haunted slopes, windswept crags, dangerous swamp tracks where the mountain stream passes downwards under the darkness of the crags, water under the earth. It is not far from here, measured in miles, that the lake stands; over it hang frost-covered groves, trees held fast by their roots overshadow the water. There each night may be seen a fearful wonder--fire on the flood. No one alive among the children of men is wise enough to know the bottom. Although the trong-antlered stag, roaming the heath, may seek out the forest when driven from the field, hard pressed by hounds, he will sooner yield up life and spirit than hide his head there. That is not a pleasant place! From it a surging wave rises up black to the clouds when the wind stirs up hostile storms, till the air grows dim, the skies
weep. . . .

Then the son of princes advanced over the steep rocky slopes by a narrow path, a constructed route where only one could pass at a time, an unfamiliar way, precipitous crags, many a lair of water-monsters. . . . Suddenly he found mountain trees leaning over a grey rock, a cheerless wood; below lay the water, gory and turbid.

The troop all sat down; they saw then upon the water many of the serpent race, strange sea-dragons exploring the deep, also water-monsters lying on the slopes of the crags, such as those that in the morning-time often attend a miserable journey on the sail-way, serpents and wild beasts. They fell away, fierce and swollen with rage; they understood the clear sound, the war-horn ringing. With an arrow from his bow the prince of the Geats parted one of them from life, from its battle with the waves, when a hard warshaft stuck in its vitals; it was slower swimming on the water when death carried it off.

. . . The water’s surge received the warrior. It was part of a day before he could catch sight of the level bottom.

. . . A vast host of weird creatures harried him in the deep; many a sea-beast tore at his battle-shirt; monsters pursued him. Then the hero realized he was in some sort of enemy hall, where no water could harm him at all, nor could the flood’s sudden grip touch him because of the vaulted hall. . . .

Terrible in itself, Grendel’s lair is made all the more appalling by its sharp contrast with the comfortable, well-lighted splendor of the Danes’ mead hall, Heorot, from whose walls the monster, his mother, and their kin are banned:

[King Hrothgar] handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room
and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old--
but not the common land or people’s lives.
Far and wide through the world, I have heard,
orders for work to adorn that wallstead
were sent to many peoples. And soon it stood there
finished and ready, in full view,
the hall of halls, Heorot was the name
he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.
Nor did he renege, but doled out rings
and torques at the table.
The hall towered.
its gables wide and high. . . .

So times were pleasant for the people there. . . .Again, the same scene is described in the prose version of the poem:

[King Hrothgar] would instruct men to build a greater mead-hall than the children of men had ever heard of, and therein he would distribute to young and old everything which God had given him--except the public land and the lives of men. I have heard then how orders for the work were given to many peoples throughout this world to adorn the nation’s palace. So in time--rapidly as men reckon it--it came about that it was fully completed, the greatest of hall buildings. He who ruled widely with his words gave it the name Heorot. He did not neglect his vow; he distributed rings, treasures at the banquet. The hall rose up high, lofty and wide-gabled. . . .

If we are most at home in our homes, our homes reflect most completely and honestly who we are. However, a home is not built entirely by the homesteader. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, it takes a community to build a home. The motive for Grendel’s attack upon Heorot is clearly given in the poem:

Then, a powerful demon,
a prowler through the dark,
nursed a hard grievance.
It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall,
the harp being struck
and the clear song of the poet
telling with mastery
of man’s beginnings,
and how the Almighty had made the earth. . . .

Nor was that the first time
he [Grendel] had scouted the grounds of Hrothgar’s dwelling--
although never in this life, before or since,
did he find harder fortune or hall-defenders.
Spurned and joyless, he journeyed on ahead
And arrived at the bawn. . . .

--or, as the prose version phrases the same passage:

Then the powerful demon, he who abode in darkness, found it hard to endure this time of torment, when everyday he heard loud rejoicing in the hall. . . .

Then out of the wasteland came Grendel, advancing beneath the misty slopes; he carried the wrath of God. . . . That was not the first time he had sought out the home of Hrothgar. Never in all the days of his life, before nor since, did he have worse luck in meeting thanes in hall. . . .

The creature, bereft of joy, came on, making his way into the
hall. . . .

Exiled Grendel feels “spurned and joyless”; he envies the Danes their free and easy camaraderie. In addition, the poem suggests that it is God’s having exiled Cain, the ancestor of Grendel’s monstrous and demonic race, that has created them, perhaps as unwilling servants of the divine will:

He [Grendel] had dwelt for a time
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel
the Eternal Lord had exacted a price:
Cain got no good from committing that murder
because the Almighty made him anathema
and out of the curse of his exile there sprang
ogres and elves and evil phantoms
and the giants too who strove with God
time and again until He gave them their reward.

--or, as the prose version phrases the same passage:

Unhappy creature, he lived for a time in the home of the monster race after God had condemned them as kin of Cain. . . . Providence drove him [Cain] away far away from mankind for that crime [the murder of his brother Abel]. Thence [i. e., from the exiled Cain] were born all evil broods: ogres and elves and goblins--likewise the giants who for a long time strove against God; he paid them their reward for that.

Jumping from the medieval world of Beowulf to that of the early twentieth-century world of Ed Gein, we see that the same principles apply, despite the passing of centuries and the crossing of hundreds of miles. Although Gein lived in Plainfield, Wisconsin, rather than in Denmark, centuries later than Grendel is alleged to have lived, Gein is as much a product and a reflection of his small town community’s indifference to him as Grendel is of the Danes’ disregard for Grendel. Their homes reflect their respective ostracism, as do their crimes against the very humanity that spurns them.


His house was as jumbled, cluttered, disorganized, and full of bizarre artifacts as his mind was full of muddled, confused, and insane thoughts and impulses. The disarray is so extreme as to be all but indescribable. Piled with magazines, boxes, crates, papers, litter, newspapers, garbage, and other materials, the house was also the repository of much grimmer and more gruesome artifacts: soup bowls carved from human skulls; chairs upholstered in human flesh; lampshades fashioned of human skin and (in, one case, at least) equipped with a pull-chain to which a pair of human lips were attached; boxes of noses and labia; women’s faces, stuffed and mounted, hung upon the wall as decorations, a “mammary vest,” complete with female breasts; human organs inside the kitchen’s refrigerator; and the decapitated head of Bernice Worden, whom Gein had murdered.

Gein murdered women. He robbed graves. He cut skin from the faces of the dead and, stuffing them with paper, hung them upon his walls, as decorations. He kept a collection of noses and a collection preserved labia. He dressed in his victims’ clothing--and in their faces, worn as masks, and in a costume of “mammary vest,” gloves, and leggings, all obtained from women’s corpses. He most likely cooked and ate some of his murdered victims’ organs. He would have had sex with the cadavers, he admitted, were it not for the repulsiveness of their stench. He did all these despicable acts and more, and, yet, so little did they know the fiend in their midst, that Gein’s neighbors and acquaintances regarded him as nothing more than an eccentric, perhaps slightly mentally handicapped loner who was, they said, a good laborer and handyman. One neighbor even entrusted her children to Ed to baby sit. Such disregard is not only monstrous in itself, but, it seems, it also succeeded in helping to create a monster. Had the community truly made an effort to befriend Gein, it may have been that he would never have felt the need to find a replacement for his domineering, fanatical mother, Augusta, after her passing. Gein had no friends, though, and even the few acquaintances he made had no genuine interest in him as a human being.

The same ostracism and disregard of the community for one of its own is evident in Stephen King’s Carrie (and most of his other works); in many of Dean Koontz’s novels, particularly with regard to his female protagonists; and in the novels of many other contemporary authors. In fact, as we have pointed out in previous posts, individual, social, and even cosmic indifference is a major theme in the contemporary horror fiction. Like the headlines of newspapers around the world, a callous disregard for others who are different, powerless, difficult, or even insane produces monsters at least as much as does the sleep of reason.

Disenfranchisement, whether on an individual or a social or a national basis, breeds monsters. The beast may live in his lair, but, more often than not, it was his community, his society, or his nation who both built his hellish abode and made the bed in which he lies, plotting his revenge. A home away from home is no home at all, and such a home--or monster’s lair--may be the place in which one hangs not his hat, but another’s head.

The Horror of the Double

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do./ Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwells in me. (Romans 7:19-20)

According to psychologists, we repress many of our desires. Sigmund Freud suggests that these repressed urges can reappear in disguised versions of themselves, often as instances of the uncanny. Apparently, such thinkers suppose, we are much like a computer: the data we delete—that is, those which we intend to delete and believe that we have deleted—are actually erased only when the computer needs the hard drive space upon which the “deleted” data are stored, awaiting the moment (if it ever comes) that they are overwritten with new data. Until this happens, the “deleted” data remain, rather as a body remains, even after it has died, until, eventually, nature, in her own sweet time, recycles the cadaver’s no-longer-living constituents.

In other words, we are all doubles. There is the persona, or public face, and there is the secret self, known, sometimes, not even by our conscious selves, consisting of those impulses and interests which we have rejected (repressed and suppressed), usually because the collective voice of society—or maybe only our parents or our friends—suggested that these desires are asocial, criminal, deviant, perverse, unnatural, or otherwise undesirable.

A Casper Milquetoast could harbor an Attila the Hun (or vice versa), just as the well-mannered, well-spoken Dr. Jekyll harbored the hideous Mr. Hyde. It’s not only Peter Parker, after all, who has a secret identity. We all have skeletons in our closets—in fact, we ourselves might be those very skeletons—or, at least, the repressed self within might be.

Horror stories, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—or, for that matter, Stephen King’s The Dark Half or Dean Koontz’s Mr. Murder—are horrifying, in part, because they threaten to reveal the secret, not-so-nice second self which we have hidden away in the basements of our unconscious minds. It wouldn’t do to let anyone see the repulsive, slimy, deviant thing we harbor within, which is an unseemly and unacceptable caricature of who we truly are (or appear to be).

For different folks, the secret self is—well, different folk. For Stevenson, Mr. Hyde might have been the consequences of an unresolved moral dualism; for Wilde, homosexuality; for King, his public image as a popular writer; for Koontz, some version of his abusive, half-mad father. Whatever—or whoever—we’re hiding deep inside ourselves is apt to be partially or fully monstrous, as were the inner demons that inhabited Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Son of Sam. It’s best that they be kept under psychic lock and key. Unfortunately, sometimes the mental jails and prisons—the dungeons of the mind—fail in their mission to keep these beastly secret selves incarcerated, and they escape.

If Ed Gein’s or Charles Manson’s inner demons could get away, why not our own, someday? The possibility is more then frightening; it’s terrifying, and it is this fear of being revealed—fully revealed—for who—and what—we are that is the rock-solid foundation of stories in which the horror stems from the fear of the exposure of one’s secret, hidden doppelganger.

Sexploitation Horror Films: Sexing It Up

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Perhaps after watching one too many horror movies while experimenting with LSD, Jim Morrison, late of The Doors, chanted, “Love is sex, and sex is death, and therein lies the ultimate high.”

 

It’s a perfect mantra for horror films in which a bit of hanky panky precedes the deaths of the participants, who usually expire in a particularly gruesome and ghastly way to show the mostly teen and young adult audiences of such motion pictures that, well, “love is sex, and sex is death, and therein lies the ultimate high.”

 

For those who aren’t happy unless a movie is more than just a story and for whom horror has to have some sort of justification for its mayhem, L. Vincent Poupard offers a Freudian take on horror films’ inclusion of bodies getting physical.

 

In his article, "The Symbolism of Sex in Horror Movies,” he argues that sex participants are rebels against parental authority and that they “are most vulnerable when they are having sex” because “hormones take complete control.” As a result, the sexual partners become “oblivious to the world around them,” making themselves perfect victims of a stealthy, possibly voyeuristic, and most likely envious, monster. That’s not why sex is “symbolic,” though. According to Poupard, it’s symbolic because it represents “not paying attention” to the dictates of one’s parents. It’s dangerous, too, he says, because it’s a minefield of “sexual diseases.” 

 

Another reason that moviemakers put sex in their scenes is because sex sells. Especially in Europe, it seems, where the horror films of such directors as Jean Rollin (Zombie Lake [1980] and Oasis of Zombies [1981]); Jesus (“Jess”) Franco (Mansion of the Living Dead [1985], Nightmares Come At Night [1970], 99 Women [1969], Golden Temple Amazons [1986], Sadomania [1981]); and Joe D’Amato (Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals [1977]) are just opportunities to exploit their audiences with sleaze-disguised-as-horror. (Yes, of course, that may be all the more reason to have seen, or to see, them; that’s the whole point of sexploitation films.) 

 

As difficult as it may seem to believe, there was sex before slasher films. Even as far back as the 1940’s and 1950’s, horror movies exploited youngsters’ urge to merge. The difference between earlier and more recent films is the manner in which sex is incorporated in the plot and shown (or not shown) on the screen. In the older films, sex was mostly suggested. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is a good example. Instead of showing, close up and in person, so to speak, detailed sequences of Marion Crane making love to her paramour, the scene starts, not in media res, but after the fact, as Crane, wearing only her undies, dresses.

 

In a more recent film, Chuck Parello’s Ed Gein (2001), the opening sex scene is mild by today’s standards, with a pair of teenage lovebirds making out on a bench in the Plainfield (Wisconsin) cemetery. The action between them is restricted to some passionate kissing and to the youth’s unbuttoning of a button on his date’s blouse. 

 

They’re scared away by the sounds of Gein’s spade as he opens the grave of a recently deceased female citizen, and they hurry off, the young man zipping his fly as they vacate the premises. Most other contemporary horror films are far less circumspect, preferring to let it all hang out, as it were. 

 

Sexploitation horror films are about the sins of the flesh and the wages of this particular sin, but, even so, they require at least some narrative pretense, which is to say, a plot. Here are those of the ones we’ve mentioned in this post, just so no one can say we aren’t being fair in trashing this trash:

• Zombie Lake: Skinny dipping girls, some bikini-clad and others bare, entice a lake full of Nazi zombies. Huh? Nazi zombies?
• Oasis of Zombies: “An expedition searching for treasure supposedly buried by the German army in the African desert during WW II comes up against an army of Nazi zombies guarding the fortune” (The Internet Movie Database [IMDb]). Huh? Nazi zombies?
• Mansion of the Living Dead: Maximum nudity with minimum gore and a touch of anticlericalism thrown in for good (or bad) measure. No Nazi zombies, though.
• Sadomania: Newlyweds Olga and Michael stumble upon a desert training camp in which the trainees are enslaved women who work at a variety of odd jobs, including prostitution. Olga becomes their latest recruit. Uh oh!
• 99 Women: The movie’s tagline pretty much sums up its plot: “99 women behind bars. . . without men!”
• Nightmares Come At Night: Two topless dancers become friends; then, one of them begins to have nightmares. In her dreams, she kills people. Voyeurs--or, rather, viewers--learn the reason for the murderous dreams: the dancer is influenced by a hypnotic jewel thief who's intent upon eliminating her partners, one by one.
• Golden Temple Amazons: A woman avenges the murder of her parents by helping an expedition sack the tribe’s golden temple.
• Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals: Emmanuelle goes undercover. In a mental asylum. Where she finds a crazy girl. Who may or may not have been reared by cannibals. A visit to the Amazon will verify whether the patient is truly insane or just homesick.

Those who enjoy a bit of flesh (and necrophilia) with their blood and guts might also enjoy such sexploitation horror flicks as The Curse of Her Flesh, Vampiros Lesbos, The Kiss of Her Flesh, Tou Kui Wu Zui, Where the Truth Lies, Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Terror, and--well, there are lots and lots of them.

Insider’s Tip: Check out your favorite scream queens on Chickipedia.