Sex and Horror, Part 8: A Gallery of Sex and Horror

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

While it is not the intent of Chillers and Thrillers to titillate its readers, no series concerning sex and horror truly conveys the subgenre without a display of some of the images that have come to represent it, which is the reason that I conclude this series with some examples of such images.

Abducted by the Daleks

Angel Heart

Breeders

Bride of Chucky

Cabin Fever



Cemetery Man

Children of the Corn

Decoys 2: Alien Seduction

Dreams in the Witch House

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead

Evil Dead

Friday the 13th 2: Jason Goes to Hell

Future Kill

Galaxy of Terror

Inseminoid

Lifeforce

Night of the Demons

Nightmare on Elm Street 3

Nightmare on Elm Street 4

Outer Limits (episode with Alyssa Milano)

Possession

Re-Animator

Rosemary's Baby

Shivers

Sleepaway Camp

Species

Species 2

Spermula

Teeth

The Entity

The Hills Have Eyes 2

The Howling

The Shining

They Live

Zombie Strippers

Perhaps the most blatant example in this gallery for the inclusion of gratuitous nudity in a horror film is Zombie Strippers.  The misogynistic attitude toward women that is displayed by many of these images is also striking, suggesting that Hollywood moviemakers seem to have low regard for the female of the species, considering them to be fallen angels, "breeders" (a term that homosexual men sometimes use to describe heterosexual women), living dolls, victims of abduction and rape, playthings, transsexuals, alien monsters, food, and (even when they are dead) strippers.  However, to be fair, some directors do not find fault with women as such; rather, they find sex itself repugnant and grotesque, as the fiilms of David Cronenberg, for example, often show.

However, sex in horror is not always as gratuitious as it is in Zombie Strippers. As we have seen, it sometimes has a satirical, a philosophical, or even a religious theme.

No pun intended, but, in literature, horror fiction included, nudity is often more complex than it may appear. Frequently, it takes on symbolic significance, representing such states and conditions as human beings’ animality, vulnerability, and mortality. Sex itself, as we have seen, is often linked, in horror fiction, to perversions of, and deviations form, normal, heterosexual, genital (and generative) sex. In horror fiction, sex often involves adultery, bestiality, homosexuality, incest, transsexuality, and even necrophilia. It also sometimes features extraterrestrials, demons, witches, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and other paranormal or supernatural participants. Such behavior flaunts the will of God, as it is established by the Ten Commandments and other divine laws that are transmitted through Judeo-Christian religious traditions. In other words, such behaviors are sinful acts of disobedience to the divine will.

Indeed, sex with aliens challenges the Judeo-Christian doctrine of a great chain of being in which various creatures occupy greater or lesser levels of significance and value, with God at the apex, followed by angels, human beings, animals, and plants, in this order, for it inserts another creature, extraterrestrial beings, into his chain. Such entities may not be the equal of God, but they seem to transcend human beings. Are aliens superior or interior to angels and their fallen peers, demons? Some consider aliens to be demons in disguise, intent upon deceiving humans, as, indeed, Hamlet suspected the alleged ghost of his father might be. Whether aliens are demons or extraterrestrials, they disturb the great chain of being, because such creatures were never part of it before the skies became home to flying saucers and other unidentified flying objects.

Sex in horror fiction is also a means of introducing twists on traditional understandings and folkways. Demonic possession which also involves sexual acts, perverted or otherwise, may signify sexual conquest. As femme fatales, women, who are traditionally regarded as weak or powerless, become strong and powerful in demon or alien guise, and men, traditionally the strong and powerful ones become the weak and impotent ones. Sex can be described in mechanical, going-through-the-motions terms, especially when one or more of the participants is a robot or a cyborg. In horror fiction, sex is also often misogynistic, expressing or suggesting a fear, and, sometimes, a hatred, of women. The vagina may be described as having, or be shown to have, teeth with which it mutilates (dismembers, in both a literal and a Freudian sense) males, castrating them as they penetrate or have intercourse with them. Alternatively, the penis can be a serpent-like monster with teeth of its own, used to devour women from within.

The movies we have listed in this post depict all of these impulses, themes, and ideas and more. Sex in horror is multivalent, multidimensional, and multifaceted.

In Horror Films of the 1980s, published in 2002 by McFarland & Company, Inc., of Jefferson City, NC, John Kenneth Muir points out some of the additional concerns of sex in horror. The movie Demon Seed (1977), based upon an early Dean Koontz novel, addresses “women’s rights,” Muir says, as well as “technology run amok,” and the story, which involves “rape by [a] computer” that is “programmed by men,” denies the protagonist, Susan Harris, “control” over both “her own body” and, since it causes her to experience an orgasm, against her will, even the very “biochemical” processes of her body (467-470).

Likewise, Muir sees David Cronenberg’s Shivers as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of so-called casual sex. It is about the consequences, Muir says, of “infidelity, STDs, pedophilia,” and other perverted, deviant, criminal or otherwise incautious sexual behaviors. In the film, a parasite that resembles a phallus (or “fecal matter,” in Muir’s view), and may or may not have been inspired by the disembodied, living, often winged phalli of ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, infect hosts with an aphrodisiac-like chemical that turns men and women into promiscuous sex maniacs who further spread the parasites and their disease. Equal opportunity parasites, the phallic pests enter their hosts orally, anally, or vaginally, through both hetero- and homosexual sex acts. AIDS and other STDs, Muir believes, are the subtext to this film, which, he argues, in some ways anticipates the movie Alien.

The sex in Wes Craven’s film The Last House on the Left serves a theological, or at least a metaphysical theme. In this film, sex takes the form of the rape of a teenage girl and represents, Muir contends, an atheistic world view in which there is no God and, therefore, no purpose in life and “terrible things” can and do “happen to good people” for no reason. The movie’s “theme song,” “The Road Leads to Nowhere” suggests, Muir says, as does the futility of the religious characters’ prayers, to the movie’s theme, that there is neither an “afterlife” nor a God, and that the journey of life “ends only in death.”

Sex in horror can transcend just sex for sex’s sake, or gratuitous sex, and can symbolize social, political, economic, and even metaphysical or theological issues. Often, for Judeo-Christian readers and moviegoers, sex in horror is related to, and often critical of, human beings relationships with themselves, each other, nature, and God. Even when sex in horror is limited to psychoanalytical interpretations, it can sometimes elucidate the causes and consequences of sublimation, repression, and other alleged psychosexual mechanisms.

Sex and Horror, Part 2

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in Part 1 of “Sex and Horror,” in this and future installments of this series, my aim will be to provide my own Christian-based explanations of the same stories for which Jason Colavito, author of Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, presents Freudian accounts, supplying the psychoanalytic explanations before offering my Christian alternatives. Whether one regards Christianity itself as true or mythical is inconsequential to my enterprise, just as it is likewise irrelevant whether one accepts Freudian thought as true or mythical. Both Christianity and psychoanalysis exist and have been, and continue to be, used as tools for literary analysis, which is what matters in this situation.

As Colavito points out, “Under the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, horror is traditionally seen as primarily sexual in nature; and most criticism of the genre proceeds from psychoanalytical frameworks emphasizing castration anxieties, phallic symbols, fanged vaginas, and other Freudian baggage” (2).

A Christian interpretation, in contrast, is primarily religious in nature, its criticism proceeding from theological frameworks emphasizing human relationships, especially those between God and humanity, between humanity and God’s creation, nature, and between human beings themselves and other human beings. In short, if psychoanalysis is primarily about sex, Christianity is primarily about divine and human relationships.

In Christian interpretations of horror fiction, where sex is involved, sex is not an end in itself (or shouldn’t be), but is, rather, a means of relating the self to the other, both when the other is nature, when the other is another human being, or when the Other is God. When sex is used other than as God intends it to be used, it is misused. Misused sex is not only perverted sex, but it is also blasphemous and sinful sex, because it perverts the relationships of human beings to God, to themselves, and to nature.

It may be worth mentioning that Freudian psychoanalysis may itself be regarded, from a Christian perspective, as a sort of perversion of Christian theology. In psychoanalysis, the superego is a stand-in, as it were, for God, who lays down the law (and thus morality) through the Ten Commandments and other moral injunctions; the ego takes the place of human beings as conscious beings with wills of their own; and the id is a substitute for the devil and his temptations. Alternatively, one may think of the superego as heaven, the ego as earth, and the id as hell, the geographical or spatial correlatives to God, humanity, and the devil, or as righteousness, corrupted virtue, and sinfulness, or evil, respectively. Thus, within a Christian framework, it is possible to think of the superego, the ego, and the id as either persons, places, or things. Christian theology is at least as rich a basis for literary interpretation and criticism as psychoanalysis purports to be.

Various psychoanalytical interpretations have been offered to explain (or to explain away) Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Basically, as Colavito observes, these analyses boil down to the notions that “the vampire’s fangs represent the penis, that his bite is an oral regression of normal genital sex, and that the novel deals primarily with the Victorian anxiety about changing sex roles and the repression of sexual desire.” The author agrees that this take on the novel is “fine as far as it goes,” but contends, as do I, that “to reduce the whole of Dracula (or indeed all vampire fiction) to mere Freudian allegories of forbidden sex is simplistic and misses the themes of horror that permeate and underlie the book’s terrors” (88).

Nevertheless, as Colavito acknowledges, “there is undoubted sexual energy in the vampire’s embrace”; however, this “energy” is not associated with reproduction, and sex, as the Bible, as the Word of God, states, quite clearly, is intended to be a means of reproduction. In Genesis 1:28, God commands Adam and Eve to “be fruitful, and multiply” that they might “replenish the earth,” and any form of sex that does not have reproduction as its end is, Catholics (and many other mainstream Christian communities) contend, sinful sex, since it frustrates its divinely prescribed purpose and constitutes, thereby, a blasphemous rebellion against the divine will.

Dracula’s emphasis upon oral sex, symbolized by his biting the necks of his victims, who are both male and female, not exclusively female, transposes sex from its assigned genital locus and its assigned generative purpose to a rebellious misuse of the body. In Dracula and other vampire fiction, sex is not a means of reproduction but of subjugation through sadomasochistic predation and victimization, a preying of the strong upon the weak, of the powerful upon the powerless, of the parasite upon the host.

Not reproduction--and certainly not love--is the end; sex, as it is represented, symbolically, by the biting of the necks of victims by the fanged vampire, is all about the ability of one person, the monstrous sadist, to subjugate another, the persecuted masochist. It is a denial of the interpersonal and mutually respectful relationship between equals that Jewish theologian Martin Buber describes in his insightful book, I and Thou; sex, as depicted in Dracula, is not an “I-thou,” but an “I-it” relationship, in which the predatory and sadistic vampire elevates his own value by reducing the value of the other person to that of a mere object. A woman (or, sometimes, a man) becomes a thing--food--to be exploited by the rapacious raptor. Vampire sex is dehumanizing sex; it is also blasphemous and sinful because it perverts the nature and intended purpose of sex itself, as instituted and defined by God.

Perhaps this is why Dracula and other vampires are depicted as fearing crucifixes and crosses. These artifacts symbolize both the sacrificial death of Christ Himself and represent the self-sacrificial life that God has shown humanity, through Christ’s own example, that He expects of all human beings. However, vampires’ very way of life is all about self-aggrandizement and the elevation of the self at the expense of others. As Christ redeemed humanity through the shedding of His own blood, vampires seek to increase their own vitality by the shedding of the blood of others. Their lives are exact opposites of the life of Christ, counterexamples, as it were, of His example. In beholding the crucifix or the cross, these monsters behold their own iniquity and are reminded of the selfish and self-serving lives they lead. These artifacts are reminders, too, of the vampires’ own eventual damnation as sinful beings whose very lives both pervert the ways of God and mock their Creator.

In short, as demonic creatures, vampires are hell-bound sinners.



Note: In Part 3 of “Sex and Horror,” I will take up the psychoanalytical and Christian implications of another horror icon--ghosts.

Sex and Horror

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

In a caption to a photograph depicting Lon Chaney as Erik in The Phantom of the Opera, Jason Colavito, author of Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, quotes David J. Skall’s observation that the actor’s “portrayal” of the characters is suggestive of a “ruined penis” (207).

This sort of statement might strike one as odd, to say the least, especially if he or she is unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, the invention of Sigmund Freud, which uses mythology, both classical and Freud’s own personal brand, to supposedly analyze human thoughts, feelings, unconscious impulses, and behavior. For those who do know a thing or two about psychoanalysis, including how fanciful it frequently is, such a statement, although perhaps incredible, is not as surprising. Indeed, as Colavito points out, psychoanalysis has been used (some would say misused) to explain (or to explain away) not only literature in general, but also the horror genre in particular:

Indeed, when we think of horror at all, we think of it in the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, positing a range of explanations for the “true” meaning of horror stories, especially psycho-sexual explanations. This is the most popular school of thought about horror, producing works with titles like Walter Evans’s “Monster Movies: A Sexual Theory” (Monsters reflect “two central features of adolescent sexuality: masturbation and menstruation”), Richard K. Sanderson’s “Glutting the Maw of Death: Suicide and Procreation in Frankenstein” (Viktor reveals his fear of female sexual autonomy and his own ambivalent femininity”), and Joan Coptec’s “Vampires, Breast Feeding, and Anxiety” (“I will argue that the political advocacy of breast-feeding cannot be properly understood unless one sees it for what it is: the precise equivalent of vampire fiction”). There are many, many more than follow such Freudian views of horror (6).

Although Colavito rejects many such interpretations (“Somehow Boris Karloff’s stiff-armed Frankenstein walk never struck me as interrupted masturbation”), he does often include the psychoanalytical “explanations” for horror fiction’s characters and themes. He acknowledges that psychoanalytic theory has had a major influence on the understanding and interpretation of horror fiction, but largely, Colavito contends, because filmmakers themselves used Freudian thought as a basis for investing their films with psychoanalytical--or, at least, psychosexual--implications:

Critics have historically discussed horror films in terms of sex, and specifically Freudian psychoanalytic views of sex, whereby horror’s primary concern is a fear of sex, usually female sexuality. Thus vampires are phallic symbols or fanged vaginas; Frankenstein’s Monster [sic] a parody of birth; the wolfman anxiety over puberty; and any mutilation a playing-out of castration anxieties. But part of this is because many horror filmmakers, even as far back as the 1930s, purposely used Freudian ideas in their scripts during a wave of Freud-mania in that time. “Why should we take psychoanalysis seriously in thinking about Hollywood movies?” asked William Paul, “because Hollywood took psychoanalysis seriously” (201).

Although I am also more than a bit skeptical of Freudian claims (and, indeed, of Freudian ideas in general), I have employed psychoanalysis as a tool for exploring, if not explaining, some of the deeper psychosexual and sociosexual implications that appear to be present in The Descent, for the same reason that Colavito and Paul cite: whether credible and scientific or not, Freudian ideas have become a seemingly inescapable part and parcel of Western culture.

To exclude psychoanalytical thought as sound doesn’t mean, of course, to deny that the issues of sex and gender do not rear their heads, as it were, in horror fiction--far from it. The genre is, in fact, permeated with themes involving both sex and gender, the literature of horror just doesn’t necessarily analyze these themes along Freudian lines of thought and, even when it does do so, its analysis often also involves other than Freudian insights, implications, and interpretations.

In this article, I would like to suggest one of my own theories concerning how sex and gender, as they appear in horror fiction, may be interpreted along Christian, rather than Freudian, lines. In this view, sex and gender, as they are depicted and rendered in horror fiction, are perversions of both the natural biological drive to reproduce the species and the divine command that men and women “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28).

Colavito sees the story of Adam and Eve as “foundational” to the horror genre; it is, he contends, the “cement” that “links. . . [the] forbidden knowledge, sin, and punishment found in horror fiction” (11). In the Bible, the term “knowledge” sometimes refers to carnal knowledge, or the understanding that derives from sexual intercourse. This “knowledge” of sex and gender can become twisted, or perverted, the apostle Paul suggests:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient. . .(Romans 1:21-28).

Of course, the literature of horror is too extensive to evaluate in this (or any other manner) in as brief space as a blog article (or series of such articles) warrants, so I will undertake a compromise, providing my own Christian-based explanations of the same stories for which Colavito presents the Freudian accounts, supplying the psychoanalytic explanations before offering my Christian alternatives. Whether one regards Christianity itself as true or mythical is inconsequential to my enterprise, just as it is likewise irrelevant whether one accepts Freudian thought as true or mythical. Both Christianity and psychoanalysis exist and have been, and continue to be, used as tools for literary analysis, which is what matters in this situation.


Next: Part 2, “Sex and Horror”

The Final Girl: Transsexual? Homoerotic? We Report; You Decide

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: In this and a few subsequent posts, I summarize and comment upon essays concerning horror fiction that appear in Gender, Language, and Myth, edited by Glenwood Irons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Although some of the claims in these essays seem far-fetched (to me, at least), others appear to have some validity and even some practical application. In any case, readers of Chillers and Thrillers are likely to find that these synopses offer unusual takes on the theory and practice of writing horror fiction.

Transgender, especially transsexual, images disturb many because such pictures suggest that not only one’s sexual orientation, but also his or her very gender--and, therefore, a person’s identity as an individual--may be more fluid and flexible than people generally suppose.

Horror fiction plays with notions of both gender and sexual orientation. For example, traditionally, women, not men, have been the victims of the monster’s or the madman’s misogynistic rage, in part as Edgar Allan Poe implied, decades ago, because “the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” (“The Philosophy of Composition”).

In “Her Body, Himself,” Carol J. Clover summarizes a number of loosely related “figurative readings” (283) of “slasher films,” which “present. . . a world in which male and female are at desperate odds with one another but in which, at the same time, masculine and feminine are more states of mind than body” (Gender, Language, and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, 252).

When directors film death scenes from the perspective of the monster or the madman, the moviegoer sees what the antagonist sees; arguably, to some degree, the audience also thinks and feels as the monster or the madman thinks and feels. Such a perspective certainly invites the viewer to identify with the killer, but, according to Clover, it also invites the viewer to identify with the killer’s victim: “Just as attacker and attacked are expressions of the same self in nightmares, so they are expressions of the same viewer in horror films. . . . We are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, the horror, comes from ‘knowing’ both sides of the story” (258).

In slasher films, defined by Clover as movies in which “a psycho-killer. . . slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived” (252), the antagonist himself is often a victim of “gender confusion” and arrested development, or “infantile fury” (260-261), and “even killers whose childhood is not immediately at issue and who display no overt gender confusion are often sexually disturbed” (261). It is with this confusion, this arrested development, and this disturbance that horror films are concerned, Clover suggests.

The “gender confusion” that is often at the heart of male slashers is an effect and a reflection, perhaps, of the psychologically, socially, and, indeed, politically plastic, even protean, nature of culture itself, of culture’s own accidental (as opposed to necessary) and constructed (as opposed to given) character. Just as gender, if not sexuality, is not biologically determined but is culturally shaped, so are the other elements of civilization, such as its psychology, social communities and nations, and political structures and institutions.

The protean, variable, mutable, and, above all, synthetic nature of culture allows horror not only to exist but to shift its shape and to take on new forms--in a word, to transform. The transformative nature of culture benefits the fantastic as it is represented in cinema, too: “If the fantastic depends for its effect on an uncertainty of vision, a profusion of perspectives, and a confusion of subjective and objective,” Clover contends, “cinema is pre-eminently suited to the fantastic” (256). The transgender themes discernable in horror fiction, both printed and filmed, dovetail with the transformative nature of culture and fantastic art. Moreover, either sex is able to identify with itself or its opposite because both males and females share the “threat function and the victim function,” which “coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex” (276). Regardless of an individual’s sex, transgender perception, like “gender confusion,” is rooted, it seems, as much in nature as it is in the individual’s nurturing..

With the introduction of the “Final Girl,” who “alone looks death in the face. . . [and] finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (266), Clover sees a transformation, rather than a mere development, of the formula that Alfred Hitchcock established in his 1960 movie Psycho, a forerunner, of sorts, to the slasher genre:

With the introduction of the Final Girl. . . the Psycho formula is radically altered. It is not merely a question of enlarging the figure of Lila [Marion Crane’s sister] but of absorbing into her role, in varying degrees, the functions of Arbogast (investigator) and Sam (the rescuer) and restructuring the narrative action from beginning to end around her progress in relation to the killer. In other words, Psycho’s detective plot, revolving around a revelation, yields in the modern slasher film, to a hero plot, revolving around the main character’s struggle with eventual triumph over evil (270-271).

Like the monster or the madman, the “final girl” is also apt to blend gender. She is, Clover says, “a “boyish” figure (266), and “lest we miss the points,” she adds, “it [her masculinity] is spelled out in her name: Stevie, Marti, Terry. . . Stretch, Will” (270). If the viewer is invited to see him- or herself as both the “attacker and [the] attacked,” as both “Red Riding Hood and the Wolf,” then he or she is also invited to see him- or herself as both masculine and feminine, as both male and female, or, in a word, as transgender. In short, Clover says, “filmmakers seems [sic] to know better than film critics that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane” (275).

Clover sees a Freudian dynamic at work in the cross-gendering of the final girl. This character, she contends, is a stand-in for the adolescent male who is progressing, via the Oedipal complex, from the latent to the phallic stage of his psychosexual development. The killer represents the father, the final girl the son who fights for both his own life and his emerging manhood:

It is the male killer’s tragedy that his incipient femininity is not reversed but completed (castration) and the Final Girl’s victory that her incipient masculinity is not thwarted but realized (phallicization). . . . The moment at which the Final Girl is effectively phallicized is the moment that the plot halts and the horror ceases. Day breaks, and the community returns to its normal order (279).

Although Clover’s tone, as she summarizes these “figurative readings” of slasher films is objective to the point that the reader may assume that she herself shares these interpretations, she makes it clear, toward the end of her essay, that she finds fault with some of their assertions. She questions whether the basically “homoerotic” interpretation that views the final girl as a surrogate male adolescent struggling to realize her--or his--phallic promise in the Oedipal murder of the killer (father) can account for the enjoyment of these films by female moviegoers. Perhaps some other dynamic accounts for young women’s pleasure in witnessing “a psycho-killer. . . [as he] slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived.” However, Clover’s questions suggest that “gender confusion” is certainly an element of such movies and, probably, among such moviegoers:

Some such notion of differential understanding underlines the homoerotic reading. The silent presupposition is that reading is that there can be no male identification with the female as female, and that the male viewer/reader who adjoins feminine experience does so only by homosexual conversion. But does female identification with male experience then similarly indicate as lesbian conversion? Or are the processes of patriarchy so one-way that the female can identify with the male directly, but the male can identify with the female only by transsexualizing her? Does the Final Girl mean ‘girl’ to her female viewers and ‘boy’ to her male viewers? If her masculine features qualify him as a transformed woman (in which case the homoerotic reading can be maintained only by defining that ‘woman’ as phallic and retransforming her into defining that ‘woman’ as phallic and retransforming her into a male)? (283)

Nevertheless, Clover agrees that slasher films are basically about “gender confusion”: “The gender-identity game. . . is too patterned and too pervasive in the slasher film to be dismissed as supervenient. It seems instead to be an integral element of the particular brand of bodily sensation in which the genre trades” (286). Instead of the transsexual or homoerotic readings that are typical among Freudian film critics in their discussions of slasher films, Clover simply suggests that the final girl’s feminine-masculine characterization reflects the contemporary understanding of sex as being both fixed and determined (“a less-than interesting given,” Clover says) but gender as fluid and flexible (“theater,” Clover says):

Abject fear is still ‘gendered’ feminine. . . . By 1980, however, the male rescuer is either marginal or dispensed with altogether. . . . At the moment that the Final Girl becomes her own saviour, she becomes a hero. . . . [and] the willingness of one immensely popular genre to re-represent the hero as an anatomical female seems to suggest that at least one of the traditional marks of heroism, triumphant self-rescue, is no longer strictly ‘gendered’
masculine . . . .(298)

. . . The fact that we have in the killer a feminine male and in the main character a masculine female--parent and Everyteen, respectively--seems, especially in the latter case, to suggest a loosening of the categories, or at least of the equation ‘sex = gender’ (292).

Moreover, Clover believes that she knows what sociopolitical upheaval has caused the phenomenon of the hermaphroditic final girl; she is the product of the feminism of the 1960s and the societal changes that this movement effected:

The fact that the typical patrons of these films are the sons of marriages contracted in the 1960s or even the early 1970s leads us to speculate that the dire claims of that era--that the women’s movement, the entry of women into the workplace, and the rise of divorce and woman-headed families would yield massive gender confusion in the next generation (292).

Characterization via Tarot

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Using the Tarot deck as a shorthand system for establishing the bases of characters can be as effective as any other approach. Whether the mysticism behind the Tarot deck or the Jungian brand of psychoanalysis, which shares some of the same notions concerning human nature and the human condition as the Tarot tradition proposes, is true or even valid is debatable at best. However, fiction, by definition, is itself not true; it needs only to be true to life, or believable, and whatever approach to personality and human behavior appears plausible is likely to be acceptable to most readers. Psychology, after all, is an inexact science, with many schools of thought concerning why people behave as they do, and fiction has always been pragmatic in electing to use whatever theory, of psychology or any other discipline, might promote its own literary aims. Before psychology existed as a study, writers referenced the theory of the four humors to explain human conduct, and some students of human behavior refer, even today, to the ideas of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. Horror writers need be no different than other writers.

So, what can horror writers gain from Tarot? The positive aspects of the cards (especially those of the major arcana) provide traits useful for characterizing the good guys and gals of your narrative, while these qualities, reversed (opposed or blocked), suggest possibilities for the characterization of the bad guys and gals.

I won’t go through all 21 of the major arcana cards. Information about them is readily available. To illustrate my point, I will suggest how three of these cards could be employed to create protagonists, antagonists, and other sympathetic or unsympathetic characters.

In most stories, the protagonist is apt to be an embodiment of the Fool, who seeks a new start, embracing life’s possibilities as he (or she) embarks upon a journey, actual or figurative, sometimes without planning all that well, if at all, for the eventualities that are likely to be encountered. The Fool has a profound, albeit perhaps rather naïve, faith in the notion that he’ll be able to get by, that his needs will be fulfilled, that he will be all right regardless of how much he plans, works, or strives. In fact (especially in a horror story), he may not be, of course, and his shortsightedness and spontaneity might help to bring him to misfortune.

Reversed, the Fool is apt either to have trouble getting started upon his adventure (that is, he may suffer from the failure to launch syndrome), or he might get stuck in his ways, failing to find the inspiration that motivates him to continue the adventure he’s undertaken.

When you think about the Fool, chances are you will recall having read about him in a horror novel or seen him in a film of this genre. Gordie LaChance and his buddies, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio, the boys in Stephen King’s The Body (and the movie, Stand By Me, based upon it), come to mind.



The Sun character is the successful, triumphant man or woman who, having discovered a great truth (or maybe several great truths) about life enjoys pleasure and fulfillment. He or she enjoys his or her day in the sun.

According to Jung, the Devil archetype represents the repression of desires, impulses, and other aspects of one’s unconscious that are condemned by society.

Opposed. This character is subject to emotion and superstition and is apt to reason falsely, taking evidence out of context or reaching warped or twisted conclusions about the facts before him or her.

Blocked, the Sun character suffers from confusion, perceiving things as through a glass darkly, and he or she may have trouble interacting with youngsters.

When you think about the Sun, chances are you will recall having read about him in a horror novel or seen him in a film of this genre. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Willow Rosenberg is an example, as is Smallville’s Lex Luthor.




The Devil card does not refer to Satan or a lesser demon. Rather, this card alludes to unbridled ambition and a lust for power. He or she can be authoritative, powerful, even manipulative and controlling.

Opposed, the Devil character can succumb to temptation.

Blocked, this character is repressed and timid in the face of risk and unwilling to take chances.

When you think about the Devil, chances are you will recall having read about him in a horror novel or seen him in a film of this genre. Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau are examples.

Generating Horror Plots, Part III

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

 

A careful analysis of the storylines of motion pictures, novels, narrative poems, and short stories in the horror genre discloses recurring plot motifs, or formulae. 1. Enact revenge. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 2. Rescue a damsel in distress. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 3. Find the strange in the familiar. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 4. Bring up the past (and relate it to the present). We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 5. Conduct an experiment. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories (“The Birthmark,” “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” which we discussed in a previous post); Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, and many of H. G. Wells’ novels (e. g., The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau) and some of his short stories. Most readers are familiar with Frankenstein, although more so with the movie versions than with the expostulatory novel in which a student of science creates a monstrous human being from cadavers, from which he flees. The monster, seeking companionship, intends to kidnap a boy, but kills him instead, when he learns the boy is his maker’s younger brother, and implicates a girl in the murder. The monster then demands that Frankenstein create a wife for him, and, to protect his family, the student agrees, but, repenting, destroys his work before it is completed, whereupon the monster avenges himself by killing Frankenstein’s bride, his cousin Elizabeth, whose father died soon thereafter, of grief. The grieving groom pursues his creation to the north pole, where the monster commits suicide. In Wells’ The Food of the Gods, scientists Bensington and Redwood concoct Herakleophobia IV, a chemical growth agent that causes organisms, whether plants or animals, to grow to tremendous size. Their experiment commences with chickens, but the careless couple whom they hire to feed the fowl allow other animals to eat the food as well, with the result that giant rats, wasps, and even worms are soon terrorizing the countryside. Armed with rifles, the scientists hunt down the monstrous animals and burn down their farm. However, rather stupid for scientists, the researchers next feed children the chemical treat, producing giants whom the world fear and reject. After one of the giants is killed, the others, whom Wells labels “Children of the Food” square off for a showdown with the normal human beings who persecute them, whom Wells describes as the “Pygmies.” The hatred and fear with which the ostracized Children of the Food are treated by ordinary men and women is echoed by society’s treatment of the Marvel Comics mutant superheroes known as The X-Men. In The Invisible Man, Wells’ scientist is a man named Griffin, believing that a person might be rendered invisible by altering his refractive index to match those of the air so that his body no longer reflects light, puts his theory to the test on himself, with the result that he becomes invisible. Thereafter, he goes insane, threatening and attacking others, until he is beaten to death by a mob. His invisibility formula is lost to posterity because of indecipherable pages in his journal. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked survivor, is brought ashore by natives of a remote, uncharted island, where he discovers Dr. Moreau’s experimental attempts to create man-animal hybrids, the so-called Beast Folk. Moreau is killed by an escaped puma, and, after Moreau’s assistant, Dr. Montgomery, is later killed by the Beast Folk, Prendick lives among the hybrid creatures until he is able to escape the island aboard a ship that washes ashore, is picked up by a ship that is returning to England, and returns to homeland, having learned by the reaction of the rescuers to his tale not to tell of his experiences to others, lest he be thought insane, and adopts the pretense of having acquired amnesia concerning the time he spent as a castaway. The theme of the mad scientist has become a favorite among both science fiction and horror writers, and it underlies such additional stories as Jurassic Park (1993), Metropolis (1927), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), The Mysterious Island (1974), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Carnosaur (1993), Re-Animator (1985), The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak (1984), and many others. 6. Invade paradise. In the film version of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale comes to appreciate the home that she first disparaged, taking her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and life on their Kansas farm for granted. This is a theme common to many horror films as well, in which the true value of a person, place, or thing, be it ever so humble, is first taken for granted but, after it is threatened, (often, in the case of places, by invasion) is appreciated for, if not exactly paradise, comes to be valued. Invaders From Mars, The War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers are some of the science fiction-cum-horror films that are based upon this there’s-no-place-like-home theme. The haunted house can be an example of an invaded paradise, as it is in Poltergeist, which is invaded by demonic spirits, and another twist on this motif is that of demonic possession in which it is not a place, but a person, who is threatened or, as it were, invaded, as in The Exorcist and The Possession of Emily Rose. 7. Dig up that which has been buried (repressed). Besides concerning himself with such matters as boys’ fears of castration which he believed the sight of a vagina created in males and girls’ supposed “envy” of boys’ penises, the eclectic theorist Sigmund Freud suggested that the uncanny has a déjà vu element that is caused by the fact that unpleasant feelings which have been repressed by a person return in somewhat disguised form and seems at once both familiar and strange, and both attractive and repulsive. Be that as it may, some find the idea of repressed memories a useful springboard for the introduction of horrible and horrific incidents. Xander Harris, a character in the televisions series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sums up this view in his typically zany, but apt, “Xanderspeak,” when he tells the protagonist, Buffy Summers, in the “Dead Man’s Party” episode, “You can't just bury stuff, Buffy. It'll come right back up to get you,” just before their party is attacked by zombies. The Others (2001) is another example of this approach. After she and her children experience a series of bizarre incidents, Grace Stewart believes that her house is haunted, only to find out that the ghosts are living people and that she and her children are the true ghosts who are haunting the house. Grace had repressed the memory of having killed her own children before committing suicide. Hide and Seek (2005) also employs this tactic. Following the murder of her mother, Emily Callaway adopts an imaginary playmate named Charlie, who is actually the alter ego of her father, the murderer, who has a split personality. Emily witnessed her father’s murder of her mother, but repressed the memory of this experience by positing the existence of Charlie as her mother’s actual killer. In subsequent posts, we will continue our consideration of basic horror storylines.

Nocturnal Suicide: An Almost-Story Born of Mere Description

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

People find treetops, especially when the branches are devoid of leaves, to be eerie. A gray sky, glimpsed through twisted limbs, is rather uncanny. The foliage of a weeping willow, seen against the light of a moon in an otherwise dark night also frightens. Fog, of course, is unsettling as well. For possible explanations of why such images are disturbing to many, we could consult Dr. Freud--but, then, he’s surely bones himself by now. We will have to do the best we can ourselves, it seems.

The thick stands of trees in a forest, blocking the horizon, form a partition of sorts--a barrier that walls us inside the woods, where we do not want to be, trapping us so that we are at the mercy of the animal--the thing--howling in the darkness. The trees shut off the ambient light of the stars and the moon (if there is a moon), blinding us with the inky black of darkness, of, it seems, nothingness. The susurration of the foliage, when the trees are thick with leaves, is unnerving and strange, like unseen giants whispering about us in the dark. Surely, such beings mean us no good, else why would they be whispering? Why would they not show themselves?


The trees of the forest conspire with the forces of darkness, shutting us in and shutting other men and women out. We are not only trapped, but we are also alone--apart, that is, from others of our own kind, from our fellow men and women, from human company. Judging by the sounds we hear--the hoots and fluttering and rustling and howling--other things are present. Ethereal entities, perhaps, as well as wild animals, which mean us harm. Attacks can come from behind, from either side, from before, or even from above--or below! There could be anything in this dark, close forest of thick trees: owls, bats, snakes, wolves, even, perhaps, werewolves! Something, certainly, is howling in the distance--and the cries seem to be getting closer each time they sound.

Deprived of vision, our hearing seems to sharpen, and even the hairs on our heads and necks and arms seem able to feel the evil in the air. Something threatens us, we are sure, something hideous and bestial and fierce. A twig snaps, and our hearts faint. We tremble, fighting the urge to run, the feeling of panic that surges forth, for, if we run, we might stumble; we might fall, and then--

--it might be all over, except the pain and the seizure of terror and the bursting of our hearts.

We stand, immobilized with fear.

Overhead, the trees begin, again, to whisper, and we despair.

In the morning, when day breaks, they will come.

Seeking us.

They will find our dead bodies, stiff and cold, staring at the sky, dead of heart attacks.

They will know, at least, that no one killed us.

They will know we’ve killed ourselves.

That, at least, is what they will say. . . .