The Horrors of Psychological Warfare

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L.Pullman

In 1950s horror movies, the military was called out, on occasion, to eliminate monsters. Less frequently today, the armed forces sometimes carry out this duty. If you've ever wondered how combined forces would take out Godzilla or other monsters, the website We Are the Mighty has the answers.

 

Taking down Godzilla would involve mostly Air Force and Navy aircraft, with the Army playing a supportive combat role involving tanks. Mostly, though, ground forces would be used to evacuate civilians. For the answer to an even bigger question, check out Military.com's response to the query “Can the Navy Handle a War Between King and Godzilla?”

 

According to the same source, zombies' threats would be twofold: surprise and superior numbers. However, the Army, this time, would have the primary role and would accomplish its objective by setting up a perimeter and channeling the zombie horde into a narrow killing zone. If, for some reason, the war turned into one of attrition, the Army would still win, since troops have ample rations that can last five years, while zombies, cut off from a ready supply of human brains, would run out of food fairly soon.

 

The Army has also teamed up with both vampires and ghosts. Alerted to the fact that the Huks, Communist rebels who'd taken up positions in the Philippines, were superstitious, U. S. Army lieutenant colonel Edward G. Lansdale employed psychological warfare against the insurgents. His troops spread the rumor that an asuang (vampire) lived in the area. Then, they ambushed the last man in a Huk patrol, punched holes in his jugular vein, and drained his body of blood, before returning the bloodless corpse to the trail. When the other rebels found his body, they were convinced that the asuang had attacked him and ran for their lives. Government forces reclaimed the area. Mission accomplished!

 

The recruitment of ghosts was also successful. Aware of the superstitious belief of local enemy forces that the souls of the unburied dead were doomed to wander forever, tapes recorded by the U. S. Army featured “Buddhist funeral music followed by a girl's cries for her father.” A ghost replies to her grief with sorrow of his own, despondent that he chose to fight a war in a far-flung field of battle rather than remain with his family. Broadcast at various times, its doubtful that the enemy was fooled by them; nevertheless, they didn't like to hear the tapes, and it took a gunship to decimate the hostile ground forces. We Are the Mighty links to the chilling tape recording!

 

Check out We Are the Mighty for stories on Bigfoot, the Yucca Man, UFOs and aliens, Area 51, and other matters both supernatural and otherworldly.

Horror Movies Are Mysteries, Too

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Many horror stories are mysteries which typically follow a well-established format:

1. An unknown monster is killing people.
2. Often, as the killings continue, the protagonist, sometimes aided by friends or others, investigates; intelligence is gathered, clues are solved.
3. The monster is identified; it is known.
4. Knowledge about the monster is used to neutralize or eliminate it.
5. The status quo returns.

 

This same formula can apply to plagues:

1. An unknown disease is killing people.
2. Often, as the killings continue, the protagonist, sometimes aided by friends or others, investigates; intelligence is gathered, clues are solved.
3. The pathogen is identified; it is known.
4. Knowledge about the pathogen is used to neutralize or eliminate it.
5. The status quo returns.

 

Of course, many a detective story also follows this path:

1. An unknown murderer is killing people.
2. Often, as the killings continue, the protagonist, sometimes aided by friends or others, investigates; intelligence is gathered, clues are solved.
3. The murderer is identified; it is known.
4. Knowledge about the murderer is used to neutralize or eliminate him or her.
5. The status quo returns.
   
   
   
   
   

Where does variation come into play? The same variables that make the structure of fairy tales, as this structure is defined by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale, makes the particulars fresh and intriguing, despite the sameness of the underlying formula's structure.

What is the monster? How is he, she, or it different than others of his, her, or its kind? Physically different? Emotionally different? Behaviorally different? Volitionally different? What motivates it?

Whom are the victims? Why are they targeted? How does the monster kill them?

Where do the killings occur? Why here and now, rather than elsewhere at another time?

What theme does the story suggest, and how does it do so?

A dictionary definition can help us to answer the question, What is the monster?

A dictionary definition does two things: it classifies, or groups, and it distinguishes, or differentiates. First, a dictionary definition tells to which group the term being defined belongs. What type of person, place, or thing is it? Then, a dictionary definition explains how it differs from the other members of its group. The group is the genus; the differences, the differentia.

Monster (n.): an imaginary creature (genus) that is typically large, ugly, and frightening (differentia).

 In what way is your monster “large”? Height? Length? Weight? Strength? Intelligence? Tall? Godzilla fills the bill. Long? What about the worms in Tremors? Heavy? The Blob! Strong? There's a reason King Kong was king of the jungle on Skull Island. Intelligent? The computer in Demon Seed or, for that matter, the extraterrestrial of Species sure turned out to be to die for.

What makes your monster “ugly”? Appearance (but be specific)? Behavior? (but, again, be specific)? Lack of emotion or twisted emotions? Other (specificity counts, always!)? Although Michael Myers, of Halloween, wasn't a bad-looking guy—some say he looks a lot like William Shatner, in fact—his penchant for murdering randy teens and sexually aroused young adults made him a lot less attractive, to be sure.

Why is your monster frightening? It's hard to defeat, perhaps? It has amazing powers, maybe? It is absolutely relentless, possibly? It is supernatural or otherworldly? Other (specificity counts, always!)? The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, like the alien in Alien, had all these characteristics and more.

The same process applies to other characters, such as the protagonist, victims, experts, warriors or soldiers . . . . How do they differ from everybody else's? What makes yours unique? The expert in The Sixth Sense, the psychiatrist, differs from his peers (or most of them, at any rate) by his being dead.

A setting should be integral to the story's plot, of course. If it is, it can be used not only to frighten—it's a spooky place, after all—but also to symbolize, to suggest, and to reveal, even as it conceals. In The Descent, for example, the caverns through which the female spelunkers spelunk may symbolize the female reproductive system itself; the cave-creatures they encounter, their aborted fetuses. On the literal level, the underground passages also add to the characters—and the audience's—claustrophobia.

 

Plug your own versions of these characters and an appropriate setting of your own into the horror-movie-as-a-mystery formula and you, too, can offer a new wrinkle to the subgenre.

Villages Under Attack

Copyright by Gary L. Pullman

In Godzilla (1954), a radioactive, fire-breathing, dragon-like monster attacks Tokyo. After being transported to New York City, King Kong attacks The Big Apple. Other creatures, gigantic and otherwise, have likewise run amok in other big cities. In The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), an escaped Tyrannosaurus rex attacks San Diego. To be a resident of any such metropolis at the time of an attack by such monsters would, indeed, be terrifying.

Big cities aren't usually isolated from the assistance that police, medical personnel, firefighters, and other emergency services provide, and they are often homes to a variety of experts upon whose knowledge and experience endangered citizens can rely. In fact, since, typically, big cities are served by airports, railroads, interstate highways, and, sometimes, ports, the deployment of military troops is often quick and easy. Such cities as Tokyo, New York, and San Diego may suffer some loss of life and damage, but, in the end, it's likely that the likes of Godzilla, King Kong, and T-rex are going down and staying down.

Villages, which lack the size, population, infrastructure, technological assets, expertise, and protective firepower of large cities and are often isolated in difficult-to-reach terrain are a different story altogether. If a gigantic monster—or a monster of any size—were to attack, I'd rather take my chances in a big city than a village, any day.

Beginning of the End (1957, clearly shows how a small town, Ludlow, Illinois, fares—or fared—against the attack of gigantic monsters—in this case, radioactive mutant grasshoppers. Apparently before it could sound an alarm, Ludlow was annihilated. Its entire population of 150 residents, who are nowhere to be found, are presumed to be dead. The only clue to what happened to Ludlow's townspeople is the barrenness of the surrounding farmlands, which look as though their crops were devoured by a swarm of locusts.

The monstrous grasshoppers do not fare well when their swarm attacks Chicago. Botanist Dr. Ed Wainwright has gathered intelligence concerning the attackers. He knows locusts have eaten radioactive grain stored in a nearby silo, and he has heard of mysterious incidents in nearby communities. When he discovers the gigantic grasshoppers, he realizes that they have devoured the region's crops and are now seeking human prey. He provides the expertise that the United States military forces need to exterminate the grasshoppers. An electronic mating call is devised from test-tone oscillators, and the warm-blooded predators are lured to Lake Michigan, where the cold water incapacitates them, and they drown.

Unlike Ludlow, Chicago survives, because it is a large city that can provide the scientific and military resources needed to eliminate the threat posed by the gigantic, predatory grasshoppers.

The Black Scorpion (1957) is similar to Beginning of the End in its contrast of a helpless village the residents of which are attacked and injured or killed by gigantic insects—the scorpions to which the film's title alludes—while a big city is saved from the predators' threat of mass destruction. Troops under the command of Major Cosio arrive in the Mexican town, San Lorenzo, to provide disaster relief in the aftermath of a nearby volcano's eruption. However, their soldiers' weapons prove ineffective against the gigantic scorpions, and the villagers remain unprotected. Military might, this movie suggests, is not enough; it must be applied in a fashion made possible only by scientists or other experts.

Fortunately for the humans whose lives are at stake, the largest of the gigantic scorpions kills the others. Now, it is up to Dr. Velasco, an etymologist, to determine an effective way to destroy the remaining scorpion. It is only after he provides the information necessary to destroy the insects, as the scorpions approach Mexico City, that the military can stop them. Using meat as bait, Velasco and his team lure the insect into a stadium, and the army attacks it with larger, more lethal weapons, such as tanks and helicopters, than those that were used by Major Cosio's men. Nevertheless, the tactic fails, and it is only when geologist Dr. Hank Scott fires a spear attached to an electric cable into the scorpion's throat—its only vulnerable spot—and electrocutes the gigantic insect that the predator is killed and Mexico City is saved.

Unlike the village of San Lorenzo, Mexico City provided such assets as a stadium, military aircraft and tanks, and the combined expertise of an etymologist and a pair of geologists, Scott and Dr. Arturo Ramos. Scientific knowledge combined with military might and the architecture of the big city were enough, combined, to defeat the scorpion.

Some other horror movies in which monsters attack villages include The Birds (1963), The Blob (1958), Carnosaur (1993), Earth vs. the Spider (1958), Iron Invader (2011), Manticore (2005), The Mist (2007), Monster from Green Hell (1957), Tremors (1990), and Wyvern (2009).

Hell on Earth

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In previous posts, we argued that horror fiction is about the survival of loss and that the monsters it features are often metaphors for various real (i. e., existential) threats. We also suggested that, for many contemporary horror writers, the evils which threaten us today are apathy and indifference, whether personal, social, or cosmic in nature. Evil, these writers seem to agree, flourishes when good men do nothing. Stephen King seems to be the odd man out in suggesting that modern evil should be considered more a threat against one’s community, on whatever scale, than apathy or indifference per se.

Writers--especially horror writers--are always Dante, creating hells, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment. The modern hell results from the evils of apathy and indifference, from the loss, in other words, of altruism and self-sacrifice. We are the waylaid traveler in a world in which there are few, if any, good Samaritans.

In past times, the threats of loss with which society was faced--the monsters of the moment, as it were--were different. After World War II, Japan, with good reason, feared the atomic bomb, and Godzilla arose, a towering monster born of underwater nuclear waste, to terrorize Tokyo as Fat Man and Little Boy had terrorized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The monster represented the annihilation of the Japanese people, a sort of genocidal doom imposed by strangers from afar.

King Kong, if we are to believe Carl Denham, seems to represent the bestial component not of humanity as such, but of the male of the species, whom only female Beauty can tame. What is the giant ape but the uncivilized and the undomesticated, and, therefore, the hyper-masculine, male? He is masculinity unrestrained, a rampage of testosterone that has not, as yet, met its match in the humanizing effects of estrogen. Too large, to be sure, to be a rapist, Kong is nevertheless an abductor who, quite literally, carries Ann Darrow back to nature, a primitive world in which there is no law other than that of the survival of the fittest. It is only when, tempted, as it were, by Ann, that Kong is captured (emasculated) and taken to the concrete jungle that he is subdued, however temporarily, and, at last, killed. As Denham laments, “’Tis Beauty killed the Beast.” The lesson of this masterful cautionary tale is as simple as it is profound: The undomesticated male is a threat not only to the female but to society--indeed, to civilization--itself, and, if it cannot be tamed, it must be destroyed by the tribe.

Beowulf’s monster, Grendel, was an outcast. A descendent of Cain, who was sent into exile by God himself, Grendel envied the fellowship displayed by the Danish warriors who met over mead in their great hall, Heorot, for which reason he attacked and killed as many of their number as he could, until, at last, he himself was dispatched by the Geatish hero. Critics see him as representing the feuding principle which, like that among today’s street gangs, requires that an outrage, real or perceived, by one tribe against another, be avenged. The act of vengeance itself, of course, requires, in turn, another act of vengeance, ad infinitum, thereby threatening the social order that is the foundation of civilization. By defeating this principle, Beowulf introduced social stability and ended the threat to the status quo that continuous intertribal warfare, in the guise of the monster, represented.

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero overcomes the monster of his own--and of the rest of humanity’s--mortality. He does not defeat death itself, but the fear of it that immobilized his will and made life seem hardly worth the living. In other words, he learns to live with death, establishing the pagan alternative to Christian immortality: the name of the man of accomplishment, if not the man himself, will be remembered forever. To be forgotten is to be annihilated. However, the man of great accomplishment is apt to be memorialized both in stone monuments and in such poems as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, so his memory is assured, and he need not fear being forgotten; in this sense, he will live forever.

Epic narratives, by definition, deal with civilizations, nations, or societies. Other types of fiction may, also, but they need not do so. Often, other genres do not. Sometimes, the focus is finer. The group is more select, and the context is more contracted. For example, according to its creator, Joss Whedon, the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is based upon the simple premise that high school is hell. It is a place that one is compelled to attend. The day progresses according to a predetermined structure that is imposed upon one by others. The setting is a more-or-less self-contained, self-sufficient environment--in sociological terms, a total institution. One is forced to participate in activities, such as physical education and geometry and English class assignments, that are abhorrent and painful, emotionally if not always physically. One is made to keep company with others whose presence one finds undesirable or even repulsive. Certain behaviors that one enjoys, whether chewing gum or making out with a member of the opposite sex, are discouraged or even forbidden, and the manner in which one would dress may be restricted or dictated by adults with no fashion sense. Pretty much everything one does is controlled by one’s keepers--the teachers and administrators--and even a visit to the rest room must be approved by someone else. High school students suffer not only a loss of freedom, but they also experience losses of autonomy, dignity, and individuality. Moreover, attempts are made to “socialize” them and to make them think in certain ways about certain things--in a sense, to brainwash them. Maybe, in many ways, high school is hell, as Whedon and others (Carrie’s director, Brian De Palma, for example) have suggested.

Buffy offers a convenient way of examining hell on earth, because it confines itself pretty much (for the first three of its seasons, anyway) to the microcosm of high school (and thereafter to the microcosm of college); because it ran for seven seasons before its demise; and because it frequently features a monster of the week, which supplies quite a bestiary of monsters, beastly, demonic, and otherwise, which suggests how horror writers are always Dante, creating hells, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment.

In “The Witch,” the third episode of season one, a high school cheerleader’s mother, who is also a witch, uses her magic to eliminate her daughter’s rivals so that she, the mother, can relive her glory days as a head cheerleader through her daughter, once the latter gains a spot on the squad. Although this plot may seem ludicrous, it has a real-life precedent in which a woman murdered the rivals of her daughter to ensure her win. The hell of high school, it seems, is home to abusive parents who, seeking to live vicariously through their children, represent real dangers to their offspring’s health and welfare.

“The Pack,” the sixth episode of the same season, examines the threats of peer pressure and mindless conformity to individuals’ personal integrity. Buffy Summers’ friend, Xander Harris, bitten by a hyena, becomes more and more feral and predatory, both socially and sexually, turning against his best friend Willow Rosenberg and his romantic interest, the Slayer herself. High school’s hell includes the demons of groupthink and the lockstep behavior that attends it.

The eighth episode of this season, “I Robot, You Jane,” takes on the dangers of the anonymous predators of Internet chat rooms: Willow meets a seemingly sweet suitor who is actually a demon that was released from the book in which its spirit was magically bound when the school’s librarian, Rupert Giles, orders the text to be scanned into the library’s electronic database and the demon escapes into cyberspace.

“Out of Sight, Out of Mind” shows the psychologically destructive effects of cliques who ignore all others but their own members: a girl who is ignored by students and teachers alike gradually becomes invisible and seeks to avenge herself upon her passive-aggressive tormentors before, defeated by Buffy, she finds a home, of sorts, with a covert government organization (most likely the Central Intelligence Agency) that performs espionage activities.

Other episodes in this and other seasons of the show provide plenty of other examples of the types of loss that high school students face and the types of monsters that threaten them with these losses. Many have to do with matters of identity, multiculturalism and cultural assimilation, sexism and chauvinism, attempts to avoid personal responsibility and duty, the effects of past deeds upon one’s present life, the consequences of refusing or being unable to repress instincts and primitive impulses, the emotional manipulation of others, unrestrained passion, child abuse, unresolved guilt, misogyny, adolescent behavior, social ostracism, service to others, and autonomy. In other words, high school hell, as it is depicted in this series for teens and young adults, is layered with personal, social, and political strata, much like the world of adults. The difference is that many of the concerns are adolescent. Adults, for the most part, have survived the losses associated with adolescence and have moved on to face other dragons. The new monsters are not necessarily bigger and more terrible (although some may be), but they’re different, for different ages, whether with respect to the individual or his or her society, nation, or culture, differ over time. In every age, however, the rejected and the exiled, the repressed and the banished, become the condemned, or the damned, and new hells are created, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment. The demons are the threats of loss; the effects that follow such losses make up the atmosphere of hell. In the hell that is high school, the blessed are the ones who, surviving these losses, ascend to new levels of knowledge and wisdom.

Of course, that’s just the hell of high school. Once writers realized that there is not one world, but worlds within worlds, the numbers and kinds of hell, like the number and types of demons, multiplied significantly. There is the hell of school, of the workplace, of the home, of the place of worship, of places of leisure, and some hells are not places at all, but states of existence, such as illness, or situations, such as a loveless marriage, or events, such as the death of a loved one. Truly, as Edgar Allan Poe observed, “misery is manifold.” Hell is on earth because, as Jean Paul Sartre points out, in No Exit, hell is other people. It is also ourselves. As John Milton observes, Satan carries hell within himself, for it is a state of mind in which he has alienated himself from God. The same is true of us as well.

One might say of this post what some critics said of Milton’s poem. Much has been said of hell, but little of heaven. That’s because, too often, we count our curses, so to speak, rather than our blessings, seeing the bad and ignoring the good. By identifying the hellish, we have, by implication, also identified its opposite, the heavenly, which is why, as we have argued in a previous post, horror fiction is a guide to the good life as well as a body of cautionary tales. Whatever we fear to lose, we value, and heaven is the realm wherein we have stored up the things we deem to be valuable beyond all else, very little of which, as it turns out, is comprised of physical or material objects.

Nothing Gets Between a Monster and Its Genes

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Why did you throw the jack of hearts away? It was the only card in the deck I had left to play.

-- The Doors

As far as I know, it was Stan Lee of Marvel Comics who introduced comic book readers to the idea of genetic mutation as the cause of superhuman traits that could convert an otherwise normal human being into a godlike character who could use his or her powers for good or evil. In doing so, Lee inserted a joker into the deck of fate. (Actually, since quite a few of the superhuman powers of Marvel’s superheroes and villains were the results of such mutations, Lee inserted almost as many jokers into the deck as there were regular, or “normal” cards.) Since there have been a rash of motion pictures based upon Marvel Comics (and, for that matter DC Comics) of late, many of the characters in which possess powers courtesy of various genetic mutations, it seems unnecessary to review these powers. For those who are unfamiliar with how the Marvel Comics’ powers-by-genetic-mutation technique works, a brief summary is in order. According to Marvel, the Celestials, an extraterrestrial race, visited the Earth a million or so years ago for the express purpose of monk eying with human deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), implanting a substance, the X-Gene, which facilitated beneficial genetic mutations in the implanted hosts, resulting, in more extreme cases, in such characters as those who swelled the ranks of the The Uncanny X-Men (the first issue of which appeared in (1963) and the Brotherhood of Mutants. For years, this was Marvel Comics’ favorite explanation for superheroes’ and villains’ great powers, explaining the abilities of such characters as Apocalypse, Beast, Cyclops, Iceman, Marvel Girl, Professor X, Storm, Wolverine, and many others. Collectively, such characters, in the Marvel universe, are also known as homo superior.

What have they done to the Earth? What have they done to our fair sister? Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and but her, Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn, Tied her with fences and dragged her down. . . .

-- The Doors

Even before Lee introduced genetic mutations as a cause of characters’ special effects, so to speak, horror fiction monsters were spawned, as it were, as a result of genetic mutations. (Most appeared in decidedly bad--no, make that terrible--B films.) Among such creatures are the sea monsters of The Horror of Party Beach (1964) (human skeletons radiated by atomic waste that leaks from an undersea drum, a peril of humans’ disdain for ecological purity); the monster of Godzilla (1954) (an undersea creature that had an origin identical to the monsters of Party Beach); The Being (1983) (a monster who was spawned by the wastes in a disposal dump); Creatures from the Abyss (1994) (teen love makers, whose decision to make out aboard an abandoned yacht equipped with a bio lab causes them to become infected with radioactive plankton); C.H.U.D. (1984) (people become monsters as a result of toxic waste dumped in the Big Apple’s sewers); It’s Alive (1974) (a mutant baby is sought by the authorities, who don’t intend to nurture it); and many others.

When the still sea conspires an armor And her sullen and aborted Currents breed tiny monsters True sailing is dead.

--The Doors

Why the popularity of genetic mutations as an explanation for the acquisition of superhuman or monstrous abilities? There seem to be several reasons:

• When horror films and Marvel Comics introduced the idea, genetic mutation as the result of changes to an organism’s DNA was relatively new, or cutting edge, as was the idea for genetic engineering. However, eugenics was already a well-known concept and attempts at engineering an ideal race were tried by mad scientists during the years of Nazi Germany. (The concept of what constitutes such a race--and, indeed, the very idea of a “master race”--is, or can be, in itself a monstrous notion and involves the same hubris that was demonstrated by Victor von Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau in earlier times.) Writers are always looking for new ideas because new ideas, in and of themselves, are intriguing.
• The origins of good and evil tend to be limited to such causes as divine creation, demonic possession or manipulation of human beings, madness, improper behavior (sin, crime, or anti-social conduct), birth defects, extraterrestrial intervention in human affairs, scientific and technological manipulations of nature and human nature, and the like. When a new cause for good or evil (and not just abilities) is unearthed, it’s apt to be popular and persistent among authors, especially of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, including writers of comic books that involve or are based upon such genres.
• Genetic mutations are real! They actually happen in nature and can be engineered in scientific labs by real-life “mad scientists.” Of course, any scientist worth his or her weight in neutronium will tell one that such mutations, rather than benefiting an organism, are more likely to have a negative, or even fatal, effect upon it. That’s a small detail often overlooked by comic book, fantasy, science fiction, and horror writers, although some do capitalize upon this fact, using genetic mutations as a way of effecting madness or physical deformity that, in return, has monstrous results.
• Genetic mutations that result from scientific and technological manipulations of nature replace miracles as a means of effecting changes to DNA and, therefore, to human nature and behavior, allowing human beings, in their arrogance, to wrest creation from the creator, putting people in charge of a world they never made but one that they are hot to remake in their own image and likeness. From a religious point of view, such arrogance, or pride, is blasphemous and can be expected to result is sure punishment. From a secular point of view, such hubris is presumptuous and, perhaps, premature, and will likely bring about, in its results, its own penalty, for, after all, it’s nice to fool with Mother Nature and it’s even worse to fool around with her.

He was a monster, dressed in black leather; She was a princess, Queen of the highway. -- The Doors

Sources

Don Markstein’s Toonopedia

Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Fear: A Cultural History: A Partial Review and Summary, Part 4

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, is the author of Fear: A Cultural History. Although she explores several other important aspects of this most basic emotion, Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear concludes its partial review and summary of Bourke’s book with a consideration of her chapter on “Nuclear Threats.”

As Bourke indicates, these threats resulted in a generation of children’ being “raised to fear.” There were the thermonuclear fireball and its resulting widespread, catastrophic physical destruction and the hideous deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of citizens, but there were also the long-term threat of radioactive fallout and lingering death from radiation sickness. Radiation could cause genetic mutations, too, so, if the explosion or radiation sickness didn’t kill one, he or she might undergo grotesque, painful, and eventually lethal mutations, becoming a monster before becoming a corpse.

Also disturbing was the fact that the wholesale slaughter of humanity--or a sizeable portion of the species--was in the hands of a few nations and, within those nations, a few individuals--and not the types of individuals in whom most people had confidence:

With the means of world devastation available to the elite of a few nations, fear became widespread. No longer were humanity’s primary enemies hidden in the
crevices of individual unconsciousness, capable of being lured out by a reassuring confidant. Instead, the fate of humankind seemed to rest with people no one trusted: soldiers, scientists and statesmen.

In fact, “fears about generals, scientists, super-computers, and terrorists,” Bourke states, “were a staple of this genre [science fiction], as was the argument that nuclear war was simply an inevitable consequence of paranoid Cold War animosities.” Another popular subject for such fiction were flying saucers: “It was no coincidence that sightings of UFOs began immediately after the Second World War, a tangible reflection of nuclear and Cold War fears.”

Worse yet, the oceans that lay between America’s east and west coasts were no longer reassuring to its citizens; “long-range aeroplanes and nuclear warheads destroyed this sense of security.”

Bourke points out that the post-war years gave rise to some important themes in the science fiction and horror genres. The most famous such example, she suggests, was Godzilla, “a prehistoric monster resurrected as a result of H-bomb experiments,” who appeared in 1956, starring in “at least sixteen feature films thereafter.” A line of dialogue in Them!, a movie about gigantic, mutated ants, suggests the metaphor that underlies the film: “Has the Cold War gotten hot?” As Bourke points out, the post-war era and the world’s newfound fear of nuclear threats inspired several novels as well, including Margot Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1954), Tyrone C. Barr’s The Last Fourteen (1959), Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog (1969), as well as Jim Harman’s short story “The Place Where Chicago Was” (1962), and Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow “did not flinch from describing a woman sitting on some stairs after a nuclear attack, vainly trying to shove her unborn baby back inside her split belly.”

Overwhelmed by the many horrors and terrors associated with nuclear threats, psychologists warned government officials to expect people to “denial and avoidance,” which would require the use of special techniques of communication, command, and control.

The Civil Defense program that the United States sponsored during the years of the Cold War was never intended, despite its name, to defend civilians from nuclear attack or its consequences, Bourke says--not directly, anyway. Instead, its purpose was to convince the public that, even in the event of a nuclear war, many people could survive by following the procedures they’d learned as participants in the program. Convinced of their potential survival, the general populace, government officials believed--or hoped--would agree with attempts on the part of their leaders to maintain a mutual deterrence policy with the then-Soviet Union, despite the cost of such a policy. Meanwhile, government leaders also endeavored to get citizens to accept the need “to militarize society in the event of a nuclear attack,” to conform to policies and procedures (those who did not might be arrested and “neutralized”), and to accept restrictions upon personal privileges and legal rights. Even the Constitutional right to free speech might be curtailed. The media would likely be controlled by the government to suppress rumors. Leaders hoped that the people would follow the procedures they had been taught as participants in the nation’s longstanding Civil Defense program: “Familiarity with air-raid drills would ensure that people would passively fall into a familiar drill procedure, thus keeping their minds busy and reducing the likelihood of panic.” Meanwhile, radios and vehicles, including airplanes and helicopters, equipped with loudspeakers would transmit or broadcast reassuring messages:

Confusion foreshadowed panic. Irrespective of the veracity of the message, a ‘calm, authoritative voice’ broadcast on an ‘intact public address system’ was crucial. As the Bulletin for the Atomic Scientists put it in 1953: ‘The human being whose normal picture of the world around him is suddenly torn to pieces struggles to replace it with another picture so that he can steer his activity.’ Loudspeakers and radios in public shelters would reorient people, preparing them for a transformed world. Since many people would not have access to radios in the event of a nuclear attack, and since rubble and fires would prevent ground vehicles from getting information to them, disaster agencies would prevent ground vehicles from getting information to them, disaster agencies recommended the use of light planes, preferably helicopters, which would broadcast information and ‘counteract panics.’ All information had to be given
in a factual, calm and easily understood manner so that ‘depressed, fearful and
resentful victims of the disaster’ would be able to understand it.’

Bourke points out that experts admitted that they didn’t really know how people would react in the wake of such a terrible and extensive catastrophe, for nothing of such a scale had ever happened, especially to a civilian population. However, they did think that, possibly at the expense of strangers, family members would stay together and look out for the welfare of one another, and it was believed that men, having more survival skills than women, would be likely to do comparatively well, and women comparatively poorly, in the exercise of adaptive behavior (that is, behavior adapted to the crises at hand). Officials might discover that their greater problem might not be “preventing hysterical flight,” but “getting them to move at all.” Nevertheless, “to provide guidance, disaster experts identified four situations that predisposed people to panic when faced with danger”:

First, partial entrapment was liable to make people panic. . . . Secondly, when the threat was seen as imminent. . . people were likely to ‘freeze’. . . . Emotional extremes would be exacerbated if, thirdly, a blocked or jammed escape faced them. Fourth, confusion and uncertainty about the nature and intensity of threat was particularly distressing.

Never had the world, despite all the many wars its nations had waged, faced such a situation as was posed by nuclear threats. The situation would be characterized by confusion, mistrust, distrust, and fear, and human beings, for the first time in history, would be seen as having “more conclusive” powers than “God, in being bale to annihilate irredeemably and without possibility of redemption.”

In such a world as the disaster experts painted, the horrors of prehistoric monsters, gigantic ants, leveled cities, and even hostile visitors from beyond the stars were mild, even comical, threats, indeed. The horrors of the human technology had outpaced the horrors of the artistic imagination.

Bourke, Joanna, Fear: A Cultural History. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.

Horror Movie Remakes

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Janet Leigh, Psycho (1960)

An old joke plays upon the sameness of the names of the Empire State and its most prominent city: “New York, New York: the city so nice they named it twice.”

The Hollywood equivalent to the double entendre is the movie remake. In the horror genre, quite a few previous films have been resurrected, or remade, as they say in the trade:

• Amityville Horror, The (1979 and 2005)
• Black Christmas (1974 and 2006)
• Blob, The (1958 and coming soon to a theater near you)
• Day of the Dead (1985 and coming soon to a theater near you)
• Fly, The (1958 and 1986)
• Fog, The (1980 and 2005)
• Godzilla (1954 and 1998)
• Halloween (1978 and 2007)
• Hills Have Eyes, The (1977 and 2006)
• Hitcher, The (1986 and 2007)
• House of Wax, The (1953 and 2006)
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, 1993, and 2007)
• Island of Dr. Moreau, The (1977 and 1996)
• Night of the Living Dead (1968, 1990, 2006)
• Omen, The (1976 and 2006)
• Psycho (1960 and 1998)
• Ring 2, The (2005)
• Stepford Wives, The (1975 and 2004)
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (1974 and 2003)
• Thing, The (1951 and 1982)
• When a Stranger Calls (1979 and 2006)
• Wicker Man, The (1973 and 2006).

Ann Heche, Psycho (1998)

But, wait! There’s more! According to Variety, RKO’s Roseblood Movie Co. plans to remake (or, in some cases, has already remade) Lady Scarface (1941 and 2006), While the City Sleeps (1928, 1956, and coming soon to a theater near you), The Monkey’s Paw (1948, 2003, and 2008), The Seventh Victim (1943 and coming soon to a theater near you), Bedlam (1946 and coming soon to a theater near you), Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Five Came Back (1939 and coming soon to a theater near you), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943 and scheduled for release [or is it re-release?] in 2009).

But wait! That’s not all! Other movies scheduled for makeovers include The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), and Near Dark (1987 and 2008).

Confronted with such a list, one may wonder, Why?

The answer is simple, but multi-faceted. Making a remake allows producers, directors, writers, actors, and others to make a movie without reinventing the wheel, so it’s relatively economical. In plot, setting, characters, theme, and other narrative elements, moviemakers are treading familiar ground when they’re remaking a movie that’s already appeared, in slightly different form, upon the silver screen.

There’s a built-in appeal for such movies, too. Obviously, in remaking a movie, filmmakers aren’t going to rip off a box office dud; they’re going to go for the gold, so they’re going to revive a popular has-been.

Moviegoers also like to compare the performances of the actors in the older versions of the film with the those of the players in the remake to see how the respective teams of actors interpreted their parts and played their roles, evaluating, in many cases, who did what better than another.

There’s the nostalgia factor to consider, too. People like revisiting the past and recalling significant moments, especially in their youth or during a time that (in retrospect, at least) seems more innocent and fun than present hard or lackluster times.

Then, too, if moviemakers remake old movies instead of making new movies (maybe we should call them movieremakers?), Hollywood doesn’t need as many writers, so writers’ strikes don’t matter as much, if at all.

Rob Zombie, who produced the Halloween remake, talked about the appeal and challenges of making a remake. When all else fails (or when all else has been said and done), one exploits the characters: “You've got a movie that has seven sequels, so you figure they've exploited this thing every which way you can,” he says. “You start fresh, and you focus on the one thing that's always most compelling to me: the characters.” More specifically, according to The San Francisco Chronicle, he “delves into the psychology of the franchise's iconic monster, prepubescent murderer-turned-bogeyman Michael Myers.” However, a word of caution applies in psychoanalyzing the monster, producer Bad Fuller, who has used the same tactic in remaking other horror movies, warns: “You don't want to humanize your monster too much, or the audience will feel sorry for him.” God forbid!

Fuller shares the considerations that led him to produce the remakes of Hitcher, The Amityville Horror, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: “"We thought ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ was great for a remake," he says. “There was a whole generation not familiar with it. So there was brand recognition, but the expectations from the youth audience couldn't be that strong.” He’s done so well at the box office with such remakes that he’s planning to release remakes of Friday the 13th, Near Dark, and The Birds as well. (Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock is spinning in his grave at the prospect of someone redoing one of his classics.)

The San Francisco Examiner article also identifies some of the ways in which originals and remakes differ. The latter typically have better special effects; the causes behind the supernatural or paranormal situation or monster are sometimes changed, the remakes tend to build up the characters’ or the monster’s back story, and themes are given new twists. Occasionally, the remake is better than the original, as in the case of When a Stranger Calls: “The first movie was essentially a 15-minute babysitter-harassing sequence followed by more than an hour of digressions that had little to do with a stranger calling. The remake was 97 fast-paced minutes of that 15-minute sequence.”

The biggest reasons, though, for remaking successful movies? They’re proven box office successes and they’re easy to exploit.

Everyday Horrors: The Atomic Bomb

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

When we see or hear the word “bikini,” we tend to think of--well, not death and destruction, certainly. However, it was upon the Bikini atoll, in the Pacific Ocean, that the first several nuclear bombs were tested. After detonating the bomb, the U. S. government relocated natives back to the atoll, from which they’d been evacuated, but the levels of radioactivity within their bodies suggested that they should be relocated again, so they were moved to Kili island, where they remain, wards of the federal government.

It was a Bikini atoll test that awakened the Japanese monster Godzilla. However, the U. S. was involved in far more sinister activities than those precipitated by the awakening of the fictitious Godzilla.

One of these activities was Project 4.1, a medical experiment that the government conducted in secret upon Marshall Island residents who had been exposed to radioactive fallout as a result of the government’s Castle Bravo nuclear test, which took place upon the Bikini atoll. The experiment, which began within a week of the Castle Bravo test, was known, officially, as “Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma radiation due to Fall-Out from High Yield Weapons.” (The powers of many of the Marvel Comics characters, including the Hulk and Spider-man, are results of radioactive experiments. Perhaps Stan Lee knew more than he’s saying?)

The Department of Energy stated the threefold purpose of the project: “(1) evaluate the severity of radiation injury to the human beings exposed, (2) provide for all necessary medical care, and (3) conduct a scientific study of radiation injuries to human beings.” The study showed significant effects from the Marshallese’s exposure to the radioactive fallout, including hair loss, skin damage (“raw, weeping lesions”), miscarriages, stillbirths, cancer, and neoplasms.

As bad as the fate of the test site’s human guinea pigs was, that of the Japanese at Nagasaki and Hiroshima were even worse. Those victims of the atomic bombs designated as Little Boy (which took out Hiroshima on August 6, 1945) and Fat Man (which took out Nagasaki on August 9, 1946), who survived the attack experienced severe burns, radiation sickness, and a variety of diseases, including cancer. As many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki were killed by the explosion of the bomb. The cities themselves were leveled, with only a few, burned-out structures remaining. Had Japan not surrendered, ending World War II, the U. S. had planned to drop several more atomic bombs on the island nation, as more of the weapons were in production and were expected to be completed during the next few months.

The atomic bomb was the product of the Manhattan Project, headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer.

During the 1950’s and 1960’s, many B horror films were made that featured monsters (often Bug-eyed Monsters) created by the effects of the atomic bomb or radiation in general, including:

• Amazing Colossal Man, The
• Attack of the Giant Leeches
• Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The
• Bride of the Monster
• Creature from the Black Lagoon, The
• Damnation Alley
• Day the Earth Caught Fire, The
• Day the earth Ended, The
• Fiend without a Face
• Godzilla
• Hills Have Eyes, The
• Incredible Shrinking Man, The
• It Came from Beneath the Sea
• Killer Shrews, The
• Omega Man, The
• Rocket Ship X-M
• Them!

Even more novels, more science fiction than horror per se, resulted from plots involving atomic bombs or radiation:

• Airship Nine
• Alas, Babylon
• Amnesia Moon
• Arc Light
• Ashes Series
• Brother in the Land
• Canticle for Leibowitz, A
• Children of the Dust
• Chrysalids, The
• Commander-1
• Dark Tower Saga, The
• Dark December by Alfred Coppel
• Dark Mirrors
• Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles, The
• Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomn
• Domain
• Doomday Wing
• Down to a Sunless Sea
• Dune
• Earthwreck!
• End of the World, The
• Farnham's Freehold
• Gate to Women's Country, The
• Hostage
• Last Children of Schewenborn, The
• Last Ship, The
• Level 7
• Light's Out
• Long Mynd, The
• Malevil
• Not This August
• On the Beach
• Outward Urge, The
• Postman, The
• Red Alert
• Resurrection Day
• Riddley Walker
• Pre-Empt
• Pulling Through
• School for Atheists, The
• Seventh Day, The
• Small Armageddon, A
• Solution T-25
• Swan Song
• Systemic Shock
• Road, The
• This Is the Way the World Ends
• This Time Tomorrow
• Tomorrow!
• Triton Ultimatum, The
• Warday
• When the Wind Blows
• Wild Shore, The
• World Set Free , The
• World Next Door, The
• Worldwar
• Z for Zachariah
• Zone, The

However, when one considers the U. S. government’s irresponsible testing and use of human guinea pigs, to say nothing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the films featuring monsters pale in comparison to the horrors unleashed by the feds. It’s as is, in seizing the power of God, humanity has become not divine, but demonic, a destroyer rather than a creator.

More horrible yet may be the proliferation of atomic weapons around the world. According to the Federation of American Scientists, these nations have nuclear weapons capabilities:

• China
• France
• India
• Israel
• North Korea
• Pakistan
• Russia
• United Kingdom
• United States

“Everyday Horrors: The Atomic Bomb” is the first in a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

Value as a Clue to Horror

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

Life is always fragile. One might suppose, however, that, before the advancements in science and technology that we enjoy (sometimes) today, the world must have been fraught with many more perils. Human life must have been especially precarious without the benefits of such modern marvels as antibiotics, computers, incandescent light, and firearms, to name but a few. Pneumonia, tornados, the blindness imposed by darkness, and inefficient or unreliable weapons must have caused many deaths that, today, could be averted or avoided. No wonder Gilgamesh sought immortality. Life in his day must have been both mean and brief. What did others seek? The treasures that were the objects of their quests tell us the things their societies valued most. Whatever threatened these treasures represented their fears, because we fear what we may lose (or want but may never gain). If Gilgamesh sought immortality, he valued life and, consequently, feared death, which may be the greatest loss of all.

“The wages of sin,” the Bible tells us, “is death,” and this is frequently the punishment that God metes out to the unrepentant, as he did with regard to Adam and Eve, to the civilization that existed at the time of the flood, to the residents of Sodom, and to many others throughout the pages of both Testaments. However, according to Christian thought, there are two types of death: physical and spiritual, as the following scripture suggests:

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both the soul and body in hell. --
Matthew 10:28

The one who can destroy both the body and the soul in hell is God, and, many times, the Bible warns the faithful to “fear God,” as does Matthew 10:20. There is a worse condition that death and a worse place than the grave, as the damned find out when they arrive to spend an eternity’s torment in hell. If hell is considered the state of the soul as it exists apart from God, then its opposite is the value that the existence of hell threatens, namely, being in the presence of God (or love, for “God is love”) for eternity. To be an eternal outcast of love is hell.

A threat to one’s whole way of life, which the Trojan War represented to the ancient Greeks, indicates that a people--in this case, the ancient Greeks--valued their culture. Although war is horrible, it’s not usually a horror story’s antagonist, because the monsters of horror fiction are, as we see in another post, metaphorical in nature. They’re symbolic of something else. Instead of a war threatening one’s way of life, therefore, a horror story might posit an extraterrestrial race, as in The War of the Worlds or Alien, as the antagonist, but, make no mistake, these monsters aren’t going to be satisfied with killing only a handful of victims; they want nothing less than a whole nation or, perhaps, the entire planet. In Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four, Galactus represents such a threat to humanity. Following the lead of his herald, the Silver Surfer, who locates inhabited planets, Galactus literally devours the energy that sustains the planets’ life forms, whether they are human or otherwise, going from planet to planet to appease his hunger. Since Galactus threatens humanity itself, as do, or could, the Martians or the extraterrestrial monsters of Alien, he represents the destruction of a whole way of life, or a civilization and its culture. This same monster--the threat to culture--appears in Beowulf, in the guise of Grendel,

Grendel’s mother, and the dragon.

Such monsters, in a more specific mask and costume, showed up in the horror films of the 1950’s. After World War II, which culminated in the nuclear destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world feared wholesale annihilation, a worldwide nuclear holocaust, and the monsters of horror represented such a threat in the guise of Godzilla, giant ants (Them!), and aliens with enormous destructive capabilities (Invaders from Mars).

The post-war decades (1960’s-present) of horror produced more personal monsters, products of the decade’s emphases on sex, drugs, and rock and roll--experiments with sexual freedom (or license), altered consciousness, and the pursuit of passion, adventure, and excitement for their own sake: deranged serial killers, cannibals, and paranormal or supernatural aberrations and entities who acted, as often as not, on the bases of vengeance, lust, or sadism, rather than on the basis of any rational purpose. Again, the monsters are the threats to the values that the writers, filmmakers, and audiences hold dear. It’s hard to exercise one’s sexual freedom when there’s a sadistic serial killer on the loose or to enjoy one’s emotions when doing so could attract an alien or a demon who feeds off human feelings or the energy associated with them.

What’s to come? Time alone, it seems, has the answer. Whatever the new monster’s shape, though, it will be the shadow of the values of the society of the day that spawns it.