Showing posts with label Poe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poe. Show all posts

Monday, May 13, 2019

Gahan Wilson's Poignant Moments of Existential Angst

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman



Wikipedia offers a brief, if succinct, albeit uncited, description of cartoonist Gahan Wilson's work:

Wilson's cartoons and illustrations are drawn in a playfully grotesque style and have a dark humor . . . . Wilson's work is . . . contemporary, gross, and confrontational, featuring atomic mutants, subway monsters[,] and serial killers [and] Wilson often has a very specific point to make.

Wilson's cartoons frequently appeared in Playboy magazine, their offbeat humor a favorite with readers.

His work is similar to that of such other artists as Charles Addams (of The Addams Family fame), Edward Gorey, and Gary Larson (“The Far Side”).


The source of the humor in some of Wilson's cartoons is fairly obvious, but, in others, it is subtler. For example, the horror of this cartoon isn't immediately apparent, but, when one “gets it,” the horror—or, in this case, the terror—is apt to be all the more striking.

The cartoon addresses the solipsistic fear that “life is but a dream,” but who, we may wonder, is the dreamer and who is merely the figment of the dreamer's imagination?

A woman, seated at a table in a living room, is about to put the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place. In doing so, she pauses and looks down, to her right. What she has noticed isn't shown to the viewer, as the object of her concern (she looks uneasy, rather than merely curious) is out of frame.

It is only after taking in the big picture, as it were, that the viewer carefully considers the puzzle that the woman is completing, only to find that it is identical to the “big picture,” right down to the missing corner piece that the woman holds, both in the smaller image and the larger one.

Now, we understand her concern. It is not an unseen object that disturbs her, but her realization, born of her discovery of the parallels between her situation and the puzzle she is completing, that she is not the center of her universe, nor is she the captain of her soul. She is merely one in an infinite series of repeated images in which none of the versions of “her” is ever the final, ultimate one. She is merely the copy of a copy among countless other copies, all identical and all terrifying.

If her situation is locked into a series of identical situations over which she nor any other of her various “selves” has any control, her existence is as meaningless as the pastime at which she occupies a leisure moment, because her whole life is this moment, eternally, nothing else and nothing more.

It takes a rare talent to convey so much in a single cartoon panel, without (in this case), even the need of a caption. Such condensed “summaries” of existential angst are immediate and poignant enough to inspire longer works of narrative fiction. Imagine what Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edgar Allan Poe might do in developing such a germ of an idea.

--or what YOU might do!

Saturday, January 21, 2012

What’s So Scary About Horror Movies?

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

What makes a horror movie scary? Why do some films frighten us while others don’t send similar chills up and down our spines? Why is Stephen King a master of this genre, both in its printed and motion picture forms? What’s the difference between a truly frightening horror movie and a merely horrible one? By analyzing those moments of fright and horror, perhaps some clues may be pieced together, allowing us to discern just what is so scary about horror movies. As a result, we can both better appreciate the techniques of the horror maestros and, if we are ourselves writers of horror fiction, improve our own work.

One way to analyze what scares people is to ask them. Fans of the genre maintain web sites, respond to interviews, rate movies, and keep blogs concerning what they like and don’t like about horror films. Since these individuals represent the market for which you are writing or intend to write, their comments, observations, points of view, praise, complaints, and questions are a goldmine waiting to be excavated.

Another way to discover what’s scary about horror fiction is to read interviews on the subject by the masters of the genre. Many of these interviews are available online or in the back issues of magazines available at your local library. You can also type in a phrase such as “what’s so scary about horror movies?” or “scary horror movies” into an Internet search engine’s window and see what results occur. Of course, another way to find out what scares the hell out of moviegoers (and readers) is to watch horror movies (or read horror stories)--and take notes!

As you visit these sites and read horror stories or watch horror movies, make a list of your insights and thoughts about the question, What’s so scary about horror movies? Before long, you’ll have a huge list. Remember, though, you’re not interested in summarizing the plot per se. Instead, you’re interested in identifying frightening moments in the film or story and understanding why these incidents scared you.

Your list might contain some of these elements:

Unexpected shock: something springs out of a closet, falls from the ceiling, bursts through the floorboards, or springs upon a character from behind, seemingly having come out of nowhere. Another example is the sudden and immediate disfigurement or dismemberment of a character. Reflections, especially strange and incongruous images, in a mirror or other glass surface can also frighten.

Red Herring: one incident occurs, such as an unexpected shock, that distracts us from the big scary moment that is just about to occur. For example, a cat springs at the character, screeching, and scares the hell out of us just before the axe murderer buries his weapon in the character’s abdomen or back.

Scary Music and Other Tone Setters: the soundtrack plays jarring, or frantic, music that sets up the expectation that something nasty is about to happen; what follows is something nasty--or a red herring. A thunderstorm is an old stand-in for such discordant music. The interplay of light with shadows, like weather and musical effects, sets the tone (horror) in many horror movies; printed horror fiction uses descriptions and juxtapositions to accomplish the same purpose.

Lights Out: a character is knocked unconscious, by the villain or by an accidental fall, only to awaken in deep, hot water, metaphorically speaking, a laThe Pit and the Pendulum.”

Gross Out!: Stephen King says he will scare his readers if he can and disgust them if he must. Blood, guts, and gore usually do the trick.

Dead Meat: showing or describing skeletons or corpses, especially partially decomposed bodies, horrifies and disgusts.

Stalking: the monster stalks the protagonist, sneaking up on him or her, or ambushes him or her; the stalking or the ambush is “previewed” for the reader or the moviegoer, however, rather than occurring as an unexpected shock: we see the villain sneaking up on or lying in wait for the main character, so we anticipate the bad guy’s next move (but the protagonist doesn’t).

Being Watched: showing the main character being watched by someone gives moviegoers and readers the willies.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

How To Create Monstrous Monsters

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman


How to create monstrous monsters is a question that pretty much all horror writers will face, usually sooner than later. It’s one of the many challenges that sets us apart from writers of say, romance fiction (unless the leading man is really, really undesirable).

So how do we create monstrous monsters?

One effective way is to follow the lead of our ancient predecessors, the makers of myth who lived, as Edgar Allan Poe might say, “many and many a year ago,” although not necessarily “in a kingdom by the sea.”

In an early attempt to demythologize mythical beasts, the basilisk was once thought to have resulted from a misshapen egg laid by a cock--that’s right, the rooster, not the hen (the beast was also known as a cockatrice). Mistaking the odd egg for one of its own, a maternal cobra hatched it, it was said. Even at the time, however, a detractor found this explanation more incredible than the mythical beast itself.

Since then, explanations have become more believable.

Scientists think that some mythical creatures (many of which are monsters) are based upon real-life counterparts.

Some, they say, are based on misinterpretations of fossilized dinosaur bones.

According to their view, the ancients, believing the skeletons were the remains of animals that had died later rather than sooner (and having no idea that the earth was millions of years old), mistook these giant skeletons for creatures who’d gasped their last gasp relatively recently. If there was one such creature, the early mythmakers believed, there were likely to have been--and might still be--others lurking nearby.

As the American Museum of Natural History’s “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, & Mermaids” points out, the notion of the one-eyed Cyclops could have derived from the discovery of a wooly mammoth’s skull, its more-or-less centralized nasal cavity mistaken for the socket of the creature’s single eye.

Likewise, the museum’s article observes, the griffin might have been based upon the skeletal remains of a Protoceratops, and the roc might have been inspired by the discovery of the fossilized bones of the gigantic, prehistoric Aepyornis, native to Madagascar, which attained a height of 10 feet and tipped the scales at about half a ton--and from the Mongol emperor Kubla Khan’s mistaking a palm frond for a feather of the fabled bird.

Other mythological monsters are thought to have derived from similar real-life lineages. Centaurs are believed to have been fanciful descriptions of nomad horsemen, the likes of whom ancient Greeks had never seen before. The many-headed hydra that Hercules, with a little--all right, a lot--of help from his nephew Iolaus, killed could have been a personification of an unruly river delta that the Greeks were able, finally, to bring under their control. The Gorgons, Ms. Medusa included, are thought to be based upon images of a snake-headed woman’s stone face. A likeness of this mask was carved into warriors’ shields.

Live Science’s “The Surprising Realities of Mythical Beasts” offers similar origins for several of the monsters of myth. Mermaids may have been born of sailors’ loneliness and longing for the womenfolk they’d left at home and a little wishful thinking that allowed them to mistake sea creatures for facsimiles of their lady loves. No less an adventurer than Christopher Columbus mistook a trio of scantily clad manatees for mermaids, albeit a rather unattractive and manly sort of maids. From a distance, they might have looked inviting enough--to a sailor far from shore--but, closer, they were “not as pretty,” the mariner complained, and “somehow in the face," the bewhiskered sea beasts resembled men.

In a related article, “Top 10 Beasts and Dragons: How Reality Made Myth,” the same website explains the origin of the dragon. This mythical monster is based upon actual reptiles such as alligators, lizards (frilled dragons, bearded dragons, flying dragons, Komodo dragons, megalania prisca, pterosaurs, seahorse-like sea dragons), and a snake (the python). Additionally, comets, with their long tails, flashing across the nighttime skies, may have been interpreted as dragons in flight.

So, how does one create monstrous monsters? The same way the ancients did. Look at something that seems as if it could be frightening if it were to be misunderstood as being something else, far more threatening. See it anew. Misinterpret it, and, in the process, envision it as wild, antisocial, powerful, threatening, and, most likely, as having bad breath. Ask yourself, for example, what kind of monster California freeways might make or imagine a not-so-innocent dust mite a thousand times its normally microscopic size. Viola! You’ve created a monster!

Sources Cited:

Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, & Mermaids.” American Museum of Natural History.
The Surprising Realities of Mythical Beasts.” Live Science.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Horror Fiction: In Search of a Transfusion of New Blood

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman


It would seem that horror fiction, based as it is upon the appearance and elimination or neutralization--or the attempted elimination or neutralization--of various threats, would be a permanent fixture of literature, that its place among narrative and dramatic works would be secure, that its life, as it were, would be as eternal as some of its paranormal or supernatural antagonists’ existences. Oddly, such may not be the case. Fans of horror fiction may, someday, have to find their chills and thrills elsewhere than in pages or on film footage that is devoted to the horror genre.


It’s not that the world itself is any less dangerous a place today than it was in times past; if anything, the world is, in some ways, more dangerous than it has ever been before. (In other ways, of course, it is far safer.) Plenty of various threats remain. The problem seems to be that the authors of short stories, novels, and screenplays continue to write about the same old monsters: beasts, demons and devils, ghosts, ghouls, vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies, and the like, or, when they do, rarely, experiment with something new, as M. Night Shyamalan did in The Happening, the experiment is frequently less than chilling and thrilling and is likely, in fact, to be a dud, as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening certainly is.


For a while, Stephen King, almost single-handedly, revitalized the horror genre by bringing ancient (and sometimes contemporary) horrors to modern, small-town America. Indeed, the townspeople of Castle Rock, Derry, Jerusalem’s Lot, and Chester’s Mill are themselves shown to be, in their own ways, as monstrous and threatening as any of the paranormal and supernatural threats that appear in King’s fiction. However, even innovation, vigorously applied, soon breeds clichés (and, in King’s particular case, tends to produce quite a bit of smug, condescending, and self-indulgent diatribes against Republicans, conservatives, and fundamentalists, to name a few of the author’s favorite targets, among the corpses that typically litter his literature).


Out with the old threats and in with the new seems to offer a solution to the tried and trite, but this solution poses a problem of its own: from whence are horror fiction’s new nightmares to come? There are but two general sources for threats: internal and external. Internal, or psychological, threats are apt to be derived from either reason gone wrong, which is to say madness, or from emotion gone awry, or hysteria. The wellsprings of external threats seem, at first glance, to be both more plentiful and more diverse, but, in fact, they are limited as well, being either social or natural (unless one includes the supernatural realm as a dimension of reality). With only two types of threat, the internal and the external, at their disposal, horror writers seem limited, indeed, as to the sources for things that go bump in the night. Monsters, after all, cannot (yet) be ordered from mail-order catalogues or bought from fiendish supply warehouses.


What horror writers can (and should) do is what writers of other genres of fiction do: expand their concerns to beyond that of simply the introduction of monsters or monstrous threats and include areas of concern to human beings as human beings, which is to say, to matters that pertain to ethics, aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, theology, history, science, politics, art, athletics, economics, and so forth. Instead of the monster’s being the story’s be-all and end-all, he, she, or it should be subordinate to the story’s human characters, who, too often, exist (but seldom live) as only the antagonists’ targets and victims. Although horror fiction authors treat of such matters in a superficial way at times, few of them make human concerns the primary consideration of their short stories, novels, and screenplays. Writers who do treat such concerns with the depth and complexity that these matters deserve may well find themselves among the celebrated few whose works are among the best narratives and dramas of any genre, horror or otherwise, including William Shakespeare s’ Hamlet or Macbeth, Dante’s Inferno, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-man,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and The Jolly Corner, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily,” Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds. Moreover, and more importantly, horror fiction will be a much better genre and one that is well worth reading (or watching).

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Heads Will Roll

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


According to Wikipedia’s article concerning the event, “the scientific revolution began with the publication of two works that changed the course of science in 1543 and continued through the late 17th century: Nicolaus Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and Andreas Vesalius’ On the Fabric of the Human Body (“Scientific Revolution”).

Before then, and even as late as the early twentieth century, the supernatural realm often served as the basis for horror stories, novels, and films. Gradually, the principles of science replaced the tenets of theology and the mad scientist replaced the mystic in such fiction. Whereas, before the scientific revolution, what occurred among the heavenly powers, both fallen and steadfast, determined human affairs, afterward, as Shakespeare argues, “he fault” began to lie more “in ourselves” than in “the stars.”

Nature, rather than the supernatural realm, became, more and more, the stage for human affairs and the human being him- or herself, rather than God or demons, increasingly became the actor upon this stage. In horror, ghosts, werewolves, witches, and vampires became less frequent villains (and less respected ones) than mad scientists, just as technology replaced magic. Where creatures such as zombies persisted, scientific, rather than mystical, explanations were offered by authors and filmmakers to explain their origin. Perhaps they were nothing more than human beings who had had the misfortune to have been infected by a bizarre virus or were victims of unscrupulous “witch doctors” who employed a mixture of “tetrodotoxin, a powerful hallucinogen called Datura, and cultural forces and beliefs” to convince uneducated and illiterate men and women that they had been resurrected from the dead and now owed their allegiance to the witch doctors who had performed this miraculous feat (“The Serpent and the Rainbow (book),” Wikipedia). In short, the change from mysticism to science fiction, or from faith to knowledge, as the primary basis for horror fiction is not accidental; it stems from the change in Western culture’s Weltanschauung.

In the past, humans were in danger of losing their souls and becoming demonic parodies of their true selves (images of God), damned forever to hell. With the general acceptance among scientists of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, human beings might fall victim, instead, to the animal nature within, which they had suppressed, more or less successfully, over the millennia since the first human beings emerged from their original, primordial ape-like ancestors. Since the industrial revolution, people have feared their affinity, as so-called ghosts in the machine (of the human body), to automatons, with cyborgs and robots replacing feral creatures as symbolic expressions of human degeneration. In the information, or computer, age, men and women fear that even their very personalities may be replaced by software encoded with artificial intelligence.

The theological has given way to the evolutionary, which has given way to the mechanical, which has given way to the digital or cybernetic. At each point, men and women have become both less and less fleshly and human and more and more incorporeal and inhuman, alienated, literally and figuratively, from both themselves and their world. Such stories (plays, novels, television series, or films) as Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604), H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), the televisions series The Six Million Dollar Man (1970s), and Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed (1973), upon which Donald Cammell’s film adaptation of the same title (1977) is based.

Although utopian fiction sometimes projects a paradisiacal future civilization based upon the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the technological inventions that often results from such a pursuit, horror fiction that is based upon science (or, more often, science fiction) has frequently opposed such an optimistic vision, showing that science, as an invention and enterprise of human origin, is, at best, a morally neutral activity, its beneficial or destructive effects being determined by the scientists (and, more often, the corporations or government agencies that underwrite the scientists’ work).

Horror writers generally take a dim view of human nature, considering it to be corrupted or corruptible, limited, fallible, and, perhaps, even innately evil. Edgar Allan Poe sums up the general view of horror writers as much today as he did in the nineteenth century: “I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. an is now only more active---not more happy--or more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.” Often, horror stories tend to be cautionary tales in which the object to be feared is not the mythical box of Pandora but the manipulation of nature, human and otherwise, for individual scientist’s own gain or as a means to the government’s end, which is usually, world domination or the control of nature itself, as H. G. Wells warned: “Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.”


In horror, science has given birth, as it were, to such terrors as aliens; cloned dinosaurs, psychotic cyborgs; disease and pestilence; gigantic plants, insects, and animals; human-animal hybrids; renegade robots; mad scientists; serial killers; super-soldiers; and a host of other menaces representative of the dangers of runaway technology or the application of science without concern for morality; the lust for political, military, or financial power at any cost; and just plain old human hubris. We can’t blame God or nature; as Shakespeare taught us, “The fault. . . lies not in our stars but in ourselves.” The attempt to avoid blame for our own cruelty, stupidity, greed, and callous indifference to anyone but ourselves that was evident in evolutionists’ insistence that we are to expect some such behavior as natural and normal, since, after all, imperfect and fallible human beings are evolving from lower life forms may be logically sound, should one accept the basic primitive that human beings are evolving in such a fashion, but horror writers don’t let their characters off the hook as easily as that, insisting, instead, that a price--and often a brutal one and a collective one--be paid in blood and guts and fear.

Horror fiction is one of the few remaining genres that seeks to hold humanity accountable for its actions toward one another and toward nature itself. Perhaps human behavior is determined, rather than elective, but, even if it is, a price must be paid for immoral or amoral behavior. Even if it doesn’t seem to make sense to punish people for the dastardly deeds that they cannot help doing (if their behavior is determined rather than free), the price must be paid, horror fiction declares. Heads must roll.

Otherwise, if heads do not roll, and everyone is permitted to do whatever he or she likes, without regard to whether an action might be considered by others, and even by a vast majority of others, to be wrong and harmful, or even disastrous, the effect will be much as would follow from a theory of morality (or amorality) such as that which Ted Bundy held and articulated, a monstrous, but perhaps irrefutable, notion of what constitutes the good in a universe devoid of evil.
Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself–what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself–that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any ‘reason’ to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring–the strength of character–to throw off its shackles. . . . I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable ‘value judgment’ that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure that I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me–after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.
(On January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy’s own head “rolled,” which is to say, he was electrocuted--for the murder of 12year-old Kimberly Leach.)

Sunday, May 23, 2010

The Fly in the Ointment of Being a Ghost in a Machine

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Monsters are degenerate. They represent deterioration or disintegration. As such, they are living object lessons, as it were, examples of what will happen to the rest of us if we pursue their course or “suffer the slings and arrows,” as William Shakespeare might put it, of their “outrageous fortune.” Potentially, we are all Frankenstein’s monster; any of us could be the creature of the Black Lagoon; you and I could both become the next werewolf, vampire, or zombie. Horror fiction is about the could-be versions of ourselves, and, often, these could-be versions are our lesser, degenerate selves.

The authors of horror fiction imply that another’s hubris can cause us to suffer, as arrogant Victor Frankenstein, in seeking to play God, makes his creature suffer. Frankenstein lusts after power and glory (or fame), and, like the novel’s author, Mary Shelley, other writers of horror fiction suggest that our lusts, sexual or otherwise, may bring about our downfall, just as the sexual desire of the creature of the Black Lagoon for Kay Lawrence and the infatuation of King Kong with Ann Darrow lead to these monsters’ downfalls and deaths. If we do not control the animal within, we may become a werewolf; if we parasitize others too freely, whether emotionally, financially, sexually, or otherwise, we may become vampires; if we are too passive and compliant (or indifferent), we may be transformed into zombies by those whom we serve (or, both history and politics show, even by those who supposedly serve us).


Often, monsters expose dangers to society and faults within a nation or a system, but they can also show us the perils of ourselves and others. In addition, horror stories show us that it is humans’ inhumanity to others that frequently creates monsters. Beowulf’s Grendel attacks the Danes because, ostracized by human society, he feels envious of the warriors’ camaraderie and fellowship. Grief-stricken, Grendel’s mother is also motivated by her passion: she seeks vengeance against the Geatish warrior, Beowulf, who killed her son. In the same epic poem, a dragon seeks to avenge the theft of gold that it guards--gold that it has itself stolen from the graves of dead warriors. Such stories suggest what is wrong with us as a group.

However, other monsters, such as Godzilla, the gigantic ants of the movie Them!, and the flora of M. Night Shyamalan’s abysmal film The Happening represent--indeed, embody--the dangers of environmental pollution, whereas such menaces as Frankenstein’s monster, the hybrid human-animal creatures of H. G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, the gigantic plants and animals of Wells’ novel The Food of the Gods (and the movie based upon it), the human fly of David Cronenberg's movie The Fly, and the dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg's movie Jurassic Park (based upon the novel of the same title by Michael Crichton), represent, as do the antagonists of many other movies, the dangers of overreaching scientists who would manipulate and control nature, regardless of the potential risks involved in their experiments. Madmen as monsters are another type of this menace. Such characters appear in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” and in such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (based upon Robert Bloch’s novel of the same title) and Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence of the Lambs (based upon the novel, of the same title, by Thomas Harris). Such movies suggest what is wrong with our behavior as individuals.


Still other monsters, such as the blob (in Irvin Yeaworth's movie The Blob) or the cosmic forces and entities that appear in many of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories suggest that the threat to humanity is an external force that is beyond our control; the menace comes from outside, infecting us or subjecting us to its will. Such stories imply that, despite our knowledge and our wit, we are but the pawns of fate.

In short, many of the monsters of horror fiction suggest that something is terribly wrong with us as a society or a species, or with our actions as individuals, or with the very cosmos in which we live. Evils, such movies, imply, are social, biological, or existential; they attack (and lay bare) our weaknesses as dualistic creatures whose structure is both physical and spiritual and who necessarily live in societies which are predicated upon and, indeed, result from, both aspects of our nature as ghosts, as it were, in the machines of our own material bodies.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Developing Your Ability to Write Description

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Unlike scripts and screenplays, all short stories and novels depend upon their writer’s ability to write convincing descriptions. One might think of description as the equivalent of the writer’s motion picture camera. By describing what a character or narrator perceives, the writer shows his or her reader what is to be seen, just as he or she also provides whatever other sensations the reader perceives, whether sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations. The world is delivered to us by our senses. Therefore, to deliver the fictional world to the reader, the writer must appeal to his or her senses. Description is visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile.

Description not only sets the scene, but it can create a mood. It can set the story’s tone. It can even suggest the story’s theme.

To develop your writing ability, study the masters of the art of descriptive writing. Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, and, of course, William Shakespeare can teach anyone a few hundred tricks of the trade, but one should study all the writers the read, especially, perhaps, those whose work--particularly whose descriptions--they most enjoy.

Nothing can replace a study of the masters of description, but a few principles for effective description can be offered:

1. Analyze the elements of perception. For example, what do we mean when we say that we “see” something? What are the elements of vision? Intensity, color, texture, distance, shape, size, contrast, density, perspective--all of these and more are elements of the visual experience.

2. Learn the principles of composition. You’re not a visual artist, you say? Oh, but you are! You may not sketch or paint or sculpt, but you create word pictures, or images, and, therefore, you should know about such elements of composition as line, shape, color, texture, direction, size, perspective, and space. You should also know how to use such principles of composition as proportion, balance, harmony, orientation, negative space, color, contrast, rhythm, geometry, lighting, repetition, perspective, viewpoint, unity, the rule of thirds, the rule of odds, the rule of space, simplification, the limiting of focus, symmetry, the centering of focus, the movement of the viewer’s eye, and others to their best advantage in achieving your narrative purpose.

3. Learn the elements and principle of mise en scene, which term refers to the placement and treatment of all the elements which are to appear before the motion picture camera, including the elements of the setting, properties (props), actors, costumes, and lighting. Although, as a writer of short stories or novels, you won’t be filming a movie, the more you know about how other artists, whether they are set decorators, directors, illustrators, painters, photographers, advertising artists, or sculptors, create, the better you will be able to develop your ability to write descriptions.

4. Use non-verbal communication to communicate; in other words, learn how to communicate through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch as well as language. There’s a great scene in the “Bad Girls” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which the slayers Buffy and Faith enter a dark alley splashed with crimson. Darkness suggests death, and crimson, blood. On a nearby construction sawhorse, an amber caution light flashes. There is no need for dialogue, music, or sound at all, and if these elements re present, I certainly don‘t remember them. However, the viewer understands immediately that something dangerous is about to happen, and, sure enough, within moments, Buffy and Faith are attacked by a band of vampires. The symbolic use of color communicates on an unconscious, almost subliminal level, thereby enhancing the effect of fear that the scene evokes. For a masterful use of non-verbal communication in a short story, read Chillers and Thrillers’ article concerning Bran Stoker’s masterpiece of terror, “Dracula’s Guest.”

5. Use metaphor, simile, symbolism, allusion, and other rhetorical devices to suggest figurative meanings and to enrich your narrative by supplying psychological, philosophical, sociological, or theological associations and themes. A story that has depth is likely to be both more rewarding and more memorable than one that does not. In fact, it is such depth that makes classic stories classics. There are reasons that Hamlet and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are likely to outlast the popular plays and novels of the moment, and one of those reasons is narrative and thematic depth.

6. Determine your scene’s purpose before you write it, and use your purpose as a means of evaluating and revising your description. Descriptive writing makes fiction immediate and emotional, but its should also help to advance your narrative purpose. Is the scene meant to evoke a powerful emotion? Is its intention to present a conflict? To introduce a new character? To provide an explanation or to supply background information? Is the purpose of the scene to plant a clue or a red herring? Is the scene meant to introduce or develop a subplot?

7. Revise, revise, revise. A functional scene isn’t good enough. It should be the most interesting and best written scene of which you are capable. Consider how rewriting the scene could improve it. What detracts from the effectiveness of the description? Would a different perspective add interest? Could the characters do something more exciting while they’re getting the point across? Again, study the masters and see how and why their scenes and descriptions are interesting and dynamic.

8. Use your web browser’s image search engine to access online images or visit actual physical locations, and then describe them. A picture of an eerie cemetery will help you to describe an eerie cemetery. Painters and illustrators paint and draw from life; the least a writer can do is to describe what he or she sees on a computer screen or, for that matter, in the real world. Charles Dickens’ short story of horror and terror, “The Signal-Man” may have been inspired by the Clayton tunnel crash of 1861; its setting resembles the actual location of the crash. Motion picture directors usually take full advantage of natural settings, too, dispatching location scouts to find appropriate and dramatically effective filming locations. Short story writers and novelists can do the same, and many have.

9. Study great descriptive writers and learn from their techniques; make sure you include poets among the writers you study. Yes, we mentioned this a couple of times already; we’re mentioning it again. That’s how important it is. Some critics and instructors advise writers to avoid the use of adjectives and adverbs in writing descriptions, but even a cursory study of great writers, whether classical or popular, shows that successful authors have used, and do use, such modifiers in their descriptions (check the examples below). While it’s probably a good idea to be judicious in selecting and employing adjectives and adverbs, there’s certainly no reason to avoid them altogether. When a critic’s or an instructor’s advice runs counter to the actual practice of established writers, go with the writers’ practice, over the critic’s or the instructor’s recommendations, every time.

10. Practice, practice, practice!

We promised you a couple of examples.

Here’s one, from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into every-day life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion,
that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the re-modelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Here’s a second, from Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder”: notice, in particular, his masterful use of metaphors and similes:

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth,
leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily, its beautifully reptile hands feeling the air.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Famous Writers and Director’s Quotes, With More or Less Direct Application to the Theory and Practice of Writing Horror

Ambrose Bierce
  • Edible--good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
  • Impiety--your irreverence toward my deity.
  • Mad--affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
  • Ocean--a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man--who has no gills.
  • Politeness--the most acceptable hypocrisy.
  • Pray--to ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
  • Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
  • The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
  • There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
  • To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
  • When you doubt, abstain.

Ray Bradbury

  • Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it. First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
  • The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance--the idea that anything is possible.
  • Touch a scientist and you touch a child.
  • We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
  • You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

John Carpenter

  • Evil hiding among us is an ancient theme.
  • To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
  • What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.

G. K. Chesterton

  • A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
  • A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
  • All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
  • An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
  • Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
  • Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
  • Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
  • Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
  • Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
  • Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
  • It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
  • If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
  • Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
  • Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a mustache.
  • Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
  • Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
  • Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
  • The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
  • The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
  • The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
  • The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
  • The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
  • The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
  • The simplification of anything is always sensational.
  • The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
  • The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
  • The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
  • Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
  • There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
  • There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
  • Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
  • When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
  • With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

Wes Craven

  • A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren't so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?
  • I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally.
  • The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

  • A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
  • All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
  • Easy reading is damn hard writing.
  • Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
  • Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
  • The founders of a new colony, whatever utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
  • We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
  • What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

Alfred Hitchcock

  • Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
  • Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
  • The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
  • The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.
  • There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Stephen King

  • I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
  • It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.
  • No, it's not a very good story--its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
  • We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

Dean Koontz

  • A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.
  • Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate.
  • Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.
  • Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.
  • I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.
  • I have been reading Stephen King since Carrie and hope to read him for many years to come.
  • I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence--I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.
  • I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.
  • If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored.
  • Never, never try to scope the market.
  • Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
  • Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
  • The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.
  • Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
  • We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another.
  • The idea of true evil has been blown away.
  • What we do as a society is seek simple answers.
  • When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

C. S. Lewis

  • An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
  • Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
  • Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
  • Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
  • If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
  • If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
  • Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
  • Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
  • Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
  • The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
  • The safest road to hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
  • The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
  • We are what we believe we are.
  • What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Joyce Carol Oates

  • If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
  • Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
  • Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
  • Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Flannery O’Connor

  • All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
  • Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
  • I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
  • I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
  • It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
  • Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
  • The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
  • The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
  • To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
  • When in Rome, do as you have done in Milledgeville.

Edgar Allan Poe

  • Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
  • I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
  • I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
  • It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
  • The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
  • The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
  • They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
  • Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Anne Rice

  • Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.
  • First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
  • I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.
  • I'm always asking questions.
  • I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.
  • Re-telling the Christian story is the essence of my vocation. That has been going on since the Evangelists in one form or another.
  • The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.
  • The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.
  • Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.
  • We're frightened of what makes us different.

Steven Spielberg

  • All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.
  • I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.
  • I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.
  • You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project.
  • Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

H. G. Wells

  • Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
  • Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.Some people bear three kinds of trouble--the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.
  • The past is but the past of a beginning.
  • There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
  • What really matters is what you do with what you have.
  • You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Making a Scene

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The scene is the building block of the short story, the novel, or the screenplay. It features one or more characters; a conflict; dialogue, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, or some other representation of the character’s or characters’ thoughts and feelings; and, like the full-fledged story of which it is a part, a scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end that is developed climactically; and the scene advances a larger, specific purpose, such as developing the narrative’s overall plot, introducing an important character, intensifying suspense, complicating the story’s basic conflict, introducing or developing a related subplot, characterizing an important character, delineating the setting, and so forth.

In horror stories, whether in print or on film, the scene also usually (but not always) communicates something terrifying, horrific, or repulsive. What Edgar Allan Poe advises, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” concerning the short story (or narrative poem) as a whole applies also to the scene: it must be carefully plotted, with the single, unifying effect that is to be created in mind from the start, and everything in the scene should lead to the development of this effect. In short, one must know one’s purpose in writing the scene--what he or she means to accomplish by it--before putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard. One must remember to connect one scene with the next through a series of cause-and-effect relationships. One scene, in other words, must logically lead to the next, and it, in turn, must lead to the one after it, and so forth, throughout the story. There mist be a reason, or purpose, for each scene. Otherwise, irrelevancies and confusion will be introduced into what, otherwise, might have been a meaningful and intelligible, perhaps even gripping, story.

In fact, whether the writer also happens to be an illustrator or not, he or she can make some rough pictures, similar to the sketches that make up a film’s storyboard, to indicate the scene’s basic purpose, structure, and Storyboards: What Are They? offers tips for storyboard construction that could aid writers in developing story scenes. The website’s article reduces the process to six steps:
  1. Think of your story as a video.
  2. In your first frame show an overview of your primary setting. Let the setting help communicate the point you want to get across or the mood you want to set.
  3. Make frames that show the 5 W’s. [These elements are identified as the scene’s “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “why” elements.]
  4. Identify the characters. [These characters are identified as the protagonist and the antagonist.]
  5. Plot. [Specify the problem, the climax, and the resolution, or the means by which the “problem is solved--which can lead directly to your message.”]
  6. Message. [This is the “moral, perspective on life or observation about life,” the theme, that the scene is intended to convey.]
Here is an example of Saul Bass’ storyboarding of the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho:


Although it is not a horror story, the original Karate Kid movie offers a good model of the construction and use of scenes, as does It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, The Wizard of Oz, and The Sound of Music, to name but a few of many well-made stories.

In horror, Poe is a superb storyteller. Each of his scenes is deliberate and purposeful and leads plausibly to the next. Other master craftsmen and artists who are especially adept at the construction and sequencing of horror story scenes include Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Wes Craven, Christian Nyby, H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury. By studying how they create and use scenes, others may benefit, improving their own fiction by dissecting the work of the accomplished others who have gone before them.

Friday, November 7, 2008

Plot, Character, Setting and Theme as Narrative Starting Points

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The four primary elements of fiction are plot, character, setting, and theme. Associated with most of these is a cluster of related components: plot is divisible into exposition, inciting moment, rising action, turning point, falling action, moment of final suspense, and (depending upon whether the narrative is a comedy or a tragedy) resolution or catastrophe.

Of course, all plots are also derived from, and developed upon, conflict. Likewise, setting is not merely a matter of a specific time and place, but it also entails the particular cultural milieu that exists in this particular time and place. Victorian London, for example, is quite different than nineteenth-century Tombstone, Arizona.

Similarly, character involves motivation, various personality traits, and, usually, interrelationships among several fictional persons. Only theme is simple, rather than complex, having no subordinate constituents.

Since any of these four elements is a potential starting point for a story, a writer may generate an idea for a story by considering plot, character, setting, or theme. Some writers, among them both C. S. Lewis and Stephen King, have been inspired by mental images of characters in specific situations or settings.

C. S. Lewis specified the image of a fawn, or satyr, carrying an armload of parcels, as the mental picture that launched The Chronicles of Narnia, and Storm of the Century, King says, began with his imagining a strange man incarcerated in a jail cell.

The placement of a character in a particular situation or setting is not a story, of course, but it is (possibly) the beginning of a story that could start by considering an interesting character. It is the starting point from which a series of questions can begin to be asked. The choice of a protagonist or an antagonist can also suggest, or even determine, the story’s counterpart as well. Once William Peter Blatty decided upon a demon—maybe Satan himself—as his story’s antagonist, an exorcist became the most logical choice of a protagonist. (Although The Exorcist is said to be based upon a true story, Blatty, as an author of fiction was free to select a character other than a priest as his protagonist, had he wished to do so; fact does not determine fiction, even when the latter is based upon the former.)

Dean Koontz says he begins many of his stories by involving a character in a bizarre situation that compels him or her to react to the incidents that ensue therefrom.

Many of Jesus’ parables begin as answers to his disciples’ questions concerning the meaning of the law or of right conduct in regard to particular situations. They are stories told, in other words, to impart wisdom. Their purpose is not primarily to entertain, but to instruct. Therefore, they originate as a means for expressing, in concrete terms, abstract ideas or values. They are theme-driven.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son illustrates the meaning of forgiveness. The Parable of the Good Samaritan shows the meaning of loving one’s neighbor. The Parable of the Mustard Seed shows the meaning of faith.

Horror stories, as cautionary tales, also often drive home a theme. Beowulf teaches the destructive and deadly effects of intertribal vengeance. The Shining shows the terrible consequences of self-absorption, self-indulgence, and child and spousal abuse. Cujo is not only about a rabid dog, but also about the devastating effects of adultery upon one’s marriage and family.

Sometimes, a setting will suggest a story. It is no accident that many horror stories take place in isolated environments, total institutions, or confining spaces. What other monster but the strange troglodytes could have inhabited the cavern into which, as if into Satan’s maw, the female spelunkers enter in The Descent? What better foe could beachgoers encounter in the finny deep than the gargantuan white shark with which Peter Benchley confronts his readers in Jaws? Likewise, the rain forest in which Special Forces soldiers first encounter the camouflaged extraterrestrial in Predator fairly cries out for such a monster as its antagonist.

Edgar Allan Poe’s essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," is the quintessential document, perhaps, alongside Aristotle’s Poetics, for the point of view that it is the plot that matters more than other elements (a point not always conceded by other authorities).

Poe argued that a writer should commence not at the beginning of his or her story but, on the contrary, with its end, working backward in determining the sequence of actions and other details that will best lead, inevitably, toward the narrative’s climactic finale, using his own narrative poem The Raven as an example of the process.

Many writers share Aristotle’s and Poe’s respect for plotting, so much so that they find themselves at a loss to put pen to paper (or, more commonly, finger to keyboard) until they have plotted the whole tale, from “A” to “Z.” (Others, such as Mark Twain, write the same way that the Who’s “Pinball Wizard” plays his game, blindly, as it were, purely “by inspiration.”)

The fact that a writer can generate a story from any of the four primary elements of fiction quadruples his or her opportunities for inspiration. It does more than this, however: it also provides the writer with a way of considering, and deciding, which element he or she wants to emphasize.

The author must consider whether the story highlights an individual’s actions in the face of fate (plot); personal limitations, abilities, and will (character); the effects of time, place, and culture on the understanding and development of character and the limitations imposed upon one by his or her environment (setting); or the lesson that the main character learns as a result of his or her experience, as recounted in the story (theme).

The choice that the writer makes at this initial point will affect the story as a whole and how the reader understands the tale. In this sense, four possible stories confront the writer, and he or she must choose which of the four to tell.

For horror story writers, Poe suggests a solution to this dilemma: pick the element that will best sustain and heighten fear and trembling. After all, that’s what horror is all about.

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Todorov:

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

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

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

My Cup of Blood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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