Plotting Board, Part 7

Plotting Board, Part 7

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

Problem-Solution Plotting

One of the X-Files's enduring plot devices is the introduction of a problem and its eventual solution. The problem-solution dynamic has built-in suspense: once a problem is posed, we want—maybe we even ache—for it to be solved. In The X-Files, the central problem, as set forth in the series's “mythology” about a possible alien invasion preceding possible alien colonization, becomes, more or less continually, more and more complicated, so the solution, which is put off again and again, has a much greater and more intense emotional payoff when it does come—or should have, at any rate.

According to VanDerWerff, episode 16 of season nine, “Release,” finally “wraps up one of the [show's] major [remaining] mysteries” (419). This mystery is “What happened to Doggett's son when he was murdered?” (410) Although this episode “answers that question,” VanDerWerff says, the answer is anything but clear. Perhaps bringing clarity and closure would make a problem-solution plot much stronger, as readers have invested much time and emotion in the ongoing, long-term, increasingly complex problem. After the tease, it's only fair to deliver.

Techno Thrills

Technology is constantly changing and developing. My father's life encompassed by the Model T and the landing of an astronaut on the moon. My own includes black-and-white television which featured, on tiny, thick screens, programming from ABC, CBS, NBC, and a local affiliate, WTTG, to drones, DARPA's robotic wonders, and self-driving cars (and there's still much more to come—or, at least, I hope there will be.)

That's the point that VanDerWerff makes about storytelling when he writes:

. . . Video software and image manipulation programs are getting so good that it will soon be incredibly difficult to ascertain when footage that seems too good (or too bad) to be true has been faked. We won't always know who's dead and who's alive, and all it will take for those in power to introduce suspicion around a certain set of facts is to stand up in front of all of us and shrug and say, “Nobody knows for sure” (469).

As always, the possibilities are only as limited as our imaginations.

Backfield in Motion

A way of developing plots while characterizing characters is to build a character's backstory. Of course, too much of a good thing is generally a bad thing, so writers have to be careful not to include too much backstory and, when they do build such a history, the character's past should be delivered piecemeal over a number of episodes or, if we're talking book series, a number of volumes.

A case in point is “Kitten,” the sixth episode of The X-Files's season eleven. This episode is unusual, VanDerWerff thinks, because it “takes what was already a serviceable character backstory (specifically that of Water Skinner) and attempts a direct dramatization of it” (474). The character's “Vietnam background” was presented in previous episodes (“One Breath,” [season two, episode eight] and “Avatar” [season three, episode twenty one]. In “Kitten,” viewers learn about Skinner's sacrifice of his own “career to support Mulder and Scully” based on Skinner's belief that their “mission to expose the truth of what the country was doing to some of its most vulnerable citizens was more important than his personal advancement” (475).

As long as a character's backstory doesn't start to take over the current story, as it does, for example, in Arrow and verges upon doing in Punisher, building a character's background to show how it has helped to shape him or her, how it has, in part, made him or her the person he or she is today, is a good way to add to a narrative's plot.

Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files has much to recommend it, not the least of which is its even-handed balance of praise and condemnation for the series it evaluates. Both Handlen and VanDerWerff point out what they believe is right and what they believe is wrong with the series's episodes. Mostly, in reviewing their book, while tossing in a few of my own observations, I've concentrated on what these critics state and imply about the plotting of the sci fi-horror series. However, depending on one's purpose, on how one reads the book, Monsters of the Week can provide a good many more—and different—insights.

And, remember: the truth is out there!

Plotting Board, Part 6

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

With a Little Bit of Bloomin' Luck

Our belief (or relative belief) in the influences of certain phenomena, including our feelings and attitudes, often affect our thoughts and our overt behavior, even when we deny that such is the case. In The X-Files, Mulder is frequently guided by his belief in the existence of paranormal phenomena, while his partner, Scully, is often led by her skepticism.

Other phenomena, real and imagined, also affect the characters, one of which, as VanDerWerff points out, is the concept of luck. “We all sort ourselves . . . into the categories of 'lucky people' and 'unlucky people'” (323), he suggests. FBI agents Mulder and Scully are no exceptions, which allows the series's episode “The Goldberg Variation” to explore “the ideas of luck” as “a giant system you pay into, then make withdrawals from” (323). By exploring other commonly held beliefs, communal or individual, writers acquire many ways to develop plots for short stories and novels, just as TV and movie writers do.

Religious fanaticism, as represented by a snake-handling cult in The X-Files episode “Signs and Wonders” is another example. According to VanDerWerff, the exploration of power of fanaticism to shape and manipulate religious fanatics has a lot to do with “the lure of complete commitment, of surrendering oneself to someone who claims to know all the answers” (328). It's an idea for plotting as contemporary and terrifying as Allison Mack's alleged involvement in the NXIVM cult, which, again, allegedly, included her branding other women as her and her master's property. (Religious fanaticism also has quite an influence on Pilgrim a character in the Punisher series.)

Such ideas as blessings and curses, optimistic and pessimistic attitudes, biases and prejudices, fetishes and phobias, the supernatural and the otherworldly, to name but a few such influences, also permit such stories as H. G. Wells's “Pollock and the Porroh Man,” “The Red Room,” and “The Apple”; Ray Bradbury's “Skeleton”; the effects of idols in Stephen King's Desperation; Rod Serling's “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”; Shirley Jackson's “Just an ordinary Day”; and W. W. Jacobs's “The Monkey's Paw,” to name but a few.

(Seemingly) Alternate Solutions

As Handlen notes in his commentary on “The Amazing Maleeni” episode of The X-Files, one way to spin a plot while maintaining suspense is to present a mystery which has—or at least seems to have—multiple possible solutions. As the characters (or readers) discover the solution they've figured out isn't the solution at all, they continue to pursue leads or watch (or read), hoping their next deduction may prove correct, only (hopefully) to be frustrated yet again, until, finally, the true, one-and-only solution is presented, by either Mulder or Scully, naturally:

“Several times through the episode, our heroes believe they've solved the case only to come up empty-handed. The result is something that continually pulls us forward along with Mulder and Scully, promising new and greater mysteries with each new discovery” (326).

Ask the BIG QUESTIONS

Plots can be generated by simply asking the BIG QUESTIONS, as the “Sein und Zeit” (“Being and Time”) episode of The X-Files does. This installment, Handlen and VanDerWerff imply, asks what might happen to a character whose “very belief system” is “eradicated before his eyes” (330).

This is such a compelling question that its very asking is enough to make anyone want to stay tuned (or keep reading, as the case may be). It also parallels such events in the lives of historical figures and, indeed, the men and women of everyday life. What became of Jefferson Davis, the man, after the Civil War ended in the South's defeat? What did the ordinary Roman think and do after the Empire fell (or the average Brit, for that matter, after the fall of the British Empire)? What does one do the day after he or she has lost his or her entire family in a tragic accident? What happens to the citizens of a nation after the fall of their country? History records some of the answers, but never all.

The question that “Sein und Zeit” asks, implicitly, is what happens to Fox Mulder when his “very belief system [is] eradicated before his eyes”? The second part of this story is presented in the next episode of the series, “Closure.” BIG QUESTIONS, it's obvious, lead to longer plots. They also generate immediate and profound interest on the part of their audiences.

NEXT: A bit more.

Plotting Board, Part 5

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

 

Alternate Histories

 

 

Just as some movies, such a Hide and Seek and 1408, offer alternate endings, some novels get a lot of plot mileage by "overlaying [their] own version[s] of history over actual history," VanDerWerff observes (245).

 

Essentially, such plots offer two stories, the actual historical account of events and the fictional version. Ironically, the latter purports to show what actually happened, after the true events are challenged as spurious, perhaps as the result of a long-ongoing conspiracy by a power elite or another group with vested interests.

 

In The Taking, for example, Dean Koontz suggests that aliens are reverse-terraforming the Earth to prepare for their invasion when, in fact, Satan and his fallen angels are preparing to take over the planet. 

 

We Are (and Do) What We Believe

 

 

The more we believe in something, the easier it is to see how that belief impacts every aspect of our lives, Handlen says:

 

If you believe in God [as Dana Scully does], then everything you do and everything that happens to you is affected [sic] by God . . . . And if you're Fox Mulder--conspiracy enthusiast and fervent follower of little gray men--every calamity is just the latest iteration of a government dedicated to crushing its citizens and consolidating power in the face of a potential alien invasion . . . .

. . . While it may be comforting to believe that everything happens for a reason, and that you can understand what that reason is, it can also be unsettling. It means that nothing is without meaning, that any hiccup [sic] or snag has dark implications (251).

To avail oneself of this method of plotting, simply ask what your characters believe in and have them act accordingly. (Philosophy, theology, biography, autobiography, and history might come in handy as reference sources in investigating world views.)

Bottom Line Plotting

To plot a series of interconnecting story lines that occur over a fairly long time span, create a situation, VanDerWerff suggests, that can "run along in the background and resurface when needed," as in "the idea that the X-Files [department] is just too expensive and ineffectual or irresponsible" and should be shut down (270).

 Motives for Momentum

"At its most basic level," Handlen contends, "plot is just a pretext for momentum." Characters need a reason to keep moving, to keep acting. The X-Files episode "Drive" provides a simple, but effective, motive for Walter White's momentum: "Keep moving, or you die (271).

Mulder, likewise, has a simple, but effective, motive for momentum: his 'compulsion to find the truth" forces him to act (272).

These characters' motives move the story forward. What compels your characters?

Be Your Own Critic

After writing a scene, critique it from the point of view of a critic. To do this, you need to know what critics typically criticize, but, until you've read a few hundred volumes of lit crit (the more, the merrier!), these principles could do as starters:

• Does the scene contain all the elements of a story as a whole: protagonist; antagonist; secondary characters, if necessary; conflict; setting; action; dialogue, if necessary; motive; narrative purpose?
• Does the scene drive the story forward?
• Does the scene provide needed information?
• Does the scene's protagonist act, rather than react?
• Does the scene have its own beginning, middle, and end?
• Does the scene end with a cliffhanger?
• Does the scene evoke a strong, definite primary emotion? (It may or may not also evoke other, secondary emotions.)
• Are the characters well-drawn and believable?
• Is the pace appropriate?
• Does the tone work?
• Could the scene be revised to present its material in a more dramatic manner?
• If the scene uses figures of speech, do they work? Are they subtle, rather than obvious?
• Should the point of view be changed?
• How might a famous author have written this scene?
• How might a famous director shoot this scene?
• How does this scene fit with those before and after it?

 NEXT: To be continued . . . .

 

Sounding Board, Part 4

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

 Role Playing

To generate plots, the writers of The X-Files sometimes have a character adopt the role of another literary figure. For example,
VanDerWerff notes that "The X-Files seems heavily influenced by the doubting apostle Thomas," (114) especially in regard to Scully, the series's skeptic who is, paradoxically, also a practicing Catholic.

In addition, in the "731" episode, Handlen explains, Mulder plays a Don-Quixote-like figure who must accept that the "answers" he finds on his "quest" differ from those he'd expected to learn. There are no aliens; his sister, therefore, was not abducted by extraterrestrial beings. Instead, "the government has been kidnapping and running tests on humans and hiding it under the cover of 'alien abductions'" (114-115).

By adopting roles played by earlier characters of other stories, which roles are thematically appropriate to the plight of their own characters, The X-Files writers not only enrich the series's storytelling through allusions, but they also acquire vehicles for advancing their narrative's own plot in a meaningful way.

"Assume" Makes an . . . .

Among the many other plot-generating devices employed by The X-Files writers is that of having a character (often Mulder) make wrong assumptions, which then produce "bad decisions," which, in turn, tend to result in potentially fatal situations (117). For example, Handlen reminds his readers, in the episode "War of the Coprophages," although Mulder and other characters believe "a bunch of bugs from outer space" have come "to earth to mess with our minds," skeptical Scully is right again; the insects "are only cockroaches," just as she'd supposed (116-118). Thanks to the false assumption of the citizens of Miller's Grove, where the roaches land (and to Mulder, of course), quite a bit of the episode's plot is generated, demonstrating the truth of the idea that false assumptions can be effective plot generators.

Either-or Premise

As VanDerWerff notes, The X-Files plays with two alternative explanations as to the causes of the series's strange events: (1) "The government did bad things, and now it's trying to keep them covered up" (Scully's point of view) and (2) "yes, aliens . . . have been visiting our world and, yes, they intend to colonize it" (Mulder's perspective) (124). This either-or premise maintains the series's fantastic character ("fantastic" in Tzvetan Todorov's sense of the word), its mystery, and its suspense, while offering a dual approach to plotting.

Memory Sucks

One way of advancing the plot while examining the human condition is to offer a definition of what it means to be a human being and then, after eliminating this identifying quality, character, or state, explore whether the character from whom the essence of humanity has been stripped is still a person, still a human being. If, VanDerWerff asks, "we are our memories," and those "memories are sucked out," do we still exist as human beings or, as X-Files writer Darin Morgan puts it, "If someone has the ability to manipulate your memory--all your memory--then, what are you, if, say, your happiest memory or your most depressing memory are [sic] all fiction?" (133-135). 

Of course, other writers might posit other characteristics or abilities as essential to human existence as such: intelligence, compassion, the ability to effect cause, religious belief, etc. However, the story would still follow the same avenue: by eliminating this characteristic or ability (or whatever else is considered essential to human existence), it would explore whether the character who lost it remains human at all, and if not, why not. By exploring what it means to be human, writers can generate plots. This approach is most suited, perhaps, to stories of fantasy, but it could inform almost any genre.

We Are What We Choose to Be

Another way to investigate the human condition is to ask not what makes people human, but whether a person is who he or she is because of the way that he or she chooses to live or because of how other people treat him or her.

The "Small Potatoes" episode of The X-Files tests this question, VanDerWerff suggests, by having a shape-shifter become other people--but he always reverts back to his own identity, resigned to being himself. He is who he is because he has adopted the persona (that of a "loser"), based on everyone else's view of him, rather than asserting his own identity through the choices he makes (193-195).

This way of developing plots has the benefit of allowing writers to investigate such heady matters as those which are more ordinarily examined within the sphere of philosophy or psychology,  thereby enriching the more mundane affairs of the typical X-Files story.

In an interesting footnote, as it were, to this question, Handlen suggests that, in fiction, autonomy is represented as an effect of doing; in doing, a character forces others to react to what he or she has done. Mulder, he says, is a doer; therefore, he is autonomous. Scully, on the other hand, more often follows a path set for her by Mulder or someone else; she is more likely to be reactive than active, and she is, therefore, only partially autonomous (224).

NEXT: More of the same! 

Plotting Board, Part 3

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

The MOTW Formula Redux

In a previous post, we identified the Monster of the Week (MOTW) formula as one of the two basic plot generators The X-Files writers use. Handlen also fills us in on a variation of the MOTW formula. In this alternative approach, he explains, "A mysterious crime or phenomenon occurs; our heroes are assigned (or stumble upon) the case; they face increasing danger as they try to understand and defeat the threat before it's too late; and finally the crime that started it all is resolved (though there may be one last shot of the monster still lurkjing in wait for the next opportunity to strike)" (216).

Spinning the Past

One way to use historical events to plot stories is to put a "spin" on them that, presenting the actual events from a different perspective and in a different context than they are traditionally seen, makes these events seem fresh. The X-Files filtered "some of the awful actions the United States had taken during the Cold War through the prism of alien technology theories to give them a new spin." VanDerWerff points out (96). The series suggested that "alien/human hybrids" could have been engineered "by Nazi doctors who'd tested the capabilities of the human body in the Holocaust. A giant warehouse containing tissue samples and medical information from everyone who received a smallpox vaccination" is eminently possible, VanDerWerff contends, "assuming the federal authorities chose to collect such samples and data. Likewise, a UFO stored in a secret mountain facility is a possibility, as is the deployment of CIA operatives "to clean up a problem involving U. S. citizens" (98-99).

Narrative Transcendence

The X-Files frequently misses the mark, the authors of Monsters of the Week suggest (and often say outright), and one area in which they err is in not milking the sources from which some of the series' plots or story ideas arise. An example, Handler suggests, is the episode "The List," in which "a prisoner is executed but swears he'll come back from the dead to avenge himself on five people who have wronged him. Mulder and Scully . . . try to stop him. They fail" (104).

 Episodes like this fail, the writers claim, because they fail to transcend their origins by taking "advantage of a trope without digging into its origins or underlying mechanisms," says Handlen (105). Such a failure prevents writers from enriching their stories by infusing their narratives with the stories' historical, philosophical, theological, cultural, psychological, or scientific underpinnings, making a potentially powerful tale much weaker than it needs (or should) be. 

As examples of how a writer can enrich his or her fiction by adopting the author's suggestion, check out Joyce Carol Oates's takes on Edward Hopper's paintings in In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper and Alive in Shape and Color: 17 paintings by Great Artists and the Stories They Inspired, both anthologies edited by Lawrence  Block.

Teamwork

A team of writers (imagined or real) can bring a variety of "voices" (special interests, skills, styles, perceptions) to a story: "[Chris] Carter is there for the big picture stuff and any detour into mysticism. [Frank] Spotnitz will become Carter's right-hand man for the alien conpsiracy plot . . . [Howard] Gordon . . . will be the one most dedicated to crafting the . . . scary MOTW episodes . . . . [Vince] Gilligan . . . is capable of writing a tense monster tale or a goofy comedic episode" (VanDerWerff, 106). 
 

Questioning the Reader 

 A story or serfies should pose specific questions for the reader (or viewer). The questions should be related through the relationships of important  characters, by characters' participation in a common situation, or by some other appropriate means: According to VanDerWerff, "The three central questions of The X-Files--'What happened to Mulder's sister?' and 'What do the aliens want?' and 'What happened to Scully?'--were so personal and pressing to our characters that they always pushed harder for answers in mythology episodes than they might when investigating a stand-alone case" (113). 

NEXT: More of the same!

Plotting Board, Part 2

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

The MOTW Formula

In our previous post, we mention The X-Files's use of the Monster of the Week (MOTW) as a plot generator to provide variety which would prevent the series from rehashing these series' mythological elements and becoming boring an “repetitive” as a result. But we didn't explain the formula the show's writers used. (There has to be some incentive to return for more posts, after all.) So here it is (the formula, not the incentive):

The MOTW episodes follow the same formula: “There's a monster; Mulder and Scully chase the monster; people die; the monster is caught or killed; and the status quo is restored . . . or is it?”

Innovative Investigation

An innovation in the investigation of a mystery is to have the detective solve it as a result of a shift in his or her thinking. This approach is as old as detective fiction, having been used, for example, both by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as well as such over-the-top police procedurals as Hawaii 5-O. (I use it myself in my historical murder mystery, Death in the Old Dominion, which is set in colonial Williamsburg).

The X-Files takes this approach in “The Erlenmyer Flask,” as VanDerWerff explains: “At every turn of the episode, Mulder and Scully are confronted with what seems to be a brick wall, until they twist their thinking in a new direction and discover the solution waiting just around the corner” (47).

Often, an intuition or the chance discovery of a clue or the understanding that a clue can be interpreted more than one way (as in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which what is assumed to be the name of a person is finally understood to refer to a building.) However, this turn of thought can also occur as the result of a deliberate review of the evidence (as in several of Doyle's short stories, including “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”).

Upsetting the Apple-Cart

In many television series, to keep things fresh, the last episode of a season upsets the apple-cart, as it were, by introducing several significant changes to the status quo. These changes can involve characters, the principal setting, the show's basic situation, or other elements, as “major changes” are made, some of which are “easily” reversible, while others “reverberate for years to come.” 

As VanDerWerff points out, at the end of The X-Files's first season, “the death of Deep Throat,” Mulder's revelation “that the X-Files has been closed down,” and Mulder's and Scully's being split up as they are “assigned to different divisions” certainly upset the apple-cart (47-48).

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the apple-cart is upset by Buffy's death at the end of season one, by Buffy's dispatching Angel's soul to hell and leaving Sunnydale at the end of season two, by Faith's escape after Buffy stabs her during a rooftop fight and by Buffy's graduation from high school at the end of season three.

Art Imitates Life

Another way to generate new directions in the plot of a novel is to imagine that the book is a television series in which actors portray the characters and that something unexpected happens to an actor, which requires a new, if temporary, change in the plot's routine. For example, as VanDerWerff recounts, during the filming season two of The X-Files, Gillian Anderson (Scully) became pregnant; as a consequence, Scully “had to recede from the narrative” (52). To accomplish this requirement, she is abducted.

Similar situations can occur in your own novel, if you imagine your characters are enacted by flesh-and-blood personnel rather than described in words on paper. Such an approach may open many possibilities that might not occur to a novelist otherwise.

MORE next post!

Plotting Board

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff. 

The Truth Is in Here

Characters' motives and goals make a simple story meaningful and significant. Make conduct personal to make it momentous.

Sitdrams Work, Too

Some of the subtitles the authors give to the reviews of X-Files episodes they discuss identify each of the episodes' respective situations; rather than being a situation comedy, or sitcom, The X-Files, it seems, is often something of a situational drama, or sitdram, as it were: “Pilot,” “In which Mulder meets Scully”; “Deep Throat:” “In which a massive conspiracy takes shape”; “Fire”: “In which Mulder faces an old flame”; “Young at Heart”: “In which Mulder has to track down an old foe”; “The Calusari”: “In which there are even more evil twins”; “Piper Maru”: “In which we meet some very strange oil”; and plenty of others.

The Connect-the-Dot Plot

Some X-Files episodes offer a series of images connected by their plots: “Pilot” shows disappearances, Handlen observes, “strange happenings in the woods, . . . little bumps on people's skin [and] . . . a weird, inhuman corpse in a coffin” (4). This connect-the-dots approach to plotting maintains mystery and suspense while providing unity and coherence by delaying the revelation or explanation of the cause of the strange events.

Balancing the Marvelous and the Uncanny

As Tzvetan Todorov points out, the fantastic exists only as long as it is not resolved as either natural (scientifically or rationally explainable) or as supernatural (scientifically or rationally inexplicable). In the former case, the apparently fantastic is uncanny; in the latter, it's marvelous.

Like most other fantastic fiction, The X-Files balances the marvelous and the uncanny, allowing a series of events to be explicable or not, depending upon one's perspective: For Mulder, science or reason can explain little, if any, of the bizarre incidents he observes, while, for Scully, almost everything she witnesses (including most of what Mulder sees) can be explained by science or reason.

For example, as Todd VanDerWerff explains, there is, in episode two of season one, “a spirited argument about whether the phenomenon the two [Mulder and Scully] observed has a paranormal or a scientific explanation” (11). The same is true, pretty much, throughout the series.

Plot Generators

The X-Files uses two plot generators to keep the action coming, episode after episode, week in and week out: “mythology” and the Monster of the Week (MOTW): “The first two episodes of the first season introduced some of the ideas that would power the mythology,” such as “alien abductions, UFO sightings, government conspiracies, and secrets,” while the MOTW provided variety, preventing the series from rehashing these elements and becoming boring an “repetitive” as a result.

As Handlen explains, “The genius of The X-Files as a premise lies in its infinite potential. Centering the show around a department of the FBI devoted exclusively to investigating strange or inexplicable cases means The X-Files can encompass any number of urban legends [and] can cross between science fiction, fantasy, and horror with ease” (11-12). (Later, to this list, the authors add “weird science” and “dramatic stories” of “the personal lives of Mulder and Scully” (14), the latter of which approach sometimes gives the series a soap opera-like character.

MORE next post!

Adolescent and Adult Themes

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In any television series, a few (sometimes, many) episodes will be dedicated to establishing and developing the season’s arc, or the plot’s tangent. The other episodes in the season are often one- or two-part stories. As such, they suggest the types of themes, or topics, that a series of a particular type, directed toward a specific audience, may address. For example, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, directed at middle-class American teenagers and young adults, deals with themes of interest to such an audience. The series deals with unbridled ambition (“The Witch”), inappropriate adult-teen romance (“Teacher’s Pet”), the demands of duty and their conflict with personal desire (“Never Kill a Boy on the First Date”), the perils of negative peer pressure (“The Pack”), the dangers of young romance (“Angel”), the dangers of Internet dating (“I Robot, You Jane”), child abuse (“Nightmares”), the callous disregard for one who doesn’t measure up to the superficial standards of the clique (“Out of Sight, Out of Mind”)--and these all in the show’s first, shorter-than-normal season!

Although the episodes of horror or fantasy series that are written with an adult audience in mind may take the “monster of the week” approach, featuring a specific type of antagonist weekly or periodically, the episodes of such shows typically don’t deal with a specific concern that their viewers share They are not, in this sense, as didactic as shows oriented toward younger viewers. Instead, the more “adult” shows may seek to unsettle their audiences by suggesting that the world may be quite different than it seems and is generally understood to be and that, beyond the ordinary and the everyday, there may exist extraordinary and mysterious persons, places, and things.

The “Squeeze” episode of The X-Files is a good example, as is the series’ use of the skeptical, empirical Dana Scully as a foil to her more open-minded, experiential partner, Fox Mulder. Although both are Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), each has his or her own investigatory methods.

Scully develops a profile of a suspect in a murder and the cannibalism that followed it (the killer ate the victim‘s liver), and, when, during a stakeout, she captures a suspect, Eugene Victor Tooms, he is subjected to a lie-detector test. Her investigatory methods are typical and routine.

Mulder, however, finds a fingerprint at the scene of a murder, and, using a computer program, matches the print to those that were found at several other murder scenes, and, during Tooms’ polygraph test, he asks several questions that makes his fellow agents doubt the validity of the test, and the suspect is released. The fingerprint that Mulder found is stretched out, which makes Mulder believe that Tooms may be a mutant who is able to elongate his body and who has a longer-than-human lifespan, sustained by his diet of human livers between his thirty-year periods of hibernation. Tooms, Mulder believes, committed not only the current murders but those in 1903, 1933, and 1963 as well.

Mulder’s investigatory methods are both routine (at times) and unusual, to say the least. He helps Scully to research Tooms. They can find neither a birth certificate nor a marriage certificate for the suspect, and the agents meet with a former detective, Frank Briggs, who tells them where Tooms resided in 1903. When Scully and Mulder visit the suspect’s apartment, they find it abandoned. However, Tooms manages to snare Scully’s necklace to add it to his collection of his murder victims’ possessions, which he keeps as souvenirs. Adopting another routine investigatory method, Mulder asks Scully to join him in another stakeout, this time of Tooms’ address, but they are instructed to abandon the surveillance.

Tooms enters Scully’s apartment through the ventilation system, but Mulder arrives in the proverbial nick of time, preventing Tooms from killing his partner, and the agents handcuff the killer. Tooms is subjected to medical tests that show that the killer has abnormal skeletal and muscular systems and an unusual metabolism. The jailed killer smiles when his guard delivers a meal, sliding the tray through the narrow slot in the prisoner’s barred door. Tooms has seen his escape route.

Scully represents the no-nonsense, realistic, down-to-earth, sensible, empirical, and skeptical adult, Mulder the open-minded, curious, even enthusiastic investigator of paranormal and supernatural phenomena who, by his own admission, wants “to believe.” The plots of the episodes play out between the extremes represented by Scully’s relative skeptical empiricism and Mulder’s relative faith and experiential approach to investigating the bizarre cases that seem to fall into his and his partner’s laps. Most adults would tend to side with Scully, seeing the world as largely understood and ordinary. The oddities, aliens, and monsters that appear, week after week, in one guise or another, on the show, however, suggest that Scully’s view may not be altogether effective in explaining some of the more mysterious experiences that he and Scully have or the stranger beings they meet. As Shakespeare’s open-minded Hamlet tells the skeptical Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth. . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, Lines 159-167).

That the world may not be what it seems frightens many adults, the same way that the monsters and villains of Buffy frighten younger audiences. Both series exemplify the uneasiness with which younger and older alike live their lives in stifled fear and trembling, looking, always over their shoulders and toward the ends of shadows, to see who--or what--is casting them.

Horror Subsets

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In Terror Television: American Series, 1970-1999's "Commentary" on The X-Files, John Kenneth Muir offers a helpful classification of the show’s “subsections of horror,” breaking the types of antagonists that the FBI’s Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully face each week into ten groups:

1. “Trust No One,” which involves “secret experiments” that “the U. S. government. . . is conducting on its own people”
2. “Freaks of Nature,” which presents “mutants and monsters,” some of which are “just beasts,” others of which are “evolutionary nightmares,” and still others of which are “genetic mutants”
3. “Foreign Fears,” comprised of “ancient ethnic legends” which happen “to have a basis in fact”
4. “From the Dawn of Time,” featuring prehistoric “creatures” which “reassert themselves in present time”
5. “Aliens!,” or “extraterrestrial creatures”
6. “God’s Masterplan,” which is replete with “elements of Christian religion/mythology” which are “explored as ‘real’ concepts”
7. “The Serial Killer”
8. “Psychic Phenomena,” such as “astral projection. . . clairvoyance. . . soul transmission,
   and. . . the effect of heavenly bodies on human bodies”
9. “The Mytharc”/”Conspiracy,” comprised of “the history of the government’s association with aliens”
10. Tried-and-trued “Standards” of the horror genre, which is populated by “the vampire. . . the werewolf. . . ghosts. . . crazy computers. . . matters of time. . . succubi. . . cannibalism. . . tattoos. . . Evil dolls. . . and the like” (353).

“In addition to these ten plots,” Muir observes, “The X-Files has also showed a commendable dedication to asking the great questions of our time, and telling stories about the most puzzling mysteries humankind has yet faced,” so that an eleventh “subsection of horror” discernable in the series is the episodes that center upon “The Mysteries” (354).

Muir’s categorization of the types of threats that the series’ protagonists face is interesting in itself, but it is also interesting because it represents an approach that writers of horror may adopt for themselves in the writing and development of their own oeuvres. A writer who writes a series, whether of television episodes, novels, or even short stories that are unified by a theme, as those, for example of Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft sometimes are, can take a leaf from Muir’s classification of the “subsections” common to The X-Files’ exploration of the horror genre.

Just as a literary genre tends to develop stock characters and characteristic settings, it also tends to evolve typical themes and situations. These situations, in fact, can, and should, support the themes, as those of The X-Files do. For example, Muir assigns the following X-Files episodes to the “Trust No One” category: “Eve,” “Ghost in the Machine,” “Blood,” “Sleepless,” “Red Museum,” “F. Emasculata,” “Soft Light,” “Wetwired,” “Zero Sum,” “The Pine Bluff Variant,” “Drive,” and “Dreamland (I & II)” (353). Taken together, he says, these episodes express “paranoia” which results from the government’s violations of “its sacred trust to represent the people,” as its agents seem “capable of any atrocity, including murder and cover-ups” (353). Eugenics experiments, bioengineered disease, experiments with dark matter, mind control, bee-delivered plague, and the like are enough to make paranoia a rational, rather than an irrational, response to the an unscrupulous government that is clearly out of control.

Muir points out eleven sources for horror; others might be space, crackpot theories or visions, the biochemical foundations of animal and human existence, arcane and mystical traditions and lore, religious cults, alternate histories and universes, conspiracies and cover-ups, dangerous self-fulfilling prophecies, solipsism, actual unsolved mysteries of crime or history (what really became of the Lost Colony of Roanoke?) and, always, of course, the seven deadly sins.

Portals to Hell and Elsewhere

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

If we were to believe fantasy, science fiction, and horror fiction, gateways to hell or other dimensions (if hell is a dimension) are everywhere and range from black holes (The Black Hole) to old-fashioned wardrobes (The Chronicles of Narnia) to mystical hotspots known as hell mouths (Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

These portals have always been interesting, if not fascinating, to me because they represent escapes from everydayness or, in other words, opportunities for adventure that is truly out of this world.

Cemeteries, houses, islands, lakes, mines, prisons, walls--these and many others have been openings to other places, sacred and horrific alike.

One of these portals is supposedly Stull Cemetery, near the Kansas city for which the graveyard takes its name. According to Stull Cemetery: Gate to Hell in Kansas?, a website dedicated to this allegedly unhallowed ground, “Some claim it an evil place; a frightening and even dangerous place--a place with a hidden stairway to hell--a place where Satan comes to visit the grave of his child.” A truly horrifying legend is associated with this burial ground. Another website paints a suitably macabre portrait of the place:

Stull Cemetery, and the abandoned church that rests next to it, is located in the tiny, nearly forgotten Kansas town of Stull. There is not much left of the tiny village, save for a few houses, the newer church and about twenty residents. However, the population of the place allegedly contains a number of residents that are from beyond this earth! In addition to its human inhabitants, the town is also home to a number of legends and strange tales that are linked to the crumbling old church and the overgrown cemetery that can be found atop Stull’s Emmanuel Hill. For years, stories of witchcraft, ghosts and supernatural happenings have surrounded the old graveyard. It is a place that some claim is one of the “seven gateways to hell” (Haunted Kansas: “Stull Cemetery”).

The method by which the legends about Stull seem to have developed is a study, as it were, for aspiring horror writers in how to create a spooky place that seems to be rooted both in history and in the supernatural.

First, the unusual features of the locale and the odd facts concerning it should be identified:

1. The church that once stood on the site was abandoned long ago.
2. The church was finally demolished.
3. The name “Stull” sounds like the more macabre word “skull.”
4. The devil allegedly appears in Stull each Halloween.
5. A headstone in the cemetery bears the name “Wittich.”
6. The few townspeople who continue to live in Stull are taciturn and unwelcoming.

Unusual, bizarre, and horrible, loosely linked alternate causes should be created to “explain” these situations and conditions. According to the present pastor of the new church, built opposite the site of the abandoned, now demolished church, many of the legends seem to have developed as a result of stories made up by students enrolled in a nearby campus of the University of Kansas and on the basis of partial truths and outright falsehoods or the exaggeration of “germs of truth”; others seem to be the offspring, so to speak of newspaper articles concerning the site:




This same two-step process can work for any place concerning which there are a few unusual features:

1. Identify the unusual features of the locale and the odd facts concerning it. (Do a little research concerning the point of interest or recall some of the eerier and odder features of your own neighborhood, past or present.)
2. Using falsehoods, exaggertions, and half-truths (or simple invention from nothing more than one’s own thoughts and proclivities), imagine alternative causes for these events, situations, and conditions that are more otherworldly. (Extrapolate and brainstorm.)

In addition, we recommend a third step:

Use loosely connected alternate “explanations” that are open ended, allowing for the accumulation of still more “legends” based upon falsehoods, half-truths, or creations ex nihilo. These additions can enrich and extend the mythos, allowing for longer works or, indeed a whole series of new stories. For example, Stull Cemetery is said to be one of seven portals, or gateways, to hell. Where are the others? They allow at least that many more stories about these portals and what they may unleash upon the world.

Horror writers do this all the time. Remember the crop circles in Signs? They weren’t mere crop circles; they were signaling devices for extraterrestrials, just as, some say, Stonehenge and the Peruvian Nasca Lines are. How about the chance alignments of towns and landscape features over wide ranges of the countryside? They’re mystical ley lines, some contend. What happened to the lost colony of Roanoke? Historians seem to believe that the colonists either died of starvation and exposure or were absorbed by the local native American tribe. The lunatic fringe, whose ranks the horror writer should consider joining, attributes their disappearance to alien abduction, the same incident that The X-Files’ FBI agent Fox Mulder believes took his sister from him.