The Humor of Horror (Or Is It the Horror of Humor?), Part 3

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Besides Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams, a third cartoonist who often finds humor in horror (or horror in humor) is James Thurber.

Thurber's cartoons often rely on implication. His artwork and captions, working together, suggest a conclusion, which Thurber leaves to his readers to infer. Thus, his work is one part of a two-way communication between himself, as artist, and his reader. Of course, in most instances, Thurber is pretty clear about the conclusion to be drawn.

His female figures often dwarf his male figures, suggesting the way his men—often husbands—see their wives. Henpecked, the submissive male characters are timid; they are careful not to offend or annoy their bigger, dominant spouses, women who could crush them by their sheer size alone.

In one cartoon, a large woman is seated on a couch with a much smaller male figure. She looks demure, with her hands folded on her lap, as she looks down at the little man beside her (whose posture makes it appear that he is about to bolt from her presence). Smiling, but looking directly at him, with a gaze that suggests the possibility of danger, if not madness, declares, “If you can keep a secret, I'll tell you how my husband died.”

Despite the fact that the body of the man beside her is turned—he has to look over his shoulder to maintain eye contact with her—and he looks as though he is about to flee for his life, his closeness to her suggests he might be a suitor, one who, perhaps, is having second thoughts about becoming involved with her. If so, is she asserting her dominance over him now, by delivering an indirect threat against his life. If she murdered her husband, as her maniacal leer and her possession of a secret concerning the cause of his death suggests, perhaps she is suggesting that the same fate could await him, should he attempt to assert his will in their relationship.

Role reversal, once again, suggests a horror that might not be apparent, the secret terror that may lie at the heart of a relationship in which one person asserts absolute dominance over another under the ever-present threat of death.

Another of Thurber's cartoons has an existentialist bent. Engaged, presumably, in a rat race, finely dressed men and women rush past each other, in opposite directions, without exchanging so much as a glance, a smile, or a greeting. Behind them, in back of a wrought-iron fence, the “DESTINATIONS” mentioned in the cartoon's caption await them in a cemetery whose headstones bear common names, such as “Bill,” “Mary,” and “Jones” or, in the distance, are altogether illegible and, therefore, anonymous. The cartoon almost begs the question, What value does life—and ambition—have when it ends in death?

Finding humor in opposites, especially those as significant as life and death or purpose and meaninglessness, can be an effective means of unearthing horror.

The Humor of Horror (Or Is It the Horror of Humor?), Part 2

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Charles Addams bases most of his cartoons on a family of monsters that not only look human, but also often act like ordinary, typical people. The humor of his work derives, in large part, from his depiction of ordinary human behavior as being, in some way, eccentric, grotesque, or outrageous. Often, however, there is an additional element that makes a particular cartoon in his oeuvre unique.

Sometimes, only a thin line separates fantasy from reality. For example, despite steady scientific progress and technological innovations such as space satellites, computers, and the Internet, many people, even today, embrace an essentially medieval worldview. The possibility, in fiction, if nowhere else, of both supernatural and natural states of existence allows the opportunity for what Tzvetan Todorov calls the “fantastic,” the “marvelous,” and the “uncanny.”

According to Todorov, the fantastic exists only if seemingly inexplicable phenomena remain inexplicable—that is, if they cannot be resolved as being either marvelous or uncanny. A phenomenon is marvelous if it defies rational and scientific explanation; it is uncanny if, although strange, it can be explained by either reason or science. For example, some contend that Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw is fantastic, while H. G. Wells's short story is uncanny and Stephen King's short story “1408” is marvelous.

Whether Addams was aware of Todorov's paradigm or not, his drawing of stone gargoyles atop a balcony's wall and the shock of a woman who, gazing upward while her companions photograph the carved monsters, sees the shadow of a flying gargoyle on the wall above, fits perfectly into Todorov's scheme. Into the world of the ordinary, the marvelous appears, for the statue cannot be explained as one of the gargoyles on the wall. Its shape does not match any of those of the statues, none of the statues is detached from the wall, and the shadow is so situated that no unseen statue among the others could cast it. Therefore, the existence of the statues cannot itself explain the presence of the shadow. In Todorov's terms, the cartoon seems implies a marvelous resolution of the apparently fantastic.

Another of Addams's cartoons reflects the criticism of the homogenized sameness of some suburban housing tracts that Malvina Reynolds popular song “Little Boxes” also satirizes:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

According to Charles H. Smith and Nancy Schimmel, Pete Seeger Reynolds said, “as she drove through Daly City, . . . Bud, take the wheel. I feel a song coming on.”

However, Addams's cartoon suggests more. The houses, indeed, “look just the same” as one another, but the residents differ considerably—and strangely. Each is bizarre but individual; each is “different” in his or her own way, yet each is regarded as normal by both him- or herself and by his or her spouse and child. Each also appears content and confident and seems to have positive self-esteem.

The first figure, at the left of the drawing, initially catches the viewer's attention, which is not surprising, since he is the largest and we are taught, in the United States, among other nations, to read from left to right. Once we notice his difference—or differences (he has three eyes, two noses, and two mouths—we may turn our gaze to the others who, like him, seem to be off to work, as their wives and children (one each to a couple), standing at their respective doorsteps, bid them farewell.

The second figure is portly. Doffing his hat, as the first figure does, he turns to face his family. His wife smiles and waves; his son waves. The gentleman wears a sports jacket, tie, and slacks, but his feet are bare, revealing sharp, pointed toes that match those of his sharp, pointed fingers.

The third figure is tiny, but game; undaunted by the rolled newspaper under his arm, which is half his own size, he looks over his shoulder, as he waves goodbye to his normal-size wife and son, who wave back.

Next, an obese man performs the same action as his neighbors, waving at his family as he departs for his day at work.

The next figure is a human octopus, with eight arms and no legs. As he shuffles down his walk, he doffs his hat to his wife and child, his wife returning his wave.

The final figure shown in the cartoon is tall and extremely thin, and he doesn't look back at his wife and child as he makes his way out of their front yard, but he has doffed his hat.

Although all the houses are identical, down to the tapered conical shrubs flanking their front doors, as are all the wives and children, the male residents differ a good deal from one another. Their wives and children seem to be exhausted by their roles; they are not individual persons but, each and all, The Wife and The Child. The horror of the cartoon comes from the sameness of the domestic lives the women and children—and, yes, the men—live. Despite the fact that the male characters are distinguished by their appearance, they live much the same lives as their wives, who look identical to one another.

The way of life, in identical houses on identical lots, and the identical papers carried by the men, who, despite their apparent individuality, live in the same type of houses, dress in a similar costume of coat, tie, slacks, and (except in the case of the figure with the sharp, pointed feet and the octopus man) shoes are what makes the characters in the cartoon as much the same as their houses and their families. A strict conformity to standard mores and social expectations are the horrors that have made everyone the same, even when significant differences exist, at least superficially.

Repetition is the technique that reveals the theme of Addams's cartoon. In and of itself, some find repetition eerie, especially when its reiterations seem unending. When such repetition is combined with a hard-and-fast conformity to rigid social conventions, its demonstration of the effects of such dehumanization is horrific, indeed, despite the humorous situation Addams's cartoon depicts. 

A third Addams cartoon exhibits a bit of ethnocentricity, the valuing of a another culture by the standards of one's own culture.

As a party of four black men wearing loincloths sit or stand about a huge cauldron at the edge of a bamboo forest in the background, one of them stirring its contents with a stick, a woman of their tribe, naked but for a string of beads around her neck, bends forward at the waist to offer a white man in khakis a bowl of food, presumably from the cauldron. A shelf below the thatched roof of a nearby hut displays four human skulls, seeming to suggest that the tribe are cannibals. Her guest grimaces in disgust, refusing to accept the bowl, which prompts the woman to say, as a parent might remonstrate with a stubborn and unreasonable child, “How do you know you don't like it if you won't even try it?”

The cartoon's readers may also find the idea of eating human flesh to be repulsive for the same reason that the disgusted man to whom the bowl is offered does. He need not sample the food to find it objectionable; he accepts his own culture's taboo against cannibalism as justified. In short, he finds human flesh, as food, obnoxious on principle. There is no need to “try” the dish to determine whether he would enjoy it.

From the native woman's perspective, her guest is being childish. She finds his position to be unreasonable. Experience, she suggests, should be the test of approval or disapproval. From her standpoint, he should “try” the meal; from his, eating human flesh is simply unthinkable.

By juxtaposing the standards of conduct dictated by two societies that differ sharply from one another, Addams suggests that some horrors are horrible only because taboos make them so. If one were a member of the woman's culture, he or she would find her guest's refusal to even “try” the dish she offers him—an affront to her people's hospitality—as rude as it is incomprehensible. If a member of his culture, one would find her offer of such a meal unenlightened at best and as horrific in any case.

As seen from the perspective of the man in khakis, the humor of the cartoon depends upon the reader's acceptance of the Western taboo against cannibalism, which makes the woman's chiding of him, as if he were a child, humorous because of the patent incongruity of it.

In a second reading of the cartoon, its humor depends upon seeing the guest, a grown man, acting in a petulant, childish, rude, and thoroughly unreasonable manner. If there is nothing intrinsically wrong with eating human flesh, he is the stubborn, unreasonable child she thinks he is.

Finally, the cartoon can also be seen as a satirical comment on the nature of morality itself, if morality is viewed as relative and ethnocentric, rather than as absolute and universal.

The Humor of Horror (Or Is It the Horror of Humor?), Part 1

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movies often include a humorous scene or two, ostensibly as a means of relieving the tension that results from sustained, intensifying suspense. Frequently of the black humor type, such visual jokes are intended, perhaps, to refocus both the teller and the listener on the normal, the customary or traditional, the everyday, rather than on the abnormal, the non-traditional, or the extraordinary.

Alfred Hitchcock presents Psycho's audience with a humorous scene after Norman Bates kills Marion Crane. He has loaded her corpse and meager possessions into her car and pushed it into a lake to dispose of the evidence of his crime. As Norman looks on, the car begins to sink. It continues to slip deeper and deeper into the water, but, then, abruptly, it stops, only partly submerged, and Norman's expression, partly anticipation, partly glee, up to this point also suddenly changes, to one of not only worry but also panic.

Unless the car fully sinks, he himself (and his “mother”) will sink, as his charade is exposed and he is confined to a mental asylum or a prison for his “mother's” dastardly deed. At the last moment, the car does, in fact, completely submerge, and Norman looks relieved. He has gotten away with murder, after all, it seems. The television series Dirty Little Liars provides its audience with plenty of black humor, much of it through its allusions to such Hitchcock films as Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, and others.

Finding the humor amid horror is a difficult task. If done clumsily, the use of humor to alleviate tension can backfire on the author. In times of hyper-sensitivity and political correctness, it is especially important not to offend readers' sensibilities, even in horror fiction. However, looking to cartoonists whose work involves the macabre can offer some pointers for effective use of black humor, although writers should use them at their own risk.

One such cartoonist is Gahan Wilson, many of whose works appeared in Playboy magazine over a period of years. Most of them include a gruesome twist. For example, most of us do not fear optometrists. We go to them voluntarily, trusting ourselves to their care, believing them, as men and women of medicine, to have our welfare at heart and in mind. It is the violation of this trust by a mad doctor that underlies the ghoulish humor of this cartoon:

In reading the eye chart, we assume the role of the patient; we are trusting, unaware, and helpless as we read of the optometrist's intention to kill us. As we read the chart, the letters tend to blur, reminding those of us whose vision isn't perfect (many of us, alas, who are of the patient's age), suggesting the additional horror that, even with our fate spelled out for us, unable to read the writing on the wall, we are in danger of being killed where we sit, unaware of our fate until it is too late.

This cartoon offers us a technique widely used in horror movies (and, less often, in novels): have the viewer (or the reader) assume (or, more often, identify with) the role of the helpless victim.

In this cartoon, Wilson shows the absurdity of a popular pastime, a supposed “sport” in which armed men kill animals that have no chance against their killers. In the cartoon, the hunter's hubris has led him to kill every animal he and his friend have encountered, as the presence of blood-splattered snow and the friend's ironic comment suggest: “Congratulations, Baer—I think you've wiped out the species!”

Naming the shooter Baer doubles the cartoon's irony, since the name sounds like “bear.” Like a bear, Baer is a predator. Unlike a bear, however, Baer kills for “sport,” not survival, killing every animal he encounters. His smug, slightly crazed look suggests that he is insane, which, in turn, suggests that hunting, at least the way he practices it, is also insane.

This cartoon's technique is to exaggerate a commonplace activity to reveal the absurdity of the pastime and those who participate in it.

Many horror movie plots, novels, and short stories take place in isolated settings. This cartoon is also set in such a locale. A small eatery in the middle of nowhere, near a two-lane blacktop next to bare mountains possibly in Alaska or the Yukon, judging by the aurora borealis seen in the night sky, bears bright signs on its rooftop and exterior walls: “EAT.” As a gigantic monster of vague, gelatin-like form, crawls over a ridge, toward the roadside cafe, one employee, the cook, possibly, says to another, the waiter, perhaps, “My God—do you suppose it can read?”

This cartoon turns the tables on humanity. It's all right to be a carnivore, Wilson seems to suggest, as long as we are the carnivores. To be the eater rather than the eaten is all well and good, but if the roles are reversed, the horror of the eat-or-be-eaten world is exposed. With apologies to Socrates, in some cases, it seems, the unexamined life may be worth living.

Role reversal is another way that cartoonists like Wilson reveal the horror inherent in everyday practices that we take for granted.

A study of other Wilson cartoons reveals other techniques for showing the horror in everyday situations and practices, but, in our next post, let's take a look at the work of Charles Addams, another artist known for disclosing the humorous within the horrific.

Heightened Horrors--and Heroes: Ourselves, Writ Large

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Watching children watching cartoons that contain moments which, to their audience, are frightening reveal that youngsters are often frightened by much the same things as oldsters: sudden attacks, distorted faces and figures, eerie sounds, and the like. One cannot plan to defend oneself against sudden attacks. A distorted face or figure suggests that something terrible may have happened to another person and that something just as terrible could therefore happen to oneself. Eerie sounds suggest the unfamiliar, and that which is unknown may be fraught with menace. In “Killed By Death,” vampire slayer Buffy Summers assures the children in a hospital in which youngsters are dying (and are possibly being killed) at an alarming rate that she knows, as they do, that monsters, but, she declares, there are those who fight monsters, too, and that she is one.

Children are not reassured by promises that the monsters they fear--the monsters in the closet or under the bed--are not real, but imaginary, because kids don’t yet have enough of a handle on the world to tightly compartmentalize “real” and “unreal,” or “imaginary”; the wall between these realms in thin, and, sometimes, the fantastic bleeds through, into the real world. Therefore, Buffy gains credibility by admitting to the kids to whom she speaks that the monsters they fear are real. Because she is believable about this concern, her declaration that she, a hero who fights monsters, is also real is also believable to the children.

In the real world, adults know that monsters are real, too: there are serial killers, rapists, and thieves. There are backbiters and toadies--and even politicians. But there are heroes, too, who fight these monsters: cops and firefighters and emergency medical technicians and soldiers and everyday men and women who are willing to risk their own lives to save others who are in trouble and need help. The everyday hero, however, is too mundane to celebrate for more than a day or two. Horror fiction (like other literary genres) create villains who are larger than life--Pennywise the Clown, Dracula, Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, Der Kinderstod--so that there can be larger-than -life heroes, both extraordinary and ordinary--the Losers, Count Van Helsing, Sam Loomis, Clarice Starling, Buffy Summers.

The phrase “head and shoulders above the crowd” derives from the custom of ancient Greek and Roman sculptors of indicating heroism by creating statues of heroic individuals that were a head length taller than the statues of ordinary mortals. The ordinary figure, ancient artists determined, is equal to seven and a half head lengths; therefore, the statue of a heroic individual would be eight and a half head lengths in stature. In a similar way, writers make both villains and heroes larger than life, so that they embody, in a heightened manner, the villainous and the heroic in ordinary men; the villains and heroes of horror (and other genres) are ourselves, writ large.

Little on "The Collection"

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Many writers are fascinated, even to the point of obsession, with other writers’ inspirations. Stephen King claims to have located a small, curious store that sells multi-million-dollar story ideas for a mere pittance, although he’s rather vague as to the emporium’s exact location.

Horror maestro Bentley Little accounts for his facility with terror by letting his readers in on a little--or should one say a “Little”--secret: his birth followed closely upon his mother’s having attended a showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

In his volume of short stories, The Collection (2002), Little offers more specific accounts of his muse’s muses, prefacing each of his tales of terror with a brief explanation concerning its inspiration.

Bentley, who won the Bram Stoker Award and was thereafter “discovered” by both Dean Koontz and Stephen King, is excellent at plotting--except in one crucial respect: his endings (at least of his novels) are notoriously unsatisfying. However, his fans, aware of this near-fatal flaw, forgive him, for his action-packed plots, full of odd characters and odder incidents, propel readers forward with roughly the same force (and at the same pace) as that of a rocket. Before they fully realize that the conclusion of the story that they’ve spent hours reading is, to put it mildly, disappointing, they’ve finished another otherwise-excellent narrative, full of suspense and horror--trademarks, as it were, of a Bentley Little production.

There are 32 stories in The Collection, involving hitchhikers, newlyweds, a unique serial killer, residents of a town as strange as it is small, and an assortment of other grotesques of only the sort whom Little can create. It would be unfair to share all of the inspirational tricks that Little’s muse played upon the writer of this volume, but a few might suggest the variety of inspiration that Little experiences.

The lead-off tale is “The Sanctuary,” which was inspired by a source similar to one of those which motivated King to write his first novel, Carrie (1974).

King was inspired, in part, to write the story of a telekinetic girl’s use of her powers to avenge herself against her high school’s in-crowd bullies by his having wondered what it might be like to live in the house of a religious fantastic, as a girl he’d known in his childhood did (and as Carrie White, his novel’s protagonist, who was based, in part, on this girl, does). Strangely enough, the “inspiration” for his first novel has since been revamped for his official website, and it now includes a theme that has received an overtly feminist interpretation:

The character “Carrie” was a composite of two girls Stephen knew during high school. The story is largely about how women find their own channels of power, and what men fear about women and women's sexuality. “Carrie White is a sadly mis-used [sic] teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of man--and woman--eaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she's also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”

(That's quite a revisionistic view of the novel's theme!)

The same sort of wonder concerning the effects of religious fanaticism upon a child prompted “The Sanctuary,” Little confides to his readers:

Religious fanatics have always seemed scary to me, and when I hear them espousing some wacky eschatological theory or promoting their perverse interpretations of the Bible, I always wonder what their home lives are like. What kind of furniture do they have? What kind of food do they eat? How do they treat their neighbors and their pets?

“The Sanctuary” is my version of what life would be like for a child growing up in such a household (The Collection, p. 1).

The similar inspirations are interesting and allow fans, readers, critics, writers, and others an opportunity to see how two masters of the horror genre each handle a similar theme, one in a full-length novel, the other in a short story. What perspective does Little take as compared to King?

The sixteenth story (the one that appears at the halfway mark, so to speak, of Little’s anthology) is “The Pond.” According to Little, it had a somewhat more cerebral theme, “about lost ideals and selling out,” and is, as such, a story concerning “moral shortcomings”:

This is a story about lost ideals and selling out--moral shortcomings which are not limited to the boomer generation depicted here.

By the way, there really was a group called P. O. P. (People Over Pollution). They used to gather each Saturday to collect and process recyclables. Back in the early 1970s, my friend Stephen Hillenberg and I belonged to an organization called Youth Science Center, which would offer weekend science classes and field trips. We got to do Kirlian photography, visit mushroom farms, learn about edible plants on nature walks, tour laser la oratories--and one Saturday we worked with People Over Pollution, smashing aluminum cans with sledgehammers.

Stephen grew up to create the brilliant and wildly popular cartoon SpongeBob Square Pants (p. 199).

The final story in The Collection is “The Murmurous Haunt of Flies,” about which Little writes:

I’m not a poetry fan. Never have been, never will be. But while suffering through a graduate class on the Romantic poets, the phrase, “the humorous haunts of flies” leaped out at me while [I was] reading Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” I thought it was a great line and wrote it down.

Some time later, I found myself thinking of my great-grandmother’s chicken ranch in the small farming community of Ramona, California. She’d died years before, and I hadn’t been there for a long time, But I remembered a little adobe banya or bathhouse on the property that used to scare me (this bathhouse pops up again in my novel The Town). I remembered as well that there had always been flies everywhere--because of the chickens--and I recalled seeing flypaper and No-Pest Strips that were black with bug bodies. The Keats phrase returned to me, a light went on, and I wrote this story (p. 433).

A graduate class in Romantic poetry. A phrase from a John Keats poem. A grandmother’s place in Ramona, California. A bathhouse. Flypaper, No-Pest Strips, and “bug bodies.” For the writer, all human experience is “grist for the mill,” and nothing is sacrosanct. Anything and everything related to being human in an inhuman world is raw material for literary treatment in the horror genre, as The Collection itself does a pretty good job of showing.

An interest in a writer’s inspiration teaches another lesson, too, for aficionados of literature, and its reading and writing pursuits. These insights into the origins of stories--or, at least, of the ideas for stories--indicate an all-too-important, if basic, truth. (Often, because such truths are basic, they are easily and soon forgotten.) As Ihara Saikaku reminds the readers of his own short story, “What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac Maker,” there is a fundamental difference between literature and life. The latter, made up of a discrete and separate series of incidents involving, more often than not, random, and even contradictory situations and expectations, lacks a pattern to its events--especially, a cause-and-effect pattern. In other words, it lacks a plot. Therefore, much of the experience--or series of experiences--that, collectively, we call “life,” seem absurd, meaningless, and purposeless, which can lead to despair at the sense of the futility of existence, tempting us to say, along with King Solomon, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

By selecting from the multiplicity of life’s--and, indeed, of history’s--incidents and situations, those which, assembled in a particular sequence, according to the principles of cause and effect, literature suggests that life is what it otherwise does not seem to be--significant, meaningful, and purposeful, which perception leads one to hope (sometimes against hope) that it is worthwhile, after all, despite Hamlet’s “ slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and “proud man’s contumely.”

With respect to horrific incidents and situations in particular, horror fiction suggests that such experiences are not only survivable but are also important. They can teach as well as torment. They can enlighten as well as frighten. They can help us to get our minds right about ourselves, others, and the world around us. How, specifically, horror fiction accomplishes such feats is analyzed in several other, previous posts and is likely to be examined, yet again, in still future essays.

Meanwhile, The Collection awaits, with interesting insights of its own.

"The Addams Family" Technique

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Cartoonist Charles Addams is the father of a truly bizarre family. “Dysfunctional” doesn’t begin to describe its dynamics. Headed by Gomez and Morticia, The Addams Family includes son Pugsley, daughter Wednesday, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, and the shaggy Cousin Itt. A disembodied hand, Thing, is a permanent houseguest. This unlikely cast of characters is waited upon hand and foot--in the case of Thing, literally--by a hulking butler named Lurch. They live on a weed-choked estate behind a wrought-iron fence in a Second Empire mansion, complete with a garden (of sorts). The cartoon appeared regularly in The New Yorker magazine. The one-panel strip was eventually translated into a television situation comedy (sitcom) of the same title starring John Astin (Gomez), Caroline Jones (Morticia), Ken Weatherwax (Pugsley), Lisa Loring (Wednesday), Jackie Cogan (Uncle Fester), Blossom Rock (Grandmama), Felix Silla (Cousin Itt), and Ted Cassidy (Lurch and Thing). The cartoon is also the basis of The Addams Family movie (1991) which starred Raul Julia (Gomez), Angelica Huston (Morticia), Jimmy Workman (Pugsley), Christina Ricci (Wednesday), Christopher Lloyd (Uncle Fester), Judith Malina (Grandmama), John Franklin (Cousin Itt), Carel Stricken (Lurch) and Christopher Hart (Thing). The screenplay for the motion picture is available at Movie Script Place. In addition to featuring the same characters and setting, the cartoon, sitcom, and movie all parodied the contemporary American nuclear family, inverting traditional family and American values. The Addamses found ordinary people and their interests either repulsive, puzzling, dull, or offensive, preferring their own bizarre, macabre, and peculiar pursuits. Gomez never stopped courting his wife. Morticia was fond of raising roses, from which, snipping the buds, she would retain the thorny stems, immersing them in ornate vases of water, and tend to her carnivorous plant. Wednesday (who is, as her name suggests, “full of woe”) delights in executing her Marie Antoinette doll by guillotine and enjoys electrocuting her brother in the family’s electric chair. Pugsley’s passion is wrecking his electric train by derailing the engine and cars or blowing it up with a well-placed stick of miniature dynamite. Uncle Fester likes to impress others with his trick of illuminating a light bulb simply by placing it in his mouth, and he often chases intruders with his blunderbuss. Grandmama, a witch, is forever trying new spells or potions. Vertically challenged Cousin Itt’s face--or, indeed, his entire head and body--is never seen, because his hair extends from his scalp to the floor. He rides around the mansion in his three-wheeled car and speaks in shrill gibberish that only the rest of the family can understand. A childhood friend of Gomez’s, Thing is a severed hand that pops out of cigar boxes, urns, and other containers throughout the house to deliver the mail and do other assorted odd jobs. The butler, Lurch, is a giant. He wears a tuxedo, maintains an expression and a posture that suggests that rigor mortis has set in a little early, and rumbles rather than speaks. A Frankenstein-like servant, Lurch, Morticia reminds Gomez, is part of many families and has the heart of an Addams. Much of the cartoon’s, sitcom’s, and movie’s humor derives from Lurch’s unfriendly demeanor and the chores he performs in his ungainly and deadpan manner. The Addams Family suggests that there is a fine line between horror and humor, as do such television shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Munsters, Bewitched, and I Dream of Jeannie. Literary critics have found humor--quite a bit of it, in fact--even in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The difference between whether an incident or a situation will be humorous of horrific depends, of course, upon its treatment. Typically, humor will look for opportunities to exaggerate or understate the significance of ordinary incidents and situations, will seek the absurdity in daily activities and the pompous or inappropriate behavior of characters who are out of their depth or in an environment foreign to them, and so forth, whereas horror will seek the bizarre, the uncanny, the eerie, the frightening, and the incongruous in such incidents and situations with an eye not to how and why these incidents and situations are amusing but as to why they are in some way menacing. It is menace that, ultimately, makes a situation horrific and dreadful. By applying The Addams Family technique to everyday situations and incidents and looking for the potential menace in them rather than for the potential humor in them, the horror writer can come up with plot material that might otherwise go unnoticed or unappreciated. The technique is simple, but effective: interpret commonplace incidents and situations from an out-of-kilter, offbeat, madcap point of view. Interpret figurative expressions literally and literal expressions figuratively. Imagine how the Addams family might interpret everyday events and occurrences or how they might understand the meaning of an innocuous phrase. For example, were the Addams family to have a dinner party, the catered refreshments might include finger sandwiches that were truly finger sandwiches--severed human digits laid side by side between two slices of bread and garnished with lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and the dressing of one’s choice. The whole meal, in fact, would be likely to comprise a feast fit for cannibals. Now, take the humor out of the situation, and replace it with horror. Make a few other adjustments, lending the storyline as much verisimilitude as possible within the conditions of the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief, and viola!, The Addams Family principle has provided a plot for a horror story such as the maestro Stephen King might have written. A bit of brainstorming--lovely word for horror writers!--may suggest other possibilities. The appetite among some Asians for dog flesh is well known. What better way to increase the stock of this delicacy in one’s freezer than to go to a large city park frequented by the owners of such pets and wait for one or more of them to walk their dogs past the perfect ambush site along the a woodland path? Another idea? (Simply insert a 100-watt bulb into one’s mouth, Uncle Fester style.) How about this one? A vampire king’s five-hundredth “birthday” (that is, the night that he was transformed into one of the living dead) is approaching, and his followers want to get him something special to commemorate the occasion. They discuss various possibilities: blood bags from the local blood bank, the chorus girls from a popular Broadway (or Las Vegas) show, kindergartners from a local preschool or daycare center. Finally, they decide on five hundred virgins. The only problem is that they’re hard-pressed to locate such a vast number of this commodity. The story resulting from this premise would be partly funny and partly fiendish, much like The Addams Family itself, showing, once again, that it is possible to mix humor with horror (and even a little social commentary), as long as, if the story is to be considered horror rather than humor, the menace outweighs the clowning.