The Horror of Star Power

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In MassAdvertising as Social Forecast, Jib Fowles, a professor of communications at the University of Houston, identifies three “stylistic features” of ads that influence “the way a basic appeal is presented”: humor, celebrities, and images of the past and present. This post concerns how horror novels and movies use celebrities as a way to enhance horror.

Of course, almost every movie features celebrities—the actors who star in the film. However, the use of the celebrities “stylistic feature” Fowles identifies could be interpreted as referring to actors who play celebrities in horror movies. In other words, one or more of the characters in the film is a famous person. Such is the case, for example, with fictional actress Ann Darrow, played by actual actress Fay Wray, who appears in King Kong. It is in thus sense that Fowles's celebrities 'stylistic feature” is understood in this post.

By being identified as a celebrity, a character receives an elevated status, because, in the United States and elsewhere, celebrities are revered; for many, they are the equivalent, in the world of popular entertainment, to royalty, and this is true not only of actors, but of other performers, including singers, athletes, comedians, bestselling authors, politicians, and other entertainers and public figures.

Not only do such characters have fame (and often fortune), but they're also typically regarded as glamorous and charismatic, living the types of lives many believe they themselves would enjoy living. They are treated with adulation by fans, but, at the same time, they may be envied, and their fall, if their careers should fail for some reason, is often as intriguing as their rise.

Horror movies that include fictional celebrities among their casts of characters include, in addition to King Kong, Misery, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

In King Kong, Darrow's celebrity as an actress allows her to represent Beauty in a way and on a scale denied to ordinary women, despite the beauty many of them undoubtedly possess. As a celebrity, she is herself a representative of the beautiful woman, of Beauty personified. She is both a flesh-and-blood woman and a type, or idea, of woman, the ideal woman, the Beautiful Woman. It is because of her that Carl Denham, the man who hopes to produce a documentary film, has a star who can deliver the box office appeal he needs to market his production.

Darrow also contrasts with Kong: she is a beautiful woman, while he is a gigantic ape. The colossal gorilla's wild nature and prodigious strength makes Darrow's helplessness all the more apparent, as she frequently struggles in his grasp. He takes her where he will, pursues her like a bestial stalker, and finally, according to Denham, at least, dies because of the pint-size femme fatale: “It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

As a human being, Darrow is also obviously a representative of humanity. As such, it is with her plight that moviegoers will identify. Through their identification with her, they will feel her helplessness and her terror. In Kong's hand, they will be grasped as the gigantic ape navigates the jungle on Skull Island. From her vantage point atop cliffs and in caves, where Kong deposits her temporarily for safekeeping, as he battles dinosaurs, she will witness Kong's titanic struggles. The audience will see Kong's pursuit by Darrow's defenders as the gigantic beast views the chase. They will ascend the Empire State Building, in Kong's hand, as he climbs the skyscraper, clutching the actress in his immense, furry fist. From her perspective atop the edifice, they will witness the airplanes' attacks.

When Kong succumbs to technology, falling, mortally wounded, from the building upon which he took his last stand in defense of Darrow as much as himself, audiences will see the difference between Beauty and the Beast and be reminded that, despite certain similarities between the human human and the lower animals, despite their kinship, there is also a huge chasm between the two, an abyss that cannot be overcome. Darrow, despite her “courtship” by Kong, remains a human being, and the two, human and animal, must ever remain distinct.

Paul Sheldon, the bestselling romance writer in Stephen King's Misery, is also a celebrity character. His romance series has made him famous, if not immensely wealthy; his success as a popular writer has set him apart from others. However, his success is predicated upon the interests of his readers. If they sour on his work, he can quickly become a has-been or, as Misery makes clear, a victim of his formerly “number one fan.”

Of course, King's notion that a fan would capture, assault, and attempt to kill a writer simply for killing off a favorite fictional character is over the top. Most fantastic literature, whether of the horror or another genre, is, by definition, exaggerated, which is why Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of the need for a reader to “suspend” his or her 'disbelief” as a condition for enjoying such literature.

Annie Wilkes, the psychotic serial killer-cum-nurse who rescues Sheldon after crashing while driving during a snowstorm, attempts to force the writer to resurrect Misery Chastain, the character whom Sheldon killed off in the last novel of his romance series, which he has abandoned in the hope of becoming a serious writer. The presence in the novel of a celebrity character affords King the opportunity of commenting upon relationship between a famous writer and his or her fans—a relationship which, in Misery, becomes more predatory than symbiotic.

According to Grady Hendrix, King's own fans reacted negatively to the novel, seeing it as an expression of King's “contempt” for his readers, and some see the novel as, indeed, a “love/hate letter to his fans.” King apparently tried to mend fences with his “outraged fans” during a “publicity tour” for the book, but it's hard to imagine he succeeded given the fact that he describes the psychotic Wilkes, his self-described “number one fan” as a soulless monster who literally reeks.

The portrait of King's fans is nothing if not ambiguous and begs the question, What sort of writer writes for such admirers? The answer appears to be Sheldon, but how much of the fictional bestselling romance author is a true likeness of King himself? There are similarities: both writers, the real and the imagined, suffered shattered legs; both became prescription pain killer addicts; and both apparently have ambiguous, “love/hate” relationships with their fans. As Hendrix observes,

King has said numerous times, the fans put food on his table. He hates them, but he owes them his life. And there are moments when Paul is waiting for Annie to react to something in the manuscript he’s writing that he knows will thrill her, or upset her, when it feels like her reaction is vital for his continued existence. He imagines her reaction and then revels in it when it comes, and one can imagine this is how King felt too. He has written for his readers (Constant reader as he calls them in his introductions) for so long that to some extent his books are collaborative: if a book is released to the public and no one reads it, does it even exist at all?

Although there are exceptions, celebrities don't typically start life as celebrities. Like everything else, fame must usually be earned. The biographies of most famous people show they paid their dues. Michael Landon, a star of the television series Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, and Highway to Heaven, not to mention the movie I Was a Teenage Werewolf, began his career as an extra. Clint Eastwood started out as a laboratory technician in Revenge of the Creature. Although they may have appeared in earlier films, many actresses, including Fay Wray (King Kong), Janet Leigh (Psycho), Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween), Jennifer Love Hewitt (I Know What You Did Last Summer), and Kate Beckinsale (Underworld: Evolution), established their Hollywood careers “scream queens.”

In I Know What You Did Last Summer, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a “D”-list celebrity, local beauty queen Helen Shivers, who hopes to leave her small town and establish herself in New York City as a major player in the entertainment industry. She finds fame elusive, and returns to her hometown, Southport, North Carolina, where she must settle for work as a “fragrance girl” in her father's department store, her show business aspirations confined to the local beauty pageant and a master of ceremonies spot for the Croaker Queen Pageant. She meets her death at the hands of the serial killer who stalks her and her friends. As far as her part in the film is concerned, the movie seems to suggest that small-town girls typically remain small-town girls, despite their hopes and dreams for something bigger and better than the lives they live as, well, small-town girls.

As with most other aspects of life in horror fiction, celebrity isn't all it's cracked up to be. For one thing, it makes a character stand out from the crowd, and that can be dangerous, indeed. Coming to the attention of—becoming, in fact, the center of attention for—a giant gorilla, a psychotic “fan,” or a serial killer bent on gruesome revenge isn't likely to promote one's career, whether as an actress, a bestselling author, or a beauty queen who wants to break out, both in the theater and from her small-town life. In fact, celebrity, in horror fiction, is likely to be brief, ending in a painful, violent, and bloody death. It's better, perhaps, to be a “nobody” than a Somebody, or, as military personnel learn, in their struggles to survive, to “keep a low profile.”

The 15 basic Appeals of Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L.Pullman

Jib Fowles helped thousands of people better understand how advertisements, print and otherwise, manipulate viewers using fifteen basic appeals to various desires, emotions, and needs. He characterized five of these needs as “needs to,” eight others are “needs for.” Generally speaking, people can satisfy “needs to” on their own, but they require the participation or, at least, the presence of others to fulfill “needs for.”

Fowles identifies these “needs to”:

The need to aggress.

The need to escape.

The need to feel safe.

The need to nurture.

The need to satisfy curiosity.

The “needs for” are:

The need for aesthetic sensations.

The need for affiliation.

The need for attention.

The need for autonomy.

The need to dominate.

The need for guidance.

The need for prominence.

The need for sex.

The fifteenth basic need is a group, the physiological needs, which include the needs for food, drink, sleep, and so forth.

His essay explains in detail each of these needs and provides several examples of each type of appeal advertisements make in promoting their products.

The same fifteen basic needs make horror novels, short stories, and movies appealing to their readers and viewers. Let's take a look at these needs, in regard to horror novels and movies, in the same order in which Fowles himself discusses these needs in relation to the appeal of advertisements, as we cut back and forth between the two analyses.

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1. The Need for Sex

Only a small percentage of ads appeal to sex, because such an appeal can overwhelm the product being advertised. As Fowles says, “it is too blaring and tends to obliterate product information. Nudity in advertising has the effect of reducing brand recall.” In other words, sex and nudity are distracting, and they are more memorable than the product they supposedly promote.

Whether or not an ad containing nudity or sexual imagery actually evokes the need for sex depends on the context of the nudity or sexual images. Such an ad in Playboy magazine, aimed at men, may be an appeal to the need for sex, but one featuring a scantily dressed young woman and aimed at other young women is more likely an appeal to the need for attention.

2. The Need for Affiliation

The need for affiliation is the need to belong, to be part of a group. In a positive approach, such ads often show a person surrounded by friends or family members whose affection and loyalty are valued. Ads may also appeal to the need for affiliation by taking a negative approach and showing it as absent or as threatened” “If we don't use Scope, we'll have the 'Ugh!' Morning Breath' that causes the male and female models [in the ad] to avert their faces [from one another].” Ads also show the solutions to such problems—the products featured in the ads.

There are “several types of affiliation”: romance, courtship (dating), family togetherness, and friendship. The AT&T telephone ad that encouraged people to “reach out and touch someone” appeals to the need for affiliation.

3. The Need to Nurture.

The need to nurture is the need “to take care of small, defenseless creatures,” such as children and pets. Taking care of children and pets can involve feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, healing, and guiding them. Both men and women have the need to nurture.

4. The Need for Guidance

The need for guidance is the opposite of the need to nurture. These pitches are made by celebrities; fantasy figures (the Green Giant, Betty Crocker, Mr. Goodwrench); authority figures, real and imagined (“When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen”); or icons of “tradition or custom” or of “American history.” Kool-Aid appeals to the need for guidance through tradition, stating, “You loved it [Kool-Aid] as a kid. You trust it as a mother.”

5. The Need to Aggress

Everyone has the need to behave aggressively, to aggress. Ads that appeal to this need must be careful, in doing so, not to alienate consumers so that they do not turn “public opinion . . . against what is being sold.” Jack-in-the-Box offended customers by destroying the company's mascot, the Jack-in-the-box, until the violence was “toned down.”

6. The Need to Achieve

Ads that appeal to this need evoke the need to excel, to “accomplish something difficult” by overcoming “obstacles . . . . surpass others,” and “attain a high standard.” Athletes are often featured in such ads. However, ads may create their own “role models,” as Dewar's Scotch ads do in their profiles of successful people.

Ads based on the need to achieve often use superlatives: “best,” first,” “finest,” to suggest the “need to succeed.” Ads for sales and bargains also belong in this category, because they suggest that one has seized “an opportunity” and come “out ahead of others.”

7. The Need to Dominate

Fowles sees the need to dominate as a “craving to be powerful—perhaps omnipotent.” This need, he suggests, can be associated with “the need to . . . control one's environment' and a desire for “clout.”

Like the other needs, this one is universal, as applicable to women as it is to men.

8. The Need for Prominence.

This need, says Fowles, is related to “the need to be admired and respected, to enjoy prestige and high social status.” Wealth does not have to symbolize prominence, as Fowles points out by referencing the American Express advertisement, in which 'we learn that the prominent person is not so prominent without his American Express card.”

9. The Need for Attention.

Distinguishing the need for attention form the need for prominence, Fowles points out that the former concerns the need to be “looked up to”; the latter, to “the need to be looked at.” he cites a Brooke Shields advertisement in which the actress wears Calvin Klein jeans not so that men will pursue her, but so that she will stand out from other young women.

10. The Need for Autonomy

We tend to want to do things our own way, to be independent and to set our own tasks, according to our own agendas. “ The focus here is upon the independence and integrity of the individual,” Fowles says, and it is opposite to the need for guidance.

11. The Need to Escape.

“Escape” can be actual, literal escape or to figuratively and emotionally escape from the responsibilities and routines of everyday life. The latter type of escape is motivated by a search for pleasure and the freedom to do as we please. The need to escape can include other people besides oneself; a group can escape together as easily as a solitary individual.

12. The Need to Feel Safe

It's only natural to want to feel safe, and advertisements can appeal to this need directly, by showing models who are safe, or indirectly, by showing models who are in danger, because, even when we're at risk, we feel the need to be safe. Product durability often plays upon this need, as do references to natural ingredients.

13. The Need for Aesthetic Sensations.

“Aesthetic” refers to persons, places, or things that are beautiful or otherwise bring pleasure. Everyone has a need to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch beautiful objects, visit beautiful places, meet beautiful people, and dine on delicious food. Anything that satisfies the need for aesthetic sensations can be used to make this type of appeal.

14. The Need to Satisfy Curiosity.

This need involves “a need for information” and addresses people's natural sense of curiosity. In advertisements, Fowles says, “ Trivia, percentages, observations counter to conventional wisdom . . . all help [to] sell products,” and “any advertisement in a question-and-answer format is strumming this need.”

15. Physiological Needs.

Physiological needs are the needs of the body: food, drink, and sleep, among them. Many food advertisements make this basic appeal.

Styles

Fowles also identifies three “styles” that many advertisements employ to influence “the way a basic appeal is presented”: humor, celebrity endorsements, and “time imagery.”

Although humor can backfire, overwhelming the advertisement's message or offending people, “softer appeals” using a humorous approach can be effective.

Celebrity endorsements can backfire when celebrities behave obnoxiously or offend people, but this approach can work well; it allows famous men and women to “introduce” a sponsor's product, using one or more of the basic appeals, such as the need for guidance, the need to achieve, the need for aesthetic sensations, the need for affiliation, and the need to escape.

Time imagery can supply advertisers with historical heroes, traditions, and artwork, appealing to such needs as those for achievement, guidance, aesthetic sensations, affiliation, and escape. Nostalgia, the fond remembrance of times past, is an example of a time imagery approach.

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How does Fowles's analysis pertain to horror fiction? We offer examples in upcoming posts.

What’s in a Name?: More (and Less) Than One Might Think

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Anyone who has entered his or her name in an Internet image browser is likely, unless he or she has a truly unique appellation, to have had the rather disconcerting experience of having come face to face, so to speak, with a stranger who shares the same name. This experience is all the more unsettling if the other person is of a different race or ethnic group or (if one bears a unisex name) the opposite sex. Social utility websites allow the same distressing experience.

Sometimes, other media provide the same result. In Las Vegas, a billboard advertises George Wallace, an African American comedian who appears at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Younger folks often miss the irony of the entertainer’s name’s being identical to that of the racist former Alabama governor who resisted the initiation of segregation during the early years of the Civil Rights movement, standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium to bar the 1963 enrollment of the school’s first black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood (“George Wallace,” Wikipedia).

According to Wikipedia’s “disambiguation” list for “George Wallace,” no fewer than eleven more-or-less famous men share this name, among them the former governor; his son; the American comedian and two other such entertainers; a football player; several politicians; foreign and domestic; an actor; an army officer; and a politician. No doubt, there are several less-famous men with this name as well.
 



Occasionally, people also change their names, Norman Jean Baker becoming Marilyn Monroe and Marion Mitchell Morrison becoming John Wayne, for example, and others who would not have shared the names with such celebrities now having their names in common with such an entertainer. (One thinks of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, for example, sharing a name with the Western film star but not with the actor previously known as Marion Mitchell Morrison.)

To most of us, our name is a representation not merely of syllables of sound but of who we are, of ourselves. We think of ourselves as unique. Indeed, we are told, in our youth, that there is no other person quite like us, that we are in a class by itself, the one and only of our kind. Discovering that we share a name with someone else or that we can change our names or that our names can come from other names, even from names that are associated with the opposite sex, is surprising; it is also a bit disconcerting, suggesting that our identities might not be as fixed and permanent as we had previously supposed them to be. If we can share our names with others, maybe we could also become other. We could become a member of the opposite sex. We could become a serial killer. We could become a bigot. We could (if we are women) lose our own identities to those whom we wed. The truth of the matter, of course, is that our identities are not as fixed and permanent as we might believe. Over time, our attitudes, our beliefs, our feelings, our tastes, our values all change; we change. Nevertheless, we believe (or hope) that, at the very core of our being, our hearts and souls remain unchanged. We trust that the essence of ourselves remains unique and incorruptible, both to time and to events. Otherwise, we fear, at some point, we would cease to exist. The loss of identity is the loss of the self to madness or to death. Eve on our gravestones, our names remain--for a time. When the elements have finally obliterated our names, it shall be as if we never existed. There will be no remnant of our identities, of our being, or ourselves.

Therefore, we are jealous of our names, and we guard them zealously, fearing identity theft as much because it is a violation of who we are as because it promotes financial disaster for us as individuals.

Prisoners abhor the loss of their names, which occurs when they are issued numbers in place of their names. They feel that they have been made less than human by being designated numerically rather than alphabetically, as if their identities have been reduced to the nomenclature of mechanical parts and assemblies. Marines also dislike drill instructors’ refusal to allow them, as recruits, to refer to themselves in the first person, as “I” or “me,” and the demand that, instead, they speak of themselves only as “the private.” They perceive the dehumanization that such attempts at resocialization have upon them as individuals.

Horror fiction plays upon our fears of transformation, of loss of identity, and of life itself. Horror writers and filmmakers know what is and is not in a name and how to translate these fears onto a printed page or onto the silver screen. Human beings undergo terrible transformations, becoming werewolves or vampires. They lose themselves to madness. They suffer agonizing deaths at the hands of others who have lost their own minds and souls.

Such films as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), a remake of the 1958 version directed by Kurt Neumann; Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982); the several versions of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Norman J. Warren’s Inseminoid (1982), John Carl Buechler’s Troll (1986), and Laurence Huntington’s The Vulture (1967) are just a few of the many, many titles of horror movies involving transformation that Buried.com lists for this category.

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories often feature protagonists who suffer a loss of themselves to madness, but this is a current theme among writers and filmmakers today as well, as is attested by such stories as John Fowles’ 1963 novel The Collector, the Friday the 13^th movie series, the 1995 John Carpenter film In the Mouth of Madness (based upon the 1936 H. P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness), and, of course the classic 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho (based upon Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same title).

Why should our sharing our names with strangers be disconcerting? I think it is because we invest symbolic value in them. Our first names are given to us by our parents. Our last names identify our families and, therefore, our lineage. Perhaps it is unsettling for those women who opt to take their husbands’ names in lieu of the surnames by which, until they marry, they have been known all their lives. Certainly, the custom alters their perspective--and that of society’s--to some degree as to married women’s identities. Women are seen as more fluid than fixed in their identities. Not only do they shift shape (during pregnancy), but they are also likely to change their very identities, Miss Emily Jones, for example, becoming Mrs. Emily Smith. In formal correspondence, married women may be stripped even of the very remnant of their personal identity and their femininity that their first, or given name, provides them, becoming the “Mrs. John Smith” whose name appears after her husband’s: “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith.” Even women who remain single often derive their identity from another person of the opposite sex: Paulette and Paula both owe their names to the masculine Paul, for instance, just as the name Denise is derived from the masculine name Dennis. It must be disconcerting, indeed, for a Samantha to realize that her feminine name is based upon a variation of the masculine Samuel.

Death is a staple of horror stories, novels, and films. Virtually every one of them alludes to or, more often, features at east one (and usually several, or even many) savage murders. However, the so-called slasher movies, wherein nubile hotties for the most part, are sliced and diced for audience members’ vicarious viewing pleasure, is perhaps the most extreme sort of this type of fare. Slasher titles include Jack Sholder’s Alone in the Dark (1982), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Jim Gillespie’s I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) (based upon the 1973 Lois Duncan novel of the same title), Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers (2001), Kevin Connor’s Motel Hell (1980), Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp (1983), Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn (2003) (reminiscent of my own 2008 Blue Mountain Detour), and a host of others.

While writers and filmmakers are careful to disguise the fact that they are playing with readers’ and moviegoers’ identities by casting their treatments of this theme in terms of other “people’s” names (those of the characters who populate their pages or screens), make no mistake about it: a reader or a moviegoer by any other name would suffer the same existential angst as the characters who experience physical transformation, madness, or death in place of their voyeuristic audiences.

What’s in a name? More (and less) than one might think!