The Thrill of It All, Part 2

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Part 1 of “The Thrill of It All,” we analyzed some of the design techniques that movie posters for thrillers use to attract audiences. The techniques that we identified are:

• Make sure that your protagonist stands out from other characters.
• For as long as possible, merely suggest the menace that your main character faces.
• For as long as possible, withhold context: do not explain the cause of the protagonist's dilemma until the end of the story; this ploy keeps your readers guessing and maintains suspense.
• In dialogue or the protagonist's own thoughts, pose a rhetorical question or two (but not too many at once) to introduce or heighten suspense by hunting at the problems your protagonist faces or may face in the future.
• Deliver on the implied promises your use of each of these techniques creates in the minds of your readers.

In Part 2 of this series, we will examine how thriller movie posters use color to appeal to the interests of thriller movie audiences.

Black and dark colors, such as browns, may have symbolic significance that viewers and readers “read” on an a subconscious level, based on associations with such colors that are transmitted culturally, through the arts in general. Black, for example, is often linked to the unknown, to evil, and to death. Like dark colors, black also obscures vision, rendering characters “blind” and reducing them to helplessness. For these reasons, black and dark colors, in general, have taken on an ominous quality. When describing scenes, refer to black and dark colors to create a sense of menace or to obscure your protagonist's sense of sight, as the poster for Thriller (2018) does.

White and light or bright colors, such as yellow and orange, can illuminate darkness, for a few inches or feet, at least, allowing a character to see that which is obscured; at the same time, white or light colors can illuminate the protagonist's face, highlighting him or her, which, of course, can make the main character vulnerable, allowing the villain to locate or attack him or her, so such colors =can both benefit and endanger the main character.

Monochromatic color use can emphasize a protagonist while, at the same time, immersing him or her in the environment, since his or her surroundings are the of a hue that is lighter or darker than the hue in which the protagonist is shown. This technique is used with good effect in the poster for Gothika (2003).

Although this technique might not be used often in novels or other written forms of fiction, it can be the basis of a pertinent descriptive passage when it is warranted. For example, a girl in a green dress may awaken in a pasture, a boy dressed in blue may walk alongside a swimming pool the water in which is reflective of a blue sky, or a man or a woman in red may enter a red room. Usually, such scenes would be reserved for significant, stand-alone scenes or short stories. Edgar Allan Poe uses this technique to great effect in his masterful short story “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842).

The Regression (2016) poster combines the use of black and gray with the use of red. The latter color appears only in one place in the poster's image, in the form of a fiery inverted cross that burns along the junctures of a barn's hayloft doors. (The color also appears once in the text at the bottom of the poster, advising viewers that the picture will play in theaters in December.) An inverted cross represents evil, since it literally turns the Christian sign of Jesus's sacrificial death upside-down. (In occult lore, an inverted sign supposedly cancels out the power represented by the sign). The fact that the cross is afire also suggests its destruction, but this image may also imply the passion with which this destruction occurs—the passion, in other words, of the unseen foe.

On the literal level, the black and gray represent night; symbolically, they might also suggest evil. The judicious use of color can accomplish as much in a novel's description as it does in the imagery used in the Regression poster.

The poster for The Night Listener (2006) uses black, white, and blue to guide the viewer's eye downward and to the right. The left side of the poster shows a a line of dark trees in silhouette. The right side of the poster shows a large image of Ganriel Noone (Robin Williams) and Donna Logand (Toni Colletee) standing side by side. The treeline on the left and the couple on the right frame the white and blue colors which, together, form hazy light, perhaps the result of a full moon shining through fog.

The wedge-shaped light funnels the viewer's vision down and to the right, past Noone and Logand, to a much smaller image of Noone, standing alone in the middle of what looks like a forest trail or road. Bright white light appears at his sides and begind him. Although the source of the light is unseen, its placement seems to suggest that the illumination radiates from Noone himself. Deliberate placement of objects and color can create symbolic effects like the ones in this poster.

As we have seen, color, as it is used in movie posters, often has a symbolic significance. In the movie poster for the thriller Bardo Blues (2019), blue is the primary color. The face of the protagonist, Jack, a mentally ill young man (Stephen McClintik), is shown amid an inkblot formed by dark purple against a variety of blue tones that create a shimmering effect.

The title of the film, Bardo Blues, references depression (colloquially known as “the blues”), suggesting that the man depicted on the poster suffers from clinical is depression. The inkblot shape implies that he is mentally ill, since inkblots were once commonly used in the controversial Rorschach test designed to uncover thought disorder. The shimmering effect of the blue tones that form the poster's background suggest confusion or instability, complementing the inklblot shape's suggestion that the protagonist is in some way mentally unstable.

Colors are used in many other ways, for a variety of additional purposes. Study other posters' uses of color to discover how you can use color in your own writing to achieve similar effects as those that the posters employ.

A couple of caveats are in order, before this post concludes.

First, the posters are ads, not stories. As such, they are designed to sell the products, the films they promote, not to present a drama that enacts a well-plotted story. Therefore, posters often do not correspond to the dramas they promote or have only a slight correspondence to the films' plots.

 

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) summary for Thriller reads: “A childhood prank comes back to haunt a clique of South Central Los Angeles teens when their victim returns home during their high-school Homecoming weekend.” The poster doesn't seem to have much to do with a “childhood prank,” with “a clique,” with “South Central Los Angeles teens,” or with a “high-school Homecoming weekend.”

IMDb summarizes Regression as involving the attempt by “a detective and a psychoanalyst [to] uncover evidence of a satanic cult while investigating a young woman's terrifying past.” The only indication of satanism as an element of the plot is the inverted fiery cross, and there is no hint of a police investiagtion, a psychoanalyst's involvement, or the young woman's “terrifying past.”

The poster for The Night Listener seems to have even less connection to the film it promotes. IMDb summarizes its plot: “In the midst of his crumbling relationship, a radio show host begins speaking to his biggest fan, a young boy, via the telephone. But when questions about the boy's identity come up, the host's life is thrown into chaos.” The poster shows no indication of the male figure's profession or “relationship,” does not refer to a “young boy,” and shows no “chaos.”

A more detailed summary of the movie's plot suggests that the poster is based on one scene, the pertinent sentence of which is, “Donna collapses in the middle of a road and tries to hold him [Noone] with her in the path of an oncoming truck.” Although the poster shows Noone in the road, a source of light behind him, Donna is not in the road with him; she is not hold him down, and there is not indication of a ruck, other than the light behind Noone, which is, apparently, produced by the truck's headlights.

Again, it must be remembered that the posters are intended to sell the movies, not to faithfully portray their plots or any details of the story (other than, perhaps, the appearance of the characters).

Second, as an integral part of a written work's story, description, wherein the visual techniques we are discussing—composition, imagery, color, symbolism—appear, must be a vital part of the narrative; it must be part of the story itself, not something that has no intrinsic significance. Description must be part of the product, not merely a sales pitch separate and largely unrelated to the action of the story.

How can a writer use the techniques that movie posters use to appeal to their audience's interests? We will take a look at some of these techniques in the last post of this series.

For now, let's sum up what we have learned about the techniques of color use:

• Color can convey symbolic meanings.
• Color can suggest emotional effects.
• Color can conceal, reveal, or highlight (or produce any combination of these effects).
• Color can emphasize a character's relationship to his or her environment while, at the same time, associating him or her with his or her surroundings.
• The study of other movie posters will show how color is used to accomplish a variety of other purposes and effects.
• In descriptions, color use must be an integral part of the story, not something used without narrative purpose.

There's more to learn from analyzing thriller movie posters. We'll do just that in a future Chillers and Thrillers post.

Poster Pointers: Color, Imagery, Figures of Speech, and Horror

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Artists often learn from one another, especially with regard to technique. In particular, visual artists—illustrators, painters, and the like—use techniques that writers can adopt, just as the reverse is true.

In this post, we'll take a look at how horror movie poster artists use color to express themes, evoke emotions, and sell films. Microsoft's Bing image browser lets users choose the color (that is, the predominant color) of images. (Other browsers may do so as well; I'm not sure.) This ability helps observers to focus on an artist's exploitation of a particular color as a means of highlighting and conveying themes and emotions.

Sometimes, a writer may be able to accomplish something similar, through description, but, even when doing so is impossible, the painter's use of color can show a writer what the painter emphasized; as a result, the writer can view his or her own subject through the eyes of another artist, one who is, in all likelihood, more visually oriented than writers, in general, as we tend to be more linguistic than visual in our orientation.

Against a black background, a poster for Craig Anderson's 2016 movie Red Christmas shows a round, red Christmas ornament inside which is a human fetus, umbilicus attached. The ornament, transformed by the presence of the fetus into a womb image, drips blood. The poster's text, in white font to the left of the ornament-womb, against the black background, reads, “This Christmas the only thing under the tree is terror.”

By using only the image of the ornament-womb, the artist stresses the metaphor which compares the ornament to a mother's womb. The metaphor also alludes to the birth of Christ, for Jesus's birth is celebrated on Christmas Day, a holiday often represented by the colors green and red. However, blood leaks from the ornament-womb, suggesting the fetus's viability is at risk. Thus, red, which is both one of the colors of Christmas and of blood, fuses the holiday with a suggestion of violence. (In the movie, a woman sought to abort her fetus, but the procedure failed when the clinic was bombed, and her child, a son, survived. Now, on Christmas Day, he returns to exact vengeance.)

The poster seems simple, but it attains depth through the artist's expert used of an image that is both metaphorical and allusive on several levels. Writers frequently use metaphors, too, of course, sometimes as central tropes, but, more often, as figures of speech related to specific narrative points, rather than as an all-encompassing, unifying, central trope. By using metaphors more deliberately and purposefully, writers can heighten and enrich the horror they seek to effect. The tip from this artist to writers seems to be not only to think in images, but also to use metaphors to encapsulate the story's theme.

A poster for Alexandre Aja's 2010 comedy horror film Piranha 3D, a spoof of the 1978 film Piranha, both alludes to and lampoons the famous poster for Steven Spielberg's 1975 horror movie, Jaws. Here are the posters, side by side:

In both posters, positioned at the top center, a young, nude blonde swims upon the surface of the ocean. In the Jaws poster, a shark, its mouth open to show its long, jagged teeth, streaks toward the unsuspecting swimmer. There is no accompanying text; the artist is willing to let the images speak for themselves. In the Piranha 3D poster, a piranha, shown close-up, appears huge in relation to the woman above it. Behind this fish, a school of other sharp-toothed piranha crowd the sea. Their shadowy presence looks eerie, as their features are somewhat indistinct, making them resemble fish, but also plants or rocks, emphasizing their primitive, prehistoric origin. They are clearly a species altogether different from that of human beings. The caption, in title case and sea-green letters, beneath the movie's title, which appears in all-capital, blood-red letters, advises, “Sea, Sex, and Blood—Don't Scream . . . Just Swim!”

The Piranha 3D poster's school of piranha, as opposed to the single shark in the Jaws poster, suggests that the latter movie is many times more horrific than the latter film; after all, an entire school of the deadly fish, not a lone shark, are about to attack the helpless swimmer. The unlikelihood of the swimmer's escaping the predatory piranha by swimming heightens the horror, just as the tongue-in-cheek advice heightens the poster's humor.

Since both posters promote horror movies associated with attacks by marine predators, their dominant color is green; however, the Jaws poster also employs shades and hues of blue (another sea color, reflective of the sky), while Piranha 3D includes grays and red (in the title). In the latter poster, the swimmer is also more clearly seen, as is her golden skin and her blonde hair, which helps her assume presence among the predatory fish that are about to attack her. The woman's placement near the top of each poster devotes much more room to depict the ocean below her. She is small, in comparison to the shark or the school of piranha, which emphasizes her helplessness while highlighting the shark or the size of the school of piranha, which makes them seem all the more formidable.

What lesson does the Piranha 3D poster offer horror novelists and short story writers? If a story is to include humor alongside horror, the humor is apt to arise from the situation. Although the situation itself is horrific, the humor is accomplished by undercutting the horror. The story alternates between presenting scenes that are truly horrific and, at the end (or, sometimes, during) the same scenes, undermining the horror, perhaps with ludicrous advice (swim—maybe you can outpace the piranha) or some other means. Mixing humor and horror is difficult. Before attempting such a feat, it is a good idea to study how screenwriters accomplish this task. Buffy the Vampire Slayer offers some excellent examples.

These posters also show the need to design the action of a scene to maximize its horror. The woman's comparably small size, her isolation—she is alone in the sea—and her utter helplessness in the face of predators much larger than she, increase the horror of her situation. At the same time, the poster's design focuses the action of the scene on the conflict between the woman, as victim, and the shark or piranha as monstrous creatures intent upon attacking, killing, and gorging upon her, even before she dies. A well-planned combination of images can both direct action and unify the scene in which it occurs.

Some horror movie posters use a dominant color because the color is suggested by the film's title (Red Eye, Red Water, Red Christmas); because the color is associated with a holiday or the season of the year during which the story unfolds (Red Christmas uses red; Halloween, orange); because the color has symbolic associations with the movie's subject matter (Red Eye's caption makes it plain that this is one of the reasons for its use of red: “He wants to see your insides”); because it contrasts sharply with, and, therefore, emphasizes, the subject matter or its representation, in the case of The Eyes of Laura Mars, by way of a synecdoche, which shows the whites of her eyes against her shadowed face and a black background); or, in some cases, as an alternate way to convey a condition or a situation (dark blue is often used to represent darkness, as it is in the poster for Poltergeist and many other films, because black is too dark). Doubtlessly, there are many other reasons that a particular color is chosen. What is done with the color is what separates amateur designers and artists from the pros. Use the color selection tab on Bing or the image browser of your choice, and see what you can discover.

Many other horror movie posters show how carefully planned images can convey unity, theme, action, emotion, and other elements of a story using color, the positioning of models (in stories, characters), settings, figures of speech, lighting, camera angles, points of view, and other elements of storytelling and cinema. Studying them can suggest similar ways of accomplishing these goals in a novel or a short story.

"The Cone": Style, Sentence by Sentence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” Wells is a master of style. He makes every word count toward the creation of the final effect he designs his stories to create. Style, as Jonathan Swift defines it, is “proper words in their proper places.” Mark Twain, like other writers, agrees that “the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” AlfredHitchcock says something similar concerning images, the lexicon of film. It is not any single image that matters, he says, but the way in which they are assembled to evoke thought and feeling. On the importance of style, a science fiction writer, a satirist, a humorist, and a master of suspense agree, as does any serious writer or producer. Style is not a small thing; it is everything, for it shapes and invigorates everything: character, including dialogue, action, plot, setting, theme.

With a single phrase or sentence, Wells often accomplishes several narrative or rhetorical purposes at once in his exemplary short story, “The Cone,” as he does in his other tales. The story is a true tour de force, the literary equivalent of expressionistic and surreal paintings, but, as I discuss this aspect of the story in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” there's no need to repeat it here. Instead, I will concentrate on the effects, literary and rhetorical, he achieves by several phrases and sentences in “The Cone.”

At the outset of the story, his omniscient narrator comments, “They [Mrs Horrocks and the artist Raut] sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there.” This sentence accomplishes three things:

1. It suggests that the air is not “fresher” near the open window, because it is not “fresh” anywhere.
2. The fact that they are “trying to fancy” fresh air near the window means that they are not succeeding. The open window admits no fresh air; like their attempt to imagine fresher air, the open window is a mere prop and, therefore, a failure.
3. The illicit couple's attempt to “fancy the air was fresher” characterizes them. In the face of a reality they find unpleasant, they imagine their circumstances are different. They seek to impose their own preferences upon the world, adjusting what is to what is suitable to them. In this, the sentence's use of “attempt” suggests, they also fail.

Wells gets much out of other phrases, too. In the story's fifth paragraph, his narrator describes an approaching train: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed” not only shows the passing of the cars, but also makes readers count them as they go past: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks.” The counting helps to make the paragraph active, but it also reinforces the number of cars in the train. The ironworks, we think, is a busy, productive place. In the same sentence, the narrator adds that the cars “were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel,” causing readers to imagine each car being “extinguished” as it enters the tunnel's “throat.” This description includes one of the many personifications Wells uses to bring his ironworks to life as an active, vengeful, and menacing entity.

For Raut, the ironworks represents “Gehenna,” meaning “a place of burning, torment, or misery,” or, “(in Judaism and the New Testament, Hell).” The ironworks is impertinent, daring to belch “fire and dust into the face of heaven.” Raut's words suggest that the ironworks is an affront to God Himself, an impious, wicked hell the very existence of which is an insult to heaven. “Fire and dust,” the insults, as it were, which the hellish ironworks belch “into the face of heaven,” are later juxtaposed to the Biblical phrase “pillars of cloud” and “pillars of fire” in which God appears to Moses and the Israelites as He guides them across the desert after their escape from pharaoh: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” (Exodus 13:21). The substitution of “fire” for the more eloquent phrase “pillars of fire” and of sullying “dust” for the more elegant expression “a pillar of a cloud” degrades the poetic language of the Bible, substituting crass terminology for its elevated diction. While Raut accuses the ironworks of insulting God, it is he, through his paraphrases of scripture, who actually does so.

In two clever sentences, Wells creates a sort of reverse-personification. His omniscient narrator describes blast furnaces, which stand “heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron,” as if they are hearts full of passion and rage; Horrocks himself, as their manager, is the mind, or soul, that controls these savage breasts. His “seething” passions and the “incessant turmoil of [the] flames” of his rage are the vengeful hearts that will burn Raut alive. 

 

Throughout descriptions of the ironworks, Wells's omniscent narrator uses phrases suggestive of violence, blood, death, and hell to depict the ironworks, the scene of Raut's eventual demise: “ghostly stunted beehive shapes,” “a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts,” “fitful flames,” “hammer beat heavily,” “palpating red stuff,” “blood-red reflections,” “succession of ghosts,” “blood-red vapour as red and hot as sun,” “white as death,” “fire writhing in the pit,” “sulphurous vapor,” “boil the blood,” and “hot suffocating flame.”

References to Gehenna, “the pit,” “pillars of cloud by day,” “pillars of fire by night,” “sin,” “sulphorous vapor” and “God” give the story a Biblical, if not an expressly Christian, context, as does Horrocks's horror at what he has done when “his sanity returned to him,” following his apparent crime of passion and he observes the effect of his vengeance, the sobbing, “inhuman, monstrous creature” that had been Raut. However, this context is undercut by Raut's reference to Jove and the omniscient narrator's allusion to “half-naked Titans.” Not only does the adulterous behavior of Raut and Mrs. Horrocks and Horrocks's seeking of vengeance against Raut suggest that religion is, for them, merely conventional, rather than sincere and devout, but Raut's use of the expression “by Jove,” like the omniscient narrator's employment of the phrase “half-naked Titans,” also implies that none of the characters is religious. Whether Horrocks' own plea to God at the end of the story is genuine or merely an expression of his horror at the sight of what he has done is open to question.

Through his conscious and deliberate selections of words and constructions of phrases throughout “The Cone,” Wells creates and maintains a style that is not only appropriate to his tale, but one which complements it at every turn, creating ironic contradictions; movement and pace; a religious context; complex characterization through allusions and personification; a sense of violence, blood, death, and hell; doubt concerning the characters' true devotion to the religious faith that is implied by the story's allusions to religious themes and theological concepts; and, overall, the unity of effect that produces a seemingly inevitable resolution of the story's central conflict. Wells' style delivers a great deal, largely thanks to his deliberate use of language—“proper words in their proper places”—a and to his own inimitable artistic genius.

"The Damned Thing": Commentary, Part 2

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

As I indicated in my previous post, Ambrose Bierce’s short story “The Damned Thing” depends, for its effect, upon a fragmented and out-of-sequence timeline, the piecemeal exposition of facts that prevents the establishment of a context sufficiently clear to allow interpretation, the withholding of certain items of information, and the misdirection that results from Bierce’s incongruous, often tongue-in-cheek chapter titles, which have no bearing upon the chapters they introduce and, in fact, may suggest lines of thought that are themselves absurd and irrelevant.

However, Bierce accomplishes more than the generation of mystery and suspense through the use of these techniques. By employing these strategies, he also creates a metaphor by which he implies the theme of his story. The lack of context can be read as the vague, uncertain, and finite understanding of reality that derives from human perception that is itself limited to the phenomena that it perceives.

Bierce’s story’s reference to science is not accidental, for science is the primary and predominant means by which modern individuals ascertain knowledge, if not always truth, and it is science--the science of optics, to be precise--that allows Hugh Morgan to understand the nature of the Damned Thing as being of a color imperceptible to the human eye and thus invisible. However, since science is empirical, resting upon the senses and their perception of phenomena (including colors), it is itself limited to the perceptible world, and, in the final analysis, the nature of the Damned Thing must, therefore, remain essentially mysterious.

Bierce’s fragmented and vague narration, as it occurs in “The Damned Thing,” despite the presence of his omniscient narrator, is deliberate, symbolizing the limits of the scientific method’s reliance upon empirical data and emphasizing the finitude of human perception, cognition, and knowledge by underscoring his story’s victim’s inability to see the invisible adversary that ultimately slays him. Without a context, interpretation is difficult, if not impossible, and Morgan’s (and Harker’s) inability to see the Damned Thing prevents them from understanding it, just as it also prevents the pedestrian and unimaginative “farmers and woodsmen” who make up the inquest’s jury from accepting Harker’s account of the creature’s existence as true. They conclude, despite Harker’s eyewitness testimony, that Morgan was killed by a “mountain lion.” In short, they are unable to think outside the box, so to speak, that the accepted model of reality, based upon science, provides as the basis, or context, for interpreting perception and experience. Therefore, they conclude that Harker’s story demonstrates his madness.

Science tells us how to interpret the things that we perceive (see, hear, smell, taste, or touch), but limits upon human perception and the ignorance that results from such limits make certain knowledge problematic even under the best of circumstances and can (and has) resulted in erroneous and fantastic conclusions concerning even everyday matters. For example, before the invention of the microscope, bacteria and viruses existed, but, unaware of these germs or their functioning, human beings regarded demons, not microbes, as the causes of diseases and mental illnesses. Likewise, the Hubble space telescope has increased astronomers’ understanding of the universe exponentially since its launch in 1990.

Nevertheless, to some degree, we can (and do) hypothesize about experiences, even when knowledge about what we perceive (or do not perceive) is uncertain. For example, no one has seen an actual tyrannosaurus rex, but paleontologists claim to know quite a bit about this dinosaur (even if their “knowledge” is tentative and subject to change in the wake of new discoveries and conjectures). These gigantic animals are considered to have been carnivores with extremely powerful jaws, binocular vision, a bipedal posture, and a highly developed sense of smell. The young, some believe, possessed prototypical feathers, although more as insulation than for flight. In addition, they were believed, by some, to have been scavengers and even cannibals. Although they were once considered too slow-moving and “cold-blooded,” because of their massive size and weight, to be good hunters, scientists later revised this conception and suggested that the tyrannosaurus was more likely than not a fleet-footed predator.

One may argue that some features and abilities of the Damned Thing could likewise be determined by observing its effects on its environment. It is likely to be fast and physically powerful. It is obviously predatory. It is apt to be large, for Morgan’s diary reports that its passing momentarily blocked out the stars. Nevertheless, any ideas concerning the nature of the Damned Thing must remain as vague, uncertain, and finite as humanity’s understanding of reality that derives from perception that is itself limited to the phenomena that it perceives. Bierce’s fragmented and out-of-sequence timeline, his piecemeal exposition of facts that prevents the establishment of a context sufficiently clear to allow interpretation, his withholding of certain items of information, and the misdirection that results from Bierce’s incongruous, often tongue-in-cheek chapter titles, which have no bearing upon the chapters they introduce and, in fact, may suggest lines of thought that are themselves absurd and irrelevant all conspire, as it were, to symbolize and reinforce the epistemological limits of an intelligence that is informed by perceptions of phenomena that, as a rule, cannot be confirmed independently of the senses that detect them.

"The Damned Thing": Bierce's Exercise in Existential Absurdity

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

The plot of Ambrose Bierce’s short story “The Damned Thing” is simple--so simple, in fact, that the author must rely upon a piecemeal presentation, in chopped chronological progression, of the narrative’s incidents. Bierce gives vague, and therefore intriguing, hints of something that has happened that is bigger, so to speak, than what is currently taking place, at the same time withholding details to keep the reader guessing as to what’s going on--and what has already gone on. The first paragraph introduces the reader to nine men, one of them a corpse, who have gathered in a small room. One of the men, seated at “a rough table,” reads from a book, by candlelight. There is an expectation, on the part of the men, other than “the dead man,” who is alone “without expectation.” The men, the reader learns, are locals, “farmers and woodsmen.”

By throwing together, as it were, a group of local men who seem to have nothing in common but their vocations, and informing the reader that something seems likely to happen, and soon, but otherwise withholding details that would create a context by which the action, such as it is at this point, could be interpreted, Bierce creates suspense. In addition, he characterizes the men as unimaginative and pedestrian, which will prove important, given the extraordinary incident that will soon be related by William Harker.

Only the man who reads from the book is unlike the others, a “worldly” man, a coroner, in fact, and the book he reads belonged to the dead man. It is, the reader will learn, the dead man’s diary, which was found in his cabin, which is the location in which “the inquest” concerning his death is “now taking place.” The casual manner in which Bierce presents the purpose of the local men’s gathering--an inquest into a man’s death--makes the revelation all the eerier.

Harker makes his appearance, his manner of dress marking him as a city dweller. The reader learns that he is a reporter; he arrives late to the inquest, he says, because he had “to post" to his newspaper "an account” of the incident concerning which he has been summoned to testify. Harker’s statement that he posted the account as fiction because it is too extraordinary for readers to accept as fact piques the reader’s interest, as does his declaration that he will, nevertheless, swear “under oath” as a witness at the inquest, that the story he tells is “true.” Again, Bierce provides just enough vague clues to keep the reader guessing--and reading.

As Harker begins his testimony, the reader learns that he had been visiting the deceased, Hugh Morgan, with whom he was hunting and fishing. In addition, Harker, admits, he was also observing Morgan, having found “his odd, solitary way of life” intriguing and supposing him to be “a good model for a character in fiction.”

In the second chapter of the story, Harker relates “the circumstances of” Morgan’s “death”: As they hunted quail, they heard “a noise as of some animal thrashing about in the bushes,” and saw that the vegetation was “violently agitated.” Morgan appeared frightened and immediately “cocked both barrels of his gun. . . holding it in readiness to aim.” As the men watch, “wild oats near the place of the disturbance” begin to move “in the most inexplicable way. . . . as if stirred by a streak of wind, which not only bent it, but pressed it down--crushed it so that it did not rise; and this movement was slowly prolonging itself directly toward” the two men. Morgan fires and flees, leaving Harker to fend for himself. Harker is “thrown violently to the ground by the impact of something unseen in the smoke,” and something knocks his own gun from his hands. As Harker looks on, Morgan seems to wrestle with an invisible creature. Before Harker can run to his friend’s aid, Morgan is killed, and the ripple and movement of the vegetation betrays the path of the invisible creature’s flight.

In the story’s third chapter, the condition of Morgan’s battered and bloody body is described as the coroner pulls the sheet that covers the corpse away; the dead man's clothing is “torn, and stiff with blood.” Despite the witness’ testimony, which the jury finds incredible, Morgan’s death is attributed to a mountain lion’s attack. Although Harker requests permission to peruse his dead friend’s diary, thinking that the public would be interested in Morgan’s writings, the coroner denies his request, claiming that it is irrelevant to its author’s demise, since “all the entries in it were made before the writer's death.”

Harker may not have been privy to the entries in Morgan’s diary, but the story’s omniscient narrator is, and he reveals to the reader that the journal contains “certain interesting entries having, possibly, a scientific value as suggestions.” Morgan had become convinced of “the presence” of an invisible intruder, and he had been terrified of the creature. However, he had resolved not to be chased away from his own home, believing, also, that God would consider his fleeing from the creature an act of cowardice. Thinking that he may be going insane, Morgan invites Harker to visit him for “several weeks,” to go hunting and fishing, thinking that, in Harker’s reactions to his own behavior, Morgan may find evidence to support either his own sanity or his own madness.

As if by “revelation,” Morgan discovers “the solution to the mystery” of the creature’s invisibility: just as there are sounds that the human ear cannot hear, there are colors that the human eye cannot see, and the invisible creature, or “the Damned Thing,” as Morgan has come to refer to the monster, “is of such a colour!”

A simple tale, “The Damned Thing” depends, for its effect, upon a fragmented and out-of-sequence timeline, the piecemeal exposition of facts that prevents the establishment of a context sufficiently clear to allow interpretation, the withholding of certain items of information, and the misdirection that results from Bierce’s incongruous, often tongue-in-cheek chapter titles, “Chapter I: One Does Not Always Eat What Is On The Table” (a corpse); “Chapter II: What May Happen In A Field Of Wild Oats” (an attack by an invisible creature!); “Chapter III: A Man Though Naked May Be In Rags” (an aphorism that suggests wisdom but introduces the final existential absurdity of death); and “Chapter IV: An Explanation From The Tomb” (the incongruity of the dead offering an elucidation of a text addressed to the living). Like the titles of Rene Magritte paintings, Bierce’s chapter titles have no bearing upon the chapters they introduce and, in fact, may suggest lines of thought that are themselves absurd and irrelevant.

Another way that Bierce withholds information, at least for a time, is to use synonymous phrases in lieu of characters' names or occupations.  For example, he refers to "a man [who] was reading," to "the man with the book"; to "the person reading," instead of to "the coroner"; he refers to "eight men," to "that company," to "farmers and woodsmen," rather than to the jurors of the death inquest; and to "a young man" instead of the inquest's witness.  In doing so, Bierce withholds, for a time, the nature of the enterprise in which the party is involved, thereby maintaining the mystery of the story and the tale's suspense.

Bierce’s reference to science is not accidental, for science is the primary and predominant means by which modern individuals ascertain knowledge, if not always truth, and it is science--the science of optics, to be precise--that allows Morgan to understand the nature of the Damned Thing as being of a color imperceptible to the human eye and thus invisible. However, since science, which is empirical, resting upon the senses and their perception of phenomena (including colors), is itself limited to the perceptible world, the nature of the Damned Thing must, in the final analysis, remain essentially mysterious.