The Ted Dilemma: Is Evil a Matter or Nature or Nurture, Determinism or Free Will?

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes life is more horrible than horror fiction. In The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule demonstrates the truth of this observation in recounting a nightmare she had as she tried to come to terms with the apparent guilt of her friend, Ted Bundy:

I found myself in a large parking lot, with cars backing out and racing away. One of the cars ran over an infant, injuring it terribly, and I grabbed it up, knowing it was up to me to save it. I had to get to a hospital, but no one would help. I carried the baby, wrapped almost entirely in a gray blanket, into a car rental agency. They had plenty of cares, but they looked at the baby in my arms and refused to rent me one. I tried to get an ambulance, but the attendants turned away. Finally, in desperation, I found a wagon--a child’s wagon--and I put the injured infant in it, pulling it behind me for miles until I found an emergency room.

I carried the baby, running, up to the desk. The admitting nurse glanced at the bundle in my arms. “No, we will not treat it.”

“But it’s alive! It’s going to die if you don’t do something.”

“It’s better. Let it die. It will do no one any good to treat it.”

The nurse, the doctors, everyone, turned and moved away from me and the bleeding baby.

And then I looked down at it. It was not an innocent baby; it was a demon. Even as I held it, it sunk its teeth into my hand and bit me (240-241).

This is the end of her dream. It is horrific. It seems mysterious, too. A baby that’s not a baby, but a demon--what could such imagery mean? Rule is certain that she knows. The baby symbolizes innocence, the demon (its true self), evil: evil is masquerading as innocence, or as she informs her readers: “I did not have to be a Freudian scholar to understand my dream; it was all too clear. Had I been trying to save a monster, trying to protect something or someone who was too dangerous and evil to survive?”(240-241).

To describe Bundy as a monster is an understatement. According to Wikipedia, the law student confessed to thirty murders, but may have committed as many as a hundred, and his modus operandi wasn’t merely cruel; it was savage: “Bundy would bludgeon his victims, then strangle them to death. He also engaged in rape and necrophilia” (“Ted Bundy”). His youngest victim, Floridian Kimberly Leach, was only twelve years old. If the brutality of his crimes, the sexual perversions he committed, and the slaying of a preteen girl are not enough to manifest the evil that was Ted Bundy (and, of course, they are), then his own words, chilling to the bone, concerning morality certainly are:

Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself--what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself--that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any ‘reason’ to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring--the strength of character--to throw off its shackles. . . . I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable ‘value judgment’ that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure that I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me–after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.

At about the time of the rise of modern psychology, which is often identified with the work of Wilhelm Wundt, who established the school of experimental psychology at Leipzig University in 1879, more than a decade before Sigmund Freud launched his ill-fated psychoanalysis, Edgar Allan Poe became one of the earliest, if not the earliest, modern writer to include madmen in his stories instead of inhuman monsters. Many other writers of horror fiction have since followed suit, and the human monster is one of today’s most popular types. One of the most widely known contemporary examples is Thomas Harris’ Hannibal (“The Cannibal”) Lecter (Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal).

Perhaps, as they age, aficionados of horror fiction become more interested in human monsters like Bundy than in fantastic creatures such as demons, werewolves, and zombies, recognizing that the true monsters are those in the mirror. Certainly, as the authors of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Monster Book point out, there is no lack of variety for such human fiends, a category of the monstrous that includes not only serial killers, but also Adolf Hitler, murderers, rapists, “monsters and abusers, drug trade predators, the heartless and shallow, and even the bitter, belittling monsters,” concluding “there are so many people whose behavior is unnatural or inhuman that we need go no further” than human nature itself “to find our monsters” (360). Joss Whedon, the creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series seems to agree. It is people, he confesses, who “terrify” him more than anything else (330).

Among the many more traditional (that is, inhuman) monsters that appear on Buffy the Vampire Slayer are a number of human monsters, as the authors of The Monster Book point out, including Billy Fordham (“Lie to Me”), “the Kiddie League baseball coach” (“Nightmares”), Ted Buchanan (“Ted”), Frawley, Frederick, and Hans (“Homecoming”), Tucker (“The Prom”), Coach Marin and Nurse Greenleigh (“Go Fish”), “the lunch lady” (“Earshot”), Kyle, Tor, Rhonda, and Heidi (“The Pack”), “the demon-worshiping fraternity brothers” (“Reptile Boy”), Eric Gittleson (“Some Assembly Required”), Pete Clarner (“Beauty and the Beasts”), Gwendolyn Post (“Revelations”), Maggie Walsh (several episodes), and Jack (“Beer Bad”) (361-362).

There are a number of theories as to what causes human monsters. Are they born and bred or are they made? Is it nature or nurture? Perhaps it is a combination both of genetics and environment. Another way to ask the same question is to pose it as a philosophical issue: is evil behavior determined or does it result from the exercise of free will? The authors of The Monster Book favor nurture (or, perhaps, the lack of it) over nature, arguing that “abnormal brain chemistry may account for certain psychopathic and sociopathic behavior, but most human monsters are not born that way; they are made into what they are by circumstances, by experience and example” (363).

Buffy’s executive story editor and writer Douglas Petrie even offers an etiology for the evil of one of the show’s long-standing human monsters, the rogue slayer Faith. The causes of her monstrosity are parental neglect; feelings of isolation, loneliness, and alienation; and an inability to “compete” against Buffy, but, at bottom, Petrie suggests, the "key" to understanding the wickedness of Faith is her “pain”: “The whole key to Faith is that she is in pain. . . . She’s so lonely and so desperate, and all her toughness comes out of trying to cover that. That’s what monsters are made of.” Her pain, however, he intimates, comes out of her lack of the relationships she would like to have: “You’ve always got a carrot you can dangle in front of her. Mrs. Post was the mother she never had. Buffy and her friends are the best friends she never had. The Mayor is the dad she never had. So she’s always looking for a family and always coming up short and making these horrible choices, and it drove her insane” (368). Primarily, Faith’s monstrosity, then, results from her abuse by her family and by society in general, by the way she has been treated--or, rather, mistreated--but it is also a result of her “horrible choices.” Evil is caused, in Petrie’s estimation, by societal abuse and the exercise of the abused person’s own free will. Secondarily, nature might also have a part to play in human monsters’ origin and development, Petrie seems to admit, tossing in, as if for good measure, the observation, concerning Faith, “Plus I think she was missing a couple of screws to begin with. ‘If you don’t love me, you will fear me’ seems to be her m. o. [modus operandi]” (368).

Paradoxically, Whedon and Petrie appear to disagree with respect to how they view threats represented by human monsters. Whedon admits that “people scare him,” the authors of The Monster Book reveal. “Terrify is the actual word he uses” (330). Petrie, on the other hand, in discussing the rogue slayer Faith, a human monster in her own right, says, “she’s not a stable girl, but a fun one” (368). In their commentary upon human monsters, the book’s authors resolve this paradox, perhaps, when they argue that, because of the number and variety of actual human monsters among us, fictional ones seem to be unnecessary:

There are so many people whose behavior is unnatural or inhuman that we need go no further to find our monsters. We don’t really need vampires or werewolves.

Or do we?

In a world where such real, visceral horrors are so disturbingly commonplace, horrors on the screen or the page may be more comforting than terrifying. We can close the book. We can turn of the television when the show is over. We have control. But in the real world, the show is never over. Nothing is more disturbing or monstrous than that (360-361).

That’s not a bad rationale for the genre.

Modern Monsters

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

“We have seen the enemy, and he is us.” -- Pogo

Before Christianity, paganism supplied humanity’s monsters. Initially, many were hybrids of wild animals and humans, among which were the centaur, the harpy, the lamia, the mermaid, the minotaur, the satyr, and the Sphinx. Most of them represented natural forces.
Christianity contributed the devil and his legions of lesser evil spirits, the demons.

Now that Christianity and other worldwide religions are in eclipse--in agricultural and progressive nations, at least--writers of horror fiction have had to find their monsters elsewhere.

Science has been a major source of modern horror fiction’s nightmarish creatures. Other worlds have supplied writers with menacing demons, extraterrestrial diseases, and a variety of paranormal threats including clairvoyants, telekinetic travelers, time travelers, homicidal cyborgs, and rampaging robots.

Psychology has also been a source for many of the inner demons that haunt the world of the self. Sigmund Freud contends that modern monsters are aspects of ourselves which we have, as it were, cut off and cast out. They are embodiments, in other words, of those elements of ourselves that we repress.

As a species, we have gone from the Other as a duality of the bestial and the human to the Other as a supernatural seducer, tempter, and deceiver to the Other as the rejected elements of a would-be self--from natural to supernatural to psychological. In the process, the monster has gone from the general to the specific.


Edgar Allan Poe showed us the way, substituting the madman for the demon, ghost, vampire, werewolf, or other paranormal or supernatural threat. However, there is another source for the modern monster: the Self--or, rather--the wannabe Self which we repress. At first, such a source might seem too finite for the task we have set it, which is nothing less than that of being the maker of all things destructive, menacing, destructive, evil, and lethal. We need not worry, however, about whether our supply of monsters will peter out. There are as many inner demons as there are individual men, women, and children.

Just the list of inner demons which have found expression as objective Others in the work of Stephen King suggests the breadth of the range of possibilities for such embodiments of iniquity. His novels have depicted demons of child abuse and religious fanaticism (Carrie), narcissistic self-indulgence and hypocrisy (Needful Things), alcoholism and psychosis (The Shining), spousal abuse (Rose Madder), adultery (Cujo), government abuse of its citizenry (Firestarter), and a host of other Others.

To develop the modern monster, one must become adept at seeing the repressed Other in oneself and in other people, for, today, the repressed is the monstrous.

Two clues are rationalization and hypocrisy. We want to be perfect, even though we know that we are not, and cannot be, without fault. Therefore, we tend to deny what is obviously true to others about behaviors which we may do but certainly not want to admit that we do them.

Instead, we lie to ourselves about our behavior, make excuses for our conduct, and deny that we have acted in anything but an admirable and proper manner. What we would condemn in others, we accept, or even celebrate, in ourselves. By identifying behaviors which we rationalize or would condemn in others but approve in ourselves, we can identify the inner demons both of ourselves and others.

Everyday Horrors: Psychopaths

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Psycho's Norman Bates meets victim Marion Crane

A sociopath suffers from an anti-social personality disorder. A psychopath is a conscienceless individual. According to a longer definition of the latter, the psychopath is “a person with a personality disorder indicated by a pattern of lying, exploitiveness, heedlessness, arrogance, sexual promiscuity, low self-control, and lack of empathy and remorse. Such an individual may be especially prone to violent and criminal offenses” (“Definition of Psychopath”).

According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the anti-social personality disorder’s “essential feature. . . is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”

The public tends to use these terms pretty much interchangeably to denote a seriously disturbed, dangerous person who is prone to mindless acts of rage and violence.

I know a psychopath. Fortunately, I haven’t seen him for many years. His name is Herbert, and, during our respective childhoods, he and the rest of his rather large family lived in the same neighborhood as the one in which I resided. His family was poor. Their father didn’t seem to be home much. Their grandmother lived with them and helped their mother rear the children. They lived upon a triangular, weed-choked lot in a two-story frame house. Inside, the furnishings and décor were minimal. Without carpeting, the wood floors were worn almost to sawdust. Their yard contained a collection of machine parts and rusted junk, and there was an outbuilding. A bare path led through what grass there was; there wasn’t a lawn in the proper sense of the word and no attempt at landscaping.

Herbert got into trouble on a few occasions. Once, when the school bus stopped, he jumped off and climbed a tree, refusing to come down. On another occasion, the local minister caught him holding a cat by the tail over an open fire “to see what it would do.” It was rumored that he stabbed a Boy Scout in the foot during a camping trip because the boy's foot “was sticking out of the tent.” Shortly before adolescence, Herbert moved with his family into the mountains, and we never saw him again until he’d become a young man. (According to psychologists, the anti-social personality disorder is often indicated by the so-called MacDonald triad, which consists of animal cruelty, arson, and bedwetting.)

Herbert returned in a late-model car with a friend. They stopped by our house and asked whether I’d like to go for a ride with them. Herbert said he’d bought the car for fifty dollars. Although I suspected he and his friend had stolen the vehicle, I agreed, against my better judgment, to go with them. As we left the driveway, I said, “So, what have you been up to, Herbert?”

NASA Photograph of Mars

Herbert told me, in a matter-of-fact way, that he’d just returned from Mars, describing the planet’s flora and fauna. Since he has limited intelligence and an inadequate imagination, it was obvious that he believed, on some level, that he had, in fact, just arrived home from the red planet. Maybe he’d read a science fiction magazine story or, more likely, had seen a science fiction movie about an expedition to Mars and had come to believe that he had been among those who’d visited the planet. I decided that the wisest course of action was to go along with him, and I said something on the order of “that’s nice.” He also told me that he’d tried to enlist in the army but had been refused admission on the grounds that he lacks a conscience. “They said I don’t know right from wrong,” was the way, I think, Herbert put it. He said, since, his ambition had changed, and he now aspired to end his days in prison.

As we pulled up to a tank at a filling station, Herbert, indicating his need for gasoline, asked me whether I had any money on me. “No,” I told him, “I’m broke.” It was after I’d replied that I saw Herbert’s friend nod toward a bank of nearby vending machines. Suspecting that they planned to rob the machines, I told Herbert I had to get home. Fortunately for me, he took me home without robbing the machines--or me--first.

I never saw Herbert again after that, but, occasionally, I wonder whether he’d ever realized his ambition, entering a prison somewhere.

At the time, Herbert hadn’t seemed especially scary, although I was wary around him. He’d always been strange, after all, and I’d known him, casually, most of my life. Mountaineering had built his body, and just his appearance showed that he’d become as strong as a bull. He could be dangerous, even deadly, if he wanted to be, I thought, and who knew what it would take to make him want to hurt, to maim, or to kill? It could have been nothing more than the desire to fill his gas tank or to secure enough money to buy a sandwich and a soda. I shouldn’t have gotten into his car, I shouldn’t have gone for a drive with him, and I am fortunate not to have incited him to anger by asserting my indigence. In retrospect, Herbert had been very scary, indeed.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface

From Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of the Amontillado” to Psycho and its sequels and The Silence of the Lambs and its sequel Red Dragon, the sociopath and the psychopath have been stock characters in horror fiction. Other horror stories in which madmen are the antagonists include:

• Brimstone, Dance of Death, The Book of the Dead (Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child trilogy novels): Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast investigates a series of bizarre deaths in which Lucifer himself seems to be the killer (Brimstone); Pendergast’s brother, the evil genius Diogenes, rescues him from certain death so that the FBI agent can stop him from committing the perfect crime--if Pendergast is able to do so (Dance of Death); and Diogenes implements his plan to commit the perfect crime (The Book of the Dead).
• Good Guy, The (Dean Koontz novel): A stone mason mistaken for a mob hit man seeks to rescue the intended target from the real killers.
• Husband (Dean Koontz novel): A husband’s wife is kidnapped; the husband must save her.
• Icebound (Dean Koontz): An iceberg is the scene of this killer's horrific crimes.
• Intensity (Dean Koontz novel): A sadistic killer chases his prey across country before the woman he’s chasing, to save herself and the child she’s protecting, sets him afire.
• Misery (Stephen King novel): A romance novelist’s greatest fan is a nurse, but she has second thoughts about nursing him back to health after he wrecks his car in a blizzard when he kills off the woman’s favorite protagonist.
• Psycho (Robert Bloch novel): A mommy’s boy becomes his mother, murdering young women to whom her son takes a shine.
• Rose Madder (Stephen King novel): An abused wife escapes through a painting into the land of the minotaur (really).
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hunter film series): He’s armed and dangerous!
• Velocity (Dean Koontz novel): A bartender has to rescue a targeted victim before she’s killed by the psychopath who hunts her (if this plot seems familiar, maybe you read Koontz’s The Good Guy).
• Wheel of Darkness, The (Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child): a sequel to the trilogy that pits the FBI’s Special Agent Pendergast against his evil genius brother Diogenes.