Showing posts with label nightmare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nightmare. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Quick Tip: Make Your Villains Both Timely and Timeless, Both Particular and Universal

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman



The nature of a monster is determined partly by the sociopolitical and cultural milieu of its time. It is also determined, in part, by the group of individuals for whom it is an embodiment of one or another fear. For example, the Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel and the Dracula who appears in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer share the same name and, ostensibly, at least, the same aristocratic and historical backgrounds, but the medieval Dracula is an altogether different vampire than his modern counterpart. Likewise, the invisible man, a scientist named Griffin, who appears in H. G. Wells’ novel, is motivated first by an ambition to make a name for himself, then by theft, and finally by revenge for his old mentor’s betrayal of him, whereas the invisible teenage girl, Marcie Ross, in the “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” episode of Buffy is motivated strictly by revenge : she wants to settle the score with those of her fellow students who have ignored or ridiculed her throughout her school years.

The monster, in other words, reflects the background of its times. Writers retool their villainous fiends and ogres so that they are representatives of the periods that help to spawn them. Since Buffy is a bildungsroman, or a story concerning “the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character,” as Yahoo! Education’s dictionary feature defines this term, its monsters tend to reflect the moral, emotional, and philosophical problems and issues that typically confront teenagers and young adults. As the series creator, Joss Whedon, himself puts it, “The show is designed to . . . work on the mythic structure of a hero’s journey. Just to reframe that as the growth of an adolescent girl. . . . The things she has to go through--losing her virginity, dying and coming back to life--are meant to be mythic, and yet they’re meant to be extremely personal” (The Monster Book viii)

Dreams are a good source for obtaining customized monsters. Because no two individuals are the same, their dreams will differ from one another, even when they are about the same general topic, such as vampires or ghosts, and each individual dreamer will project his or her own attitudes, beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and values onto the monsters that he or she creates in his or her dreams. In other words, such nightmarish creatures will reflect the anxieties, insecurities, fears, and worries of the man, woman, boy, or girl who creates these monsters. If monsters are projections of unconscious feelings, they must and will differ with respect to the particular unconscious in which they are rooted and from which they arise. Therefore, in this sense, they will be novel and original.

As individuals, though, no one exists in a vacuum. As John Donne wrote, no one is “an island.” In countless ways, each day we affect one another, as our common culture, language, and society suggests. Therefore, the monsters that any one of us creates in his or her nightmares, while rooted in and arising from his or her own unconscious mind, is also rooted in and arises from the common experience of his or her nation, culture, and species. The monsters that we make are both particular and universal. They are timely when we apply them to our own time and the current events of our day; yet, they also remain timeless, because the hopes and fears of humanity are not those of any particular time and place, but of all times and all places.

Nevertheless, by letting ourselves be inspired, and even guided, to some extent, by, our nightmares, we can render the representations and reflections of our own personal fears and those of our own particular day and age in such a way that the worn and tattered monster is retooled and renewed yet again. . . and again.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Sexploitation Horror Films: Sexing It Up

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman
 
Perhaps after watching one too many horror movies while experimenting with LSD, Jim Morrison, late of The Doors, chanted, “Love is sex, and sex is death, and therein lies the ultimate high.”
 
It’s a perfect mantra for horror films in which a bit of hanky panky precedes the deaths of the participants, who usually expire in a particularly gruesome and ghastly way to show the mostly teen and young adult audiences of such motion pictures that, well, “love is sex, and sex is death, and therein lies the ultimate high.”
 
For those who aren’t happy unless a movie is more than just a story and for whom horror has to have some sort of justification for its mayhem, L. Vincent Poupard offers a Freudian take on horror films’ inclusion of bodies getting physical.
 
In his article, "The Symbolism of Sex in Horror Movies,” he argues that sex participants are rebels against parental authority and that they “are most vulnerable when they are having sex” because “hormones take complete control.” As a result, the sexual partners become “oblivious to the world around them,” making themselves perfect victims of a stealthy, possibly voyeuristic, and most likely envious, monster. That’s not why sex is “symbolic,” though. According to Poupard, it’s symbolic because it represents “not paying attention” to the dictates of one’s parents. It’s dangerous, too, he says, because it’s a minefield of “sexual diseases.” 
 
Another reason that moviemakers put sex in their scenes is because sex sells. Especially in Europe, it seems, where the horror films of such directors as Jean Rollin (Zombie Lake [1980] and Oasis of Zombies [1981]); Jesus (“Jess”) Franco (Mansion of the Living Dead [1985], Nightmares Come At Night [1970], 99 Women [1969], Golden Temple Amazons [1986], Sadomania [1981]); and Joe D’Amato (Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals [1977]) are just opportunities to exploit their audiences with sleaze-disguised-as-horror. (Yes, of course, that may be all the more reason to have seen, or to see, them; that’s the whole point of sexploitation films.) 
 
As difficult as it may seem to believe, there was sex before slasher films. Even as far back as the 1940’s and 1950’s, horror movies exploited youngsters’ urge to merge. The difference between earlier and more recent films is the manner in which sex is incorporated in the plot and shown (or not shown) on the screen. In the older films, sex was mostly suggested. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is a good example. Instead of showing, close up and in person, so to speak, detailed sequences of Marion Crane making love to her paramour, the scene starts, not in media res, but after the fact, as Crane, wearing only her undies, dresses.
 
In a more recent film, Chuck Parello’s Ed Gein (2001), the opening sex scene is mild by today’s standards, with a pair of teenage lovebirds making out on a bench in the Plainfield (Wisconsin) cemetery. The action between them is restricted to some passionate kissing and to the youth’s unbuttoning of a button on his date’s blouse. 
 
They’re scared away by the sounds of Gein’s spade as he opens the grave of a recently deceased female citizen, and they hurry off, the young man zipping his fly as they vacate the premises. Most other contemporary horror films are far less circumspect, preferring to let it all hang out, as it were. 
 
Sexploitation horror films are about the sins of the flesh and the wages of this particular sin, but, even so, they require at least some narrative pretense, which is to say, a plot. Here are those of the ones we’ve mentioned in this post, just so no one can say we aren’t being fair in trashing this trash:
  • Zombie Lake: Skinny dipping girls, some bikini-clad and others bare, entice a lake full of Nazi zombies. Huh? Nazi zombies?
  • Oasis of Zombies: “An expedition searching for treasure supposedly buried by the German army in the African desert during WW II comes up against an army of Nazi zombies guarding the fortune” (The Internet Movie Database [IMDb]). Huh? Nazi zombies?
  • Mansion of the Living Dead: Maximum nudity with minimum gore and a touch of anticlericalism thrown in for good (or bad) measure. No Nazi zombies, though.
  • Sadomania: Newlyweds Olga and Michael stumble upon a desert training camp in which the trainees are enslaved women who work at a variety of odd jobs, including prostitution. Olga becomes their latest recruit. Uh oh!
  • 99 Women: The movie’s tagline pretty much sums up its plot: “99 women behind bars. . . without men!”
  • Nightmares Come At Night: Two topless dancers become friends; then, one of them begins to have nightmares. In her dreams, she kills people. Voyeurs--or, rather, viewers--learn the reason for the murderous dreams: the dancer is influenced by a hypnotic jewel thief who's intent upon eliminating her partners, one by one.
  • Golden Temple Amazons: A woman avenges the murder of her parents by helping an expedition sack the tribe’s golden temple.
  • Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals: Emmanuelle goes undercover. In a mental asylum. Where she finds a crazy girl. Who may or may not have been reared by cannibals. A visit to the Amazon will verify whether the patient is truly insane or just homesick.

Those who enjoy a bit of flesh (and necrophilia) with their blood and guts might also enjoy such sexploitation horror flicks as The Curse of Her Flesh, Vampiros Lesbos, The Kiss of Her Flesh, Tou Kui Wu Zui, Where the Truth Lies, Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Terror, and--well, there are lots and lots of them.

Insider’s Tip: Check out your favorite scream queens on Chickipedia.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Buffy: More than Pastiche


copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a pastiche, as executive producer Marti Noxon freely admits in a comment on the series’ third season compact disc (CD). Most viewers believe the series was far superior during its first three seasons than it was thereafter. One reason for this, perhaps, is that the show based many of its earlier episodes upon classic horror monsters, offering Buffy’s take on them. If “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” as Charles Caleb Cotton said, Buffy is positively sycophantic toward such artists and movies as:

  • Cat People (“The Pack”)
  • The Terminator, and (if only in the title) Tarzan the Ape Man (“I Robot, You Jane”)
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street (“Nightmares”)
  • H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (“Out of Sight, Out of Mind”)
  • Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (“Some Assembly Required”)
  • The Mummy (“Inca Mummy Girl”)
  • The Terminator (“Ted”)
  • Werewolf films and folklore (“Phases” and others)
  • The Creature from the Black Lagoon (“Go Fish”)
  • Stephen King’s Pet Semetary, Night of the Living Dead and the Gorgons (Greek mythology) (“Dead Man’s Party”)
  • Hansel and Gretel (“Gingerbread”)
  • Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (“Primeval” and other episodes featuring Adam)
  • Bram Stoker’s Dracula (“Buffy vs. Dracula”)
  • Ground Hog Day (“Life Serial”)
  • Tremors (“Beneath You”)

It’s fine to be “inspired” by other writers and their works, as long as other writers’ ideas are treated differently in one’s own work--as long as, to paraphrase Noxon, one makes the other’s creature feature one’s own. Just by relating classic horror monsters to contemporary teens and the problems and issues that they face in their daily lives, Buffy goes a long way in doing this. Of course, the characters, the setting, the conflicts, the themes, and pretty much every other dramatic element also differs as a result of bringing the monsters into a new arena, just as these elements are drastically different in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as compared to Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, despite the fact that both stories feature vampires.

It may be instructive to examine Buffy’s treatment of a couple of the classic horror monsters, so, in this post, we’ll take a look at the show’s use of three in the same episode: Stephen King’s Pet Semetary, Night of the Living Dead and the Gorgons of Greek mythology, all of which inform the plot of “Dead Man’s Party,” and at werewolf lore, which is developed in “Phases” and several of the series’ other episodes.

In “Dead Man’s Party,” Buffy Summers has just returned home to Sunnydale after running away to Los Angeles, where she’d been living in a motel and working as a waitress in Helen’s Kitchen (an allusion to New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen), calling herself by her middle name, Anne. Now that she’s returned, her friends and her mother, Joyce, insist upon throwing her a welcome-home party. Unfortunately, Buffy is still struggling with the “fallout” from her “love life,” as she characterizes her problematic relationship with Angel in “I Only Have Eyes for You”: in the episode previous to “Anne,” Buffy had to dispatch Angel to hell in order to prevent him from sucking the world into the same dimension, and, in an argument with her mother, who forbade her to leave the house, Joyce told Buffy not to come back if she left the house. Buffy’s attempts to repress her feelings are not working.

After Joyce, the owner of an art gallery, hangs a Nigerian mask on her bedroom wall, she announces to Buffy that she is hosting Buffy’s welcome-home party, and sends Buffy to the basement to retrieve their better dishes. As she does so, Buffy discovers the cadaver of a cat, which mother and daughter bury in the back yard. That night, the mask glows, and the cat is resurrected. The next day, it returns to the Summers’ house, shocking Buffy and Joyce, who call Buffy’s watcher (mentor), Rupert Giles, the high school librarian. Giles traps the animal in a cage and takes it to the library to study. The resurrection of the dead, buried cat is an allusion to Stephen King’s novel, Pet Sematary, in which a beloved pet is buried after being killed and returns (as, later, a dead child, buried in the same cemetery, does, as well).

During the party, it’s clear that Buffy is not coping well with her difficulties. She seems to have been avoiding her best friend and confidante, Willow Rosenberg. Xander, on the other hand, is too busy spending time with Cordelia Chase, his newfound girlfriend, to pay Buffy much attention. Buffy overhears Joyce confide in a friend as to how difficult it is for her to have Buffy back home again. Meanwhile, Buffy is surrounded by strangers who have crashed her party. Feeling alienated and alone, she packs her bags to run away again, but she’s caught by Joyce and Willow. In a confrontation between mother and daughter, in front of her friends and the other partygoers, Buffy is humiliated. Xander also confronts her, telling her that she must deal with her problems rather than trying to repress them: “You can’t just bury things, Buffy. They’ll come right back to get you.” They do just this, in the form of zombies.

In his research, Giles learns the secret of the Nigerian mask that Joyce has hung on her bedroom wall, and rushes to the Summers house to warn Joyce and Buffy, but, on the way, he’s attacked by the zombies.

As Joyce and Xander confront Buffy, the zombies crash Buffy’s party, attacking and killing guests in a scene reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead.

One drags Joyce’s friend, Pat, down a hallway. Buffy, Joyce, Xander, and Willow take refuge in Joyce’s bedroom, where they find Pat lying on the floor, while Willow’s boyfriend, Oz, and Cordelia hide in a closet downstairs. Checking her pulse, Willow confirms their fears: Pat is dead.
As Oz and Cordelia step out of the closet, they encounter Giles, who’s just arrived, and he explains that Joyce’s mask is imbued with the power of a zombie demon, Ovu Monabi, or Evil Eye. The zombies have come to retrieve it. Whoever dons the mask becomes the demon.

Pat shocks everyone by recovering. She was dead, but, now, she lives. She’s also wearing the mask, having become the zombie demon. In a fight with Buffy, the slayer knocks the demon through Joyce’s bedroom window, and both combatants tumble off the roof, to land in the yard below. During the fight, Buffy learns that the demon can paralyze people, after the fashion of Medusa and the other Gorgons of Greek mythology, whose look could turn their victims into stone. When Oz distracts the demon, it paralyzes him, giving Buffy the chance she needs to attack the monster, and she shoves a shovel into its eyes, blinding it. Defenseless, the demon (and the body of Pat) vanishes, and those who were paralyzed recover.

The episode ends with Buffy and Willow bonding as life returns to as-close-to-normal as it gets in Sunnydale.

This episode fuses elements of the plots of King’s Pet Sematary, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and the Greek myth of the Gorgons. However, these elements are synthesized in a way that makes them unique to the demands of Buffy’s continuing storyline. The resurrection of the dead cat foreshadows Pat’s resurrection, both of which are accomplished by virtue of the power of the mask; the zombies are associated with the mask, but they also represent the powerful negative emotions that Buffy has sought to repress, or bury; and the power of unresolved emotional trauma, represented by the demonic mask and the demon’s power to paralyze its victims, represents Buffy’s alienation, her inability to cope, and the destructiveness to others of her unwillingness to communicate. In using these elements, the Buffy writers have made them their own, as Noxon says, and, in doing so, have transformed them rather than simply copied them off from other writers and stories.

“Phases,” “Wild at Heart,” and other Buffy episodes use werewolf legends and folklore in a similar way to develop the TV show’s continuing storylines and themes.

There hasn’t been a definitive story about werewolves the way there has been, with Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, a definitive story about vampires. The closest that the literature of horror has come in distilling the legends and folklore regarding the hirsute horror is, perhaps, The Wolfman, starring Lon Chaney. For the most part, however, the stories concerning werewolves remains fragmented and diverse, lacking a center. In the episodes of Buffy that concern the werewolf as an antagonist, the series provides a center, if not a definitive one, for this character, as it appears in the Buffy mythos.

The show’s writers cleverly play upon the idea that the creature is a monster only on the night preceding a full moon, on the night of the full moon, and on the night following the full moon, or three days out of a month. (Traditionally, a werewolf is a werewolf only on the night of the full moon, but the show’s writers wanted to suggests that their three-day period is equivalent to a woman’s menstrual period, as Willow tells her boyfriend, Oz, the show‘s sometime-werewolf, “Three days out of the month, I’m not much fun to be around, either.”)

Willow, Buffy, Giles, and the other members of their clique protect Oz from a poacher whose specialty is werewolves. (He makes necklaces of their teeth and sells their pelts.) To protect Oz and those whom he might kill and devour were he allowed to run free during his “period,” Oz is locked inside the library’s rare books cage. In another departure from most werewolf lore, Oz suffers guilt, in “Beauty and the Beasts,” when he escapes from the cage and believes that he may be responsible for the death of a human being. In the same episode, he says, after having devoured part of the actual killer after a fight with him, which Oz, in his werewolf avatar, wins, he says, that, oddly enough, he feels full although he hasn’t eaten. Oz doesn’t recall his actions as a werewolf when he reverts to human form. Such forgetfulness is in keeping with traditional werewolf lore. However, this will change, he is assured by a fellow werewolf, Veruca, whom he meets in “Wild at Heart.” Veruca has been a werewolf longer than Oz, and, after they are intimate as werewolves (if such creatures can in any real sense of the word be intimate), she tells him that she can recall some of her experiences as a werewolf, and relishes them, as he will do as well, eventually. The prospect horrifies Oz rather than delighting him.

When Veruca approaches Oz the next night, he locks her inside the library book cage with him, and Willow finds their naked bodies, there, the next morning. Later, Veruca attacks Willow, but is saved by Oz, who, in his werewolf state, attacks and kills Veruca. Next, he turns on Willow, but Buffy’s arrival saves the witch, and, the next day, distraught at the thought that he may have killed Willow, Oz leaves Sunnydale to seek a cure for his lycanthropy.

When he finds the cure, Oz returns, finding that Willow has become enamored of another woman, her fellow college student, Tara Maclay. Enraged, he reverts to his vampire self, and attacks Tara, but he is subdued by a military platoon led by Buffy’s new boyfriend, Riley Finn. When Oz escapes, he leaves Sunnydale for good, accepting the fact that Willow loves Tara rather than him.

The romantic relationship that Oz has with Willow is another departure from traditional werewolf lore. One reason that the legends concerning this monster may remain fragmented and diverse rather than having acquired coherence and a more cohesive structure is that the beast, rather than the human, aspects of the monster have been highlighted historically. When the protagonist is more animal than man, character development is unlikely. One of Buffy’s more creative innovations with regard to the show’s use of werewolf folklore is to reverse this treatment, showing the humanity of the monster rather than the bestiality of the human. Because Oz is allowed to be not only a beast but a man, the writers can more fully develop both his character and the tradition out of which it, in part, comes. After all, werewolf is motivated, primarily, by instincts, but a person, being far more complex, is motivated by many impulses, instinctive, emotional, rational, and otherwise. The show’s use of the werewolf motif, like its use of the zombie motif, is complex, but it is also unique, because it makes it serve its own narrative and dramatic purposes. In so doing, the show makes these classic monsters its own, rather than simply using them as the monster of the week or the creature feature of the moment.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Fear: A Cultural History: A Partial Review and Summary, Part 2


copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman



In Fear: A Cultural History, Joanna Bourke summarizes emotionology, or the study of human emotions, which “aims to show how emotions were classified and recognized within particular cultures,” summarizing various psychological theories as to what constitutes an emotion and as to what circumstances are involved in the production of the passions. For Knight Dunlap, of Johns Hopkins University, she says, emotions are specific responses that people make to situations. One may fear or be angry with someone else who threatens him or her, depending upon whether the threatened person perceives the other person as having “greater power.” According to Bourke, the fact, Dunlap contends, that a person can respond emotionally in two or more ways shows that the emotions are responses to situations, not “psychological entities” with “unique affective processes.” Instead, Bourke, stating Dunlap’s case for him, emotions are to be regarded as “nothing more than teleological constructs.”

The definition of any particular emotion, such as fear, depends not only upon “the situation in which the emotion appears,” Dunlap argues, but also upon “the psychological and philosophical theory of the commentator.” A case in point is that of a boy given to tantrums:
In their history of anger, Carol and Peter Stearns. . . observed that ‘a tantrum in a society that has nor word for the phenomenon is a different experience for both parent and child than is a tantrum that is labeled, and labeled with a judgmental connotation.’ As the words changed, so too did the meaning of the emotion within a particular culture.
Her chapter on “Nightmares” reviews, in summary fashion, how this phenomenon has been considered through history. First, nightmares were regarded as “communication with the ‘other world.’”

Later, they were understood as being effects of bodily states and processes. (Remember Ebenezer Scrooge’s explanation of the cause of his nightmarish visits by ghosts as resulting from a bit of undigested potato?)

Subsequently, evolutionary psychologists believed that the past is to blame for “all kinds of fear, including those inspired by. . . nightmares.” One of their number, G. Stanley Hall, thought that the history of the human race is “recapitulated” in every infant. Emotions have survival value; therefore, through evolution, they were retained”: “fear of eyes dated from the time when human ancestors competed for survival with other large-eyed animals,” Hall declares.

Psychoanalysis regarded nightmares as “latent content” that, in a relaxed state, during sleep, the ego allowed to go unrepressed, and it surfaced, as it were, from the unconscious mind, albeit in a disguised state. What the dreamer recalled upon awakening was the dream’s “manifest content.” The purpose of dreams was to express concealed wishes, and, once their manifest content was identified, with the help of a competent psychoanalyst, Freud claimed, “the disguised fulfillment of wishes would become obvious.” For Carl Jung, a one-time follower of Freud, dreams, including nightmares, “contain images and symbols shared by all humanity,” Bourke reminds her readers, arising from the “collective unconscious” that the members of the human species shared with one another, a product (somehow) of evolution and genetics.

William H. R. Rivers, an anthropologist and psychologist, working with victims of “shell shock,” or, as it is known today, post-traumatic stress syndrome, realized that his patients did not wish to relive the terrors they’d faced upon the battlefield and that, consequently, their “nightmares could not be reconciled,” as Bourke observes, “with Freud’s assertion that dreams were a form of wish-fulfillment.” Instead, she tells her readers, Rivers “maintained that the dream was ‘the attempted solution of a conflict’” that plagued the patient’s waking life.

Nathaniel Kleitman’s research suggests that dreams are more likely to be physiological processes than mental activities. A physiologist himself, Kleitman identified four stages of sleep, three of which are characterized by what he calls “non-rapid eye movement,” or NREM, and one of which features “rapid eye movement,” or REM. On the average, a person “experienced four or five REM periods during a sleep of six to eight hours,” during which periods they have dreams, including nightmares. However, more disturbing dreams that mere nightmares, called “terror dreams” or “an incubus attack” (now generally known as “night terrors”) occur “in Stages 3 and 4, before the REM period.” Kleitman’s research has had a profound impact upon the understanding of dreams, as Bourke points out:
. . . Fundamentally, dreams, nightmares and terror dreams were stripped of significant ‘meaning.’ For some neuroscientists dreams and nightmares were a way the brain rid itself of unimportant information. Dreams stopped the brain from becoming overloaded. We dream in order to forget. Others regarded dream images as the result of random bursts from nerve cells in the brainstem during REM sleep: they were simply the brain’s attempt to make sense of stray signals generated by the lower brain.
The upshot of emotionology?
. . . the natural and social sciences were informed by extremely different, even contradictory theories about the nature of emotions such as fear. . . . Clearly the answer to the question: ‘What is fear?’ depends as much upon the psychological and philosophical theory of the commentator as it does on the situation in which the emotion emerges.
For those who are not well informed about the alleged nature and significance of dreams, especially nightmares, Bourke’s review of the psychological and philosophical theories is both amusing and enlightening, although there is nothing new here for those who are already familiar with this material. Nevertheless, Bourke’s review is a remedy for those who, devoid of critical thinking abilities, fall prey to psychobabble by those whose own views are by no means certain foundations for psychological inquiry, analysis, or therapy. If dreams are nothing more than instances of what might be called the brain’s indigestion of neural signals (perhaps Scrooge was closer to the truth than Freud), one can toss out one’s dream dictionaries and any theories, such as those of Freud and Jung, upon which the use of such alleged reference works are based. To paraphrase William Shakespeare, the cause of our dreams is in our bodies, not in our minds.

On that note, we will pause, taking up Bourke’s survey of the subject of fear again in future posts.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Leftover Plots: Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman
 

As a result of considering “leftover plots” or plot-seeds or springboards or whatever we choose to call narrative motifs that occur in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we identified several additional storylines that could have been used in the series or (better yet, for us) that we ourselves, with some revision regarding characters, setting, and other narrative elements, could employ to write horror stories (or even novels) ourselves:

  • An imprisoned character can escape, causing more mischief or even a little death and destruction before being killed or imprisoned again.
  • Things that give rise to new organisms or liberate forces or entities, such as eggs, seeds, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, melting icebergs, shifting tectonic plates, earthbound meteors, and the like, can introduce new characters, including such worthy adversaries as hideous, horrible monsters.
  • Problematic characters, such as a naïve, incompetent, or foolish follower or sidekick can create havoc and endanger lives.
  • Physical objects, or artifacts, can function as inciting moments that spark a chain of narrative incidents, setting the rest of the story in motion.

We also learned some important factual matters pertaining to this technique:

  • Ideas cannot be copyrighted, so they are fair game as inspirations for plots.
  • The specific and unique ways in which ideas are developed can, and often are, copyrighted.
  • Using the characters, settings, and other elements of such treatments could constitute plagiarism and/or copyright infringement.
  • Ideas must be given an original treatment in which characters, settings, and other elements are new, not derivative.
They’re lots more we can learn from considering other Buffy episodes, so let’s get started. In “Angel” (episode 7, season 1), viewers are introduced to a mysterious stranger who comes to Buffy’s aid, helping her to defeat three vampires who attack her in the proverbial dark alley. Viewers wonder who this stranger is, what his interest in Buffy may be, and how he got the strength, agility, stamina, and fighting prowess to take on vampires alongside the supernaturally gifted slayer. Later, when, sharing a passionate kiss with Buffy, the stranger transforms into a vampire himself, one of these questions is answered, but the answer raises further, even more intriguing questions, one of which is why a vampire would be interested in (and apparently smitten with) his mortal enemy. Willow Rosenberg, Buffy’s nerdy computer geek friend, starts an online romance with a stranger in “I Robot, You Jane” (episode 8, season 1). Buffy is concerned about the possible dangers of Internet dating, and, as it turns out, she has good cause to be concerned, for Willow’s newfound boyfriend turns out to be a demon that, once imprisoned in the text of a book, was liberated into cyberspace when the book was scanned into Sunnydale High School’s library database. “The Puppet Show” (episode 9, season 1), which is one of the lamer stories in the series, is a takeoff upon the Chucky movies about a demon-possessed doll, except that this toy is a human who was cursed by having his soul confined to a ventriloquist’s dummy by the same brain-eating demon who’s been killing Sunnydale High School students and lunching upon their brains. (See! High school kids do have brains.) Nightmares come true in “Nightmares” (episode 10, season 1). The bad dreams are products of an abused boy whose Little League baseball coach believed in making an example of him after blaming the boy for the team’s loss of a big game. Some of the dreams, although nightmares, are amusing--Xander’s fear of going to school in his underwear, his fear of the clown that performed at one of his childhood birthday parties, and Willow’s fear of theatrical performance--but others are truly terrifying, as when Buffy’s mentor, Rupert Giles, dreams that she has been killed or Buffy’s own dream that she has been transformed into a vampire. Interesting because of one of the more transparent metaphors upon which Buffy plots are typically based, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” (episode 11, season 1) equates being neglected and ignored with becoming invisible. In this episode, an invisible girl, Marcie Ross, uses her invisibility to gain revenge against Cordelia Chase and other Sunnydale students and, indeed, teachers who mistreated, neglected, ignored, and otherwise abused her before becoming a spy for the federal government. “Prophecy Girl” (episode 12, season 1) is the two-part finale of Buffy’s first season. The slayer learns that a prophecy foretells her death at the hands of an ancient vampire king known as The Master. She tries to quit, but, when The Master’s minions attack and kill several of her fellow students, traumatizing Willow, Buffy reluctantly accepts her destiny and is first bitten and then, unconscious, cast into a pool of water, in which she drowns--only to be resuscitated by her friend Xander, who arrives in the nick of time with Buffy’s vampire lover, Angel. Revived, Buffy finds that she has taken on some of The Master’s strength--and darkness--becoming stronger and is now immune from his mesmerizing gaze. A fight, to The Master’s death--ensues. Okay, so what have we learned? Most of these episodes deal with xenophobia, an irrational fear of strangers, except that, as it turns out in most cases, the fear doesn’t seem all that unwarranted when one is residing atop a Hellmouth. The introduction of a stranger who is mysterious in some ways is a universal and well-used plot device. When used adroitly, the mysterious stranger creates and maintains suspense because his or her sudden introduction into the setting and circumstances of the larger story naturally arouses curiosity on the reader’s (or viewer’s) part, especially when the entrance is a grand one, dramatic and--in the case of the horror genre, at least--unsettling. In Buffy, to enhance the mystique of the stranger, the series’ writers used such techniques--okay, they can be called “tricks,” if one prefers to think of them in this way--as these:
  • A possible threat. (Is the mysterious Angel stalking Buffy?)
  • Romantic intrigue AND star-crossed love. (Buffy no sooner meets Angel than they’ve become a couple, but, since he is, as she soon learns, a vampire, and she’s the slayer, theirs will be star-crossed, to say the least.)
  • Juxtapositions. The past (as represented by print-bound books) and the present (as represented by computers and cyberspace) meet, and they don’t get along all that well. Good (Buffy) and evil (Angel and the other vampires) represent two moral extremes. The natural, everyday world of Sunnydale and its citizens’ mundane lives are set against the supernatural world of their vampire foes. Life, as it is lived by Buffy and her friends, is contrasted with the life-in-death state in which the vampires exist, a hedonistic world of the senses and of passions that are cut off from such roots as love and compassion.
  • Similarity of themes. Buffy often explores a theme from several perspectives. For example, Willow, whose love for Xander remains unrequited because of his love for Buffy, which is also unrequited because Buffy loves Angel, leaves Willow lonely, as does Marcie’s neglect by her peers. In each instance, the characters’ loneliness leads them to foolish actions. In Willow’s case, she is saved by her friends, to whose circle she returns. Marcie, having no friends, becomes a ward of the state, so to speak, after Buffy rescues Cordelia and defeats Marcie. Although it may not cure one’s loneliness altogether, friendship, such thematic treatments suggest, is the tie that not only binds but also saves one from a perfunctory, institutional existence as a ward of, and a servant to, the state.
  • Animation of inanimate objects. This is a motif that is popular in fantasy fiction, including the horror and the science fiction genres. The animation of inanimate objects, whether through magical or technological means, is a subtype of the artifact plot device, in which an object, whether a ring (Lord of the Rings), a crystal (The Dark Crystal), or even a spaceship (Rendezvous with Rama) or some other object is the artifact.
  • Trauma’s consequences. As child abuse, spousal abuse, torture, combat and other mistreatment or crisis situations have shown, trauma has long-, if not life-long, consequences and can cause recurring nightmares, acts of violence, and other disturbed behavior.
  • Duty’s duty. Blaise Pascal wrote, “The heart has reasons which reason does not know.” So has duty. Even when there is no logically defensible reason to do so, the claim of duty often holds, especially when altruism, or even self-sacrifice, are directed at protecting others, more helpless than oneself, about whom one cares. Buffy dies that others may live, and, in doing so, she underscores the supreme values of brotherly love, courage, and that pesky pest, duty.
So, these episodes provide quite a bit of fodder for horror story writers, with regard to characters’ usefulness to plot, popular narrative motifs and techniques, and popular themes. With modification to suit one’s own interests and the demands of one’s own story, they can enrich and enhance a narrative. As such, they are useful tools--or tricks--to have in one’s authorial kit.

Having considered only a few of the lessons to be learned from a consideration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, we’ll revisit the topic of “Leftover Plots” in future installments.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Everyday Horrors: Nightmares

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman


We’re not sure why we dream or what, if anything, dreams mean. Some believe that they are nothing more than a venting of mental, or psychic, steam, so to speak. Others believe that they are attempts by a clumsy, rather inarticulate subconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind, or ego, through such devices as figures of speech, symbolism, and puns. Still others believe that dreams are--or can be, at times--messages from God.

Dreams can be inspirational. The benzene molecule’s unusual structure came to a German chemist, Friedrich August Kekulé, in a dream in which he envisioned a snake forming a ring by biting its own tail. The dream showed him the circular structure of the molecule he’d long sought to decipher. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge claims that the poem--or fragment of the poem--Kubla Khan came to him, fully complete, in a dream--one of which, it seems, was induced by opium.

Sometimes, dreams prove prophetic. During a journey by steamboat, Mark Twain and his younger brother Henry paused in their journey to stay at their sister’s house for the night. Twain dreamed that Henry had died. He saw him lying in his casket, which rested upon two chairs. The coffin was topped by a bouquet of white roses, a single red rose at its center. Rushing downstairs, Twain saw that his dream had been just that--a nightmare--as Henry was fine.

A week later, Twain, a riverboat pilot was transferred from the Pennsylvania, which he‘d shared with Henry until now, while Henry continued his trip aboard the other riverboat. Three days later, word reached Twain that the Pennsylvania’s boilers had exploded, just after the steamboat had passed Memphis, injuring or killing 150 people. Henry had been among those injured.

Twain made it to Memphis in time to sit by his dying brother’s side. The next morning, Twain went to the room in which the caskets of the dead awaited burial, and saw Henry’s coffin, resting upon two chairs, only the bouquet missing. However, as the grief-stricken Twain watched, a volunteer nurse approached Henry’s casket and set a bouquet of roses atop the casket. At its center was a single red rose.

In “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Ward Hill Lamon describes a horrific prophetic dream that the president had:
About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible.

I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?

I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered.

There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers 'The President' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin!' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream.
Soon thereafter, Lincoln, attending a production of the comedy Our American Cousin at the Ford’s Theater with his wife, Mary, was shot in the back of the head by the actor John Wilkes Booth. He was carried across the street to a private residence, where he died. His body, placed inside a casket, was placed upon a platform in the East Room of the White House and guarded by soldiers, just as Lincoln had dreamed.

Both the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible records dreams which it declares to have been heaven-sent. One of the more memorable is Joseph’s dream, which came to him while he and his family were living in Egypt, under the rule of the pharaoh. He said that he was “binding sheaves of grain out in the field” with his brothers “when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.” His brothers were jealous and angry, because they interpreted the dream to mean that Joseph would rule over them.

Joseph later had a second dream, in which “the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down” to him. This time, Joseph’s dream aggravated his father, for he interpreted the dream to indicate that both Joseph’s brothers as well as his parents would be subjects to Joseph’s reign.

At the age of thirty, the pharaoh made Joseph his second in command. Another memorable dream is that of Mary, Jesus’ mother, which was brought to her by the angel Gabriel. The angel informed her that the baby to whom she would give birth would be the Son of God. When Mary said that she was a virgin, and, as such, could not have conceived a child, the angel told her that the birth would be the result of a miracle. “With God, nothing is impossible,” the angel declared, and then told Mary that her elderly relative, Elizabeth, was pregnant with the baby who would be Jesus’ herald, John the Baptist. Gabriel, before visiting Mary, had already informed Elizabeth’s husband, Zacharias, that he would be the father of a boy named John.

Darker dreams--the dreams of terror and horror--are called nightmares, and they have inspired great literary art as well as adrenaline rushes and heart palpitations. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, dreamed the idea for her novel’s plot. After reading Phantasmagoria, a book of ghost stories, to divert themselves on a holiday to Lake Geneva, Switzerland, during rainy weather, it was suggested that their party participate in a contest to see which of their number could devise the most frightening horror story. Of those present--Mary, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidon--only Mary completed her story, which she published in 1831 as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Perhaps as a result of having read of Luigi Galvani’s use of electricity to animate dead frogs’ legs, Mary had a nightmare in which she dreamed of a young scientist’s use of electricity to bring life to a body composed of parts of human cadavers he’d sewn together. She’d reasoned that her nightmare had frightened her; therefore, it was likely to frighten others as well.

Stephen King likewise cites nightmares as the muses that have inspired some of his fiction, one of which was the novel Misery:

The inspiration for Misery was a short story by Evelyn Waugh called “The Man Who Loved Dickens.” It came to me as I dozed off while on a New York-to-London Concorde flight. Waugh's short story was about a man in South America held prisoner by a chief who falls in love with the stories of Charles Dickens and makes the man read them to him. I wondered what it would be like if Dickens himself was held captive.
One wonders what sort of novel King might have written had he read O. Henry’s short story “The Ransom of Red Chief” before nodding off.

Not only have literary artists received inspiration from nightmares, but visual artists have also been inspired by these dark dreams. An oil painting by Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, features a sleeping woman dressed in a white nightgown, her head and arms dangling over the edge of her bed, dreaming of a horse (the nightmare) and an incubus (a demon in male guise who has sex with sleeping women) seated upon the woman’s breast. Copies sold with the accompanying inscription, by Erasmus Darwin, which he later expanded and included in a long poem, The Loves of the Plants:

So on his Nightmare through the evening fog
Flits the squab Fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;
Seeks some love-wilder'd maid with sleep oppress'd,
Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.

Kathleen Russo believes that the painting may have been inspired by the painter’s own nightmares, which he related to folktales that claimed demons possessed lone sleepers, visiting them as hags on horseback, although the origin of the term “nightmare” is unrelated to horses, whether mares or stallions, having referred, originally, the Online Etymology Dictionary asserts, to “‘an evil female spirit afflicting sleepers with a feeling of suffocation,’ compounded from night + mare ‘goblin that causes nightmares, incubus,’ from O.E. mare ‘incubus.’”

One may agree or disagree with Freudians and neo-Freudians as to whether dreams have any actual significance. Perhaps they are nothing more than the effects of an undigested bit of potato, as Ebenezer Scrooge tried to claim, early on, at least. Maybe they are communications from the deeper self. Maybe they are divine messages, borne by angels. Maybe we will never know, for certain, what they are, but, it seems safe to say, whatever they are, we will be likely to remain fascinated by them and to find them inspirational to art if not to life.


“Everyday Horrors: Nightmares” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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