Making Every Word (or Image) Count

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

The opening sequence of Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) is well known to many moviegoers. Each moment in the sequence keeps viewers' attention, enhances the victim's humanity, characterizes the victim (or alternately dehumanizes her) or her companion, intensifies viewers' emotions, establishes contrasts that heighten emotion and sharpen theme, suggests despair, and/or leads up to the victim's savage and horrendous death. The blue font indicates how the action sequences accomplish these tasks.

A young blonde woman runs, Chrissie Watkins, along a fence, or what is left of it, pursued by a young man. Is he a threat? Does he mean her harm? Is he a stalker?

This sequence of action creates suspense, as the viewer, having no clue as to why the man is chasing the woman, wonders whether she is in danger.

He trips, falls, but is again on his feet in a second, and the pursuit continues. Chrissie glance back, over her shoulder, as she runs, shedding her denim jacket. Beneath her sweaters, her breasts bounce as she runs, suggesting she is braless. The man continues his pursuit.

Chrissie may shed her jacket because it impedes her range of motion, slowing her down. The motion of her breasts calls attention to her femininity and her sexuality, suggesting a possible motive for the man's pursuit. Is he intent upon rape?

She pauses to remove a shoe, before stumbling onward, her pursuer giving chase, as he doffs his sweatshirt.

Perhaps she removes her shoe for the same reason she removed her sweater: it slows her flight.

Chrissie pulls off her sweater; she is, indeed, braless. Viewers see her bare breasts bounce as she runs. Although she continues to flee from the man following her, viewers begin to suspect the couple are playing a game, as she has voluntarily removed her shoe and top.

The suspense dissipates, as viewers realize the couple are playing a game of sorts. Chrissie is not in danger. (However, since she soon will be, this segment of the film's introductory sequence creates a false expectation for viewers.) Her braless states suggests she is a modern, “liberated” young woman who is comfortable in her own skin.

As the man tumbles down a hill at the side of the trail, Chrissie, now completely nude, runs toward the ocean, her buttocks drawing viewers' gazes.

When suspense is unavailable, nudity can keep viewers' attention. The fact that she has chosen to be naked suggests she is a carefree young woman, just as the game of flight-and-pursuit she plays with her friend suggests she is playful.

She enters the surf and dives into the sea. She is a strong swimmer, and, by the time her friend arrives on the beach, removing more of his clothing, she is nearing a buoy some distance off shore.

The young man remains only a figure, rather than a character, he's little more than a prop; the introductory portion of the film remains focused on Chrissie. For this part of the film, at least, she is the protagonist.

Projecting her leg into the air, her foot extended straight, in a manner similar to that of a ballerina standing on her toes, she lets herself sink into the ocean. For a moment, she is lost to sight.

The positioning of her leg indicates Chrissie has a sense of humor.

A closeup shot shows her resurface, mouth wide as she gasps for breath, water streaming down her face. She smiles, before turning as she dog paddles, to look west, toward the sun, which is low on the horizon. Sunset is on its way.

Although she is in her element and is enjoying herself, Chrissie hasn't much time left: symbolically, the near-sunset indicates that the end is near for her.

On the beach, her friend is a silhouette against the wash of the surf, a stretch of low land, and a sky in which scattered clouds are illuminated, yellow and pink in the setting sun. He falls as he struggles to remove a shoe. Perhaps, given his clumsiness, he is drunk.

It seems clear that he is not the type of man who is apt to be able to rescue a damsel in distress. He cannot even take care of himself.

Chrissie resumes swimming, her gliding silhouette seen from below the calm, blue waters as she performs the breaststroke. Then, the back of her head and her arms are seen at a distance, as she continues to swim.

Seen from this perspective, below and at some distance, Chrissie is dehumanized. She might as well be a maritime animal, a fish or a seal, as a human being.

Pausing for a moment, as the camera shows her closeup, she turns her head from side to side, smiling.

Her moment of joy will contrast sharply and dramatically with her coming horror and pain.

She sinks below the surface of the ocean, kicking her legs and waving her arms. The camera views her from below. Her pubic hair is a dark, triangular patch, her breasts discernible as a pair of firm, buoyant mounds topped by her nipples.

Her sexuality is highlighted by this shot, but it is, at the same time, darkened by the lack of light, both below the surface of the ocean and in the dusky sky above. She is undoubtedly a beautiful and sexy woman; her death will seem all the more a waste. She could be a mother. Instead, she will become a corpse. Sexuality and life are established, through her nudity, as contrasts to her upcoming demise.

At the surface again, she smiles. Then, her head jerks back and she is pulled violently downward. Her eyes widen in surprise. She turns her head slightly to her right, looking puzzled. Her head dips below the surface, before reappearing. She looks panic-stricken. In a splash, she vanishes beneath the waves. When her head pierces the surface, her mouth is open, her eyes shut tightly, a grimace of terror and pain freezing her features.

Chrissie feels surprise, followed by shock, followed by horror and pain, as she realizes she is in the grip of an adversary too ferocious and powerful to resist and that, alone at sea, she is on her own.

A splash, and she is pulled across the water, past the buoy, only her head and shoulders visible above the water. She struggles. Her body is pulled to the right. She straightens, and her body is again pulled to the right. Water churns around her.

It is as if, clinging to the buoy, she hopes against hope, even in her hopeless situation, to survive somehow. Of course, she has no chance.

On the beach, her friend sleeps, as Chrissie continues to struggle for her life against her unseen adversary. She is launched toward the buoy and clings desperately to its platform. It turns, and, cast off, she swims toward shore, but, a moment later, she is seized. Her face flashes with anguish amid the roiling water, as she cries out. She is taken underwater.

This seems to be her last moment: she is buried, as it were, at sea, the closure of the water above her body a metaphorical closing of her grave.

Her friend continues to sleep on the beach, despite the breaking waves that wash over his lower body. The sky is now nearly dark.

The near-darkness suggests both the young man's sleep (and his unawareness of Chrissie's death) and Chrissie's own demise.

In well-made movies, regardless of their genre, every moment of screen time contributes to the film's overall effect while moving the movie forward. The same is true of well-written novels, although, sometimes to their detriment, novels are allowed more leeway than movies, probably because feature films cost millions of dollars to produce, while novels typically cost those who write and distribute them far less. A tightly written novel, though, in which every chapter, paragraph, sentence, and word contributes to the narrative's overall effect while moving the story forward is apt to be a superior one. Whatever their medium, one type of artist can often suggest ways to improve another one's work, regardless of its medium. The opening sequence of Jaws, like the movie's other scenes, has a lot to teach those willing to study and to learn.

How to Haunt a House: Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Even Victorians can intimidate.

In the previous post, we considered two rules concerning how to haunt a house:

1. Make it spacious--the bigger, the better.
2. Fill it with rooms.

In this post, we’re going to look at the ways in which haunted houses often symbolize characters and their states of mind or serve as a gateway to a darker realm. As is often the case with regard to fiction, fact gives us a direction. In particular, we’re thinking of Ed Gein, the schizophrenic murderer upon whom such characters as Psycho’s Norman Bates, Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill are based.

If ever a home was a reflection of its resident, Gein’s house certainly indicated his mental state. The house was a veritable garbage dump. The floors were littered and strewn with old magazines and newspapers, and boxes stood in precarious stacks along the walls and among piles of assorted materials that should have been discarded but weren’t. Among the rubbish were the trophies, consisting of human body parts, that Gein collected from the female corpses he robbed from the cemetery in his hometown, Plainfield, Wisconsin, and from Spirit Land, a graveyard located a few miles to the north. One box contained a bag, inside which, police found, was a mask that had once been the face of Mary Hogan, the owner and operator of a tavern that Gein had once frequented. The walls of some rooms were decorated with other such masks, and Gein ate soup from bowls he’d fashioned from the upper halves of human skulls. He also kept a torso, or mammary, vest; a collection of women’s noses; female genitals; and a belt made of women’s nipples.

After his mother died, Gein, who was a momma’s boy, missed her so much that the psychiatrist who examined the killer after his arrest concluded that Gein collected cadavers and female body parts in an attempt to fill the loss of female companionship that ensued his mother’s death and burial. In some ways, he was thought to be trying to bring home a bride (or parts thereof) or, perhaps, his dearly departed mother. Gein also kept part of the farmhouse he inherited upon his mother’s demise sealed off from the rest of the residence as a sort of shrine to his mother’s memory.

From Gein’s example, we see that haunted houses may be cluttered, and that the clutter may include some grisly, ghastly artifacts--perhaps human body parts--and that the resident of such a house might keep a door locked or even part of the house sealed off, either as a shrine or for some other purpose (hiding a body, an insane relative, or a secret of some sort, perhaps). In A Winter’s Haunting (2002), Dan Simmons’ sequel to Summer of Night (1991), the protagonist, Dale Stewart, keeps the upper floors of the house he rents--it belonged to a childhood friend who was murdered, years ago--sealed off from the lower floor, where he resides. Likewise, there’s a locked attic in The Skeleton Key (2005). After hearing voices from inside the locked room, the movie’s protagonist, Caroline Ellis, becomes curious. When she finally manages a look inside, she finds evidence that maybe demons do cause illness, and, in fact, maybe the invalid she’s been hired to care for may be a victim of dark magic. We all know what’s said about curiosity and the cats it lures. Other horror stories, both in print and on film, make use of the locked room motif as well.

Other novels suggest other approaches.

Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, suggests that it may be the individual within a house, rather than the house itself, who is haunted or (depending upon one’s reading of her story) that a haunted house may, in turn, haunt its residents. This novel, like Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and many lesser narratives, drives home the relationship--indeed, the interrelationship--between resident and residence. A home is a reflection of its owners or occupants. The disorderly state of Gein’s house reflected the disordered (confused) state of his mind, because normal people not only do not live among filth and clutter, but they also do not reside among human body parts and eat out of human skulls. Often, ghost stories are symbolic of past sins, of guilt, and of remorse or of past trauma and its continuing, present-day effects.

Therefore, many ghost stories connect with past events, and the incidents that occur within haunted houses represent such sins, such guilt, and such trauma. In The Others, the mother keeps her house dark because her children suffer from photophobia, a fear of light. Her concern with keeping them in the dark represents her love for them, but the darkness of the house also represents her ignorance of--and her refusal to see--the truth about her past. She has killed her children, and they, like her, are the ghosts who actually haunt the house in which they reside, not the residents of the house whom she imagines are its ghosts.

In an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, college students transform a fraternity house into a haunted house as a setting for a Halloween party. The partygoers become more than amorous, all but having sex in front of one another. Buffy stays in bed with her boyfriend, Riley Finn, from the time they arrive until their friends rescue them. When the partygoers touch a wall, they experience an orgasm, and playing a game of spin-the-bottle becomes the occasion for more than a friendly kiss between players. Buffy’s mentor and friends discover that the house is haunted by the souls of adolescents who’d lived in the house under the stern and disapproving tyranny of a foster mother who feared and hated sex and severely punished her charges when, at the onset of puberty, they began to experiment with sex, murdering at least one boy by drowning him in her bathtub. The dead child--or, perhaps, children--having been abused, now, as ghosts, become the abusers.

The Winchester mansion is allegedly haunted.

The furniture and décor in a haunted house also often reflect the resident’s state of mind. Bizarre images in a mirror which are seen only by one character suggest that these images are not real. Rather, they are likely to be but the contents of his or her own mind, projected onto his or her environment--the looking glass sees within, rather than reflecting that which truly exists. Therefore, only the one who sees such images can perceive them. The mirror mirrors his or her own thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. If a character ascends a staircase (or, for that matter, descends one), what type of revelation does he or she experience as a result? What happens at the top or the bottom of the stairs is indicative of what this character believes, feels, or thinks, and it is likely to be either transcendent or reductive in nature, depending upon whether the stairs lead upward or downward. An ascent into the attic is apt to represent an elevation to consciousness and knowledge; a descent into the basement is likely to symbolize a decline into the subconscious and the unknown.

When a locked room or a shut-off part of the house is part of a haunted house, the secret it contains will probably be the heart of the narrative’s mystery and, most likely, it will represent a great truth about the haunted character’s nature, behavior, goal, past, or present. Unlocked, the door may admit the resident to madness--or to revelation. The secret within the locked or sealed-off room or suite may deliver or destroy.

H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” and “The Rats in the Walls” show that basements can be portals, as it were, to other, darker places, such as subterranean cities or dwellings in which cannibalistic mutants reside. His example reminds us that haunted houses often contain secret passageways, hidden rooms, and trapdoors to subterranean chambers or tunnels that allow villains to come and go in secret or to conduct clandestine operations. Sometimes, dungeons are accessed through trapdoors, wherein sadists torture, dismember, and kill victims. Such portals may even be gateways to another dimension or to hell itself, as in William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderlands and Bentley Little’s The House.

From this consideration of how to haunt a house, we may deduce three additional rules:

1. A haunted house often symbolizes its resident’s state of mind.
2. A haunted house is often associated with the resident’s past.
3. A haunted house may be the portal to another dimension or to hell itself.

In our next post, we’ll take a look at what might be called the special effects that are typical of haunted houses.

Body Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A type of fiction, known as body horror, is based upon the fear that something may be amiss with one’s body. One may be sick. One may be disfigured. One may have been born with a physical defect. One may give birth to a deformed baby. One may undergo some sort of hideous physical transformation. A number of horror films and literary texts fit this subgenre of horror.

Sometimes, body horror references men's fear of castration and the twin fears of sex, erotophobia (fear of the erotic) and genophobia (fear of sexual intercourse). The motif of the vagina with teeth, or the vagina dentata, is an example. This story has a moral. It's a cautionary tale, warning young men to be wary of having sex with women whom they do not know: not only may such a young man acquire a venereal disease, but he may also suffer a fate worse than John Wayne Bobbitt’s. (At least his wife used a knife!) In one such story, a bestial element is added: the vagina is not itself armed, as it were, with fangs, but is inhabited by a fish with teeth.

The movie Teeth (2007) is based upon the vagina dentata theme: a chaste, innocent young woman, Dawn, discovers that her vagina is equipped with teeth. (The movie’s tagline is “Every rose has its thorns.”)

As the movie’s official website points out:

Looking into, touching or entering the female orifice seems fraught with hidden fears, signified by the confusion of sex with death in overwhelming numbers of male minds and myths. Since vulvas have labia, "lips," many men have believed that behind the lips lie teeth. Christian authorities of the middle ages taught that certain witches, with the help of the moon and magic spells, could grow fangs in their vaginas. They likened women's genitals to the "yawning" mouth of hell.

As odd as it may seem, like many of the other horrors of horror fiction, the vagina dentata motif may also have a factual (and physical) basis. Dr. Dean Edell reports one of his colleague’s experiences: “a gynecologist. . . reported that he actually saw some teeth in a vagina.”

She had a dermatoid cyst, Edell explains:

Dermoid cysts are derived from the outer layers of embryonic skin, and they are
capable of growing hair and teeth and bones, anything that comes from the outer layers of the embryo. They can occur anywhere.

So this woman had one in the pelvic region and the cyst grew teeth, and when it ruptured through the wall where her uterus joins her vagina--there were the teeth.

Edell himself also saw a patient who was a victim of dermoid cystitis: “In my practice once, I saw one in the eyelid."

Science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer wrote a pornographic sci-fi-horror novel, The Image of the Beast, that features a character, Vivienne, with a vagina dentata of sorts. A sharp-toothed snake-like creature, reminiscent of the lamia of Greek mythology, lives inside her womb, devouring various body parts of her male lovers. She appears again in a sequel, Blown: Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind.

The vagina dentata is one of the more shocking examples that show that things can and do go wrong with the body. However, it is certainly not the only example that is horrible, as any number of birth defects, physical abnormalities, genetic anomalies, and medical conditions indicate.

Several other such conditions involve primary or secondary sexual characteristics. Normal human males (with the requisite X-Y chromosome combination) have been born without penises; others have been born without testicles. Human females have been born with multiple nipples (multiple nipples syndrome, or supernumerary nipples) or with multiple, or accessory, breasts (multiple breast syndrome; also called polymastia, supernumerary breasts, and mammae erraticae).

Body horror recognizes that the body is subject to these, and worse, conditions. Even before Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Birthmark” and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” there were stories that demonstrated that, with regard to the body (as is true of the mind and the soul as well), sometimes whatever can go wrong does go wrong.