Supernatural Means of Inducing Impotence: A Study in the Human Imagination Inspired by Fear

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Assisted by demons and by magic, witches could perform wonders. They often produced such marvelous feats as changing women into men, although, it was said, they were unable to do the opposite, transforming men into women, because, as R. E. L. Masters observes in Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft, “it is the method of nature to add rather than to take away” (128). Apparently, although demons are, by nature, supernatural, their powers are, nevertheless, constrained by the “methods” of nature.

According to Masters, witches frequently practiced “ligature or the production of impotence by magical means” (128-129). They used various means. They might make a woman appear so repulsive that her looks would quench her man's desire (129). (Think of the bathtub scene in The Shining.) More often, witches and demons left men's libido unchanged, so that their victims could the more greatly suffer, being unable to satisfy their lusts (130).

Demons could also prevent intercourse by placing themselves between a couple, thereby preventing any physical contact between the man and the woman; could “freeze” lust; and could either cause the penis to remain flaccid or to be unable to “perform” in its erect state, “closing . . . the seminary ducts” (131).

Another tactic available to demons and their witches was said to be the theft of the male genitals themselves, either actually or by means of inducing an illusion to this effect, although this method was hotly debated (131-132). Masters declares that he has tried, with some success, to reproduce the illusion through hypnosis: “I have so managed that the subject could neither see nor feel his sex organ” (132).

As an alternative to blocking the seminal ducts, demons and witches could desensitize the penile nerves, making the organ incapable of assuming its erect state; could cause the semen “to congeal and become hard as rock, so that it could not flow out of his urethra”; shrink the organ “to a mere shriveled shred of flesh”; close the vagina to prevent the introduction of the penis; or cause the penis to retract into the man's abdomen (134).

One of the chief means of inducing impotence in human males was the “tying [of ] a knot in a cord . . . . and there were at least half a hundred different knots, each inflicting a different degree or form of impotence or frigidity,” permanent or temporary in its duration(135).

The same ingenuity of imagination that devised this array of magical means for inducing impotence also suggested a variety of cures. God Himself might intervene on behalf of the impotent man or the frigid woman; magic spells might be reversed through “confession,” remorse, making “the sign of the cross, humility, meditation, and a pilgrimage to a holy and venerable shrine; or, by urinating through her wedding ring, a wife might “undo the ligature” (136).

Witches might also provide methods of preventing such curses. Using “pagan amulets and charms” might do (that is, undo) the trick, and there were several from which to choose, including “phallic symbols” (an “upright knife and broomstick”); “bisexual symbols” (“a horse's skull, a goblin's foot and a pentagram”); or “vulva symbols” (“horseshoes and hag stones, or rocks with holes bored through them” (136). “A love potion or philtre” might overcome impotence or frigidity, or a witch might “restore” an impotent man's manhood after he agreed to “copulate with her.”

There was a limit to the powers of demons and witches to impose impotence and frigidity, however, set by God Himself, according to Johann Klein, and a reason for this limitation. As Masters summarizes the divine motive: “God in all his divine love and mercy would never allow such universal impotence or permit his beloved children to perish by so odious a means” (137).

This chapter, “Sexual magic,” of Masters's intriguing book shows, once again, how inventive the human imagination can become when a woman is threatened with or (monstrously, to be sure) subjected to torture until she “confesses” what her tormentors want to hear and the sexual repression of both the victims and the victimizers seek release through any means possible.

Certainly, no writer would or should subject him- or herself to such extremes, but imagining that the same fate could await one as thousands of women (and a relatively few men) suffered at the hands of the Inquisition during the Middle Ages could produce similarly imaginative and horrific “accounts” of supernatural activity, whether related to human sexuality, psychopathology, or some other sphere of human experience as it is represented in fantastic fiction, including the horror genre, which, unfortunately, is too often rife with “torture porn” misogyny, and sadomasochism.

The threat and fear of imminent death seems to have been a strong muse, indeed, for both women accused of witchcraft and for Scheherazade, the author of The One Thousand and One Nights.

"Eros and Evil": A Review of Medieval Beliefs about the Sex Lives of Witches and Demons

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 In Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft, R. E. L. Masters supplies a focused historical account of what he describes as "the sex lore of witchcraft" (146). Such lore, he declares, contains "all the elements usually found in the pornographic and obscene work of literature" (147). The topics that Masters covers in his intriguing, frequently shocking, book testify to the accuracy of his assertion.

Detail of a drawing by Mark Blanton

Without going into detail, the first part of the 322-page volume reviews, among other topics, "the origins of incubi and succubi," demons who have sex with women and men, respectively; "the anatomy of the devil" and "the semen of the demon," which indicate that both demon penises and semen have decidedly strange, sometimes contradictory, properties; "offspring of demonality," among whom, Masters, naming names, reports, are included Plato, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne's daughter, and Martin Luther. Other topics are just as interesting--and bizarre.

The second part of the book seeks explanations for the strange beliefs about and the alleged practices of medieval witches and demons. Masters suggests that alcohol and drugs, blind faith, delusion, hallucinations, mass hysteria, mental illness, sexual repression, and superstition—and the torture inflicted upon suspected witches by members of the Inquisition—can account for these phenomena. Witches and demons need not apply. (Possibly, he should have included politics as well.)

Published in 1962, the psychological sources the author taps may be outdated, as are some of the concepts associated with that field of human endeavor; however, in general, his explanations as to the possible causes of the "witch craze" are, for the most part, credible and convincing, and Eros and Evil makes very interesting reading.

Detail of a drawing by Javier Gil

The book also gives readers and writers of supernatural horror a glimpse into the mad, mad world of the medieval mindset. It was (and is), in many ways, an unfamiliar, fantastic world in which witches and demons not only copulate and otherwise engage in a variety of sexual acts, many of which would at the time have been considered unnatural, perverse, and sinful, but the volume also acquaints its readers with such particulars as the anatomical nature of the damned and the ingenious solutions they developed to such problems as how to obtain and deposit semen (since, according to some theologians, demons could not supply this substance themselves). Such details can fire the imagination of writers of supernatural fiction.

 
Whether Ira Levin read Eros and Evil before he wrote Rosemary's Baby is unknown, to me, at least, but Masters's book would definitely have been a great resource for Levin's novel. It would be an equally invaluable source for other writers who want to be accurate as well as lascivious in describing the sex lives of witches and demons. It would also be a good read for artists who depict such shenanigans in illustrations, paintings, sculptures, or other visual or plastic media. For those who are interested in such art, Mark Blanton and Javier Gil are highly recommended (but be forewarned: their art is both "demonic" and lascivious!)

"Teeth" and the Horrors of Sexual Repression

 Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Although on a literal level, Teeth, a movie about a teenage girl with a toothed vagina, or a vagina dentata, is—there's no polite way to say it—imbecilic, on a figurative level, the film, despite its sophomoric plot, offers more than its mixture of horror and comedy: it has something significant to say about the effects of sexual repression on teenage girls. 

It's difficult for young male moviegoers to envision, much less to appreciate, the social and psychological pressures teenage girls are under. By virtue of their having been born female, rather than male, they're subject to social expectations concerning sex that do not apply to males. Girls, after all, can become pregnant; males cannot. Therefore, women are encouraged to avoid sexual intercourse until they're married, when, having wed, they've acquired a potentially secure means of providing for the welfare of their children. Indeed, unmarried women, especially teens, are discouraged from participating even in non-procreative sexual behaviors, which could lead to sexual intercourse.

Teenage boys rarely face such taboos, although, in the interests of sexual equality and political correctness, lip service may be given to the importance of their committing to abstinence until marriage as well, as they are encouraged to do in Teeth. It's obvious, however, that the boys don't take their vows very seriously, and most of them seek to have sex whenever possible. 

These prohibitions against premarital sexual intercourse are represented in the movie by the protagonist's devotion to her vow to abstain from sexual intercourse until marriage. Dawn O'Keefe doesn't merely commit to this goal, but she champions it in speeches to her abstinence group, The Promise.

Unlike other girls, Dawn is equipped with a sharp set of teeth in her nether region. They seem sentient enough to know when their territory, so to speak, is threatened with invasion. As a toddler, her future stepbrother Brad's curiosity gets out of hand while he's seated in a wading pool, next to Dawn, and her teeth bite off the tip of the forefinger he's inserted into her vagina.

Despite her sincere devotion to her ideals, teenage Dawn's resolve is tested. With Tobey, a boy to whom she is attracted, Dawn goes to a cave in which teenagers often retreat to have sex. Although she returns Tobey's kisses, she refuses to have sexual intercourse with him. Angry, he becomes aggressive. When he tries to rape her, Dawn struggles, and her head strikes the ground, dazing her. Tobey rapes her. Recovering, Dawn fights back, and her teeth bite off Tobey's penis. Horrified, Dawn flees the scene.

Feeling guilty and depressed at having succumbed to temptation, Dawn, nevertheless, addresses The Promise, but the pastor seems to see that she has been sexually active and ushers her away from the group. Returning to the swimming hole near the cave in which she involuntarily lost her virginity, Dawn throws her Promise ring, a symbol of her vow to preserve her virginity until marriage, into the water. She sees a crab crawling on Tobey's severed penis, and the horrible sight inspires her to research her condition.

Realizing she may be in possession of the legendary vagina dentata, she visits a gynecologist, asking him to examine her to determine whether there is anything inside her. When her gynecologist slips his bare hand into her during a pelvic examination, her teeth bite off his fingers. Terrified, Dawn flees the clinic on her bicycle.  

Her coy demeanor during her first visit to a gynecologist—and a male one, at that—; her nakedness under the hospital gown she's made to don for the occasion; her humiliating position on the examination table, with her feet in the stirrups and her legs spread wide; her having to follow the doctor's repeated instructions to “scoot down”; and the cold, barren, antiseptic, clinical setting dehumanize and objectify her while, at the same time, they emphasize her sexuality. The scene brings home the way women, especially young women, are made to feel alien and “other.” Their sex even requires them to have a medical doctor who specializes in problems and issues related strictly to women. 

Horrified, Dawn flees on her bicycle from the scene of carnage, only to see a police officer driving Tobey's car. She returns to the swimming hole, where she sees police retrieving Tobey's corpse from the water. He appears to have died of shock and blood loss as a result of his injury. Her sexual repression has led her to take a boy's life, just as, indirectly, sexual repression may have prompted Tobey to commit rape, although, of course, ultimately, from a legal and societal point of view, both Dawn and Tobey are responsible for their own actions, despite the pressures, social, psychological, and sexual, under which the teenagers find themselves.

At home, Dawn is further traumatized by her discovery that her mother, who is seriously ill and has collapsed on the floor, must be rushed to the hospital. This incident, like Dawn's first, forced sexual experience, marks the end of her childhood. Her mother is unavailable, which means that her experience and wisdom as an adult female is also unavailable to Dawn. The daughter becomes entirely responsible for herself, at least as a female, which puts even more pressure on her to act responsibly. 

The boy's half-hearted “devotion” to their vows of abstinence (and, therefore, their relative freedom from the social and psychological, if not the sexual, pressures placed upon them) is highlighted by the behavior of Ryan, who pretends to befriend Dawn, only to take advantage of her when the opportunity arises. She goes to him, disturbed by Tobey's death, the gynecologist's dismemberment, and her mother's condition. Although he pretends to sympathize with her and to comfort her, Ryan offers her a tranquilizer only so he's able to masturbate her with a dildo while she's in an acquiescent state of mind. Relaxed, Dawn's vagina dentata do not defend her as she engages in quasi-consensual sex.

When they have intercourse the next morning, the couple is interrupted by a telephone call from one of Ryan's male friends, and Dawn learns that the boys had placed a bet as to whether Ryan would be able to “score” with Dawn. In her anger, she bites off Ryan's penis with her vagina, leaving him to seek help from his mother. 

After her mother dies, Dawn learns that Brad continued to have sexual intercourse with his girlfriend Melanie at the O'Keefe family's house, instructing Melanie not to go to the aid of Dawn's mother after she had collapsed at home. (Brad is the son of Bill, who marries Dawn's mother.) Bent on revenge, she seduces Brad (who had previously tried to seduce her), bites off his penis with her vagina dentata, and leaves him, presumably to die of shock and blood loss, as Tobey had done. The previous times during which Dawn used her vaginal teeth to kill or maim, she'd been attacked, humiliated, or insulted; this time, she acts with premeditation, so this incident marks a wholly voluntary, conscious, and deliberate act, not an instinctive or reflexive reaction to sexual, physical, or emotional trauma. With this act, Dawn has crossed a moral line. She is no longer innocent; she has become as monstrous as those who have committed crimes against her. She is definitely now a criminal. 

After leaving home, Dawn is picked up while hitchhiking. Exhausted, she sleeps, awakening after nightfall. When she tries to get out of the driver's vehicle, the old man repeatedly locks the doors. He looks at her, licking his lips, and she, understanding his intentions, smiles seductively at him, implying that she intends to commit another murder.

Despite its comic elements, this seemingly simple horror movie is disturbing because it indicates how rigid expectations of sexual repression, reinforced by societal, parental, and religious support, can create psychologically pressures that can be dangerous to oneself and others. The movie does a good job of showing how a teenage girl, in particular, is affected, emotionally and otherwise, by such taboos. 

Francisco Goya's painting, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, suggests that terrible consequences can spring from irrationality. Teeth suggests that it is irrational, perhaps unnatural, to fetter young adults, particularly teenage girls, with ironclad expectations that, difficult to meet, place unbearable pressure on the young. It might be hyperbolic to suggest, as this movie does, that the result of sexual repression could transform a normal, “nice,” or “good” girl into a monstrous killer, but hyperbole gets attention, especially when the girl involved in the nightmarish situation is as likable, appealing, and familiar as the schoolgirl played by Jess Weixler, who, despite a silly script, does a good job of portraying the girl next door. The movie's theme saves it from being the clunker it would have been without the depth the movie receives from its explorations of vows of abstinence, sexual repression, on one hand, and underage, premarital sex in a permissive society on the other.

The Monster as Sexual Menace

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

On one level, most horror fiction is about sex. Monsters are rapists. Monsters are penises. Monsters are sperm. Monsters assault, force their way in, invade. Their victims are vaginas, wombs, and ova, disguised as men and women or, less often, children. Because monsters are often of or related to body parts or their secretions—saliva, mucus, semen, blood—they themselves often produce visceral reactions and such dark emotions as fear and loathing, disgust and repulsion.

What is the Frankenstein monster but the womb bypassed? It is the embodiment of technological, rather than natural, reproduction and the denial and the dismissal of woman as a necessary participant in and contributor to the replenishment of the human species.

The vampire is an embodiment of non-procreative sex or, more specifically, oral sex. It's love bites represent its sex life. There is need for neither vagina nor penis, ovary nor testicle, ovum nor sperm. The end served by the vampire is not new life, however, but the end of life; it is death.

In some stories, such as The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the monster as sexual threat is merely suggested in its seeking out of female victims. In others, such as Species, the message is explicit and direct: the monster (whether male, as in Lagoon, or female, as in Species) is out to kill us, and its modus operandi is sexual, whether the scriptwriter is circumspect or in our faces about it.

It helps, in writing (and reading) horror fiction to remember the lesson of Freud: everything is sexual, because there are two forces, eros and thanatos, in conflict with one another, with human beings their battleground, no matter the shape and the name the monster, in its present disguise, takes, and whether the story being told is classic or contemporary, literary or popular. Such text (or subtext, as the case may be) enriches horror fiction, just as it grounds it in both the human anatomy and human experience.

Giger's Art: A Lesson for Horror Writers of the Biomechanical Age

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Horrific sex is about domination and submission, about control and being controlled, about power and powerlessness, about pleasure and pain, about joy and misery, about elevation and degradation. Its fulcrum is neither love nor affection, but power. It is the use and abuse of another human being--not only sexually, but also physically and emotionally--for one’s own purposes. It is the reduction of a person to a thing and the use of him or her as a means to the end of satisfying one’s own psychosexual needs and desires.

H. R. Giger’s art is horrific because it depicts such behavior. In his nightmarish biomechanical worlds, men and women--mostly women--are cyborgs--part human and part machine, and their situations (and their postures) are indicative of their degradation and humiliation. Indeed, the very purpose of Giger’s art seems to portray, as starkly as possible, the abject nature of fleshly incarnation, of the fleshly aspects of human existence, of the body that houses the soul. It is in the flesh that humanity is lost; it is in flesh that the animal within is to be found--except that, in Giger’s art, even the flesh and the animality of human existence is transformed; it is reduced to an even lower level, that of the mineral and the mechanical. In Giger’s art, free will is denied in favor of the mechanistic and the material, the mechanical and the determined. At best, people (mostly women) are what is leftover of them--half faces, half bodies, partial personalities, all immersed in a mechanical apparatus that is greater than themselves, in which they are, quite literally, mere cogs in a machine.

When a face does appear, amid the wires and cords, plates and pipes, tubes and gears, hose connectors and clamps, presses and compressors, motors and switches, the eyes usually show only their whites. The irises are missing, signifying, perhaps, the agony or the death of the individual enmeshed in the machinery. Emphasis, in general, is given to the sex organs--breasts, vagina, buttocks, anus, penis, and testicles--the animal parts of men and (mostly) women. These organs are hooked into the machinery or, in some cases, have become one with the machines of which they are part, penises becoming pistons, vaginas sockets, breasts dome-shaped lids with nuts instead of nipples.

Paradoxically, it is humanity itself who has manufactured the machinery that enslaves men and women, that dehumanizes them, that humiliates them. Human beings have created of the natural world a hell on earth, wherein they have reduced themselves, along with nature, to something lower than the beasts. They have become one with, and part and parcel of, their machinery, as determined and soulless as the engines that perform ambiguous functions without direction or, it appears, purpose. Having been set in motion, they do whatever task they have been designed to do--usually something, in Giger’s art, that is as horrific as it is bizarre and absurd. The human (mostly female) cogs in his machinery are there, it seems, mostly to be raped, tortured, and possibly killed. This is the earth that we have made, Giger’s work suggests; this is the world as we would have it to be, not a garden of Eden but a nightmarish mechanical world in which we are not the image and likeness of God but cogs in a giant and incomprehensible, but horrific, machine of our own making. The biomechanical world is the world that we have created in our own image and likeness.

In Giger’s art, sadomasochism is taken to new heights--or lows. It has become passionless, it has become a matter of course, it is mechanical and perfunctory, operating under the same laws of physics as any other impersonal force in the universe. Penile pistons pump back and forth inside tubular vaginas without love, affection, or any kind of emotion, except, perhaps, mute horror, with the machine-like efficiency of a cog in a machine. Impaled, women seem to be all but unaware of their rape by the monstrous machines that ravish them, sometimes vaginally, sometimes orally, sometimes anally--sometimes in all these ways, simultaneously--to no purpose or end but, it seems, efficiency of motion, for, obviously, no machine is capable of inseminating a woman, nor is a woman who is partly--or even mostly--machine able to conceive or bear a child. The sex in Giger’s art is mechanical and purposeless, as absurd as the rest of the machinery in his factories of the damned. Sex, which, in times past, united couples, does not depend upon even the presence of a complete man or woman. All that is needed is the sex organs themselves and a face to register the misery and horror of dehumanized, mechanical existence in a determined and material world apart not only from God but from spirituality itself. This is the true horror of Giger’s horrific art.

In fantasy, science fiction, and horror, the theme had emerged--and had been emerging--for decades, even centuries. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had warned of artificial reproduction which bypasses sexuality. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack warned us about the dangers of bestiality in King Kong. Dean Koontz portrayed the dangers of sex with computers in Demon Seed. Some fundamentalist Christians are also warning us that sex with robots might not be without menace. According to “Why Sex With Robots Is Always Wrong: The Impending Demise of the Human Species,” a somewhat histrionic, and perhaps tongue-in-cheek article (it‘s written as if its incidents occur in the 2030 and “is not about sex with robots at all,” but “increasing sexual perversion and increasingly pervasive virtual sex happening through the expanding acceptance of online pornography”), “the idea that sex with robots will radically effect the attitudes of practitioners also comes from studies of those involved with pornography on a regular basis,” and “studies have found that viewing of pornography results in“ the following outcomes: 

1. increased callousness toward women
2. trivialization of rape as a criminal offense
3. distorted perceptions about sexuality
4. increased appetite for more deviant and bizarre types of pornography (escalation and addiction)
5. devaluation of monogamy
6. decreased satisfaction with a partner’s sexual performance, affection, and physical appearance
7. doubts about the value of marriage
8. decreased desire to have children
9. viewing non-monogamous relationships as normal and natural behavior

Even in the “real world,” some are predicting that men and women may, within the present century, fall in love with, marry, and have sex with robots.  According to Dr. David Levy, a researcher at University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, as paraphrased by Charles Q. Choi in the MSN online article, “Sex and marriage with robots? It could happen,” “psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, “and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships.” Some, if not all, of these reasons could be programmed into robots, Levy argues: “For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that's programmable too.”

So far, the robots resemble human beings. “There's a trend of robots becoming more human-like in appearance and coming more in contact with humans,” Levy said. Indeed, he predicts that realistic sex dolls of the type manufactured by RealDoll will be the prototypical robotic paramour: “It's just a matter of adding some electronics to them to add some vibration,” Levy contends, and maybe equipping the robots with the ability to coo a few sweet nothings. “That's fairly primitive in terms of robotics, but the technology is already there.” Levy’s is only one vision of the future of sex with robots, however, and it is a decidedly utopian dream Alongside it is Giger’s dystopian nightmare. It remains to be seen who, Levy, the artificial intelligence expert, or Giger, the surrealistic artist, will prove more prophetic.

Sex and Horror, Part 5

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

For Sigmund Freud and his followers, a witch is basically a hysterical woman. Of course, for Freud, witches were also associated with a sexual element: “The broomstick they ride,” Freud declared, “is the great Lord Penis” (A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, 171). During interrogations by members of the Inquisition, women accused of witchcraft were invariably asked about their demonic paramours’ genitals, and their reports varied, suggesting that demons are able to grow their penises almost anywhere they wish on their anatomies. The organ itself varied as well, being sometimes the size of a mule’s member, other times black and covered in scales, and other times non-existent. Most of the women did agree in one particular: the devil’s penis, like his semen, was apt to be ice cold (A Mind of Its Own, 3) Freud had an answer to the polymorphous perversity, as it were, of the demonic penis: women were affected not by the fleshly organ itself, but by the idea of the penis; it was the mental image, the envisioned phallus, that caused neurosis in women (A Mind of Its Own, 172). Moreover, since witches could steal men’s penises, women could emasculate, or symbolically and emotionally castrate, men, whose penises they envied.

For Christians, the witch is a woman who has entered into a pact with Satan or a lesser demon. Christians also see an element of sexuality in the witch: in return for serving the demon, both sexually and otherwise, she receives supernatural powers or is empowered by the demon to perform supernatural acts through magical incantations and spells. The Bible forbids the practice of witchcraft, condemning it as abominable: “Neither let there be found among you any one that shall expiate his son or daughter, making them to pass through the fire: or that consults soothsayers, or observes dreams and omens, neither let there be any wizard, / nor charmer, nor any one that consults pythonic spirits, or fortune tellers, or that seeks the truth from the dead./ For the Lord abhors all these things, and for these abominations he will destroy them at your coming.(Deuteronomy 18:10-12). Indeed, the Bible goes so far as even to declare that “Wizards you shall not allow to live” (Exodus 22:18), a text which doubtlessly authorized the persecution and execution of women accused of practicing witchcraft during the trials of the Inquisition. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s article, “Witchcraft,” has much more to say about the topic, including these rather curious and chilling words:

The question of the reality of witchcraft is one upon which it is not easy to pass a confident judgment. In the face of Holy Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers and theologians the abstract possibility of a pact with the Devil and of a diabolical interference in human affairs can hardly be denied, but no one can read the literature of the subject without realizing the awful cruelties to which this belief and without being convinced that in 99 cases out of 100 the allegations rest upon nothing better than pure delusion. The most bewildering circumstance is the fact that in a large number of witch prosecutions the confessions of the victims, often involving all kinds of satanist horrors, have been made spontaneously and apparently without threat or fear of torture. Also the full admission of guilt seems constantly to have been confirmed on the scaffold when the poor suffered had nothing to gain or lose by the confession. One can only record the fact as a psychological problem, and point out that the same tendency seems to manifest itself in other similar cases. The most remarkable instance, perhaps, is one mentioned by St. Agobard in the ninth century (P.L., CIV, 158). A certain Grimaldus, Duke of Beneventum, was accused, in the panic engendered by a plague that was destroying all the cattle, of sending men out with poisoned dust to spread infection among the flocks and herds. These men, when arrested and questioned, persisted, says Agobard, in affirming their guilt, though the absurdity was patent.

Whether regarded as penis-envying hysterics or women empowered by demons, witches have been a mainstay of horror fiction, both in its printed and filmed versions. Although, in recent years, in novels, witches have more often populated works for teens and young adults, they continue to appear with some regularity in movies aimed at older audiences, such as Black Sunday (1960), Horror Hotel (1960), Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), Witchfinder General (1968), The Witchmaker (1969), Mark of the Devil (1970), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), The Devils (1971), Virgin Witch (1971), Baba Yaga (also known as Kiss Me, Kill Me (1973), The Wicker Man (1973), Suspiria (1977), Warlock (1989), The Craft (1996), and--well, a coven of others.


Note: The next installment of “Sex and Horror” will take a brief look at a few movies that depict perverse sexuality and have more generalized sexual themes, rather than characters per se.

Sex and Horror, Part 2

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in Part 1 of “Sex and Horror,” in this and future installments of this series, my aim will be to provide my own Christian-based explanations of the same stories for which Jason Colavito, author of Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, presents Freudian accounts, supplying the psychoanalytic explanations before offering my Christian alternatives. Whether one regards Christianity itself as true or mythical is inconsequential to my enterprise, just as it is likewise irrelevant whether one accepts Freudian thought as true or mythical. Both Christianity and psychoanalysis exist and have been, and continue to be, used as tools for literary analysis, which is what matters in this situation.

As Colavito points out, “Under the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, horror is traditionally seen as primarily sexual in nature; and most criticism of the genre proceeds from psychoanalytical frameworks emphasizing castration anxieties, phallic symbols, fanged vaginas, and other Freudian baggage” (2).

A Christian interpretation, in contrast, is primarily religious in nature, its criticism proceeding from theological frameworks emphasizing human relationships, especially those between God and humanity, between humanity and God’s creation, nature, and between human beings themselves and other human beings. In short, if psychoanalysis is primarily about sex, Christianity is primarily about divine and human relationships.

In Christian interpretations of horror fiction, where sex is involved, sex is not an end in itself (or shouldn’t be), but is, rather, a means of relating the self to the other, both when the other is nature, when the other is another human being, or when the Other is God. When sex is used other than as God intends it to be used, it is misused. Misused sex is not only perverted sex, but it is also blasphemous and sinful sex, because it perverts the relationships of human beings to God, to themselves, and to nature.

It may be worth mentioning that Freudian psychoanalysis may itself be regarded, from a Christian perspective, as a sort of perversion of Christian theology. In psychoanalysis, the superego is a stand-in, as it were, for God, who lays down the law (and thus morality) through the Ten Commandments and other moral injunctions; the ego takes the place of human beings as conscious beings with wills of their own; and the id is a substitute for the devil and his temptations. Alternatively, one may think of the superego as heaven, the ego as earth, and the id as hell, the geographical or spatial correlatives to God, humanity, and the devil, or as righteousness, corrupted virtue, and sinfulness, or evil, respectively. Thus, within a Christian framework, it is possible to think of the superego, the ego, and the id as either persons, places, or things. Christian theology is at least as rich a basis for literary interpretation and criticism as psychoanalysis purports to be.

Various psychoanalytical interpretations have been offered to explain (or to explain away) Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Basically, as Colavito observes, these analyses boil down to the notions that “the vampire’s fangs represent the penis, that his bite is an oral regression of normal genital sex, and that the novel deals primarily with the Victorian anxiety about changing sex roles and the repression of sexual desire.” The author agrees that this take on the novel is “fine as far as it goes,” but contends, as do I, that “to reduce the whole of Dracula (or indeed all vampire fiction) to mere Freudian allegories of forbidden sex is simplistic and misses the themes of horror that permeate and underlie the book’s terrors” (88).

Nevertheless, as Colavito acknowledges, “there is undoubted sexual energy in the vampire’s embrace”; however, this “energy” is not associated with reproduction, and sex, as the Bible, as the Word of God, states, quite clearly, is intended to be a means of reproduction. In Genesis 1:28, God commands Adam and Eve to “be fruitful, and multiply” that they might “replenish the earth,” and any form of sex that does not have reproduction as its end is, Catholics (and many other mainstream Christian communities) contend, sinful sex, since it frustrates its divinely prescribed purpose and constitutes, thereby, a blasphemous rebellion against the divine will.

Dracula’s emphasis upon oral sex, symbolized by his biting the necks of his victims, who are both male and female, not exclusively female, transposes sex from its assigned genital locus and its assigned generative purpose to a rebellious misuse of the body. In Dracula and other vampire fiction, sex is not a means of reproduction but of subjugation through sadomasochistic predation and victimization, a preying of the strong upon the weak, of the powerful upon the powerless, of the parasite upon the host.

Not reproduction--and certainly not love--is the end; sex, as it is represented, symbolically, by the biting of the necks of victims by the fanged vampire, is all about the ability of one person, the monstrous sadist, to subjugate another, the persecuted masochist. It is a denial of the interpersonal and mutually respectful relationship between equals that Jewish theologian Martin Buber describes in his insightful book, I and Thou; sex, as depicted in Dracula, is not an “I-thou,” but an “I-it” relationship, in which the predatory and sadistic vampire elevates his own value by reducing the value of the other person to that of a mere object. A woman (or, sometimes, a man) becomes a thing--food--to be exploited by the rapacious raptor. Vampire sex is dehumanizing sex; it is also blasphemous and sinful because it perverts the nature and intended purpose of sex itself, as instituted and defined by God.

Perhaps this is why Dracula and other vampires are depicted as fearing crucifixes and crosses. These artifacts symbolize both the sacrificial death of Christ Himself and represent the self-sacrificial life that God has shown humanity, through Christ’s own example, that He expects of all human beings. However, vampires’ very way of life is all about self-aggrandizement and the elevation of the self at the expense of others. As Christ redeemed humanity through the shedding of His own blood, vampires seek to increase their own vitality by the shedding of the blood of others. Their lives are exact opposites of the life of Christ, counterexamples, as it were, of His example. In beholding the crucifix or the cross, these monsters behold their own iniquity and are reminded of the selfish and self-serving lives they lead. These artifacts are reminders, too, of the vampires’ own eventual damnation as sinful beings whose very lives both pervert the ways of God and mock their Creator.

In short, as demonic creatures, vampires are hell-bound sinners.



Note: In Part 3 of “Sex and Horror,” I will take up the psychoanalytical and Christian implications of another horror icon--ghosts.

Sex and Horror

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

In a caption to a photograph depicting Lon Chaney as Erik in The Phantom of the Opera, Jason Colavito, author of Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, quotes David J. Skall’s observation that the actor’s “portrayal” of the characters is suggestive of a “ruined penis” (207).

This sort of statement might strike one as odd, to say the least, especially if he or she is unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, the invention of Sigmund Freud, which uses mythology, both classical and Freud’s own personal brand, to supposedly analyze human thoughts, feelings, unconscious impulses, and behavior. For those who do know a thing or two about psychoanalysis, including how fanciful it frequently is, such a statement, although perhaps incredible, is not as surprising. Indeed, as Colavito points out, psychoanalysis has been used (some would say misused) to explain (or to explain away) not only literature in general, but also the horror genre in particular:

Indeed, when we think of horror at all, we think of it in the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, positing a range of explanations for the “true” meaning of horror stories, especially psycho-sexual explanations. This is the most popular school of thought about horror, producing works with titles like Walter Evans’s “Monster Movies: A Sexual Theory” (Monsters reflect “two central features of adolescent sexuality: masturbation and menstruation”), Richard K. Sanderson’s “Glutting the Maw of Death: Suicide and Procreation in Frankenstein” (Viktor reveals his fear of female sexual autonomy and his own ambivalent femininity”), and Joan Coptec’s “Vampires, Breast Feeding, and Anxiety” (“I will argue that the political advocacy of breast-feeding cannot be properly understood unless one sees it for what it is: the precise equivalent of vampire fiction”). There are many, many more than follow such Freudian views of horror (6).

Although Colavito rejects many such interpretations (“Somehow Boris Karloff’s stiff-armed Frankenstein walk never struck me as interrupted masturbation”), he does often include the psychoanalytical “explanations” for horror fiction’s characters and themes. He acknowledges that psychoanalytic theory has had a major influence on the understanding and interpretation of horror fiction, but largely, Colavito contends, because filmmakers themselves used Freudian thought as a basis for investing their films with psychoanalytical--or, at least, psychosexual--implications:

Critics have historically discussed horror films in terms of sex, and specifically Freudian psychoanalytic views of sex, whereby horror’s primary concern is a fear of sex, usually female sexuality. Thus vampires are phallic symbols or fanged vaginas; Frankenstein’s Monster [sic] a parody of birth; the wolfman anxiety over puberty; and any mutilation a playing-out of castration anxieties. But part of this is because many horror filmmakers, even as far back as the 1930s, purposely used Freudian ideas in their scripts during a wave of Freud-mania in that time. “Why should we take psychoanalysis seriously in thinking about Hollywood movies?” asked William Paul, “because Hollywood took psychoanalysis seriously” (201).

Although I am also more than a bit skeptical of Freudian claims (and, indeed, of Freudian ideas in general), I have employed psychoanalysis as a tool for exploring, if not explaining, some of the deeper psychosexual and sociosexual implications that appear to be present in The Descent, for the same reason that Colavito and Paul cite: whether credible and scientific or not, Freudian ideas have become a seemingly inescapable part and parcel of Western culture.

To exclude psychoanalytical thought as sound doesn’t mean, of course, to deny that the issues of sex and gender do not rear their heads, as it were, in horror fiction--far from it. The genre is, in fact, permeated with themes involving both sex and gender, the literature of horror just doesn’t necessarily analyze these themes along Freudian lines of thought and, even when it does do so, its analysis often also involves other than Freudian insights, implications, and interpretations.

In this article, I would like to suggest one of my own theories concerning how sex and gender, as they appear in horror fiction, may be interpreted along Christian, rather than Freudian, lines. In this view, sex and gender, as they are depicted and rendered in horror fiction, are perversions of both the natural biological drive to reproduce the species and the divine command that men and women “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28).

Colavito sees the story of Adam and Eve as “foundational” to the horror genre; it is, he contends, the “cement” that “links. . . [the] forbidden knowledge, sin, and punishment found in horror fiction” (11). In the Bible, the term “knowledge” sometimes refers to carnal knowledge, or the understanding that derives from sexual intercourse. This “knowledge” of sex and gender can become twisted, or perverted, the apostle Paul suggests:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient. . .(Romans 1:21-28).

Of course, the literature of horror is too extensive to evaluate in this (or any other manner) in as brief space as a blog article (or series of such articles) warrants, so I will undertake a compromise, providing my own Christian-based explanations of the same stories for which Colavito presents the Freudian accounts, supplying the psychoanalytic explanations before offering my Christian alternatives. Whether one regards Christianity itself as true or mythical is inconsequential to my enterprise, just as it is likewise irrelevant whether one accepts Freudian thought as true or mythical. Both Christianity and psychoanalysis exist and have been, and continue to be, used as tools for literary analysis, which is what matters in this situation.


Next: Part 2, “Sex and Horror”

Not-So-Gratuitous Nudity

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Nudity is popular in horror movies, as it is in other films. Why? One might suppose the answer to this question to be, like the equality of human worth to Thomas Jefferson, self-evident. It is, too, of course--or, at least, one of the reasons for the frequent inclusion of nudity in films, horror and otherwise, is obvious: displays of female flesh (and, perhaps, to a lesser degree, of male bodies as well) is titillating.

Nudity is popular in film for other reasons, too, though. Its promised display, for example, is a means of creating and maintaining suspense. Moviegoers of both sexes are curious as to what an actress looks like beneath her clothes. Men and women want to catch a glimpse of a famous female’s breasts, pubes, and buttocks, to see all (or almost all) there is to see, to observe the “bare truth” or the “naked truth” concerning the performer’s true outer beauty. To lay bare the body is, we believe, to lay bare the secrets of the soul. By suggesting that, eventually, this, that, or the other actress is likely to shed her clothes keeps moviegoers on the edges of their seats. When, where, and under what conditions will the screen siren reveal her charms, in all their gorgeous glory, are questions that sustain suspense.

Besides the creation and maintenance of suspense, nudity also reminds moviegoers of female characters’ femininity. Even clothed, women typically show themselves to be women in several hard-to-miss ways: long, styled hair; cosmetics; frilly attire; shaved underarms and legs; and the wearing of clothing and accessories that are designated by tradition and the dictates of fashion as belonging exclusively to women. Primary sexual characteristics (breasts, wider hips than men may claim, fuller buttocks than men may boast, and female genitalia) are indications as well, of course, and, usually, these characteristics are more or less noticeable in most women. However, when milady is nude, the unmistakable presence of primary sexual characteristics makes the artifices by which women proclaim their sex and gender unnecessary. One need not advertise herself as female and feminine through hairstyles, cosmetics, and clothing when, quite obviously, her body’s nakedness reveals her to be so.

Horror movies have recently become less sexist, offering moviegoers male as well as female victims and female and well as male predators, but the genre, nevertheless, remains largely chauvinistic and, one might argue, misogynistic. Women remain, far more often than men, the victims rather than the victimizers. One reason, besides sexism, for this preference for female over male victims is the relative physical weakness of women as compared to men. Because women typically have less physical strength than men do, they appear to be easier victims than men do. They also appear more vulnerable than men do. Weakness and vulnerability make them more likely to be victims than to be victimizers, for predators stalk the sick, the lame, and the lazy, or, in milady’s case, the weaker of the two sexes. Femaleness and femininity mark characters as relatively helpless and, therefore, as potential, even likely, victims. The nudity of female characters, in horror films, reminds audiences of the women’s identities as prospective casualties or fatalities.

Nudity in horror movies creates and maintains suspense, reminds moviegoers of female characters’ femininity and relative weakness and helplessness, but nudity also often leads to sex, and sex often leads to death or dismemberment. There is something of an unwritten law in the horror genre that taking one’s clothes off, even when it is not an act that is intended as a prelude to sex, is punishable by death; when nudity leads to sex, there is a virtual guarantee that it will end in pain, suffering, and the nudist’s demise. Even in the ultra permissive society in which we live, in which teen sex is rampant, as is teen pregnancy, abortion, and the birth of children to children, premarital sex, like adultery or other forms of sex outside the confines of holy matrimony, is considered taboo (by screenwriters in the horror genre, at least, if no one else), and it will surely be punished severely, with loss of limb, if not life. Nudity, as a precursor to sex, also identifies (often female) characters as likely victims. (The characters are more often female than male because most people believe that women look better in the nude than men do and because women seem more helpless, because they are typically physically weaker than men seem to be.)

We do a pretty good job of hiding our animal natures, but, despite our art, our culture, and our complex social structures, our philosophy and religion, and our humanity, we remain very much mammals who eat, drink, fornicate, sleep, and otherwise exhibit the animal within. We are not simply ghosts; we are ghosts in machines, and the machines we inhabit are made not of iron and steel but of flesh and blood. We are driven by fleshly as well as by psychological and social needs. We have appetites for food, for sex, for dominance, and for blood. The fact that, concealed beneath our shirts, blouses, trousers, and skirts, we have breasts and vaginas or penises and testicles and buttocks indicates that we are not merely human beings; we are also animals who breed and devour and hunt and kill. Nudity is a reminder of our animal natures, and female nudity is a reminder of the seldom-displayed, but always present, nudity of the male of the species. In seeing a nude woman, we understand that men, too, have “private parts” that disclose their animal nature, just as the undraped form of the female of the species reveals her own animality. Nakedness is a reminder, too, of our reproductive capability, a capability that we share with the so-called lower animals. Moreover, our nakedness reminds us that we, as much as lions and tigers and bears, oh my!, are (or can be) red in tooth and claw, that we are also potentially predators and prey, that we are, each and all, Drs. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes.

Under our clothes, we are flesh and blood, not the steely selves our aggressive personas sometimes tend to make others suppose we are. We can look daggers at another soul. We can set our jaws. We can give another person the cold shoulder. We can shake our fists and stamp our feet. We can stand tall. In short, we can use our bodies to intimidate others, but doing so while naked might be much more difficult, if not impossible, to do, because our fleshly selves, minus the armor of our suits and dresses, gives the lie, as it were, to the armor of costume and the arsenal of body language cues by which we seek to impose our wills upon others. It is hard to take someone in his or her birthday suit very seriously, no matter how he or she might glower or glare. Nudity renders us vulnerable. In horror movies, vulnerability of any kind is seldom a good thing and is apt, sooner or later, to get one killed. A nude character is a vulnerable character, and a vulnerable character is likely to become--well, a dead duck.

Nudity, we observe, is not necessarily gratuitous. In horror movies, as in other types of film, nakedness can, and frequently does, serve thematic purposes. (Typically, it also identifies probable victims and may characterize them as sexually promiscuous and, therefore, morally weak of perverse.)

In forthcoming posts, I will take up this matter again, exploring, more specifically, the contribution to the horror genre that on-screen nudity makes on a more-or-less regular basis.

Until then, for goodness’ sake, keep both the lights and your clothes on!

The Hyperfeminine Monster: What Does She Look Like?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Some hypermasculine fictional characters are good guys (of a sort, at least), among whose ranks we may count The Incredible Hulk and Wolverine or, on a slightly more realistic level, James Bond or Dirty Harry. More often, however, especially in horror fiction, such characters tend to be the heavies, the Predators and the Xenomorphs or, on the slightly more realistic level of the espionage and the police dramas, the Odd Jobs and the Scorpios. In real-life, the hypermasculine good guy might be a cowboy, a policeman, a soldier, or a mercenary, and the hypermasculine bad guy might be a gunfighter, a sociopath, an enemy commando, or an outlaw biker. Whether comic book super villain, horror story monster, or police drama bad guy, the hypermasculine character is fairly familiar, but what does his counterpart, the hyperfeminine monster, look like, and how does she act? Hyperfeminine characters exhibit exaggeration of feminine qualities. Typically, they stroke the male ego, are passive, naïve, innocent, flirty, graceful, nurturing, and accepting, even, sometimes, of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. They want to be seen as all-woman women, and they are drawn to hypermasculine men (men who exaggerate masculine traits). If the aliens of Predator and Alien represent horror fiction’s image of the hypermasculine monster, does Sil, of Species (1995), represent the female equivalent, the hyperfeminine monster, or are we talking something more along the lines of another extraterrestrial creature, the Blob? “Sil” is the name given to a female alien-human hybrid produced by scientists, using instructions transmitted to them from the alien species, by splicing human and alien DNA together. When she reaches adolescence in only three months, breaking free of her confinement, the scientists view her as a potential menace, and the government seeks to hunt her down and destroy her before she can mate with a man or men. Able to revert to her alien form at will, Sil is extremely strong, agile, and intelligent. She also has incredible regenerative abilities. She seeks a mate, killing two men, the first because he is a diabetic and, therefore, unworthy of her, the second because the couple are interrupted as they’re about to, uh, couple. Disguised, she does mate with one of the scientists in the hunting party, killing him when he recognizes her. Ultimately, she and her offspring are killed in a cave. (The monstrous Sil was created by H. R. Giger, the same superb biomechanical artist who designed the xenomorph that appears in Alien and its sequels.) Although in her human guise, Sil is beautiful (Michelle Williams plays her as an adolescent, and Natasha Henstridge portrays her as an adult) and she is adept at turning men’s heads (both literally and figuratively), Sil seems to have too many traits that are traditionally categorized as masculine (or, indeed, as hypermasculine) to qualify as a hyperfeminine monster: she is aggressive, physically powerful, and violent. Although she becomes a mother, she doesn’t appear to be the nurturing type, and she most definitely is not at all concerned with stroking the male ego, is not passive, is not naïve, is not innocent, is flirty only in a clumsy fashion, and is anything but accepting of others’ flaws. It’s hard to imagine any female creature that is less likely to tolerate physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. In fact, if anything, she is the predator and the abuser. A more recent movie, Teeth (2007), may offer us the image of the hyperfeminine monster. The premise seems promising: Dawn O’Keefe, a young woman, has teeth in her vagina. She’s certainly able to defend herself: when a new acquaintance refuses to take no for an answer, forcing himself upon her in a cave after a quick swim, she--or her vagina dentata (vagina with teeth)--bites off the offensive offender’s penis, and she flees the scene of the crime, leaving him to bleed to death. After researching the topic of the vagina dentata, Dawn visits her gynecologist to see whether her condition qualifies. When the doctor, pretending to examine her, molests Dawn, she--or her vagina--responds, biting off his fingers. Later, learning that her classmate Ryan has bet that he can seduce Dawn, her vagina dentata bites off his penis. She recalls an earlier victim of sorts: her stepbrother, who molested her when she was younger. It wasn’t with her mouth, as she had remembered until now, that she’d bitten his finger at the time; it was with her vaginal teeth. She leaves home on her bicycle, but, when it has a flat tire, she accepts a ride with a male driver. He locks the car’s doors when she tries to get out at a gas station, and intimates that he wants to have sex with her. Dawn responds with a sinister smile. Both aggressive and violent, Dawn isn’t really a predator as such, attacking only those who have or would molest or otherwise harm her, so it seems difficult to imagine her as a hyperfeminine monster. Maybe the much earlier movie, The Blob (1958), offers a better idea of the hyperfeminine. Although the alien’s sex, if it has one, is not identified in the story, it does seem to have some traits that are traditionally identified as feminine, and it seems extreme in its exercise of these qualities. An alien, the Blob is a formless creature resembling a colossal ameba. Able to envelope its prey, incorporating animals and human beings into its jelly-like mass, it is repelled by cold temperatures, and the military dispatches it to the arctic after it is frozen in carbon dioxide, where it remains until the movie’s sequel, Beware! The Blob (1972). In the latter film, Chester, a construction worker who is helping to lay the Alaska oil pipeline, brings home a mysterious, jelly-like substance. When it thaws on his kitchen countertop, it is hungry, after being frozen for fourteen years, and appeases its appetite by devouring increasingly bigger prey: a fly, a kitten, Chester’s wife, and Chester himself. Afterward, the monster attacks and eats hippies, police, a barber and his customer, homeless people, a Scout master, bowlers, skaters, and even chickens, before it is frozen inside the ice skating rink. The 1988 movie is a remake of the original, rather than another sequel. The Blob is aggressive (in a somewhat passive manner) and, in its own way, violent, which are attributes that are traditionally associated with males. However, its ability to envelop its prey; its passive-aggressive nature; its aversion to cold (i. e., its preference for warmth, which, symbolically, might signify a desire for sociable contact, if not affection; its open acceptance of all; and its womblike “smothering” of others are qualities that are traditionally linked to females. It seems, then, that the Blob is more hyperfeminine than either Sil or Dawn O’Keefe and, for the present, at any rate, earns the title of horror fiction’s most nearly hyperfeminine monster.

Everyday Horrors: Worms

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In Tremors and Dune, they’re the size of trains. Worse yet, they have teeth. And they’re hard--almost impossible--to kill. In death, we become their food. Ugh!

What are they?

Worms, of course.

To scientists, worms are long (okay, elongated), spineless (okay, invertebrate), gushy (okay, soft-bodied) animals, and they’re everywhere--in rivers and lakes and oceans, in the ground, and in plants, animals, and, yes, people--even dead people (well, not really; read on). Some of them, those of the nastier sort, are parasites, too lazy to work for a living, that live off honest, hardworking folk. There are flatworms, roundworms, hookworms, threadworms, bristle worms, and, of course, earthworms. There are also spiny-headed worms, tapeworms, arrow worms, goblet worms, jaw worms, tongue worms, horsehair worms, ribbon worms, velvet worms, peanut worms, and--we’re not making this up--phallus, or penis, worms. The lowly earthworm, like many of its snootier cousins, has been around since the dinosaurs.

Worms eat apples, corn, and other fruits and vegetables. Worms don’t really eat rotten flesh--yum!--they’re brainless wonders, but they’re not that stupid; after all, they do have nerve centers, called ganglia.

According to the Internet article, “Death to Dust. . .,” worms got a bad rap as consumers of corpses because maggots, which were once thought to be worms, because they look like rice, but are really fly larvae, do infest corpses, arriving by air. The flies land on the corpse, if it hasn’t been wrapped or buried, and lay eggs inside the body’s mouth, ears, nose, and any open wounds the corpse may have been considerate enough to have provided for this purpose. Beetles, spiders, mites, and millipedes next visit the remains, to feed on their predecessors or on the corpse itself, and forensic scientists can use insect infestation (or the lack thereof) to help determine when death occurred: “Since the exact feeding pattern varies with a body's location, the time of death, and the climate, forensic entomologists are often able to determine the date of death very accurately-even a decade later.”

The same article cites the “first recorded episode of insects revealing a killer,” which “occurred in thirteenth-century China, where an individual had been slashed to death in a rural village”:

When no one confessed, authorities ordered all of the villagers to lay down their sickles. The murderer was identified when flies swarmed to only his sickle, an apparently clean implement that still retained small traces of the victim's flesh and blood. Insects were also used to identify the killer in England's famous Lydney murder trial, when the time of death, as determined from insect evidence, invalidated the killer's alibi.

Like Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Frank N. Furter, worms are hermaphroditic, but at least some of them can also have regular sex, if they get tired of dating themselves.

To collect worms for bait, some fishermen (and, maybe some fisherwomen as well) “charm” worms by vibrating the ground, which causes them to surface (but not to impale themselves on fishhooks, except, perhaps the hookworms; they’re brainless, sure, but that doesn’t make them stupid--they do have nerve centers, or ganglia, after all.)

Despite Dune’s claims to the contrary, worms don’t really live in the desert (although some do have crystalline teeth like their Dune cousins). They prefer wet soil and will pack up and leave if the earth becomes too dry for their tastes.

The longest worm on record, one source declares, is a bootlace worm, which measured 180 feet, and, according to another article:

The Center for Biological Diversity, Palouse Prairie Foundation, Palouse Audubon Society, and Friends of the Clearwater yesterday took the first step in a lawsuit to protect the giant Palouse earthworm (Driloleirus americanus)--a three-foot-long, spitting worm that is native to parts of Idaho and Washington--under the Endangered Species Act.

Even a giant like this is a far cry from the worms is Dune and Tremors, though. Worms also appear in Bram Stoker’s novel The Lair of the White Worm, Edgar Allan Poe’s poem about the “conqueror worm,” the Harry Potter novels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Beneath You” episode, The X-Files’ “Host” episode, and other science fiction and horror fiction.


“Everyday Horrors: Worms” 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.