What Scares Me and, More Importantly, What Scares YOU?

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

The List Challenges website depicts “A List of 100 Common (And Not So Common) Fears. Maybe some of yours are on it. A few of mine certainly are!

 

Among the fears identified on the List Challenges list are the fears of heights, dogs, diseases, dying, spiders, flying, snakes, crowds, elevators, being pregnant, and a lot more.

What scares me?

 

The uncertainty of life: We are here today and gone tomorrow, but we don't know when “tomorrow” may come.

 

Being trapped: Despair, followed closely by madness, seems likely to be the end results of being trapped; when there is no way out, there is no hope; when there is not hope, sanity seems certain.

 

Pain: Each of us has his or her own pain threshold. For some, it is lower than for others but, at some point, we will have had more than enough, more, maybe, than we can handle. When and where the threshold is—well, we wouldn't know that until we'd passed it.

 

Torture: To be tortured implies that one is bound or caged, as no one would suffer torture willingly, and if we are immobilized or confined, we have neither freedom nor control; we are helpless at the hands (literally) of a sadist. Watching another person being tortured might not frighten as much as horrify.

Heights: A height reminds us of the precariousness of our existence, of how quickly, completely, and irrevocably our existence—our minds, hearts, dreams, and intentions—can be wiped out within seconds, should we fall.

Now, what about you?

What sacres you? Make a list. Then, ask yourself what the fear is about. For example, if you fear darkness, why? What does darkness imply, or represent, to you? Blindness? Vulnerability? Loss of control? Helplessness? All of the above?

Once you have your list and you have identified what each specific fear may “mean” to you, ask yourself how you could visually represent the fear and its “meaning” to an audience. What images would you choose? How would you convey them?

Here's how I would visualize my own:

The uncertainty of life: A patient lies in bed, on his back. He turns onto his left side. A patient nutrition representative enters the room, picks up the patient's tray, on which the meal delivered earlier remains untouched. It is a meal that could be served for lunch or dinner. The representative shakes his head, looking with pity upon the sleeping patient, the leaves, removing the tray. The patient rolls onto his right side. The vital signs monitor's alarms sound, the numbers on the multiple displays spinning impossibly fast, as various lights flash. The monitor shows flat lines. In bed, the patient twists, sits rigidly upright, collapses, writhes, frothing at the mouth, his eyes bulging. The vital signs monitor melts, catching fire. A clock shows a second hand sweep past noon or, perhaps, midnight: the lighting of the room makes it impossible to tell which. The patient's body relaxes, goes limp; his eyes stare at nothing.

Being trapped: A mine collapses. Inside, pinned beneath fallen rock, a miner struggles to free himself. After a strenuous struggle, he quits, out of breath and weak. He sees a saw just out of reach. The mine remains unstable. A fall of rock shoves the saw within the miner's reach. Grimacing, he cuts off the leg beneath the rock, ties a tourniquet around his amputated calf, and crawls down the tunnel of the mine. He passes out. Awakening later, he is weaker from blood loss, but he manages to crawl toward a shaft of sunlight, hopeful that he has found a means of escape. As he continues to crawl, another collapse of the mine occurs, burying him and crushing him to death.

Pain: A surgeon tells a missionary who preaches at a remote African mission that his injury has become infected with gangrene and that his leg must be amputated. Fortunately, medical supplies are available, and the surgeon has everything he needs—except an anesthetic. The surgeon tells four men he has recruited as assistants to “hold him down.” To the missionary, the surgeon says, “Star praying, padre.”

Torture: A Chinese soldier is assigned the task of filming the torture of a Chinese man who tried to assassinate a politician. The failed assassin has been condemned to die the death of a thousand cuts. The soldier photographing the horrific torture wants desperately to avert his eyes but cannot. He winces as the first cut to the condemned man's body is made.

Heights: A woman taking a selfie poses at the edge of a 2,000-foot cliff. Unnoticed to her, a rat scampers over nearby rocks. “It's funny,” she says aloud, “how we fear one thing and not another. I mean, I'm terrified of rats, but heights mean nothing to me.” She adjusts her stance, moves her camera in and out, adjusting the range. The rat dashes forth from a crevice. Seeing it, she jumps backward and falls to her death, her body tumbling down the jagged face of the cliff.

Now, ask yourself what to change, if anything. Add details? Delete details? Change an angle? Show blood? Viscera? Switch between everyday incidents and the building horror you are showing? Have two people trapped in different ways? Two people experiencing different kinds of pain? Two people being tortured at the same time but in different ways? Two people climbing a cliff, one of whom falls? Change the character's age, sex, or social class? Change the setting so that, perhaps, torture occurs in the penthouse suite of a luxury hotel or the fall from a height involves a helicopter instead of a cliff? Change the time that the horrific incident takes place? It's not a mine, but one's own mind, in which the character is trapped? Work up several scenes before deciding on which is most horrific. Then, change your description into a full, dramatic scene and use it in your novel, short story, or film script.

Creating an Eerie Setting and Tone, Part II

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

In the first part of this series, we considered this same topic. In this post, we take a look at it from a different perspective.

Woods can be unsettling. Why? They are apart from developed areas, which are products of human knowledge, innovation, art, technology, imagination, and technique. Development takes (and shows) a mastery of the environment, control over nature.

We did not ask trees to assume the dimensions and configurations of floors and walls and ceilings. We used trees to make planks and boards, panels and drywall, just as we used lime or gypsum and sand and water to make plaster and converted sedimentary material into clay to make bricks. Every building, commercial, residential, or otherwise, is a human product, an example of humanity’s power and control over the earth.

Outside cities and suburbs and farms, though, nature, not humanity, rules. Beyond civilization, the wilderness reigns. Woods, like other natural landscapes, represent the untamed world of nature, “red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1992) reminds us. Our power centers are only fortresses and outposts in an indifferent universe in which menace and death are as likely as benefit and nurture.

Like deserts, islands, mountains, rain forests, swamps, and the open sea, woods, or forests, remind us that human power and authority over nature are limited, especially outside the cities and suburbs and farms that peoples have carved out of the wilderness, and “tamed” (to some extent) for themselves, as centers of human enterprise. (Blizzards, earthquakes, forest fires, floods, hurricanes, landslides, tornadoes, and other natural disasters are also reminders that human power and authority are limited and fragile; both can be lost in a moment of time.)

When we leave behind our homes and communities to venture into the wilderness, we leave behind the support and assistance of government, families, friends, and neighbors; we also leave behind the organizations and institutions we have created and developed over centuries: military forces, police, firefighters, paramedics, hospitals, doctors, nurses, jails, prisons, forts, highways, vehicles. We put ourselves, to a large degree, at the mercy of nature, “red in tooth and claw.”

Certainly, we may have some tools at our disposal: a tent, food, water, a knife, perhaps a pistol or a rifle, a telephone, matches or a lighter, maybe a hatchet. While such items certainly assist us with everyday tasks and provide the means to satisfy basic needs, they might not be all that helpful against a bear, a cougar, a forest fire, a flash flood, illness, or an escaped prisoner.

What copywriter Barbara Gips observed, in suggesting the tagline to her husband, artist Philip Gips, for the Alien movie poster he was creating, “In space no one can hear you scream” is as true in the woods as it is beyond the exosphere or, as Star Wars puts it, “in a galaxy far, far away.” We are cut off, isolated, on our own, without recourse to protection or any other kind of assistance.

People who read our fiction may not remember their vulnerability as they sit down to read a novel or a short story of watch a movie, but they will feel this helplessness and exposure, all right, if we, as writers, do our jobs well, because our fiction—and our settings—will put them at risk, if only vicariously, and the risk will not be slight; it will be the risk of the loss of life or limb. Described properly, an eerie setting can, and should, suggest this vulnerability to injury or death or, at the very least, to peril, to menace, to danger, to jeopardy, to pain and suffering, and, quite possibly, death.

“Think globally, but live locally,” we have been advised. Similar advice is good for writing: “Think cosmically but write personally.” As writers of horror, we have a Weltanschauung, or world view, that is likely pessimistic: we may hope for the best, but we expect the worst. Possibly, that’s the case because we are aware that the shadow of death falls across all things: friends, family, pursuits of happiness, love, and life itself. With some exceptions, for horror writers, life is a tragedy, ultimately: Life is a bitch, and then we die.

Again, we shouldn’t expect our readers to think about such glum ideas as they read our stories, but we should; we need to know what lies ahead, and, we know, what lies ahead is not a pretty or an encouraging sight. All may be well that ends well, but life does not end well. Instead of lecturing readers, we show them. What happens to our characters, we suggest, could happen to our readers. That’s what identification and vicarious experience are all about.

We describe settings as eerie; we show what happens to our characters in such a setting. We leave it to our readers to discern that they, too, could become prey or victims, whether of the environment itself or a wild animal, a monster, a serial killer, or some other peril. 

I am studying a picture, now, of woods. The image evokes a feeling of disquiet, of uneasiness; it is unsettling, eerie. I write, describing it.

The fog, white here, gray there, as if unable to settle on one shade or the other, is a wall. Rising from the forest floor, it ascends into the sky, a screen, a barrier that cuts off sight, rather than passage. It does not move, does not waver or drift, but stands, a wall immovable and resolute, sinister in its immovability, in its resolute intent.

Leafless trunks, sparse of branch and twig, stand, tall and thin and dark—at least up close; those more distant are vague suggestions, obscured by the pallid pall of the fog engulfing them, the mist that seems to leech away their vitality, their form, their very being. They are more the ghosts of frees, it seems, pale and thin in the motionless haze of the fog. The stand of trees is lost, kindling wood awaiting the flames, should lightning strike this dreary wood in a storm that has not gathered yet, but will.

The fog and the frail, thin trees I take in at a glance, but my eye is arrested by the leaves shed by the trees, the leaves lying, by the hundreds and the thousands, red, like drops of blood, upon the forest floor, lit by a moon unseen—or, perhaps, by an unearthly, unnatural light not of this world. It is as if the very trees or the earth itself bleeds! What power could injure the land itself, blight a forest, obscure the wilderness itself with a veil that is not of this world?

Let’s trek through this forest, the forest of my description, and mark the rhetorical trail we have forged through the narrative wilderness, the better to see the way we have come, and how.

We start with a personification, as the fog is unable to decide (“settle on”) whether to be white or gray and, consequently, is both. An effect of the weather, fog has no intelligence or will—except that we have given it both! If the fog is possessed of a mind that can consider alternatives and make choices, in principle, at least, it could decide to act against us and plan an attack upon us. Its indecisiveness may not work to our advantage. If the fog is unable to decide how best to kill us, it might try several methods, proceeding by trial and error. It is also a barrier, cutting us off—from what? Community? Society? Assistance? The infrastructure of organizations and institutions? Highways? Resources? Or is the fog preventing us from seeing whatever lies beyond it—our way out, perhaps, our avenue to rescue or escape? Whatever its aim, the fog’s intent seems hostile. It is also resolute, determined, staunch: it will not permit sight and the knowledge that vision provides. By blinding us, it keeps us ignorant and, therefore, vulnerable—perhaps to whatever it hides.

The trees of the forest suggest that nature itself is under attack. The trees are bare, leafless, perhaps lifeless. They are thin, pale, perhaps sickly. They are “engulfed” by the parasitic fog, which seems to “leech away their vitality, their form, their very being.” Whatever threatens the trees—the very forest itself—is likely to threaten any who enter the forest, including us. Seen from a distance, the trees appear to be already dead, to be mere “ghosts of” themselves. They seem to be “lost” souls, as it were, awaiting the destructive “flames” of divine judgment, of a wrathful god’s lightning bolt. We, who have entered the forest, are likewise under the sentence of divine judgment.

Finally, our gaze is “arrested” by the sight of the blood-red, fallen leaves, which make it appear that “the very trees or the earth itself bleeds!” We wonder, as does the omniscient narrator, “What power could injure the land itself, blight a forest, obscure the wilderness itself with a veil that is not of this world?” Whatever it is, it is a power with which to reckon, to be sure!

These techniques—personification; ambiguous, paradoxical personality traits; and suggestions of a force able to attack and drain the vital forces of nature itself, with specific references to tangible natural objects, fog, trees, and leaves—create an eerie setting that imperils both the forest and anyone, including the story's characters and we, readers who identify with the characters, conveying feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, confusion, and terror.

What's in a Phrase?

In a previous post, we considered how to use horror movie posters to generate plot ideas. In this post, we'll take a look at using commonplace phrases to do the same.

Let's stay with the “bug” them. By typing “bug” into the Internet search engine of my choice (Bing), several links appeared, including this one: Phrases, which lists these commonplace phrases that include the word “bug” and the meaning associated with each:

• bug off
• bug out
• bug in her bonnet
• bug someone
• bug storm
• cute as a bug's ear
• snug as a bug in a rug

At first, not many of the phrases may seem to inspire ideas for horror plots (or even scenes), but, of course, the phrases are raw material; we have to work with them a bit. Let's take “snug as a bug in a rug,” for example. Let's jettison the “snug as” portion of the phrase, paring it down to “a bug in a rug.” instead of the denotative, or dictionary, meaning of “rug,” let's go with a figurative use. Toupees are sometimes referred to, usually derogatorily, as “rugs.”

Could a toupee-manufacturing company plant a bug inside its hairpieces? Sure—but why? Maybe the bugs aren't really insects. Maybe they're miniature microphones that someone plants in the toupees of certain men ho wear “rugs.”

Okay—but why? The bald men are spies or suspected terrorists or masters of organized crime. Maybe the toupee company is a CIA front that makes “special” toupees for only a select few clients.

Sounds good, maybe, but why go through all the trouble of making toupees instead of using more traditional ways to bug persons of interest?

No one, least of all a spy, a suspected terrorist, or a master of organized crime, is likely to suspect there's a listening device in his toupee. It's the perfect hiding place—as long as the wig stays on the suspect's head, which I likely to be most of the time that he's in public.

There's another possibility, too. If the “rug' isn't a toupee, but a merkin, the story takes on a whole different tone. It could take a satirical or even an erotic twist. A merkin, after all, is a pubic wig, a toupee worn down under (mostly by women).

Now the client is likely to be a female spy, a female terrorist suspect, or a female head of organized crime. The possibilities aren't endless, but they're sure different than those that are likely to be inspired by a male character's wearing of a toupee.

Maybe you don't like either possibility, that of the toupee or that of the merkin. Besides, we might wonder, where's the fear in such a conceit? There could be one, if the bug is set to self-destruct, Mission Impossible style, after so many hours or days, killing its wearer out at the same time. Some suspense, or even terror, could flow from the thought that the presence of the bug, over time, scrambles the brains of the surveilled suspect—and those around him or her. Perhaps the government agency that sells the implanted toupee or merkin knows that this effect will occur; maybe they discover it as the “bugs” are put into use. Alternatively, maybe the “bugs” have this effect only on some suspects, and the government agency must discover why and how to prevent the effect from occurring.

The possibilities are many, and they have all resulted from brainstorming about a phrase that includes the word “bug.”

Of course, if you don't like the results of using “bug” phrases, you can always substitute a word associated with another horror trope or theme and brainstorm about phrases containing this (or these) term(s).

To find such tropes, check out images of horror movie posters. You'll find that many of them contain the same types of images, such as dolls (Abandoned, Dolls, Worry Dolls, The Doll, Finders Keepers, Doll in the Dark, Child's Play, Annabelle, The Devil Doll); heads (Pumpkinhead, Hatchet, Shrunken Heads, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Hostel); eyes (The Eye, Would You Rather?, The Crawling Eye, Candyman 3, The Theater Bizarre, The Return, Cat's Eye).

Just a few of the many phrases that contain the word “eye” or closely related words include:

• up to your (my) eyeballs
• your (my) eyes are bigger than your (my) stomach
• a bird's-eye view
• a feast for the eyes
• a jaundiced eye
• a roving eye
• a worm's-eye view
• all eyes are on someone (something)
• an eagle eye
• an eye for an eye
• as far as the eye can see
• bat one's eye
• bawl one's eyes out
• easy on the eyes
• bedroom eyes
• eye opener
• eye to eye
• eyes in the back of your head
• eye popper
• eyes only
• get some shuteye
• give your eyeteeth for
• stars in your eyes
• in the wink of an eye
• keep a weather eye on

Possibilities are endless.

Plotting by Poster

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I would like to suggest how movie posters can help to suggest plots. Before I get to a couple of examples, though, I offer a few guidelines for anyone who might like to try this approach to plotting stories. They have served me well.

1. If the poster you select promotes a movie you have seen, pretend it does not, and don't reference the film, even in your thoughts, as you analyze the poster. The poster should speak for itself, as it were.
2. We are taught to read from left to right and from top to bottom. Graphic designers know this and use our training to their benefit in creating designs and art and in communicating to us.
3. A poster is likely to have a central image, and this central image will be emphasized in some way—through its position, just off center; through color or intensity; by being of bigger than other images. It is obvious that the artist wants the viewer to focus attention on this central image. Text and other images, if any, will relate to this central image and help to develop its figurative aspects.
4. Most art employs various “visual” figures of speech—metaphors, similes, allusions, personifications, exaggerations, understatements, symbols, puns or other plays on words, synecdoches.
5. See all there is to see—not just size, but color, intensity, depth, balance, negative and positive space, shape, texture, size, density, position, arrangement, patterns. facial expressions, hairstyles, costumes (i. e., the models' clothing), age, sex, gender, class, income level. Also consider whatever props might be displayed.
6. Analyze visual evidence of behavior: care, neglect, attendance, abandonment, support, and so forth.
7. Consider the other four senses, too: what sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations does the poster suggest?
8. The text is the key that unlocks the visual imagery's figurative meaning.

With these guidelines in mind, start by describing the poster. Start at the top and work your way down. Include quotations of any text you encounter. Be detailed, but don't be flowery. At this point, be a camera operator, not a sketch artist, an objective viewer, not an interpreter.

After describing the poster, use the elements you identified to complete this list, creating a complete sentence in the process. In doing so, stick to the poster itself.

WHO?
WHAT?
WHEN?
WHERE?
HOW?
WHY?

Next, question yourself about each of the six phrases you entered into the table. In doing so, make observations; draw inferences from what you see and read in the poster. Look for potential relationships among the poster's elements. Look, also, for possible connections between your own thoughts, between your own feelings, and between your own thoughts and feelings. Ask yourself how the answers you listed in the table could be “flipped,” or reinterpreted.

As a result of this process, you may develop an idea for a story or even a synopsis of a plot for a story. At the same time, you will have a sequence of elements that are logically related and which, together, form a narrative thread upon which, by the questioning process and the use of your own imagination, you can embroider, or develop further.

FRIGHT NIGHT

Text above the image reads: “There are some very good reasons to be afraid of the dark.”

It is night. There are stars and a full moon. Spirits swarm above a house. One appears to be the ghost of a vampire; its wide open mouth is positioned above the center of the house, near the domicile's rooftops. Two other spirits have a bestial appearance. The rest are heads with faces and fanged mouths—demons, perhaps.

Behind a simple white rails, a front porch runs the length of the three-story Victorian house. In the center, second-floor room (perhaps a bedroom), the silhouette of a standing figure, hands on hips, is visible between drawn drapes, against light.

Five low steps lead to the porch from the end of a sidewalk, the other end of which connects to a sidewalk that parallels the street out front. Low shrubs are planted along the front of the porch. A tree flanks each side of the front of the house; each is almost as tall as the house. The lawn is cut. Behind the house is a line of trees, perhaps the front rank of a forest.

Text below the image reads, “Fright Night: If you love being scared, it'll be the night of your life.”

Observations

Although the house could be in a suburbs, it seems more likely that it is in a more rural area. Not only are there large trees present, but the visibility of the stars suggests that the house is some distance from the street lights common to suburbs.

The swarm of spirits seem to fountain from the house, suggesting that it is haunted.

Although rather indistinct, the figure appears to be wearing a dress, which would indicate that the figure is that of a woman. It is impossible to tell whether she faces forward, but her presence at the window suggests that she is looking out of the room.

The house is in good repair, and the lawn is landscaped and well kept.

The text suggests that this is a special night; it is Fright Night. The text also suggests that the spirits are the “reasons” that one should fear the dark.

The text that reads “it'll be the night of your life” suggests that Fright Night will be momentous, probably unique.

The figure stands in a lighted room, surrounded by darkness. The room may be her “safe place,” but only as long as the light continues to burn.

WHO? A young woman

WHAT? stands watch

WHEN? at night

WHERE? in the lighted room of an otherwise dark Victorian house in a rural part of the United States

HOW? ready to become a conduit for spiritual warriors

WHY? to ward off a horde of demons that appear every decade on Fright Night.

Questions

Over what, if anything, do the demons rule? What powers do they have? Why do they appear every decade on Fright Night? Whom do they seek to frighten? Why is one the spirit of a vampire? Why are two of bestial form? Why do the remaining demons look similar? Where are the spirits' bodies? Why have they gathered here, at this particular house? Is the house significant in some way? Who is the young woman? Why is she in the house? Why is she alone? How can the story line be flipped?

IT FOLLOWS

Text above the image reads, “it doesn't think. It doesn't feel. It doesn't give up.”

Looking frightened, a tense, young blonde woman, eyes wide, stares into her car's rear-view mirror, which she adjusts. Outside, it is dark and perhaps foggy. Her headlights don't seem to penetrate the gloom.

Text below the image, the film's title, reads, “It Follows.”

Observations

The woman wears makeup, and her nails are painted red-orange. Her eyebrows, like her eyes, are brown, which suggests that she is a peroxide, not a natural, blonde. She wears her hair in a bob or a pixie cut.

WHO? A young woman

WHAT? looks into her rear-view mirror

WHEN? at night

WHERE? on a lonely stretch of country road

HOW? as she is driving her car

WHY? fleeing from a relentless, inhuman pursuer.

 

Questions

Who is the young woman? She appears to be alone—is she? If so, why? If not, why not? Where is she going? Where has she been? Is she on some sort of mission or is she just trying to escape? Why is she driving at night? Who or what is she fleeing? Why is her pursuer chasing her? Why is her pursuer relentless? Is her pursuer behind her, as she appears to believe, or in front of her? Her tension and fear suggest she may be involved in an emergency situation? Is she? If so, what is the emergency? If not, what else explains her tension and fear? Is her car a sedan? A convertible? New? An older model? How large or small is her car? Is it in good repair? Is someone expecting her? If so, who? Why? If not, why not?

In future posts, I may model this technique for plotting by posters again. There are many posters, after all—an inexhaustible supply of them. To generate a strong, intriguing, suspenseful plot, we need only one. Meanwhile, why not try your own hand at this poster:

From Passion to Profit

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, the one-star reviews on Amazon are more informative than the other rankings. Those who were disappointed by a novel expose a particular narrative's faults, as the reviewers see them, but, at the same time, they suggest faults to be avoided by all writers. A recent review of these ratings for several novels produced this list of demerits:

• boring
• cardboard characters
• cliches
• deus ex machina ending
• expository
• flat characters
• formulaic
• making it up as he goes
• mundane characters
• over-long
• pointless sadism
• politically correct
• preachy
• predictable plot
• rambling
• recycled characters
• recycled endings
• rehash of familiar themes
• repetitive
• ridiculous situations
• self-indulgent (politically)
• shallow characters
• simplistic
• slow-paced
• sophomoric
• stalled action
• stock characters
• unanswered questions
• unbelievable characters
• unfocused and redundant
• unimaginative
• uninspiring characters
• unmotivated behavior
• unsympathetic characters
• washed-out characters

That's quite a list of complaints, but many of them can be categorized into four groups, most of which concern the so-called elements of fiction:

• characters
• plot
• technique
• structure

It may be surprising that established writers continue to experience difficulty with such basics of their craft, but, according to readers' complaints, they do, sometimes so much so that readers vow never to waste another dime on their once-favorite authors' dreck.

Part of the problem might be that established writers are too comfortable. They've developed a formula that works for them and which their fans more or less accept, even expect. Getting published is difficult, and maintaining a spot at the top of bestsellers' lists is next to impossible. When writers have accomplished these feats, they are apt to be reluctant to try something new. As a result, they employ the same formula over and over again, cranking out the same tried-and-true tale, until, at last, their faithful readers abandon them. 

An occasional influx of “new” readers (those who haven't tried the established writer's work before, possibly because they were young when the writer was well-established) keeps the dollars—and the formulaic novels—coming. The number of readers appears to be declining, perhaps rather sharply. If this is true, eventually, established writers won't be able to rely on “new” readers. If enough of their faithful followers stop following them, they could be in trouble.

Since many established writers have earned fortunes, they'll be able to live out their days in comfort, although their reputations will suffer and there's not likely to be, for them, a literary legacy (not that there would be otherwise). Even the most literary of writers often vanish from the bookstores and the public consciousness within a generation or two of their deaths. Only the best of the best survive for centuries, although with diminished sales.

What's the solution? The only possible remedy that occurs to me is simple. Writers, whether of horror fiction or another genre or of fiction of lasting literary value, started because they had something to say. They had a fervent desire to communicate a truth, a vision, a belief, and they cared about the “people” (their characters) about whom they wrote. They need to return to these roots, the emotional, indeed, spiritual, roots of writing.

As time went by and dollars accumulated in their bank accounts, many seem to have become more interested in sales than in the stories themselves. We can think, easily, of writers who continue to write not because they have something worth saying, but despite the fact that they have nothing to say anymore; they've communicated their truths, visions, and beliefs long ago. Now, they simply rehash them.

They're not in the writing business to convey a message that's important to them and perhaps to society, but to see their names on yet another bestseller's list, to add yet another million dollars to their bank accounts, to compose yet another self-indulgent lecture on politics, and to inflate their egos one more time. Just as politicians are loathe to give up their power and the perks of their offices, writers don't want to forego the pleasures of wealth and fame. In short, writing, for them, is no longer a passion, but a business—a business and a means of stroking their egos. As Stephen King said, in a relatively recent interview, he plans to continue to write every day because he needs something to do to fill up the hours.

Alfred Hitchcock on the Importance of Style in Cinematic Storytelling

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, horror Movies don't expect much from their audiences. Typically, there's nothing philosophical or theological about them. As a rule, they don't offer social criticism. If they mix science with their horror, the science is likely to be dubious. Psychology, when it's included, as an explanation for a character's bizarre behavior, is apt to be simplistic or patently absurd. History is usually general and vague or wrong altogether.

Audiences don't mind. They're happy to overlook such discrepancies. They're not interested in factual or political correctness. They want to see death and destruction, blood and guts, and a naked scream queen or two. Give them that, and they'll consider their $10 well spent.

Nevertheless, some horror movie directors want to give audiences more bang for their buck. They have something to say, and they want to say it. In addition to merely entertaining viewers, they want to share their visions, their understandings, their insights with audiences concerning evil, society, heroism, the human psyche, art, filmmaking, or what-have-you. Alfred Hitchcock is one such director. Stanley Kubrick is another. Both Scott Derrickson and William Friedkin are other horror movie directors whose films deliver more than fear, as is David Rosenberg.

Some of the points Hitchcock makes is about filming per se. In an interview with Cinema magazine, the director defines cinema as “pieces of film assembled.” The individual pieces of film, he adds, mean “nothing”; it is their combination, in such a way as to form a “mosaic” of them, whereby their “combination creates an idea” (or, he adds, later, “an emotion”), that they become meaningful. Part of the forming of the mosaic is the selection of the images; another part, in Psycho, in particular, is the “juxtaposition of angles” and the rapidity with which each piece of film appears, for only a fraction of a second, on the screen, resulting in the assembly of a “montage” suggestive of the stabbing of Marion Crane (Jennifer Leigh), while, in fact, “no knife ever touched any woman's body in that scene.”

In the same interview, Hitchcock also speaks of how he maintained and intensified suspense while avoiding a cliche in North by Northwest. The cliche was “a place of assignation [taking] the form of a figure under a street lamp at the corner of the street,” which is often used to “put [a] man on the spot.” Besides the boredom that results from the use of a cliche, another problem is that cliches set up predictable situations. The audience has seen them so many times before that they know what will follow.

To avoid this hackneyed device, Hitchcock “take[s] the loneliest, emptiest spot I can so that there is no place to run for cover, no place to hide, and no place for the enemy to hide, if we can call him that,” having the protagonist disembark from “the bus . . . , a little tiny figure,” standing in the middle of a “complete wasteland.”

Then Hitchcock seems to threaten the man. Just as he intends, the audience thinks, “Well. This is a strange place to put a man.” As cars pass, the audience begins to suppose, “"Ah, he's going to be shot at from a car,'” but Hitchcock frustrates this expectation by showing “a black limousine go by.”

Next, a car approaches from a different direction, stops, and “deposits a man,” before returning from the direction it came. Just as the director intends, the audience imagines the man may be the protagonist's assassin. When the main character approaches him, engaging the stranger in conversation, it's clear to the audience that the new arrival is not a killer. For a second time, Hitchcock has raised the audience's expectation as to what will occur, only to frustrate their prediction.

Now, as “the local bus” approaches, the stranger to whom the protagonist is speaking says, “That's funny.” He points out that a crop-dusting plane is “dusting a place where there's no crops.” The stranger gets onto the bus and leaves. Hitchcock says, “The audience says . . . 'Ah, the airplane.' Now, what's gonna be strange about the airplane, and you soon know. And from that point on you have a man trying to find cover. There is no cover until he gets into the cornfield. Now, you do in the design a very important thing.”

By avoiding a give-away cliche, and repeatedly arousing and frustrating his audience's expectations about what will happen, Hitchcock creates and maintains suspense. Then, when the threat they suspect is coming finally arrives, Hitchcock makes sure the action continues, as the protagonist scrambles “to find cover,” as he is chased by the menacing airplane. The entire scene, from beginning to end, is carefully designed before it is ever filmed. As Hitchcock explains, “This sequence is very carefully designed step by step both visually and to some extent in its menace . . . . So that's production design, exemplified in terms of its function.”

Any author of horror fiction should take the same pains as Hitchcock did in planning the action of his movie's scenes, remembering that the images created on the page, like those filmed on the sound stage or on location, are, when properly combined, in such a way as to form a “mosaic,” the means by which the writer “creates an idea”—and the way that he or she manipulates readers by causing them to draw inferences as to what will come next—inferences which the writer must then frustrate as he or she introduces new possibilities or plot twists.

Now that he has explained how to design combinations of images to create ideas, Hitchcock explains how to use the same process to create an emotion in his audience.

Hitchcock offers two examples. The first, from Psycho, involves Detective Milton Arbogas entering the Victorian house occupied by Norman Bates and his “mother.” As Arbogas steps onto the upper-story hallway floor, after having ascended the staircase, “Mother” rushes from her bedroom, knife in hand, and stabs him across the face. A close-up shot shows the bloody gash in his forehead and cheek and registers his shock as he begins to fall backward, down the stairs, pursued by his killer. Hitchcock explains how he captured this horrific sequence:

. . . When he got to the top of the stairs, I took the camera very high, extremely high. So that he was a small figure. And the figure of the woman came out, very small, dashed at him with a knife. And the knife went out, and we're still very high, and as the knife started to come down, I cut to a big head of the man. And the knife went right across the face, and he fell back from that point on. Now the reason for going high—and here we're talking about the juxtaposition of size of image. So the big head came as a shock to the audience, and to the man himself. His surprise was expressed by the size of the image. But you couldn't get the emphasis of that size unless you had prepared for it by going high.

As an example of how an effect can be varied, he refers to Rear Window, whose main character is L. B. “Jeff” Jeffrey, a photojournalist convalescing after having broken his leg. A voyeur, he spends much of his time peering at his neighbors across the way.

Mr. Stewart is sitting looking out of the window. He observes. We register his observations on his face. We are using the visual image now. We are using the mobility of the face, the expression, as our content of the piece of film. Let's give an example of how this can vary, this technique, with whatever he is looking at: Mr. Stewart looks out. Close-up. Cut to what he sees. Let's assume it's a woman holding a baby in her arms. Cut back to him. He smiles. Mr. Stewart likes babies. He's a nice gentleman. Take out only the middle piece of film, the viewpoint. Leave the close-ups in—the look and the smile. Put a nude girl in the middle instead of the baby. Now he's a dirty old man. By the changing of one piece of film only, you change the whole idea. It's a different idea.

When Jeffrey smiled at the baby, the audience thought him a “nice gentleman,” but were a nude woman substituted for the baby, the audience would have imagined Jeffrey is a pervert, and their emotional response to him would have been quite different.

Every piece of film that you put in the picture should have a purpose,” Hitchcock says, which means each sequence of images should be planned in detail and be combined so as to encourage the audience's ideas and emotions while depicting whatever action is called for by the scene. Style is the means by which Hitchcock says he accomplishes these goals, insisting, “I put first and foremost cinematic style before content . . . . Content is quite secondary to me.”

Alexander Pope defined style, with regard to writing, as “proper words in their proper places.” If “images” were substituted for words, so that, so amended, Pope's definition reads that style, with regard to film making, is proper images in their proper places, Hitchcock, no doubt, would agree. By substituting one image for another, Hitchcock can change the context of a scene and, as a result, the audience's reaction, or feelings, about Jeffrey.

Note: In future posts, we will consider the messages Stanley Kubrick, Scott Derrickson, William Friedkin, and David Rosenberg express through their films:

Edgar Allan Poe on Writing Short Stories That Sell

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Edgar Allan Poe described the nature of the fare in which readers of such publications as The Southern Literary Messenger and Blackwood's were interested:

The ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought into the strange and mystical. . . . To be appreciated, you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.

Unfortunately, he does not offer his own definitions of the terms he uses, implying, perhaps, that he has their standard dictionary definitions in mind, but his explanation suggests the common feature, in each pairing,” whether of “ludicrous” and “burlesque” or “singular” and “strange” and “mystical,” is exaggeration: the ludicrous must be “heightened” to become grotesque; the fearful must be “coloured into the horrible”; the witty must be “exaggerated” before it is burlesque, and the extraordinary must be “wrought” to become weird ad mysterious. It is this sort of exaggeration, these sorts of extreme, that, Poe found, interests and attracts readers. Poe's stories and essays themselves show how he accomplishes these exaggerations.

His tongue-in-cheek essay, “How to Write a Blackwood's Article,” in particular, explains the process of writing sensational fiction, if one reads between the lines, for, it is, after all, both a process analysis essay and a parody of the typical Blackwood's Magazine fare, and his “Loss of Breath: A Tale a la Blackwood's,” parodies the typical Blackwood's story itself, and is, therefore, also instructive in revealing the technique of sensationalizing incidents through exaggeration, its own parodic nature notwithstanding.

Published from 1817 to 1980, this British periodical was originally known as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine.

In “How to Write a Blackwood's Article,” once Poe gets down to specifics, he has his caricature of the magazine's founder, Mr. William Blackwood himself, tell Signora Psyche Zenobia, who has come to interview him on behalf of an organization of which she is a member, exactly what comprises the typical Blackwwod's fare and how it is produced. First, each story is based upon an improbable, or, often, indeed, an impossible incident. He offers a few examples of such incidents:

“There was 'The Dead Alive,' a capital thing!—the record of a gentleman's sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body . . . . Then we had the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater'— . . . plenty of fire and fury' . . . . “Then there was 'The Involuntary Experimentalist,' all about a gentleman who got baked in an oven, and came out alive and well . . . . And then there was 'The Man in the Bell' . . . . It is the history of a young person who goes to sleep under the clapper of a church bell, and is awakened by its tolling for a funeral. The sound drives him mad, and, accordingly, pulling out his tablets, he gives a record of his sensations.”

Second, a Blackwood's tale requires vivid descriptions of emotion, or “sensation.” “Sensations are the great things after all,” Mr. Blackwood tells Zenobia. “Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations—they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet. If you wish to write forcibly, Miss Zenobia, pay minute attention to the sensations.”

The typical Blackwood's article also delves into the supernatural, the paranormal, the mystical, or the spiritualistic, using the type of cant that Poe, in his poem “The Raven,” characterizes as the sort of “forgotten lore” that fills “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” There is, in such stories, a patina of the esoteric, the occult, the mysterious, and there are references to lost or little-known sources, such as confessions, diaries, historical accounts of past events, all set forth with “erudition.” Indeed, if the sources are unintelligible, so much the better—as long as they sound learned. These sources may be mentioned by the characters in the stories or in an epigram at the head of the story. (In Poe's article, he chooses the latter method, quoting the cry of a Turkish fig peddlar: “"In the name of the Prophet—figs!”)

The Blackwood's writer is careful to choose a tone appropriate to his other story, Mr. Blackwood tells Zenobia, as he identifies various choices:

“There is the tone didactic, the tone enthusiastic, the tone natural--all common-place enough. But then there is the tone laconic, or curt, which has lately come much into use. It consists in short sentences. Somehow thus: Can't be too brief. Can't be too snappish. Always a full stop. And never a paragraph.

“Then there is the tone elevated, diffusive, and interjectional. Some of our best novelists patronize this tone. The words must be all in a whirl, like a humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which answers remarkably well instead of meaning. This is the best of all possible styles where the writer is in too great a hurry to think.

“The tone metaphysical is also a good one. If you know any big words this is your chance for them. . . . I shall mention only two more—the tone transcendental and the tone heterogeneous. In the former the merit consists in seeing into the nature of affairs a very great deal farther than anybody else. . . . Above all, study innuendo. Hint everything—assert nothing.

“. . . As for the tone heterogeneous, it is merely a judicious mixture, in equal proportions, of all the other tones in the world, and is consequently made up of every thing deep, great, odd, piquant, pertinent, and pretty.”

According to Mr. Blackwood, writers of the type of fiction that appears in his magazine—sensational fiction—must sprinkle trivia that has an air of erudition throughout the story, introducing little-known facts as if they are the results of research or personal acquaintance with the scholars who provided the expert tidbits of knowledge. It is acceptable, or even desirable, to present the information in a foreign tongue that is then translated into English (or not). As an example, he offers a line in German, from the philosopher Schiller:

'Und sterb'ich doch, so sterb'ich denn
Durch sie--durch sie!'

Translated into English, the line reads, “'And if I die, at least I die for thee—for thee!” French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Latin offer other usable quotations that will give the story a sense of erudition.

The occasion that inspired the Blackwood story might be mundane, but if it is presented according to the principles, using the elements he has identified, Mr. Blackwood implies, it will be properly exaggerated to the point that it is worthy of inclusion in his magazine:

“It is just possible that you may not be able, so soon as convenient, to—to get yourself drowned, or choked with a chicken-bone, or—or hung, or bitten by a—but stay! Now I think me of it, there are a couple of very excellent bull-dogs in the yard—fine fellows, I assure you—savage, and all that—indeed just the thing for your money—they'll have you eaten up, auriculas and all, in less than five minutes (here's my watch!)—and then only think of the sensations!”

In short, it will fit the Blackwood's formula.

In “Loss of Breath: A Tale a la Blackwood's,” Poe furnishes a short story that, parodying those which typically appear in Blackwood's Magazine, also exemplify the principles and techniques he has outlined in “How to Write a Blackwood's Article” as forming the formula for such sensational stories.

For aspiring writers who would like to see a story in the genre itself, rather than a parody, they need seek no further than Poe's work itself, for, according to Paul Collins, the author of the critical study Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, assures us that Poe's short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” constitutes “a Blackwood's story to top all Blackwood's stories”: Poe could mock sensational “predicament” stories . . . . but he also knew they sold readily, and he had a magnificent one in “The Pit and the Pendulum.”