Monsters in Our Midst

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In horror fiction, monsters originate from only a handful of sources:

• Natural
  • Physiological (e. g., mutation or birth defect)
  • Natural catastrophe
  • Human
    • Psychological
    • Social
    • Scientific/Technological
• Supernatural
  • Angelic/Demonic
  • Divine

Within this framework, the specific contents of these categories change, sometimes vanishing (at least for a time) or being replaced by newer understandings of the concept of the monstrous.

For example, among the ancients, hermaphrodites were considered omens from God. Signs of his displeasure, humans with both male and female sex organs were viewed as warnings form God. Their existence bespoke His wrath and the punishment that He would soon visit upon his sinful people.

Today, hermaphrodism is understood as an effect of male hormones, an adrenal glans disorder, or aromatase deficiency. In other words, the condition results from natural, not supernatural, causes. In male-to-female or female-to-male transgender transgender cases, the cause of gender dysphoria is corrected through hormone therapy, gender-confirmation surgery, and other surgical or medical procedures. Its cause is psychological; its remedy is medical and surgical.

With the change in the understanding of the causes of hermaphroditism and transgender conditions, intersex individuals are seldom cast as “monsters” in contemporary horror fiction, and, when they are cast as such, as in Sleepaway Camp (1983), critics, like much of the general public, movie-going and otherwise, are offended by such representations.

Likewise, zombies, as they are depicted today, more often result from radiation, mental disorders, pathogens, or accidents during scientific experiments than from voodoo or magic. These fundamental changes, both in the way we view the world and the basis of epistemology, have led to changes in the nature and origin of the zombie.

In short, the category of horror “monster,” which once included hermaphrodites as omens of God's displeasure and imminent wrath, are now more frequently seen as having experienced a hormonal or glandular problem or as having experienced gender dysphoria. Their conditions are caused by physiological or psychological, not supernatural or divine, agencies. Zombies, likewise, have been given a natural, rather than a supernatural, origin.

Frequently, horror movie monsters are seen as representing metaphors for political, social, or cultural events typical of particular time periods:

Godzilla (1954) has been seen as representing the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Them! (1954) ends with a caution about the dangers of “the Atomic Age,” as myrmecologist Dr. Harold Medford warns, “When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.”

The 1966 science fiction-horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which people were replaced with alien look-alikes, has been regarded as an allegory for both McCarthyism and communism.

Some critics regard The Fly (1986) as a metaphor for AIDS, although director David Cronenberg said he intended the horror movie to be a metaphor for “aging and death.”

Although no horror movie seems to sum up more recent decades, a film in which political figures instigate armies of ordinary citizens to go to war against one another might be just the type of film to symbolize the current state of affairs in the United States, wherein Antifa and Democratic protesters, encouraged and emboldened by otherworldly or demonic, hypnotic versions of Senator Maxine Waters, who exalts the public confrontation of individuals who disagree with her party, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who claims civility is impossible between Democrats and those who oppose them, attack their opponents in the street, confront political appointees during meals in public restaurants, disrupt Senate hearings, and attack the Supreme Court Building, eventually precipitating a war that endangers the entire country. Such an allegorical film, called, perhaps, Demonic Uprising would certainly capture the spirit of our age.

Something's Wrong!

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Something’s wrong with. . . . Well, just about everything. We fear that something is not quite right. That something is wide of the mark. That something is improper. Something’s wrong with the baby! That could be the tagline for Rosemary’s Baby.

 

Something’s wrong with the dog! That could be the tagline for Cujo.

 

Something’s wrong with the house! That could be the tagline for The Amityville Horror.

 

Something could go wrong with virtually anything--or anyone. Including me. . . . or you.

 

There’s something wrong with my nurse! Couldn’t that be the tagline for Misery?

 

There’s something wrong with my husband! That could be the tagline for The Shining.

 

What could go wrong? Again, almost anything. The baby could be the spawn of Satan, a true devil’s child. The dog could have rabies. The house could be haunted. The nurse and, for that matter, one’s husband could be psychotic and violent, even murderous.

 

Whatever could go wrong might go wrong. Horror stories are often about things (and people) that go wrong. They suffer a mechanical, an electrical, or a nervous breakdown. They go awry or insane. They fly off the handle, hit the roof, lose it, flip their lids, lose their heads.

 

The things that go wrong or, sometimes, the things that make other things go wrong, are the monsters or their human equivalents, most of which are symbolic of other, actual dangers: demons (weaknesses and appetites), ghosts (past traumas or guilt or fears that both haunt and drive the emotions of the haunted), giants (seemingly insurmountable, irresistible, or invincible situations), ogres (natural catastrophes or technological terrors), vampires (depression or sexual lust or perversions), werewolves (the animal within), witches (women in league with forces beyond human understanding), and zombies (the brain damaged, the psychotic, and the mesmerized).

 

Look up synonyms for some of these terms, and their real-world equivalents will appear. “Haunted,” for example, suggests haunted “troubled,” “preoccupied,” “worried,” “disturbed,” “anxious,” or “obsessed.”

  

Horror stories are also about what happens after things (and people) go wrong. Such fiction is about survival and recovery. Novels and short stories in this genre are about restoration and rebirth. In seeing what protagonists and other characters do in the face of extreme danger, menaced by natural, paranormal, or supernatural forces as irresistible and as powerful as they are relentless, we readers can learn how to survive and recover. We can learn how to be restored and how to be reborn. We can also learn the nature of the monster, whether it takes the form of a charismatic man or a beautiful woman, a seemingly innocent child with a shy smile, or a leader who promises things for which we’ve longed all our lives or have clutched to our breasts only in our dreams, and we can avoid the menace or neutralize or kill it.

 

Of course, we can always say that there is nothing wrong, that everything is all right, that there’s no cause for alarm. Life gives us that choice; horror fiction often doesn’t.

Do Not Pass “Go”; Do Not Collect $200: Monster Board Games

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

When one tires of Monopoly and Scrabble, there’s always the death and destruction of the diabolically creepy horror board game. They may make better Halloween presents than Christmas gifts, but, should Santa need a stocking stuffer, your wee ones could enjoy receiving one of these ghoulish games.


Arkham Horror (Fantasy Flight Games): H. P. Lovecraft provides the town and the mythos. Bizarre incidents occur in the town that Lovecraft made, heralding a horrific catastrophe; Lovecraft’s Old Ones are the culprits, and all that stands between them and the end of the world are the game’s players, a team of investigators, numbering between one and eight, who are twelve years old or older and who can spare two to three hours--not much time when one considers the height of the stakes involved: the fate of the world awaits the throw of the dice.

Gateways open upon other areas of the town, and, if too many open at once, look out! An alien will enter the scene, wrecking havoc. Therefore, it’s a good idea to close the gates! Unfortunately, to do so, the players themselves must enter these same portals and be teleported to--well, somewhere else.

An interesting addition to this game is its extension, Dunwich Horror (also manufactured by Fantasy Night Games), which supplies a game board for another Lovecraft town, Dunwich, which is a short distance from Arkham and is beset by its own mystical and macabre problems. The play is similar, but the rules have changed. Similar games from the same maker are the additional Arkham Horror Expansion games Kingsport Horror (based on yet another of the fictional towns that Lovecraft invented), Curse of the Dark Pharaoh, and The Black Goat of the Woods.

There is also Zombie Town: players’ neighborhood have gone to the zombies, who rise from their graves in the cemetery in the middle of the community, and no help is forthcoming; it’s up to each player to scrounge up the makeshift weapons he or she needs to survive for the ten days’ duration of play, by which time the neighborhood will be overrun by zombies, some of whom will be one’s next-door neighbors! Isn’t this the same premise of The Beverly Hillbillies?


For younger players, All Wound Up: Escape from the Cemetery (Twilight Creations) is a fun alternative, in which the pieces are, as the game’s title suggests, wind-up zombie toys. Players are allowed to wind their avatars so many times, depending upon their play, as they race in various directions to be the first to reach the cemetery’s front gate. Two to four players, eight to adult, can participate in the mayhem.


Dracula (Rio Grande Games/Kosmos) is based upon Bram Stoker’s novel, and sets Dr. van Helsing the unenviable task of locating the coffins of the undead while his nemesis, Count Dracula himself, seeks five new victims. Play lasts about half an hour, can be joined by two who are twelve or older and have sound hearts, if not sound minds, and contains such contents as the game board, cards, figures, barriers, energy cubes, and a rulebook, which, appropriately enough, come in a box. This is one you can really sink your teeth into! (Sorry; couldn’t resist.)


There are lots of other games in the horror genre waiting to take a bite out of your favorite goblin this Christmas; some are apt to be harder to find than others, and a few may be out of production altogether (but there’s always eBay):

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Susan Prescot Games)
• Dracula’s Revenge (Human Head Studios/Green Ronin Publishing)
• Frankenstein’s Children (Human Head Studios)
• Vampire: Prince of the City
• When Darkness Comes: The Awakening Game Board (Twilight Creations)
• Munchkin Bites (Steve Jackson Games)
• Betrayal at the House on the Hill (Avalon Hill)
• Ghosts (Milton Bradley)
• The Great Brain Robbery (Cheapass Games)
• Minion Hunter (Games Designers Workshop/Dark Conspiracy)
• Which Witch? (Milton Bradley)

Buffy: More than Pastiche

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Dictionary of the Paranormal, the Supernatural, and the Otherworldly (V - Z)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: Unless otherwise noted, definitions are courtesy of dictionary.die.net, an Internet dictionary in the public domain.

V

Vampire--a corpse that rises at night to drink the blood of the living.

Vanishing--the sudden disappearance of an object that may or may not reappear or be seen again; many such vanishings are said to have occurred in the so-called Devil’s, or Bermuda, Triangle; see “Bermuda Triangle” and “Saladin balloon” (the author).

Veronica cloth

Veronica cloth, miraculous image of Christ on--veils or other cloths upon which the image of Christ’s face appears or is a part, as a result of a miracle; see “holy relic”) (the author).

Victor, wild boy of Aveyron-- “a boy who apparently lived his entire childhood alone in the woods before being found wandering the woods near Saint Sernin sur Rance, France (near Toulouse) in 1797” (Wikipedia); see “feral children.”

Virgin Mary--the mother of Jesus Christ; according to the gospels, she conceived as a virgin, impregnated by God, and bore and delivered his son, the founder of Christianity, in which religion he is considered “the only begotten son of God”; see “Fatima, Virgin Mary appears at” (the author).

Vitalism--a doctrine that life is a vital principle distinct from physics and chemistry.

Voodoo--a religious cult practiced chiefly in Caribbean countries (especially Haiti); involves witchcraft and animistic deities.

W

Wandering Jew (by Gustave Dore)

Wandering Jew--according to legend, a Jew who was cursed to wander the earth forever because he taunted Jesus on the way to his crucifixion (the author).

Warlock--a male witch or demon.

Wells, H. G.--science fiction author (see his story in the column to the right) (the author).

Werewolf--a monster able to change appearance from human to wolf.

Witch--a female sorcerer or magician.

Wizard--one who practices magic or sorcery.

X

Xenophobia--an irrational fear of strangers (the author).

Y

Ying-yang

Ying-yang--a Chinese symbol of opposites united or reconciled (the author).

Z

Zen Buddhism-- “school of Mahayana Buddhism that asserts that enlightenment can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation, and intuition rather than through faith and devotion and that is practiced mainly in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. (Answers.com).

Zombies

Zombie--a dead body that has been brought back to life by a supernatural force; a spirit or supernatural force that reanimates a dead body; god of voodoo cults of African origin worshipped especially in West Indies; someone who acts or responds in a mechanical or apathetic way.

Zombie, philosophical--a a human body without consciousness which would nevertheless behave like a human body with consciousness (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

A Note on the Dictionary Entries

Many short stories, novels, epic poems, television series, and motion pictures that involve elements of Gothic romance or horror are based, in part or in full, upon the concepts, beliefs, theories, legends, or folklore mentioned in the definitions of the terms in this blog’s “Dictionary of the Paranormal, the Supernatural, and the Otherworldly.” Here is a sample:

Ad hoc analysis: many stories, in print and on film, make use of the ad hoc hypothesis as a means of explaining, explaining away, or diverting attention from the cause of the bizarre series of incidents that have been taking place of late.

Aliens populate many stories, including H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and countless movies, from Invaders from Mars to Alien and Independence Day.

Dracula nearly always wears an amulet.

The Argo and its crew, the Argonauts, appear in several movies of the 1950’s, including Jason and the Argonauts.

Stephen King alludes to auras throughout Insomnia.

Willow Rosenberg channels spirits in several Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, as do several of the series’ characters in “Conversations with Dead People.”

Close Encounters of the Third Kind occur in the movie of that title and in many others in which human characters encounter extraterrestrial aliens.

Crop circles occur in Signs.

In Stephen King’s Children of the Corn and other films and stories, cults are central to the plot.

Curses are featured in many films, one of which is Curse of the Mummy.

Buffy Summers has a déjà vu experience in “Becoming, Part I.”

Demons appear in countless stories, in print and on film, including, perhaps mist notably, in William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist and the movie based upon it.

Dinosaurs still walk the earth (or part of it) in such films as The Lost World, King Kong, One Million Years B. C., and plenty of others, and they’re brought back in Jurassic Park.

Stephen King’s novel, Desperation, includes an encounter with the divine, as do many other horror stories, such as Bentley Little's novels, University and Revelation.

Prophetic dreams are plot elements in a number of horror stories, including Nightmare on Elm Street.

The protagonist of the film 1408, based upon Stephen King’s short story by the same title, has evidence of the haunting he experienced in the tape-recorded voice of his deceased daughter, an example of electronic voice phenomena.

Poltergeists appear in Poltergeist and many other movies and in some novels.

What would The Exorcist be without demonic possession and exorcism?

Feral children are the adversaries in Cat People and other films, and, one might argue, appear, in a sense, in H. G. Wells’ novel, The Island of Dr, Moreau.

The theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung inform virtually every horror story every written, but are especially discernable in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Ghosts are plentiful in the fiction of horror, appearing in a myriad stories, not the least of which by any means is Henry James’ classic, The Turn of the Screw.

Hallucinations appear frequently as ad hoc hypotheses to account for the mysterious doings that characters perform and the bizarre beliefs they hold.

Without hell, Dante couldn’t have written The Inferno any more than John Milton could have penned Paradise Lost.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel is about a lamia.

Lycanthropy and full moons underlie every story ever written or filmed in which a werewolf appears, from The Wolfman and I Was a Teenage Werewolf to The Howling and An American Werewolf in London.

It’s largely thanks to lucid dreaming that Nancy is able to confront Freddie Kreuger in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Logical positivism, as a convenient ad hoc hypothesis, underlies the initial rejection of supernatural realities in movies such as The Exorcist and countless other movies that include demons, vampires, and other things that go bump in the night.

A fungus, delivered courtesy of a meteorite, is the death of the character in the “The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verril” segment of Stephen King’s Creepshow.

Numerology is at the heart of the psychological thriller, The Number 23.

Ouija Board is about, well, a Ouija board. So is Ouija.

Psychics appear in Poltergeist, Rose Red, The Psychic, The Shining, and many other horror stories, in print and on film.

Repressed memories are vital to The Turn of the Screw and the movie, The Innocents, based upon the Henry James ghost story.

Urban Legends is based upon urban legends.

Mummies, trances, vampires, voodoo, witches, and zombies are in movie after movie and book upon book, including The Mummy, Trance, Dracula, Burn, Witch, Burn!, and Night of the Living Dead.

Sources

The following sources were used in compiling this dictionary:

About.com

American Heritage Dictionary

Charles Fort Files, The

Dictionary.die.net
Famous Scientologists (Church of Scientology)

Skeptic’s Dictionary, The
Wikipedia

Note: Unless otherwise noted, definitions are courtesy of dictionary.die.net, an Internet dictionary in the public domain.

Visualizing Horror: Movie Posters

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

For writers, horror is primarily a matter of action described in words. For illustrators, horror is primarily a matter of image depicted in color and shape. A writer has a few sentences with which to snare the unwary reader’s attention, plunging him or her into the action of the story, an illustrator a few seconds in which to ambush the wandering eye. To do so, creators of horror posters, in addition to traditional design techniques and artistic principles, rely upon creating both a sense of the bizarre and an air of mystery. Their pictures pose more questions than answers, arousing viewers’ curiosity and, their creators hope, make them want to see the films that the posters advertise.

In the early days of horror movies, posters were more verbose, as wordy as they were pictorial. Mostly, adjectives suggested the traits of the featured creature and, perhaps, how the moviegoer should feel about the monster. A poster for The Blob read “Indescribable. . . Indestructible. . . Nothing Can Stop it. . . THE BLOB!” The picture showed a massive, blood-red gelatinous mass enveloping a passenger train from which horrified travelers seek to escape on foot while one of them, a woman, screams in the foreground.

Another early poster, even more loquacious, shows a young blonde woman, lying supine. Facing the viewer, she reaches out with her right hand while she attempts to fend off a monster with her left, a look of abject horror upon her face. Although the text suggests she is being raped, the monster is depicted only as a demonic head, out of which tentacles grow, Gorgon like, some ending in suckers, others in animal skulls, and still others in the heads of bizarre beasts. The text reads, “A few years ago in Dunwich a half-witted girl bore illegitimate twins. One of them was almost human! THE DUNWICH HORROR.”

For films that are associated with a particular person, place or thing, such as The Amityville Horror, the action of which takes place inside a haunted house of sorts which is of a distinctive design, the poster depicts the house, with its eyelike windows looming in the background while, at the center of the foreground, the silhouette of a male figure approaches the viewer, carrying an object that is difficult to identify clearly but may be a rifle. Clearly, the gunman and the spooky-looking mansion are related in some way, but how? Why is he armed, and what sway does the apparently haunted house hold over him?

A more recent film, The Descent, shows six women, the characters who explore the movie’s uncharted cave, who, by the unlikely postures they’ve adopted, form a human skull. “Scream your last breath,” the text advises. How are the women related, and why, collectively, are they posed to depict a human skull? Will they be the deaths of one another? If so, how? And why? And into what will they descend?

A poster for Friday the 13th is divided in half horizontally. The left side of the upper half shows the close-up of a young woman’s head as she screams. The right side of this same half of the poster shows a cabin, lit from within, at the edge of a deep woods; a full moon glides across a partly cloudy, starlit sky. The upper and lower halves of the poster are divided by paper, perhaps representing a diary. Words, in red, on the folded-down sheet of paper on the right read, “On Friday the 13th they begin to die horribly. One. . . by one.” The left side of the lower half of the poster depicts typical events at Camp Crystal Lake, and, thrusting in from the right edge of the same portion of the poster, a hand holds a sharp-edged hunting knife. The juxtaposition of innocent fun at a summer camp with an image of brutal death creates a sense of dread.

A poster for Hellraiser shows the close-up of a man’s head into which, porcupine-style, many nails have been hammered, all to the same relatively shallow depth so that he resembles a human pincushion, giving literal expression to the term “pinhead.” Between the nails, lines of blood are visible, dividing his face into a grid pattern. Who hammered the nails into the man’s head and cut the gridlines into his face, and why? Who is this mysterious “hell raiser”?

For The Hills Have Eyes 2, a vaguely feminine body, trussed up inside a sheet of canvas, and secured by a rope, is being dragged across the desert by a male figure, dressed somewhat like a mummy, whose back is all the viewer sees. Directly behind the dragged figure, a hand pushes through the soil, clawing at the ground. What the hell is going on here?

A film called simply Horror shows a white-collared priest wearing a cross, except that, in place of a human head, he has the head of a long-horned goat, which is emblematic of the devil. The poster’s text reads, “Expect nothing less than sheer. . . HORROR.” The picture is as humorous as it is horrible, suggesting that the movie may be a bit campy, but it does make the viewer wonder what the satanic priest’s motive is and what plan of action he hopes to execute. Is he merely a deceiver--a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as it were--or is he something much worse?

Jeepers Creepers 2, a film in which a serial killer collects his victims’ eyes, shows what appears to be an orange sky in which a series of crimson lightning bolts flash and out of which emerges the suggestion of a human face, the most distinctive feature of which is its open mouth and teeth. Under the movie’s title, the caption reads, “Feed your fear.” Upon reflection, it becomes obvious that the orange sky and red lightning bolts are really an image such as is produced by a retinal scan--the poster’s viewer is looking at his or her own eyeball and, at the same time, into the face of the serial killer who collects just such trophies. The design for this poster seems to take into consideration the old wives’ tale that the last image that a murder victim sees--that of his or her killer--is imprinted upon his or her retina forever. This poster creates a sense of immediacy, once one sees that the outer world--the sky and lightning--is really the inner world and that, consequently, one might be viewing what will soon become one’s own death

Alfred Hitchcock showed Psycho audiences just how frightening vulnerability can be when he had knife-wielding Norman Bates attack a hotel guest as she was showering in her bathroom. The movie Slither capitalizes upon this same sense of vulnerability. A bather has left her bathroom door ajar, and the viewer--or voyeur--sees her bent knee, rising above the side of the tub in which she bathes, presumably relaxed, unaware of the large, wormlike creature that, poised upon the rim of the tub, is about to plunge into her bathwater while, behind it, others ascend the side of the bathtub--and still more of the loathsome slug-like monstrosities, gathered at the base of the tub, await their turn to join their ilk. The phallic significance of the large worms hardly needs to be mentioned. This poster evokes the fear of both physical and sexual assault.

Sometimes, the movies that such posters advertise actually contain the scenes that the posters depict. For example, the Slither poster suggests that the antagonist--the monster--is going to be a mass of monstrous worms symbolizing, perhaps, the violence of sexual assault, or rape. There is a parasitic worm--a bunch of them, actually--courtesy of a fallen meteorite, which transforms its host--the bathing beauty’s husband, Grant--into a zombie-like monster. There’s sex, too--or a lack thereof--for Grant becomes infected after, refused sex by his wife, Starla, he goes to a local tavern to drown his sorrows, meets a female acquaintance who’s smitten with him, and goes into the woods with her, where, before anything further can happen between them, Grant becomes a host to the alien parasite. At home, he builds a nest for the larvae and, hatching, they possess the townspeople, turning them into zombies as well. Suggesting sexual assault by wormlike creatures, the poster is accurate on a figurative, if not a literal, level.

Of course, it’s not really the task of the poster to provide a faithful and accurate depiction of the movie’s scene; the poster’s task is to sell tickets. To do so, in a few images, digestible by instinct more than reason, within a few seconds, the artwork must create a sense of horror and of fear, and it must also appeal to its viewer’s curiosity by creating an air of mystery that leaves questions unanswered.

Everyday Horrors: Zombies

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Suspecting that there might be some truth to the legends of zombies (dead bodies brought back to life through a voodoo spell), Harvard University’s Wade Davis, an ethnobiologist, traveled to Haiti to investigate his theory. Sure enough, he discovered, there is some truth--quite a bit of it, actually--behind the legends of the revenants.

To create a zombie, a voodoo priest, or witch doctor, poisons the victim with a topically applied mixture of frog and puffer fish toxins, which slows both heartbeat and breathing rate to all-but-imperceptible levels. The supposedly deceased person is then buried. Within eight hours, to avoid the “deceased: person’s actual death by suffocation, the body is dug up and the occupant of the grave is administered a Jimson weed paste, which causes a psychotic delirium. The mad revenant is then sold as a slave to a wealthy plantation owner.

The drugs also make the zombies' movements clumsy. They walk in an awkward fashion. They are unable to see well, and they often extend their arms in front of them, feeling their way along to avoid unseen obstacles, just as they are represented as behaving in horror movies.

There's also another type of actual zombie. Known as the philosophical zombie, this version appears in every sense to be just like you and me (well, just like you, anyway), and lives in a world just like yours. There’s only one difference between you and the philosophical zombie. It lacks consciousness, whereas you are a conscious entity (as far as anyone can tell, at least). Its behavior, however, is, or appears to be, just like yours. Philosophical zombies are used in thought experiments concerning the possibility of physicalism and to refine ideas about phenomenalism. As one might suspect with anything pertaining to philosophy, the whole thing become amazingly complicated and rather tedious, but the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains all any sane person (or zombie) wants to know but is afraid to ask, and we direct those with sufficient courage and curiosity to the university’s online reference work (just click the volume’s title; it links to the article), which discusses the “idea of zombies, zombies and physicalism, the conceivability argument,” whether conceivability must involve possibility, and related issues and concerns.


Films which feature zombies, such as Night of the Living Dead (1963), Zombie (1979), Day of the Dead (1985), Re-Animator (1985), Dead Alive (1992), Army of Darkness (1993), Cemetery Man (1994), Bio Zombie (1998), 28 Days Later (2002), and Dawn of the Dead (2004), therefore, are not quite as inane as they might seem otherwise. In fact, you should be careful if you plan to vacation in Haiti any time soon. We hear there’s a labor shortage there, and employers are looking into innovative ways to fill vacancies in the workforce.

Note: A number of zombie movies are in the public domain and may be downloaded free or watched free online. For further information, visit these links:

• Free Horror Films, Part I
• Free Horror Films, Part II
• Free Horror Films, Part III

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

Free Horror Films, Part III

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The Internet Archive houses thousands of free items. They’re free because, their copyrights having expired, they’ve fallen into the public domain. Among the offerings are a number of classic horror films (descriptions are from the Internet Archives, where the authors are credited). (Click the title of the movie to visit its download site.)

Werewolf of Washington

A reporter who has had an affair with the daughter of the U.S. President is sent to Hungary. There he is bitten by a werewolf, and then gets transferred back to Washington, where he gets a job as press assistant to the President. Then bodies start turning up in D.C

Revolt of the Zombies

An expedition to Cambodia leads to the discovery of the process for creating zombie slaves.

Fall of the House of Usher

English dubs over French cards in this haunting version of Poe's classic tale. A stranger called Allan. . . goes to an inn and requests transportation to the House of Usher. The locals remain reluctant, but he gets a coach to transport him to the place. He is the sole friend of Roderick Usher. . . , who leaves in the eerie house with his sick wife Madeleine Usher. . . and her doctor.

Frankenstein

This is [Thomas] Edison’s COMPLETE 1910 silent Frankenstein film.

Killer Shrews

No summary available.

The Little Shop of Horrors

Roger Corman classic about a nerdy flower shop clerk who grows a giant, man-eating plant. Jack Nicholson makes his film debut as a dental patient who loves pain.

The Mad Monster

No summary available.

White Zombie

A young man turns to a witch doctor to lure the woman he loves away from her fiancée, but instead turns her into a zombie slave.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter

Legendary outlaw of the Old West Jesse James, on the run from Marshal MacPhee, hides out in the castle of Baron Frankenstein's granddaughter Maria, who proceeds to transform Jesse's slow-witted pal Hank into a bald zombie, which she names Igor.

Black Dragons

It is prior to the commencement of World War II, and Japan's fiendish Black Dragon Society is hatching an evil plot with the Nazis. They instruct a brilliant scientist, Dr. Melcher, to travel to Japan on a secret mission. There he operates on six Japanese conspirators, transforming them to resemble six American leaders. The actual leaders are murdered and replaced with their likeness and Dr. Melcher is condemned to a lifetime of imprisonment so the secret may die with him.

The Phantom Ship

Also known as "The Mystery of the Marie Celeste". [sic]

Indestructible Man

No summary available.

The Corpse Vanishes

A newspaper reporter begins to investigate after a series of brides die suddenly during their wedding. Her quest leads her to the secret of eternal youth and almost gets her killed.

Teenage Zombies

Teenagers Reg, Skip, Julie and Pam go out for an afternoon of water skiing on a nice day. They come ashore on an island that is being used as a testing center for a scientist and agents from "an eastern power." They seek to turn the people of the United States into easily controlled zombie like creatures. The agents steal Reg's boat, stranding the teens on the island. The four friends are then held captive in cages able only to speculate on their fate.

Nightmare Castle

No summary available.

The Red House

Curiosity propels two teens, Meg and Nath. . . to explore an apparently abandoned house in the countryside. Of course they are warned to stay away from the secluded place.

Bluebeard

Young female models are being strangled inexplicably. Will law enforcement be able to stop the crime wave before more women become victims?

The Ghost Walks

No summary available.

The Terror

A young officer in Napoleon's army pursues a mysterious woman to the castle of an elderly Baron where he discovers that she is the pawn of an old witch bent on driving the Baron to suicide.

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women

A team of astronauts crashes on the surface of Venus. Accompanied by their robot, they explore the surface and end up destroying the Venusian God. This film is also known as "The Gill Women" and "The Gill Women of Venus". This film began life as a Soviet-produced work. An American producer then added some new footage and changed the credits to hide the film's Soviet origin.

To download the movies:
After you find the title you want, using the categories and the search windows at the top of the homepage, click on the blue link to the film you want (it will usually be the title). Then, at the left of the screen, select FTP. (This way, if the download is interrupted, it will resume downloading at the point of interruption.) Right-click the link to open it in another window. Then, select from among the file types. Mpg (not the .mpeg) file is usually best. Right-click the selected file and click "Save Target As." The file will automatically download, but you can specify the directory that you want it to be saved in (or just let the computer determine the directory). The "My Videos" folder in the "My Documents" directory is a reasonable choice. Then, pop some corn, grab a soda, and enjoy!

(You can also watch the movies, cartoons, etc. without downloading them, although the screen area is rather small and you need high-speed Internet capability.)

Early Body Horror

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Body horror is a subtype of the horror genre that is based upon the fear that something may be amiss with one’s body or with some portion of one’s body. Such horror often produces fear or revulsion concerning various anatomical parts, especially those that are deformed, diseased, crippled, amputated, torn off, eaten, or otherwise injured or removed. The late 1950’s and early 1960’s featured what could be considered a precursor to this sub-genre. In these early body horror films, the body parts--heads, hands, and eyes--are given unnatural lives of their own, as the result of alien intervention or the use of human technology. As bad as the current crop of body horror films sometimes are, their precursors are worse still--so bad, they’re good.

What makes a movie so bad, it’s good? Clichés. Predicable (or incomprehensible) plots. Overacting. Unintentional humor. Cheap sets. Horrible costumes. Tawdry special effects. Terrible music. Ludicrous incidents (snakes in a toilet, human communication with animals, attacks by giant bug-eyed monsters). An all-too-earnest tone. Gaffs and goofs. Situations that invite sarcasm and parody. Melodrama instead of drama. Incompetent protagonists. Campy villains. Corny dialogue. In short, despite their sheer stupidity (or maybe because of it), such movies are entertaining. In a few rare instances, they may also not only teach one how not to make a movie (or how not to write such a story), but they also may prefigure a sub-genre, such as body horror, that is yet to come, as do The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The Crawling Hand, and The Crawling Eye.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die ( 1962) features Dr. Bill Cortner’s attempt to keep his fiancée, Jan Compton, alive after she’s decapitated in a car crash. Using the latest in 1962 technology (a fluid-filled tray), the scientist manages to revive her head and keep it alive while he seeks a suitably shapely body to attach to it. He finds a woman with a beautiful anatomy but a scarred face. Promising to remove the scar free of charge, the doctor lures her to his house, gives her a drink that renders her unconscious, and takes her to his downstairs lab to decapitate her and attach her body to Jan’s head. However, Jan does not want to live in such a manner, and, using telepathic powers she’s acquired as a result of having been marinated in the fluid-filled tray, she commands a mutant in her ex-future hubby’s lab to kill the mad scientist, and, after the ogre carries the unconscious damsel in distress to safety, the lab, the house, the scientist, and Jan’s head are incinerated in the fire that the mutant starts. Note: The Brain That Wouldn't Die is in the public domain and may be downloaded, free, at Internet Archives.

In The Crawling Hand: Five Fingers of Death (1963), a space capsule is blown up as it orbits the earth. Among the resulting debris that falls to earth is the arm of the astronaut who’d been aboard the capsule. While it had still been part of the astronaut aboard the capsule, it (and the rest of the astronaut as well, one may presume) was possessed by an alien life form. When the arm recovers, perhaps guided (or misguided) by the alien, it starts life anew as The Crawling Hand, murdering a young man whose mind it possesses.

In The Crawling Eye (also known as The Tollenberg Terror) (1958), extraterrestrials invade a remote Swiss resort near the Tollenberg Mountains, decapitating some people and transforming others into zombies. Traveling under the cover of a strange, ground-bound, radioactive cloud, the cloaked invaders maintain telepathic communication with their victims. Humanity’s could-be savior is a young psychic, Anne Pilgrim, who travels through Europe with her older sister Sarah, performing a mind-reading act. However, there’s another possible hero in the mix in the person of the alcoholic United Nations troubleshooter Alan Brooks.

A more recent horror movies that features an animated body part is more daring. Teeth doesn’t present viewers with a crawling eye, a crawling hand, or even a brain that won’t die. The monster in this movie is a vagina dentata --or, in plain English, a vagina with teeth. Women may feel empowered by this latest twist on body horror, but castration anxiety is likely to make men avoid the film--and its monster--at all costs. Besides, with a plot like that, it has to be a chick flick.

Horror Movie Remakes

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Janet Leigh, Psycho (1960)

An old joke plays upon the sameness of the names of the Empire State and its most prominent city: “New York, New York: the city so nice they named it twice.”

The Hollywood equivalent to the double entendre is the movie remake. In the horror genre, quite a few previous films have been resurrected, or remade, as they say in the trade:

• Amityville Horror, The (1979 and 2005)
• Black Christmas (1974 and 2006)
• Blob, The (1958 and coming soon to a theater near you)
• Day of the Dead (1985 and coming soon to a theater near you)
• Fly, The (1958 and 1986)
• Fog, The (1980 and 2005)
• Godzilla (1954 and 1998)
• Halloween (1978 and 2007)
• Hills Have Eyes, The (1977 and 2006)
• Hitcher, The (1986 and 2007)
• House of Wax, The (1953 and 2006)
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, 1993, and 2007)
• Island of Dr. Moreau, The (1977 and 1996)
• Night of the Living Dead (1968, 1990, 2006)
• Omen, The (1976 and 2006)
• Psycho (1960 and 1998)
• Ring 2, The (2005)
• Stepford Wives, The (1975 and 2004)
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (1974 and 2003)
• Thing, The (1951 and 1982)
• When a Stranger Calls (1979 and 2006)
• Wicker Man, The (1973 and 2006).

Ann Heche, Psycho (1998)

But, wait! There’s more! According to Variety, RKO’s Roseblood Movie Co. plans to remake (or, in some cases, has already remade) Lady Scarface (1941 and 2006), While the City Sleeps (1928, 1956, and coming soon to a theater near you), The Monkey’s Paw (1948, 2003, and 2008), The Seventh Victim (1943 and coming soon to a theater near you), Bedlam (1946 and coming soon to a theater near you), Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Five Came Back (1939 and coming soon to a theater near you), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943 and scheduled for release [or is it re-release?] in 2009).

But wait! That’s not all! Other movies scheduled for makeovers include The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), and Near Dark (1987 and 2008).

Confronted with such a list, one may wonder, Why?

The answer is simple, but multi-faceted. Making a remake allows producers, directors, writers, actors, and others to make a movie without reinventing the wheel, so it’s relatively economical. In plot, setting, characters, theme, and other narrative elements, moviemakers are treading familiar ground when they’re remaking a movie that’s already appeared, in slightly different form, upon the silver screen.

There’s a built-in appeal for such movies, too. Obviously, in remaking a movie, filmmakers aren’t going to rip off a box office dud; they’re going to go for the gold, so they’re going to revive a popular has-been.

Moviegoers also like to compare the performances of the actors in the older versions of the film with the those of the players in the remake to see how the respective teams of actors interpreted their parts and played their roles, evaluating, in many cases, who did what better than another.

There’s the nostalgia factor to consider, too. People like revisiting the past and recalling significant moments, especially in their youth or during a time that (in retrospect, at least) seems more innocent and fun than present hard or lackluster times.

Then, too, if moviemakers remake old movies instead of making new movies (maybe we should call them movieremakers?), Hollywood doesn’t need as many writers, so writers’ strikes don’t matter as much, if at all.

Rob Zombie, who produced the Halloween remake, talked about the appeal and challenges of making a remake. When all else fails (or when all else has been said and done), one exploits the characters: “You've got a movie that has seven sequels, so you figure they've exploited this thing every which way you can,” he says. “You start fresh, and you focus on the one thing that's always most compelling to me: the characters.” More specifically, according to The San Francisco Chronicle, he “delves into the psychology of the franchise's iconic monster, prepubescent murderer-turned-bogeyman Michael Myers.” However, a word of caution applies in psychoanalyzing the monster, producer Bad Fuller, who has used the same tactic in remaking other horror movies, warns: “You don't want to humanize your monster too much, or the audience will feel sorry for him.” God forbid!

Fuller shares the considerations that led him to produce the remakes of Hitcher, The Amityville Horror, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: “"We thought ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ was great for a remake," he says. “There was a whole generation not familiar with it. So there was brand recognition, but the expectations from the youth audience couldn't be that strong.” He’s done so well at the box office with such remakes that he’s planning to release remakes of Friday the 13th, Near Dark, and The Birds as well. (Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock is spinning in his grave at the prospect of someone redoing one of his classics.)

The San Francisco Examiner article also identifies some of the ways in which originals and remakes differ. The latter typically have better special effects; the causes behind the supernatural or paranormal situation or monster are sometimes changed, the remakes tend to build up the characters’ or the monster’s back story, and themes are given new twists. Occasionally, the remake is better than the original, as in the case of When a Stranger Calls: “The first movie was essentially a 15-minute babysitter-harassing sequence followed by more than an hour of digressions that had little to do with a stranger calling. The remake was 97 fast-paced minutes of that 15-minute sequence.”

The biggest reasons, though, for remaking successful movies? They’re proven box office successes and they’re easy to exploit.

Everyday Horrors: Gangs

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Occasionally, as in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, by Jimmy Breslin, gangs are treated with humor. (The police and the New York and Chicago branches of La Cosa Nostra also refer to the midwest and east coast gangs' Los Angeles counterparts as the “Mickey Mouse Mafia.”) Most of the time, though, they’re treated with respect and fear. Although most people don’t think of the Mafia as a gang, considering them, instead, to be members of “organized crime,” they are, of course, a gang--or several loosely associated gangs, actually--by definition. The Hell’s Angels, like other so-called motorcycle clubs, are also gangs. Any organization, big or small (except the IRS and the federal government in general), that uses illegal methods, including extortion, intimidation, violence, and weapons, to effect compliance from victims for any reason is a gang.

According to The Mafia Encyclopedia, 2nd edition, by Carl Sifakis, one of the most violent gangs was the Westies, who lived in, terrorized, and controlled New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. When a Mafia loan shark, Ruby Stein, visited their neighborhood to collect some debts, the Westies murdered him and took over his collections. One member of the gang, Patrick (“Paddy”) Dugan, found this enterprise so lucrative that he continued to rob loan sharks even after the Westies had aligned themselves with the Gambino crime family. His fellow gang members overlooked his peccadilloes in this regard, as did Carlo Gambino, the godfather for whom, ostensibly, the Westies now worked as hired hit men. When Paddy killed a friend of the Westies’ leader, Jimmy Coonan, however, he’d finally gone too far, and Dugan himself was murdered. His body was cut into small pieces and distributed over a large part of the city, a piece here and a piece there, except for his fingers, which Coonan kept in a bag, along with those of the gang’s other victims, to intimidate people and to frustrate the police’s identification of the dead. The Westies had liked Paddy, however, and they honored his life with a wake. They took his decapitated head with them to a tavern, set it atop the bar, and plied it with drinks, even lighting a cigarette for what was left of their friend, placing it between his lips so Paddy--or his head, at least--could enjoy a last smoke. It was only when Coonan met John Gotti, who’d murdered Gambino so that he could take over the crime family that the previous godfather had led, that the Westies’ leader met “a grease ball tougher than we are.”

Given the record of such gangs (and those of many others), it’s no wonder that gangs have appeared as bad guys in several horror stories (mostly TV series or movies, rather than novels).

An early film with the unenviable title I Was a Teenage Vampire brings Dracula’s teenage son to America, where he feeds off the Vandals, a street gang, before coming to an untimely end from a severe case of sunburn as he flees on a motorcycle to the safety of his grave in the local cemetery, but is caught by the rays of the rising sun as his bike crashes into the cemetery’s gates. The Vandals reappear in another movie with the unfortunate title The Teenage Frankenstein Meets the Teenage Werewolf. (At least the studios knew how to market their products to a targeted audience!) In a previous film The Teenage Werewolf, a mad scientist-cum-hypnotist transformed Tony Rivers into a werewolf, but the teen wolf died in a fall. In this sequel, he’s back, a revenant risen from his grave, and he joins the Vandals. The gang attack a hunchback, Gregore Frankenstein, who happens to be a descendant of the original monster maker. Having acquired the remains of his ancestor’s creature, which he keeps in a woods, Gregore revives the monster, and it attacks the Vandals. In the ensuing fight between monster and werewolf, a forest fire is ignited, which consumes the monster while the werewolf escapes to the safety of a river. (See? We told you that teenagers and young adults are dangerous!)

In “Becoming,” an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an outlaw motorcycle gang of vampires arrives in Sunnydale to party and terrorize the local citizenry, having heard that the slayer herself has been slain. (Unknown to them, Buffy’s friend, Willow Rosenberg, a powerful witch, has brought the dead slayer back to life).

A street gang of vampires also stars as the villainous protagonists of The Lost Boys, one of whose members, Michael Emerson, attracted to the gang’s sole female member, Star, drinks blood, which he thinks is wine and is himself transformed into one of the undead. A novel by the same title was written by Craig Shaw Gardner for release with the film. The movie was part horror, part comedy, as its tagline indicates: “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire.”

In Gangs of the Dead, rival Los Angeles street gangs join forces with one another--and the police--to fight off an army of zombies born, so to speak, of an extraterrestrial virus that arrives courtesy of a meteorite. President Ronald Reagan once observed that the threat of war by an extraterrestrial species would unite the warring nations of the earth against a common threat. For street gangs, an army of dead men walking seems to work, too.


“Everyday Horrors: Gangs” is the first in 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.

Everyday Horrors: Cornfields

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Southeast Kansas crop circles captured by NASA satellite

Cornfields don’t seem all that menacing, do they? After all, green stalks standing tall against a high blue sky, tasseled husked cobs full of golden nuggets hanging amid large, elliptical leaves are, for many, one of the symbols of the heartland, right? We speak of wholesome corn-fed girls and boys (and--a note of the eerie enters--corn-fed livestock). However, quite a few movies (and some novels) are set, in part--usually, the terrifying and horrible parts--in cornfields, as is a disturbing scene in my own novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt.

Remember Stephen King’s Children of the Corn? Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night? Jonathan Maberry has also set part of the action of his novel Ghost Road Blues in cornfields. So has Norman Partridge, in Dark Harvest.

Television shows and movies sometimes use cornfields as settings, too, although not all are chillers or thrillers. Smallville is a case in point. I’m Not Scared is another movie set, at times, in cornfields. Others movies that include cornfields as places where the action is include:

High Tension
Freddy vs. Jason: A Match Made in Hell
Hallowed Ground
The Silence of the Lambs
Scarecrow
Jeepers Creepers II
The Corn Stalker
I Walked with a Zombie
The Stand
Night of the Scarecrow
Shallow Ground

Okay, if cornfields spring up as settings in so many horror stories, there must be something horrific about them that’s not obvious enough to present itself upon one’s first consideration of the crop. Ergo, let’s reconsider them.

• They’re vast, covering acres and acres, and the corn stalks are tall--sometimes ten or twelve feet high. When a character is inside one, it’s like being in a forest of regularly spaced trees that go on, seemingly, forever, in all directions, and getting lost isn’t merely easy, it’s almost guaranteed.
• If the good guys can get lost in a cornfield, the bad guys in the cornfield can run into them. Maybe they’re even lying in wait in the cornfield, in multiple places, even, waiting for the lost ones to come their way!
• Other things can be in the cornfield, too--unexpected, nameless, and unimaginable things that are furious at having their territory disturbed and that are ravenous.
• There could be landmines, ditches, craters, and other booby traps in store among the ranks of corn.
• Cornfields can be claustrophobic, because the stalks are close and evenly spaced and, well, just everywhere, like a trap or a vegetative cage.
• At night, cornfields are dark and foreboding. A full moon, especially one moving among dark clouds, isn’t reassuring; quite the contrary, it’s ominous and eerie. The ground is uneven, and the cornstalks are everywhere, always in one’s face, no matter what direction one may take, and, of course, one is bound to get lost and stay lost. If one’s adversary is human, he will be equipped with night-vision goggles. If the enemy is not human--if it’s an animal, an extraterrestrial creature, a monster, or worse--it will have vision like a cat’s or be able to sense the good guys through its radar sense, like a bat, or sniff them out with their heightened sense of smell, like a wolf.
• Cornfields attract aliens. (Remember Signs?)

What do those strange crop circles mean, anyway, that have popped up in pastures and, yes, cornfields, the world over?

Maybe we don’t want to know.


“Everyday Horrors: Cornfields” 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.

Alternative Explanations, Part IV: Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Alternative Explanations, Part III: Telekinetic Characters,” we considered ways by which skeptics seek to debunk claims that some people make concerning their ability to move or affect objects simply by the use of mental powers, an act known as telekinesis. In the final part of this series, we’ll consider how your horror story’s skeptical character might challenge the belief that vampires, werewolves, and zombies actually exist.

Vampires are corpses that demons possess and animate, causing them to terrorize the living, upon whose blood they feed, sucking it from their victims’ jugular veins after piercing them with their vampire fangs. Anyone whom the vampire bites also becomes a vampire, an incident that has permitted a mathematician to deliver devastating proof that vampires do not and cannot exist.

According to “Math proves that the Buffy universe harbors no more than 512 vampires,” Costa Efthimiou and Sohang Gandi, authors of Ghosts, Vampires, and Goblins: Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality, vampires do not and cannot exist because, if they did, they would soon “depopulate the earth.” According to the authors, were a vampire to appear on the earth in the year 1600, when the world’s population numbered 536,870,911 people, and this vampire fed upon only one person per month, thereby transforming him or her into a vampire, each of which newly created vampire also fed upon one human per month, transforming him or her into another vampire, the whole human population of the planet would have been transformed into bloodsucking fiends in only thirty months, despite any offset that would be gained by the human birth rate. Therefore, Efthimiou and Gandi conclude:

. . . that vampires cannot exist, since their existence contradicts the existence of human beings. Incidentally, theological proof that we just presented is of a type known as reductio ad absurdum, that is, reduction to the absurd. Another philosophical principal related to our argument is the truism given the elaborate title, the anthropic principle. This states that if something is necessary for human existence, then it must be true since we do exist. In the present case, the nonexistence of vampires is necessary for human existence. Apparently, whomever devised the vampire legend had failed his college algebra and philosophy courses.

Sorry, Buffy Summers, but your career as a “vampire slayer” and the difficult sacrifices it entailed as you sought to defend the world against bloodsucking fiends were totally unnecessary and ridiculous, and you could have had the normal life that you so often claimed to crave. Apparently, you really were nothing more than the paranoid schizophrenic that you were diagnosed to be in one of your television series’ episodes.

Wait a minute! Buffy also fought other paranormal and supernatural threats, including demons, ghosts, werewolves, and zombies. If one or more of these monsters actually exist, maybe she wasn’t completely crazy, after all, and maybe she didn’t waste the best years of her life.

We’ve already dealt with demons, ghosts, and vampires. But what about werewolves and zombies? Might they exist? Somewhere? Somehow?

A werewolf is a animal (or a human) that can switch back and forth from being a human (or an animal) to being an animal (or a human) and is believed to devour humans. (It’s all rather complicated.) Unfortunately, as our spoilsport extraordinaire, The Skeptic’s Dictionary, points out, “there are no documented cases of any human turning into a wolf and back.” The best we can come up with is lycanthropy, a delusion in which its victim believes he’s a wolf, just as a person may believe that he is possessed by demons. Perhaps especially hirsute men have experienced this delusion, adding to the belief that men and wolves are--or, at times, can be--pretty much the same thing. Extreme hairiness does occur, in both men and women (ever heard of the “bearded lady”?), usually as a result of the genetic disorder known as hypertrichosis or such disorders as adrenal virilism, basophilic adenoma of the pituitary, masculinizing ovarian tumors, or Stein-Leventhal syndrome. At least, that’s what your horror story’s skeptical character can suggest to explain the misguided beliefs of others that werewolves are afoot. The Skeptic’s Dictionary article on “werewolves” links to photographs of people who are afflicted with these conditions.

We’re going to conclude our review of paranormal and supernatural phenomena and the explanations that a skeptical character may offer as alternatives to those that claim that these phenomena result from the existence and exercise of mysterious, occult powers by considering the zombie.

According to the drill, zombies are soulless bodies created by voodoo sorcerers. Scientists believe that zombies are actual people who are drugged, kidnapped, buried alive, disinterred, and kept as slave laborers:

The black magic of voodoo sorcerers allegedly consists of chemicals, various poisons (perhaps that of the puffer fish) which immobilize a person for days, as well as hallucinogens administered upon revival. The result is a complacent, paralyzed, or brain damaged creature used by the sorcerers as slaves, viz., the zombies.

The other kind of zombie--the corpse that is revived but without benefit of the soul it once had, seems unlikely (okay, downright impossible) to anyone beyond the age of nine or ten, so if it’s this kind that’s supposed to be running loose through your story’s setting, the skeptical character has every right to cast aspersions upon the view that the antagonists are really and truly revenants. Indeed, his or her failure to do so would be cause to transform this undoubting doubter into a zombie him- or herself.

Sources Cited in the “Alternative Explanations” series.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary
Live Science
Federation of American Scientists
NOVA Online
MythBusters
Ghosts, Vampires, and Goblins: Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality