Monday, January 14, 2008

The Horror of the Wax Museum

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman


What’s horrible about wax? When it takes the form of a human being, it, like other statues, whether of marble, plastic, or some other material, becomes a stand-in for a body--but it is still. It is stationary. It does not move. It neither smiles nor frowns, laughs nor cries. It utters not a word. It doesn’t so much as breathe.

Were its lungs to move, at least, one might suppose the figure represented by the wax or clay or stone or plastic were merely paralyzed. Without breath, however, there seems no question but that it must be dead. Therefore, we must surmise that the wax figure, like other statues, suggests the dead rather than the living. A wax museum is a mausoleum, a house of death.

However, the figures, we also feel, may be only pretending to be dead. They may breathe when our attention is focused elsewhere. Their hearts may beat in secret. They may grimace, or even gibber, when we are, for the moment, absent, or otherwise occupied. They might even be revenants, returned from the dead, disguising themselves as mere effigies of the quick. Even if they do not move, they may be alive. They may be watching our every move. They may be thinking. They may be communicating with one another by some secret, silent means. They may mean us harm, and, when the moment is right, they may strike, hurting or even destroying us, before we’ve realized what’s afoot.

Wax figures of human form are mirror images of ourselves, but they are silent and still. They seem to mock us with their waxen visages. There’s something unreal about them; at the same time, there is something all too real about them. They are not quite right. They invite our study and our thought. They bid us to consider them, and, in meditating upon their smooth features and their too-bright eyes, to consider ourselves, too, for, in studying them, we study ourselves.

Who was this Winston Churchill, this Joan of Arc, this Abraham Lincoln? Are the stories we’ve heard of them true? Could this man have led England through the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of its World War II years? Did this slip of a girl really defeat the armies both of England and of Burgundy? Was she truly burned alive at the stake before being hailed as a saint? Surely not? How could such cruelty have been possible against a mere girl? Did this tall and gangly man in top hat and tails hold together a nation rent by a terrible civil war which pit brother against brother and North against South, and was a simple bullet in the head enough to bring his craggy, noble features to the ruin of the grave? Looking at their wax effigies, it all seems unlikely. It seems impossible. If the true-life counterparts of these figures could do such amazing feats, perhaps we, who are yet made of flesh and blood, might do likewise, we hope.

But there are horrible figures in wax museums, too, some real, others imaginary, and they also ask us to think of them and of ourselves, reflected off and projected from them. Consider this one, Adolph Hitler. Did this absurd little man with the odd mustache really kill six million Jews and nearly defeat the combined military might of the world? It seems preposterous. Or what about that one, Ted Bundy? Could such a handsome, clean-cut young man really have killed nearly thirty women, one as young as fifteen, without remorse, taking pleasure, in fact, in such monstrous deeds? Perhaps, if so, then such creatures as the vampire, the witch, the werewolf, and the mummy, also depicted in wax and set up in their niches and alcoves, upon pedestals, might also creep in the night or even stalk the corridors and chambers of this very house of wax!

Shadows may precede their footfalls, so we should keep careful watch.

We fear the wax museum for much the same reason that we fear the funhouse, wherein we can see little in the dark until a burst of flame reveals a leering face or a snarling mouth full of fangs. When such sights as these, or a headless corpse, a skeleton, or a dagger in a bleeding heart, are revealed to us, amid the flaring fire or the flashing lightning, we are shocked and frightened, but only because, in our imaginations, we have envisioned monsters much more terrible, much more horrible, much more dreadful. We have, in short, scared ourselves. Half to death, perhaps.

That’s why the house of wax--or, for that matter, a haunted house, a subterranean cave, a remote resort, an abandoned church, a deep forest, a scientific laboratory, or the attics or basements or closets of our childhood homes--frightens us half out of our wits. We create the monsters. We are they.

There's Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself: Preying Upon People's Phobias

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Asked what he feared, Stephen King once replied, “Everything!”

While his reply might have been purposefully overstated, it suggests a way of enhancing the fear factor of the horror story. The horror fiction writer can enhance the audience’s aversion to and anxiety toward the story’s antagonist (the monster) by preying upon readers’ natural fears.

Fortunately, if they don’t fear quite everything, many people do fear many things. We tend to be rather fearful creatures.

First, there are the phobias. There are plenty. Although these fears are held to be irrational, there may be an organic cause for them, according to psychologists, who, Lea Winerman, author of “Figuring out phobias,” says, locate the amygdala, perhaps by way of the brain’s higher cortex, as the point of origin for fear. Dr. LeDoux offers an example of the split-second timing characteristic of the fear response to threatening stimuli: “If a bomb goes off, you might not quickly be able to evaluate any of the perceptual qualities of the sound, but the intensity is enough to trigger the amygdala. If you knew a lot about bombs, then through the cortex pathway you could evaluate the danger, but it will take longer.”

Although studies have focused on obsessive-compulsive disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias were once believed to represent “abnormalities in the fast-track through the amygdala,” Dr. Scott Rauch declares, but further research suggests, instead, that “the amygdala responds immediately to anything that might be threatening, but that with more time to process other areas of the brain suppress the amygdala's initial response.”

Fear, like other emotions, appears to have an organic and chemical basis.

Meanwhile, there are the phobias, such as (just to list some that begin with “a”) acrophobia (fear of heights), agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), androphobia (fear of males), arachnaphobia (fear of spiders), astraphobia (fear of thunderstorms), autophobia (fear of being alone), aviophobia (fear of flying). For those who are interested in others, a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) article, “The A-Z of Fear,” lists a number of select others, only one of which, anuptaphobia, the fear of remaining single, begins with “a.”

How can phobias be used to heighten horror? Many people are claustrophobic. They fear close places, which suggests that they also fear being trapped. A person who is trapped is at the mercy of his or her environment, which means that the trapped individual is at the mercy of other people (perhaps his or her captors, from whom the person had escaped before becoming trapped), of wild animals, of extreme temperatures, of hunger and thirst. The trapped individual has no control over circumstances or events. By setting a story in a cramped environment from which there is no escape, such as a subterranean cavern that becomes sealed off by a landslide or an avalanche, a writer takes advantage of the audience’s claustrophobia. If, before reading such a story, a person was not claustrophobic, afterward, he or she might be.

Many horror movies have been produced that revolve around wild animals as the monsters. One reason may be that men and women fear quite a few animals, including cats (ailurophobia), bees (apiphobia), spiders (arachnaphobia), bats (chiroptophobia), dogs (cynophobia), insects (entomophobia), horses (equinophobia), reptiles (herpetophobia), mice or rats (musophobia), snakes (ophidophobia), birds (ornithophobia), frogs (ranidaphobia), and animals in general (zoophobia).

In reading through this list, you probably thought of several movies that are based upon these phobias, but let’s list a few, anyway, for those who may have missed them:

  • Ailurophobia - Cat People
  • Apiphobia - Attack of the Killer Bees
  • Arachnaphobia - Arachnaphobia
  • Chiroprophobia - Dracula
  • Cynophobia - Cujo
  • Entomophibia - Them!
  • Musophobia - Willard
  • Ophidophobia - Snakes on a Plane; Anaconda
  • Ornithophobia - The Birds
  • Xenophobia - The War of the Worlds; Alien
  • Zoophobia (and some others as well) - The Food of the Gods
Another film, The Others, even preys upon photophobia, the irrational fear of light!

One might say that horror fiction itself is based upon phobophobia, the fear of fear.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Writing As A Schizophrenic, Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman


In Part I of "Writing As A Schizophrenic," we saw that, while two heads may be better than one, neither nature nor God has seen fit, more than rarely, to equip any of us with such an advantage. We also discovered a work-around. It may not be possible to grow a second head, but we can develop multiple perspectives on the same topic, or theme. Good news! There's another advantage to having several points of view toward something. In this case, the "something" is the object of fear.

An example may help, as examples usually do.

Let's bash the lowly snake. Let's say you imagine six different characters, each of which is afraid of the serpent. Some may be older, and others may be younger, and we should have some males and some females among the crowd we're imagining, so we can have a variety of perspectives--in this case, a variety of reasons (and non-reasons) as to why the serpent is feared. The result may be something like this:

Boy 1 fears the snake because of its appearance: it is long and narrow, without legs, and it has pitiless, lidless eyes, flared nostrils, and a flickering, forked tongue.

Boy 2 fears the snake because of the physical associations he imagines it has: it is slimy and cold (he believes), and its skin is coarse and raspy.

Girl 1 fears the snake because of the things a friend told her about an encounter with a blue racer that her grandmother had as a child. According to the grandmother’s story, she was in an outhouse when a blue racer inside the privy chased her from the toilet and across the backyard in front of a neighbor boy who saw her immodestly attired, the snake in hot pursuit. Irrationally, the girl fears that something similarly frightening and humiliating might happen to her (despite the fact that blue racers are not indigenous to her own locale).

Girl 2 fears the snake because of a personal experience that happened to her. To tease her, her pesky little brother once held a snake inches from her face before awakening her, causing her to have nightmares about the creepy reptiles ever since.

Woman 1 fears the snake because of its symbolic value. The serpent is associated with evil, temptation, and sin, and seeing one gives her the willies, making her think that she may be in the presence of Satan himself in his serpent’s disguise.

Woman 2 fears the snake because a cousin had the misfortune of being killed by a rattlesnake when he fell off his horse at an inopportune moment.

Man 1 fears the snake because it’s one of the creatures of which he is afraid, and he fears encountering one because, in doing so, he may expose his fear of the animal.

Man 2 fears the snake because, well, he fears snakes--in other words, he has snake phobia, or ophidiophobia, "an unwarranted fear of the reptiles" that causes him to suffer such symptoms as "shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, nausea, and. . . dread."

By imagining six different characters and the reason (or, in some cases, the non-reason) that each fears the snake, we’ve added verisimilitude to our character's or characters’ emotional reactions to serpents. We can combine one or more of these six emotional responses so that the same character has all of them or we can parcel them out to as many as six different characters. We can also scatter these emotional reactions throughout our story, keeping the appearances of the snake interesting because, each time it appears, it frightens the same character for a different reason (or non-reason) or frightens a different character because of his or her ideas and attitudes concerning the snake.

Once again, writing as a schizophrenic proves the old adage, “Two heads (or, in our case, two or more perspectives) are better than one.”

Creepy Crawlies Quiz

Note: Keep track of your answers so you can check your accuracy!

1. According to math, which monster is impossible?

A. Ghost
B. Vampire
C. Werewolf
D. Zombie

2. Which monster’s true purpose is to carry water away from buildings?

A. Demon
B. Gargoyle
C. Lamia
D. Witch

3. Which monster is created from the use of a toxic drug?

A. Vampire
B. Werewolf
C. Witch
D. Zombie

4. Which of these items were used to frighten away evil spirits?

A. Crystal balls
B. Jack-o-lanterns
C. Halloween masks
D. Ropes

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Christabel is about a(n)

A. Demon
B. Gargoyle
C. Lamia
D. Witch

6. Whose “keen fashion sense” helped her to fight monsters?

A. Buffy Summers
B. Daphne Blake
C. Nancy Drew
D. Prudence, Piper, and Phoebe Halliwell

7. According to ancient Hebrew legends, Adam’s first wife, Lilith, was a(n)

A. Ghost
B. Vampire
C. Witch
D. Zombie

8. Horus is an example of a(n)

A. Lycanthrope
B. Misanthrope
C. Therianthrope
D. Xenothrope

9. Which of these figures is considered an omen of death?

A. Banshee
B. Gorgon
C. Lamia
D. Siren

10. The enemies of the Norse gods were

A. Genies
B. Ghouls
C. Giants
D. Goblins

Click here to check your answers.

How To Rob A Grave

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Verisimilitude means "true to life," and it's a quality that enhances any story, those of horror included, as it helps in the suspension of disbelief if a fantastic tale is believable in its mundane circumstances. Therefore, should an author of such fiction assay to write a story about grave robbers, he or she ought to be familiar with the extraction methods of such ghouls.


Resurrectionists, as they were known in merry old England. supplied the vast majority of the corpses that medical schools needed for their anatomy courses, the dissection of dead bodies being outlawed except when capital punishment furnished the bodies. There were never enough executions, so the schools were in a constant need of fresh corpses. Body snatchers supplied this need. They used two methods to do so.

In one, a small opening was created, above the coffin. A manhole-size opening was then made in the casket, a rope was secured around the corpse, and the body was pulled free of the grave.
Since family members often mounted a watch upon the graves of their dearly departed and placed various obstacles in their way, such as criss-crossed iron bars, the resurrectionists adopted the strategy of opening the earth some distance from the targeted corpse, dug a narrow tunnel to the coffin, and withdrew the body from the end of the casket, pulling it through the tunnel. The disturbed earth was several yards from the violated coffin and, being of relatively small size, was difficult to spot.

Ed Gein, the Plainfield, Wisconsin serial killer upon whom such fictional killers as Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill are based, collected bodies and body parts from the graves he robbed in the Plainfield Cemetery and the Spirit Land Cemetery a few miles north of Plainfield. To collect just the heads, as he sometimes did, he simply twisted the neck back and forth until it snapped. He never sawed off the head, he said, because he never took a knife, a hatchet, or a saw with him on his after-hours forays into the local cities of the dead.

According to "Stealing Lincoln's Body," by Thomas J. Craugwell, a pair of would-be grave robbers, commissioned by Jim Kennally, tried to rob the grave of Abraham Lincoln, but they made the mistake of including two police informants as assistants, and the undertaking was botched when one of the detectives who were lying in wait for the robbers accidentally discharged his firearm. Kennally's men fled, only to be arrested a short time later at their hideout.

As a result of the attempted robbery, Lincoln's body was exhumed and reburied inside "a steel cage, lowered into a vault, and covered with cement."

According to "The 1876 Attempt to Steal Lincoln's Body!", therobbers, Terrence Mullen and John Hugehs, were actually counterfeiters, but their "chief engraver," Ben Boyd, had bee arrested; the theft of the president's body was to have provided a means of liberating Boyd and of generating a recovery fee of $200,000.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Evil As A Threat To Social or Communal Values

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A society fears the opposite traits or conditions that it values and regards these contraries as threats. Therefore, for the society that values certain qualities or circumstances, a creature that symbolizes the traits or conditions that are opposed to these values represents a monster. These are qualities and objects that the tribes of Beowulf value and the opposites of, or the threats to, these values:

The monsters in the poem threaten several of the Anglo-Saxon values that Beowulf defends. In addition, Grendel is Beowulf’s shadow--the monster represents values that the Anglo-Saxon society of which Beowulf is a member and, indeed, a leader. In exiling him from human company, God has cut him off from humanity. The attitudes, beliefs, emotions, ideas, and other qualities that Grendel embraces are spurned by the Danes and Geats. He, his mother, and their kind, as well as their values, are rejected by Beowulf and his people and by the other peoples of their world.

In myths that have developed a concept of paradise, such as that of the Norse, one can easily discern the social values behind or beneath the idea of heaven. These are the sources, in fact, of the bliss that the blessed experience in paradise. In Norse mythology, Valhalla, as the Hall of the Slain, is the warriors’ portion of the paradisiacal Asgard. By day, the dead warriors, restored to life, feast, drink, and enjoy the attentions of their Valkyrie lovers. In the afternoon, they take to the heavenly battlefield and hack at one another with axes, stab and slice one another to pieces with swords, and club one another with spiked maces, to be made restored to life, health, and wholeness at the end of the day by Odin. The cycle is repeated until the advent of Ragnarok, the final battle between the gods and the frost giants that ushers in a new age. The ticket to Valhalla is valor; only the warriors who die courageously on the battlefield are selected as residents of the Norse paradise. Those who die of illness or old age spend their afterlives in Hel. It is easy to identify the values that these myths reflect and their opposites, the threats against the values:

The early and modern Christian church represents a community more than a society as such. Its enemy, however, threatens its values just as other monsters may threaten a society’s (or even a civilization’s) values, as Beowulf threatens the values of the medieval Scandinavian nations’ values.

According to the New Testament, the “fruits of the Spirit” number nine and, together, comprise a truly loving and godly personality; their opposites represent threats to such a personality:

In Christianity, Satan is Jesus’ shadow (in the Jungian sense), because Satan is able to tempt Jesus. Therefore, Satan represents qualities or things that Jesus would like to have. Instead, Jesus represses his desires for these things, resisting the devil. To ask what Jesus values, we need simply to identify the temptations with which Satan tempted him. There were three.

In the first, Satan invited Jesus to end his fast by transforming a stone into a loaf of bread.

In the second, Satan challenged Jesus to throw himself down from a high place, arguing that God would send his angels to protect Jesus from harm.

In the third, Satan told Jesus that if he would worship him, Satan would give Jesus dominion over the world.

It seems that Jesus was tempted to set aside his dependence upon God for his food, to demonstrate his status as the Son of God and of God’s love for him as such, and to take upon himself the rule of humanity. In each case, Jesus was tempted to act according to his own will and to accomplish his desires in his own way, as Satan did when he rebelled against God and was exiled from heaven. Satan tempts Jesus to act out of pride rather than humility and out of his own will rather than out of faith. These are the impulses within himself that Jesus represses.

A History of Hell, Part III

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman


In their exhaustive survey of human civilization, historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel introduce many topics, including some that touch upon matters of interest to the writer of horror fiction, such as hell. This post provides a brief summary of the points that Will Durant (not yet joined in his venture by his wife) makes concerning this rather otherworldly theme in Volume IV, The Age of Faith, of The Story of Civilization:

  • Al Ghazali claimed that theists considered heaven and hell to be “spiritual conditions only,” rather than actual places.
  • The Sufi Moslems held that hell is but temporary and that, ultimately, salvation is universal.
  • Arab descriptions served as part of the basis for Dante’s vision of hell in The Divine Comedy.
  • For their inspiration for hell, the Hebrews referred to He Hinnom or Sheol, a valley in which rubbish heaps were continuously ablaze to prevent the spread of disease. Sheol, Durant observes, “was conceived of as a subterranean region of darkness that received all the dead.” The Hebrew hell consisted of seven stories , “with graduated degrees of torment.” It was a place of temporary torment for all but adulterers, those who shamed others publicly, and those who slandered or libeled others.
  • Irishman Johannes Scotus Eringena believed that heaven and hell were spiritual conditions, not physical locations.
  • Pope Gregory the Great held that hell is a physical place, wherein fire eternally burns the damned, tormenting them without destroying them; their suffering is increased, he maintained, by their being made to witness the torment of any of their loved ones who have also been damned and by their despair at ever being liberated or delivered from their suffering.
  • Durant says that medieval Catholic men and women “hoped vaguely for heaven, but vividly feared hell.” The Bulgarian king, Boris, was converted, it is said, by seeing a mural of hell that an artist painted upon his palace wall. Mystics claimed to have visions in which they saw the “geography of hell.” Satan, chained upon “a burning gridiron,” was alleged to snatch suffering sinners and crush them in his teeth, swallowing “them down his burning throat,” as “assistant demons with hooks of iron plunged the damned alternately into fire or icy water, or hung them up by the tongue, or sliced them with a saw, or beat them flat on an anvil, or boiled them or strained them through a cloth.” A sumptuous stench permeated the damned and their environs, and the flames gave no light, the darkness adding to the terror and the suffering of the damned. Christ was feared in his aspect of the judge of the living and the dead, for he could send or deliver the souls of the dead to eternal bliss or to everlasting damnation. “The devil,” Durant points out, “was no figure of speech but a life and blood reality, prowling about everywhere, suggesting temptations and creating all kinds of evil.” He was also quite the ladies’ man, fathering monstrous children, one of whom is alleged to have had “a wolf’s head and a scorpion’s tail.” His many assistants also tempted people and liked to lie with women as incubi, or sex demons. Although the people feared the greater demons, “a saving sense of humor saved this demonology, and most healthy males looked upon the little devils rather as poltergeist mischief-makers than as objects of terror,” and one exhausted demon, resting “on a head of lettuce. . . was inadvertently eaten by a nun.” Limbo was introduced as the abode of the unapprised infant, although St. Augustine had believed that they also went to hell. There was debate as to whether more souls would be saved and go to heaven or more souls would be damned and go to hell, and Moslems believed most Christians would go to hell, while Christians believed the opposite. No soul could be saved, the Roman Catholic Church contended, except through itself. Volcanoes were assumed to be “the mouths of hell,” and “their rumbling was a faint echo of the moans of the damned.” According to Pope Gregory, “the crater of Etna was daily widening to receive the enormous number of souls that were fated to be damned.” Pope Gregory IX held as heretical Raymond Lully’s assertion that the greatness of Christ’s love ensured the salvation, rather than the damnation, of the vast majority of souls. “The last moment of life” was considered to be “decisive for all eternity,” which added to the terror of life that many felt. Purgatory offered slight hope to the living. According to a legend, St. Patrick had a great pit dug, into which monks descended; “some returned. . . And described purgatory and hell with discouraging vividness.” Many other travelogues of hell also existed. As Durant notes, “Apocalyptic literature describing tours or visions of heaven or hell abounded in Judaism and Christianity,” and priests, such as Peter Damian, delivered “fiery sermons on the pains of hell.” Nevertheless, some challenged these doctrines of the faith--and, indeed, the faith itself, asking, for example, why God should have created the devil if he’d known in advance that the devil would sin and fall, whether a just and loving God could “punish finite sin with infinite pain,” and whether hell-fire would not at some point render the damned insensitive to its pain.
  • The doctrine of original sin was a theological attempt to account for “the biological theory of primitive instincts” and “the preaching of this doctrine” led to a diminishing of the “fear of hell. . . till the Reformation,” when it was “to reappear with fresh terror among the Puritans.”
  • St. Anselm said that only the “infinite atonement” of Christ could atone for the “infinite offense” of Adam and Eve, their sin being “infinite” because it had been directed “against an infinite being,” God. Therefore, only “the death of God become man could ransom humanity from Satan and hell. . . . and restore the moral balance of the world.”
  • For medieval people, “the earth was the chosen home of Christ, and the shell of hell, and weather was the whim of God.”
  • Roger Bacon endorsed the study and use of mathematics because this subject “should aid us in ascertaining the position of paradise and hell.”
  • Dante used many Arab sources as inspirations for his descriptions of hell, including the Koran, “the story of Mohammed’s trip to heaven and hell in Abu-l-Ala a;-Ma’arri’s Irisalat al-Ghufran. . . . and Ibn Arabi’s Futubat.
  • The hell of Dante’s Inferno is entered through an opening in the earth near a forest. The opening leads to the gates of hell, where an inscription reads, in part, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” In the poem, “hell is a subterranean funnel, reaching down to the center of the earth,” imagined by the poet as featuring “dark and frightening abysses between gigantic murky rocks; steaming, stinking marshes, torrents, lakes, and streams; storms of rain, snow, hail, and brands of fire; howling winds and petrifying cold; tortured bodies, grimacing faces, blood-stilling shrieks and groans.” The funnel leads through nine levels. Nearer the surface, the lesser sinners reside, whereas the greater sinners dwell at the lower levels. At the lowest level, the ninth circle of hell, traitors are housed, and, at the lowest of all points, “Lucifer lies buried to the waist in ice, flapping enormous wings from his shoulders, weeping icy tears of blood from the three faces that divide his head, and chewing a traitors in each of three jaws--Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.” Dante included actual people among the damned, including, in addition to popes. His Divine Comedy also describes purgatory and heaven, or paradise.


What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? Many sources have formed the idea of hell, including mythological, pagan, Jewish, and Christian ones.

For the first time, the idea is formed that hell may signify a spiritual condition, rather than a literal place. Theology seems to be losing out to psychology as an explanation of human behavior.

The idea that hell is permanent and eternal rubs some the wrong way, and the doctrine of universal salvation appears, both in Moslem and Christian faith, only to be condemned in Roman Catholicism as heretical. However, Limbo is allowed for unapprised infants, to spare their innocent souls from hell. For those who maintain faith in the existence of an actual, physical hell, the torment of the damned becomes more extreme, the imagination supplying many details as to the nature and effects of the suffering that the lost souls must endure there, forever, as if the catalogue of horrors somehow ensures their reality and, therefore, the reality of the hell in which they occur.

Many write of their supposed journeys to heaven and hell, as if they are reporting trips to foreign lands. Locating heaven and hell becomes a motive for the study of science and mathematics.

Satan and the lesser demons are believed to be incarnate and to be able, in fact, to have sexual relations with women, as incubi (and with men, as succubi). Lesser demons are considered mischievous rather than malignant.

Churchmen argue whether more souls will be saved or damned, with more supporting the latter over the former view.

Dante’s Inferno, borrowing from many earlier sources, Christian and otherwise, offers the most detailed geography of hell, populating it with both imaginary and actual historical figures, including popes, suggesting that hell is a real place to which anyone, including leaders of the church itself, may be tormented in a variety of real and agonizing ways.

Today, the imagining of hell continues in sermons and in books written by people who claim to have undergone near-death experiences, and the debate continues as well as to whether a literal hell exists or, whether, for that matter, literal demons live and stalk the earth.

Those who appear as damned in literary texts represent the values of the society or the poet or other writer in whose work the damned appear, for the values of the lost souls are the values that are rejected by these creators of hell. Therefore, hell can be thought of, in the Jungian sense, as representing a psychic reservoir, akin to the universal mind, in which humanity’s collective shadow archetype lives, in bits and pieces, disguised as this or that individual or type of person. For example, in Dante’s hell, from least (closest to the surface) to the greatest (farthest down), these are the damned; whose values represent the opposites of those embraced by the poet himself:

  1. Unbaptized infants
  2. Lustful
  3. Gluttonous
  4. Greedy and wasteful
  5. Wrathful and sullen
  6. Heretical
  7. Violent
  8. Fraudulent
  9. Treacherous

Plus, did anyone notice the historical references to "mouths of hell"? Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, apparently did, because at least two are mentioned in his television series, one of which was located beneath the Sunnydale High School library (or, in the high school later built on the same site, the principal's office)!

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Todorov:

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

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

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

My Cup of Blood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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