Monday, May 31, 2010

Alternate Endings: When One Conclusion Is As Good As Another

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Aristotle condemned the irrelevant, tacked-on endings with which the playwrights of his day sometimes concluded their dramas (Poetics), and, Edgar Allan Poe contended that the end of a story should be implicit in and follow from the narrative’s beginning (“The Philosophy of Composition”), although not in an obvious way. Apparently, some filmmakers disagree, for, recently, alternate endings seem to have become all the rage.

According to the fine folk of Wikipedia (whoever they may be), “alternate ending is a term used (usually in movies) to describe the ending of a story that was planned or debated but ultimately unused in favor of the actual ending. Generally, alternate endings are considered to have no bearing on the canonical narrative” (“Alternate Ending”). (By “canonical,” the anonymous authors presumably mean the film as it was actually released.)

The online encyclopedia article offers a list of twenty eight alternate endings, including those of 1408, Army of Darkness, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

In 1408, “Mike Enslin dies in the fire he causes. At his burial, his wife is approached by the hotel manager, offering his personal belongings. She refuses [to accept them], and he lets her know that her husband did not die in vain. Back in his vehicle[,] he listens to the tape recorder, and screams in fear as he sees Enslin’s burned[,] deformed body in his back seat for only a moment. The film closes with an apparition of Mike Enslin still in 1408, muttering to himself, and finally exiting the room, hearing his daughters [sic] voice” (“1408 [film]”).

In Army of Darkness, “after Ash drinks the potion that would make him sleep long enough to wake up in his own time, he accidentally drinks too much and wakes up in the future. In the new time[,] it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland of a world and he screams ‘I slept too long!’” (“Army of Darkness”).

In I Know What You Did Last Summer, “Julie receives an invite [sic] to a pool party and read[s] an email that reads ‘I still know” ("I Know What You Did Last Summer [film]").

Those who have seen these films are likely to agree that their actual endings are more satisfying and integral to their stories than these alternate possibilities.

1408 ends with Enslin recovering “in a New York hospital, Lily at his bedside. He swears that he saw Katie, but Lily refuses to believe him. After his recovery[,] Enslin moves back in with Lily, beginning work on a new novel about his stay in 1408. While sorting through a box of items from his night in 1408[,] that [sic] Lily wants to discard, Enslin comes across his Mini Cassette recorder. After some difficulty[,] he manages to get the tape to play; it begins with Enslin's dictation of 1408’s appearance, but cuts in with audio from his interaction with the apparition of his daughter. [In shock,] Lily, who is standing by him[,] listening to the audio, drops a box she was holding. . . . The scene ends with Enslin staring at Lily's face” (Wikipedia, “1408 [film]”).

Army of Darkness concludes “with Ash back at the S-Mart store, telling a co-worker all about his adventure back in time, and how he could have been king. After this, a deadite starts wreaking havoc on the store (it is implied that he again raised the dead by saying the wrong words needed to travel through time), and Ash slays the creature. The film ends with Ash. . . saying, ‘Sure I could have been King, but in my own way, I am a king.’ He then says out loud, while kissing a female customer, ‘Hail to the King, baby!’” (Wikipedia, “Army of Darkness”).

In I Know What You Did Last Summer, Julie “receives a letter resembling the one she had got[ten] from Ben, but it. . . contains [only] a pool party invitation. Julie returns to the bathroom, which has filled with steam. On the shower door, ‘I STILL KNOW’ is written. Ben jumps through the shower door, attacking her” (Wikipedia, “I Know What You Did Last Summer [film]”).

The Wikipedia articles concerning the alternate endings of two of these movies explain why they were dropped and the movies’ existing endings were substituted. The reactions of test audiences at screenings of the movies before their public release did not favor the original (that is, the “alternate”) endings or studio executives ordered that a different ending be filmed:

“Director Mikael Håfström has stated that the ending for 1408 was reshot [sic] because test audiences felt that the original ending was too much of a ‘downer’”, [sic] and “when test audiences didn’t approve of [Sam] Raimi's original ending [to Army of Darkness], he cut the film down to the international cut that now exists on DVD. When it was again rejected by Universal, Raimi was forced to edit it again to the U.S. [sic] theatrical version.” (No explanation as to why the original ending to I Know What You Did Last Summer is provided by the authors of its Wikipedia article.)

In short stories and novels, which are usually produced by a lone author or, occasionally, a pair of collaborators, no advance audience reacts to the narratives’ endings before the stories or novels are published. The emphasis is upon the artwork, not the public’s reaction to it. In other words, the artists determine how and why their work should end the way that it does, and Aristotle and Poe, among others, provide the guidance that most such writers follow in ending their stories: the conclusion must both be logical and organic, as it were, flowing from the narrative’s structure, from the very beginning, and not tacked on for convenience’s sake or, these critics probably would have contended, their audience’s, readers’, or producers’ approval. Whose take is wiser, those of Aristotle and Poe or the Hollywood film industry’s? The filmmakers or their audiences? Or is the very question itself a false dilemma? Could the filmmakers be right in some cases and the test audiences’ reactions be correct in others? It’s impossible to say for certain, but devising several possible alternate endings may be useful as a tool for sustaining situational irony until the very end of a story, although, in the end, a writer should be more concerned with his or her art than with pleasing the reader (or the audience).

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Religious Fundamentalism Is Not the Answer in "The Vanishing"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


In a previous post, I addressed Bentley Little’s thematic use of aberrant sexuality in The Vanishing, observing that he employs it in this novel for the same purpose as he does in his others: it expresses and represents the degenerate nature of the men and women who engage in it. I concluded that, in Little’s fiction, sexual debauchery suggests that men and women, separated not only from God and nature, but also from any sense of moral decency or even decorum, are haunted, or even possessed, by an idolatrous sensuality and a demonic sexual deviance and that, regardless of the shapes and appearances of the monsters in Little’s novels, sexual perversion--or, rather, what it symbolizes--the moral degeneracy that issues from the godlessness and idolatry of modern, secular society--is the true demon about which he writes, the nature of the human beast, unclothed by cultural pretenses and rhetorical rationalizations.

However, Little has no evangelical mission. He seeks not to proselytize. He wishes to make no converts to traditional Christian faith, in either its Roman Catholic or its Protestant versions. Indeed, Little appears to have serious misgivings about Christian faith as it is interpreted and practiced by both Roman Catholics and Protestants. His omniscient narrator makes this clear in such comments as these:

. . . “Reverend Charles asked about you the other day.”

“Really?” he said noncommittally.

“He knows you’re a writer and thought you might help us out with our letter-writing campaign. The school board refused to allow science teachers in the district to talk about creationism or intelligent design. We’re trying to get that changed.”

“Mom. . .”

“Don’t worry. I told him you wouldn’t be interested.”

“Yeah, you’re right. They should be teaching religion at school and leave the controversial stuff like science for the parents to teach their kids at home.”

“Don’t you start blasphemin’ with me.”

. . . His mom had always been religious, but she’d never been nutty. He wasn’t sure that was still true. . . .

. . . Disbelief in evolution was no longer just a fringe viewpoint. An antiintellectual [sic], anti-science attitude no seemed to hold sway over vast sections of the country (17-18).

After characterizing Christians as irrational, if not insane, Little suggests that their holy book is unsatisfactory as a guide to anthropology, using myths to explain away, rather than to explain, mysteries of nature:

It was a graveyard unlike any they had ever seen, not least for the fact that the graves had been big enough to accommodate giants. . . . and footprints led away from the pit through the muddy soil, monstrous footprints that were not only four times the size of an ordinary man’s but resembled those of neither animal nor human.

. . . And how had the one giant come back to life and emerged from the grave?

“There were giants in the earth in those days,” Morgan James said, quoting the Bible as if that explained everything.

Of course, it explained nothing . . . (129).

Next, the author implies that Christians are stubborn and prefer to attribute impossibilities to God rather than to accept the possibility that bizarre phenomena may contradict their faith in the order and intelligibility of the universe and the rule of an omnipotent and omniscient creator, behavior that an agnostic character sees as fanatical:

. . . in this new land they were encountering phenomena no civilized man had ever seen. But the religious among them took this to mean that God Himself was intervening on their journey, performing miracles, scourging the land of evil, and for the rest of their trip they had prayed and proselytized to the point where [sic] Alf Thomas raised his hands to the sky and yelled, “God, if you’re up there, strike these” men “mute so I don’t have to listen to their. . . voices any more.! Do. . . it. . . right. . . now!” When nothing happened, he turned to Emily Smith and her group of fanatics and said, “See? Either God is dead or He doesn’t exist. Now shut the hell up!”

But of course they didn’t (131).

Many other passages depict Christians in an unfavorable light, such as this one, that implies believers’ trust is both absurd and inadvisable, if not, indeed potentially fatal:

So they parted ways after happening upon the well-worn tracks of the Mormon Trail and connecting with another wagon train a few miles up the route. The religious contingent headed west on the California Trail, claiming God would protect them from the winter, though they had been warned by fellow seekers that Donner Pass was inaccessible. The remainder headed northwest along the Oregon Trail. . . (134).
If aberrant sex marks humanity as morally degenerate, their faith (or fundamentalism, mistaken for faith), as Little characterizes it (as irrational, unscientific, fanatical, absurd, and potentially fatal--the Donner party was caught in a blizzard and, when some died of exposure or starvation, the others cannibalized them), depicts them as hopelessly dependent upon a vain and foolish tradition that, far from having any survival value, is not only fantastic and incredible but is also likely to get them killed.

What answer, if any, to the problem of the human predicament, as involving moral degenerates whose faith is absurd and impotent, does Little’s fiction suggest? I’ll save the answer to this question for my next post concerning The Vanishing.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

House of Horrors

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman
Horror stories are like houses. In constructing a domicile, builders lay a foundation and, then, according to the blueprints designed by the architect, with the needs and desires of its future residents in mind, the construction crew builds the residence.
 
After the family moves into the house, they must furnish it and maintain it, repairing fixtures and appliances, repainting the interior and the exterior, landscaping the yard. They may also improve the property, adding rooms or, perhaps, a backyard swimming pool or tennis court.
 
Some houses--bungalows, perhaps--are short stories; others, such as mansions, are novels. In any case, particular rooms are provided for specific needs and purposes: a living room for socializing, a dining room for enjoying meals, a kitchen for preparing the meals to be enjoyed, bedrooms for sleeping, one or more bathrooms for bathing, an attic for storage, and so forth. The narrative equivalent to the room is the scene, just as its counterpart to the yard is the setting.
 
The family, of course, corresponds to the narrative’s characters. As any television sitcom shows, conflicts arise from the interactions of the family members. Consider the horror stories which take place in a house (or, for that matter, a castle or a hotel): The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Hill House, The Castle of Otranto.
 
Of course, a community is an extension of a family, in which case, the rooms, as it were, of the house, are not chambers but other buildings: the library, stores, the police station, the fire station, the hospital, the high school or college campus, the dentist’s office, the community swimming pool, the movie theater.
 
The characters are the townspeople, and the setting is the landscape both in and around the town. As Stephen King’s novels show, a story becomes more complicated and more sophisticated when it takes a village to tell a story. Most horror writers have written one or more short stories or novels set in small towns or even big cities. Rather than the personal or the familial, such stories typically deal with the social aspects of human existence.
 
If houses and families can be expanded into villages and communities, small towns and their residents can be extended into nations and nationalities or, for that matter, into the entire world and its global community, the human race. Think Stephen King’s The Stand, Robert McCammon’s Swan’s Song, or H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
 
The concerns of such narratives expand accordingly: instead of rooms, cities; instead of yards or landscapes, nations; instead of a family, humanity itself. The theme of such stories is typically scientific (whether in the biological or sociological sense), for these narratives are often about the survival of the species itself.
 
Whether it is housed in a single-family residence, a small town, a nation, or the planet itself, horror is primarily a family affair. It’s just that the concept of family changes at each level, from mom, dad, and the kids to the townspeople to one’s fellow citizens to humanity itself. At every level, problems arise, helping writers to define and to redefine what it means to be a human being living in a world of menaces and malevolence. Hank Ketchum never had it so good.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

. . . And So It Begins. . . .

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


Elsewhere, I have analyzed the basic plot that is common to horror fiction in general. One of the elements of such a plot is the introduction, following an initial period of relative calm and normalcy, of a bizarre incident which is followed, in turn, by a series of other strange occurrences.

Most of the time, writers of horror fiction, accomplished or aspiring, have little trouble imagining such incidents, and the news supplies a wealth of possibilities when one’s imagination does fail. However, as the proverb suggests, “all is grist for the mill,” and no source of ideas for such incidents should be overlooked. One such source, for me (and, I daresay, many others) are the drawings, paintings, and photographs that are readily accessible in any Internet image browser, such as AOL, Google, Yahoo!, or Flickr.

Such browsers are easy to use, of course: simply type a specific word or group of words into the browser’s “search” window and press the SEARCH button on the computer screen or press your keyboard’s Enter key. A whole page of thumbnail images will appear, from which a specific one may be selected with the click of a mouse and enlarged, once it appears, by another click of the mouse atop the picture.

A list or keywords (“bizarre,” “eerie,” “horror,” “scary,” “strange,” “weird,” for example), will solicit hundreds of such images. More than one is likely to be appropriate as a basis for the bizarre incident that will kick off your narrative, and several may be chosen to continue the series of bizarre events that follow it. Here are a few that I came across as I prepared this post:

  • A bloody, open mouth screams from within the palm of a hand.
  • A streetlamp illuminates the side of a massive building, but leaves dark everything without the circle of its light.
  • A set of butcher’s knives hangs from a magnetic wall strip; one of the knives is missing from the lineup.
  • A close-up shot of a toy soldier’s face, looking eerily inhuman.
  • The silhouette of a young girl pressing her face and arm to a foggy window; in one hand, she holds a meat cleaver.
  • A dark tornado approaching across a grassy plain.
  • A highway disappearing into a thick white fog as it curves round the edge of a thick forest.

Any (or none) of these images may initiate a story’s horror, depending upon the story’s needs and the writer’s mood.

Of course, after one selects an image or a series of images, he or she must develop a purpose for their use--an explanation, in other words, of their origin, a reason for the images' use in the narrative, and an account (eventually) of how and why they cohere or are related one to the next.

  • The bloody, open mouth that screams from within the palm of a hand could be the result of a psychotic person’s hallucination.
  • A streetlamp that illuminates the side of a massive building, but leaves dark everything without the circle of its light is a natural enough image to require no explanation of its origin, but what about it occasions the horror of the story and how is it related to successive incidents?
  • A set of butcher’s knives hangs from a magnetic wall strip; one of the knives is missing from the lineup. Do the knives belong to a chef or a serial killer? Which knife is missing, and why? Will the blade be used to carve a chicken, a victim, or a cadaver?
  • A close-up shot of a toy soldier’s face, looking eerily inhuman may not call for a paranormal or a supernatural explanation (although it could), but, again, how and why is this image the springboard of horror in the story to follow?
  • The silhouette of a young girl who presses her face and arm to a foggy window as she holds a meat cleaver may be fairly normal (depending upon the greater context of the narrative), but why does she have the cleaver and what, pray tell, does she intend to do with it? And whose window is she's pressed against, trying, perhaps, to see whether a particular resident is home?
  • A dark tornado’s approach across a grassy plain is, once again, a natural event, but who or what is it approaching, and what happens next?
  • A highway disappearing into a thick white fog as it curves round the edge of a thick forest is not in itself unusual, but what lies around the curve, hidden by the fog, may be both terrible and horrific.

Finally, are any (all) of these seemingly disparate images in some way related? If so, how? If not, what sequence of bizarre incidents does follow, and how are the subsequent events related to the initial one and to one another?

. . . And so the story begins. . . .

Sunday, May 23, 2010

The Fly in the Ointment of Being a Ghost in a Machine

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Monsters are degenerate. They represent deterioration or disintegration. As such, they are living object lessons, as it were, examples of what will happen to the rest of us if we pursue their course or “suffer the slings and arrows,” as William Shakespeare might put it, of their “outrageous fortune.” Potentially, we are all Frankenstein’s monster; any of us could be the creature of the Black Lagoon; you and I could both become the next werewolf, vampire, or zombie. Horror fiction is about the could-be versions of ourselves, and, often, these could-be versions are our lesser, degenerate selves.

The authors of horror fiction imply that another’s hubris can cause us to suffer, as arrogant Victor Frankenstein, in seeking to play God, makes his creature suffer. Frankenstein lusts after power and glory (or fame), and, like the novel’s author, Mary Shelley, other writers of horror fiction suggest that our lusts, sexual or otherwise, may bring about our downfall, just as the sexual desire of the creature of the Black Lagoon for Kay Lawrence and the infatuation of King Kong with Ann Darrow lead to these monsters’ downfalls and deaths. If we do not control the animal within, we may become a werewolf; if we parasitize others too freely, whether emotionally, financially, sexually, or otherwise, we may become vampires; if we are too passive and compliant (or indifferent), we may be transformed into zombies by those whom we serve (or, both history and politics show, even by those who supposedly serve us).


Often, monsters expose dangers to society and faults within a nation or a system, but they can also show us the perils of ourselves and others. In addition, horror stories show us that it is humans’ inhumanity to others that frequently creates monsters. Beowulf’s Grendel attacks the Danes because, ostracized by human society, he feels envious of the warriors’ camaraderie and fellowship. Grief-stricken, Grendel’s mother is also motivated by her passion: she seeks vengeance against the Geatish warrior, Beowulf, who killed her son. In the same epic poem, a dragon seeks to avenge the theft of gold that it guards--gold that it has itself stolen from the graves of dead warriors. Such stories suggest what is wrong with us as a group.

However, other monsters, such as Godzilla, the gigantic ants of the movie Them!, and the flora of M. Night Shyamalan’s abysmal film The Happening represent--indeed, embody--the dangers of environmental pollution, whereas such menaces as Frankenstein’s monster, the hybrid human-animal creatures of H. G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, the gigantic plants and animals of Wells’ novel The Food of the Gods (and the movie based upon it), the human fly of David Cronenberg's movie The Fly, and the dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg's movie Jurassic Park (based upon the novel of the same title by Michael Crichton), represent, as do the antagonists of many other movies, the dangers of overreaching scientists who would manipulate and control nature, regardless of the potential risks involved in their experiments. Madmen as monsters are another type of this menace. Such characters appear in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” and in such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (based upon Robert Bloch’s novel of the same title) and Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence of the Lambs (based upon the novel, of the same title, by Thomas Harris). Such movies suggest what is wrong with our behavior as individuals.


Still other monsters, such as the blob (in Irvin Yeaworth's movie The Blob) or the cosmic forces and entities that appear in many of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories suggest that the threat to humanity is an external force that is beyond our control; the menace comes from outside, infecting us or subjecting us to its will. Such stories imply that, despite our knowledge and our wit, we are but the pawns of fate.

In short, many of the monsters of horror fiction suggest that something is terribly wrong with us as a society or a species, or with our actions as individuals, or with the very cosmos in which we live. Evils, such movies, imply, are social, biological, or existential; they attack (and lay bare) our weaknesses as dualistic creatures whose structure is both physical and spiritual and who necessarily live in societies which are predicated upon and, indeed, result from, both aspects of our nature as ghosts, as it were, in the machines of our own material bodies.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

The Metaphysics of Horror

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman



From a religious point of view, the problem of evil, as philosophers call the idea that a loving, omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal God allows evil and suffering, seems to suggest one of these possibilities:

  • There actually is no God.
  • God is less than he is believed to be (for example, not loving, omniscient or omnipotent).
  • God does not intervene in nature or human affairs.
  • The devil (or chief evil entity) is equally as powerful as God.

Sooner or later, if only implicitly, horror fiction must grapple with this philosophical conundrum.

Dean Koontz wrestles with the problem of evil in The Taking, Stephen King in Desperation.

In the former’s novel, the arrival of Satan and his minions, mistaken for an extraterrestrial invasion of alien spacecraft, occurs when these dark forces seek to usher in Armageddon. The nature of the problem of evil is not directly assessed, although Koontz’s novel suggests that, despite its opposition to God’s goodness, evil does have a divine purpose, unintended though that effect may be on the part of the devil. Rather as in the book of Genesis (crossed, perhaps, with the Norse concept of Ragnarok, in which a man and a woman, surviving the destruction of Middle-earth, repopulate the planet at the beginning of a new age), a remnant of humanity is preserved against the wholesale destruction that ensues the hellish invasion. In place of Noah’s ark, the protagonist, having been impregnated by her husband, bears the seed of humanity’s hopes for the future within her womb. The old world dies that a new one may be born.

If Koontz’s novel is informed (by way of Norse mythology) by the Genesis account of the flood and the survival of Noah and his family (and two of every other species on the planet), King’s story seems to take, as its foundation, the Old Testament story of Job.

In King’s novel, God has summoned protagonist David Carver and several others to stop the demon Tak, who has recently escaped from a caved-in mine. In the process, David loses his entire family and concludes that “God is cruel.” However, another character, writer John Marinville, gives the teenager a note that he, Marinville, found while he was in the demon’s lair, a get-out-of-school-early pass that David had left nailed to a tree in his backyard, hundreds of miles away, before he and his family undertook the vacation that ended in Desperation. On the note is a message that wasn’t on the note originally, a message that, presumably, is from God himself: “God is love.” To effect the greater good, love must, at times, take a harsh and unbending stand toward evil, even at the cost of great sacrifice. David is too young to know the ways of God, but, King suggests, like longsuffering Job, the protagonist must trust in the goodness of God and take the deity at his word that he is a God of love who intervenes in human affairs for purposes which are inscrutable to human beings but are just, nevertheless, and, on some greater scale, probably merciful as well.

Koontz, a Roman Catholic, and King, who grew up in the Protestant tradition but claims to subscribe to no “traditional” religious faith and to have a non-traditional idea of God, both offer a view of the problem of suffering which is rooted, at least in part, in the Judeo-Christian faith (and, in Koontz’s case, perhaps Norse mythology), as it is expressed, respectively, in the book of Genesis (and the Eddas) and the book of Job. Although neither author presents an original thesis concerning the problem of evil, each draws attention to the issue in an entertaining and inventive fashion. (A recent film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, also enquires as to the basis of evil and suffering, leaving the answer open.)

The mystery of iniquity is perhaps unsolvable, but it clearly still retains a powerful interest upon the imaginations of writers and readers today, just as it has for several millennia now.

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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