Learning from the Masters: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

In Chapter 47 of their latest novel, Fever Dream, authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child shed light upon their technique for creating mysterious and engaging thrillers.

To NYPD’s Captain Laura Hayward, a stand-in, at this point in the story, for the reader, who may be as mystified as to the protagonist’s actions as Hayward herself, the investigation that her boyfriend, homicide detective Lieutenant Vincent (“Vinnie”) D’Agosta, and his friend, the FBI’s Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, are conducting concerning the murder, twelve years ago, of Pendergast’s wife, Helen, seems to be “a typical Pendergast investigation, all hunches and blind alleys and conflicting evidence, strung together by highly questionable police work” (235).

However, from the author’s perspective (and from Hayward’s as well, once Pendergast explains his and D’Agosta’s findings to date), “the bizarre story” has “an internal logic,” for Preston and Child, of course, have plotted the story in full, in advance of their writing a single word of it. However, because they withhold relevant information from the reader, supplying key material in a piecemeal fashion, the authors deny both D’Agosta, Pendergast, and the reader the very context that the writers have had from the beginning. As a result, “the bizarre story” they tell, through Pendergast, has “an internal logic” to them, but not to the reader (or, initially, to the investigators or to Hayward, before she is clued in).

Of course, eventually, Preston and Child must allow their protagonist, with the help of D’Agosta, to figure out at least something of what is going on--in other words, to causally connect the pieces of evidence and the clues that the investigators discover--and, to gain Hayward’s confidence when he needs her to take over D’Agosta’s role as his assistant, following the lieutenant’s being gravely wounded, Pendergast shares his theory concerning the significance of the evidence:

. . . Pendergast explained his late wife’s obsession with Audubon; how they had traced her interest in the Carolina Parakeet, the Black Frame, the lost parrot, and the strange fate of the Doane family. He read her passages from the Doane girl’s diary: a chilling descent into madness. He described their encounter with Blast, another seeker of the Black Frame, himself recently murdered--as had been Helen Pendergast’s former employer at Doctors With Wings, Morris Blackletter. And finally, he explained the series of deductions and discoveries that led to the unearthing of the Black Frame itself (235).

In Fever Dream, the authors also suggest an analogy (not an especially original one, but one which is, nevertheless, illuminating) concerning their narrative technique. Due to his association with Pendergast, D’Agosta has learned, “long ago. . . to never get caught without two things: a gun and a flashlight” (138). As if the investigators were in a darkened room throughout their investigation, most of the contents of the room (the facts and clues of the investigation) are unseen (unknown, overlooked, or not understood). Therefore, facts, clues, and other pertinent information are brought to light (discovered or recognized as relevant) only a little at a time, as the flashlight’s beam (perception, comprehension, analysis, and evaluation) exposes them--and, when it does expose them, these pieces of evidence are usually not in any apparent logical or systematic order. As a result, both to the investigators and the reader at the moment that the evidence is gleaned), it may well seem that the investigators are, indeed, pursuing “hunches,” following “blind alleys,” and collecting “conflicting evidence” blindly and haphazardly. It is only after they have gathered the evidence, determined its significance, and interpreted its meaning that D’Agosta and Prendergast (mostly Pendergast) can develop a theory that fully illuminates their findings so that their work (or their “bizarre story”) begins to have “an internal logic.”

In his discussion with Hayward at his estate, following D’Agosta’s grave injury, Pendergast, in fact, models his method, deducing the meaning (and thereby providing the explanation for) “the central mystery of the case, the birds,” linking Audubon’s illness (the cause of his genius as a painter) to Helen’s discovery of the same link between Audubon’s genius and his sickness:

“And all she wanted with the painting was confirmation for this theory?” [Hayward asks Pendergast].

Pendergast nodded. “That painting is the link between Audubon’s early, indifferent work and his later brilliance. It’s proof of the transition he underwent. But that doesn’t quite get to the central mystery in this case: the birds.”

Hayward frowned. “The birds?”

“The Carolina Parakeets. The Doane parrot.”

Hayward herself had been puzzling over the connection to Audubon’s illness, to no avail. “And?”

Pendergast sipped his coffee. “I believe we’re dealing with a strain of avian flu.”

“Avian flu? You mean, bird flu?”

“That, I believe, is the disease that laid Audubon low, that nearly killed him, and that was responsible for his creative flowering. His symptoms--high fever, headache, delirium, cough--are all consistent with flu. A flu he no doubt caught dissecting a Carolina Parakeet” (236).

Nor is Pendergast through with demonstrating his powers of deduction, for he next links the birds to the Doane family’s artistic brilliance and the madness to which they later succumbed, citing significant “similarities” between the family’s behavior and Audubon’s own conduct:

“But all that still doesn’t explain how those parakeets [the Carolina Parakeet specimens Helen stole from the Audubon collection] are linked to the Doane family” [Hayward declares to Pendergast].

“It’s quite simple” [Pendergast explains]. The Doanes were sickened by the same disease that struck Audubon.”

“What makes you say that?”

“There are simply too many similarities, Captain, for anything else to make sense. The sudden flowering of creative brilliance. Followed by mental dissolution. Too many similarities--and Helen knew it. That’s why she went to get the bird from them [the Doanes]” (237).

He is also certain that Helen had known the same cause-and-effect relationship between the birds and the flowering genius (and madness) of both Audubon and the Doane family, which is why she visited the museum housing specimens of birds personally preserved by Audubon and why she visited the Doane family, stealing both museum specimens and the parrot that the Doane family had found and adopted as a pet. Helen had meant, Pendergast contends, to “extract from them [the birds] a live sample” of the avian virus, both to “keep it from spreading” and “to test it. . . to confirm her suspicions” that the virus was what had caused the artist’s and family members’ artistic genius and subsequent madness. Helen’s knowledge is attested to, Pendergast says, by the precautions she had taken to avoid infecting herself with the virus:

“. . . She wore leather gloves, and she stuffed the bird and its cage into a garbage bag. Why? Initially, I assumed the bag was simply for concealment. But it was to keep herself and her car from contamination” [Pendergast tells Hayward].

“And the leather gloves?’

“Worn no doubt to conceal a pair of medical gloves beneath. Helen was trying to remove a viral vector from the human population. No doubt the bird, cage, and bag were all incinerated--after she’d taken the necessary samples, of course” (237-38).

Preston and Child do not merely have characters discuss past investigative findings. The authors also use dialogue between their characters to present rhetorical questions pertaining to as-yet-undiscovered aspects and implications of the investigation, as in this exchange between Pendergast and Hayward, wherein the reader is advised, as it were, of three other, related questions implicit in the case:

“Isn’t there another question you’re forgetting?” Hayward asked.

Pendergast looked at her.

“You say Helen stole the parrots Audubon studied--the ones that supposedly sickened him. Helen also visited the Doane family and stole their parrot--because, as you also say, she knew it was infected. By inference, Helen is the common thread that binds the two events. So aren’t you curious what role she might have had in the sequencing and inoculation?” (238)

Masters of their craft, Preston and Child show how, in skilled hands, authors can provide data without context, piece together a theory that, using deductive and inductive reasoning to analyze causes and effects and to infer implications concerning the significance and meaning of such evidence, explains criminal undertakings and their perpetrators’ motives and goals while, at the same time, keeping unresolved questions that are important to the developing case before the reader’s mind. Whether an aspiring author writes horror fiction or thrillers, he or she can learn a good deal from the example of such masterful storytellers.

Fever Dream’s Opening Paragraphs (Chapters 4 through 6)

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

The fourth chapter of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Fever Dream does not begin with a tagline that identifies the action’s location, for the action continues in the setting that was identified in the previous chapter’s tagline, that of “The Fever Trees.” The chapter’s opening paragraph opens in media res, or in the middle of things, with the protagonist’s regaining consciousness:

The world came back into focus. Pendergast was in one of the rondevaals. The distant throb of a chopper sounded through the thatch roof, rapidly increasing in volume (22).

The authors again prove their adroitness at marrying action to emotion and, indeed, action to a specific character’s own current dilemma or perceptions. The helicopter’s “throb” mirrors the throbbing that, readers might suspect, Pendergast himself feels after having just been mauled by a huge and vicious lion. In addition, the fact that the sound of the aircraft’s engine “rapidly” increases “in volume” suggests that it is arriving, not departing, and again makes readers share the protagonist’s perspective: Pendergast hears the approaching “chopper,” as do the novel’s readers. It is as if the aircraft is coming for them as much as for him.

The scene shifts in Chapter 5, as its tagline informs readers, from Africa to “St. Charles Parish, Louisiana.” The paragraph’s allusion to luxury automobiles, to a palatial “plantation house,” and to the estate’s being listed “on the National Register of Historic Places” indicates that whoever is traveling in such an automobile to such a destination probably him- or herself (himself, as it turns out, for the next paragraph makes the character’s identity--protagonist “A. X. L. Pendergast”--clear)a man or woman of means and status:

The Rolls-Royce Grey Ghost crept around the circular drive, the crisp crunch of gravel under the tires muffled in places by patches of crabgrass. The motorcar was followed by a late-model Mercedes, in silver. Both vehicles came to a stop before a Greek revival plantation house, framed by ancient black oaks draped in fingers of Spanish moss. A small bronze plaque screwed into the façade announced that the mansion was known as Penumbra; that it had been built in 1821 by the Pendergast family; and that it was on the National Register of Historic Places (24).

Chapter 6 transports the reader, its tagline declares, to “New York City,” introducing a recurring character, Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, who is busy investigating a murder scene. For readers for whom Fever Dream is the first of the Pendergast series of novels, D’Agosta will appear to be a new character; those who have read other novels in the series will recognize him as a friend and sometimes-ally of Pendergast. The paragraph is matter-of-fact in style, depicting the crime scene with the dispassionate and objective manner of a motion picture camera. Employing, as the rest of the novel does, an omniscient narrator, the paragraph’s impartial reporting of the scene indicates D’Agosta’s own professionally detached observation of the scene. Here, readers will think, is a man who is used to investigating murders.

Four AM, Saturday, Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta pushed through the crowd, ducked under a crime-scene tape, and walked over to where the body lay sprawled across the sidewalk outside one of the countless identical Indian restaurants on East 6th Street. A large pool of blood had collected beneath it, reflecting the red and purple neon light in the restaurant’s grimy window with surreal splendor (32).

(Readers may--or may not--learn more about this seemingly casually referenced death; the authors sometimes include a future incident that bears upon or is in some way related to such a seemingly random event as this murder of an as-yet anonymous individual; other times, such an incident as the one described in this opening paragraph is a stand-alone occurrence, unrelated to future narrative events. By sometimes connecting such an incident to another, future event and sometimes not making such an association, Preston and Child keep their readers guessing.) In either case, the investigation of a murder scene is an interesting way to introduce a character and a good way to suggest his expertise as an investigator.

Once again, the authors show their substantial talent for making a single paragraph perform several functions--in the cases of the three cited in this post, identifying readers’ perspective with that of the novel’s protagonist and characterizing characters by associating them each with a particular type of setting.

"Fever Dream": Opening Paragraphs (Chapters 1 through 3)

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s latest novel, Fever Dream, like most of their books, changes scenes with regularity. This time, the action moves among locations in Africa, Louisiana, New York, Georgia, Maine, the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and Mississippi. Eve when the action does manage to settle down for a moment, in one state, the story tends to move among lesser locations, such as towns, swamps, and plantations.

Because the action shifts among a variety of scenes, the opening paragraphs of the book’s chapters are largely devoted to the task of setting the scenes. Douglas and Preston accomplish this goal with economy, making each chapter interesting in itself, despite its similar mission with most of its brethren, by employing a variety of rhetorical and poetic devices.

The chapters in which a new or recurring scene occurs begins with a tagline, announcing the location, which is followed by the opening chapter. The first chapter is labeled “Musalangu, Zambia,” which is followed with this description of the place:

The setting sun blazed through the African bush like a forest fire, hot yellow in the sweltering evening that gathered over the bush camp. The hills along the upper Makwele Stream rose in the east like blunt green teeth, framed against the sky (1).

The authors employ two similes, “sun. . . like a forest fire” and “hills. . . like teeth,” which add interest to what might have been an otherwise rather mundane description, and the second figure of speech suggests danger and, more specifically, a bestial danger, which the beginning of the story soon delivers in the death of Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast’s wife Helen, who is killed and devoured by a rogue lion.

Chapter 2 begins with the tagline, “Kingazu Camp, Luangwa River,” and involves the readers in the story’s action, as Pendergast and Helen drive to the camp mentioned in the chapter’s tagline. The writers’ description puts their readers inside the vehicle in which the characters make their way to their destination; the readers can all but feel every bump and jolt of the rough ride:

The Land Rover banged and lurched along the Banta Road, a bad track in a country legendary for them. Pendergast turned the wheel violently left and right to avoid the yawning potholes, some almost as deep as the bashed-up Rover. The windows were wide open--the air-conditioner was broken--and the interior of the car was awash in dust blown in by the occasional vehicle passing in the other direction (6).

Involving the readers in the action creates a sense of immediacy, a sense of you-are-here, which gives them a stake in the characters’ mission. Thanks to Preston and Child’s use of this technique, their readers are literally along for the ride. This opening chapter also employs a personification; the potholes in the road are “yawning,” which may recall the simile, in the previous chapter’s opening paragraph, in which “hills” were likened to “blunt green teeth.” The authors seem, again, to remind their readers, albeit rather subtly, that there is a dangerous predator not far ahead--a “yawning” mouth full of “blunt green teeth,” the “green” of which could symbolize the African veldt--or a denizen therein.,

The opening paragraph to chapter 3 (which is labeled “The Fever Trees”) sets up a stark contrast between nature, as represented by the African veldt, and civilization, as represented by Kingazu Camp. The jungle is quiet, seemingly “subdued,” and its stillness contrasts with the busyness of the camp’s residents as they go about their daily business. The relative quiet of the seemingly somnolent jungle, however, appears deceiving, somewhat like the calm that precedes a storm, because the authors include the phrase “false dawn,” suggesting that the daybreak which illuminates the dark continent is somehow deceitful or fraudulent. In short, it would be a mistake, perhaps, to let down one’s guard. Even when the jungle appears to be at rest, it is a dangerous place:

The night had been silent. Even the local prides that often tattooed the darkness with their roars were lying low, and the usual chatter of night animals seemed subdued. The sound of the river was a faint gurgle and shush that belied the massive flow, perfuming the air with the smell of water. Only with the false dawn came the first noises of what passed for civilization: hot water being poured into shower-drums in preparation for morning ablutions (13).

The suggestion of deceitfulness or fraud that the phrase “false dawn” creates is echoed, and reinforced, by other phrases. “The river was a faint. . . shush,” readers are told--and they are likely to think the noun “shush” strange in this context; normally, one does not think of a river as making a “shushing” sound such as librarians sometimes make to quiet noisy young patrons. Moreover, like the “subdued” jungle animals, the river seems to be in a conspiracy with the dawn to suppress some secret; the sounds that it makes--”a faint gurgle and shush”--themselves are deceitful, as it were, for they are “belied” by the river’s “massive flow.”

Finally, the opening paragraph to this chapter suggests that nature, as represented by the jungle, which is full of mighty forces--”lions, “night animals,” and a “river” of “massive flow”--is characterized as powerful, perhaps predatory, whereas civilization is portrayed as paltry and weak. One of the few improvement that the camp has been able to the offerings of nature is meager, indeed: The water from the river has been heated so that “hot water” may be “poured into shower-drums in preparation for morning ablutions.” Humans, who often fancy themselves to be the masters of nature, are here characterized as being something more like its parasites--or potential prey.

Plotting From Blurbs

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Although they may not be novelists, publishing company employees who pen blurbs for books and motion pictures released on DVDs are themselves accomplished writers. They know not only how to summarize a plot (or enough of the plot, at any rate, to excite the reader’s or the viewer’s interest in reading or watching the novel or the movie), but they understand, also, such narrative elements as conflict, high stakes, suspense, and pace. Blurb writers know what readers and moviegoers want to read or see and why. Aspiring storytellers, whether of the horror genre or any other, can learn a thing or two of value from the blurbs that such writers produce and use these techniques themselves in plotting their own narratives.

Let’s take a look at a few blurbs concerning horror movies, taken directly from the backs of the DVD packages upon which the blurbs appear.

 

While awaiting her husband’s return from war, Grace [the main character is introduced and the basic situation is established] and her two children live an unusually isolated existence [an isolated setting enhances character’s vulnerability, especially when the characters are a woman and two children, living alone] behind the locked doors and drawn curtains of a secluded island mansion [the reiteration of the setting’s isolated, or secluded, nature and the mention of its location on an island emphasize the house’s remoteness and inaccessibility and the character’s helplessness; the “locked doors and drawn curtains” suggest secrets or the fear of threats or both]. Then, after three mysterious servants arrive [the same number as the house’s occupants, each of whom is characterized as being in some way “mysterious”] and it becomes chillingly clear [expect to be frightened!] that there is far more to this house than can be seen [such as ghosts?], Grace finds herself in a terrifying fight to save her children and keep her sanity [the stakes are high, indeed!, as is the threat with which Grace and her children are menaced]. -- The Others

 

. . . A skeptical writer [is] investigating paranormal events [the main character is introduced and the basic situation is established]. When he insists in staying in the reportedly haunted room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel [the adjective “reportedly” makes the reader wonder whether the room will prove, in fact, to be “haunted,” as it is alleged to be; a hotel is large enough, too, to offer some real chills] against the grave warnings of the hotel manager [if “dire warnings” are deemed necessary by the man who manages the place, it may well be haunted, the reader may suppose--or is the manager trying to pull some sort of bizarre practical joke or effect some strange fraud, perhaps by destroying the “skeptical writer’s” reputation as a debunker of the paranormal?], he discovers the room’s deadly secret--an evil so powerful, no one has ever survived an hour within its walls [apparently, the moviegoer is in for an equally harrowing hour in the “reportedly haunted room 1408]. -- 1408 

 

 . . An American nurse. . . has come to work in Tokyo [the main character is introduced and the basic situation is established; the setting, far-away Tokyo, a city in a foreign land influenced by an alien culture is also introduced]. Following a series of horrifying and mysterious deaths, she encounters the vengeful supernatural spirit that possesses its victims, claims their souls, then passes its curse to another person in a spreading chain of horror [will the nurse become the spirit’s latest victim?] Now, she must find a way to break this supernatural spell [her purpose, or goal, is identified] or become the next victim [the stakes are presented] of an ancient evil that never dies, but forever lives to kill [she is up against a formidable foe--something that is not only supernatural but immortal--and, of course, evil] -- The Grudge 

Although each of these blurbs is written somewhat differently, they all include these elements:

1. Introduce the main character.
2. Establish the basic situation.
3. Identify the setting (which is usually isolated).
4. Hint at mysterious secrets, spells, or incidents.
5. Identify high stake (such as protecting innocent children or saving one’s own life, sanity, or reputation).
6. Give the protagonist a goal (often related to the story’s stakes).
7. Suggest that the antagonist is formidable, powerful, ancient, and possibly supernatural.

By including such elements in his or her own stories’ plots, the aspiring (or, for that matter, the professional) writer of horror stories, novels, or screenplays is likely to capture, hold, and heighten his or her intended audience’s emotions, making the reader or moviegoer want to read or watch the novel or film from beginning to end--maybe several times over!

Dear Reader, Meet Gideon Crew; Gideon, Dear Reader

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

There are 80 chapters (405 pages) to Douglas Lincoln and Preston Child’s latest novel, Fever Dream, which will set you back $26.99 (retail hardback), if you decide to buy it. (I checked out a copy from my local library.) I have read only 15 chapters 83) pages so far, but find it, as I do most of this duo’s fiction, a page-turner. The synopsis of the plot provided by the book’s flyleaf does a good job of uniting the action in a succinct fashion, linking past to present and present to future:

Yesterday, Special Agent Pendergast still mourned the loss of his beloved wife, Helen, who died in a tragic accident in Africa twelve years ago.

Today, he discovers she was murdered.

Tomorrow, he will learn her most guarded secrets, leaving him to wonder: Who was the woman I married? And, above all. . . Who murdered her?

In earlier novels, the authors have provided dibs and dabs of their novels’ protagonist back story, building up the eccentric agent’s character so that he becomes both understandable and sympathetic. Other recurring characters are, perhaps, more loveable, but Pendergast, certainly, is most memorable. In this novel, he is humanized still further as he seeks to discover the truth behind his late wife’s murder.

At the end of the story, when Fever Dream is over, Preston and Child surprise their readers with the announcement of their creation of a new detective of sorts, who will appear, they say, “in an exciting new series.” The “investigator,” Gideon Crew, the authors assure their readers, debuts in Gideon’s Sword, which is due to hit the bookstores (and, hopefully, the library shelves) “in the winter of 2011.” However, he will not replace Pendergast: The authors make it clear that they “will continue to write novels featuring the world’s most enigmatic FBI agent with the same frequency as before.”

Preston and Child claim that they “can’t give. . . any information about this novel except its title,” but mean, of course, that they won’t divulge any further information. Chillers and Thrillers will, however, courtesy of this synopsis of the novel’s plot by David Pitt of Book List:

Gideon Crew, the hero of Preston and Child’s new novel, has a complicated backstory. As a boy, he watched as his father, who had taken a man hostage, was shot down by a sniper. Less than a decade later, he learned from his mother that his father had been used by the U.S. government as a scapegoat for a failed intelligence project. After dispatching the man responsible for his father’s murder, Gideon is offered a job with a private contractor that does hush-hush work for the government. Gideon’s mission: to intercept a Chinese scientist and relieve him of the plans for a top-secret weapon. The mission doesn’t go as drawn, however, and Gideon is left with a mysterious string of numbers. Now, working mostly alone, he must determine what the numbers mean. This novel (which is apparently the first installment in a new series) isn’t as elegantly written or constructed as the authors’ popular Special Agent Pendergast novels, but it does—once you get past the backstory—hold the reader’s interest, and Gideon is undeniably a big-shouldered character, capable of supporting a series.

I, for one, look forward to meeting Mr. Crew--and to continuing my acquaintance with Special Agent Pendergast. Now that you've been properly introduced to Gideon, maybe you'll look forward to meeting him, too.

Sex and Horror, Part 9

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Having provided both Freudian and Christian definitions and examples of erotic horror, I would now, in the final installment of my “Sex and Horror” series, like to offer my own thoughts concerning this subgenre of horror fiction (or, depending upon one’s point of view, this subgenre of erotic fiction). Although I fervently disbelieve in psychoanalysis, I also believe that Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality does provide some insights that may be, in some sense and to some extent, valid and applicable to the horror genre in general and to the erotic horror subgenre in particular. I likewise believe that the Christian criticism of such fiction, both Catholic and Protestant, offers valid insights concerning sex and horror.

Freud’s emphasis upon unconscious drives and impulses as wellsprings of human behavior is certainly valid, as is the Christian insistence that non-reproductive sex necessarily involves one in human relationships and possibly human-divine relationships as well and may constitute “sinful” conduct. Unless masturbatory, sex must involve at least two individuals, after all, and even masturbatory sex doesn’t occur in a vacuum--a whole web of social and cultural values, taboos, and inducements, including religious ones, apply--even in the commission of solitary sexual activities.

For me, however, sex and horror merge mostly in the duality of human beings as, on the one hand, material-animal beings and, on the other hand, as spiritual-human beings. As ghosts inhabiting machines, men and women are both part and parcel of the natural world and, at the same time, transcend the natural world. As minds, or spirits, people are able to freeze experience in thought and to react or respond to it emotionally and imaginatively; they can project themselves forward in time and imagine a variety of sexual pathways, alternatives, and futures, both for themselves as individuals, for others as individuals, and for society.

In addition, one may find that he or she does not measure up to the expectations of others, whether the “other” involved is one’s partner or one’s society. Perhaps a man may discover that he is impotent, that he cannot perform, or please his lover; a woman may find that she is more highly sexually charged than society deems correct or that she prefers one of her own, to the opposite, sex. Men and women may have trouble relating to anyone else, male or female, on intimate emotional, physical, and sexual levels. They may fear not sex itself but what it will reveal concerning innermost secrets of the self which they would conceal at all costs.

Moreover, social mores shift from time to time, and what is permissible in one era may be impermissible in another; what was once “right” may now be “wrong”--or what was impermissible or wrong in an earlier time may be acceptable or right today. The recognition of the relative and ethnocentric nature of morality is usually disturbing, whether it occurs through reflection upon one’s sexual behavior (or sexuality) or upon human experience in general, and erotic horror is often a product of a character’s discovery of such limitations.

Sex is a physical act in which the heart rate increases as muscles flex and contract, blood flows more copiously, the lungs pant, and body fluids, ultimately, are exchanged. In short, sex reveals human beings’ animality, an aspect of themselves that, in polite society men and women generally take pains to obscure, preferring to think of themselves as “a little lower than the angels” rather than as “higher animals.” Paradoxically, sex, which can generate life, is also a reminder of death. People are animals. They are meat. They will die. Sex brings men and women close to the physical--and, indeed, the visceral--components of themselves and, in doing so, with their own imminent mortality.

But sex is also about power, too. It is about conquest. It is about seduction. Men sometimes regard themselves as conquerors, sex as a means of conquest, and women as the conquered. Sex is, such men suggest, a "war" in which, sooner or later, women are likely to become "casualties." Sex is a series of ongoing "battles" in which the strongest will survive, and men are stronger than women.

Some women, on the other hand, consider sex a means of seduction. In nature, the male animal is bright, beautiful, and alluring, but, among human beings, women adorn themselves, attract and lure, seduce, and claim as their own the suitors who fight among themselves for the exclusive claim to women’s charms. In either vision, the male or the female, sex itself is about power, especially the taking of it from one person--and from one sex--and the conferring of the taken power upon oneself--and one’s own sex.

Many of the icons of horror fiction are used to suggest the multivalent nature of erotic horror: the demon, its amoral quality; the ghost, the repressive social and cultural limitations associated with it and the personal and psychological responses to such restrictions and taboos; the vampire, its predatory aspects; the werewolf, its animality; and the witch, its seductive character. Often, scenes of so-called bondage and discipline highlight the sexual, the social, and the sadomasochistic qualities of sex, suggesting that it is emotionally, physically, and sexually painful and that there is a dynamic of power and powerlessness, of dominance and submission, involved in every expression, of whatever variety, of the sex drive.

Sex is primal and instinctive; sex is personal and secret; sex is social and cultural; sex is revelatory and fearsome--it is a complex set of behaviors, including thoughts and emotions, because humans are themselves complex dualities which are neither exclusively physical or material nor completely incorporeal or spiritual. Men and women live in a number of twofold worlds, but they are defined by none of them: the material and the spiritual, the animal and the human, the temporal and the eternal, the private and the public, the barbaric and the civilized, the natural and the cultural (and, indeed, it may be, the natural and the supernatural). These crossroads of being come together, as it were, as many intersections, the centers of which are often sexual.

Sex unifies us, both as individual persons and as societies and cultures, just as, at the same time, it separates us, both from ourselves and one another. At the heart of erotic horror is our duality as material-spiritual beings who have a foot in both the world of nature and the world of the supernatural, ghosts in machines for whom neither oneness with God or the universe nor oneness with our own fleshly existence is completely comfortable or sufficient. Therefore, sex will always be both a delight and a horror, the center and the fulcrum of erotic horror.

Sex and Horror, Part 8: A Gallery of Sex and Horror

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

While it is not the intent of Chillers and Thrillers to titillate its readers, no series concerning sex and horror truly conveys the subgenre without a display of some of the images that have come to represent it, which is the reason that I conclude this series with some examples of such images.

Abducted by the Daleks

Angel Heart

Breeders

Bride of Chucky

Cabin Fever



Cemetery Man

Children of the Corn

Decoys 2: Alien Seduction

Dreams in the Witch House

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead

Evil Dead

Friday the 13th 2: Jason Goes to Hell

Future Kill

Galaxy of Terror

Inseminoid

Lifeforce

Night of the Demons

Nightmare on Elm Street 3

Nightmare on Elm Street 4

Outer Limits (episode with Alyssa Milano)

Possession

Re-Animator

Rosemary's Baby

Shivers

Sleepaway Camp

Species

Species 2

Spermula

Teeth

The Entity

The Hills Have Eyes 2

The Howling

The Shining

They Live

Zombie Strippers

Perhaps the most blatant example in this gallery for the inclusion of gratuitous nudity in a horror film is Zombie Strippers.  The misogynistic attitude toward women that is displayed by many of these images is also striking, suggesting that Hollywood moviemakers seem to have low regard for the female of the species, considering them to be fallen angels, "breeders" (a term that homosexual men sometimes use to describe heterosexual women), living dolls, victims of abduction and rape, playthings, transsexuals, alien monsters, food, and (even when they are dead) strippers.  However, to be fair, some directors do not find fault with women as such; rather, they find sex itself repugnant and grotesque, as the fiilms of David Cronenberg, for example, often show.

However, sex in horror is not always as gratuitious as it is in Zombie Strippers. As we have seen, it sometimes has a satirical, a philosophical, or even a religious theme.

No pun intended, but, in literature, horror fiction included, nudity is often more complex than it may appear. Frequently, it takes on symbolic significance, representing such states and conditions as human beings’ animality, vulnerability, and mortality. Sex itself, as we have seen, is often linked, in horror fiction, to perversions of, and deviations form, normal, heterosexual, genital (and generative) sex. In horror fiction, sex often involves adultery, bestiality, homosexuality, incest, transsexuality, and even necrophilia. It also sometimes features extraterrestrials, demons, witches, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and other paranormal or supernatural participants. Such behavior flaunts the will of God, as it is established by the Ten Commandments and other divine laws that are transmitted through Judeo-Christian religious traditions. In other words, such behaviors are sinful acts of disobedience to the divine will.

Indeed, sex with aliens challenges the Judeo-Christian doctrine of a great chain of being in which various creatures occupy greater or lesser levels of significance and value, with God at the apex, followed by angels, human beings, animals, and plants, in this order, for it inserts another creature, extraterrestrial beings, into his chain. Such entities may not be the equal of God, but they seem to transcend human beings. Are aliens superior or interior to angels and their fallen peers, demons? Some consider aliens to be demons in disguise, intent upon deceiving humans, as, indeed, Hamlet suspected the alleged ghost of his father might be. Whether aliens are demons or extraterrestrials, they disturb the great chain of being, because such creatures were never part of it before the skies became home to flying saucers and other unidentified flying objects.

Sex in horror fiction is also a means of introducing twists on traditional understandings and folkways. Demonic possession which also involves sexual acts, perverted or otherwise, may signify sexual conquest. As femme fatales, women, who are traditionally regarded as weak or powerless, become strong and powerful in demon or alien guise, and men, traditionally the strong and powerful ones become the weak and impotent ones. Sex can be described in mechanical, going-through-the-motions terms, especially when one or more of the participants is a robot or a cyborg. In horror fiction, sex is also often misogynistic, expressing or suggesting a fear, and, sometimes, a hatred, of women. The vagina may be described as having, or be shown to have, teeth with which it mutilates (dismembers, in both a literal and a Freudian sense) males, castrating them as they penetrate or have intercourse with them. Alternatively, the penis can be a serpent-like monster with teeth of its own, used to devour women from within.

The movies we have listed in this post depict all of these impulses, themes, and ideas and more. Sex in horror is multivalent, multidimensional, and multifaceted.

In Horror Films of the 1980s, published in 2002 by McFarland & Company, Inc., of Jefferson City, NC, John Kenneth Muir points out some of the additional concerns of sex in horror. The movie Demon Seed (1977), based upon an early Dean Koontz novel, addresses “women’s rights,” Muir says, as well as “technology run amok,” and the story, which involves “rape by [a] computer” that is “programmed by men,” denies the protagonist, Susan Harris, “control” over both “her own body” and, since it causes her to experience an orgasm, against her will, even the very “biochemical” processes of her body (467-470).

Likewise, Muir sees David Cronenberg’s Shivers as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of so-called casual sex. It is about the consequences, Muir says, of “infidelity, STDs, pedophilia,” and other perverted, deviant, criminal or otherwise incautious sexual behaviors. In the film, a parasite that resembles a phallus (or “fecal matter,” in Muir’s view), and may or may not have been inspired by the disembodied, living, often winged phalli of ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, infect hosts with an aphrodisiac-like chemical that turns men and women into promiscuous sex maniacs who further spread the parasites and their disease. Equal opportunity parasites, the phallic pests enter their hosts orally, anally, or vaginally, through both hetero- and homosexual sex acts. AIDS and other STDs, Muir believes, are the subtext to this film, which, he argues, in some ways anticipates the movie Alien.

The sex in Wes Craven’s film The Last House on the Left serves a theological, or at least a metaphysical theme. In this film, sex takes the form of the rape of a teenage girl and represents, Muir contends, an atheistic world view in which there is no God and, therefore, no purpose in life and “terrible things” can and do “happen to good people” for no reason. The movie’s “theme song,” “The Road Leads to Nowhere” suggests, Muir says, as does the futility of the religious characters’ prayers, to the movie’s theme, that there is neither an “afterlife” nor a God, and that the journey of life “ends only in death.”

Sex in horror can transcend just sex for sex’s sake, or gratuitous sex, and can symbolize social, political, economic, and even metaphysical or theological issues. Often, for Judeo-Christian readers and moviegoers, sex in horror is related to, and often critical of, human beings relationships with themselves, each other, nature, and God. Even when sex in horror is limited to psychoanalytical interpretations, it can sometimes elucidate the causes and consequences of sublimation, repression, and other alleged psychosexual mechanisms.