There's a problem with writing "monster movies": there aren't that many monsters left. It's not that we disbelieve them too much; there's always that "willing suspension of disbelief" that is the entry price for a good story, and we gladly give it. But at this point, we've befriended all the major monsters. Friendly ghosts? That's been done long since; Casper was ages ago, and Nearly-Headless Nick is just one of the more recent entries in the series. Friendly vampires? Twilight has enough of them to make a vampire soap opera. Friendly werewolves? Definitely, Twilight and Harry Potter again have the territory well-covered between Jacob Black, the Wolf pack, and Remus Lupin. The old Adams Family and Munsters were just an early act in a now-expected storyline. Wicked has a sympathetic retelling of the Wizard of Oz's Witch of the West. Even Godzilla isn't that bad, once you understand his motives. (Godzilla as an apocalyptic vengeance on man has some small similarities to the beasties of the Book of Revelation.)
So what do you do when you need a monstrous character? Well, humans have enough monstrous traits, and the other monsters were often projections of our worst selves. So storytellers generally turn to humans for their monsters. Many a story contains a "surprising" revelation that the monster is, after all, human. Environmentalists tend to write stories where humanity or industrialism or capitalism is the monster, or man is the disease that needs to be eradicated. People of a political bent tend to create caricatures of their political opponents and show them as monstrous. Or (based on J.K. Rowling's statements), people she has personally disliked over the years appear in Roman-a-clef format as distasteful characters such as Gilderoy Lockhart, or odious ones like Dolores Umbridge. (Honestly, Lord Voldemort has more a sympathetic backstory than the stand-ins for some people the author once knew.)
But what if -- what if we haven't taken "befriending the monster" quite far enough? What if the human monsters also could be understood? What if, once you understand where they're coming from, they're not quite as monstrous as we supposed? What if prejudice has blinded us, or a personal bad experience has tainted our thoughts? Why is it, again, we're so certain we shouldn't listen and seek understanding?
Once we listen to "the monster" and try to understand, the monster tends to become more human. And if we decide not to understand or listen ... well, it's easy to miss the scarier point of the "surprise" revelation that the monster is human: the monster might be us.
So here's to Halloween. It's the night where we pass out lots of candy to all the ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches, dragons -- and neighbors -- that we might see. And for that, it may well be my favorite holiday.
Showing posts with label horror stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror stories. Show all posts
Friday, October 31, 2014
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Halloween Special 2: Horror Stories and Evil
Our horror stories say something about the areas of evil that still awaken deep disgust and fear. It shows, in some sense, that we are still aware of good and evil on some level. This Halloween, I'd like to visit the legend of the Cauldron Born. J.K. Rowling's Voldemort was hardly the first Cauldron Born in literature. Lloyd Alexander's The High King and The Black Cauldron did a nod to the Cauldron Born. Before that, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein explored the Cauldron Born motif in a proto-sci-fi direction. Some modern fiction flirts with genetic engineering as a potential for horror, for creating a terror beyond our control.
What is so horrifying about the Cauldron Born, from Frankenstein to Voldemort? It's not that they're alive, nor that they're human. The problem is that they're not fully human, that they're masquerading as human but something has gone monstrously wrong. Something is lacking in these would-be humans, and that lack makes their powers frightening.1 I think the appearance of cauldron born beings in literature -- engineered by human hands -- explores our discomfort with the limits of what we can make through science or magic, and how that falls short of the life found naturally.2 It mirrors back our unease that we may not, after all, know quite enough about what we are doing to be able to fully handle the results. It is, in its way, similar to the story of the Fall all over again: we have a temptation to godlike power and, with more knowledge but less wisdom, it becomes a dehumanizing and nature-corrupting mix with results that are difficult to predict and more difficult to stop. The same basic theme informs much of the environmental movement's fear: that our knowledge and our greed for gain have outpaced our wisdom, opening up the potential for catastrophe. In more moderate terms, it's a critique of the history of human attempts to control the world, including a critique of certain applied sciences, where history has proved a good few times now that our knowledge of how to do something has outpaced our knowledge of the consequences and side-effects that happen when we do it.
Close cousins to the Cauldron Born are the creation-gone-haywire themes. In recent times these have focused (unsurprisingly) on computers. HAL (one step ahead of IBM) from 2001: A Space Odyssey is always a favorite. So is the unnervingly dispassionate military computer who responds to a teenage hacker's request, "Let's play 'Global Thermonuclear War'" in WarGames in a way that threatens to destroy the planet.
These man-made horrors also reflect the old theological observation that evil does not have a nature of its own, but takes another nature and parodies or corrupts it. Evil's nature is defined by what it lacks.
But it's not a right Halloween post if I spend all the bandwidth explaining why the genre strikes a chord. Let's get back to the Cauldron Born. Nobody else I've read does the Cauldron Born quite as sickeningly as Rowling's Voldemort. For Halloween, and for the identity of evil, sickening can be a mark of having shown just how revolting evil is ... right? ANYWAY ...
Happy Halloween!
1 - It's debatable how much the "fundamentally inhuman" bit applies to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the movie adaptations. Is the problem in the created object, or just in our perception of it? Is the problem that we go beyond what we can reasonably handle, or is the problem that people can't handle "progress"?
2 - I know that not all of the "man-made humans" in literature turn out too badly. There's Pinocchio, whose life is not frightening to others, but personally sad until he becomes more fully human. This is much like the Tin Man in the Oz stories. But those get demoted to a footnote for Halloween! Tonight we explore the dark side of the story.
General footnote: Yes, I get impatient with those who do not see horror and science fiction as "worthy" or "serious" literary genres. They are the myths of our day where we grapple with the questions of life, death, and our place in the world -- or the universe. Granted that not all horror and sci-fi are high quality, still the same could be said fairly for any other genre.
What is so horrifying about the Cauldron Born, from Frankenstein to Voldemort? It's not that they're alive, nor that they're human. The problem is that they're not fully human, that they're masquerading as human but something has gone monstrously wrong. Something is lacking in these would-be humans, and that lack makes their powers frightening.1 I think the appearance of cauldron born beings in literature -- engineered by human hands -- explores our discomfort with the limits of what we can make through science or magic, and how that falls short of the life found naturally.2 It mirrors back our unease that we may not, after all, know quite enough about what we are doing to be able to fully handle the results. It is, in its way, similar to the story of the Fall all over again: we have a temptation to godlike power and, with more knowledge but less wisdom, it becomes a dehumanizing and nature-corrupting mix with results that are difficult to predict and more difficult to stop. The same basic theme informs much of the environmental movement's fear: that our knowledge and our greed for gain have outpaced our wisdom, opening up the potential for catastrophe. In more moderate terms, it's a critique of the history of human attempts to control the world, including a critique of certain applied sciences, where history has proved a good few times now that our knowledge of how to do something has outpaced our knowledge of the consequences and side-effects that happen when we do it.
Close cousins to the Cauldron Born are the creation-gone-haywire themes. In recent times these have focused (unsurprisingly) on computers. HAL (one step ahead of IBM) from 2001: A Space Odyssey is always a favorite. So is the unnervingly dispassionate military computer who responds to a teenage hacker's request, "Let's play 'Global Thermonuclear War'" in WarGames in a way that threatens to destroy the planet.
These man-made horrors also reflect the old theological observation that evil does not have a nature of its own, but takes another nature and parodies or corrupts it. Evil's nature is defined by what it lacks.
But it's not a right Halloween post if I spend all the bandwidth explaining why the genre strikes a chord. Let's get back to the Cauldron Born. Nobody else I've read does the Cauldron Born quite as sickeningly as Rowling's Voldemort. For Halloween, and for the identity of evil, sickening can be a mark of having shown just how revolting evil is ... right? ANYWAY ...
It was as though Wormtail had flipped over a stone and revealed something ugly, slimy, and blind -- but worse, a hundred times worse. .... no child alive ever had a face like that -- flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes. ... (Skipping a piece of black magic done on behalf of the villain ...)
But then, through the mist in front of him, he saw, with an icy surge of terror, the dark outline of a man, tall and skeletally thin, rising slowly from inside the cauldron. ... Lord Voldemort had risen again. (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, various excerpts from chapter 32)
Happy Halloween!
1 - It's debatable how much the "fundamentally inhuman" bit applies to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the movie adaptations. Is the problem in the created object, or just in our perception of it? Is the problem that we go beyond what we can reasonably handle, or is the problem that people can't handle "progress"?
2 - I know that not all of the "man-made humans" in literature turn out too badly. There's Pinocchio, whose life is not frightening to others, but personally sad until he becomes more fully human. This is much like the Tin Man in the Oz stories. But those get demoted to a footnote for Halloween! Tonight we explore the dark side of the story.
General footnote: Yes, I get impatient with those who do not see horror and science fiction as "worthy" or "serious" literary genres. They are the myths of our day where we grapple with the questions of life, death, and our place in the world -- or the universe. Granted that not all horror and sci-fi are high quality, still the same could be said fairly for any other genre.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Halloween Special 1: Night of the Living Dead
If horror movies tell us something about our culture's deepest fears, what do the zombie movies say? I think the message is this: that we are already living among the undead, shuffling through life without seeing, without feeling, without loving, without caring, without resting, without any thought but our next meal. And in those zombies, we recognize more than just the masses of unlooking, unspeaking people around us, but ourselves as well.
If I were to start an evangelism campaign among the children of the Age of Apathy, I think I might start with the zombies. They are the personifications of the apathetic age. How much more alive are we than they are? Are we really alive or are we just undead? What does it take to be more alive? I'd almost be willing to pass out tracts that had a zombie cover on them ...
If I were to start an evangelism campaign among the children of the Age of Apathy, I think I might start with the zombies. They are the personifications of the apathetic age. How much more alive are we than they are? Are we really alive or are we just undead? What does it take to be more alive? I'd almost be willing to pass out tracts that had a zombie cover on them ...
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Haunted World: The Past that Won't Stay Buried
Amityville Horror. The Shining. Poltergeist (and Poltergeist II). Pet Sematary (and Pet Sematary II). And more imitators than you can count. What do they have in common? The Native American / Indian burial ground underneath it all. Then there's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, with its cursed Aztec treasure. This horror over our national past is not strictly a United States phenomenon. Mexican horror films have seen their share of Aztec mummies.
The stuff that nightmares -- and horror films -- are made of: Genocide of chilling scope, partly accidental through disease but far too much deliberate. A culture's betrayal of those who welcomed them. The more technologically advanced cultures plundering and dispossessing the less technologically advanced cultures. These days shame has increased to the point where it's not considered polite to mention that the native peoples of the Americas were less technologically advanced, even though the New World cultures of the time were often stone-age and, more often than not, pre-literate in development. But I don't think these things should be swept under the rug. Abusing our advantage was an aspect of what went wrong, and part of a pattern that has repeated itself often in history. One lesson we need to remember these days is that scientific and technological advantage does not make for better people. And if the learning of our culture counts for anything, then how in the world did all that happen?
We Christians have to wonder at those times. Had the words of Christ fallen on deaf ears? Had our culture learned no more, or forgotten so much, about treating others as we would want to be treated? To be sure, there were cases of people protesting the treatment of the native population back when the land was still, in the main, in their possession. But not enough to make a difference. The majority of people went along with what was happening. And as a culture, it gives us nightmares. (Are horror films the nightmares of a culture? I wonder.)
Then there's the temptation of self-defense. How many cultures in the rest of the world are built on the subdued ruins of the peoples who lived before? How many of our cultural role models (such as Greece and Rome) were empires? How many of the native peoples of the new world attacked and conquered and enslaved each other, built empires at each others' expense before any Europeans came? But that rings hollow in our own ears despite being true. It's just that defending ourselves by saying "we are absolutely no better than anyone else at their worst" is no excuse at all, and we know it.
Neither is this only an American-content concern. It began under Old World flags with Europe pushing out its religious heretics and deporting its criminals, or plundering gold and silver to send back to the mother country. Still, those of us who live in the Americas must remember that when the New World won its independence from the Old World, nothing changed. The high-sounding ideals of the U.S. Declaration of Independence did not make the U.S. suddenly wiser or kinder in its dealings with the native peoples. "All men are created equal ... " Ouch.
It wasn't us. But for many of us, it was our culture and we don't get away clean. And the time for easy solutions is centuries past. Many of us are not from Europe -- we are from Africa or Asia; not part of the culture that betrayed its hosts, though still living on land that was not rightfully gotten from its previous owner. Is there still a lien? Many of us who look European are of partially native ancestry. Many of us who are of entirely European ancestry would have nowhere to go in Europe now, when we no longer even remember the names of our ever-so-great-grandparents' home towns, even if we assumed (perhaps optimistically) that we would be welcomed in Europe. Many a hard-traced family tree in the U.S. stops at the eastern ocean in the early days of our country, unable to bridge the gap to where we came from.
Still the horror movies keep asking: Will the spirits of the betrayed ever rest? Can there ever be peace after what happened? Is there a solution of gold returned or blood repaid to end the nightmare? The movies always seem to find the answer in two or three hours. It is both easy and true to say that history cannot be undone. But not all of history has been written. We do not share guilt for the evils of the past merely because we are the descendants of "Pilgrims" and and conquistadores. But the lingering problems of injustice are as much a part of our cultural heritage as the music and scientific achievements of our culture. We share the evils of the past if we do nothing to right the wrongs we have inherited. As a culture, it bothers us; that's why so many works of literature pick up on that theme. We know we have to act, but have no easy time figuring out what to do. The first step is figuring out what end result we would want. This would be a good step in the right direction: that the native peoples who remain now should live in as much prosperity as is common in this nation. So the task falls to our generation: to figure out what it would take to make that happen. Will our children inherit our nightmares and our horror stories, a tradition of helplessness or apathy or self-justification? Or a tradition of action?
The stuff that nightmares -- and horror films -- are made of: Genocide of chilling scope, partly accidental through disease but far too much deliberate. A culture's betrayal of those who welcomed them. The more technologically advanced cultures plundering and dispossessing the less technologically advanced cultures. These days shame has increased to the point where it's not considered polite to mention that the native peoples of the Americas were less technologically advanced, even though the New World cultures of the time were often stone-age and, more often than not, pre-literate in development. But I don't think these things should be swept under the rug. Abusing our advantage was an aspect of what went wrong, and part of a pattern that has repeated itself often in history. One lesson we need to remember these days is that scientific and technological advantage does not make for better people. And if the learning of our culture counts for anything, then how in the world did all that happen?
We Christians have to wonder at those times. Had the words of Christ fallen on deaf ears? Had our culture learned no more, or forgotten so much, about treating others as we would want to be treated? To be sure, there were cases of people protesting the treatment of the native population back when the land was still, in the main, in their possession. But not enough to make a difference. The majority of people went along with what was happening. And as a culture, it gives us nightmares. (Are horror films the nightmares of a culture? I wonder.)
Then there's the temptation of self-defense. How many cultures in the rest of the world are built on the subdued ruins of the peoples who lived before? How many of our cultural role models (such as Greece and Rome) were empires? How many of the native peoples of the new world attacked and conquered and enslaved each other, built empires at each others' expense before any Europeans came? But that rings hollow in our own ears despite being true. It's just that defending ourselves by saying "we are absolutely no better than anyone else at their worst" is no excuse at all, and we know it.
Neither is this only an American-content concern. It began under Old World flags with Europe pushing out its religious heretics and deporting its criminals, or plundering gold and silver to send back to the mother country. Still, those of us who live in the Americas must remember that when the New World won its independence from the Old World, nothing changed. The high-sounding ideals of the U.S. Declaration of Independence did not make the U.S. suddenly wiser or kinder in its dealings with the native peoples. "All men are created equal ... " Ouch.
It wasn't us. But for many of us, it was our culture and we don't get away clean. And the time for easy solutions is centuries past. Many of us are not from Europe -- we are from Africa or Asia; not part of the culture that betrayed its hosts, though still living on land that was not rightfully gotten from its previous owner. Is there still a lien? Many of us who look European are of partially native ancestry. Many of us who are of entirely European ancestry would have nowhere to go in Europe now, when we no longer even remember the names of our ever-so-great-grandparents' home towns, even if we assumed (perhaps optimistically) that we would be welcomed in Europe. Many a hard-traced family tree in the U.S. stops at the eastern ocean in the early days of our country, unable to bridge the gap to where we came from.
Still the horror movies keep asking: Will the spirits of the betrayed ever rest? Can there ever be peace after what happened? Is there a solution of gold returned or blood repaid to end the nightmare? The movies always seem to find the answer in two or three hours. It is both easy and true to say that history cannot be undone. But not all of history has been written. We do not share guilt for the evils of the past merely because we are the descendants of "Pilgrims" and and conquistadores. But the lingering problems of injustice are as much a part of our cultural heritage as the music and scientific achievements of our culture. We share the evils of the past if we do nothing to right the wrongs we have inherited. As a culture, it bothers us; that's why so many works of literature pick up on that theme. We know we have to act, but have no easy time figuring out what to do. The first step is figuring out what end result we would want. This would be a good step in the right direction: that the native peoples who remain now should live in as much prosperity as is common in this nation. So the task falls to our generation: to figure out what it would take to make that happen. Will our children inherit our nightmares and our horror stories, a tradition of helplessness or apathy or self-justification? Or a tradition of action?
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