Lovecraft Quotes | Striking at Shadows

There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences – H.P. Lovecraft The Thing on the Doorstep

I love this quote from one of the creepier stories that Lovecraft wrote, and I find it so pertinent to my ideas on the psychology of horror. The interesting thing about horror is that it surrounds us on a daily basis, those black zones of shadow are quite tangible for those who know where to look. But what does it mean for those “who know” to strike them down?  In the context of the quote it meant dealing with the monster regardless of later repercussions. In the context of horror psychology I think this deals with what we do  internally when we come across a horror. The scariest part of any horror is not necessarily the monster, it is living on after the monster is struck down, knowing that you have been irrevocably changed by it. I think of the likes of soldiers, police, first-responders, etc. who must act quickly in situations that can be quite horrific, and having to later make meaning and sense out of world that just had the sense pulled out from under them after it is all over. I am still trying to determine if the ability to deal with that, sort of re-calibrate the world, in light of the thing that just crawled out of the shadow, be that what it may, is learned or innate. From what I have gathered I think it can be taught. What do you think?

Types of Horror | Everyday Horror

In interesting thing about human psychology is that we actually attend to very little of what is going on around us. The brain simply edits all of our perceptions on the fly. It takes what it finds to be important and filters out the rest. For the most part this keeps us alive and happy. There is a darker side to this though. One of the most intriguing things about studying horror is that you begin to see it everywhere, skulking about in every corner of our lives. Like a glamour we are blind to it either willfully or unwittingly. I am not talking about the horrors of war, violent crimes, or the general mill of human travesties. These things are terrible, and to a degree we pass over those too with a blind-eye. No, the horror I am talking about is what happens when come to some very strange realizations that things you thought were innocent or mundane are actually quite horrific.  Here are a couple to wet your whistle:

Oil

Oil Gusher-original by John Trost

You might wonder to yourself what is so horrific about oil. Keeping the environmentalism aspect out of it, I want you to stop and think. We live in a world where oil has made so many modern marvels possible. It gives us light, heats our houses, provided transportation, and it’s were all the plastic that makes up most of our gizmos and gadgets comes from. Oil is responsible for our way of life. But what you have not stopped to think about is the reality of oil’s original form. We live on a world built upon and powered by the dead!

Toy Story

How can there possibly be anything in this jolly movie about childhood that makes your mom cry when she sees it because it reminds her of her babies that are now grown-up (yeah this is my mom)? Never mind all the movies in the  series lack an adult-gaze that leaves you puzzled, if not disturbed. The everyday horror in this one is this scene right here.

Have you really ever stopped to think about what this meant for Sid? I mean yeah we root for the toys in the moment, but this kid just had his world-view rocked. If toys are now sentient, what else might be sentient? Think about the consequences that would occur from this. Here is a kid who obviously has some psychological issues, fire-starting, bullying, toy mutilation, consistent behavioral regulation problem (kicked-out of camp earlier this year) then you add on a paranoid belief that his toys are alive and are out to get him. This kid would get slapped with an early-onset schizophrenia disorder and wind up on anti-psychotics the rest of his life, for a belief, that in reality, is true. Does this fate sound familiar? To any self-respecting Lovecraft fan it should.

These are just a couple of every day horror moments. What are some every day horror moments that you can think of or experience?

Horror Psychology | Missing the Mark

I am currently neck-deep into my thesis on the psychology of horror and getting ready to start my doctoral program in Fall, hence the lack of posts of late. I try to keep tabs on the latest stuff coming out about the psychology of horror, which is not a lot, but I find myself ever disappointed by it. There are several things that seem to miss the mark of what horror does. Now I don’t know how many of the researchers are avid horror fans, and I seriously doubt that most of them consume as much horror in a year as I do in a week. However there seems to be a lack of critical thought with most of the current research, so I thought I would take the time to outline what is missing, as I feel that most of the current horror fans, myself included , feel alienated and even offended by what is inferred by some of this research. I will foot note my citation at the end of this for those that are interested.

I know I have ridden this pony since day one of this blog, but it is an important question, What is Horror?  I think it is one of the most important questions that needs to be answered. So important in fact my thesis, and very likely my dissertation are and will be spent answering this question. The reason this question is so important is that nearly all the research that is out there just assumes that there is a common understanding of what horror is and skip onto other things. Their reasoning is usually circular and goes something like “horror is what is depicted in horror film/stories/books/etc.” Slashers, thrillers, ghost stories, torture porn, demonic, and even occasionally sci-fi genre pieces are all lumped together as being the same things. Really? In none of the psychology of horror research that I have reviewed have researchers even bothered to define horror in their work.¹ Until this is defined we have a big problem. Most of the these studies are looking at why do people like horror films, and what makes horror fans tick, they don’t even bother to explore the emotion itself. They implicitly equate horror to various things such as, thrill/pleasure seeking, the ability to live out social roles (often called the cuddle theory of horror). Still other studies look at horror fans as lacking in empathy because of some particular physiological responses rate to violence or some other supposed mental or emotional deficit. These particular theories are often used to all but state that horror fans are closet sociopaths who get off on watching others pain, sex, (insert any other of human vice or suffering here), and while I am sure there are people out there, that does not describe me or any of the myriad of horror fans that I know. The research leaves an important question unasked: Why did you use horror and not some other genre. There are plenty of other genres that display wanton destruction, lust, and violence, why did you choose horror to investigate your questions of empathy, anxiety, psychopathy, etc? In the mountain of articles that I have read they never answer that. These authors do not seem to know what horror is or even have much experience with it,  at least they given no written indication of it anyway. For example, take a look at this article, The Lure of Horror, the author talks about why Stephen King’s novel It is frightening. The author states “…Perhaps clowns (e.g. as in Stephen King’s 1986 novel It) have the capacity to provoke fear because their make-up conceals their true facial emotions, thus thwarting our instinctual desire to read other people’s minds through their faces(it’s notable that many other horror baddies conceal their faces with masks)”. GIVE ME A BREAK! Anyone who has read the novel knows it has nothing to do with children’s proclivity toward coulrophobia. It rarely even appears as the Clown in the novel. And this is not just a one off, it happens multiple times in this article alone.  For another example you get explanations like the one provided by Marvin Zuckerman who is giving a discussion of stimuli habituation to media violence and thrill seeking, all under the banner of The Psychology of Horror Films, and yet not once has is it explained why horror is the target genre or address the kind of horror that I find the scariest, the quiet horror that never uses the violence and cheap thrills that is often stereotyped as horror.  Let me be clear it is not that I have a problem with definitions of horror including any of the aspects found in the above research papers, rather it is the assumptions made about what horror is without defining it as so. Psych research 101 is to define your constructs and give justification for your construct.

So what is horror then? Well my definition is ever evolving but I still think Lovecraft said it best, Fear of the Unknown. However I am not just talking about fear of what you can not see in the dark, although that is a part. It is the unknown that occurs when your most basic premises are violated and your ontological footing is crumbling beneath you; what you have always used to make meaning is life doesn’t work anymore. I am not saying I have hit on the universal definition of horror, nor that my definition wont change over time, but at least it is a position. I hope to raise the standard of work in horror psychology so that horror fans can find the thoughtful emotional-contemplation on the human condition and the strangeness and horror that surround us everyday in my research, rather than being seen as aberration of society and leaving them left horror struck. As horror fans or non-horror fans how do you feel about the way people think about your feelings of the genre? What do you think needs to spoken up about horror to those outside of it? Any other thoughts?

¹Tamborini, R., Stiff, J., & Heidel, C. (1990). Reacting to graphic horror: A model of empathy and emotional behavior. Communication Research, 17(5), 616.
Straube, T., Preissler, S., Lipka, J., Hewig, J., Mentzel, H.-J., & Miltner, W. H. R. (2010). Neural representation of anxiety and personality during exposure to anxiety-provoking and neutral scenes from scary movies. Human Brain Mapping, 31(1), 36–47.
Houran, J., Kumar, V. K., Thalbourne, M. A., & Lavertue, N. E. (2002). Haunted by somatic tendencies: Spirit infestation as psychogenic illness. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 5(2), 119-133.

Jarrett, C. (2011). The lure of horror. Psychologist, 24(11), 812–815.

Clasen, M. (2012). Monsters evolve: A biocultural approach to horror stories. Review of General Psychology, 16(2), 222–229.   
Just to name a few.

Audio Horror | I Only Am Escaped Alone To Tell Thee

art by Steve Santiago

“Whatever you do, don’t call me Ishmael.”

This is the opening line to one of the best stories I have listened to in a long time, I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee is a genre bending story by Christopher Reynaga. It is the story of Moby Dick and is also unabashedly Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu.

In this tale it turns out that the story we know about Ahab is all wrong, that the man was not a vengeful insane sea captain we all thought he was.  He is insane, and he sails to his death to fight the white beast he has hunted, but that beast is no whale.

As Ahab says himself:

“It is not a whale we hunt, but a god. A tentacled and winged god, greater than the greatest whale that ever lived. You must think me mad, and I am, but mad with knowing whats in store for this earth…It means to kill us all, and not because its the Lord’s instrument hailing the end of days, this beast is the end of all gods and men.”

Ahab is dying, his first encounter with the Leviathan has left him marked, the peg-leg is more than what meets the eye, and he hunts the beast for his wife and son. He does not believe that he can kill it, but only seeks to buy time, if only a few minutes, he will not have died in vein.

The story ends as Moby Dick has always ended, but again the light cast on Ahab is much different

 Ahab rode through it, like a titan going forth to meet a god, buoyed up by the strength of his unnatural leg; his blessed spear gripped in his had “from Hell’s heart I stab at thee” Ahab cried…

I do not know why that great man sacrificed himself for you, but no man here deserves his Providence. You believe Ahab is mad; he is the Christ come to try and deliver us all, and there’s not enough blood in him to save us.

Like all cosmic horror it delivers in the ending, dooming us all to the utter destruction at the hands of Cthulhu. This is an amazing piece of writing and is performed fantastically by Graeme Dunlop. It can be found at the DrabbleCast, here.

For me this is the story of a monster hunter.  The monster hunter is one of more fascinating aspects of the horror genre. I have a great deal more to say about it in an upcoming post, but suffice it to say, the horror psychology in play here is largely existential. The hunters are men and women who have found their will-to-meaning and let nothing deter them in their steady march toward it. Ahab found this in this story where as Ishmael does not. Interestingly even in literature the will-to-meaning makes itself apparent plays out as it does in real life. Those that have it find strength to go on or die trying, and those that don’t fall into despair.

Go take a listen to the story above, the whole podcast is only 30 mins long and is well worth your time, and by the end I can only hope that you, like I, are left horror struck.

Hollywood Horror Movies| Cabin in the Woods

*SPOILERS* If you haven’t seen this movie yet, go watch it, then come back and read this. Or, if you don’t care, keep reading anyway.

Cabin in the Woods has gotten a lot of attention since it came out, and with good reason.

Watching horror movies has become such a different experience for me these days. I watch them in an almost clinical or academic way, and for that exact reason Cabin in the Woods was a perfect movie for me. It took my detached mode of watching a horror movie, deconstructed it and reflected it back at me.

First lets talk about the types of horror present in this movie.

Horror by Reduction: Yes this type of horror is very present in this movie, but not in the typical way. We are not shown humans transforming into zombies, vampires, or demons. However the true horror comes along with what is implied by the Facility and the Controllers. The horror by reduction comes from the idea that we can be reduced to machines controlled completely by our environment. Adjust the temperature, release pheromones  reduce “cognition” through hair dye, and we become helpless puppets on a string. All of these ideas are based on the real-life work of B.F. Skinner, the father of Operational Conditioning,as a matter of fact the technology he created was the Skinner box. Which might look familiar.

Now imagine it with a “monster dispenser” and holographic glass

The other type of horror in this movie is of course, what I am feeling is becoming a site favorite, Cosmicism. A universe filled with ancient slumbering gods who will destroy the world if they awake, sound familiar? This is one of the better Lovecraftian movies that I have seen in a long time and for good reason.  Our heroes come to the knowledge  that they are part of a ritual sacrifice, and not just an isolated ritual, but one run on a global scale filled with redundancies. Unlike the typical trope of horror movies, the sacrifice in Cabin in the Woods is not to gain the favor of some nameless god, but rather to keep him inert, to simply maintain the status quo.  Those who work at the Facility seem to see themselves beyond good and evil, a hallmark of Cosmicism, the Facility is simply trying to keep our pathetic little sphere rolling. And like all good Lovecraft stories it shows us that despite all of our best intentions and attempts, humanity is just not up to the task.

What about the horror psychology of this movie? This movie is very explicitly about agency. Choice is the central theme to the movie, we learn that it is only by their willingness to proceed that the characters can fulfill their role as sacrifices. They choose which of the monster will kill them, and in the end it was a choice to let the Old Gods awaken. But was there ever really any choice? Or rather, is there any meaning to the choices they make? I think the answer to that question is, Maybe, if they chose to find it.

If we were to follow the line of existential thought put forth by Victor Frankl we might arrive at some interesting places. Frankl had some thought provoking ideas when it came to finding meaning in life. He posited that Life always has meaning, even in the most dire of circumstances, our will to find the meaning is our main motivation in this life, and finally that we are free to find meaning in what we do and experience or at the very least in the stand you take when faced with unchangeable horror and suffering.

Ring a bell?  Yeah this is exactly how our two heroes play out the ending of the movie. Knowing that their actions are going to be damning no matter their choice, either the insanity of the sacrifices will continue because of them, or the world will burn and will  have to face a truth it had long ago buried in an attempt to forget, and take responsibility for it. They make a choice and stand for what they believe to be right, whether it was right  or not is a matter of personal opinion, but either way they have made a decision that makes sense for them and their lives, however short they are going to be.

Frankl was no stranger to this kind of horror, and suffering, remember he was a survivor of the Auschwitz death camps of WWII. He often saw these kind of damning choice made and watched as people struggled to find meaning and die with purpose or, like the friends of Job suggest, curse God and die miserable and alone. Freedom and responsibility were key to Frankl and to agency, but being truly free can be enough to leave you horror struck.

What do you think? Was the choice the characters in the film make the right one? Do you think Frankl’s ideas apply to this film or not?

Happy Birthday H.P.Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Born Aug. 20 1890
Died Mar. 15 1937

122 years ago today, a boy was born in Providence, Rhode Island that changed the face of horror as we know it.

I tip my hat to you sir, although your work was never acknowledged in your lifetime, like all great artists, the world would not be the same without you. Your time here was short, yet profound. Horror fans everywhere thank you for your work.

Lovecraft Quotes | Nemesis

There are many who know H. P. Lovecraft for his fiction, but many do not know that he was a poet as well. In line with my theme of altered reality I wanted to share this. It comes from his poem Nemesis and is the excerpt which starts Lovecraft’s last work The Haunter of the Dark. This line always chilled me as I think of the vast cosmic scope of the universe and what could possible be out there in the void.

I have seen the dark universe yawning,
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

Thoughts?

 

 

Horror Short Stories | The Boogeyman

The Boogeyman is a short story by Stephen King, one of my favorite authors, and can be found in his horror short story collection, Night Shift. I read this story late last night and it really freaked me out.

This story is of particular interest because it takes place in an psychological setting with the main characters being the client and and an analyst who he is seeing for the first time. The story opens on Lester Billings, a hyper-masculine chauvinistic protagonist, talking to a therapist saying, ”I came to you because I want to tell my story…I can’t go to a priest because I’m not a Catholic. I can’t go to a lawyer because I haven’t done anything to consult a lawyer about. All I did was kill my kids. One at a time. Killed them all.” We come to find out that Lester did not actually murder his children, but he knows who the murderer is and the truth of it is much more frightening than infanticide.

The Boogeyman
Image By buddawiggi

Lesters children have all died at very young ages(2-3 yrs old), all deemed as accidental, and/or crib death (old vernacular for SIDS). But Lester’s children were haunted by something that lives in the closet. The Boogeyman. It comes for them when the child is alone in their own room, they cry out and plead with their parents, but Lester wont hear it, and wont let his wife go help because he doesnt want his children to become “sissies”, “Spoiled”, and other hyper-masculine, Eisenhowerian Era notions of how to make children “independent.” When they find the first child dead Lester noticed something odd and says ‘The closet door was open. Not much. Just a crack. But I knew I left it shut, see.’   Each time the child tries to tell their father what is happening saying ‘Boogeyman, Daddy’. ‘Craws’ (claws). Even though neither parent has taught the child the word Boogeyman. After the events surrounding the death of the second child Lester is convinced there is something in the closet.  A third child is born to the family,and the family moves. The boogeyman doesnt come for some time, but it does come. At first Lester tries to protect his child by keeping him in the same room. But It knows that Lester knows and starts to play mindgames with him:

You’d wake up at three in the morning and look into the dark and at first you’d say, “It’s only the clock.” But underneath it you could hear something moving in a stealthy way. But not too stealthy, because it wanted you to hear it. A slimy sliding sound like something from the kitchen drain. Or a clicking sound, like claws being dragged lightly over the staircase banister. And you’d close your eyes, knowing that hearing it was bad, but if you saw it.
‘And always you’d be afraid that the noises might stop for a little while, and then there would be a laugh right over your face and breath of air like stale cabbage on your face, and then hands on your throat.’

Lester, afraid for his own skin,moves the child into his own room knowing it ‘would go for him, see. Because he was weaker.’ Needless to say the Boogyman comes and in the most gut wrenching part of the story, before the monster comes and finishes its work the child cries out “The boogeyman, Daddy. . . boogeyman.wanna go wif Daddy, go wif Daddy.”‘  In the end Lester’s karma comes full circle, when the analyst is not who Lester thought he was.

This is an interesting horror story. The horror psychology in it is fascinating.The children are learning the word Boogeyman from somewhere, and since the parents aren’t telling it to them, that leaves only the monster to have given it to them. Why?

Lester is a protagonist that leaves a lot to be desired, and is not very likable, we feel both sorrow for his loss and loathing for his cowardice. Why didn’t he do something?

What do you think about these two questions?

I have two very young children, and I have often been awoken in the middle of the night with cries of fear from my two year old boy, and sometimes, with a hand pointed to the window, or a dark corner of the room, that word is on his lips: “Monster”. It never ceases to send chills down my spine.

I think what scares us the most about the boogeyman is the truth that come with it. We are all afraid of the dark. It’s True. We spend our whole lives convincing ourselves that there is nothing there, nothing to be afraid of. The truth is there is plenty of things out there in the dark to be afraid of. The truth is, the dark holds all of the unknown, all at once. Lovecraft himself said it best, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

I have never been comfortable with closets in the dark. My wife still thinks it’s funny that I shut all the closet doors at night. My biggest fear is that I will wake up in the middle of the night and find one open.Not much. Just a crack.

Lovecraft Quotes | The Genuine and Powerful

Lovecraft’s death anniversary was yesterday, but I was too busy with midterms to make a post. So here is my tribute to the Man of Providence

“The question to ask of art, including literature, is not whether it is healthy or pleasant, but whether it is genuine and powerful.” (emphasis added by author).

This one is a recently discovered quote from HPL, found on a postcard held in a private collection, directed as a criticism to one of the weird tales magazine editors. However I think it can give us something to talk about..

Horror I feel is probably one of the most genuine and powerful of all art genres, as it doesn’t pull the punches, and truly dives down to the deepest darkest parts of our psychology. Do you agree or disagree and why?

Lovecraft Mythos | At the Mountains of Madness

Shoggoth in the Deep Image by Craig J Spearing

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Often considered to be the pinnacle of the Lovecraft Mythos by his fans  .If you haven’t read it you can get it here. I found this to be an interesting story by Lovecraft, but it had a different flavor to it. The sci-fi elements were atypical of HPL, who up until this point of his career generally leaned toward the mystical side of things. S.T. Joshi, author of the book the Annotated Lovecraft, and foremost Lovecraft scholar had a similar opinion about it being different from his other work calling it “demythologizing” of C’thulhu mythos. I don’t feel that I quite agree with this whole heartedly so I looked at some other Lovecraft scholars and found one that I think best suited how I felt about the story. John William Gonce III wrote, in his book The Necronomicon Files, that Lovecraft “never divorced magick from his fiction; he simply married it to science.”  In response to this I look at the world that Lovecraft found himself in at the time that he wrote this story. Magic was fading from a world that was rapidly advancing in the sciences; however, one did not have to look far to see some scientific sorcerers  in Tesla, Edison, and Planck. The danger of the occult—the unknown, was still very real.

In regards to the story as a whole, I think that this story might have been a cautionary tale, for us to learn from. Lovecraft spun a mythos where the Earth, for some unknown reason, is not held sway to all the laws that rule in the rest of the of a dark and dangerous universe. Previously the only way to come to the “truth” of this cosmic horror was through magical means, but Lovecraft might have been telling us that science was starting to take us there too.

In the story two characters, Dyer and Danforth, following the trail of something that massacred one of their antarctic research scouting parties, venture deep into an heretofore unknown antarctic mountain range. In these mountains they find the ruins of a unnaturally ancient city. There they learn more and more about the prehistoric arrival of the Elder Things from outer space and the accidental creation of life on this planet as a result of their science experiments. It also seems that the Elder Things choose to let this accidental life continue to exist as a kind of a joke.

As the our heroes get to the bottom of the city they are confronted by the evil and sanity stripping Shoggoth:

the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us

The Shoggoth is a terror to be sure. However, once the heroes have learned that Elder Thing science created the Shoggoth as a slave race, and that the slave’s revolt ultimately led to the destruction of their species on Earth, Dyer starts to relate to the Elder Things. Our hero realizes that they had erroneously painted these creatures the villains and monsters, when in fact they are not so different from mankind. I think that Lovecraft meant Elder Things to be a symbol of mankind’s future. The Shoggoths are a warning, that at the bottom of all our sciences we may ultimately find something ugly, formless, and dangerous.Like the Shoggoth, this may serve us for a time, but in the end will be destructive and strip away all that man holds dear. Leaving us nihilistically horror struck and empty like the colossal city that lies beyond the Mountains of Madness.