The Haunted City: on Horror Fiction

I have always loved horror.  When I was a wee lad, my favorite television show was Fantastic Features, which presented horror movies each Friday and Saturday night.  The host wore a vampire costume with cape and medal included.  He announced himself this way: “I am Sivad, your Monster of Ceremonies!”  You can see the lead clip at the link above. 

I mentioned my theory of genres in a previous post.  I repeat it here. 

I have a theory about genres.  Each is centered on some essential idea, usually attached to certain special signs.  Westerns, for example, are essentially about the frontier: the grey land between civilization and the utter lawlessness of the uncivilized territories, coupled with the signs of horses, hats, and handguns.  The samurai movie genre is very similar, if you trade swords for guns and modify the architecture.  Horror is about the idea that evil can be a real force in the world, like gravity or electricity.  Science fiction rests on the idea of a constantly expanding scientific view of the Kosmos and the surprises that such a view might hold.

Horror fiction is very popular.  Scan the Apple Movie Trailers site and you will always see a few horror offerings, even when Halloween is not approaching.  But it is approaching, as so my mind turns toward the October side of life.  It is a good time to think about the dead.  Summer is sinking as fast as the sun in the west, and much of what makes life rich is sinking with it.  Death, I read somewhere, is always behind us; but sometimes it turns off its lights.  In October, its lights are one and glowing with an orange titled just a bit to the side of crimson. 

Horror, as I say above, is about the idea that evil is a real force in the world.  It is frequently personified, as in all the vampires and devils that populate the genre.  Occasionally, it gets biologized.  In a very good film, The Creeping Flesh, starring two horror superstars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, evil is a microorganism with a nucleus and tentacles.  That same idea animates almost all zombie films, including a recent superb offering: The Girl with All the Gifts. 

The above are examples of the cross-pollinization of horror and science fiction.  A lot of science fiction falls into this category overlap.  Consider “Who Goes There?”, the novella that was filmed as The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s brilliant remake, The Thing.  In the novella, a scientist and a military officer are looking at the frozen corpse of the monster.  The scientist can see only a hopeful possibility.  Perhaps the scary look on its face is only scary to us.  Maybe on its world that was a look of compassion.  The soldier is not fooled.  He recognizes it as malevolent, and unfortunately, he is right. 

More often, horror depends on premodern notions of good and evil.  In Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the vampire and his henchman worship the Devil.  “I bring you spoiled flesh…”  Even then, modernity presses in.  In Salem’s Lot as in almost all horror rooted in ancient mythology, evil is very vivid and personal.  The vampire has a name and speaks.  Good is perhaps more powerful, but it is anonymous and silent.  When the hero finally faces the vampire, he pours holy water over his axe.  The water glows with eerie green light but we are told that it is older than any mythology we still have. 

Why do we like this sort of thing?  I have an idea.  It’s the same reason I like English beer.  It’s bitter.  Our response to bitter is an evolved psychological mechanism.  It alerts us to a possible poison in what we are tempted to eat, just as the smell of spoiled meat alerts us to the same.  Pregnant women are especially sensitive to both, so much so that they sometimes faint after exposure to the latter. 

And yet, most of us can adjust to the taste of bitter, if we consume it without ill effects.  This is another of our great gifts: the ability to adapt to new items on the smorgasbord.  Genuine fear is hardly pleasant; however, fear in small doses, in a context where we feel safe, stimulates us.  More exactly, it engages us.  We sit around the fire and listen the story.  By scaring us, the evil binds us together.  All of us are threatened.  We get behind the hero as we listen and so invested, we enjoy his triumph. 

That is an interpretation of our horror genre as an adaptation.  A lot of our pleasures are not adaptations but by-products of such adaptations.  The hero does not always triumph.  We enjoy tragedy as much as triumph.  That is a consequence of our extraordinary capacity for adaptation to new environments.  We can put together our emotional responses and assemble tales and tastes that have no adaptive value; they merely please us. 

We are fond of stories that end well and of stories that end badly.  The latter may teach us something and that may be one reason we tell them.  It is not why we enjoy them.  We enjoy them because they speak to parts of our souls that add up to the beautiful.  This is what makes it possible for us to appreciate being human.  Horror fiction composes its tapestries from such materials as I have described.  It is occasionally edifying.  It is always entertaining. 

Horror fiction may be edifying in so far as it teaches us to stand together against evil.  It is also edifying in so far as it teaches us that evil is real.  Most of the bad things that people do they do for reasons that all of us can easily understand.  The thief wants money.  The jilted husband wants revenge.  It is easy to dismiss such things as just human nature.  Someone firing down on a crowd, someone neither insane nor motivated by a murderous ideology or religion, that is something else. 

Evil is real.  It is best to remember that.  Happy Halloween.  

Dawkins v. Gould & Plato

While cleaning up my basement today, I found a book I didn’t remember that I had.  It’s Dawkins v. Gould: Survival of the Fittest, by Kim Sterelny.  I have been interested in the Dawkins-Gould debate for some time. 

Dawkins (along with philosopher Daniel Dennett) are “ultra-Darwinians”.  They think that the central question in biology is how organisms are so well adapted to their environments and they hold that the answer is always natural selection.  Moreover, Dawkins thinks that the primary unit on which natural selection acts is the genes or, more correctly, gene lineages.  Organisms are just military vehicles built to carry and maintain their genetic architects, largely by victories in battle with other lineages.  Finally, the larger level of evolution‑the emergence of distinct species‑is just the aggregate of events at the level of organisms and genes. 

Reading a portion of Sterelny’s book tonight, I think I finally have a grasp of Gould’s counter position.  Gould thinks that the basic question is why there are really a rather small number of basic organism forms and why there is so much stability in organic form over time.  The basic division of the animal kingdom is into phyla, of which there are about thirty.  Gould thought that they all appeared at about the same time and observes that there has been little change in the arrangement since.  While adaptation surely continues, the era of phyla innovation seems to be well over. 

Gould interprets this as pointing to species selection as one of the primary force in evolutionary history.  From time to time, usually or always as a result of some big change in the environment (think comet strike), a lot of the biological landscape is scraped clean and there are openings for new types of organism.  There are only so many basic possibilities in biological design space and only some are suited to the new environment.  These are the ones that appear.  In this account, it is the species that is the target of selection and limits on species design that account for the basic organic models.  Chance plays a very big role in this, as it is chance that steers the comet or whatever else roles the dice. 

By contrast, natural selection plays a minor role.  Individuals in a successful line will tend to be, well, successful.  Once the successful models have been established, there will be relatively little change until the next apocalypse. 

I discussed the difference between chance, unintentional biasing, and intentional biasing in a previous post with the regard to explaining the origin of life.  While unintentional biasing looks dubious as a solution to the origin problem, it strikes me that Gould took it very seriously as an explanation of the basic disparity of life, i.e. explaining why organisms fall into a number of basic patterns. 

Consider the beetle.  There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of distinct species of beetle.  All of them (by definition) follow the same pattern.  A second set of wings evolved into a retractable coat of armor protecting the functional wings.  In the organic form of the species from which all beetles descend, there was unintentional biasing towards the beetle form.  The proto-beetle, apparently having two sets of wings and whatnot was unintentionally biased toward a new and very successful area in design space. 

I confess that this strikes me as a quarrel that does not force me to take sides.  I suspect that Gould was right to insist on the importance of general forms and stability in evolution.  I have often thought that the chief thing that Darwin explained was not how species come to be but why so many of them remain so stable over time.  I like the emphasis on species selection because it looks to me like a modern version of Plato and I have the hots for Plato. 

At the same time, Gould’s successful species types are successful because the individual members are well adapted to their environments.  Even if cumulative instances of selection are less important in the explanation of general species forms than the ultra-Darwinians suppose, every species is just a bunch of critters and each critter has to make a living and leave a legacy.  The emphasis on natural selection and adaptation is still the fundamental explanation of how organisms are adapted to their environment and how a general species is kept in business.