Things That Go Bump in the Dark
Strange creatures roamed the streets of my neighborhood a few days ago, monsters, ghosts and a few space creatures. Halloween, we call it, and explain that though it has pagan origins, it also has a Christian overlay – or maybe we don’t bother with that at all and just concentrate on the candy. Whatever we think of the holiday, it’s a symptom of something that goes deep into the human psyche: our fear of, and attraction to, strangeness, otherness.
As a species, we seem to have always been fascinated by the monstrous. I imagine our cave-dwelling ancestors sitting around the fire, telling stories about the terrifying things that stalk by night. And surely, real predators like the Dire Wolf and the Sabertooth Tiger, eyes glowing in the dark forest, were scary enough to engender a host of cautionary tales. Perhaps racial memories of other, competing tribes so recently extinct such as the Neanderthals gave rise to stories of the frightful creature that was almost but not quite human. The list of fearsome beasts is diverse and long: Minotaur, sphinx, dragon, basilisk, lamia, Sasquatch – every tribe had its own favorite horror. In the centuries before science was able to explain away (for the most part) these horrifying creations, they exerted an endless pull on our imaginations.
Part of the monsters’ function, of course, was to keep people – especially children – in line. Rule-breaking, tradition-defying, laid one open to the predations of the unthinkable. The power of these mythic beasts lay in the fact that they could be true, not that we always believed they were true. But as science vanquished superstition, these strange children of the imagination lost their power to enthrall us, dwindling down to the scurrying forms on our streets at the end of October, carrying our token offerings of candy in exchange for a promise not to vandalize the property. Most of us don’t believe in ghosts and goblins today, and most modern religions have given up threatening us with devils and demons, yet, like our ancestors, we still enjoy the frisson of terror.
Luckily for us, there is one species of monster that science hasn’t forbidden us to believe in; in fact science fosters the possibility of this creature being out there: the alien from space. Most of us have no more chance of meeting a Martian than our ancestors had meeting Grendel, but we are susceptible to tall tales just the same. The thing is, to be truly spine-chilling, there has to be an element of human reference in our alien monsters. It’s not as scary to us if the alien does things completely outside our comprehension as it is if we can recognize some aspect of ourselves in the alien’s actions. Otherwise, the monster is interesting but not likely to inhabit our nightmares for very long.
Take for example, one of the most satisfying monsters in recent film: the alien Sigourney Weaver faces in the series of eponymous movies. One thing movies do better than written SF is build frightening creatures, and this alien is undoubtedly one of the most successful. But that’s not why it comes across to us as genuinely terrifying. When we analyze the basis for its shocking actions, we can identify several elements that we recognize from our own experience. This monster is female; she nurtures her young – albeit by inserting them into nutritional hosts, but some Earth creatures do that too. She protects her young by killing those who might menace them; we understand that protective instinct. She seeks revenge when her young are killed, a very human-like reaction. In other words, this monster is a classic almost-but-not-quite-human, and that’s what stimulates the most ancient part of our brains, raising our atavistic hackles. It’s like looking into a distorting mirror of extreme aspects of ourselves. The sight of Godzilla destroying yet another city doesn’t evoke the same terror.
Written SF about aliens relies on the same psychological mechanism to cause fear in the reader. Octavia Butler’s Nebula and Hugo award-winning “Bloodchild” poses a horrifying choice for its main character: accept his stomach-turning symbiotic destiny with the alien and lose his freedom (and perhaps his life), or deny it and escape but not find peace. Yet the aliens that cause this horrendous dilemma are not evil, and the bonds between them and the humans are about nurturing and love. The real horror in this story is that on some level we not only understand but come to sympathize with the aliens.
On the other hand, Terry Carr’s “The Dance of the Changer and the Three” gives us an apparently friendly alien that unpredictably destroys an entire human colony for ultimately inscrutable reasons. This is a fascinating , well-told story, but it lacks the chilling power of Butler’s tale, not because its aliens are energy beings rather than carbon-based life-forms, but because their psychology isn’t remotely similar to ours. We find nothing in them to identify with.
Perhaps this primitive reaction to the almost-but-not-quite-like-us gives us insight into one of the genre’s earliest novels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. While the scientist regards his creation as a monster, and the other characters react with terror and outrage, the reader’s sympathy is more likely to be divided. The monster is scary, but we recognize aspects of our own humanity in its yearnings.
The trick for the writer or film-maker is to construct an alien that is different enough to be interesting while still remaining understandable to us on an emotional level. Humans in monster costumes are fun on the page or screen as they are on the street, but they aren’t frightening to adults. And no battlestar, deathray, robotic storm-trooper or secret weapon can cause that chill that runs down our spines like the image of humanity seen in the distorting mirror of the alien.
Trick or Treat, anyone?
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds. To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.
