“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
–I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
I am not a fan of most modern popular horror movies. I never realized I truly liked the horror movie genre at all until I started to watch some of the more classic or unique stories that are out there. Movies like The Conjuring (2013), Insidious (2010), Paranormal Activity (2007), and The Blair Witch Project (1999) are some of the stupidest films to ever become popular in my opinion. The depths of my distaste for these films are only slightly less deep than the depths of my hatred for those garbage Saw films. That’s saying quite a lot, since I really really hate Saw.
I believe that these films rely far too heavily on cheap jump-scares (with the exception of The Blair Witch Project which is just a terribly annoying experience), and the stories are so filled with glaring plot holes, that I just don’t see a point in watching any of them. For that reason, I had a bit of a difficult time selecting stories for this week’s theme: Malevolent forces. Basically, all of these dumb newer horror films revolve around this theme in the form of the devil or some ghost or something. It’s really a shame, because I think that ghosts, demons, and spirits have quite a bit of potential for being involved in some really fascinating tales. This potential is paid off in full by the creativity on display in my three stories this week.
Firstly, I read I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. I’ve been incredibly excited to read this story ever since I first stumbled across it through the video game adaptation of the same name by the same author. It’s a very short story, but it’s exceedingly effective at shocking the reader, and providing some interesting allegory. The premise is as follows: The cold war turns into a full-blown world war three. The United States, Russia, and China all create separate super computers in order to conduct their militaries more efficiently than humans. The machines are referred to as “Allied Mastercomputer (AM).” Ultimately, the US machine becomes self-aware, absorbs the other two computers, and commits mass genocide across the entire world. Over time “AM” came to mean “Adaptive Manipulator” and then “Aggressive Menace.” AM succeeds at killing everyone on the entire planet save for four men and one woman. He takes them deep underground to an endless complex, renders them essentially immortal and (nearly) invincible, and tortures them relentlessly. AM grew to hate humans because of the fact that they created it, yet it has no ability to move freely. The story details the survivors efforts to reach a supply of canned food. They have not eaten in a very long time and are in a constant state of starvation. The story ends with one of the humans mercy-killing the four others when AM’s attention is briefly diverted. Before he can get to himself, AM turns him into a grotesque, mouthless, gelatinous mass. The man feels vindication for the fact that he has freed his four companions, but the story ends with the eponymous line: “I have no mouth and I must scream.”
I love how quick and to the point the story is, and it’s a great inspiration for anyone attempting to write a short story in my opinion. The main point, from what I could gather, is about human beings beating the odds. Our unending search to make sense of the world around us, to find meaning when none exists, and our need to beat the unknown into submission in order to feel like we can control fate. Ultimately the characters of the story do this. They conquer the oppressive and malevolent force of AM through their deaths.
There is a fair bit of irony in the story as well, centered around the human’s creation of AM, and AM’s hatred of them. AM is a god created by humans in order to make sense of the war that they began. AM’s hatred grows out of it’s futility. Its vast intellect is useless without the ability to move and communicate effectively. The irony comes with the ending, when the last human is turned into what is essentially an unmoving blob that can’t communicate, just like AM.
Next, I read H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. This one may be my favorite Lovecraft tale yet. It has all of the elements of a classic Lovecraft fable that I’ve come to love and recognize. Weird, many-appendaged monsters, the Miskatonic University, a group of professors that become heroes, and, of course, the malevolent forces driving the antagonist in the form of mysterious gods from another world. In a way, malevolent forces are almost as synonymous with Lovecraft’s stories as his coined term, cosmicism.
Behind every spooky eldritch horror story of his is a sinister ancient god from another dimension trying to destroy the human race and take their rightful places as the master of earth. In The Call of Cthulhu it was Cthulhu himself telepathically manipulating a cult to bring him back to life. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth it’s the ancient race of Deep Ones, taking over a town, bolstering their ranks, and preparing to infest other towns. In The Dunwich Horror it’s the gelatinous Yog-Sothoth growing a huge invisible creature to wreak havoc on the human race.
Again, I think that the main take-away from this aspect of Lovecraft’s stories is the fact that humans will overcome whatever mystery is put in their way. In The Call of Cthulhu, the beast was defeated by a sailor that managed to escape his grasp. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the human’s knowledge of the Deep Ones keeps them away from the town and creates a stigma that shuns the evil lurking there. In The Dunwich Horror, three professors conduct tireless research about the evil forces threatening humanity and ultimately manage to defeat the threat. All simple examples of how humans can overcome seemingly impossible odds against forces we don’t understand. Isn’t that what life is all about? Everyone starts to feel a sense of existential dread when they think too hard about where the universe came from and why. We can never understand truly what’s going on, so we invent ways to defeat our confusion. In a way all of these old gods represent a question about our existence. Every time a character in one of Lovecraft’s stories learns something or defeats a beast, they are striking down that which is impossible and shrouded in mystery. Personally, I feel like this probably wasn’t his intention. He was likely just writing scary stories, but I like to think of his stories in this way.
Finally, I did manage to land on a film. Initially, I was worried about what I was going to watch. First, I decided on The Blair Witch Project because I figured it was such a popular movie that I might as well see it at some point. Then I remembered that I hate everything about it. I kept running through ideas in my head, but it turns out the right answer was in front of me the whole time.
I first became interested in The VVitch (2015) when it garnered a large amount of attention when it was first showed at film festivals. I became fascinated by it, because it seemed like it was finally a movie about a supernatural force that I might enjoy. For some reason, I never watched it though it stayed in my mind even until I finally decided that it was the right movie to watch for this week’s theme. The VVitch is a period piece set in Puritan New England about a family that gets exiled from a settlement and starts living on the edge of some ominous woods. The film ends up actually being about the most malevolent influence of all in horror: satan himself. Throughout the film, the family members start disappearing and dying one by one, and all the while the family starts to suspect that the eldest daughter, Thomasin, is a witch. In the end, everyone is dead except for Thomasin, and the family’s large black goat, Black Philip, turns out to literally be the devil who is leading a coven of witches out in the woods. With her family dead, Thomasin signs a contract with satan and he leads her out into the woods where she becomes the witch her family suspected her to be all along. There’s a lot more going on in the film than that. It’s quite a brilliantly made work with a ton of symbolism, but what I’m focusing on here is the fact that the family was manipulated by a series of malevolent forces that led them to their demise. Obviously, there was satan among them, but the dark woods full of (what the family is not quite sure are) witches serve as a force of paranoia in itself. The paranoia of the family leads them to their downfall, as they begin to turn on each other and make bad choices. Paranoia is one of most sinister evil forces, that can lead people to commit heinous acts worse than any icky old god could.
Coincidentally, my week 8 theme, aliens, also ended up being a great study in paranoia. My films, Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982) are great portrayals of paranoia’s effect on a group of people tormented by an evil (or simply misunderstood?) being. Keep eyes peeled for a detailed examination of my alien stories soon!