A. IN ACTION
Though many people claim to have encountered (or to actually be) these creatures, there’s no scientifically accepted real-world evidence. That’s good news for storytellers – let your imagination run wild.
According to most anthropological studies, zombies seem to be humans hypnotized through ritual and drugs, not enlivened dead bodies as voodoo practitioners would have you believe.
B. IN MEDIA
The horror genre is huge, and many hinge on these weird creatures.
In some of the classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde films, he turns werewolfish in his Mr. Hyde side. An American Werewolf in London is a cult movie from the ‘80s, and from the same era, the Howling movies.
For psychologically complex vampires and demons, and a lot of good fun, watch the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles book series offers an ancient explanation of how all that blood sucking got started, back in ancient Egypt in a bid for immortality. The Hunger, starring Susan Sarandon and David Bowie, is a classy and poignant version; you must read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the modern daddy of vampire stories.
Cult favorite Night of the Living Dead is a classic zombie movie where the dead try to eat the living. In the comedy Death Becomes Her Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep are glamorous zombies, rivals for beauty and attention.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Centers of Motivation – Root: death, survival.
Experiment with other human-animal mixtures.
Besides blood, what would vampires want? One story has them going for pituitary glands to stay young. Play with the principle of ritual cannibalism — you eat what you want to become: heart = courageous, brain = clever, genitals = potent.
These afflictions hint at addictions; have their human cravings directly correspond to their animal actions. Or play against it and have each side loathe what their other self does: the wolf can’t stand cigarette smoke, the vampire faints at the sight of blood, the human is a city girl, or she is allergic to dogs, etc.
MONSTERS
Our first bouts with monsters are usually the ones under our beds and in our closets. As we grow up, our monsters become more sophisticated. Fear of the unknown is the cause, incredible creatures are the result.
CHARACTERISTICS
Nonhuman, so pretty much anything goes. To be actual antagonists there must be some slight ability to relate to humans: as food, as toys, as punching bags, as obstacles to their goals, as slaves, as mates.
Captain Taggart (Tim Allen) snaps in Galaxy Quest when counseled by a fellow actor Alan Rickman to determine the motivation of the monster chasing him, “It’s a rock monster — it doesn’t have any motivation!”
A. IN ACTION
Like much of art, monsters are an exaggeration of reality. Sea monsters are real storms personified or symbolically stand for emotions run amok. Some think dragons are a genetic memory of early mammals competing with dinosaurs.
Animating the typically inanimate equals monsters, like tree stumps, rocks, or slime.
B. IN MEDIA
Mythic monsters come from the sea, the sky, the jungles, underground, etc.
Science spawns fearsome monsters, beginning with Dr. Frankenstein’s and hitting a peak with the Terminator.
The atomic age ushered in a rash of 1950s movie monsters such as Godzilla and Them (giant ants). Novelist Stephen King managed to turn lots of ordinary objects into monsters, including cars and cell phones.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Centers of Motivation – Root: death, survival.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche advised, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Show your heroine taking on some characteristic of the monster in order to defeat it. And then having trouble giving up that ability.
Update mythic monsters.
Scan science reports for new discoveries and technologies to monsterize: deep-sea creatures, deep-earth exploration, off-planet life forms, genetics, etc.
ALIENS AMONG US
I once attended a Hollywood party where the hosts had set up a black light and a recliner; you could lie down, bare your skin, and have the black light scanned over you to search for alien surgery scars, said to show up under black lights. Hey, it was Hollywood.
CHARACTERISTICS
Extraterrestrials range from human-like to the silicon-based rock monsters of Star Trek and Galaxy Quest, to the lizards of Alien Nation and V, to particular smells and shades of color.
The way we know they’re alien is because their appearance, motives, or means are subtly, or wildly, different from those of humans.
A. IN ACTION
Many people claim to have encountered aliens; some claim to be aliens. Hypnotherapists claim to retrieve memories of alien abductions, including impregnations, stolen fetuses, lost time, and travel to the mother ship.
UFO conventions and websites draw huge crowds, and the U.S. government funds the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence [SETI], scanning the cosmos with telescopes and computers for signs of obviously designed signals.
Theories abound about government cover-ups of alien contact and technology. Many believe contact has been going on for eons and embrace the ancient astronauts theory of how humans and civilization came to this planet.
And yet… there’s been no widely accepted, scientifically proven, repeatably testable evidence for alien contact. Again, that’s good news for storytellers — imagine what you will, no one can prove you wrong.
B. IN MEDIA
Mythologies tell of visitations and genetic manipulations by extraterrestrials. Sumerian myths credit the Anunaki with creating humans as a labor force, as retold in the Stargate movie and series. The Bible mentions the Sons of God interbreeding with the Daughters of Men, and many interpret Ezekiel’s Chariot and Jacob’s Ladder as spacecraft. The ancient astronauts theories propose that the Teacher Gods of most cultures were off-planet explorers.
Scientology teaches a colonization by aliens many millions of years ago, remnants of which still attach to humans.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers embodied Cold War paranoia as humans were taken over in their sleep to become bodies for the aliens. The Alien movies, starring Sigourney Weaver, were exceptionally terrifying because the slathering-fanged alien looked vaguely human and used live humans as disposable nests for its vicious offspring.
The X-Files TV series gives exposure to all sorts of aliens and cover-up conspiracies.
Some stories reverse the trend with good aliens tut-tutting over bad humans. The Day the Earth Stood Still echoes the legend of teacher aliens putting a quarantine around earth after that Atlantis debacle. In the TV series Alien Nation conflict centers on how to integrate lizardly humanoids into regular life in LA… as if anyone would notice.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Centers of Motivation – Variable, depending on what they are and what they want.
Let your imagination run wild!
Even if your aliens deliver your story’s message, give them something to learn from humans in return.
Limit the weirdness to two to three basic concepts: faster-than-light travel, mind reading, stopping time, etc.
Go far enough back or forward in time, and human evolution looks pretty alien.
HAUNTED THINGS AND
HAIR-RAISING PLACES
Things and places can be haunted. Strictly speaking, any religion’s paradise and hell are haunted by no-longer-human entities. Travels to the underworld are so common in myth there’s a special name for the guide – psychopomp.
Ships and buildings are ripe for haunting since humans often die in them. So are temples and tombs.
CHARACTERISTICS
Different laws of physics. Time slows or speeds up. Some hells are misty oblivion, some crowded torture. Most reflect the individual’s expectations.
A. IN ACTION
Some people claim to sense former inhabit
ants in houses, sacred places, and battlefields — even to correctly describing them.
Legends of haunted ships have thrilled us since humans first began to float above the unknown deep. I’ve gone on the Halloween tour of the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor, featuring haunted parts of the historic ocean liner where people swear they’ve heard voices of long-dead crewmen.
B. IN MEDIA
Mythic heroes Ulysses, Aeneas, Hercules, Orpheus, and many others traveled to the underworld, as did Italian poet Dante in his epic, The Divine Comedy.
Both the Tibetan and the Egyptian Book of the Dead offer advice on how to navigate the afterlife, avoid demons, move to the next dimension, or get reborn. So do Mystery Schools.
The film What Dreams May Come showed artistically gorgeous renditions of the self-created afterlife, where some of the dead look like they did in life, while others do not.
Conan the Barbarian was always battling ghosts in haunted places. The TV series Lost drew watchers curious about what or who was haunting the island. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies feature ghostly ships and sailors.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Centers of Motivation – Solar Plexus: the doorway to other dimensions, & Root Center: death.
Even if you’re sending your character to the typical afterlife of their religion, toss in something unexpected: their cell phone works but no one can hear them, their own fears turn into monsters and turn on them, their words are taken literally, etc.
It’s said that heaven is gaining your heart’s desire — and so is hell. Show that reflection and polarity between the two extremes.
Exaggerate something merely annoying from real life into something fearsome in the afterlife: traffic, yappy dogs, telemarketers.
Where’s the back door to Hell? What unlocks it?
The protagonist usually goes to the underworld to retrieve information, a weapon, a treasure, or a loved one. If your character does return, have them bring back something unexpected as well: a recipe, design idea, song, game, etc.
CONCLUSION
Regardless of whether you’ve seen ghosts, angels, or aliens… lots of people believe they have. Regardless of whether you believe in such things without seeing them… lots of people do. Humans have been filling our stories with these fascinating nonhumans since we first huddled around a campfire and turned flickering shadows into the ghosts of our ancestors.
Recall Mulder’s poster in the X-Files TV series, “I want to believe.” Most people do want to believe the weird stuff, which makes our storytelling that much easier. Just remember to hold internal logic, skew your character descriptions and actions enough to keep us off balance and uncomfortable, and maintain mystery all the way through.
IV
THE LURE OF
THE DARK SIDE
So why do those people in the last section go to the Dark Side? How do they get lured away? What are the steps they take? These are important questions your audience wants you to answer. It’s not enough to just give two-dimensional cut-out characters — this guy’s bad because, well, he wears the black hat; that woman’s bad because she just kidnapped the hero’s baby. Tell us why. It’s scarier when you show us how evil, darkness, and even simple dimness works because we can then more easily imagine that there, but for the grace of God, we might also go. Plus, it’s way more entertaining to watch a temptation, decline, and fall than to just start out with a ready-made villain.
Depending on your plot structure, you may not always be showing us the full history of the villain or the situations that brought him to be that way, but by knowing this backstory well yourself, you can make potent reference to it that will enrich your portrayals.
10.
THE DEVIL MADE
ME DO IT
The ghost
The fatal flaw
I was under orders
Ate the Twinkies, drank the Kool-Aid
Gateway Dwellers
Guilt, grief, and shame
Born under a bad sign
Karma
Curses and voices
Aliens
Your audience wants to know why we do the things we do.
What turns faithful spouses into adulterers, honest people into thieves, and innocent babies into mass murderers? The Catholic Church has a catch-all answer: Original Sin. Freud identified it as inherent aggression. Superstitions blame evil curses. Reincarnationists cite karma. Whatever the cause, it’s a fact that some people just simply go bad. Look what happened to that sweet little boy Anakin Skywalker.
The popularization of psychological principles moved the supernatural inside, and instead of being possessed by seven demons, a person now has Multiple Personality Disorder. Neurobiology has pinpointed regions in the brain that cause hallucinations both visual and aural, so that voice of the devil you hear may just be bad brain wiring. On the other hand, some say your brain is just the radio the devil uses to talk to you.
The first words I learned in Klingon were Pich vighaj-BE, “It’s not my fault,” a very handy phrase. Contrary to blaming everything on other people, Fate, or the gods, however, self-help systems preach a healthy responsibility for one’s own actions. This can veer over into blaming others for their weaknesses, but the principle is sound.
Science may explain the mechanisms, but keep in mind the influence of archetypes and devas. Just as we can be swept up emotionally by love, loyalty, and joy, so too can we be swept into maelstroms of jealousy, lust, and hate. It’s enough to give one pause: maybe it is devils, because the alternative is rather unsettling. If it’s all just us humans.…
This section explores some backstory and cause-and-effect reasons for why your characters go down the Left Hand Path.
THE GHOST
What is it in your character’s past that haunts his present? A dead wife like in Lethal Weapon? A failed rescue like in The Guardian? A mother’s tragedy over the loss of a child like in Sophie’s Choice? The injury that scarred the Phantom of the Opera? Everybody has something they regret doing, or something they dearly wish had not happened. To increase suspense, reveal this motivation slowly throughout the story, and be sure it fits. Losing a kitten isn’t likely to create a serial killer; losing a mother might. What will bring balance and peace for your character? Do they accept it when offered? Or are they so identified with their suffering they refuse to let it go?
THE FATAL FLAW
Every tragic character has one. Choose from your basic Seven Deadly Sins: Greed, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, Anger, Pride, Envy. Also visit the “Dweller on the Threshold” chapter. Hubris (pride) is a typical flaw in Shakespearean drama and Greek myth. What do character flaws allow your characters to do? I heard a boisterous guy at a party say, “I was sober for three weeks. I had to start drinking again because without it, I had no excuse for my otherwise inexcusable behavior.” The Fatal Flaw is usually a positive quality taken to excess; show us that process. Charlie Sheen in Wall Street is a good example of the progress of ambition ramping up to greed and the problems that causes. In the classic Sunset Boulevard it’s ambition plus vanity that turn corrupt and deadly.
I WAS UNDER ORDERS
Some people excuse their actions with the Nuremberg Defense, used by Nazis in the post World War II warcrime trials: I was just following orders. Most Military Codes insist soldiers refuse to carry out illegal or inhumane orders, as do the Geneva Conventions. Wars and police actions too often provide cover and sanction for people just yearning to be bad. Show diverse approaches to these situations: refusal, reluctance, overindulgence of sadism, wavering, etc. Research the Vietnam Mai-Lai Massacre, the Zimbardo Experiment, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib, and other wartime and police atrocities. Play with the concepts that “Soldiers don’t make policy, politicians do,” and “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”
ATE THE TWINKIES™,
DRANK THE KOOL-AID™
Hard to believe, but people have actually been acquitted for murder because they were under the influence of too much suga
r (The Twinkie Defense). Most legal systems recognize crimes of passion and are more lenient to those possessed by the raging devil of jealousy. Mediterranean cultures typically waive crimes committed when the hot dry Sirocco winds howl in off the deserts. So far Los Angeles has not implemented a “Santa Ana wind” defense, but give us time. Until fairly recently in Texas, a man would not even be arrested for killing his wife and her lover. And there are “honor killings” in some cultures where outraged male relatives slay a girl perceived to have misbehaved.
To “drink the Kool-Aid” is to be brainwashed, as in the 1976 Jonestown Massacre where followers of cult leader Jim Jones drank poisoned Kool-Aid in a mass suicide/murder. The term is used a lot in politics and the military.
GATEWAY DWELLERS
Our Dwellers on the Threshold offer gateways to the Dark Side. Temptations, dependencies, obsessions, and addictions can get way out of hand. Some say they are gateways for the Darkness to enter a person; others that they are gateways for it to come through them and out into the world. Either way, show us how not dealing with the problem enlarges the gateway and leads to more trouble. Films such as Barfly, Leaving Las Vegas, Postcards from the Edge, Girl Interrupted, 28 Days, Quills, In the Realm of the Senses, Last Tango in Paris, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf dramatize this tragic process of temporary, too often permanent, insanity.
Power of the Dark Side Page 15
