Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural

by Marvin Kaye (ed. )

  “Come on!” said Bilbo. “I am waiting!” He tried to sound bold and cheerful, but he did not feel at all sure how the game was going to end, whether Gollum guessed right or not.

  “Time’s up!” he said.

  “String, or nothing!” shrieked Gollum, which was not quite fair—working in two guesses at once.

  “Both wrong,” cried Bilbo very much relieved; and he jumped at once to his feet, put his back to the nearest wall, and held out his little sword. But funnily enough he need not have been alarmed. For one thing Gollum had learned long long ago was never, never, to cheat at the riddle-game, which is a sacred one and of immense antiquity. Also there was the sword. He simply sat and whispered.

  “What about the present?” asked Bilbo, not that he cared very much, still he felt that he had won it, pretty fairly, and in very difficult circumstances, too.

  “Must we give it the thing, preciouss? Yess, we must! We must fetch it, preciouss, and give it the present we promised.” So Gollum paddied back to his boat, and Bilbo thought he had heard the last of him. But he had not. The hobbit was just thinking of going back up the passage—having had quite enough of Gollum and the dark water’s edge—when he heard him wailing and squeaking away in the gloom. He was on his island (of which, of course, Bilbo knew nothing), scrabbling here and there, searching and seeking in vain, and turning out his pockets.

  “Where iss it? Where iss it?” Bilbo heard him squeaking. “Lost, lost, my preciouss, lost, lost! Bless us and splash us! We haven’t the present we promised, and we haven’t even got it for ourselves.”

  Bilbo turned round and waited, wondering what it could be that the creature was making such a fuss about. This proved very fortunate afterwards. For Gollum came back and made a tremendous spluttering and whispering and croaking; and in the end Bilbo gathered that Gollum had had a ring—a wonderful, beautiful ring, a ring that he had given for a birthday present, ages and ages before in old days when such rings were less uncommon. Sometimes he had it in his pocket; usually he kept it in a little hole in the rock on his island; sometimes he wore it—when he was very, very hungry, and tired of fish, and crept along dark passages looking for stray goblins. Then he might venture even into places where the torches were lit and made his eyes blink and smart; but he would be safe. O yes! very nearly safe; for if you slipped that ring on your finger, you were invisible; only in the sunlight could you be seen, and then only by your shadow, and that was a faint and shaky sort of shadow.

  I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: “We are ssorry; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only only pressent, if it won the competition.” He even offered to catch Bilbo some nice juicy fish to eat as a consolation.

  Bilbo shuddered at the thought of it. “No thank you!” he said as politely as he could.

  He was thinking hard, and the idea came to him that Gollum must have dropped that ring sometime and that he must have found it, and that he had that very ring in his pocket. But he had the wits not to tell Gollum.

  “Finding’s keeping!” he said to himself; and being in a very tight place, I daresay, he was right; Anyway the ring belonged to him now.

  “Never mind!” he said. “The ring would have been mine now, if you had found it; so you would have lost it anyway. And I will let you off on one condition.”

  “Yes, what iss it? What does it wish us to do, my precious?”

  “Help me to get out of these places,” said Bilbo.

  Now Gollum had to agree to this, if he was not to cheat. He still very much wanted just to try what the stranger tasted like; but now he had to give up all idea of it. Still there was the little sword; and the stranger was wide awake and on the look out, not unsuspecting as Gollum liked to have the things which he attacked. So perhaps it was best after all.

  That is how Bilbo got to know that the tunnel ended at the water and went no further on the other side where the mountain wall was dark and solid. He also learned that he ought to have turned down one of the side passages to the right before he came to the bottom; but he could not follow Gollum’s directions for finding it again on the way up, and he made the wretched creature come and show him the way.

  As they went along up the tunnel together, Gollum flip-flapping at his side, Bilbo going very softly, he thought he would try the ring. He slipped it on his finger.

  “Where iss it? Where iss it gone to?” said Gollum at once, peering about with his long eyes.

  “Here I am, following behind!” said Bilbo slipping off the ring again, and feeling very pleased to have it and to find that it really did what Gollum said.

  Now on they went again, while Gollum counted the passages to left and right: “One left, one right, two right, three right, two left,” and so on. He began to get very shaky and afraid as they left the water further and further behind; but at last he stopped by a low opening on their left (going up)—“six right, four left.”

  “Here’ss the passage,” he whispered. “It musst squeeze in and sneak down. We durstn’t go with it, my preciouss, no we durstn’t, gollum!”

  So Bilbo slipped under the arch, and said good-bye to the nasty miserable creature; and very glad he was. He did not feel comfortable until he felt quite sure it was gone, and he kept his head out in the main tunnel listening until the flip-flap of Gollum going back to his boat died away in the darkness. Then he went down the new passage.

  It was a low narrow one roughly made. It was all right for the hobbit, except when he stubbed his toes in the dark on nasty jags in the floor; but it must have been a bit low for goblins. Perhaps it was not knowing that goblins are used to this sort of thing, and go along quite fast stooping low with their hands almost on the floor, that made Bilbo forget the danger of meeting them and hurry forward recklessly.

  Soon the passage began to go up again, and after a while it climbed steeply. That slowed him down. But at last after some time the slope stopped, the passage turned a corner and dipped down again, and at the bottom of a short incline he saw filtering round another corner—a glimmer of light. Not red light as of fire or lantern, but pale ordinary out-of-doors sort of light. Then he began to run. Scuttling along as fast as his little legs would carry him he turned the corner and came suddenly right into an open place where the light, after all that time in the dark seemed dazzlingly bright. Really it was only a leak of sunshine in through a doorway, where a great door, a stone door, was left a little open.

  Bilbo blinked, and then he suddenly saw the goblins: goblins in full armour with drawn swords sitting just inside the door, and watching it with wide eyes, and the passage that led to it! They saw him sooner than he saw them, and with yells of delight they rushed upon him.

  Whether it was accident or presence of mind, I don’t know. Accident, I think, because the hobbit was not used yet to his new treasure. Anyway he slipped the ring on his left hand—and the goblins stopped short. They could not see a sign of him. Then they yelled twice as loud as before but not so delightedly.

  “Where is it?” they cried.

  “Go back up the passage!” some shouted.

  “This way!” some yelled. “That way!” others yelled.

  “Look out for the door,” bellowed the captain.

  Whistles blew, armour clashed, swords rattled, goblins cursed and swore and ran hither and thither, falling over one another and getting very angry. There was a terrible outcry, to-do, and disturbance.

  Bilbo was dreadfully frightened, but he had the sense to understand what had happened and to sneak behind a big barrel which held drink for the goblin-guards, and so get out of the way and avoid being bumped into, trampled to death, or caught by feel.

  “I must get to the door, I must get to the door!” he kept on saying to himself, but it was a long time before he ventured to try. Then it was like a horrible game of blind-man’s-buff. The place was full of goblins running about, and the poor little hobbit dodged this way and that, was knocked over by a goblin who could not make o
ut what he had bumped into, scrambled away on all fours, slipped between the legs of the captain just in time, got up, and ran for the door.

  It was still ajar, but a goblin had pushed it nearly to. Bilbo struggled but he could not move it. He tried to squeeze through the crack. He squeezed and squeezed, and he stuck! It was awful. His buttons had got wedged on the edge of the door and the door-post. He could see outside into the open air: there were a few steps running down into a narrow valley between tall mountains; the sun came out from behind a cloud and shone bright on the outside of the door—but he could not get through.

  Suddenly one of the goblins inside shouted: “There is a shadow by the door. Something is outside!”

  Bilbo’s heart jumped into his mouth. He gave a terrific squirm. Buttons burst off in all directions. He was through, with a torn coat and waistcoat, leaping down the steps like a goat, while bewildered goblins were still picking up his nice brass buttons on the doorstep.

  Of course they soon came down after him, hooting and hallooing, and hunting among the trees. But they don’t like the sun: it makes their legs wobble and their heads giddy. They could not find Bilbo with the ring on, slipping in and out of the shadow of the trees, running quick and quiet, and keeping out of the sun; so soon they went back grumbling and cursing to guard the door. Bilbo had escaped.

  Afterward

  Caution: Plot elements of several anthologized selections are discussed below. The reader may wish to peruse the works by Asimov, Bloch, Bürger, Carr, Hearn, Hoch, Lee, Level, Runyon, Singer, Stoker and Tennyson before embarking upon the following essay and the ensuing notes.

  Is Terror a Dying Art?

  Although horror and terror commonly are employed synonymously, the dictionary unmistakably links the former term with that revulsion experienced upon witnessing something ugly, disgusting, shocking, etc. Terror carries no such connotation. Its meaning is cleaner, more profound, deriving as it does from the Latin terrere, to frighten.

  For the past decade or more, I have been disappointed with most of the sophomoric horror tales, novels and films recommended to me, mostly by younger friends. It is not solely because my tastes are jaded (they are) that I am resoundingly unimpressed with such fare as Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Howling, The Shining, Ghost Story, The Omen, The Thing, Creepshow, Twilight Zone the Movie, and so on and on ad—literally—nauseum. To borrow an image from the Episcopalian priest-philosopher, Robert Farrar Capon, the public has heard so many tin fiddles squealing that it’s hard to recall what a Stradivarius sounds like.

  You disagree? Wade through the purple prose and puerile theology of Blatty’s The Exorcist, then flip back and read Andreyev’s bleakly existential “Lazarus” or find a copy, if you can, of Russell’s first novel, The Case Against Satan, and read the identical story but without Blatty’s artsy straining-for-effect pretentiousness. Look at Rosemary’s Baby. Try to find anything the least bit ambiguous about its sweet-young-thing-brutalized-by-the-bogeyman plot. Some critics tried to make a case for Rosemary’s predicament existing solely in her mind, but nothing Ira Levin wrote substantiates that claim, whereas Isaac Bashevis Singer accomplishes precisely that in a fraction of the verbiage in “The Black Wedding.” Films? None of the above can seriously be considered in the same company as Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence or Jack Clayton’s 1961 classic, The Innocents. They can’t even compare favorably with Val Lewton’s low-budget thrillers, or the unnerving mixture of horror and poignancy in Franju’s Les Thux Sans Visage. And the ventriloquist episode of Cavalcanti’s Dead of Night holds more genuine terror than all those pitifully inept Roger Corman-Poe clinkers or the Hammer Draculas with their bottomless buckets of blood.

  I’m not suggesting that horror should be divorced from terror and exiled from the kingdom of night. That would be both foolish and impractical. When you romp through graveyards or play Peeping Tom to a sociopath, you must expect to feel the impact in the pit of your stomach at the same time those icy glissandos xylophone their way along your spine.

  What I am proposing is a rebirth of artistic balance and taste by relegating horror to its rightful subsidiary position as a mere contributory device towards achieving terror. Naked horror is a meretricious effect, easy to employ, liable to pall if used too liberally or often. The true impact of Damon Runyon’s “The Informal Execution of Soupbone Pew,” for instance, is not the nasty hugger-mugger in the jail cell, but the unexpected revelation in the last line of the story. Here the true note of terror is sounded, rooted as it is in the awesome enigma of the human mind.

  Even at its crudest, most melodramatic level, terror has the ability to stir up the secret dreads embedded in our individual and collective imaginations. By recognizing our worst nightmares, we are capable of exorcising them, at least temporarily. When a great artist turns to the terror genre, he or she elevates the exorcism process to the level of catharsis: that working out of pity commingled with terror that the Greeks experienced at the close of a Sophoclean trilogy—a massive cultural/spiritual purging that permitted the participants to leave the sacred theatre uplifted and better equipped to deal with the everyday fears of life itself. Thus terror in its most noble incarnation is a vital component of the art of tragedy.

  It therefore follows that great works of terror depend largely for their power upon characterization. By their very nature, the related genres of fantasy, the supernatural, mystery, science fiction and suspense—all of them capable of producing tales of terror—tend to stress concept, i.e., the plot gimmick, the vampire, the animated flayed hand, the sadist with the eternal smile on his face. Because concept is so striking, too many writers and film directors become enamored of the device to the detriment of character.

  Imagine, for example, a film that shows a white-haired old woman feebly scrabbling in the dark among the rotting pieces of corpses that have dropped from a gallows. She finds certain bones, peers uncertainly at them, separates them from the sinews and eyeballs of more recent cadavers. She hides them in a burlap sack and scuttles away muttering, “My son . . . my son.”

  Well, it might work, but any shock it produced would be slight. Why? Because we know nothing about her, less about her son. But tum to Tennyson’s “Rizpah” and hear the dying woman’s heartrending secret. The poet sets the son’s harmlessly rakehell character swiftly, deftly, and paints his mother’s anguish with such agonizing force that we weep for her and shake with rage at the towering inhumanity of that system of “justice” that destroyed both lives.

  Character is more important than plot every time. Without it, a writer might just as well hide in a closet and yell “Boo!” at passersby. That, in essence, is what most modem horror literature and cinema amounts to. But when the reader begins to believe in and care about a fictional protagonist, he or she becomes susceptible to those calculated manipulations that a masterful fabulist must devise in order to invoke a sense of wonder and terror (the two often go hand in hand).

  Proper manipulation of the reader’s emotions requires a sense of structure and an appreciation of the greatest special effect of them all: economy. Not showing the wicked something that this way comes too soon, too clearly or too often. Watch some of those old scare movies on late-night television. Even the hack “B” film directors usually knew enough to delay the first appearance of the monster. One of the more effective oldies is Night of the Demon, based on M. R. James’ eerie tale, “Casting the Runes.” A great sense of menace is developed in the early sequences because the demon lurks just beyond view. When he finally makes his onscreen appearance, His Satanic Nibs is a decided letdown. He looks a little like Ernest Borgnine, The director (Jacques Tourneur, who usually knew better) passed the “too soon” test but displayed his critter too clearly. As for employing an effect too often, note the overused images of decay in the film Ghost Story. We see the rotting corpse so many times that her appearance is familiar and not in the least shocking by the end of the film. If the director had only given us the reactions of her victims and held o
ff on what she looks like till the climax, it might have been harrowing rather than predictable.

  Terror, though rooted in character and artfully orchestrated, still needs one more thing to be truly effective: an understanding of psychology, of what frightens us. This is the distinguishing requisite. What works for one person may leave another totally unmoved. Example: Ike Asimov’s “Flies.” Some readers understand the analogy being drawn between Casey and the flies that worship him and the possible relationship between mankind and godhead; others miss it entirely. One friend of mine who understood it perfectly merely laughed—and over the years, I’ve also come around to seeing “Flies” both as a tale of terror and a bit of black comedy.[1]

  H. P. Lovecraft once stressed the importance of the fears of darkness, cold and dampness. Many of his stories begin with a night scene near the seaside, sometimes during winter—thus consciously employing all three fears to (hopefully) unsettle the reader at the very outset.

  The catalog of things that really frighten us is endless. It would include odd phobias that only affect a few. Roger Price once enumerated several in his hilarious book In One Head and Out the Other. His “capper” was the fear of being covered with gold paint, which Price called a “gilt complex.” Then Ian Fleming wrote Goldfinger, in which a woman is asphyxiated by being totally immersed in gold paint and the idea no longer seemed quite so funny.

  Robert Bloch employs quite a few common terrors in “The Hungry House”: fear of the unknown as the nature of the malign entity puzzles and terrifies the hapless protagonists; fear of madness when it appears that the house is haunted by a violently insane spirit; fear of pain, death and possession as bloody deaths await the heroes who become the latest in a growing population of captive ghosts.

  A variation of the fear of pain (and suffering) is the use of dismemberment in tales of terror. Sometimes the bodily parts just lie there, as in Carr’s “The House in Goblin Wood,” while on other occasions, they become animate with ghastly purpose (de Maupassant’s “The Flayed Hand”). But I maintain that the mere existence of a severed head or hand only makes for horror. It is the calculating inhumanity of the murderers in the Carr tale that makes us quake with the notion that the most innocent-looking milquetoast “may smile and smile and be a villain.” As for the active extremity in the de Maupassant story, I suspect it is the inexplicable cosmic mystery it implies that is responsible for any morsel of fear we feel upon reading the tale.