by Matt Cardin
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”: The Blurring of Sanity and Insanity
Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) reads on the one hand as a gruesome horror-supernatural story but on the other as a realistic, if terrifying, psychological fiction in which sanity and insanity blur. It is one of his most popular tales, and it has been anthologized countless times.
Attempting justification for murdering an old man for whom he has served as caretaker, the story’s first-person narrator states that the latter’s eye appalled him, so he murdered the old man to negate the repellent eye, carefully dismembered the corpse, and buried the parts under the floor. The narrative proceeds detail by detail, as if such careful, seemingly rational explanation of the circumstances will demonstrate the narrator’s sanity. Such obsession as he reveals concerning his opinion about the old man’s eye initially indicates that this account is rational, only to lead to a conclusion in which the narrator’s guilty conscience causes him to imagine that his crime is perfect, so that he feels emboldened to invite the police to search his home. But he has begun to hear a strange noise, which to him seems to be the beating of the old man’s heart, and ultimately this sound drives him into frenzy; he tells his visitors to tear up the floor boards, exposing the truth he tried to conceal. What the narrator hears may be the sound made by an insect, colloquially called “the Lesser Death-Watch,” though no precise origin has been established. But more important than any specific source is the fact that the imagined sound drives the narrator to his undoing, thereby ironically undercutting all of his careful planning.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” remains as popular today as it was with its original readers. It has been adapted many times for radio, television, and film.
Benjamin F. Fisher
Film has provided a welcoming medium for horror, and psychological horror has played an essential part in film history. Sometimes this has been linked to literary sources; adaptations of Psycho (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), The Haunting of Hill House (filmed as The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, 1963), and The Shining (directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1980) are considered film classics. Cinema began to explore psychological horror very early, especially in the case of German Expressionism (1919–1933), which created a striking visual style by exteriorizing characters’ often dark inner states by means of exaggerated and surreal lighting and set design. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which is set in an asylum, and Fritz Lang’s M (1931), which follows a murdering pedophile through Berlin, use composition and lighting to reflect inner disorientation and fear. Also often cited as early examples of cinematic psychological horror are The Black Cat (1934), Cat People (1942), and White Zombie (1932), the latter of which, despite its title, is more a psychological film than monster movie.
Given the fluid boundaries between horror subgenres, a number of horror narratives can be read or viewed from a variety of critical perspectives that unite psychological horror with something else. For example, both Jack Finney’s classic horror/science fiction novel The Body Snatchers (1955) and its several film adaptations as Invasion of the Body Snatchers—as in Dan Siegel’s 1956 version, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version, and Abel Ferrara’s 1993 version—are as much psychological studies of disorientation in the face of an almost inconceivable and unbearable event—the sinister replacement of one’s friends, acquaintances, and loved ones by alien duplicates (“pod people,” as they are commonly referred to in popular culture)—as they are science fiction invasion narratives. Both Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs and its superlative 1991 film adaptation by director Jonathan Demme stand more as studies in madness, inhering in the almost transcendent and magisterial insanity of the genius, psychologist, and serial killer Hannibal Lecter, than they do as killer thrillers.
Jim Holte
See also: Bloch, Robert; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Fear; Harris, Thomas; The Haunting of Hill House; “Ligeia”; Misery; The Shining; The Turn of the Screw; “The Yellow Wall-Paper”; “Young Goodman Brown.”
Further Reading
Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Hoppenstand, Gary. 2001. “Horror Fiction.” In The Guide to United States Popular Culture, edited by Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne, 406–408. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Massé, Michelle A. 2015. “Psychoanalysis and the Gothic.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 307–320. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Spratford, Becky Siegel, and Tammy Hennigh Clausen. 2004. “Psychological Horror.” In Horror Readers’ Advisory: The Librarian’s Guide to Vampires, Killer Tomatoes, and Haunted Houses, 90–97. Chicago: American Library Association.
Wisker, Gina. 2005. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum.
PULP HORROR
The term “pulp horror” refers to a brand of horror fiction chiefly but not exclusively limited to twentieth-century popular magazines printed on cheap paper and catering to lower- and middle-class readers. Pulp horror is marked by an adherence to formula writing and stereotypical characters and themes at the expense of originality.
Horror fiction had been comparatively rare in the general-interest pulp magazines of the twentieth century until the advent of Weird Tales in 1923. Titles such as Argosy were formulated to appeal to a broad audience, and individual issues typically contained general fiction and the commonly accepted popular genres, such as mystery, Western, and romance. Horror was considered “off-trail,” an editorial term denoting a story out of the mainstream of acceptability, and only the most compelling horror stories by reputable authors found their way into print.
For its first decade, Weird Tales had the field virtually to itself, and its readers were largely content with the traditional subgenres of supernatural fiction—vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and like monsters. It set the standard for magazine horror fiction in its day, and although it claimed to have no editorial taboos, in reality its contents hewed to common and comfortable horror conventions, with the contributions by H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and very few others representing notable exceptions.
The first wave of Hollywood horror talkies in 1931–1932 directly inspired a parallel trend in pulp detection fiction. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and other now-classic films demonstrated that the general public was open to horror stories. This led to a wave of “menace” tales appearing in pulp magazines such as Detective-Dragnet and Dime Mystery Magazine, in which detective protagonists battled ghoulish fiends, the classic Prohibition-era gangster antagonist having become passé.
In 1933, menace detective fiction evolved into the mystery-terror story, becoming a distinct subgenre unto itself. In the fall of that year, Popular Publications reformulated Dime Mystery Magazine as a vehicle for horror-themed suspense stories with a specific mystery—but not deductive—slant.
Publisher Harry Steeger cited the horrific Grand Guignol Theater in Paris as the inspiration for this unique new brand of pulp story, but Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade were equally influential. Editor Rogers Terrill described the rigid formula writers were required to follow slavishly: “Our stories usually concern a young man and a young woman in love, either married or sweethearts, and terror menaces both of them. The emotional effect of terror felt for someone else is far stronger than fear for oneself. Where a terrible menace threatens a man and woman in love, they will fight like hell for each other. . . . We want an eerie, uncanny type of menace, which may seem supernatural as the story progresses, but which can be logically explained at the end—or it may be definitely supernatural” (Lenninger 1935, 16).
Dime Mystery’s rising circulation proved Steeger correct. The title was followed by Terror Tales (1934) and Horror Stories (1935), in which the new mystery-terror formula was relentlessly codified by writers such as Norvell W. Page, Frederick C. Davis, Wyatt Blassingame, Hugh B. Cave, Arthur J. Burks, Paul
Ernst, and John H. Knox. “Weird Menace” became the operative term for these super-specialized stories wherein lay protagonists—as distinct from official or semiofficial crime solvers—confront and defeat seemingly supernatural situations and survive, if not triumph. One conceit of the formula avoided admitting that any actual supernatural agency was at work. The ghouls, fiends, vampires, and other depraved monsters were usually revealed as diabolical frauds, giving the stories a climactic twist in the direction of normalcy triumphant. A sprinkling of supernatural denouements were offered to create an element of uncertainty. The editorial need to push the boundaries of taboo situations inevitably led to excesses in the areas of sex and sadism, as typical Weird Menace titles such as “Death’s Loving Arms,” “Girls for the Devil’s Abattoir,” and “Daughter of Dark Desire” suggest, resulting in censorship pressures that culminated with the banning of such magazines in 1940 and their extinction in 1941.
With variations, the Weird Menace formula has been periodically revived. The so-called “Men’s Sweat” magazines of the 1950s and 1960s flirted with it without success. Readers preferred Nazi torturers and naturalistic wildlife encounters instead of the faux-supernatural horror element. However, Weird Menace continues to thrive in Hollywood, as exemplified by the cycles of Scream, Saw, and Nightmare on Elm Street film franchises, in which hapless teenage protagonists endlessly reenact the grisly Ten Little Indians formula of classic mystery fiction, but with horrific trappings.
Will Murray
See also: Lovecraft, H. P.; Occult Detectives; Penny Dreadful; Smith, Clark Ashton; Splatterpunk; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Jones, Robert Kenneth. 1978. The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s. New York: New American Library.
Lenninger, August. 1935. “Six of a Chain.” Writer’s Digest, January. Cincinnati, Ohio.
Q
QUINN, SEABURY (1889–1969)
Born in the nation’s capital during America’s Gilded Age, and infamous today as the creator of the supernatural sleuth Jules de Grandin, Seabury Grandin Quinn was more than a prolific pulpsmith. He also led a varied career as a soldier during World War I, processed secret documents for military intelligence during World War II, acted as legal consultant to various chemical and mortuary concerns, and contributed extensively to the funeral trade through his skills in teaching, writing, and editing.
Quinn’s first professional fiction sale, “The Stone Image,” appeared in the May 1, 1919, issue of The Thrill Book followed by a prodigious amount of fiction throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, with 146 tales in Weird Tales alone. Although his output slowed with the impact of the paper shortage on magazine publication during World War II, he continued to write for a variety of markets, contributing to Robert A. W. Lowndes’s Magazine of Horror in 1965.
Conventional wisdom denigrates Quinn for earning more money as a writer for Weird Tales than H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith combined by cranking out one formulaic tale after another, mindful only of word-count and the obligatory nude scene; but even the fastidious Lovecraft acknowledged in a 1936 letter to fellow fantasist Catherine L. Moore that Quinn was one of several “brilliant figures” while lamenting his “literary ruin” through the “effect of commerce on the writer” (Lovecraft 1976, 327).
It is true that works like the ambitious de Grandin novel The Devil’s Bride (1932) fail to gel and have more than their share of faults despite episodes of great imagination and the high quality of some of their intercalated narratives. Nonetheless, two collections with overlapping contents, Is the Devil a Gentleman? (1970) and Night Creatures (2003), demonstrate just how brilliant Quinn could be in top form. The former contains four stories that are not shared with its 2003 counterpart, and these are quite interesting in idea. However, they are not developed with particular finesse. For instance, in spite of the enthusiasm Quinn and Virgil Finlay expressed for “The Globe of Memories” (1937) while Finlay was creating its Weird Tales cover art, the stilted antique dialogue compromises the shifts between medieval Italy and contemporary New York it is meant to reinforce. Night Creatures more consistently represents Quinn at his best. That he treated lycanthropy with rare sympathy and an unusual variety of approaches is evinced by the first of its six unshared stories, the simultaneously moving and unnerving “The Phantom Farmhouse” (1923)—filmed as part of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in 1971—and the contrast it presents with the malevolent lycanthrope engaged in a battle of wits with the doughty Jules de Grandin in “The Thing in the Fog” (1933) a decade later. “Mortmain” (1940) revolves around issues the author would have encountered under less perilous circumstances while offering advice about mortuary law. Sympathy for the victims of social injustice appears repeatedly in his work and manifests here in two quite different stories from 1941, “There Are Such Things” and “Two Shall Be Born.” Particularly impressive among the less familiar stories is “The Golden Spider” (1940), a supernatural tour de force in a medieval French setting reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne, with mythic undertones and a measure of sweetness that brings it closer to the fairy tale. If, when compared to the rest of these, “The Gentle Werewolf” (1940) is enjoyable but unremarkable in its convoluted plot and its transplantation of common fairytale motifs to a thirteenth-century Asian setting, the other four among the shared stories show Quinn adept at weaving plot and character into a setting that seems natural to both. “Glamour” (1939) is a superior specimen of the type of rural supernaturalism best known today from Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936) and the work of Quinn’s friend Manly Wade Wellman. “Uncanonized” (1939) tells the love story of a suicide turned werewolf, with an odd ecclesiastical twist again worthy of Averoigne. “Is the Devil a Gentleman?” (1942) revolves around the moral dilemma of accepting supernatural aid from dubious forces or submitting to persecution and death from the superstitions of colonial New England. Another paradox faces attendees at the “Masked Ball” (1947), who discover that the dead fear the living at least as intensely as the living fear them.
It is this yoking of the conventional with surprising ethical or mythical twists that makes Quinn’s best work a continued pleasure to read, so that even a novella as sentimental as the 1938 Christmas trilogy Roads entertains precisely because the legend he creates to account for the figure of Santa Claus through the unusual mixture of Norse mythology with court intrigue and the life of Christ from infancy to crucifixion is handled with such conviction.
The ninety-three case studies of Jules de Grandin present an interesting, if not always entirely successful, succession of crime stories and supernatural adventures, while also offering a fascinating view of American society during the years in which they were written. The predominant setting, Harrisonville and its environs, encompasses aspects of the idyllic small town and the bright, cold city of the hard-boiled school; the dark, superstitious forests of the Old World and a wide assortment of immigrant peoples and supernatural forces from every portion of Europe and Asia. As a result the tone of the tales is not as uniform as Quinn’s detractors claim. Tales such as “The Devil People” (1929) have a gritty, hard-boiled quality. Others, such as “The House of Three Corpses” (1939), mix elements of traditional and hard-boiled detection with a strong dose of humor. “Ancient Fires” (1926) has a dreamlike quality, as does “Pledged to the Dead” (1937).
Many of the tales are also interesting ethically. In “The Isle of Missing Ships” (1926) and “Stealthy Death” (1930) hypocritical missionaries preying on the wealth and women of the foreign peoples they have been sent to assist precipitate horrendous events off the coast of Malaysia and present-day Harrisonville. The history behind the murders in the latter tale is even more horrible than the murders themselves. In “The Devil’s Rosary” (1929), not only is the protagonist to blame for the assassinations launched against his family, but de Grandin sympathizes with the “villains” sufficiently to return their l
ost treasure to them and set the latest would-be assassin free. Sometimes Quinn repeats situations to explore a theme from more than one perspective, as when he deals sympathetically with the supplantation of personality in “Ancient Fires” and “A Gamble in Souls” (1933), but handles it with horror in “Trespassing Souls” (1929) and “The Brain-Thief” (1930), often revealing what is happening not only from the victims’ viewpoint, but from the miscreant’s viewpoint as well. The creation of de Grandin allowed Quinn to rail against the puritans, hypocrites, bigots, bullies, and snobs in a world in which he was outwardly comfortable, defending the rights of the individual regardless of their social status, race, or sins. Flying against convention, de Grandin has no more concern about burying a black woman in a white cemetery or an unshriven strumpet whose body had been the altar for the Black Mass in consecrated ground than he has in slitting the throat of a man who treated him treacherously or spilling down the stairs to his death an old man he knows will otherwise get away with murder.