‘MONSTER ... something extraordinary or unnatural ... an animal deviating in one or more of its parts from the normal ... an imaginary animal having a form either partly brute and partly human, or compounded from elements from two or more animal forms ... a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness.’
Oxford English Dictionary
What is this monster which, since time immemorial, has so haunted the imagination and fantasies of mankind? As we shall see, it is a question of deepest importance to the understanding of stories, relevant to tales of many kinds other than just those centred on the plot we have been discussing.
The question may be put in the singular – speaking of one ‘monster’ rather than many – if only because the essential characteristics of this creature are so unvarying, regardless of the variety of outward guises in which he (or she) appears.
For a start, throughout the world’s storytelling, we find the monster being described in strikingly similar language. It tends, of course, to be highly alarming in its appearance and behaviour. It may be:
horrible, terrible, grim, mis-shapen, hate-filled, ruthless, menacing, terrifying.
As goes without saying, it is mortally dangerous:
deadly, bloodthirsty, ravening, murderous, venomous, poisonous.
It is a deeply deceitful and tricky opponent to deal with:
cunning, treacherous, vicious, twisted, slippery, depraved, vile.
There is also often something about its nature which is mysterious and hard to define. It may be:
strange, shapeless, sinister, weird, nightmarish, ghastly, hellish, fiendish, demonic, dark.
In other words, in its oddly elusive way, we see this ‘night creature’, whether it is a giant or a witch, a dragon or a devil, a ghost or a Martian, representing (often vested in a kind of dark, supernatural aura) everything which seems most inimical, threatening and dangerous in human nature, when this is turned against ourselves.
Then there are the monster’s physical attributes. And here we must not be misled by the fact the monster is so often represented as an animal, or even a composite of several animals: e.g., the imaginary dragon, which we can only conceive of as made up from the organs of existing animals, such as a reptilian body, a bat’s wings and the head of a giant toad or lizard. Such monsters may be animal in form, but they are invariably invested with attributes no animal in nature would possess, such as a peculiar cunning or malevolence. They are in fact preternatural, having qualities which are at least partly human.
Again, of course, there are many monsters in stories which are human, but invested with animal attributes: either directly, like the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull; or, more often, just in the way they are described (e.g., the comparisons of Dracula to a ‘leech’ and a ‘bat’). In other words, they are seen as less than wholly human. And even when monsters are shown as entirely human in appearance, they tend to be in some way physically abnormal: abnormally large (giants), abnormally small (dwarves) or in some way deformed (e.g., missing an eye or a limb, or hunchbacked).
In short, whether it is animal, human or a mixture of both (or even, like John Wyndham’s triffids, an intelligent plant), the monster will always have some human characteristics, but will never be represented as wholly human. By definition, the one thing the monster in stories can never be is an ideal, perfect, whole human being.
Then there are the monster’s behavioural attributes. We invariably see it acting in one of three roles:
1. In its first ‘active’ role, the monster is Predator. It wanders menacingly or treacherously through the world, seeking to force or to trick people into its power. It may have a lair which it sallies out from, but primarily in this role it is looking for victims. It ‘walketh about seeking whom it may devour’, spreading fear and destruction, and casting a shadow wherever its influence is felt.
2. The monster’s second, more ‘passive’ role is as Holdfast. It sits in or near its lair, usually jealously guarding the ‘treasure’ or the ‘Princess’ it has won into its clutches. It is in this role a keeper and a hoarder, broody, suspicious, threatening destruction to all who come near.
3. When its guardianship is in any way challenged, the monster enters its third role as Avenger. It lashes out viciously, stirring from its lair, bent on pursuit and revenge.
In fact we may often see the same monster acting out all three roles at different stages of the same story. In Jack and the Beanstalk, for instance, we first see the giant as Predator, prowling about, demanding human food. We next see him as Holdfast, brooding in miserly fashion over his treasures. We finally see him, when Jack steals the treasures, running angrily in pursuit, as Avenger. And the point about these three roles is that they represent all the main aspects of the way human beings behave when acting in an entirely self-seeking fashion. When people are at odds with the world, behaving selfishly or anti-socially, they are either ‘after something’, as Predators; wanting grimly to ‘hold onto something’, as Holdfasts; or, as Avengers, resentfully trying ‘to get their own back’.
One may sum up by saying that, physically, morally and psychologically, the monster in storytelling thus represents everything in human nature which is somehow twisted and less than perfect. Above all, and it is the supreme characteristic of every monster who has ever been portrayed in a story, he or she is egocentric. The monster is heartless; totally unable to feel for others, although this may sometimes be disguised beneath a deceptively charming, kindly or solicitous exterior; its only real concern is to look after its own interests, at the expense of everyone else in the world.
Such is the nature of the figure against whom the hero is pitted, in a battle to the death. And we never have any doubt as to why the hero stands in opposition to such a centre of dark and destructive power: because the hero’s own motivation and qualities are presented as so completely in contrast to those ascribed to the monster. We see the hero being drawn into the struggle not just on his own behalf but to save others: to save all those who are suffering in the monster’s shadow; to free the community or the kingdom the monster is threatening; to liberate the ‘Princess’ it has imprisoned. The hero is always shown as acting selflessly and in some higher cause, in a way which shows him standing at the opposite pole to the monster’s egocentricity.
And even though the monster wields such terrifying power that, almost to the end, its dark presence is the dominant factor holding sway over the world described by the story, it has one weakness which ultimately renders it vulnerable. Despite its cunning, its awareness of the reality of the world around it is in some important respect limited. Seeing the world through tunnel vision, shaped by its egocentric desires, there is always something which the monster cannot see and is likely to overlook. That is why, by the true hero, the monster can always in the end be outwitted: as was the mighty Goliath by little David, who was able to stay out of reach of the giant’s strength by using his little slingstones; as was the Medusa by Perseus with his reflecting shield, which meant he did not have to look at her directly; as was Minos by his own daughter secretly presenting Theseus with the sword and thread; as were Wells’s Martians by their overlooking even something as apparently insignificant as the destructive power of bacteria. It is this fatal flaw in the monster’s awareness which is ultimately its undoing. Despite its power, the monster is shown not only as heartless and egocentric. It is also, in some crucial respect which turns the day, blind.
This shadowy figure is of the greatest significance in stories, not just because of the more obvious and lurid appearances it makes in myths, folk tales, horror stories and science fiction, but because to a greater or lesser extent these characteristics describe the dark, negative and villainous characters who appear in stories of almost every kind.
Indeed, once we have identified the monster’s essential attributes, we can see how there are a great many types of story shaped by the Overcoming the Monster plot other than just the more literal examples we have so far been looking at.
There were, for instance, many of those melodramatic tales beloved of the nineteenth century which may be caricatured as ‘the hero having to rescue the beautiful maiden from the clutches of the wicked Sir Jasper’.1 A familiar instance is Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839). Like the hero of many a fairy tale, young Nicholas is left orphaned by the death of his father and having to provide for his penniless mother and sister. He is taken in hand by a seemingly kindly uncle, Ralph, who arranges a teaching post for him at the grim Northern school, Dotheboys Hall. And when we meet the tyrannical owner of this establishment, Mr Squeers (who, like Polyphemus, ‘had but one eye, and popular prejudice runs in favour of two’), we might think we had met the story’s chief ‘monster’. But no sooner has Nicholas overcome this particular villain, by giving him a thrashing and escaping from the school, than it gradually emerges that the hero and his family are in fact threatened by a kind of mysterious, Hydra-headed conspiracy, of which Squeers had merely been one lesser ‘head’.
In fact the chief monster at the centre of this web of evil is the wicked usurer, Uncle Ralph himself. The action centres first on the liberation of Nicholas’s sister Kate from the predatory clutches of Ralph’s disreputable friend Sir Mulberry Hawk, another ‘Hydra-head’; then on the even more hazardous rescue of his own chosen ‘Princess’, the beautiful Madeleine Bray, from a vile plot to marry her off to yet another Hydra-head, the unpleasant old Arthur Gride. Finally all Ralph’s wicked schemes are exposed and brought to naught. Nicholas, the triumphant hero, is free to marry his ‘Princess’ who, it is then discovered, has inherited a great ‘treasure’ from her father.
A very different kind of tale shaped by the Overcoming the Monster theme is the war story, particularly those set at the time of the Second World War. In the past 60 years the immense drama of World War Two has inspired many more fictional stories than any other real-life episode in history. One reason for this was the way Hitler’s Nazis, and to a lesser extent their Japanese allies, provided storytellers with such an extraordinarily rich store of ‘monster-imagery’.
In countless films from the 1940s on, we saw Hitler’s Germany cast as invading Predator, with all the diabolic paraphernalia of the blitzkrieg; as Holdfast, exercising ruthlessly tyrannical sway over Occupied Europe; or as Avenger, lashing out at resistance heroes, prison camp escapers or anyone else who dared challenge its murderous authority. The vast majority of such stories were based on the plot of Overcoming the Monster, with the underlying pattern of the story in almost every instance the same. At first there is a preparatory stage of anticipation, as of some great forthcoming ordeal. We see the seemingly insuperable power of the German war machine. There is then a gathering sense of danger, as battle is joined, and the heroes seem to have all the odds stacked against them. Then comes the climactic confrontation and, finally, the miraculous victory. The Nazi (sometimes Japanese) monster is overthrown. The dark armadas of the Luftwaffe (as in The Battle of Britain) are hurled back. The great Predator ship (as in The Sinking of the Bismarck) is destroyed. The invasion of Europe (as in The Longest Day) is successfully achieved. The Nazis’ counter-offensive (as in The Battle of the Bulge) is fought off. The beautiful city of Paris (in Is Paris Burning?), like a rescued Princess, is at the last moment saved.
But never far from the surface of these apparently modern, and even ‘historically accurate’ accounts were the patterns and imagery of a story as old as the imagination of man. Alastair Maclean’s The Guns of Navarone (1963), a typical fictional Second World War adventure story, tells how five heroes land on a closely-guarded Aegean island to destroy two huge German guns concealed in a clifftop cave, which Holdfast-like dominate a narrow strait. We are aware that this is the only way through which a large number of beleaguered Allied soldiers can be lifted to safety from a nearby island. Thousands of lives are at the mercy of these mighty engines of destruction. Painfully the heroes make their way across the island, narrowly escaping every kind of disaster, until at last they reach the cave and see, against the night sky:
‘crouched massively above, like some nightmare monsters from another and ancient world, the evil, the sinister silhouettes of the two great guns of Navarone.’
Evading detection as they catch the sentries on their ‘blind spot’, the heroes fix their little explosive charges against the guns, like ‘magic weapons’ against something so massive and overpowering. Finally, as the ‘tremendous detonation tore the heart out of the great fortress’, it is at one level not just the guns of Navarone which are being destroyed, but Humbaba, the Minotaur, Dracula and every other monster who has ever been. After the mounting suspense of the long ordeal, penned in at every moment by the prospect of sudden death, liberation is here! Life has triumphed over death! Humanity can breathe again!
So basic is the outline of the Overcoming the Monster plot that there is almost no limit to the variety of story-types it can give rise to. We can recognise it wherever our interest in a tale is centred on the steady build-up to a climactic battle between the hero and some dark, threatening figure, or group of figures, whether this be the wicked witch in a fairy tale or invading aliens from outer space, Spielberg’s flesh-eating dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the outlaw gang in a Western.
An obvious instance of a Western based on this plot is The Magnificent Seven (1960), inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), his film version of a traditional Japanese legend. It begins in classic Overcoming the Monster style by showing a community living under the shadow of a monstrous threat: a little Mexican farming village being terrorised by an outlaw gang, led by the villainous Calveros, who regularly arrive at the village to rob the farmers of food. We see one such predatory visit, when one old farmer tries to protest. Calveros shoots him in front of the villagers, thus underlining just what a heartless and predatory tyrant he is. A wise old man living nearby advises the farmers that the only way to stop this reign of terror is that they should buy guns. Three of them ride over the American border where they see two professional gunmen (played by Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen) fearlessly standing up to the inhabitants of a small town in insisting that an Indian who has died in the town should be buried in its whites-only cemetery. This establishes that the two heroes are not racially prejudiced and are willing to fight against injustice. For a small sum of money, all they can afford, the Mexicans persuade the two gunmen to come back to their village to defend them against the outlaws. The two recruit another five, and the seven gunmen arrive in the village to train its inhabitants in self-defence.
When Calveros’s gang next returns it is beaten off with heavy losses. But when the seven ride out into the countryside to see what the gang is up to, Calveros outwits them by secretly occupying the village in their absence. When they return they discover they have fallen into his clutches. In front of the cowed villagers, he removes their guns, and allows them to leave. Foolishly, however, showing the monster’s blind spot, he allows their guns to be returned to them when they have left town. He cannot imagine that, as mere hired gunmen, they will not just ride away to avoid any further trouble, leaving him free to carry on oppressing the villagers. But, bruised by their humiliation, the seven ride back into town for a final climactic battle, in which Calveros and his gang are routed, not least because the villagers recover their courage and join in. Four of the seven are dead. One decides to remain in the village because he has fallen in love with a village girl, which allows the story to end on the image of a man and woman united in love. But the two original brave heroes ride off into the wide blue yonder, having overcome the ‘monster’ and saved the community.
Another classic Hollywood Western based on this plot was Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), written by Carl Foreman. Again we see a community living under the shadow of a monstrous outlaw gang, the little town of Hadleyville in the old West. The story begins on the morning when the hero Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper), having resigned as town marshal, is getting married to Amy, a pretty young Quaker (Grace Kelly). No sooner is the ceremony over than Kane unpins his badge of office and he and his new bride prepare to leave the town for ever. But then shocking news arrives. Some years earlier Kane had been responsible for arresting Frank Miller, a psychopathic gang-leader who had terrorised the town, and now Miller has been released from prison. He is heading back to Hadleyville on the noon train, due to arrive in just two hours time. The three unsavoury members of his gang are already at the station waiting for him, and for the moment when they can settle their score with Kane and reimpose their reign of terror.
Scarcely have the newly-weds set out from town than Kane realises he cannot leave the townsfolk defenceless. He turns back, hoping to round up a posse of townsfolk to help defeat the gang. But the people are so cowed that they dare not help. Just like some of the villagers in The Magnificent Seven, they would much rather Kane left them, in the appeasing hope that trouble might be avoided. Amy herself, as a Quaker, refuses to have anything to do with bloodshed and leaves for the station to catch the same train. Suspense mounts, as clocks tick away the two hours, and Kane finds no one to support him. At last a distant whistle is heard from across the plain. The train approaches. Miller disembarks to join his gang and the four men swagger into the now-deserted town looking for a showdown with the solitary hero. The gun battle begins and Kane manages to kill first one of his opponents, then another. But finally he is trapped in a building, its exits covered by Miller and the other outlaw. It seems all is lost and he is at their mercy. Then a miracle takes place. A shot rings out from across the street, and a third villain lies dead. At the last minute Amy has jumped off the train and returned to town, and she is standing at a window with a smoking gun in her hand. Frank Miller seizes her, pushes her out in front of him into the street and tells the hero that, unless he comes out to surrender, she will be killed. As Kane emerges, Miller pushes Amy aside to fire; but bravely she jogs his arm, giving the hero a chance to get his shot in first. All four outlaws are dead. Hero and heroine embrace as the shamefaced townsfolk emerge from their hiding places to cluster round their saviours. The loving couple can at last ride happily off together to start their new life.
Beneath its comparatively modern trappings (guns, the train) there is nothing about this story which could not have been presented in the imagery of an ancient myth or legend: with the little town as a kingdom threatened by the approach of a terrifying dragon, and Kane as a princely hero who, against all odds, finally slays the monster – although, like Theseus, he only manages to do this with the help of a loving ‘Princess’, who unexpectedly comes to his aid just when all seems lost.
Another genre of story usually shaped by the Overcoming the Monster plot is the thriller: and here again we see how often thriller writers unconsciously fall back on the age-old stock of ‘monster imagery’, as they look for the kind of language which will help them to build up their hero’s chief antagonist into a shadowy figure of immense menace and evil.
In that early thriller-adventure story Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844), the action centres on the long struggle between the hero D’Artagnan and the evil Lady de Winter, who lures the hero’s chosen ‘Princess’, the beautiful young Madame de Bonancieux, into her clutches. When we look at the imagery used to describe Lady de Winter, whose sinister influence extends all over France, we see her not only characterised explicitly as ‘a monster’ who has ‘committed as many crimes as you could read of in a year’, but as a ‘panther’, a ‘tiger’, a ‘lioness’ and several times as ‘a serpent’.
When in The Final Problem Conan Doyle wished to create a villain who was at last a worthy match for the powers of his hero Sherlock Holmes, he conjured up the ‘reptilian’ Moriarty, like Dracula ‘a fallen angel’, a man of ‘extraordinary mental powers’ who has perverted them to ‘diabolic ends’. ‘For some years past’ says Holmes, ‘I have been conscious of some deep organising power which stands forever in the way of the law’. He realises that it is the shadowy Moriarty, eternally elusive, a master of disguise, ‘the most dangerous criminal in Europe’, who:
‘sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of his web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he well knows every quiver of them.’
The thrillers of John Buchan made lavish use of similar imagery. In The Thirty Nine Steps, for instance, the hero Richard Hannay learns of the materialising of some vast, shadowy threat to ‘the peace of Europe’: ‘behind all the governments and the armies, there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by some very dangerous people’. When he tracks down the chief villain at the heart of this immense conspiracy to a remote Scottish moor, he is a German master-spy, described as ‘bald-headed’ like ‘a sinister fowl’.
In those most successful of all twentieth-century thrillers, Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories, the imagery again and again quite explicitly builds up the ‘monster’ with echoes of myth and fairy tales. Le Chiffre, the villain of Casino Royale, is ‘a black-fleeced Minotaur’; Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker has ‘a hulking body’ with ‘ogre’s teeth’; Mr Big in Live and Let Die has ‘a great football of a head, twice the normal size and nearly round’; the villain of Dr No, bald and crippled, with steel pincers instead of arms, ‘looked like a giant venomous worm, wrapped in grey tin-foil’.
Indeed one of the key reasons for the initial success of the Bond stories, even before they were translated to the cinema screen (increasingly modifying Fleming’s original versions), was precisely the way they tapped so unerringly into those springs of the human imagination which had given rise to similar stories for thousands of years. So accurately did the typical Bond novel follow the age-old archetypal pattern that it might almost serve as a model for any Overcoming the Monster story.
As conceived by Fleming, the basic Bond story (one or two vary the pattern slightly) unfolds through five stages rather like this:
1. The ‘Call’ (or Anticipation Stage): The hero, a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service, is summoned by ‘M’, head of the service, and told of suspicious goings-on somewhere in the world which appear to pose a deadly threat to Britain, the West or mankind as a whole. Bond has been chosen to track down and confront the source of this evil, and the general mood of this opening phase is one of anticipation of the immense task to come. To prepare him for his ordeal, Bond may visit the armourer, ‘Q’, to be equipped with special weapons, such as a new gun, a sports car fitted with a smokescreen device or a rocket pack which will enable him to fly. These are exact modern equivalents to the ‘magic weapons’ of ancient myth, such as the sword, the ‘helmet of invisibility’ and the winged-sandals enabling him to fly with which Perseus was equipped by the gods before his journey to confront Medusa.
2. Initial success (Dream Stage): Bond has first brushes with the ‘monster’s’ agents or even the ‘monster’ himself, in which he is victorious (he catches Goldfinger or Drax cheating at cards or golf). There may be attacks on his life, but he survives these, and the general mood of this stage is a dream-like sense of immunity to danger, with the full horror of the monster’s power and ambitions not yet in full view.
3. Confrontation (Frustration Stage): Bond eventually penetrates the monster’s lair to get closer to his enemy and then suffers his first serious setback, when he falls into the monster’s clutches. But this enables him to get a full view of his sinister and repulsive opponent for the first time.2 Because the villain thinks he has Bond in his power, he reveals the full scale of his intentions, e.g., to rob Fort Knox or to drop a nuclear bomb on London. Bond’s frustration at not being able to communicate this vital information back to the outside world is redoubled by knowing that the monster also has in his grip some beautiful girl or captive ‘Princess’.
4. Final ordeal (Nightmare Stage): Bond is now forced by the monster to face the ‘terrible ordeal’, which seems fiendishly designed to lead to his painful, long-drawn out death: e.g. having to endure a deadly obstacle race, crawling through a subterranean tunnel, where he has to run the gauntlet of poisonous spiders, roasting heat and finally a battle with a giant squid.
5. The Miraculous Escape (and Death of the Monster): Bond survives the ordeal and then, by a miraculous feat of ingenuity and strength, manages in the nick of time to turn the tables, outwitting and killing the villain. He thus saves not only his own life but Fort Knox, London, mankind or whatever has been threatened with destruction. The monster is dead and Bond is free to end his adventure locked in fond embrace with the liberated ‘Princess’.
Just when Ian Fleming was publishing his first Bond novels, some of his British contemporaries were producing particularly striking examples of that type of story which in the past century has revived the imagery of archetypal monsters more grotesquely inhuman than anything seen in storytelling since the Dark Ages and the myths of ancient Greece. Since H. G. Wells had written his account of the invasion of Earth by leathery-skinned, tentacled Martians in The War of the Worlds at the end of the nineteenth century, science fiction writers had not come up with many repeat versions on this theme, apart from the celebrated episode in 1938 when the young Orson Welles first sprang to fame by broadcasting an Americanised adaptation of Wells’s novel on radio, so vividly presented as a ‘live news event’ that it provoked a wave of panic among listeners who thought it was actually happening. In the early 1950s, however, as the world awaited the imminent arrival of the space age, two genres of science fiction story swept conspicuously into fashion: the first, following Wells, centred on deadly invasions of the earth by monsters from outer space; the other featuring some world-threatening catastrophe unleashed by mankind’s own growing technological ability to interfere with nature.
A well-known example of this second genre was John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), which began with a combination of two human experiments going disastrously wrong. A spectacular light show in the heavens turns out to be the unleashing of a secret weapon which renders the vast majority of the human race blind. This suspiciously coincides with the breaking loose of large numbers of triffids, genetically-engineered carnivorous plants which have a malevolent intelligence, the ability to move about and a deadly whiplash sting with which they can catch human beings as their prey.
The story begins in London, centred on a handful of survivors, including the hero and heroine, who have for various reasons retained their sight. They eventually manage to escape the city, where most of the population are helplessly falling victim to roaming bands of triffids. The ‘frustration stage’ begins when hero and heroine are separated, and much of the action is taken up with his quest to track her down, as he picks his hazardous way across the triffid-infested countryside of southern England. They are finally reunited in Sussex, where a determined band of survivors have holed up in a fortified farmhouse behind an electrified fence. The ‘final ordeal’ begins when an ever-growing mass of triffids lays siege to the farm, finally finding a way to break through the fence. But in the nick of time the survivors make their ‘miraculous escape’, to join others in the Isle of Wight. This has been established as a triffid-free sanctuary, from where humanity’s counterattack is to be launched to liberate the mainland from the monsters who have taken it over.
In his next book The Kraken Wakes (1953), Wyndham switched to the other genre, where the deadly threat to human survival is posed by a monstrous invasion from outer space. As in The Day of the Triffids, the story’s power comes from the way the normality of everyday life is suddenly disturbed by the appearance of mysterious phenomena, the sinister nature of which is not initially clear. The action then unfolds through the familiar stages:
1. Anticipation Stage: Curiosity is aroused by reports from various parts of the world of ‘mysterious fireballs’ seen at sea.
2. Dream Stage: Rather more serious incidents take place, such as the unexplained sinkings of various large ships, and the discoloration of ocean currents, indicating some vast submarine activity in ‘the Deeps’. But the real nature of the menace is not yet clearly in view, and it still seems too remote and mysterious to justify real alarm.
3. Frustration Stage: The first real shock. Various islands are mysteriously attacked, and when the hero and heroine visit the West Indies to investigate we actually see the ‘monsters’ in their full horror for the first time: huge ‘sea tanks’, crawling up from the shore and removing hundreds of people by means of deadly ribbon-like ‘cilia’ which stretch out into streets and houses to capture them. It seems mankind is powerless to deal with this threat. The attacks continue to worsen.
4. Nightmare Stage: The world’s ice caps begin to melt, the sea-level rises catastrophically all over the globe, a large part of the world’s population dies in various disasters and almost all social order breaks down.
5. Miraculous Escape: Humanity finds unspecified ‘magic weapons’ to kill off the monsters; the sea stops rising; humanity is saved; hero and heroine are happily united; life begins to return to normal.
The same year, 1953, just after the Queen’s Coronation had prompted millions of Britons to install their first primitive television sets, the first serial on the new medium to catch the nation’s imagination was Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment, with its hero a shrewd and robust scientist, Professor Bernard Quatermass. As head of the world’s first manned space-flight project, Quatermass is horrified when the spaceship returns with only one of the three astronauts alive. Gradually it becomes clear that the survivor, Victor Caroon, has not only absorbed the personalities of his two dead colleagues but has been taken over by some diabolically ingenious extra-terrestrial power which is using his body as a vehicle to take over the earth. The ‘frustration stage’ sets in when Caroon appears to be turning into a cross between a cactus and a fungus, then disappears. When next sighted he has become a huge and fast-proliferating fungoid monster spreading over the interior of Westminster Abbey, about to throw out millions of spores which will wipe out humanity, allowing the aliens to take over. In this ‘final ordeal’, Quatermass confronts the monster and somewhat implausibly persuades the three human beings who are still mysteriously part of it to resist its influence, even though this will involve their own suicide. This leads to the ‘miraculous escape’ by which humanity is saved.
In the sequel Quatermass II (1955) our hero again saves mankind from extraterrestrial invasion when he discovers that mysterious small meteorites dropping out of the sky contain an alien life-force which possesses any human being who comes near them. The only outward sign of what has happened is a mark on their skin. He then discovers that, with the aid of their new zombified human allies, the aliens have established a mysterious ‘defence plant’ in a remote part of northern England, The ‘frustration stage’ begins when Quatermass comes to London to alert people at the top of government that something astonishingly sinister seems to be going on. He is surprised to receive bland assurances that there is nothing to worry about. But then, in each case, observes that the senior figure to whom he is talking has the telltale mark on his arm. Frustration turns to nightmare when Quatermass manages to visit the plant with a delegation. One member separates from the group to look into a vast pressure dome. He comes out dying of ammonia-poisoning, uttering the one word ‘slime’. Quatermass guesses the aliens are using the oxygen-free dome to reproduce, before emerging to take over the world The ‘final ordeal’ comes when the plant is stormed by an army of angry locals. As they engage in a shoot-out with zombified armed guards, Quatermass opens up the dome to oxygen, thus destroying the monsters within and saving mankind.
Kneale’s third and most successful working of the theme, Quatermass and the Pit (1958), begins with the discovery on a London building site of a mysterious cylinder, at first taken to be an unexploded wartime bomb. Quatermass realises from surrounding fossil remains that in fact it must have been there for five million years. Through the now familiar sequence whereby initial dream-like curiosity leads first to frustration, then to a nightmare running out of control, it gradually emerges that the cylinder had originated from Mars. A civilisation threatened with extinction had used the spaceship to colonise the earth, by ‘possessing from within’ the prehistoric ancestors of mankind. The final ‘nightmare stage’ begins when Quatermass realises that most human beings are still unwittingly influenced by this ‘Martian element’ buried in their unconscious, and that this is now being activated by the unearthing of the buried space capsule. The Martian cylinder dissolves into a towering vision of a creature looking like the Devil and London is thrown into chaos, as crazed mobs launch a ‘Wild Hunt’, tracking down to kill any ‘outsider’ who has somehow escaped its influence. Finally, with half the city burning, Quatermass works out that the only way to destroy the monster is to short-circuit its electrical energy with a steel cable. He throws this earthing device into the heart of the spectral vision, there is a mighty electrical discharge, the vision disappears and its malign force ceases. Once again, thanks to our wise and indomitable hero, mankind has been saved in the nick of time from what looked like certain destruction.
Yet the underlying five-stage pattern of all these stories is only too familiar. As each of them begins with the arousal of curiosity, then continues with frustration as the monster’s true deadly nature becomes apparent, leading to a ‘nightmare stage’ when catastrophe seems inevitable, finally ending in the ‘miraculous escape’, their pattern is exactly the same as that which we first came across in some of the simplest stories of our childhood, such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
As a last example, to underline just how fundamental a pattern to storytelling this is, we may look at what became the most successful science fiction film ever produced by Hollywood, George Lucas’s original Star Wars (1977).
The story is set ‘long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away’, the many planetary worlds of which are ruled by one government. For centuries this had exercised benevolent sway as ‘the Republic’, with the aid of the brave and honourable Jedi Knights. But the government has now been seized by a conspiracy of power-crazed politicians, bureaucrats and corporations, headed by a shadowy ‘Emperor’; and no-one, it seems, wields greater power in this tyrannical new ‘Empire’ than the ruthless ‘Dark Lord’ Darth Vader, once himself a Jedi knight, now, like Lucifer, a ‘fallen angel’. Scattered across remote reaches of the galaxy dispossessed supporters of the old order, ‘the rebel Alliance’, are hoping one day to overthrow the dark Empire, to reclaim the universe for the forces of light.
The story opens with a rebel spaceship being attacked by an ‘Imperial cruiser’ captained by the terrifying Vader, whom we only see hidden in menacing black armour. As his Imperial forces take over the rebel ship, a tiny spacecraft escapes, containing See Threepio and Artoo Deetoo, two ‘androids’ or humanised computers, who land safely on the surface of a nearby planet, Tatooine. Still on the rebel ship is the beautiful Princess Leia, daughter of the leader of the rebel Alliance, whom Vader takes prisoner.
We thus begin with the familiar image of a Princess falling into the clutches of the ‘monster’. But the one thing the ‘Dark Lord’ is desperate to discover is the whereabouts of the rebel organisation’s secret headquarters, so he can destroy it, thus making the victory of the Empire complete. What he does not realise is that the resourceful Princess has programmed Artoo Deetoo with this vital information, along with an urgent appeal for help, before the androids bail out. By the fatal mistake of allowing them to escape, because he thinks their little craft is unmanned, the arrogant Vader has revealed a first ‘blind spot’.
Only now do we at last meet the young hero of the story, Luke Skywalker, who lives with his uncle and aunt on a lonely farmstead on Tatooine, dreaming of future glory as a space-pilot. When the two androids arrive at the farm, Artoo lights up with a hologram of the Princess. Luke is at once smitten by her beauty. She utters the baffling message ‘Obi-wan Kenobi, you’re my only remaining hope’, which Luke vaguely connects with a mysterious bearded hermit, ‘a kind of sorcerer’, who lives in an even more remote part of the desert. He and the androids set off to find him and, after Kenobi has miraculously intervened to save them from death at the hands of desert-dwelling monsters, they find themselves in the ‘wizard’s’ cave. The old man reveals he is one of the last surviving Knights of the Jedi, with supernatural powers, and that Luke’s lost father had been another, one of the bravest of all. Interpreting the Princess’s cry for help, Kenobi asks Luke to accompany him on a hazardous mission to rescue her.
This marks the end of the ‘Anticipation Stage’. The hero has received the ‘Call’, giving him and the story a focus. We can see now what the story is centrally to be about; and the hero’s sense of being impelled towards this mysterious new destiny is reinforced when they return to the farmstead to find that the uncle and aunt who have brought him up have been vapourised by Imperial troops. There is nothing left to keep him at home.
Despite further threats, fought off with Kenobi’s supernatural aid, Luke gradually assembles a team to make the journey; and in the nick of time, pursued by Imperial soldiers, they make a ‘thrilling escape’ in a deceptively battered old spacecraft, piloted, solely for the money, by a reckless mercenary Han Solo. This enables them to throw off their pursuers as they head off faster than light to their mystery destination. On the journey Kenobi imparts some of the ancient Jedi secrets to Luke, not least the importance of the mysterious ‘force’ with which the Knights learn to ally themselves, giving them supernatural powers. As the wise old man explains, this is ‘an energy field, and something more. An aura that at once controls and obeys, a nothingness that can accomplish miracles.’ During this phase of the story, the hero and his companions seem to enjoy a magical immunity to danger: the ‘Dream Stage’. But we are reminded of the dark reality prevailing elsewhere, as we glimpse the Princess being subjected by Vader to horrific tortures, trying to force her into giving up the secret whereabouts of the rebel headquarters, the distant planet Alderaan.
Then suddenly, as they near their destination, they see the horrifying sight of a vast, mysterious man-made structure floating in space ahead of them. It is the Empire’s own secret weapon, the Death Star, a spaceship so powerful it can destroy a whole planet. This is where the Dark Lord Vader is holding the Princess prisoner. Even as they approach, this monstrous engine of death pulverises Alderaan, including the Princess’s father, to atoms. At the same time, the hero and his companions feel their own small spacecraft itself being sucked inexorably down a powerful beam into the heart of the Death Star. As their ship comes to rest it seems they are the monster’s prisoners. Like Bond, when he penetrates the lair of one of his monstrous opponents and falls into his clutches, they have reached the ‘Frustration Stage’.
Now begins the terrible ordeal of the ‘Nightmare Stage’ as, pursued all the way, threatened by one horror after another, they wander through the endless, dark, metallic labyrinth of this huge structure, first to track down and release the Princess from her prison cell; then to thread their way back to their own spacecraft, having first immobilised the gravity beam which had taken it prisoner. Finally, thanks to old Kenobi sacrificing his life in a hand-to-hand struggle with his one-time pupil, the Dark Lord, they make their miraculous escape, with the freed Princess on board – hurtling through space to another unknown planet where, hidden beneath ancient ruins in a jungle, is the true secret command headquarters of the rebel Alliance.
Here indeed begins the true ‘Final Ordeal’ of the story, as a small team of space pilots, including Luke, who has now captivated the Princess as surely as she had entranced him, set off for a final showdown with the Dark Empire, on which the whole future of the universe will rest. Thanks to Artoo having programmed himself with the entire layout of the Death Star, they have learned its vital secret. There is just one tiny aperture on the entire face of that immense, impregnable structure where a perfectly-aimed missile might penetrate to the central reactor which is its heart. After a deadly prolonged aerial battle between two groups of small spacecraft, more reminiscent of a World War Two dogfight than anything belonging to the space age, Luke and Darth Vader, hero and monster, finally come face to face. Just when it seems all is lost for the hero, he is miraculously saved. Han Solo, after refusing to risk his life in the battle because his only interest was money, has decided after all to intervene, arriving in the nick of time to blast Vader’s craft helplessly out into space. Simultaneously, even more miraculously, Luke has become at one with Kenobi’s supernatural ‘force’, unconsciously managing to launch his missiles at just the right split-second to hit the mark. Scarcely have Luke and Solo withdrawn to a safe distance than the whole artificial planet explodes into a trillion fragments, in a sunburst which lights up that corner of the cosmos for days.
The monster has been overthrown. The victorious heroes return to a tumultuous welcome at the Alliance headquarters. In a vast temple hall, before a delirious crowd representing peoples from all over the universe, they walk up to a dais to be presented with gold medals by a radiant figure dressed in flowing white. As Luke receives his prize, he can scarcely hear the cheers. His thoughts are solely occupied by the smiling face of the Princess before him.3
Again and again in all these expressions of the Overcoming the Monster plot we see a moment which is of fundamental significance to storytelling: one which, like the characteristics of the monster itself, is relevant to stories of many kinds other than just those shaped by this particular plot.
To the huge relief of the hero (and of ourselves as the audience, identifying with his fate), just when it seems all is lost and that his destruction is inevitable, he makes a miraculous escape. Always it is only in the nick of time, just when all seems lost, that Luke Skywalker escapes from the final deadly assault by Darth Vader; that Quatermass saves mankind from the extra-terrestrials; that the tiny band of survivors escape the clutches of the triffids; that James Bond escapes from the clutches of his villains; that Wells’s invading Martians are killed by bacteria; that the guns of Navarone are blown up; that Gary Cooper in High Noon is saved by the unexpected shot fired by his wife; that Jack manages to scramble back down the beanstalk; that the forester bursts in to save Red Riding Hood from the devouring wolf; that Goldilocks scrambles out of the window to escape the three bears. From the constricting sense of imminent death, often physically represented by some dark, enclosing space in which the hero or heroine is trapped, they, and we the audience, are suddenly liberated.
So familiar is this moment of liberation, ‘the thrilling escape from death’, that in certain kinds of popular storytelling it has become a cliche, almost a joke: ‘saved in the last reel by the US Cavalry’, we say; or think of the hero of the old silent films galloping in to snatch away the heroine who has been tied down by the villain in the path of the oncoming train. Cartoon films like Tom and Jerry are made up of little else except one ‘thrilling escape from death’ after another, as cat and mouse are ironed out flat, or blow each other up in remorseless succession. Another famous instance was that legendary hero of a newspaper serial who was finally trapped by so many impossible dangers that not even his creator could think of a way to extricate him, until a colleague supplied the answer simply by writing in ‘with one mighty bound Jack was free’.
Despite such caricatures, the significance of the thrilling escape from death runs very deep. It is one of the most consistent motifs in storytelling, cropping up again and again in stories of every kind. And it is hardly surprising that we should find stories based on little else but the build-up to a thrilling escape.
An obvious example is Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. We know nothing of the hero of this short story, who he is or why he has been imprisoned. All we know is that he is tied down in some ‘dark, enclosing space’, a form of prison cell, undergoing a succession of mounting horrors. First he is attacked by giant rats. Then a huge, razor-sharp pendulum swings closer and closer to his body, although he uses this to sever his bonds. Then the metal walls of his prison become red-hot and begin to close in on him, driving him nearer and nearer to the edge of a bottomless well, until suddenly, just as the sense of oppression becomes unbearable:
‘the fiery walls rushed back. An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell fainting into the abyss ... the French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.’
Poe explores the same theme in his Descent into the Maelstrom, in which the hero describes how his fishing boat had been sucked down into the black, roaring hole of the world’s most notorious and deadly whirlpool. Deeper and deeper they spiral down the watery walls, until the hero notices that certain lighter pieces of driftwood are being carried not downwards, but upwards. He jumps out of the boat as it is being carried down to certain destruction and, miraculously, is carried up to safety.
There are other stories based on little more than this relentless build-up towards some inevitable doom, followed in the nick of time by miraculous deliverance. For instance, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Camus’s La Peste are both stories set in a city which has been attacked by a mysterious, deadly pestilence. From small beginnings, we feel the virulence of the plague becoming more and more obvious and terrifying until it seems no one can possibly survive: then suddenly, as by a miracle, it fades away. The mysterious plague in such stories is playing the part of the monster, all-conquering, deadly, remorseless in its power: except that we never see this particular monster face to face because it cannot be directly personified, but remains just a shadowy, increasingly threatening presence. Similarly the hero is not personally responsible for overcoming the monster; at the story’s climax, the reversal comes when the threat suddenly recedes, as it does for Poe’s hero in The Pit and the Pendulum. Indeed the same is true in other stories we have already cited under the heading of Overcoming the Monster. The War of the Worlds, for instance, is not strictly an Overcoming the Monster story, because the hero himself has nothing to do with the routing of the monsters; and the same is true of many of the stories which followed it in showing a deadly attack by some world-threatening monster from outer space, such as The Kraken Wakes. We experience such stories, in fact, much as we do those of Poe, Defoe and Camus: through the eyes of a hero who is merely a more or less helpless observer, sucked into a nightmare which seems certain to end in his death, until brought to an end by agencies beyond his awareness or control.
Stories on this pattern have again become familiar in recent times in the form of those ‘disaster movies’ so popular from the 1970s onwards, such as The Towering Inferno (1974). This followed the experience of a disparate group of people who become trapped in a huge skyscraper, during the hours after an electrical fire breaks out in the bowels of the building. At first the fire is tiny and unnoticed. For a long time we know it is spreading behind the scenes, so that there is a sense of some enormous growing threat while, on the surface, life in the tower carries on as normal. But finally, by the time the fire has broken out into full view, it has become an unstoppable monster, raging uncontrollably through the whole building to a nightmare climax, when hundreds of victims are trapped on the upper floors, seemingly doomed to certain death. At this point they are miraculously lifted to safety.
Airport (1970) similarly centred on a group of passengers caught in the ‘enclosing space’ of a crowded airliner at night, threatened with imminent destruction by the presence of a madman armed with a bomb. At least here the threat is partly personified, and when the bomb explodes and the madman is sucked out into the darkness, it might seem the ‘monster’ has been ‘overcome’: except that the real source of the nightmare is not the madman himself, as it would be if he were a true monster, but simply the fear of the plane crashing; and this remains until, with enormous difficulty and to universal relief, the plane is at last brought safely to the ground.
In fact this story of the hero’s deliverance from the nightmare of being trapped in some dark, enclosing space, threatening death, is one of the oldest in the world. An obvious example is the tale of Jonah, who falls overboard and is swallowed by the ‘great fish’. For three days he lies in its cavernous interior, sure he is about to die:
‘The water encompassed me round about, even to the soul; the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottom of the mountains; the earth with her bars was round me forever.’
Then miraculously his prayers are answered, and the fish ‘vomited out Jonah on the dry land.’
Jonah does not, of course, kill his ‘whale’, which is why again his adventure cannot be considered strictly an Overcoming the Monster story. But this is only one of countless tales of a hero swallowed by a monster, found in mythology and folk tales from Europe, North America, Polynesia, Japan and almost all over the world, in many of which the hero does actually slay the monster from within. In Hiawatha Longfellow gives a North American ‘Indian’ version, where he describes how the hero goes to challenge ‘the King of Fishes’, Mishe-Nama:
‘up he rose with angry gesture,
quivering in each nerve and fibre,
slashing all his plates of armour,
gleaming bright with all his war-paint;
in his wrath he darted upwards,
flashing leaped into the sunshine,
opened his great jaws and swallowed
both canoe and Hiawatha.’
(Note the familiar anthropomorphisation of the animal ‘monster’ – ‘armour’,‘war-paint’, ‘wrath’.) In ‘that darksome cavern’ the hero ‘groped about in helpless wonder’ until he finds the fish’s ‘great heart beating’ and slays it. The corpse drifts ashore, and Hiwatha, ‘exulting from the caverns’, cries out to the birds how he has killed the great monster, and they rescue him.
In the folklore of the Shetlands, the story was told as that of Assipattle, who is treated with contempt by his brothers (like the little shepherd boy David). But he alone is brave enough to challenge the great ‘Mester Stoorwoorm’, so huge that it stretches half across the world, to rescue from its clutches a captive Princess. Clutching a burning piece of peat, Assipattle allows himself to be swallowed, and places the live coal on the monster’s liver: ‘in troth, I think it gave the Stoorwoorm a hot harskit’. Then (as in many other versions) the hero is spewed out by the monster in its dying spasm, and wins the hand of the Princess.
One way in which a story seems naturally to form in the human imagination shows the hero being called to face and overcome a terrible and deadly personification of evil. This threatening figure is defined by the fact that it is heartless, egocentric and seemingly all-powerful, although we ultimately see that it has a blind spot which renders it vulnerable. As the story is usually presented, there is a long build-up to the final decisive confrontation, and the story is likely to to run through these five stages:
1. Anticipation Stage and ‘Call’: We usually first become aware of the monster as if from a great distance, although in some stories we may be given some striking glimpse of its destructive power at the outset. Although initially we may see it as little more than a vaguely menacing curiosity, we gradually learn of its fearsome reputation, and how it is usually casting its threatening shadow over some community, country, kingdom or mankind in general. The hero then experiences a ‘Call’ to confront it.
2. Dream Stage: As the hero makes his preparations for the battle to come (e.g., as he travels towards the monster or as the monster approaches), all for a while may seem to be going reasonably well. Our feelings are still of a comfortable remoteness from and immunity to danger.
3. Frustration Stage: At last we come face to face with the monster in all its awesome power. The hero seems tiny and very much alone against such a supernaturally strong opponent. Indeed it seems that he is slipping into the monster’s power (he may even fall helplessly into the monster’s clutches), and that the struggle can only have one outcome.
4. Nightmare Stage: The final ordeal begins, a nightmare battle in which all the odds seem loaded on the monster’s side. But at the climax of the story, just when all seems lost, comes the ‘reversal’.
5. The Thrilling Escape from Death, and Death of the Monster: In the nick of time, the monster is miraculously dealt a fatal blow. Its dark power is overthrown. The community which had fallen under its shadow is liberated. And the hero emerges in his full stature to enjoy the prize he has won from the monster’s grasp: a great treasure; union with the ‘Princess’; succession to some kind of ‘kingdom’.
So powerful is the effect on us of one element in this plot – the growing sense of nightmare as the hero seems to be slipping into the monster’s power, followed by the surge of relief at his thrilling escape from death – that a whole sub-group of tales has grown up which use just this element in the story to make a plot in itself. And this serves to introduce another very important general aspect of the way stories are constructed, and the way in which we all experience them.
At the most basic level, whenever we identify with the fate of a hero or heroine, we share their experience as the story unfolds in a particular sense. As they face ordeals, or come under threat, so we feel tense and apprehensive; even in extreme cases so terrified that we can scarcely bear to watch or listen. As the threat is lifted, we can relax. Our own spirits are enlarged. In other words, along with the story’s central figure, we feel a sense either of constriction, or of liberation; either of being shut in and oppressed, or of being opened out. And in a story which is well-constructed, these phases of constriction and release alternate, in a kind of systole-diastole rhythm which provides one of the greatest pleasures we get from stories.
But of course these alternations are not evenly pitched throughout the story. As it unfolds, the swings from one pole to the other may become more extreme until usually the most violent of all comes just before the end, with the story’s climax. This is the point where the pressure of the dark power is at its greatest and most threatening, followed by the miraculous reversal and release of the ending.
If again we take Jack and the Beanstalk as a simple example, we initially feel, as Jack and his mother become poorer and poorer, a vague sense of constriction. How are they going to escape from their plight? As we then follow Jack up the beanstalk and his exhilarated discovery of a whole new mysterious world at the top, our spirits expand. As Jack enters the castle, and begins to pass under the menacing shadow of the giant, we feel a more violent constriction setting in. Three times this happens, punctuated by Jack’s escapes with the golden treasures (each more valuable than the last). But on the third occasion the giant is roused to angry pursuit; and, as Jack runs back to scramble down the beanstalk in a nightmare chase, it seems he is about to be caught by the giant thundering ever closer behind him. This is the climax of the story, when constriction is at its most acute, until in the nick of time Jack manages to bring beanstalk and giant crashing to destruction. The shadow is at last lifted. We feel a surge of liberation; and as it fades, we are left with the warming knowledge that, in the treasures he has won from the giant’s grasp, the hero has won some much deeper hold on life which will last indefinitely into the future. As the phrase has it, he will ‘live happily ever after’.
In other words, the inmost rhythm of our experience of the story is of an initial sense of constriction, followed by a phase of relative enlargement, followed by a more serious constriction. Then the story works up to its climax, when the threatening pressure on the hero is at its greatest. This is released in a final, much deeper act of liberation, coupled with the sense that something of inestimable and lasting value has been won from the darkness.
Such is the underlying structure of most Overcoming the Monster stories. But, as we shall see, this fundamental rhythm is so central to the way we tell stories that we find it, in different guises, almost all through storytelling.
We can now move on to our second plot.