Genre Literacy

Entirely too many years ago, I saw a monster movie where something was lurking in the basement of the main characters’ house. They knew it was there because their dog disappeared inside the house and they found a heating vent that had been smashed upward, with pathetic little tufts of dog fur caught on the torn metal.

Unusually for characters in horror movies, they had the good sense to call the cops instead of going to investigate by themselves. The responding cop went down in the basement and was rushed by the monster. He emptied his pistol into it and it collapsed at his feet. He then naturally bent down to check out its teeth, and it then naturally bit his head off.

I told this story to a friend who played role-playing games, and observed that, if it takes a whole magazine to bring a monster down, you should put another magazine in it to make sure it stays down.

Some months later he told me that he’d been playing a game and his character was rushed by a monster. It took a whole magazine to bring the monster down, and he followed up by saying, “I load another magazine and empty that into the monster too.” He was looking at the gamemaster as he said it and, he told me gleefully, you could see the gamemaster’s disappointment.

I recall another monster movie in which a group is chased into a tunnel by the monster and are able to close and secure a manhole cover to keep it out. As they huddle fearfully together, one looks at his watch and says, “well, it’s been fifteen minutes; I’ll check if it’s gone.” He sticks his head out of the manhole cover and naturally drops back in without a head. My reaction was that even a cat will watch a mouse hole longer than fifteen minutes. If I’d been in that tunnel, I’d have proposed waiting fifteen hours, and then poking something non-vital, such a jacket on a stick, out of the manhole cover.

I also recall a horror movie — standard young people in a camp being picked off one by one — in which a couple of survivors have fled through the camp with the killer on their heels, run into a building, locked the door, and backed away with clubs in their hands, ready to sell their lives dearly. They neglected to note the wall that was directly in front of them as they ran in, and thus failed to observe the picture window that was directly behind them as they faced the door. Naturally the killer smashed through the window as I expected the moment they ran in.

The point of this is that those of us who’ve watched horror movies and monster movies have some pretty good ideas as to what to do and what not to do when facing monsters and killers.