The "monster" blindspot

Fictional monsters are all very well, but I still think I'd be pretty chuffing surprised to be faced by a real zombie or vamp.

I said suprised, not scared!

Actually, in the case of a zombie, I'd probably be going "Hey, dude, you look ill maybe you shoul-AAAUUUUGHGHHHHH....MY BRAINS!!"

I'm just not paranoid enough to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Never underestimate the power of disbelief. There's a big difference between seeing a vampire in fiction and saying "Hey, that's a vampire!" when you expect to see them, and seeing something in real life that you don't believe exists in which case you keep tossing other labels on it because it can't be that other thing. It might not even occur to you it's the same thing you read in a novel, because that novel wasn't real. There have been lots of people over the years that have imitated vampires, but most of us don't believe they were/are actually supernatural vampires with immortal lifespans. Plus, characters don't always have to be completely in the dark in terms of "A monster? What's that?" It can be just as interesting to watch them see a monster and refuse to believe in it, or realize exactly what the monster is but still not be able to do anything about it.

You could take it a step further and make it even more meta. There are plenty of zombie walks, parades, flash mobs, etc. where people dress up in costume. If you saw a zombie IRL, you'd probably first assume it was someone cosplaying. Until it started gnawing on you.

In my zombie novel, most of the First Encounters with Zombiekind are gruesomely violent (they're fast/aggressive zombies), leaving no doubt that it's a) not cosplay and b) actually zombies. The younger/geekier characters are quick to declare they're dealing with zombies, while the older/less imaginative characters resist and try to find practical explanations for what's happening. Until reality bashes them in the head with the fact that if it walks like a zombie and bites like a zombie, it's probably a zombie.

But yes, like posters above said, being familiar with something in fiction isn't the same as handling it IRL. In fact, being knowledgeable about something fictional could actually work against you, because (at least in the case of zombies/vampires/werewolves/et al), you'd wonder if it was just over-eager cosplay, crazed fans, etc. instead of taking its threat at face value. You'd get hung up on whether or not it was real. But once you accepted the reality of the monster, you'd probably be better psychologically prepared to handle it.

There's been at least one spoof of the "monster blindspot" in one of the comedic horror movies awhile back.

Truthfully and realistically, I think most people would react with disbelief at first followed by an attempt to utilize the knowledge they've gleaned from thirty years of horror movies. There's a huge problem with this reaction in my opinion.

First, it would inspire a sense of tremendous overconfidence - "What? It's just a zombie. They're slow and not very smart. Shoot it in the head." This happens right before the zombies prove to be a lot faster than the victims think. Then, most people are very poor shots with a gun. Something like 90% of the civilians in a major city have never even handled a handgun or long arm. The head is a relatively small target. I'm a pretty good shot, but even in close quarters I'm not sure I could place a shot in the head of an attacking zombie with a handgun and fairly certain I could not with a long arm. At some distance, maybe with the handgun, probably with a rifle or shotgun. Under combat conditions against a mass of moving targets? Odds drop for even a good shot, not a sniper, to around 20-25% or less I would think.

The average citizen is probably going to panic, probably start panic firing and wasting ammunition, and completely miss once they figure out that head shots take time they don't have even if they were a better shot.

Second, the average citizen, as I said above, is going to panic. TV has shown them that a single bullet of any caliber kills anything no matter where it hits. Guess what? That isn't the case even with a living human being. Zombies are going to ignore body and extremity shots and just keep on coming. Overconfidence rapidly turns to abject panic. The Fight or Flight Response starts kicking in and their confidence melts away as fast as their comrades and allies do. Even the toughest and most overconfident, combat-trained soldier will give ground when his squad mates decide to retreat. The average civilian is going to run screaming in panic (probably right into the arms of the next nearest group of flesh-hungry monsters lurking around the corner a couple blocks away).

Third, combat is noisy. It attracts attention, usually of the type least welcome. The average civilian or even police officer is going to want to stand around and catch their breath following a zombie encounter. Soldiers are trained, generally, to move away from the scene of a battle as soon as possible (mainly because battles tend to draw enemy and friendly artillery and air support fire). While they're standing around wondering what to do next the next group of zombies is going to be coming in their direction.

It's easier to move on rapidly and give yourself an avenue of retreat before you are surrounded. Just ask Custer.

Fourth, as Will Smith said in Men In Black (somewhat paraphrased), "Individuals are smart. Crowds are just stupid, panicky animals." Panic breeds panic even in organized military units. Retreat breeds retreat and retreat breeds panic. Once one person panics and runs the odds of one then two then four then the whole group panicking and running increases astronomically.

Fifth, death erodes morale. Let just one person get pulled down and eaten alive and the rest of a group is going to suffer an extreme crisis of confidence. See Four, above.

Sixth, Panic kills. Fear is good, but panic will kill you just as dead as any zombie bite. And there's going to be a lot of panic amongst any civilian or even military organization during a zombie outbreak. Panic leads the average civilian and soldier to make mistakes they otherwise might not make. It makes them incautious, unheeding of potential danger, as potentially dangerous to their comrades and themselves as they are to the zombies, and largely oblivious to the fact they might be running from the frying pan straight into the fire.

Thus, it's my conjecture that, even given thirty plus years of zombie and other monster movies, when faced with the real thing the average Joe is going to panic in the first ten minutes of an encounter and get himself and probably a lot of others killed in the next ten minutes.

^Just want to point out that it was Tommy Lee Jones who said that, and not Will Smith.

/geek off

To the OP: I kind of get what all the other posters are saying. You can't be but so genre-saavy when real life is so different from fiction, at least in terms of the monster population.

However, it's good to keep in mind that people exist who do believe in zombies, vampires, and other types of supernatural whatnot. Not that many, but they're out there. The skeptic is the most fun to set up as a redshirt, but keeping one or two who are genre saavy in the bunch is not necessarily a bad idea, just to keep things interesting.

Good example of a former skeptic coming around: George Clooney's "I don't believe in vampires" speech in From Dusk Till Dawn (warning--NSFW): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9UmtCPp9V0&feature=related

I think a lot of genre stuff works well when the stereotypes are subverted and things don't act as they do in 'known fiction'. Characters are free to beleive what the hell they like about zombies, vampires and werewolves but when they encounter one 'for real' they don't actually know if any of the crap (sunlight, stakes, sea salt, silver bullets, shot in the head etc) they have heard actually works or not. In some Vampire fic, Vampires deliberately make up a lot of the crap and try to pass it off as true so that when someone throws a clove of garlic at them rather than shoot them they can shrug, ignore it and kill them quicker.

So, you can know all there is to know but you don't know what works until you try it and in horror, with the right monster, you only get one chance to carry out that experiment... and failures don't report results so the myths continue.

Rhoda, thanks for the correction. I guess I need to rewatch the movie (again).

BTW, something else that made sense to me reading Rhoda's comments above - in most cases, with the exception of vampires or werewolves, but especially in the case of a zombie outbreak, once things get going the survivors are probably going to find themselves hideously outnumbered.

Fighting 10, 20, or 50+ to 1 odds and needing a head shot to put one down permanently is not going to be pretty for anyone. It's a good reason why military units get overrun, etc. (but armored personnel carriers, tanks, military helicopters, etc. have NBC gear and there's not a zombie on the planet that can get through even a half inch of aluminum armor plate so a lot of the military would probably survive, regroup, and figure things out - in addition, a Bradley AFV carries a squad of 8 men plus a crew of 2-3 and has firing ports for the squaddies and a 30mm autofiring cannon. Damned few zombies are going to be left walking around after being hit by a 30mm buzz saw).

Military "firebases" and cantonments would likely be relatively quickly established. Of course, these might draw the zombies in on their locations. This has both serious and strategic/tactical implications. Pulling the enemy onto your position is a good thing. It means you can kill more of them in one spot. It, unfortunately, makes you violate Clause Three, above, and makes your position susceptible to being overrun if you run out of ammo. You lose the initiative by losing the ability to maneuver and it is not, generally, a good thing militarily (always amazes me whenever I hear of it being used these days because the firebase strategy was generally considered a failure in Vietnam).
.

In 2 novels that I've written, one soon to be published and one just recently written, one of which is about vampires and one about zombies, I've chosen to not have the "blindspot" and I think it worked out pretty well and, to make my job easier, suggested many of the characters' reactions and dialogue. I don't think it made the monsters any less frightening to the characters. Everyone's heard of cancer, but a diagnosis can still devastate someone.

However, it's good to keep in mind that people exist who do believe in zombies.

Click to expand...

I have, what i think is, an unhealthy and irrational fear of zombies. I can't watch zombie movies at all. Out of all the monsters I know, zombies seem the most plausible to exist somewhere.

I think I'd be able to tell if it's a costume or the real thing...

If I ever encounter one, I'd seriously puke and crap my pants at the same time.

Not all of them... In Scream (ok, its comedy but it is comedy horror...) the characters are all aware of horror films and even reference them. Many vampire books reference Dracula, Buffy, Anita Blake, Hammer and a number of other sources. In Buffy itself there is evidence that the characters have an awareness of pop culture horror. In many of these cases the information is flawed but it is out there.

areteus said:

Not all of them... In Scream (ok, its comedy but it is comedy horror...) the characters are all aware of horror films and even reference them. Many vampire books reference Dracula, Buffy, Anita Blake, Hammer and a number of other sources. In Buffy itself there is evidence that the characters have an awareness of pop culture horror. In many of these cases the information is flawed but it is out there.

Click to expand...

Flawed? How so?

Yes, to new monsters.

But the tried and true promise to deliver gore and screaming and blood lust. I think readers get addicted to the "fear factor" for different characters and not care that vampires and zombies have been done before.

Romance readers never tire of the same old love connection either. There is comfort in redundancy.

BTW, that headshot you mentioned...how many people can really make that shot? Especially, when it's moving? How many readers have ever shot a gun? They must be reading for research.

jennontheisland said:

Flawed? How so?

Click to expand...

Because if such things existed in a world where was a massive body of literature about them they would make damn sure that a lot of fake information was also out there. Vampires at least (Zombies rarely have the smarts, though in the Felix Castor books they are just as intelligent as their living selves, being a ghost possessing their own dead body) would almost certainly attempt to exercise an influence over all forms of entertainment media in order to ensure that the 'truth' is hidden amongst a body of convincing lies. I have read at least one vampire story where the concept of 'not showing up in mirrors' is a deliberate lie to convince people that 'no, I cant be a vampire - see, I show up in mirrors'. The classic is, of course, Lost Boys where the characters find out one important piece of info at the very end - 'You never invite a vampire into your house, it renders you powerless'.

A writer can have a lot of fun with the metaphysics of monsters - deciding for themselves which work and which don't and why. Their characters won't know until it is too late...

Ah. That makes sense. Thanks.

Another Editor said:

Something occurred to me about "monster" subgenres of horror. Suppose a story has zombies in it, and a scene is being written in which some characters encounter the zombies for the first time, ever. This is a very dramatic event and the characters are going to be frightened (and possibly eaten, depending on how important they are).

This is all good and well, but it's been over 30 years since Night Of The Living Dead came out and there have been tons of zombie movies, novels, comic books, graphic novels, and even episodes of South Park and Deadliest Warrior since then. How does the author ignore the seeming omnipresence of zombies in popular culture? Do the characters live in an alternate universe in which nobody has even contemplated the notion of dead people rising up and trying to eat them? That seems dubious.

The foregoing applies to vampires too. Some characters might be shocked the first time they encounter a bloodsucker in a story, but we're more than a century past Bram Stoker's Dracula; we've been through dozens more vampire novels, movies and whatnot; and vampire-like monsters have occurred in many cultures for a millenium or more. The very notion that nobody would know what a vampire is when they saw one is a little odd.

Maybe we need new monsters.

Click to expand...

Great post, I agree. I'm reading a zombie novel right now and there's no reference to the zombies of movies for the past 40 years.

I'm writing my WIP without the blind spot, and I'm going with the "does not compute" reality-break brain-freeze reflex and the flawed info gambit.

My story involves ghosts and vampires and it has a contemporary setting with contemporary characters. To me it just wouldn't be realistic if these people did not have a grounding in supernatural pop culture.

But supernatural pop culture is all over the frikkin' map. We've been telling these stories literally for thousands of years, across all cultures. There are so many sets of rules, who is to say which ones "work" and which are "old wives' tales"?

My story's central haunting/infestation/conspiracy problem is based on a set of incidents from real history and on Old World folklore and folk beliefs. That's what I chose to have be "real." That means that all the more modern lore, from Stoker on up to Twilight is a bunch of hoo-hah, so my modern American characters might be fairly quick to recognize the critters they're dealing with but find themselves utterly unequipped to deal with them until they change reference sources. Kind of like Bill and Ted in Hell realizing they were totally lied to by their album covers.

I'm of the school that says horror is scarier if it's in the room with us, i.e. if the settings and people are familiar and similar to our own lives, thus creating the feeling that it could really happen and happen to us. So I like to have as much realism in my scary stories as possible, and to me that includes the cultural context in which the characters live. We have to feel their reality to feel it being subverted. If I'm writing a story about contemporary Americans, those people are going to have grown up in a monster-saturated entertainment culture. They are not going to say, "Zombie? What's a zombie?"

I'd also point out that the blind spot probably should not ever be total cultural unawareness. As was already pointed out, there really are people who believe vampires, zombies, etc., and especially ghosts and aliens, really do exist and who go to a lot of trouble to become experts on them. Even Dracula had a Van Helsing.

donatos said:

Great post, I agree. I'm reading a zombie novel right now and there's no reference to the zombies of movies for the past 40 years.

Click to expand...

I don't see any problem with this at all.

Movies are fiction. If I met a zombie in real life, I wouldn't take movies as a guide; I'd think, "What the fuck is that?"

My brain would be doing a does-not-compute thing where it'd refuse to accept what was right in front of me because this fictional being...is...what? Real? Really?

The "it was like something out of a romance novel" happens a lot in romance novels, and it does seem a bit eyerolly.

Well, yeah, I would think that would be, but then again, how many people in reality point to a flash in the sky and yell "Spaceship!" Or a smudge on a film or floating dust in a video and declare "Ghost!" Or a grave that should have someone in it but is found to be empty and conclude "Vampire!" And then go on ... and on ... and on ... telling us all about what that means and how it works and what to do about it.

Having an "expert" who knows all about it, or thinks he does, in a horror story is more believable than unbelievable, in my opinion.

Also, think how many times people learn things are real that were previously thought to be mythical monsters -- giant squids, for example -- and the general response is "For reals? Well, damn."

So I also think it's realistic to have characters with some awareness of the monster, even if they had no belief before or ability to cope now with the reality of it.

One of the many, many problems I had with Twilight was Jacob saying, "Girl, y'boy's a vampire," and she read a few books and went, "Well spank my arse -- Edward is a vampire!" She was too easy to convince.

When it comes to people speculating about ghosts and so on, I don't believe in them. I believe that the other person believes, though.

It takes a lot more than some folk tales and some flimsy 'evidence' to convince people in real life.

I know there are people who (for example) drink blood, but that doesn't convince me they're vampires. It convinces me they think they are.

Most people these days would say, "Heh. That looks like a zombie. There must be some scientific, logical explanation for this. Let's find it."

Well, granted, and in horror fiction there's always the skeptic who insists there has to be a "logical explanation for all this" through most of the story. Likewise, for a very, very long time most people thought giant squids were mere legend and held onto disbelief even in the face of bits of giant squids washed up on Caribbean beaches. To this day, there are probably people who haven't heard the good news that there really are giant squids out there and would respond to such news with a "pfft, yeah, right." It is entirely believable in a horror story for people to deny the reality of the monsters even as that reality unfolds around them in the story because skepticism is strong in real life.

And yes, it is true that some people will refuse to accept the conclusion of "vampire" even as they observe a dead loved one return from the grave, displaying all the classic signs, slowly draining their life away night after night, casting no reflection, etc, etc, up to and including bursting into flame and/or being reduced to dust and bones by exposure to sunlight. But at what point does skepticism morph into denial?

Remember, I'm talking about the context of a fictional reality, and the original question was about the "monster blind-spot" whereby characters in a story are devoid of any cultural awareness of the story's monster. My view is that it's more realistic if contemporary characters have awareness of contemporary culture, so for example, modern American characters should be at least nominally acquainted with modern American pop culture monster references. But knowing the stories doesn't mean believing them or accepting them as real, nor does it mean reacting to reality in accordance with what the movies tell us, or even that any of the stories turn out to be true. I'm just saying I like it when the characters know the same stuff I, as a reader know, and that the full spectrum of responses from freezing to denying to buying it hook, line and sinker all would make sense to me, because people really do have all those reactions to extreme information.