mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
We’ve talked about several different archetypes of monster here thus far — the zombie, which includes other mute, lumbering killing machines like Jason and Michael Myers, and the vampire, who if you take away the fangs and the literal need for blood looks a lot like Hannibal Lecter — but none of these monsters have been too conceptually challenging. (The zombie eats your brain. The vampire drinks your blood. Boom.) By comparison, the Thing Without a Name is downright intellectual.
It’s also my favorite. Unfortunately, you don’t see the TWaN on celluloid very much, because by its very nature it’s difficult to describe, and thus difficult to film. It resides more in the province of horror fiction, where twisted souls like Poe and HP Lovecraft perfected it. Here’s the TWaN’s deal, in a nutshell: usually an entity from another dimension, another reality or Hell, it’s so mind-rapingly horrible that in most cases to even look upon the TWaN means you’ll be spending the rest of your days in a straitjacket.
Many of Lovecraft’s best stories deal with TWaNs, like his oft-imitated “At the Mountains of Madness,” about a team of Antarctic explorers who find the strange ruins of an alien outpost behind a range of long-unscalable mountains. When a few of the the horrible, ululating creatures who live there emerge and chase the team, the one man who looks back at them promptly loses his mind, and is later unable (or unwilling) to describe what he saw. (If this story and its title reminds you of John Carpenter’s cruddy In the Mouth of Madness, it should; it’s one of many cinematic homages to Lovecraft’s work and this story in particular. In it, the latest novel by a Stephen King-esque author named Sutter Cane drives people who read it insane, turning Cane’s agent into an axe-wielding maniac and causing riots in the streets. Ooookay.)
Above: in the aforementioned shlockfest, Sam Neill saw something he shouldn’t have. Now THAT’S crazy.
More popularly known, Stephen King’s It trades on classic Lovecraftian Thing Without a Name tropes. For those of you who only remember Pennywise the Clown, don’t forget that “It” was a shape-shifter — one way to get around never showing your TWaN is to have it manifest itself in different forms “which the human mind can comprehend.” Wikipedia elaborates:
“‘It’ apparently originated in a void containing and surrounding the Universe, a place referred to in the novel as the “Macroverse”. Its real name (if indeed It has one) is unknown. Likewise, It’s true form is never truly comprehended. Its final form in the physical realm is that of an enormous spider, but even this is only the closest the human mind can get to approximating It’s actual physical form. Its natural form exists in a realm beyond the physical, which It calls the ‘deadlights.’ Coming face to face with the deadlights drives any living being instantly insane.”
It’s a little corny, maybe, but I really dig the whole it’ll-drive-you-insane thing. It trades on larger issues we have as human beings in the world, and — not to get Biblical on you or anything — some Old Testament spookiness that I’ve always found compelling. When Job begs God for an explanation for the horrible suffering he’s endured, God finally appears to Job — but not as a benign old man the sky. Instead Job is confronted by an horrific, baffling whirlwind which some Biblical scholars translate to be called simply “The Unnameable,” and the story ends with Job getting no answer and being kind of sorry he asked in the first place; it’s made starkly clear that he’ll never comprehend the true nature of the universe. Like, wow — so God is a Thing Without a Name, too!
There are plenty of references to this kind of intense, frightening revelatory experience in religious literature — what Thoreau calls (paraphrasing) “the light of truth that will put out your eyes.” Naked reality is too much for our little minds to handle. It’s a theme that’s used in religious literature and horror literature alike; two sides of the same coin. Too much knowledge can destroy you — don’t bite the apple; don’t fly too high or your wings will melt — etc etc. My favorite example is the Tower of Babel story: hubristic humans try to built a tower to Heaven so that they might know the mind of God. Instead their tower is destroyed and their minds are confused; the story ends with them running around like chickens with their heads cut off, all speaking different languages. In other words, you don’t have to know everything, and in fact it’s better if you don’t. Look back at Sodom and Gomorrah as God is destroying them and you might turn into a pillar of salt; look back at the horrible Antarctic Elder Being that’s ululating behind you and you just might lose your mind.
Stephen King briefly lays out his ideas on the subject (while talking about Lovecraft) in his exegesis on horror, Danse Macabre:
The best of [these stories] make us feel the size of the universe we hang suspended in, and suggest shadowy forces that could destroy us all if they so much as grunted in their sleep. After all, what is the paltry evil of the A-bomb when compared to [Lovecraftian creatures] Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, or Yog-Sogoth, the Goat with a Thousand Young?”
On the flip side of that coin, at the end of Job, our titular hero also feels the powerful, incomprehensible hugeness of the universe, but rather than losing his mind, he loses his hubris:
“Therefore I will be quiet / Comforted that I am but dust.”
In closing, let’s rock out to Metallica’s take on the subject with their song “The Thing That Should Not Be.”
Comments (16)
Comment
- Follow mental_floss
Okay, so this is part shameless self-promotion…
But here’s one of Lovecraft’s creatures (click on my website :D)
posted by Fruppi on 3-19-2008 at 1:34 pm
Very cool article. I love “At the Mountains of Madness” and was thrilled to hear that a faithful film adaptation is the dream project of the most excellent filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth). I really can’t think of anyone who would be better suited to bring that type of insanity to the big screen.
posted by SpaceMonkeyX on 3-19-2008 at 1:36 pm
Touches on notions of “the sublime” in JMW Turner and other artists’ works. Shudder.
This sort of monster really paralyzed me as a child. Thanks for making me look it, somewhat, in the face.
posted by MaryGirl on 3-19-2008 at 1:57 pm
…And wasn’t that other Sam Neill work, “Event Horizon” something like this?
posted by ACute Angle on 3-19-2008 at 2:11 pm
I tried this before, but it didn’t post:
There’s a ghost story out of london about a TWaN in an address I can’t remember (I’d have to look up my notes), but the basic gist of the story is this: there is something in the attic of this townhouse that kills people with fear and those it doesn’t kill are irreparably driven mad. Over the years people have tried to stay there, either as a dare or a bet or disbelief and it all comes to a bad end.
On one occasion a man went upstairs and left his friends downstairs to listen in case he rang a bell (in case of trouble). After midnight-one, they heard the bell frantically ringing, and ran pell-mell up the stairs only to find him dead, with no sign that he had ever touched the bell.
And there’s a mirror of this type of haunting-story out of Scotland, involving a “lost” address (or so the tourguide told me when I asked).
I think if you looked you’d find something like this story occurs in oral traditions and ghost stories globally as a fear of what one cannot see.
When I get home tonight, I’ll look it up the address… (is kicking herself for not remembering this….)
posted by ACute Angle on 3-19-2008 at 2:13 pm
Lovecraft’s story “The Colour Out of Space” is an interesting twist on the idea. It involved extraterrestrial invaders and such, but the most interesting part of the story to me was the fact that the alien artifact in the story gives off a light that is “a color that no living man has ever seen before”. I always thought that was a neat idea.
posted by Craig on 3-19-2008 at 2:13 pm
That is why God appeared to John Denver in the form of George Burns in the “Oh God!” movies. He said his true form would BLOW YOUR MIND. When I was a kid, that concept totally made me go, “Woah.”
posted by Nat X on 3-19-2008 at 3:25 pm
Don’t forget the Pandora’s Box story.
The first woman in Greek mythology, she opened up a jar that released all the evils of mankind upon the world. While the jar/box wasn’t a monster exactly, it still represented a great evil that was better left alone and without the meddling of a curious mortal. ;)
posted by Dash on 3-19-2008 at 3:30 pm
In the terms of a horror movie, the TWaN is used to scare or frighten us.
Curiously, in the terms of religion the TWaN is used in the same way.
posted by Florida on 3-19-2008 at 4:01 pm
EVENT HORIZON was indeed written to be a TWaN story. In fact, in the original script, the ship did not go to “hell;” the very act of warping spacetime destroyed the sanity of the original human crew and infected the ship. The studio felt that was too intellectual, hence, it became, “hell ship,” broadcasting warnings in Latin on all frequencies.
I love the idea that God is a TWaN; or, if you are an atheist, that God is NOT a TWaN.
posted by Philip Eisner on 3-19-2008 at 4:59 pm
As much as I hate to read him now, I loved the desriptions of TWaNs Clive Barker wrote. Also, China Mieville has had some luck describing the undescribable — his incomprehensible Weavers, for example.
posted by Mudi-B on 3-19-2008 at 7:02 pm
Of course a TWaN is the ‘most’ scary – because we are always more afraid of something we can’t see, but only imagine…our imaginations are always gonna be more powerful than watching a dude in a monster suit, even if Rick Baker did do the makeup…the worst kinds of monster w/ no faces are the ones we imagine we hear in our houses, late at night, after all the lights are out, we’ve just watched a scary movie and have to find our way from the living room to the bedroom by ourselves…that’s when i like to turn on EVERY light between here and there…
posted by donner on 3-19-2008 at 10:08 pm
In Greek myth, Zeus offers one of his lady friends (Semele, mother of Dionysis if I remember properly) any favor in the world, and she insists on seeing him in God form. He tries to talk her out of it, but finally takes off his mortal disguise, and she burns to a cinder.
Probably one reason Zeus needed so many girlfriends.
posted by Meg on 3-20-2008 at 6:54 am
How can you say Michael Myers and Jason are Zombies? There’s no comparison man. Zombies are society gone bad – that’s the metaphor, that’s the whole point of zombies – that they could be your friends and neighbors gone loco. Jason and MMyers are the “lone wacko” metaphor. VERY different.
posted by Rappsui on 3-20-2008 at 12:44 pm
Okay, I’m gonna be That Girl and bring up Buffy. But here is a textbook case. The villain in the final season is called The First- the first evil, which existed before existence and can never be destroyed. It has no form, and cannot physically interact with the world. But it can take the shape of anyone who has died, and use that appearance to manipulate people. This is a different kind of Thing Without a Name, a thing with the name and the face of someone you knew while alive, or someone you don’t even know is dead. Spooky.
posted by Iris on 3-20-2008 at 1:05 pm
i find the TWaN incredibly fascinating, and at the same time incredibly scary. of course, the reason for that is because we fear what we don’t understand, but at the same time our curiosity drives us to WANT to know what the thing is.
posted by ian on 3-21-2008 at 7:24 pm