Horror’s Effaced Protagonists

By JDC Burnhil

What qualifies a protagonist as a protagonist?

The answer may vary depending upon whom we ask, and for what purpose. At one extreme, we find a very simple set of criteria, offered for functional purposes by author Robin D. Laws: “Any figure who the viewer wants to see succeed, both because they empathize with the character and because the character appears early on and in a large number of scenes, qualifies as the protagonist.” These characters “become the focus of our hopes and fears”, making the ups and downs of those characters’ fates impactful to the audience (Laws, ch. 1).

Yet Laws himself acknowledges that others have more rigorous demands for granting “protagonist” status, that “some [sources] argue … that the protagonist is the character responsible for the instigating action that sets the story in motion” (ch. 1) This is by no means the sole or most stringent set of criteria; to give an example from the other extreme, Michael Mackenzie explains why, in one of the two subtypes of giallo film he identifies, he deliberately chooses to not refer to the main characters as protagonists: “… the protagonist is considered to be the primary active force in any dramatic work, propelling the plot forward through their actions … the spectator typically shares the point of view of the protagonist … these conventions do not apply to the main … characters of the F-giallo …” (112-113). Others make the overlapping demand that a protagonist must have agency, and if this is not the case, “Your Story Is About the Wrong Character” (Ashkenazi).

Putting all these together leads to a puzzling picture: a corpus of works that conventional wisdom suggests are written in a “wrong” fashion, about the “wrong characters,” and yet they evoke substantial audience response. After all, it’s unlikely that Mackenzie would have had two dozen F-gialli to write about (228-232), if being centered around a non-“protagonist” had been a barrier to pleasing the audience; the environment from which the giallo emerged saw relentless copying of successes, not of failures.

At least a partial solution to this puzzle lies in a category I call “effaced protagonist narratives.” In these narratives, the main characters occupy the protagonist role as defined by Laws (we hope for their success and fear their failure) but they are unsuited to be “the primary active force” in that narrative – and, rather than this being a poor choice, it actually enhances the atmosphere or the message intended by the creator. It is only natural that horror literature would contain a substantial number of these narratives, as one of the most predictable effects of effacing the protagonists is to make the antagonists seem by contrast more powerful and more to be feared.

Of three works that we will examine closely, it feels appropriate to begin with a classic of horror where the antagonist forces could scarcely be more overwhelming.

The Call of Cthulhu

H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 short story The Call of Cthulhu introduces the title entity, an alien god who sleeps in the sunken city R’yleh, along with a cult of humans trying to hasten the day when he will awaken fully and destroy human civilization.

Let’s take a moment to speculate how another writer of the era might have woven a story around these antagonists.

The tale might have started with Frank “Thunderbolt” Thurman, a renowned man of intellect and action, visiting his grand-uncle Professor Angell just when the sculptor Wilcox comes to show Angell the bas-relief he’d produced under Cthulhu’s psychic influence. Between them, Thurman and the professor would have recognized the ancient antecedents of the sculpture. Thurman, the man of action, would be more likely to have encountered Inspector Legrasse, to have heard his strange story of the human sacrifices in Louisiana and seen the idol captured from that cult. Angell might be more likely to have heard and remembered the account of fellow academic Webb, who discovered in Greenland the terrible cult whose chants were exactly the same as those in Louisiana.

By careful study of the items turned up by a cuttings-bureau, “Thunderbolt” realizes it’s all one worldwide cult, anticipates that their goal must be to rouse Cthulhu, and deduces that R’yleh must be somewhere in South Pacific waters. This would lead to Thurman being aboard the Emma when that vessel is attacked by the cultists of the steam-yacht Alert. Surely it would be Thurman’s skillful fighting that allows the Emma‘s crew to defeat their attackers and board the Alert, taking it to the arisen R’yleh. Likely it would be some other sailor who unwisely opens the door from which Cthulhu emerges, after which the crew is decimated by treacherous terrain, the mighty force of Cthulhu’s claws, and sheer horror – but we can be confident that, whether Thurman was at the controls or not, the daring and eventually successful plan to ram Cthulhu with the boat itself, letting the few survivors escape, would be his.

Our “pulp” version certainly has a protagonist with a capital “P,” a primary active force, but it’s certainly not the story Lovecraft actually wrote. The actual Call of Cthulhu has no character who, like “Thunderbolt,” is always in the right place at the right time with the necessary understanding.

In fact, the exact opposite is true: the crew of sailors from the Emma are in the right place at the right time, but have no understanding of the situation (hence definitely making things worse, by rousing Cthulhu, and only making them any better if it’s argued that the ship collision played a role in his return to hibernation). On the other side of the coin are the scholars, none of whom are in the right place or time to act. Not only that, but most of the scholars have only small individual pieces of knowledge; the one who manages to assemble the most pieces and get the most complete picture, Francis Thurston, only does so after Cthulhu has already returned to sleep, far too late to affect anything.

Several decades after its first publication, Call is still highly regarded and considered to be “one of [Lovecraft’s] bleakest fictional expressions of man’s insignificant place in the universe” (Cannon 7). If Lovecraft had shaped the narrative around a key figure like our “Thunderbolt” Thurman, making him greatly significant to the narrative, that choice could only have undercut the story’s dominant theme of human insignificance. Although key actions may need to be taken to “propel[] the plot forward,” a much different effect is achieved by dividing key actions between multiple characters, than by giving the lion’s share to one individual.

Note, however – and this is an observation we’ll return to – that a reader could easily infer a character to have a protagonist status stronger than the creator ever intended, simply by reasoning backwards from the character’s fate. Is Johansen the only member of the Emma‘s crew to make it back alive? Then Johansen must be special. Is Francis Thurston the only one to comprehend the full picture of how Cthulhu almost awakened to doom the human species? Then Thurston must be special. Perhaps this is why Lovecraft made it as clear as possible that, for both Johansen and Thurston, their final fate is being murdered by the cult to keep them from revealing the secrets they know.

One more observation before we move on: as compared to our pulp version, the true version of The Call of Cthulhu also avoids painting any character as unusually suited to the role they will play. The closest the story comes to any such sentiment is in calling Johansen especially brave – and that is a quote from a newspaper, not from any narrator.

The reason for this absence is not hard to work out. As the playwright Chekhov might have phrased it, “if the audience’s attention is called to special attributes possessed by some character in the first act, those should affect the plot before the end of the third act” – and by extension, if an author’s intent is to emphasize how his characters cannot meaningfully affect their fates, downplaying special suitability is another strategy for keeping central characters effaced – that is, preventing them from appearing to be capital-P Protagonists.

Note that there is no need to take things in the opposite direction: there is no reason to paint Johansen as cowardly, or to suggest that Thurston’s grand-uncle Angell was unworthy of the professorship he held for decades. They only need to be life-sized, as opposed to being “larger than life” in the style of “Thunderbolt” Thurman.

Speaking of “larger than life”…

Part 2

Shin Gojira

In scripting and co-directing the 2016 film, Shin Gojira, Hideaki Anno used many of the effacement techniques found in The Call of Cthulhu, as well as in the original 1954 Gojira. However, the ends to which Anno employs these strategies are very different.

Lovecraft’s monster, Cthulhu, represents cosmic forces, and, in accordance with Lovecraft’s philosophy of “cosmicism,” the story contains no key figure: no human with special qualities that meaningfully affect the outcome of a struggle with such cosmic forces.

Somewhat surprisingly, the original Gojira actually does possess such a key figure, uniquely qualified to defeat the giant monster of the title. Throughout the movie, Gojira is made a very obvious symbol of nuclear weapons and their danger. It is thus a bit jarring to be presented with the key figure of Daisuke Serizawa, a brilliant scientist who can destroy Gojira with a super weapon, developed in solo research, that he’s been keeping secret.

The discordance is somewhat lessened by the role Serizawa plays: in Laws’ terms, he is not a protagonist but an alazon, defined as a “figure of resistance who must be dealt with by emotional entreaty” (Laws, ch. 1). The reason for Serizawa’s resistance – why he has not already used the Oxygen Destroyer to vanquish Gojira – is the very realistic fear of that weapon becoming the next nightmare that will be constantly over mankind’s head. Serizawa’s fiancée Emiko Yamane, a “focus of hopes and fears” protagonist, makes a moving appeal which includes televised footage of the devastation wrought by Gojira. The entreaty prompts Serizawa to solve the dilemma by drastic means: sacrificing himself as he deploys the weapon underwater to destroy Gojira, taking his weapon’s secret to a watery grave.

Sixty-two years later, Shin Gojira tells the same basic story of humanity’s first encounter with a fearsome monster, but the monster has been radically retooled to serve a different symbolic referent. In March 2011 a huge earthquake struck forty-five miles from Japan’s coast, causing a massive tsunami, which in turn flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant causing meltdowns and radioactive spillage. Poor government oversight of the plant and poor planning for evacuations from the disaster resulted in a higher toll of death and damage. The reimagined Gojira represents such disasters.^[1] Accordingly, Anno’s message is not, like Lovecraft’s, “you are helpless in the face of such things,” but nearly the exact opposite: it is a message to Japan’s bureaucracy informing them, “here is what you need to do to not be helpless and ineffective when disasters occur.”

Anno uses effaced-protagonist strategies to argue his “do’s and don’ts.” The film has no protagonist in the mold of Emiko Yamane, who can only urge others to do things. (It is almost true that there is no key figure like Daisuke Serizawa, either, but we’ll examine that issue shortly.) We have an arguable ‘main’ protagonist in junior-but-rising politician Rando Yaguchi, as defined by Laws’ criterion of “appears early on and in a large number of scenes.” Above all, though, we have an enormous cast of characters who overwhelmingly play the same role: to be in the right place at the right time, with the right abilities, to make some small individual contribution (or obstacle, in the case of some bureaucrats) towards the titanic effort of neutralizing Gojira.

In part, the movie is a satire of Japanese bureaucracy; one particularly effective early gag shows Yaguchi assessing priorities, coming to a rapid decision, and issuing orders… only to discover that, for all that there are several dozen people in the room, no one seems to be there for the purpose of acting on what’s resolved. But even when he forms his own “crack team of lone wolves, nerds, troublemakers, outcasts, academic heretics and general pains-in-the-bureaucracy” to study Gojira and devise countermeasures, this team still numbers easily thirty to forty people. These characters are certainly more personally distinct than the endless charcoal-suited bureaucrats seen elsewhere, but no one of them leads the way, making a majority of the needed breakthroughs. The operating principle is clearly strength in numbers.

Later, this principle is demonstrated to be sadly prescient, as Anno deploys an effacement strategy that Lovecraft didn’t: brutally stressing the replaceability of the protagonist forces. When the Prime Minister and a majority of the cabinet are wiped out in a single attack from Gojira, an interim PM is quickly appointed and the struggle to defeat the monster continues. A shaken but resolute Yaguchi understands that he too might fall and be replaced: “This country’s good at quickly picking a successor.”

Lest we think the intended message is “leaders are just figureheads; they can be replaced,” a scene immediately following shows Yaguchi’s scientific team reuniting in a new location and being addressed by Mori, their leader: “It is great to see you all.  Over half of our team has returned. Our hearts are heavy for those we lost. We’ll fill their positions.” When failure is not an option, neither is hinging all your plans on the irreplaceable skills of single individuals.

This brings us back to the question of whether the movie has an equivalent to Daisuke Serizawa. There are three characters who might be considered candidates, starting with Yaguchi himself. As already noted, he possesses many markers for protagonist status (including a photogenic appearance, which we haven’t previously noted but which definitely guides an audience’s perception of “who is our protagonist?”) But we’re not actually looking for the protagonist right now. We’re looking for a key figure with special irreplaceable genius of some kind, in the style of Serizawa. As we’ve already seen, however, Yaguchi himself would dismiss the suggestion that he is so irreplaceable. Only the same sort of reasoning-backwards that we noted might be applied to Lovecraft’s characters – i.e., deciding that an action with a crucial effect could only have come from a crucial person – would cause Yaguchi to be mistaken for “the Serizawa.”

Our second candidate is the American envoy, Kayoco Anne Patterson, but it must be said that she would only come under consideration for the same reasons that we have examined and rejected in Yaguchi. Without question, she has plenty of markers for protagonist status. In fact, she possesses many markers that indicate a certain kind of protagonist – starting with the very distinctive spelling of her name, continuing with her heritage (the quarter-Japanese daughter of an American congressman), and the rather large amount of screen time other people spend talking about her and openly declaring that her combination of “talent, pedigree, and coattails” makes her a peer to Yaguchi.

Her assertive and flirtatious manner, her peppering of her speech with gratuitous English, her declaration that the reason for her glamorous dress is that she “didn’t have time to change coming straight from the party” – these might be explained as representing how Japanese audiences expect Americans to act: convinced of their larger-than-life nature and extreme individual importance, even when those exist only within their own minds. Taking all clues into account, however, might lead us to suspect a different explanation.

While the term is controversial, it can hardly be denied that younger and less experienced writers frequently do create the characters referred to as “Mary Sues”/”Marty Stus” (Pflieger), inserting them into existing fictional stories – including ones where the author had a very specific intent in not making their protagonist the enviable, admirable, larger-than-life fantasy figure that the Marty Stu typifies. One such story that saw many young fan writers “correcting” the creators’ choice to feature a very ordinary protagonist struggling with doubts about his self-worth would be “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” a legendary TV anime directed by… Hideaki Anno.

To avoid confusion, there is no suggestion here that Kayoco Patterson is a badly conceived character, or executed in a way that imbalances the story – the frequent implication of Sue/Stu status. There is no denying that her contributions to the story’s successful resolution are key: in the early movie, she is the one who shares with Yaguchi the notes of the mysterious disappeared scientist Goro Maki, who made intense study of the sea creature that would become Gojira, and, towards the climax, she pulls every diplomatic string she can to delay a nuclear strike by outside nations against Gojira. But when we examine the many traits of Patterson, and compare them to the classic traits of a Mary Sue, it’s hard to not suspect that Anno might have introduced the character at least in part to satisfy audience members who could not or would not understand why no character on the screen was manifesting “main character energy.”

That leaves us with one last candidate for “the Serizawa”: biologist Goro Maki. Maki never appears on screen, and is heavily implied to have died by suicide before the events of the movie. When his files on Gojira are brought to Mori’s team of several dozen experts, his solo work (admittedly, done over a potentially very long period of time) proves an intense challenge for them to puzzle out – implying that Maki’s scientific skill may have been truly unique, like Serizawa’s. The possibility is sinister, however, because Goro Maki was not the ally to humankind that Serizawa was. He was expelled from Japan under mysterious circumstances after his wife died of radiation sickness, becoming deeply embittered. It is not only speculated within the movie that he deliberately unleashed the creature he gave the name Gojira, “incarnation of God,” as a test of the Japanese people; it’s further implied (even more heavily in supplementary material) that Maki sacrificed himself to the creature to make it more potent with human DNA (Zakarin, LSD Jellyfish). This is the inverse of Daisuke Serizawa; one gave his life underwater to stop a threat to humanity; the other did the same to make the threat worse (LSD Jellyfish, Phillipw1954). Anno’s message to the audience may well include the advice “Don’t go looking for a Serizawa-like genius that you can entreat to solve your problems. They might not be on your side.”

The effacement strategies we’ve looked at so far all depend on numbers. We’re about to examine an alternate approach which avoids that requirement.

Psycho … and its progeny

In my discussion of Shin Gojira I mentioned how, in film, the option exists to mark a character as a protagonist by casting a notable or photogenic actor in the role. There are many similar options that can be employed, both within the film (e.g., frequent close-ups) and outside (e.g., featuring a character prominently in advertisements).

Famously, Alfred Hitchcock used many such techniques to convince audiences that Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, would be the protagonist of his 1960 film Psycho. She was featured prominently in the advertising, clad in lingerie and thus sure to draw attention. From the start of the movie itself, she appeared in nearly every single minute of screen time, and the audience was given reasons to hope and fear for her: hope that she could find happiness with her lover Sam, and fear that the impulsive crime she committed to try and be with him would catch up with her. Then, forty-seven minutes into the movie, she is stabbed to death in the shower.

What many people forget is that Hitchcock then used the same trick again in the same movie. After Marion disappears, a detective named Arbogast appears, trying to locate her and the money with which she fled. Arbogast seems a fairly savvy sort: he initially suspects that Sam and Marion’s sister Lila are covering up some knowledge of her location, but soon correctly changes his mind. Moving on, he successfully follows the trail to the Bates Motel – where he too (like Marion) is attacked and killed.

Unlike the other effacement techniques we’ve looked at, nothing prevents the false protagonist technique from being used in conjunction with traditional protagonist markers. On the contrary, doing so enhances the intended effect on the audience, which is to foster doubt as to whether any figure we identify with will reach a positive conclusion. If a figure marked for success fails, what chance does the comparative nobody have? If a professional private detective can’t investigate the Bates Motel and come out alive, what chance do amateurs Sam and Lila have? Indeed, Sam and Lila are very effaced protagonists – “sketchily drawn,” as Carol J. Clover observes (203-204) – and as a result, suspense is kept high as to whether they will succeed or fail, live or die.

Slashers

Clover is best known for bringing early academic attention (and thus a measure of legitimacy) to the slasher film. At a time when many voices were muttering that nothing could explain the popularity of such movies – except a concerning amount of sadism and misogyny in the target audience – Clover offered an alternate hypothesis: the Final Girl. The panic over viewers identifying with the killer during the gory spectacle of a kill scene, she suggested, assumed that “identification” was a simple, predictable phenomenon. Instead, the evidence that the same viewers who cheered the spectacle of a “kill” also then cheered equally hard for the Final Girl’s victory over the killer indicated that identification was not “the straightforward notion some critics take it to be” (Clover 190).

Clover defines a slasher as “the story of a psycho-killer who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived.” At first, it may not seem that it would have mattered if the word “sequence” or “assortment” were used in place of “string”: there is no importance to the order in which characters are introduced and dispatched, only their quantity.

But it turns out to matter very much. If it were actually true that the sole appeal of the slasher was misogyny and sadism, then the cheapest, easiest way filmmakers could sate that appetite would be to make every victim an Arbogast: not even introduced until after the previous victim had been dispatched. This structure, however, is almost never seen. Indeed, the far more common occurrence is for the audience to be introduced to all the movie’s victim-candidates quite early in the film: the five friends driving in the Hardesty van, the Elm Street kids walking together to school, or the counselors gathering at Camp Crystal Lake to prepare it for re-opening, to name three famous examples.

This of course makes perfect sense if these characters are collectively our protagonists – if slashers work as most narratives do, by getting the audience to connect with characters so that we hope they will survive the ordeal to come, and fear that they won’t. (Although, it must be said, the occasional character seems designed to inspire the reverse.) The more time we have with these characters, the stronger our feelings for their fates typically become. The question thus arises: should we view a slasher film’s “victim-pool,” so to speak, as its effaced protagonists?

At this point. the basic argument for this proposition practically makes itself: we are invested in these characters’ fates, yet recognize that it is the antagonist, rather than any of them, who is the “primary active force” propelling the plot. Yet we run into an argument against the proposition, from an unexpected source: Carol Clover.

In Clover’s formulation, the Final Girl is not merely the key figure who achieves victory by escaping or defeating the killer. She is exactly the opposite of an effaced protagonist: “The Final Girl … is presented from the outset as the main character. The practiced viewer distinguishes her from her friends minutes into the film.” She fulfills particular requirements that mark her as special: “watchful to the point of paranoia,” “intelligent and resourceful in extreme situations,” “not sexually active”) (Clover 204). Lila Crane in Psycho may prefigure the Final Girl, but she is, again, too “sketchily drawn” to actually fulfill the role (Clover 203-204); she barely distinguishes herself at all, much less as the specific sort of protagonist Clover describes.

The most reasonable reading of Clover’s points is of course as descriptions rather than dictates. However, something unusual has happened to the concept of the Final Girl: it has gone from a term employed in academic writing to a commonplace of pop culture, mutating along the way into a much more rigid, clearly prescriptive form. This latter trend was probably initiated (certainly accelerated) by 1996’s Scream, with its metatextual emphasis on “the rules” of slasher film; its continuing memetic dominance is shown by the 2015 film The Final Girls, where characters transported into a Reagan-era slasher film discover that universe is effectively controlled by those “rules,” including stringent requirements that must be met to be a Final Girl.

At this point, the Final Girl is such an institution that we might shock some by suggesting that some of her sightings may in fact have been pure illusion.

The most fundamental requirement for a Final Girl is, of course, that she have the final and most sustained struggle against the killer. Yet we have noted several times how an observer can speciously reason backwards, from “this was the character who performed a crucial action” to “this character was always special, possessed of the qualities that made them especially suited to perform this action.” Are some of our Final Girls actually effaced protagonists, erroneously awarded retroactive destinies?

To be absolutely clear, some characters absolutely do embody Clover’s Final Girl. The second Final Girl sequence outlined by Clover is that of Laurie Strode from Halloween and few viewers would dispute that Laurie meets every key Final Girl qualification. The first outlined sequence, however, is that of Sally Hardesty from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the difference between the two is stark.

Despite being named in the opening text crawl, Sally is not by any reasonable standard “presented from the outset as the main character.” No one in the Hardesty siblings’ party receives any real characterization (save Franklin, whose passive-aggressive oversharing about slaughterhouse practices allows exposition to be slipped in.) Sally is as sketchily drawn as Lila Crane is.

Clover rightfully observes that Sally’s “will to survive is astonishing.” Yet for all we know, her traveling companion Pam, or Jerry, or Kirk, might have possessed an equal will to survive, which we never got to see in action because – unlike Sally – they were immediately incapacitated by the cannibal family. For all that Sally makes the choices and takes the opportunities that allow her to survive the night and escape at dawn, we cannot logically infer that she was always more qualified to survive than those who fell victim.

Certainly, any slasher film fan can easily name half a dozen characters who fulfill the Final Girl trope brilliantly. But the fact that the first character ever named as a Final Girl turns out to be such a dubious example suggests that, when examining slasher narratives, we should take care not to reason backwards from “final survivor” to “Final Girl.”

Conclusion

If we examine works with too fixed an idea of what we will find, we run the risk of simply feeding our own preconceptions back to ourselves, instead of actually listening to what creators intended to say. We have hopefully made an argument that (especially in the horror field) we should start looking for effaced protagonists, a useful narrative tool for letting creators speak about people dealing with circumstances beyond their control, who cannot be “the primary active force” in the events that engulf them. In particular, slashers seem to be an area where we are likely to find surprises if we can set aside our accustomed views about Final Girls being the destined protagonists of such narratives.

Notes

^[1] A striking feature of Anno’s Gojira, not seen in any previous incarnation of the monster, is its evolution through multiple forms before it reaches the saurian appearance common to all previous versions. These forms, especially in terms of the damage they inflict, mirror the stages of the Fukushima disaster (Mihic 90).

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JDC Burnhil is a writer with an MFA from Emerson College who resides in New England, possibly even aboveground. He is a contributor to the volume Somebody, Save Me! of the long-running “Superheroes and Vile Villains” fiction anthology series. Among his many interests are folk horror, theological fiction, Italian gialli and American slashers, and the theory of fiction writing itself. He has written previously for Horror Homeroom on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. While he has a website, he is much more active on Bluesky.

 

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