Motif of harmful sensation
The 'motif of harmful sensation'\ involves harm befalling a person directly from the mere fact of their experiencing a sensation; it appears in both traditional and authored stories.An idea with close affinities to the sight that harms is the gaze that harms: in one case seeing it, and in the other being seen by it, is thought harmful. (Ambiguity and confusion about the distinction may be associated with metaphysical or vitalist conceptions that treat vision as an active function of the eye, in contrast with the scientfic account of the eye passively receiving light that is present even when vision does not occur.)
While the apparent fascination with this motif may be based in philosophic imagination, independent of actual observations, a real-world parallel lies in visual stimuli at a specific frequency that can "pump" EEG rhythms at the same frequency and induce an epileptic seizure in people who already have epilepsy. Real examples of this happening have included flashing screens in anime and video games.
Warning: Plot details follow.
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2 1800s 3 Early 20th century 4 Late 20th century 5 21st century |
Mythology
In classical mythology, anyone directly viewing Medusa would be turned to stone, but Perseus avoided this fate by viewing her in a mirror in order to guide his sword attack.
In both the Odyssey and the tale of the Argonauts, the singing of the sirens drew to them, heedless of harm, any mariner who heard it; the stories describe countermeasures such as being physically restrained, plugging one's ears, and listening to even more beautiful music.
The basilisk, dating back to classical Greek myths, has a rich tradition, sometimes including a harmful voice; fatal gazes are generally attributed both to basilisks, and to the cockatrices that may be derived from variations on basilisk tales.
It was once believed that when the mandrake was pulled from the ground, it emitted a shriek so horrible that anyone who heard it was deafened, driven mad, or even killed.
Legend has it that, who reads the whole Book of One Thousand and One Nights will become mad.
1800s
In Stendhal's 1817 Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio is outlined the so-called Stendhal syndrome.
Mark Twain's 1876 short story A Literary Nightmare concerns a notice seen on a railway car that, once heard, obsesses the hearer, who cannot forget about it until he or she repeats it to someone else.
An 1895 collection of stories about a fictional play (the book and the play within it are both entitled The King in Yellow) described the play driving each of its viewers mad.
Early 20th century
H. P. Lovecraft, in the early 20th century, wrote in stories and novels about a fictional book of magic, The Necronomicon, saying reading it was dangerous to both health and sanity. In his Cthulhu Mythos stories, he also wrote of creatures, the Great Old Ones, the presence of which would drive people insane.
In 1929, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story, "The Zahir", about objects which, when seen, destroy the viewers with obsession until the point where they cannot think of anything else. The Zahir of the story was a twenty-centavo coin.
The 1956 novel The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester, the protagonist protects himself from telepaths by learning a song so catchy that anyone who hears it will have it stuck in their head for three days.
J. G. Ballard's 1964 short story "The Reptile Enclosure" describes a near-future in which the launch of telecommunications satellites triggers "innate releasing mechanisms" that cause people to commit mass suicide by walking into the sea.
Late 20th century
Monty Python performed in 1969 a joke-warfare sketch in which a writer produces a joke so funny that he, and anyone else who reads or hears it, dies laughing, while anyone who sees a few words requires a period of convalescence. The joke is eventually translated from English into German, one word at a time, by military authorities, and monolingual English-speakers read it by rote to the German troops they face on the battlefield, killing so many of them as to quickly end the war.
In the novel The Andromeda Strain and its movie adaptation, an important plot point revolves around a scientist's epilepsy being triggered by a blinking red alarm light, triggering an absence seizure.
In 1977 Jerzy Skolimowski directed the horror film The Shout (based on a short story by Robert Graves) which told the story of a man who had learned (from a witch doctor) to produce a "terror shout" as he called it, that would kill anyone who heard it unprotected.
From 1981 to 1993, in Sam Raimi's popular trilogy of movies Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness, the Naturan Demantos or Necronomicon Ex Mortis appears as an evil book of magic; in the first Evil Dead, a recording of an academic reading from the book caused all of the character Ash's later troubles.
The 1983 film Videodrome, which stars James Woods, focuses on a series of television programs that take control of Woods' body, deforming it and bending it to an evil will that ultimately forces him to commit suicide.
In 1992 Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash described one of the lost ancient Sumerian texts as having had the power to reprogram the reader's brain by exploiting a backdoor, and centers on a computer virus that has a similar effect, via the seemingly random "snow" it displays on the computer screen.
Infinite Jest, a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace, revolves around a film so entertaining that anyone who sees it is put into a stupor, from which they can never recover.
In 1998 a Japanese film, Ringu, depicts a video cassette which when watched, will cause the viewer to die horribly exactly one week later. A Hollywood remake, The Ring, was subsequently released in 2002
The theme also appears in the 1999 children's book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Ron informs Harry that "Some of the books the Ministry [of Magic]'s confiscated... burned your eyes out. And everyone whe read Sonnets of a Sorceror spoke in limericks for a the rest of their lives." He goes on to mention "...a book you could never stop reading! You just had to walk around with your nose in it trying to do everything one-handed."
A number of stories by David Langford are set in a future containing images, colloquially called "basilisks", which crash the human mind by triggering thoughts that the mind is physically or logically incapable of thinking. The first of these stories was "comp.basilisk FAQ", published in a 1999 issue of Nature.
The 2000 fantasy novel Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville, concerns a flock of winged monsters whose wings have a hypnotic effect on those who see them.
In 2002, Chuck Palahniuk's horror-satire novel Lullaby describes a "culling song", which causes the death of people who hear it (or even have it thought in their direction).21st century