Examples of the motif of harmful sensation in fiction

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This is a chronological list of examples of the motif of harmful sensation in modern fiction.

1 Before 1901
2 1901-1949
3 1950s
4 1960s
5 1970s
6 1980s
7 1990s
8 2000s
9 References

[edit] Before 1901

In Stendhal's 1817 Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio, the eponymous Stendhal syndrome is outlined.
Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which the narrator is compelled to kill his old man because of his evil eye.
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 by Robert W. Chambers about a fictional play (the book and the play within it are both entitled The King in Yellow) described the play cursing each of its readers and driving many of them mad.

[edit] 1901-1949

H. P. Lovecraft's invention of the fabled malign book the Necronomicon is one of the most famous and oft copied of his Cthulhu Mythos creations and brings doom to any that read it. It may in turn have been based on The King in Yellow. The harm is both direct (concepts that the human mind cannot bear are a staple of Lovecraft's works) and indirect (the very knowledge of some beings exposes the knower to them).
Clark Ashton Smith, a correspondent of Lovecraft, wrote a short story entitled "Ubbo-Sathla" (1933), about an age-old scrying stone that offered the protagonist addictive visions of deeper and deeper epochs of time. The stone merged the protagonist's consciousness with that of the previous viewer, each viewer in turn merging with the previous viewer and thereby regressing into the distant past. Through "aeons of anterior sensation", the viewers' merged consciousnesses became increasingly primitive and devolved until nothing was left but a primordial "thing that crawled in the ooze" and "fought and ravened blindly". After repeated viewings, the obsessed protagonist, helpless to resist or escape, ceased to exist in his own time.
In 1929, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story, The Zahir, about a twenty-centavo coin that, when seen, drove the viewer to obsession.
Arthur Machen's short story, The Children of the Pool (1936) concerns a landscape in rural Wales that brings guilty memories to life in the form of hallucinatory accusers.
In the comic strip The Phantom created by Lee Falk, a legend is mentioned on several occasions that whoever sees The Phantom's face without the mask will die a horrible death. It is untrue, but the Phantom does nothing to discourage it.
In Vladimir Nabokov's short story Ultima Thule (1942) a man named Adam Falter, who loses all motivation and is assumed to have gone mad, is found one day to have killed his psychiatrist without touching him; when asked what happened, he replies that "having accidentally solved 'the riddle of the universe,' he had yielded to artful exhortation and shared that solution with his inquisitive interlocutor, whereupon the latter had died of astonishment." The story concerns a grieving widow's desperate attempts to persuade Falter to reveal this solution.
In Henry Kuttner's short story Nothing but Gingerbread Left (1943), Allied scientists in World War II develop a German-language jingle with such compelling rhythm and words that any German-speaking person hearing it becomes obsessed. The jingle is broadcast over the radio to the Nazis and cripples their war effort by driving them to distraction.

[edit] 1950s

In the 1950 short story collection The Dying Earth, the wizard Pandelume does not allow any of his students to see his face; to do so is supposed to cause incurable insanity.
In 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.
On the syndicated television series, Science Fiction Theater, in the May 19, 1956 episode entitled "The Flicker" police detectives attempted to prove that a man had been driven to murder by the hypnotic effect of a movie flickering on the screen.
In the 1957 Arthur C. Clarke short story "The Ultimate Melody" (collected in Tales from the White Hart), a continuous computer-generated "perfect song" has the unintended consequence of completely ensnaring all listeners who fall into earshot.
In the 1957 novel The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, exposure to raw data transmitted by a superhuman intelligence is fatal to humans.
In the 1957 short story "Axolotl", which appeared in the collection Final de juego, Julio Cortázar wrote of a person who became obsessed with watching axolotls in an aquarium, to the point that he became one.
Fritz Leiber's 1958 short story "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" suggested the appearance of a rhythm and corresponding splatter painting that have contagious effects on anyone that hears them, until they have infected the entire population of the world, greatly reducing their capacity to do anything but imitate the rhythm and the forms of the painting.

[edit] 1960s

In James H. Schmitz's 1962 short story "These Are The Arts" (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1962), the people of Earth are fascinated by Galcom, a series of television programs supposedly produced by benevolent aliens. The programs display beautiful symbols, similar to mandala, which are said to awaken telepathic abilities, preparatory to Earth's being welcomed into a galactic confederation of planets. Suspicious that this is an all-too-human political con game, one man discovers that the aliens are real, but that they seek to enslave humanity.
The plot of Roger Corman's 1963 film X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes concerns a man gifted with x-ray vision, which turns out to be a curse as he is driven mad in Lovecraftian fashion by seeing through the boundaries of space and time.
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.
In a story line of Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner, a comic writes a joke so funny that its audience dies laughing. An attempt to use the joke as a weapon by telling it on a television broadcast fails because the title character fails to understand the joke, and substitutes a harmless joke that he believes is funnier.^{[citation needed]}
In Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain and its movie adaptation, an important plot point revolves around a scientist's epilepsy being triggered by a blinking computer display, triggering an absence seizure. Later, the same scientist suffers a tonic-clonic seizure when he is exposed to a flashing red light.
In 1969, Monty Python performed 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. The Germans invent their own joke of that kind; it does not work, Germans being stereotypically known for their lack of humour.
The central device of Piers Anthony's 1969 novel Macroscope is an instrument capable of viewing anywhere in the Galaxy, and which could be used for eavesdropping upon the communications of advanced civilizations. The effects of massively advanced technology in the hands of immature species were so bad that advanced civilizations permanently jammed the macroscope's "channel" with a video signal that destroyed the mind of any sufficiently intelligent viewer (those not intelligent enough to be vulnerable would be unable to use the technologies discoverable by the macroscope).
The episode Is There in Truth No Beauty? of the television series Star Trek (1968) features an alien species so ugly that the mere sight of it drives human beings insane.
In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, starting with "Neutron Star" (1967), hyperspace interacts with the human eye so that attempting to observe anything outside the protective manifold of the ship causes it to be perceived as a 'blind spot'. Most humans find this disturbing, and prolonged viewing can cause eventual madness.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the monolith is presented as producing noises and sensations that have positive and negative effects. This is especially associated with the sound the monolith produces, which is actually Requiem by György Ligeti.

[edit] 1970s

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1973 short story The Field of Vision features an alien artifact on Mars; its purpose is unexplained, but its physical proportions interact with the human nervous system to cause the deaths of investigating astronauts, leaving one survivor in a state of religious ecstasy, and later triggering a religious revival on Earth.
The 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Knights who say Ni inflict fear with their namesake word but are themselves vulnerable to the pronoun "it".
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.
Robert McCloskey published Centerburg Tales in 1977, a collection of children's stories as a sequel to Homer Price. One of the short stories deals with a catchy juke box song that a person is compelled to sing forever, infecting other people along the way. The song is countered (partially) by the one described in Mark Twain's A Literary Nightmare (see above).
In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, listening to Vogon poetry is described as an experience similar to torture. In the same SF work, the Total Perspective Vortex is the most horrible torture device a sentient being can be subjected to. As a result of its operation, the knowledge attained by the subject on the proportion of his existence in relation to the entire unimaginable infinity of the universe is mind-shattering. Finally, in what is perhaps the ultimate example of harmful sensation, it is revealed that knowing both the Ultimate Question and its Answer would cause the Universe to end.

[edit] 1980s

Christopher Cherniak's short story The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution (appearing in The Mind's I) tells of a research project in computer science which includes content that makes anyone who views it become permanently catatonic. Only after the deadly files have had their tragic effect on a team who fetches them remotely — hoping to avoid what they believe is a normal contagious disease — is their true dangerous nature realised. Efforts to use apes to discover which part of the files has this effect fail — the deadly effect is limited to humans. There is occasionally an incubation period, in which an exposed subject is apparently unaffected; the last thing said by them, some time later, before slipping irrevocably into a coma, is "Aha!"
One of the science fiction elements in the film Looker (Michael Crichton, 1981) involved a device (gun) that is used to force a victim into a temporary (30-120 min) catatonic state by flashing a focused light into a victim's eyes at a specific frequency. The victim would not be aware of the event and would perceive the time spent in catatonia as passing instantly. (A similar device was also used by the protagonist of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man)
The 1983 film Videodrome, which stars James Woods, focuses on a series of television programs that take control of Woods' character's body, deforming it and bending it to an evil will that ultimately forces him to commit suicide.
In the 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami, the main character of Hard-boiled Wonderland discovers that an unanticipated malfunction of a chip in his head, set off by hearing a specific series of musical tones, will end his life as he knows it.
On the Album The Whole Story (1986) by Kate Bush the song "Experiment IV" describes working with the military to create "a sound that could kill someone at a distance".
In the first season (1985 - 1986) episode "Need to Know" of the first revival of The Twilight Zone a town is infected by a secret message which causes insanity as well as the compulsion to spread the secret message to others.
The first episode of the 1987 TV series Max Headroom is about blipverts, television commercials which are compressed into a few seconds. Sometimes, people who watch blipverts explode. A later episode of the series concerned an addictive video clip capable of putting its viewers into a narcotic stupor.
An episode of the animated Fraggle Rock series in 1987 revolved around "The Funniest Joke in the Universe", which was only heard in whispers and caused whoever heard it to be unable to stop laughing. The pessimist Boober hears it but doesn't get it, which makes him the only person able to save the others by getting water from the "Well of Forgetfulness". At the end of the episode after saving everyone though, he finally gets it, and the others have to save him.
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 "BLIT" (Interzone, 1988); others include "What Happened at Cambridge IV" (Digital Dreams, 1990); "comp.basilisk FAQ", and the Hugo-winning "Different Kinds of Darkness" (F&SF, 2000).

[edit] 1990s

In 1991, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that American television personality Mary Hart's voice, perhaps best described as perky, had triggered seizures in an epileptic woman. [1] This was later referenced in an episode of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld, where Kramer (Michael Richards) suffers from convulsions whenever he hears Hart's voice.
In Thomas Ligotti's 1991 short story "Nethescurial" from the collection Grimscribe, the eponymous god reveals itself through the ink of a manuscript telling of it, which is stained with the greenish-brown patina of its idol. This horrible revelation destroys the narrator.
In the fifth season (1992) Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "I, Borg", the Enterprise crew capture a young Borg, dubbed "Hugh", and consider exploiting him to attack the Borg collective. The plan involves implanting him with a "virus": the plans for a geometric shape that cannot exist. When Hugh returns to the collective, he will be re-assimilated and the impossible shape will obsess and destroy the entire race.
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 in language processing; as well as a digital image resembling black-and-white "snow" that can cripple the minds of computer programmers who deeply understand binary code.
In 1993 Greg Bear's novel Moving Mars a system is tested that has the ability to change the basic physical laws of our universe. After a bad edit one character views space directly and as a consequence, enters a short duration fugue state. The other characters are unaffected because they only view space through monitors, and the monitors being unable to process the information, show only nonsense.
In 1993's Issue #45 of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, the diminished goddess Ishtar has taken up a new life as an exotic dancer. In one final dance, the goddess performs her true erotic best, the power of which kills the men in the audience and destroys the strip club.
"Treehouse of Horror IV", a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, involved Bart Simpson hosting in a parody of Night Gallery. Of the last picture of the show, Bart says that "to look upon it is to go mad". Said painting is Dogs Playing Poker, and Homer, after seeing it, goes insane. Claiming that the story behind the picture is "too intense", Bart then says the writers threw something together with vampires.
In 1994 Ian McDonald's novel Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone posited "fracters", computer-generated images that variously induce religious awe, terror, ecstasy, obedience, and death.
In 1994 Peter F. Hamilton's novel A Quantum Murder involves a person being subconsciously programmed to kill by transmitting the mental state of a serial killer through a coded flash of light.
In the 1995 film In the Mouth of Madness the works of the (fictional) horror writer Sutter Cane break through into the reality of those who read them.
A 1995 episode of The Tick animated series entitled Evil Sits Down for a Moment involves the World's Most Comfy Chair, a chair so comfortable that anyone who sits in it immediately loses the will to do anything else.
An episode of the 1995 anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion shows the character Asuka being attacked with a beam of light that causes her to go into mental shock and recall memories of her dysfunctional childhood.
In the 1995 novelette TAP, by Greg Egan, religious and cultural groups think that a poet has been killed by a word in an all-encompassing thought-language.
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.
The theme also appears in the 1997 children's book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The magical Mirror of Erised traps viewers by showing them their hearts' deepest desires. Total captivation is not immediate, but the sights are highly addictive, leading people to return ever more frequently and to eventually waste away.
The titular agents in the 1997 film Men in Black carry a small device called the "Neuralizer", which produces a flash of light which erases the memories of witnesses and leaves them highly susceptible to suggestion.
The Koji Suzuki novel Ring and its subsequent film adaptations depicts a video cassette which, when watched, will cause the viewer to die horribly exactly one week later. The horror films FeardotCom (2002) and Kairo (2001) used a similar idea: an evil web site that kills those who view it after a certain time has passed.
Curse of the body spirits, a 1998 story in Russian by Leonid Kaganov, centers on a report of a military project to create a deadly message.
In the 1998 movie Pi, the protagonist's tutor dies from a stroke induced by studying the secrets of the number pi. Also, it is believed by a small group of Cabbalists that a number discovered by the protagonist is the true name of God and if any but the anointed reads this number aloud, they will be smitten.
The 1998 computer game Fallout 2 was intended to include an outpost of the Environmental Protection Agency which, among other projects, would have included a method of curing epilepsy: speaking a series of letters that would cure any epileptics within earshot by rewiring their neural patterns.^[1]
In the 1999 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 who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for 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."
Battle Angel Alita, also known as Gunnm, has a major plot point, in which a closely guarded secret of the elite city of Tiphares/Zalem is that its citizens, after being eugenically screened and rigorously tested in a maturity ritual, have their brains scanned, removed and replaced with chips. When revealed to a Tipharean/Zalem citizen, the internalized philosophical debate causes most citizens to go insane.
1999 Hong Kong film Hypnosis/Saimin involves a hypnotic spell which causes victims to commit suicide when they hear any high-pitched metallic sound.
Johnny Sorrow first appears in DC Comics in 1999. He is a supervillain with the appearance of an invisible man in a suit, with an expressionless mask floating where his face should be. When this mask is taken off, anyone who looks into his face will die instantly of shock.
In 1999 Peter F. Hamilton's book The Naked God proposed an 'anti-memory' device that would erase the entire personality of a person (and any extra consciousness residing in them) using light signals directed at the victim's eyes, leaving nothing but a non-functioning body.

[edit] 2000s

In Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves, the character Zampanò may or may not have been killed "by" the fictional film The Navidson Record.
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.
The 2001 manga and subsequent OVA Read or Die involves a plot to recover a lost Beethoven symphony that induces compulsive and violent suicide in all listeners.
The 2001 Harry Potter school book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them written by J.K. Rowling (under the pseudonym "Newt Scamander") has an entry about the Fwooper. The Fwooper is an African bird whose song "...will eventually drive the listener to insanity".
The 2001 fantasy novel Threshold, by Caitlín R. Kiernan, involves an impossible seven sided figure in a fossil which drives viewers insane if they can comprehend it. People who comprehend the symbol even for a moment are driven to 'suicide'. The symbol is only the threshold of what lurks outside of time and does not want us to see it.
The .hack series features the recurring motif of experiences within an MMORPG that put the user (player) into a coma.
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). In 2003, Palahniuk published the novel Diary, in which Stendhal syndrome plays a major role.
William Gibson's 2002 novel Pattern Recognition features a protagonist who is hyper-sensitive to style, design and branding, so much so that exposure to bad or overexposed design makes her have something like a psychotic episode. A business rival uses this against her.
A 2002 short story called "Spambot", featured on upsideclone.com, describes a dissociated press program that automatically generates e-mails compelling readers to donate their money to the sender and then commit suicide.
In the 2002 video game Xenosaga, the "Song of Nephilim" could drive URTVs (engineered humans) insane, and also summon beings known as the "Gnosis" into the universe.
The 2002 novel Generica by Will Ferguson features a self-help book called What I Learned on the Mountain which causes anyone who reads it to enter a permanent state of blissful stupor. A similar thing happens to characters in the Mark Osborne short film More after exposure to a Virtual Reality device called Bliss.
In the 2002 short story collection Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King, the protagonist of the title story, Dinky Earnshaw, has the ability to kill people by drawing complicated designs or pictures.
"Invasive", issue #3 (December 2002) of the comic Global Frequency by Warren Ellis, features an invading alien meme picked up from a copy of SETI@home that causes its victims to hemorrhage from the eyes from the "physical stress of the takeover."
A number of the entries in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (2003) use this motif in the transmission vector of the imaginary diseases described; for instance, China Miéville's "Buscard's Murrain, or Wormword," is caused by speaking a single word called the wormword and causes its victims to preach the wormword in the hope of inducing others to speak it. Other diseases are marked with a warning indicating that merely reading about the disease may cause the reader to become infected with it. (See also wormwood.)
Ted Chiang's short story "Understand" is about a man who becomes more and more intelligent, and is ultimately destroyed by a harmful idea presented by another superintelligent man.
Episode 12 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex featured a movie (in the form of a simulated theater within a "box" into which the user would ghost-dive) which was so compelling that all those who entered remained of their own free will (leaving their bodies behind, defenseless).
Episode 12 of Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG features a two-part computer virus that infects cyberbrains. After downloading the virus, the infected user begins a quest to look for a chapter out of a book about regarding the May 15 Incident, the Individual Eleven. Upon finding and reading the chapter, the reader seeks out others who have been infected, plan and eventually commit suicide.
The Death Note franchise involves a notebook that allows its user to kill a person simply by writing their name and imagining their face. The user can also specify the cause of death; otherwise, the subject dies of a heart attack by default.
The prank flash video Red Room details the story of a protagonist searching on the internet the existence of a website that kills anyone who learns of its existence.
Alan Moore's comic, Alan Moore's The Courtyard, follows an FBI agent initially searching for a dangerous drug with suspected psychopathology-inducing side-effects; the drug turns out to be a language that, when heard, induces violent insanity. (The story is intended as an addition to H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos).
One of the novels based on the popular TV series Angel, entitled "Book of the Dead", by Ashley McConnel, features a book inhabited by a creature known as the Bookwyrm, which trapped victims in the book, then ate them. There are also other instances in the series where reading from a particular book opened a portal to another dimension whither the reader was then transported. ("Belonging", "Through The Looking Glass", "There's No Place Like Pltz Glrb")
The 2005 short movie Cigarette Burns, directed by John Carpenter as part of the Masters of Horror television series, centers around the fictional film Le Fin Absolute du Monde, which drives its viewers into a state of murderous insanity.
The 2005 show Threshold involved an alien probe sent to Earth that plays a painful noise which can induce the mutation of double-helix DNA into a triple-helix form, turning Earth-based life into alien flora and fauna if exposed to the signal long enough.
In the 2005 film Serenity, an encoded signal in an advertisement causes River Tam to become extremely violent.
The 2006 cartoon Metalocalypse uses the motif in a joking fashion throughout the series. Several times fans are shown driven to violence by the death metal songs of the band Dethklok, including a mass suicide at a concert when the band plays a 'metallized' blues song.
Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y (2006) centers around a cursed book (of the same name) that kills anyone who reads it. It contains the secret to movement within the "Troposphere", a landscape created by the interconnected minds of everyone in the world.
The 2006 novel The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child makes reference to a phantasmagoria (a nineteenth-century projection lantern) designed to destroy the mind of anyone who used it.
Similarly, the 2007 novel The Wheel of Darkness, by the same authors, revolves around an ancient artifact called the Agozyen. Glimpsing the Agozyen strips away the veneer of morality and conscience from an individual, leaving only the individual's most base, atavistic impulses and the purity of thought to carry them out.
In the television series Battlestar Galactica episode "Rapture," when cylon D'Anna Biers saw the identity of the final five Cylons, she immediately went blind and died.