Motif of harmful sensation

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The motif of harmful sensation refers to the physical or mental damage that a person suffers merely by experiencing what should normally be a benign sensation. The phenomenon appears in both traditional and modern stories.

The theme is similar to the notion of the evil eye: the sight that harms is the gaze that harms. The harm is thought to be caused by seeing something or being seen by it — a parallel idea is the contrast between metaphysical or vitalist conceptions that treat vision as an active function of the eye, and the scientific conception of the eye as passively receiving light that is present even when vision does not occur.

While this motif is largely imaginary, a real-life example is epileptic seizures triggered by strobe lights. Light flashing at a specific frequency can "pump" EEG rhythms at the same frequency and induce a seizure. This effect can also be triggered by flashing screens in film and video games. The Pokémon episode Dennō Senshi Porygon was believed to have caused seizures in some 700 children (although the number actually affected was later thought to be far fewer).^[1]

Contents 1 Mythology, legend and tradition 1.1 Viewing a deity 1.2 The eye that can kill 1.3 Greek mythology 1.4 The harp of Daghda 1.5 Indigenous Australian traditions 1.6 Other examples 2 Urban legends 2.1 The Nigerian phone call 2.2 The Hungarian Suicide Song 3 Modern examples 4 In fiction 4.1 19th century 4.2 Early 20th century 4.3 1950s 4.4 1960s 4.5 1970s 4.6 1980s 4.7 1990s 4.8 2000s 5 See also 6 References

[edit] Mythology, legend and tradition

[edit] Viewing a deity

A Judeo-Christian tradition claims that viewing God's face will result in death (see Exodus 33:20). For example, when Lot's wife defies the orders of an angel and watches God destroy a city, she is turned into a "pillar of salt" (Genesis 19:16-26).

Death caused by seeing the true form of a deity is a common belief in mythologies. In Greek mythology, for example, when Heracles meets his father Zeus, the god appears behind the mask of a ram. Showing his true form would cause the death of his son, even though Heracles is a demigod.

In many religious systems, a deity's nature cannot be understood by the inferior human senses nor by the human mind. To experience what God is, one must commune with God by leaving the ego and the body behind — this is one of the aims of yoga, tantra, and other Gnostic practices.

[edit] The eye that can kill

Another variation of the motif is the eye that brings death, a capability that some gods possess in a number of mythologies. In Hindu mythology, for example, Shiva can use his third eye to emit a beam of some kind of energy that instantly burns the target.

Another dramatic example of the killing eye is found in Celtic mythology. The Fomorian king Balor of the Burning Eye possessed an eyeball that not only had a destructive gaze but was itself dangerous to touch. Balor's eyelid was so heavy and swollen that he could not lift it himself and had to order his bodyguards to lift it using a bone ring. He was defeated by the hero Lugh of the Long Hand, who cast his spear at Balor's eye just as his bodyguards were about to open it. When Lugh's spear exited through the back of Balor's head, every creature struck by a fragment of the deadly eye perished in agony.

The mythical catoblepas also has a deadly gaze that it cannot easily use because its head is unusually heavy and is almost impossible for it to lift. Unlike the basilisk, the catoblepas is traditionally portrayed as a pathetic beast rather than as a malevolent one. Indeed, in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the catoblepas says that because its head is constantly forced downward, it has sometimes gnawed its own forelegs without realizing it.

[edit] Greek mythology

• In Greek mythology, anyone who directly views the Gorgons is turned to stone. When Perseus confronted Medusa, the most famous of the Gorgons, he avoided this fate by viewing her in his reflective shield in order to guide his sword. Athena or Zeus mounted the head of Medusa on her shield to form the Aegis. Roman mosaics are often decorated with Medusa heads as a protective charm.

• In both the Odyssey and the tale of the Argonauts, the sirens used their singing to draw heedless mariners to their doom. As countermeasures, the characters of the stories physically restrained crew members, plugged their ears, or listened to even more beautiful music.

• Narcissus was so paralyzed by the mere sight of his beautiful reflection that he could not look away. As a result, he eventually starved.

• Artemis chastised those she caught peeping at her (such as Actaeon and Siproites) by metamorphosing them.

• The basilisk, dating to classical Greek myth, has a rich tradition. Its characteristics sometimes include a harmful breath and a fatal gaze. It passed into Medieval legend under the Latin-derived name of cockatrice.

[edit] The harp of Daghda

In Celtic mythology, the gods known as the Tuatha Dé Danann brought five magical items from the North to Ireland to use against the Fomorians. The fifth item is the harp of Daghda, which Lugh later used to battle the Fomorians.

The harp can play three songs: One of sorrow, one of joy, and one of peace. When heard, the song of sorrow inflicts pain, the song of joy causes laughter, and the song of peace brings calmness. The duration that the song is played changes the effect. If the song of peace is played too long, for example, the listener falls asleep, which can ultimately lead to eternal sleep, the equivalent of death.

It is also said that the three songs must not all be played at once, because this will result in the ultimate song and will cause the world to cease to exist.

[edit] Indigenous Australian traditions

• Among Indigenous Australians (Aborigines), ceremonies that are part of men's business should not be seen by women, and vice versa. Harm is said to come upon those people who accidentally witness what they are not traditionally permitted to see.

• There is a strong and continuing belief among urban Aboriginal people that a person can have the evil eye put upon them, particularly by pointing the bone and wishing them dead, or that they can be whispered to death.

[edit] Other examples

• It is said that if a mandrake plant is pulled from the ground, it emits a shriek so horrible that anyone within earshot is deafened, driven mad, or even killed. Hence, acquiring a mandrake requires a number of precautions. In Niccolò Machiavelli's play La Mandragola (1518), a dog is used to pull up the mandrake so that it will die from the scream instead of those procuring the plant.

• One version of the legend of the Rhine siren Lorelei says that the man who sees her loses sight of reason, while the man who listens to her is condemned to wander with her forever.

• According to legend, reading the whole of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights brings madness.

• Those who see the Galician procession of the dead, the Santa Compaña, must join it.

• It was a widespread belief in Spain, Portugal and Latin America that some people had an "evil eye" (mau-olhado, mal ojo, olho gordo) that could cause a lot of trouble regardless of the subject's intentions (the effect was unintentional and the possessor of the evil eye could be unaware of it):
  • Livestock would die off or cease producing milk,
  • Beautiful children would die or suffer disfiguring diseases,
  • Porcelain china would fall down and break,
  • Pregnant women would suffer miscarriage,
  • Handsome men would die or become impotent,
  • Pets would get rabies, be killed by wild animals or attack their owners,
  • Houses would catch fire,
  • Paintings would peel off or fade away,
  • Milk would turn sour,
  • Employees would leave or become lazy,
  • Betrothals would be broken,
  • Furniture would be involved in domestic accidents hurting people,
  • Clothes would wear off or be attacked by moths.

Because no one could be sure whether his eying of someone else's properties or family was safe from evil eye it was commonplace to add the phrase Benza-o/a Deus ("God bless it/him/her") after any remark about anything in someone else's possession or anyone from another family. People who refused or neglected to say this were often shunned as potential bearers of the evil eye. As of 2007, in Brazil, one can still find newspaper ads of psychics claiming to identify and divert the effects of evil eye.

• In various Balkanic mythologies, seeing a faerie without performing preventive rituals, or even worse being spotted by one, breaks a faerie taboo, and consequently the person may receive illnesses ranging from foot or leg-related problems to epilepsy or madness. These conditions can be cured by going back to the same place at the same time of day with a person who is on good terms with faeries (for example, a shaman initiated by faeries) or with someone who is able to cure such illnesses.

• In the Lady Godiva legend, Peeping Tom is the character who defied a proclamation and watched the naked Godiva riding through the streets of Coventry. As punishment, he was blinded; though in other versions of the story, he was struck by lightning.

[edit] Urban legends

[edit] The Nigerian phone call

In a modern twist of the motif, a widespread urban legend from mid-2004 in Lagos, Nigeria claimed that answering phone calls made from a certain number would result in instant death.^[2]

[edit] The Hungarian Suicide Song

According to urban legend the song Gloomy Sunday written by Rezső Seress in 1933 inspired hundreds of suicides. Publicity accompanying its North American release described it as the "Hungarian Suicide Song", probably as a marketing ploy. The German/Hungarian movie Gloomy Sunday - Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod (1999), based on the novel by Nick Barkow, suggests that the song contains a hidden message which, once heard clearly, will resolve the listener to suicide. In the film the song does not initially have words, and a large number of suicides are inspired by the tune alone.

[edit] Modern examples

• Some recently developed nonlethal weapons use sounds to induce paralysis or extreme discomfort.

[edit] In fiction

[edit] 19th century

• In Stendhal's 1817 Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio, the eponymous Stendhal syndrome is outlined.
• 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] Early 20th century

• 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 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 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 the 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 Michael Crichton's 1968 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.

[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.
• 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" (Nature, 1999), 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.
• 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.^[3]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.)
• The darkly humorous Flash animation "Banana Phone" is centered around the motif of harmful sensation, based on one of Raffi Cavoukian's songs.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• Various internet chain-messages say that whoever reads the message will have either them or a loved one die of theirs die, unless they spread the word.

[edit] See also

• Fnord
• Computer prank
• Stendhal syndrome
• Fatal hilarity

[edit] References

1. ^ Urban Legends References Page: Television Fits to Be Tied. Snopes.com. Retrieved on December 18, 2005.
2. ^ "Panic at Nigerian 'killer calls'", BBC News, July 19, 2004. Retrieved on 2006-05-03. 
3. ^ Environmental Protection Agency, The Vault. Retrieved on 2006-05-03.