Story Trope: Animals' Sixth Sense
What It Is & How Writers Can Subvert It
Several years ago, I spent three straight days writing a 40,000-word first draft of a horror novel. (For context to non-writers, the average novel is around 80,000 words.) Upon going back to edit and fill in all the details I’d skimmed before, I was dismayed to see that the romance subplot read like truly horrible fanfiction, but thinking back to it now, I realize there were far bigger problems than that. I was still a newbie horror fan at the time and had developed the plot around an idea—an image, really—that scared me once while trying to fall asleep. But that image was something my brain plucked from a movie trailer that had terrified me in middle school. Though we’re all inspired by the stories we’ve absorbed throughout our lives, everything I wrote in that draft was pulled directly from things I’d seen or read before, and having little context for how good scary stories are crafted, it was riddled with well-worn tropes.
In a sense, every story is just a collection of tropes: the protagonist faces some challenge and, through various plot points, must change enough to either succeed heroically or fail disastrously. But if a trope is utilized the same way every time, it becomes cliché. Clichés signal laziness on the writer’s part, indicating to the audience that they either don’t know enough about the genre to understand its tropes or aren’t creative enough to approach them in unique ways. Subversion is key to keeping stories fresh and consumers engaged.
As a story lover who cares deeply about improving how animals are represented in fiction, I’ve noticed that the way writers use tropes involving animals is nearly always cliché. I hope that by analyzing these tropes, such as the one I’ll be discussing today, writers can better understand why they work (or don’t) and readers can learn how stories reinforce subconscious biases.
SPOILERS AHEAD: The Conjuring (2013), The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft, It Will Only Hurt for a Moment by Delilah S. Dawson, Nosferatu (2024), The Sixth Sense (1999), The Watchers (2024)
What is the “Sixth Sense” Trope?
If you’ve ever seen a dog barking at an empty doorway in a movie or read about a cat who runs whenever the protagonist’s new partner comes over, then you’re familiar with this trope.
To have a sixth sense is to have some kind of preternatural perception of the world. In the film The Sixth Sense, the child protagonist can see ghosts, and the same often goes for animals. For some reason, they have a heightened awareness of supernatural goings-on or can tell when a bad guy’s a bad guy. This is primarily used to signify danger, and as such often dovetails with the Sacrificial Animal trope, since the villain must dispatch the animals before the heroes become aware of what’s going on.
Case Study: The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft
This novella was published nearly 100 years ago, yet the trope remains virtually unchanged. The story unfolds in typical Lovecraftian fashion: A strange child, Wilbur Whateley, is born on the outskirts of the small town of Dunwich, Massachusetts. He grows unnaturally fast—looks to be ten years old at only one-and-a-half, fifteen at four. Secluded in the family’s farmhouse is a mysterious creature. After his grandfather dies and his mother disappears, Wilbur travels to Miskatonic University to consult the Necronomicon. Within its pages, he learns of the Old One: Yog-Sothoth. He and his twin brother, who we learn is the monster in the farmhouse, are Yog-Sothoth’s children, born to a human mother. The monster eventually escapes and wreaks havoc. Yet before ever laying eyes on the creature, dogs attack Wilbur and local whippoorwills screech hysterically.
I wanted to discuss this story specifically because there are some layers in Lovecraft’s use of the trope that help explain its complexities and, therefore, how to utilize it in more original ways.
Examples
“The aversion displayed towards [Wilbur] by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety.”
“[P]eople paid more attention to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills, which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse.”
“[Wilbur] had never seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds, where, indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at its stout chain.”
Sixth Sense = Smell
It’s only when Wilbur travels to Miskatonic in search of the Necronomicon that we get an explanation for the animals’ strange behavior: “By their smell can men sometimes know they’re near.” It seems simple, but this is never explained in most stories. Rather than picking up on electromagnetic energy like a sentient EMF meter, we now know that monsters—at least in Lovecraft’s universe—emit a noxious odor that animals’ more sensitive noses can pick up better than ours. Wilbur carries this foul smell on him, pungent enough to draw the attention of humans and other animals.
Smell —> Terror
After being briefly impressed by this explanation, I still wasn’t totally satisfied. Other animals may have a keener sense of smell than humans, but humans don’t immediately attack Wilbur once they get a whiff of him. So, using smell signals speciesism: it’s only humans, with our oh-so-rational minds, who can discern that the monster emitting this pungent odor, while evil, can be defeated through strategy rather than simple assault.
Sunaura Taylor writes on the fallacy of human rationality in Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation:
“We humans are the species with language, with rationality, with complex emotions, with two legs and opposable thumbs. Animals lack these traits and abilities and therefore exist outside of our moral responsibility, which means we can dominate and use them….
“Presumed to be deficient in human markers of intelligence, animals are understood, to put it bluntly, as stupid. Their lack of various capabilities is often cited as proof of our superiority as human beings and as justification for our continued use of them for our own benefit.”
Taylor notes how the assumption of “rationality,” much like two legs and opposable thumbs, is an inherently ableist argument. After all, there are many humans without two legs or thumbs, or whose legs and thumbs function differently, as well as humans with more or less of an ability to think “rationally.” It wasn’t too long ago that anyone aside from white men was considered incapable of “rational thought”—and if you were queer, disabled, or neurodivergent, then forget about it! Contrasting animals’ lack of human intelligence or ability as evidence of their inherent inferiority not only dehumanizes actual human beings but overlooks the myriad capabilities of nonhuman animals.
Using Lovecraft as an example of the Animals’ Sixth Sense trope is fitting in this way, too. He may have created his own horror subgenre, but he was also a bigot who abhorred people who didn’t look like him—and it shows in his prose. You don’t have to read between the lines to see the disdain dripping off each word when he writes of Black or Native peoples, and in a sense, he considers them even lower than animals. They are abominations of the human race, whereas animals are so insipient that they don’t even merit his disgust. To quote Taylor again,
“Animals, in their inferior bestial state, can be used by us without moral concern, and those humans who have been associated with animals (people of color, women, queer people, poor people, and disabled people, among others) are also seen as less sophisticated, as having less value, and sometimes even as being less or non-human.”
I doubt most authors are thinking about this when they follow in Lovecraft’s footsteps and write of animals losing control of basic survival instincts in the presence of a monster, but prejudice lurks in the subtext.
Terror —> Comprehension
Though animals go berserk in the monster’s presence, there could be a potential positive message here.
In my experience, odors I dislike are the ones that most entice dogs. (To spare us all, I won’t name those smells here.) So, even without “rationality,” these dogs and birds not only both recognize this stench as repulsive but understand it’s dangerous. Humans, on the other hand, do not. The human characters are disgusted by it but can’t initially comprehend that the smell is associated with something evil. This implies some level of understanding on the animals’ part, that they are able to associate the odor with danger without ever reading the Necronomicon or seeing the monster themselves.
That’s a reading of this trope I’d never considered until contemplating it more deeply here. I’d love to see more writers make this connection.
Unfortunately, the animals can’t utilize their Sixth Sense to defeat the monster. It’s the humans who know not to immediately attack; they step back and plan. It’s only with the knowledge gained from the Necronomicon that they succeed.
How to Avoid Clichés
Every story is unique, so there’s no one way to subvert this trope, but here are a few ideas.
Remove Animals from the Story — The Conjuring
When the Perron family moves into a new home, their dog Sadie digs her heels in outside the front door, refusing to enter. She’s later heard barking at seemingly nothing, and before the family even realizes they’ve got an evil spirit in their midst, Sadie’s been killed. The ghost, Bathsheba, seeks to possess mothers and kill their children. It’s dark stuff, but guess what? There’s nothing in her backstory about dogs! Sweet Sadie could’ve been removed from the story entirely and the plot wouldn’t have been impeded whatsoever. That’s just lazy writing, relying on an overused trope instead of creating something original.
Just because the audience knows this is a horror movie going in, you still have to earn your scares. And The Conjuring has some incredible moments! The hide-and-clap jump scare, Bathsheba on top of the wardrobe when you’re expecting her to be inside it—that’s gold. If the filmmakers had cut Sadie out of the story altogether, the movie would’ve been even more effective.
If you’re worried your story isn’t scary enough and are thinking about giving the protagonist a dog to up the tension, then you need to go back and brainstorm. What will scare your main characters, specifically? Even better, why would the villain waste their energy killing an animal who can’t hurt them? You have to know your characters inside and out. Use that knowledge to tailor the scares to the inner journey your protagonist is undergoing throughout the plot. And in the meantime, leave the dog out of the script.
Make Animals the Heroes — The Watchers
A group of four people find themselves trapped in a cabin in the woods while monsters sit outside the wall-to-wall window each night to watch them. This movie offers two variations of the trope.
1. Our protagonist, Mina, had been transporting a golden conure, Darwin, through the Irish countryside when she found herself lost in this cursed forest. As the group of survivors makes their escape to a river just beyond the woods, Mina finally frees Darwin from his cage, and he inexplicably flies in the exact direction they need to go to flee the forest, rather than flying off in some other direction or roosting in a tree. Not only that but after their escape, he sits patiently on the boat with them as they sail down the river.
Since Mina worked at a pet store and was taking Darwin to a zoo, it seems safe to assume that Darwin lived most of his life in a small cage. Even if he were tapping into his migratory bird brain, it stretches the limits of believability to think he would instinctively know how to get out of the forest.
2. Each day at sunset, a flock of crows—yes, a murder—takes the same path out of the forest before the Watchers emerge from the earth for their nocturnal entertainment. Why do the crows keep coming back if this forest is uninhabitable at night? Why do they always fly the same way? Why is it so easy for them to leave when the humans get twisted and turned around as if this were The Blair Witch Project? We never know.
Additionally, in the very last scene, Darwin flits over to a window in Mina’s apartment and squawks at a Watcher standing outside. Is that just fortuitous timing for Darwin’s daily people-watching, or did he sense the monster out there?
Though Darwin is a hero for leading the survivors back to civilization, the story could just as easily move along without him. (A common theme among these stories.) It’d be far more interesting to learn more about the crows and other woodland animals, and how they’ve adapted to live in the forest.
If nothing else, fictional animals must act believably. If you want to use animals in your story, study them, understand their behavior and how they react to stressors and conflict. Remember that, just like your human characters, animals act and react to the plot based on past experiences. So, what in your fictional animals’ backstory would allow them to become the heroes your protagonists need?
Offer an Explanation — It Will Only Hurt for a Moment
If anybody saw my face while listening to this audiobook, they easily would’ve spotted when this trope appeared. (Visible eye-rolling, a firm scowl, clenched fists.) But today I’ll only be discussing one of the plotholes.
During a six-week artist retreat at a secluded mansion, the artists all begin acting strangely. The protagonist has vivid dreams of a woman who died there, a pianist plays an uncanny song over and over, a caligrapher repeatedly writes the same words as if she were in The Shining. The protagonist stops by the rabbit hutch (Angora rabbits—does the author know how bunnies are ripped naked for their fur?) and one of the bunnies launches themself at her.
You’re telling me a little bunny rabbit’s first instinct is to attack a predator? Really? A bunny?
(Maybe you’re thinking the author is trying to say that what we do to rabbits is so cruel that the bunny was just trying to defend themself from more abuse. Sure, it’s possible. But she also used the simile “as calm as a cow being led to slaughter,” and not in an ironic way, so I’m not inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. Sorry, I hate to be so negative. I’ll stop now…)
I presume the rabbit’s attack is because the protagonist is occasionally possessed by the aforementioned dead girl, but even if that’s the reason for the attack, she wasn’t possessed at the time. It makes no sense. Later, the rabbits are killed, and then they’re quickly forgotten so the plot can wrap up. There’s never an explanation for why the rabbits acted like that, why they were killed, and who killed them. That’s unacceptable.
Instead of writing cheap scares that’ve been done countless times before, think about why something like this would happen before throwing it into your story. If mysterious things are occurring, there must be a reason. Don’t kill off animals just because it’s creepy. Audiences already hate when animals die in stories, so doing so will only ostracize them. Remember that your audience is an expert in your genre; they’ve read all the books, watched all the movies. When an animal appears in the plot, they’ll already be on guard because they know they’ll likely be offed.
Let Animals Be — Nosferatu
Let’s conclude with a good example. Though the most recent iteration of Nosferatu contains many animals, the film doesn’t fall victim to this trope.
The protagonist, Ellen, has a lovely cat called Greta, of whom Ellen says, “She has no master nor mistress.” Professor Eberhart von Franz (Nosferatu’s version of Van Helsing) is called in to avail Ellen of her vampiric affliction, and we see the inside of his home is filled with beloved cats. After Ellen sacrifices herself to kill the vampire, Franz picks up her cat, who’d been patiently waiting on a chair beside her bed. Apparently the cat was so uninterested in becoming a cliché that she willingly watched her human perish without lifting a paw.
For the same reason it’s important to have queer, BIPOC, disabled, etc. protagonists without making that part of their identities integral to the plot, it’s important to let animals exist in fictional worlds without forcing them to interact with the story. Let sleeping dogs—or cats—lie.
On my mind: The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
My most recent audiobook listen unintentionally fit perfectly with this topic! A hilarious novel set in a small Indian village, the widowed Geeta gets roped into helping her friends kill their abusive husbands. Along the way, she finds four dogs chained to a fence under the blazing sun and frees them from the man who’d been poisoning them. Despite not being much of an animal person, Geeta’s heart warms to one of the dogs, whom she’d brought home with her because he was so sick.
Later, the dog, now named Bandit, takes an instant dislike to a man, which seemed to be the Sixth Sense trope in action. However, Shroff offers a great explanation for Bandit’s uncharacteristic animosity, which I won’t divulge here. As a bonus, one of the many male villains in the story refuses to kill Bandit because he says that’s something only psychopaths do. You never know what books might secretly harbor a pro-animal message!