Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (20 page)

A reverse condition, which is nowhere near as hazardous but often far more frightening, is sleep atonia, or sleep paralysis. In this situation, the safety signal works too well. When the person wakes, his brain ends its dream state and he becomes aware of reality, but his muscles continue to obey the “don’t move” command that they were sent when REM sleep began. As a result, the waking person cannot move. He is literally frozen in place.

Sleep atonia sounds like the sort of thing that would be rare, but the medical literature indicates the opposite. According to the American Sleep Disorder Association’s
Diagnostic and Coding Manual,
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between 40 and 50 percent of the human population experiences sleep atonia at some point. More important, the manual explains that the condition is frequently associated with hallucinations.

As the mind shifts between the dream state and the waking state, it is common for it to notice things that aren’t actually there. Sometimes noises are heard that belong to a dream rather than reality; sometimes the presence of other people, who existed in the dream, are sensed by the waking dreamer. These are hallucinations, and they are entirely normal and benign for most people, but when combined with sleep atonia, they can become truly awful.

One particularly frequent hallucination that seems to run hand in hand with sleep atonia is believing a creature of some sort is present in the room with the waking dreamer. Commonly, this entity is described as seated on the waking dreamer’s chest, holding them in place or standing over them. In the Western world, this combination of hallucinations and sleep atonia takes place often enough for it to have a name: Old Hag Syndrome.

The name stems from an area in northeastern Newfoundland where a mix of hallucinations and sleep atonia appears to be remarkably
prevalent, and people often refer to the hag or
ag
coming to terrorize them. According to the medical sociologist Robert Ness at Augusta State University in Georgia who reported on the condition in a Newfoundland community during the 1970s, people in the region commonly believed that the traumatizing sleep experiences were the result of being cursed by an old hag who came to them during the night to sit on their chest.

Observations of this condition are not unique to the English-speaking world. The Chinese tell tales of the
gui ya shen,
which literally means “phantom that presses on the body”; the islanders of St. Lucia in the Caribbean tell of the
kokma,
which is the spirit of a dead baby that haunts an area and attacks people in their beds by jumping on their chests and clutching at their throats; and the people of Thailand speak of the
Phi um,
an enveloping ghost that holds people in their beds as they wake up. When these legends are considered in combination with Artemidorus’s description of Ephialtes jumping on chests, it seems that fear of sleep atonia has been present in communities around the world for centuries and long taken the form of something spectral dwelling half in the waking world and half in a world of dreams.

So it would seem that at some point around AD 200, the terror presented by sleep atonia started to merge with the fear of sexual dreams induced by Christianity. The two fears became one and ultimately developed into the incubus presented in
The Nightmare.
And the fear has not gone away.

Modern films like James Watkins’s
The Woman in Black
(which is an equally terrifying stage play) and Oren Peli’s
Paranormal Activity
and television series like
The X-Files
gain much of their fear factor from the concept of creatures lurking in the realm between the seen and the unseen. Even though these creatures can be playful, like the succubus that comes to the heroes as they are sleeping in Ivan Reitman’s
comedy
Ghostbusters,
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more often than not they are truly terrifying, like the demons in Tobe Hooper’s thriller
Poltergeist,
which upon emerging from the family’s television caused the child Carol Anne to utter the immortal words “They’re here.”

An intriguing element of many stories about ghosts and demons is that they usually take place in hot spots for spectral activity. This is certainly the case in
Ghostbusters,
where Egon Spengler says, “It’s not the girl, Peter, it’s the building,” when he defends the lead character’s love interest, Dana Barrett, who is possessed not because she is inherently evil but because the building she lives in was built by a demon-worshipping lunatic. This is equally true of Mary Lambert’s version of Stephen King’s novel
Pet Sematary,
where there is much talk of “sour” land;
Poltergeist
; Stanley Kubrick’s presentation of King’s
The Shining
; and countless other phantasmal thrillers. Haunted places have a long history, and this leads to the natural question of whether there are certain environmental conditions, which could be present in a specific location, that can induce a combination of sleep atonia and hallucinations. A search through the dream disorder literature indicates there definitely are conditions, like jet lag, alcohol abuse, depression, and chronic anxiety, that can increase a person’s chances of having a sleep atonia episode. However, none of these can reasonably be tethered to a location. So it would seem that there must be something else that makes locations haunted.

While most people suffer sleep atonia only once during their lives, a very small percentage of the population suffers regularly from the dreaded experience. Most important, this chronic version of the disorder is genetic; meaning parents who have it can pass it along to
their children. This inherited version of sleep atonia may not seem especially relevant today, when children break away from their parents as young adults and tend to live in distant locations, but historically it was common for houses to pass from one family member to another over the generations. For this reason, it is possible that the concept of the haunted house emerged as a result of a family with the genes for chronic sleep atonia moving in and passing the home along to other family members who also carried the genes for chronic sleep atonia. Ironically, if this were true, it was not houses that were cursed but the families dwelling in them who were cursed with bad genes.

All hauntings and modern ghost stories aside, there are few recent monsters that are more true to the demonic history of mixing fears of uncontrolled sleep behaviors and sexual activity than Freddy Krueger from the 1984 film
Nightmare on Elm Street.

In Wes Craven’s film, a group of sexually inquisitive teenagers begin experiencing terrible dreams. They find themselves in a boiler room being chased by a disfigured man whose right hand is covered in a glove with wicked blades attached to every finger. Dreams and reality merge as the teenagers begin to find five-fingered blade marks in their clothes and sheets when they wake up, hinting that they could die from their dreams. This ultimately happens when one girl, Tina, is slashed to death in the night after sleeping with her young boyfriend.

Tina’s murder, while entirely spectral in nature, carries sexual overtones. Later in the film, when Krueger’s bladed glove appears in the bathtub between another teenage girl’s legs, it is hard to not think of some sort of deadly phallus. The horrifying combination of the vulnerability of sleep and sexual violation links Krueger to the fears of the incubus.

Yet the film backs away from presenting Freddy Krueger as anything more than a deformed killer. Even after being disfigured by fire, he is still recognizable as having once been human. This is likely the result of the film’s creators not wanting to stray too far from reality. If Krueger had been an utterly inhuman demon, he would have been less real, less believable, and, in the end, less scary.

And if Krueger is an evolved form of the incubus, so too are the many aliens that “abduct” humans. Charles Stewart convincingly argues that people who claim to have been abducted and sexually assaulted by aliens during their sleep are really just doing their best to rationalize experiences of sleep atonia, hallucinations, and sexual dreams. This makes perfect sense, particularly if people suffering from these sleep disorders no longer find demons believable but do consider the existence of extraterrestrials a possibility. The monster is being created by the same core fear, but believability is forcing the form of the monster to change.

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 The horse in the background is thought to be a visual pun on the word “nightmare” and was not part of the original chalk sketch of the work.

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 This is where the concept of wizards having familiars comes from and why Harry Potter has an owl, Hermione a cat, Ron a rat, and Neville a toad.

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 This is actually remarkably similar to behavior seen in numerous primates where there is a dramatic surge in sexual activity shortly after securing a major food source.

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 A good thing for people whose partners have particularly vivid imaginations.

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 Suffer from insomnia? Try reading the ASDA
Diagnostic and Coding Manual
; it’ll knock you out faster than Ambien.

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 The title of this film is a terrible misnomer. The demon Zuul is the creature that possesses the body of Dana Barrett; the doglike demon Vinz Clortho takes over the body of Dana’s neighbor Lewis Tully; and Gozer is the shape-shifting demon that initially appears as a red-eyed human and later transforms into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that the heroes do battle with during the climax of the film. While it probably would have driven away audience members by the thousands,
Demonbusters
would have been a more accurate title.

7

Cursed by a Bite—Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves

“You’re intoxicated by my very presence.”

—Edward Cullen,
Twilight

Slinking through the shadows of night, they come to feed on the innocent. Seemingly human in appearance, the threat that they pose becomes apparent only as needle-sharp fangs pierce the throat of their intended victim and blood is sucked away. When every last drop of this precious life essence is consumed, prey becomes predator, seeking out blood to fuel its own newly acquired supernatural hunger. Vampires are among the world’s most celebrated and popular monsters, and they have an extremely complex history and biology surrounding them, supported by a long line of books and movies featuring them as both villains and heroes. Yet working out exactly which fears drove the rise of vampires is a tricky question to answer because they are such multifaceted monsters with no clear point of origin.

On the face of it, they are predators like lions and play upon the
terror of being killed by a nocturnal hunter. With such a basic fear, one would expect vampires to be present during ancient times when fears of beasts lurking in the night were at their height, yet vampires as we know them today arrived on the scene only in the eighteenth century. Even so, earlier reports of creatures resembling these monsters do exist.

In the
Odyssey,
Odysseus is forced to travel to the land of the dead and confront the ghosts of people he once knew in order to gain information to aid him on his quest. The witch Circe advises that he must allow the ghosts to feed on blood freshly spilled from the body of an animal to gain their trust and knowledge. At first he is highly protective of the pool of blood that he spills on the ground, allowing only the ghost of the wise man, Teiresias, to feed and answer his questions. But then the ghost of Odysseus’s mother appears and fails to recognize him as her own son. Odysseus turns to Teiresias for answers: “Tell me and tell me true, I see my poor mother’s ghost close by us; she is sitting by the blood without saying a word, and though I am her own son she does not remember me and speak to me; tell me, Sir, how I can make her know me.” Teiresias replies, “Any ghost that you let taste of the blood will talk with you like a reasonable being, but if you do not let them have any blood they will go away again.” Odysseus then allows the ghost of his mother to feed on the blood, and her memories of him come flooding back.

For Homer, blood is clearly a link between the dead and the living, even if it has to be spilled from an animal’s body onto the ground to have this effect. However, while the spirits in the
Odyssey
are a tantalizing ancestor to the modern vampire, they are still very different, and it is not until nearly two thousand years after Homer, during the late 1100s, that creatures more like the vampires of modern fiction appear in Europe. The person who documents these monsters is William of Newburgh, an English historian who is widely thought to have had a network of trustworthy informants who helped him report on historic events that took place between the days of William the Conqueror in 1066 and those of Richard the Lionheart in 1198. In
his
Historia rerum Anglicarum,
amid information about royalty and political events, he tells the tale of an evil man who dies from a fall shortly after discovering his wife is having an affair:

A Christian burial, indeed, he received, though unworthy of it; but it did not much benefit him: for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster. But those precautions were of no avail; for the atmosphere, poisoned by the vagaries of this foul carcass, filled every house with disease and death by its pestiferous breath.

Death comes to many people after the evil man’s burial, and desperate to bring the monster’s curse to an end, two brothers take action:

Two young men, who had lost their father by this plague, mutually encouraging one another, said, “This monster has already destroyed our father, and will speedily destroy us also, unless we take steps to prevent it. Let us, therefore, do some bold action which will at once ensure our own safety and revenge our father’s death. There is no one to hinder us; for in the priest’s house a feast is in progress, and the whole town is as silent as if deserted. Let us dig up this baneful pest, and burn it with fire.” Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure
turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames, it was announced to the guests what was going on, who, running thither, enabled themselves to testify henceforth to the circumstances. When that infernal hell-hound had thus been destroyed, the pestilence which was rife among the people ceased, as if the air, which had been corrupted by the contagious motions of the dreadful corpse, were already purified by the fire which had consumed it.