Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (24 page)

Is a rising awareness of just how easy it is for good people to go bad increasing our interest in heroes who are battling their own bestial natures in a very visible way? Vampires, it seems, display this beautifully. Certainly Edward Cullen in the
Twilight
saga fits this mold by choosing to feed only on the blood of animals and to befriend, rather than eat, Bella, the girl he finds so fascinating. Bill in
True Blood
behaves similarly in the first episodes of the series by spilling his own blood to save the life of Sookie. Angel, the love interest in the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
television series, is in the same position, passionately kissing a woman whose protective crucifix burns his flesh. Even vampires who are sort of confusing to place as decidedly good or bad, like Louis in
Interview with the Vampire,
who refuses to take human life and chooses to feed on the blood of sewer rats for the first half of the story, endure this struggle. Moreover, many of these vampires
experience pivotal moments where they are forced to duel with the monsters they truly are. To save Bella after she is attacked by another vampire, Edward must drink her blood and siphon away just enough of the evil vampire’s essence to keep her from being corrupted but not drink so much that she dies. Similarly, Louis fights his desire to feed on the servants of his plantation, trying—and failing—to protect human lives from his own nature.

An explanation of why vampires are being viewed more positively over time could also be similar to the reason why snakes turn up in mythology as both monsters and godlike creatures of creation and fertility. As discussed with dragons, in spite of their long history of killing people, snakes have sometimes been viewed as something akin to divine because they seemingly survive off of no food and appear to stay perpetually young by shedding their skins. It is possible that the element of immortality that has woven its way into the modern vampire myth is causing perceptions of vampires to function in a similar way. They evolved from a long history of fear of contagious disease but have now attained a form in the human imagination that possesses a trait many today covet. Just as snakes historically have been both feared as monsters and worshipped as symbols of fertility, the vampires’ role in society is changing as fear of them turns to enthrallment with their status as undying creatures. Could a key reason why vampires are now viewed as sexually attractive heroes be that they are presented as lovers who know no pain and who will be eternally young? It seems plausible, but there might be another element at work.

Vampires, as they have been known for so long, might now be entering their twilight years as the result of increasing scientific awareness. People knew next to nothing about communicable diseases when vampires first emerged as monsters, but this is no longer the case. When swine flu broke out, epidemiologists were quick to spot where the disease was appearing, how it was spreading, and, most important, how to contain it. Avian flu is an even better example. Researchers around the world are aware that the virus can, under rare circumstances, leap from birds to people and that some
strains of avian flu inflict high mortality. This is why the disease is getting so much attention and why monitoring stations have been set up worldwide to keep track of how the disease is behaving (and evolving) in other animals.
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So fear of contagious disease is as present as ever, just as it was with the rise of vampires, but there is now a major difference: The vast majority of the population understands where the true monster resides.

Thrillers like
The Andromeda Strain, Outbreak, The Hot Zone,
and
Contagion
all give audiences a white-knuckle ride through the panic that could realistically strike if a horrific disease were to emerge. There is no question that the monster in these films is the disease, but this fact raises an intriguing question. Are these disease monsters merely a new form that the fears responsible for the rise of vampires are starting to take as scientific understanding spreads?

In
Interview with the Vampire,
the ancient vampire Armand comments, “The world changes, we do not. Therein lies the irony that finally kills us.” The point is that a vampire’s inability to cope with the ever-changing human world eventually leads to the vampire’s destruction. However, when taken in the context of vampires and their life span in society as monsters, the statement could not be more true. The world is changing, and vampires as they have been known for so long may soon no longer find a place in it. Their only choice seems to be to evolve into heroes that feed on animal blood, like the Cullens in
Twilight,
or on artificial blood, like Bill in
True Blood.
To do otherwise may be to face extinction.

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 The Latin word
sanguisuga
literally means “blood” (
sanguis
) “sucker” (
suga
). It is understandable that the original translation used the word “leech” in place of “bloodsucker” since “bloodsucker” is not really a word typically thrown around in scholarly English… unless, of course, you happen to be writing a book about monsters.

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 Driving a stake through a corpse’s chest counts as meddling at the highest level.

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 “Buy our life insurance and we promise that our greed will ensure you are most certainly dead before we pay.” Not exactly an advertisement that any company is likely to use today, but let’s face it, they saved Hays’s life.

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 In some tales, these berserking warriors are said to have transformed into bears to maul their enemies. Whether the drugs they were taking led the warriors to view themselves as werebears or whether the sight of them charging in a bestial fury covered in animal furs led their foes to believe they had become animals is difficult to determine. Either way, it seems the toad was involved.

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 From a survival perspective, a bacterium or virus is in serious trouble if it finds itself in a small and isolated population. The disease will either kill off everyone and then die too when no hosts are left to infect or, under sunnier circumstances, everyone in the population will catch the disease, survive, and develop resistance to the disease so they never catch it again, a situation that also often destroys the disease. Pathogens depend upon having large numbers of people available to move through. This is why international travel is as much a boon to the diseases of the world as it is to economic development.

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 Romania is of course home to Transylvania and thus the epicenter of all things vampiric. At least, that is what the tourism industry would have you believe. Historically, though, there is nothing that connects Romania any more tightly to the origins of vampires than England, Belgium, or Hungary. It just happens to be the place that Bram Stoker chose as Dracula’s homeland.

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 Sounds almost like something out of a horror movie. Oh wait…

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 In case you are curious, the sources that document this do not specify whether this was with one partner or many.

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 Rabies is not the only condition that could have led the soldier to behave in this way. There are numerous drugs that can make people act like beasts and then fall ill. There is also a condition known as “excited delirium” that is starting to be recognized by medical communities. Sufferers strip out of their clothes, snarl and grunt like animals, lose control of their actions, become resistant to pain, and struggle fiercely when confronted. What causes the disorder is, to date, unknown but, like drug overdoses, it does not appear to be transmitted by a bite.

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 Yes, the antagonistic relationship between the werewolf Jacob and the vampire Edward in
Twilight
has a potentially scientific basis surrounding the scavenging behaviors of wolves in graveyards.

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 How do booby researchers test this stuff? They kidnap females when the males aren’t looking and use crayons to color their feet gray. Seriously, folks, this is cutting-edge science in action.

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 One of the coolest monitoring systems is in zoos in the United States. Because zoos have a wide variety of animals that are very closely watched by veterinarians, and because these animals have good access to wild birds (think pigeons and ducks), if a virus evolves that is capable of jumping from birds to other animals, it is likely to be spotted first in a zoo, where experts are now watching.

8

The Created—The Golem, Frankenstein, HAL 9000, Terminator

“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

—HAL 9000,
2001: A Space Odyssey

The idea of life being created by the hand of humanity is hardly new. The mythological Greek inventor Daedalus was famous for constructing wings that allowed him to fly out of the labyrinth he designed for the imprisonment of the Minotaur, but these wings were not his only invention. Classical writers described other wonders he built, including statues with lifelike qualities. The only evidence of these inventions having existed comes in the form of notes made by Plato in
Meno
: “The images of Daedalus… if they are not fastened up they play truant and run away; but, if fastened, they stay where they are.” Daedalus, it seems, had found a way to bring his sculptures to life, and if they were not chained to a wall, they ran off.

Yet Daedalus’s mechanical creations did not threaten anyone.
They were curious and odd but never found harming humans, and it is this point that defines them as wonders rather than monsters.
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While many creatures “created” by the hands of gods turned out to function as monsters—Medusa, Scylla, and Chimera, for instance—there are no classical texts suggesting people ever created such things.

By the 1500s, this was no longer the case. Jewish mythology tells of a rabbi who fashioned a human-shaped structure out of clay and then made prayers that allowed it, through divine intervention, to function as a living creature. The story reportedly existed as oral tradition for centuries, but in 1909 a manuscript was found that was claimed to have been written by the Golem-creating rabbi’s son-in-law.
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This document detailed how the creature, which came to be known as the Golem of Prague, was created: “I continued circling the glowing figure in the mud, and soon lost awareness of the number of times I had encircled it. The outline of the Golem was glowing more and more intensely and the odor of scorched earth reached my nostrils… no sooner had we completed our slow, concentrated recitation of the verse in Genesis, when the Golem opened his eyes.”

The role of the Golem is well outlined in notes. The rabbi ordered it to protect the Jews of Prague from the constant persecution they were enduring from Christians, and it fills this role perfectly. The tales that are told in this work (including one harrowing story where the Golem jumps aboard a rushing wagon and wrestles with a man who is about to frame a Jew for murder) represent the creature as nearly invulnerable, incredibly strong, and always fighting to bring criminals to justice.

The Golem is undeniably alien in form, but classifying it as a monster is difficult because its behaviors are not outwardly harmful toward
humanity. It does attack people, but we can all agree these people are villains. Does an aberration that regularly causes harm to evil humans count as a monster? Or does it count as something else? Technically, the mutants of the
X-Men
comic books and movies are also aberrations who frequently harm villainous humans. Are they monsters? In the comic universe within which they exist, they are not. Really, the Golem is more of a historic clay superhero than a monster.

From a believability standpoint, it is hard to see how anyone could think that a pile of wet clay can become animated by being shaped into human form and exposed to prayer. There are places in the world where clay can take on lifelike qualities, bubbling thermal pools being one of them, but the concept seems too far-fetched. The stories of the Golem do not have the creature sneaking about in places where people could have mistaken some natural event for a creature of this sort. The Golem’s activities always took place in towns or inside homes, and were easily seen during the day. So it could not have been a case of mistaken identity. What is possible is that there was a vigilante at large in Prague at the time this tale was recorded, something akin to a Jewish
Dark Knight,
and that the Golem mythology was invented as a form of cover story much as the masked Batman was invented as a cover for Bruce Wayne. For all we know, the rabbi who created the Golem, or his son-in-law who supposedly recorded the tale, could well have been the vigilante himself.

The story of the Golem of Prague ultimately concludes with anti-Semitic behavior coming to an end. The rabbi, seeing that all is finally well, declares, “I feel the golem must be destroyed. His mission is accomplished. If we keep him longer than necessary, we may fall into the danger of misusing sacred property.” And with this sentiment, the creature is done away with in prayer.

If
The Golem of Prague
is something of a cautionary tale about creating artificial life only when the need is great and God consents, the
1818 publication of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
was the cautionary nightmare. While a lump of human-shaped clay may have achieved only certain levels of horror, a creature built from scavenged body parts was another matter entirely.

Shelley’s writing is infused with dread and awe: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”