Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (34 page)

Rosemary had her baby in the same year that Pope Paul VI promulgated the encyclical
Humanae Vita
(“On Human Life”). Given the progressive changes brought to Catholicism by Vatican II, many Catholics, especially in America, expected a liberalization of the church’s traditional strictures against contraception. The pill had been developed, in part, by a devoutly Catholic doctor who believed it to be a “natural” method of birth control that cooperated with female biology to prevent conception. Pope Paul’s advisory committee, made up of laypeople as well as bishops and theologians, had recommended that the church’s stance be altered.
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Paul VI’s encyclical, instead of a new vision of human sexuality, represented a battle cry of the most conservative forces in the Vatican, a declaration of war against the sexual revolution. American Catholics responded by leaving the church in droves. Over the next several decades, an increasingly hard-line stance taken by the American Catholic hierarchy on matters of gender and sexuality created an unlikely alliance between traditionalist Catholics and the evangelical Christian Right.
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Rosemary’s Baby
makes good use of the growing religious crisis. Rosemary is herself a lapsed Catholic, and her pregnancy coincides with the Pope’s visit to New York City. In her doctor’s office, the infamous
Time
magazine cover with the stark question, “Is God Dead?” sits on the waiting room table. The birth of the child is a demonic nativity, complete with visiting foreign satanists who appear as diabolical wise men. Like the birth of Christ in Christian theology, the satanists hail the birth of the “Promised One” as the beginning of a new satanic millennium.

Religious groups reacted with fury to
Rosemary’s Baby
. The Catholic Office of Motion Pictures (formerly the Legion of Decency) attacked the film’s “perverted use … of fundamental Christian beliefs.” If Polanski had not perverted, he had at least inverted Christian symbols in order to create a powerfully subversive aesthetic document.
Rosemary’s Baby
wrapped American sexual and religious anxieties into a single disturbing package.
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In Polanski’s vision, the satanists are urging typical bourgeois American values, indeed “family values” on Rosemary. She is forced to make the child the center of her experience and to allow her once beloved apartment to become a literal and psychological prison. In a prescient satirical move, Polanski created a satanic send-up of religious conservatism’s efforts to control women’s bodies, particularly to control their role in reproduction.
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Most of the cinematic body horror watched by Americans during the culture wars did not have the rapier thrust of Polanski’s satire. As the culture attempted to navigate the transformation of the American family and attendant issues of sexuality and gender, a popular form of folklore became a way to talk intensely about intimate anxieties. This folklore, known generally as “urban legend,” increasingly found its way into America’s horror films, and even its politics. These legends would have real-world consequences, creating monsters that ruined lives and reputations.

A Hook for a Hand

Alone in the house, the teenaged babysitter does her homework and watches TV as the children sleep peacefully upstairs. The phone rings and she picks up the receiver. “Hello?” Silence. A few minutes later, the phone rings a second time and she answers. Again, silence.

She returns to her homework, a feeling of unease beginning to grow. Soon, the phone is ringing every few minutes, and a male voice finally says in a threatening tone, “Have you checked the children?” Terrified, the babysitter calls the police, who arrange to trace the call. The phone rings again, and the threatening male voice urges the sitter again to “check the children.” The police call, warning her to “Get out of there! The call is coming from inside the house.”

This nasty little chiller is undoubtedly familiar to every reader. Folklorists refer to it as the motif of the “Babysitter in Danger” or “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs,” an American urban legend that became popular in the 1970s and the basis for the 1979 hit film
When a Stranger Calls
. It became part of a large fund of rapidly circulating modern folklore that told monster stories of sexual danger and deviance. Frequently, these tales are punishment narratives triggered by behavior that mainstream culture considered immoral, inappropriate, or at least anxiety producing.
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Although oral folklore that combines elements of rumor, legend, and narrative are as old as human society, the “urban legend” is a distinctly modern phenomenon. These materials are not “urban” because they always take place in cities, but because they travel at light speed along communication media typical of modern, industrial society. The telecommunications boom of the ’60s and ’70s and the growth of pop culture industries in the same period ensured that urban legends traveled from coast to coast and became national phenomena. The babysitter in danger became such a common trope in the 1970s that it provided fodder for both John Carpenter’s
Halloween
(1978) and
When a Stranger Calls
(1979).
The latter represents a milestone in the growth of American folklore, the first time that an urban legend had been used as the narrative basis of a major feature film.
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Babysitting had become an American institution by the late 1950s. The emerging teenage demographic supplemented its allowance in the prosperous post-World War II years with all manner of part-time jobs. Baby-boom parents seeking a night away from the kids paid teenage girls to stay in their home, eat all they wanted from the refrigerator, and not have any friends over. By the 1970s, as women entered the workforce and rising divorce rates significantly increased the number of single-parent families, hiring childcare went from being a luxury for middle-class parents to an economic necessity for most parents.
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Anxious parents frequently worried that leaving a teenager in charge of their home and child may not have been the best idea. Parents’ practical concerns fed off larger anxieties about gender, parenting, and intergenerational conflict. Meanwhile, babysitters themselves, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, often saw their part-time jobs as preparation for motherhood, an initiation into domesticity.
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The babysitter in danger folklore motif reflects the fear that teenagers, especially in the intergenerational conflict of the 1970s, were simply not ready for the responsibility of babysitting. The story, in which the parents are a missing element, exploits the teenage girl’s fears of being unable to protect either herself or her charge from a masculine attacker. Sometimes these stories drew specifically on parental fears. The same genre of urban legends includes the story of “the Cooked Baby” or, especially telling, “the Hippy Babysitter.” In this cautionary tale, a countercultural babysitter, often described as being high on pot, alcohol, or both, mistakes a baby for a roast or a turkey and cooks it in the oven (later variants of the story made it a microwave).
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These stories, circulating through oral transmission and later on the Internet, encoded a profoundly conservative message. Urban legends became tales of matriarchal failure, a conservative critique of women’s unwillingness to domesticate themselves fully. Variants of the cooked baby tale had an unhappy mother roasting the baby or a mother “taking pills” to deal with depression (usually rendered unsympathetically in these stories as a “woman’s illness”). Monsters, either as home invader, babysitter, or bad mother, suggested that women’s liberation threatened the very lives of America’s children.

Monsters came in handy for other deeply conservative purposes in the post-1960s era. Urban legend provided a way to police the sexuality of teenagers and to suggest that immediate, bloody, moral retribution
awaited the sexually adventurous. Notably, teenagers themselves often became important transmitters of a genre of stories, generally described by folklorists as the motif of “the Hook” or “Hook Man.” In this story, a teenage couple parks at a local inspiration point, making out and listening to the radio. The music and the mood are interrupted by a radio announcement that a “lunatic” has escaped from a local asylum. The announcer helpfully observes that the escapee can be recognized by a hook used to replace his amputated hand. This terrifies the girl, but the boy wants to stay and have some more fun. Finally, she convinces him to leave and he angrily pulls away, tires squealing. When they arrive at the girl’s house, the boy goes around to open the door for her and passes out when he sees the bloody stump of a hook hanging from the passenger door.
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The monster of the story of the Hook served the need of post-1960s American society to rein in the kids and their hormones. In this most common version of the tale, the girl resists the boy’s advances, “holding out” while he seeks to make her “give it up.” His hormones almost bring about their deaths, leading folklorist Bill Ellis to suggest that “Hook Man” plays the role of “moral custodian” in a time of shifting mores. Some versions of the story make this point even more strongly when the amorous boyfriend meets his death while the “good girl” gets away. “Only Victorian sexual standards can save you” is the message to teenage girls. Lie back and think of the Hook.
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Monster tales became part of a larger project in post-1960s America to produce a solid and respectable citizenry. Churches, schools, and civic groups sought to socialize teenagers in ways that limited the effects of the sexual revolution and the political repercussions of the counterculture. Nervousness over sex, drugs, and rock and roll called forth a powerful cultural movement to direct young Americans down more traditional paths. This effort took the form of an increased and intensive concern about “the youth” in churches where programs directed specifically at them blossomed. Parents and teachers sought to attract adolescents to the Boy Scouts of America even as the organization’s membership declined (the phrase “he’s such a boy scout” became a common, derogatory phrase). Summer camps advertised themselves as centers for moral education that would teach middle-class values. The wilderness became a training ground for life in the suburbs.
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The growth in popularity of summer camps for children and teens promised a deeply American experience, a replication of the frontier experience that would inculcate “good values.” Activities tended to reinforce gender conventions, while counselors insisted that campers
maintain high standards of cleanliness and hygiene even in allegedly natural settings. After 1960 camps featured areas set aside for specific recreational pursuits, often with the idea that such predetermined arenas of fun and learning (waterfront, archery range, craft cabins) created safe environments that facilitated supervision and discipline. Above all, summer camps insisted on full participation of all campers. “Teamwork” represented a primary social value.
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An odd counterpoint to the wholesome fun is the campfire tales of mindless, unstoppable killers who haunt the woods around the camper’s cabins. Most major American summer camps have such a story told and retold every year by camp counselors. Camp Robert Meecher in northern Kentucky has “Headless Haddy,” a dark-clad woman who rides a horse and beheads male campers. Camp Clifton in Ohio has “The One-Armed Hermit” who rips and tears at camper’s screen doors trying to get in. Camp Ranger, just outside of New York City, has a maniac who had once been a counselor but was burned up in a fire trying to save a camper. Despite his altruism in life, the unquiet spirit of the counselor has become murderous.
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In various ways, the murderers who haunt the edges of the campfire are figures that violate the norms that summer camp seeks to inculcate or they dispatch those that do. Many of the stories fit a general motif that folklorists refer to as “The Dismembered Hermit,” a disfigured monster that chooses social isolation over the values of teamwork and community spirit that almost every summer camp seeks to impart. Folkloric monsters may also punish campers who fail to live up to camp standards of health and hygiene. Camp Ranger in New York State promises “fellowship” and “athletic competition.” Apparently, not accepting these values can have dire consequences. Its counselors warn that the camp’s resident murdering maniacal ghost will “pick the fattest kid out of the bunch” and will tear “all his limbs off.”
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Monsters by the 1970s had seemingly become instruments of social discipline. Urban legends and campfire tales shed light on the role of the horror film in relation to America’s late twentieth-century struggles over gender and sexuality. A number of feminist critics of American horror films in the 1970s and 1980s argued that slasher films celebrated violence against women and punished sexual behavior.
Halloween
seemed to critics to represent the first and one of the worst offenders until slasher films became one long postcoital massacre in the 1980s. John Carpenter himself took note of the raft of cultural criticism his film and its imitators had received when he jokingly apologized for bringing an end to the sexual revolution.
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These critics fail to note that slasher films, at least the best of them, riff on powerful narratives that already contain profoundly conservative messages not only about sexuality but also about the role of women in the household. The classic slasher films subvert these stories, expressing, if not a political message, at least discontent at the vision of society propounded by traditional authorities.
Halloween
provides a good example. On one level, the film borrowed all the imagery of babysitters in danger from urban folklore. But it also transformed one of those babysitters into a hero, the final girl whose courage and cleverness allow her to outwit and even outfight the monster.
Friday the 13th
drew directly on tales of unstoppable maniacs haunting the summer camp with its story of Jason Voorhees stalking and killing teens at Camp Crystal Lake. Notably, however, Jason had once been a child at this camp, and his mistreatment by the counselors had turned him into a monster. He reserves his hatchets, knives, and, at one point, even a spear gun for the counselors themselves, the ones who tell scary stories to keep the kids in line.
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