Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (5 page)

All of the creatures of folklore and popular culture raise unanswered questions about the bodies we inhabit. The walking corpse horrifies because our bodies will bear a real resemblance to them someday, sans the perambulation. Medical oddities are disturbing because they remind that the boundaries of the human body are inherently unstable and represent images of alternative bodily experiences. Sea serpents, multi-headed hydra, giant squids, and white whales are too big, have too many eyes or too many heads, revolting us with a gigantism that is awe inspiring but also inhuman. Other members of the monstrous fraternity, even the sultry vampire, threaten to puncture, rend, and ultimately destroy our bodies. We fear the monster perhaps because we fear the death and dissolution of our temporal selves.

Sigmund Freud noted this aspect of human fears in his seminal essay describing the nature of what he called “the Uncanny,” that creeping feeling of terror equal parts nausea and equal parts panic. He credited part of this feeling of horror to the possibility of physical damage, noting the number of children’s fairy tales that introduce creatures that wound the eye or steal the head. Freud believed the very essence of horror to be bound up in the fear of physical gore, the horror of the body being disassembled in an especially messy way. He concluded that such fears are tied closely to male sexual panic over the possibility of castration. Sometimes a bloody stump is, in fact, more than just a bloody stump.
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Freud saw the severed body part as just the beginning of terrifying possibilities: the ultimate fear, the heart of the uncanny darkness, spilled over from the feeling of nausea evoked by the sense of something that refuses to respect the categories of the known and knowable. In fact, Freud argued, the sudden eruption of what human beings think they have repressed, denied, or defeated constitutes the most terrifying reality of all. In his interpretation, the uncanny “applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open.”
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Numerous scholars of the monstrous have followed Freud in seeing the complexities of the human psyche as determinative of the human response to creatures of horror. Unfortunately, many of these efforts share the two major flaws in Freud’s approach. First, like Freud’s interpretation, they focus on the individual response to horror, and fail to explore both the societal and historical aspects of horror. Following Freud’s path has ended in highly reductive interpretations that consign beliefs about the monstrous to the realm of individual nightmare or even to the exigencies of psychological development and gender differentiation.
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Second, Freud’s interpretation of the uncanny places too much emphasis on the sense of repulsion that the monstrous provides. Later interpreters of the concept, most notably Julia Kristeva, have insisted that there is something deeply attractive about the horrible, indeed even something erotic about it. The monster may cause us to run and hide but with a frisson that has more eros than thanatos. Though it can in no sense be regarded as a pleasant sensation, the terror of the monstrous can, according to Kristeva, “worry, fascinate and beseech desire.” Popular fascination with the vampire provides the best example of the strange human tendency to want the thing hiding under our beds to be in bed with us.
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American cultural history is replete with examples of the uncanny as a desirable quality; in fact the underground history of America can be seen as a quest for the monstrous that will both terrify and fascinate. The angry reception to
Freaks
came at the end of a long period, dating from the nineteenth century, when actual “Freak Shows” had been enormously popular in America. Moreover, compare the reception of
Freaks
to Tod Browning’s earlier film
Dracula
. Rather than being repelled by the bloodsucking, foreign monster, American audiences welcomed Bela Lugosi’s version of the vampire as a new and exciting sex symbol. Today the vampire and its related mythology serve as one of America’s primary erotic symbol systems.
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Julie Kristeva’s discussion of what she calls “the abject” helps to explain this exciting combination of fear and desire, building on and complicating both the work of Freud and Lacan. The abject both creates a sense of disgust as something to be cast out, while at the same time evoking a desire to know and even possess the object that creates this deep disturbance. While producing this strange combination of what she calls “phobia, obsession and perversion,” the abject creates a devoted following.
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Popular responses to America’s monsters illustrate Kristeva’s point. A devoted female following for Bela Lugosi in the 1930s is perhaps explicable by the fact that the audience separated the suave, handsome Hungarian actor from the monster. But monsters on the silver screen are not the only creatures of the night surrounded with an aura of desirability. A real-world case in point is Richard Ramirez, the so-called “Night Stalker,” who, in the summer of 1985, went on trial for the murder of thirteen people. His victims had ranged from elderly women to children. The few who survived his attacks described him as dressed in black with long hair, poor teeth, and a bad smell. When finally brought to trial, Ramirez flashed the sign of the pentagram tattooed in his hand at the judge and jury, apparently intimidating both.
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Ramirez would seem a highly unlikely candidate as a sex symbol and yet this is exactly what he became. According to one account of the days following his trial, a “line of female admirers formed at the prison” in an attempt to visit him. Ramirez transfixed one female juror, who sent him a valentine during the trial (later voting to convict him anyway). Men also feel this attraction to the serial killer. Author Jason Moss developed an intense obsession with John Wayne Gacy (even reading gay erotica in an effort to find tantalizing images to include in letters that would pique Gacy’s interest). “The victims of the abject” Kristeva writes “are its fascinated victims.” The monster always has its groupies. The power of what Kristeva calls the abject is the power of the monster. It incites, excites, and horrifies all at once.
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Interpreters of monsters who have not closely followed Freud have still often relied on psychological theories. A number of scholars, many of them seeking to explain the appeal of the monstrous in pop culture, have seen the monster primarily as part of an inner horror show, the personal nightmares of the ego torn between a reptilian id and the moralistic superego. This interpretation understands the monster as a metaphor of human development, the demons that guard the gates of adulthood and emotional maturity. Monsters, according to this view, are primarily inner monsters. Our desire for them emerges from our desire to embrace our own darkness.

This approach often makes the self, especially the adolescent self, the locus of understanding the horrific. Walter Evans, in a 1984 essay entitled “Horror Films: A Sexual Theory,” claims that the appeal of the monster comes from adolescent fear and anxiety over alienation. Monsters, for Evans, embody all the dangers of puberty including threat, bodily changes, and an increased awareness of mortality. Other studies have reached similar dubious conclusions. An article by communications
scholars Dolf Zillman and James B. Weaver asserted that horror acts on adolescents to shore up societal gender expectations. Basing their argument on a single experiment in which male and female pairs watched
Friday the 13th, Part 3
and recorded their responses, Zillman and Weaver conclude that horror films teach boys “fearlessness and protective competence,” while girls learn “fearfulness and protective need.”
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Larger, more serious, and more influential studies have come to at least similar conclusions. Cultural historian James Twitchell’s massive study of horror over several centuries concludes that the horror tale provides “formulaic rituals coded with precise social information needed by an adolescent audience.” Like all myths and fairy tales, Twitchell believes, tales of monsters both “preserve culture and protect the individual.” Horror tales, he claims, act specifically on adolescents to excite sexual longings while at the same time explaining the dangers inherent in these longings. In particular, Twitchell insists, tales of monsters contain warnings about the violation of the incest taboo. Even classic tales where such a motif is not readily apparent, such as Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, yield to Twitchell’s rather ingenious interpretation.
Dracula
, in his reading, becomes a kind of retelling of the Freudian “primal horde” myth in which “a band of boys” seeks to destroy the “evil patriarch” so they can have sexual access to his “wives.”
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These examples, when looked at through the broad history of fascination with the monster, fail to cover the full range of possible meanings. Twitchell’s description of the “audience” who consumes horror, which he claims is primarily adolescent, neglects to take into account everything from genre to time period. Even more damning of this approach is his concept of audience, which is significantly limited. Twitchell fails to explore a much larger cultural attraction to monstrosity by restricting the discussion entirely to the productions of popular culture. The history of the American monster is far more complex than this, and audiences who thrill to the monster are far more diverse and sophisticated than Twitchell allows.
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The failure of much of the literature of horror to consider the larger social context has been challenged, especially by scholars of religion. Douglas E. Cowan’s tour de force
Sacred Terror
argues that every cinematic image of terror comes with its own “social history.” Cowan describes the American horror film as working in terms of “sociophobics,” a symbolic machinery that structures a social order and teaches us to fear through the production of intense cultural images (like horror films themselves). Cowan goes beyond scholars who have sought to locate the sources of pop entertainment terror in the individual self. He
suggests that these films register profound fears that are the warp and woof of cultural order, the societal sense of anxiety that Cowan calls the direct collision between “what we hope to be true about the world and what we fear may be the reality.”
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Cowan is not alone in his insistence that the monster must be understood as reflection of society rather than simply the shadows of the individual psyche. Jonathan Lake Crane, in his powerful criticism of much of the writing about horror, has argued that too many critics have seen images of the monstrous as “archetypes or psychic blackholes” rather than social experiences. Specifically writing about the enjoyment of modern horror films, Crane insists that this is not a solitary experience with one’s own psychological terrors but rather “joining millions of others on a roller coaster.”
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This book will build on the work of Crane, Cowan, and others who have located the monster outside of the human psyche. Monsters of all kinds are far more than malefic explosions of the id, more than a return of the repressed. Monsters occupy a central place in American social and cultural history. They sit like spiders in the center of a web of political identities, economic forces, racial fantasy, and gender dynamics. They are more than the dark side of the human personality or the dark side of popular culture. They are part of the genetic code of the American experience, ciphers that reveal disturbing truths about everything from colonial settlement to the institution of slavery, from anti-immigrant movements to the rise of religious fundamentalism in recent American politics. They are more than fantastical metaphors because they have a history coincident with a national history.
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The interpretation of the monstrous as the working out of psychic trauma is deeply flawed in its reductive and overdeterminative implications. Scholars who focus primarily on the psychological symbols that appear in modern monster narratives explain some aspects of pop culture; they tell us something about the unconscious dynamics at work in modern horror films; they help to describe how and why an audience might find a specific horror icon both dreadful and tantalizing. In relation to the event that opens this chapter, they might even be able to explain F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nausea—but they do not tell us anything about sea serpents.

The Abyss

In August of 1817 a small group of fisherman sighted a sea monster off the coast of Massachusetts. At that time, wrote the
Boston Daily Advertiser
, the sighting had been assumed to be “a creature of the imagination.” But
within ten to twelve days, reported the same source, the giant creature entered Gloucester harbor, one of the most prosperous fishing ports in New England, and had been seen by “hundreds of people.”
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A broadside distributed in Boston on August 22nd claimed that witnesses who had come within “10 to 15 yards” of the creature had described it as between fifty and seventy feet in length with “the width of barrel.” The creature’s head, characterized as being the size of horse or a large dog, periodically raised itself out of the water. The sea serpent moved with great speed and could whip itself round to move in reverse motion “almost instantaneously.”
The Salem Register
reported that the sea beast left a wake a mile and a half in length as it moved through the water at prodigious speeds.
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The whaling community of Gloucester contained plenty of men who considered themselves experts in seeking out sea monsters. The second day of the sightings, four boats of “adventurous sailors and experienced gunners” went after the creature with guns, harpoons, and all the accoutrements of whaling. The gunners claimed to have discharged three musket balls into the head of the sea beast, with no effect other than causing it to dive beneath the waters only to briefly resurface, head for the outer harbor, and disappear. The creature came back a few days later and this time observers said that the beast was even bigger than first reported. Some insisted that the creature, seeming to gambol and play just offshore, appeared to be at least 150 feet in length.