There
have been many attempts at such classification, and one suspects the process is
amusing, if not always edifying. Stephen
King, for example offers a simple and effective means of categorizing
monstrosity in his important book Danse
Macabre. He proposes that many—though
not all—specimens of monstrosity can be categorized as variations of one of the
three most popular Universal Studios monsters from the 1930s and 1940s: Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the
Werewolf.
Broadly
speaking, the Frankenstein monster is “the Thing Without a Name”, created from
parts, utterly incapable of assimilating with itself or its environment. It is soon out of the control of the arrogant
scientist or society that assembled it, and becomes a destructive horrific
force.
Dracula
represents all entities that subsist on and contaminate the life force of
another, often through perverted and displaced sexuality. The timeless conflict between civilization
and barbarity, between id and superego—between the Apollonian and the
Dionysian, as King puts it—is expressed in the Werewolf, and his less hirsute
cousins, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For
good measure, King later throws in a fourth archetype, the Ghost—formed from
the projections of a tormented, divided mind.
Most
horror readers and writers are probably familiar with Danse Macabre, which is comparable in many ways to H.P. Lovecraft’s
foundational Supernatural Horror in
Literature (1927). Whereas Lovecraft
surveyed horror literature from the mid-1700s until the early twentieth
century, King covers the period between the 1950s and 1980s, including radio
and film—an ambitious undertaking. (The
2010 edition of Danse Macabre
contains commentary that brings the book up to the early twenty-first century.)
King’s
book is more accessible and much less pretentious than Lovecraft’s essay, but both
are valuable and interesting to read side by side. One can see how far the field has developed,
and appreciate the impact of various media on horror entertainment since
Lovecraft’s time. Danse Macabre contains two very helpful lists of recommended books
and films—about 100 in each category—which if diligently followed makes this
work the equivalent of a graduate course in modern horror.
While
less concerned with the taxonomy of monsters, Ken Gelder’s The Horror Reader (2000) contains several insights about the nature
of monstrosity offered by various critics in the field. The material here can be used to flesh out
some of the subcategories in the model presented in the last post, especially
those that pertain to human mutations and serial killers.
For
example, in an excerpt from the introduction to her book, Monstrous Imagination (1993) Marie-Hélene Huet describes how in the
Renaissance it was believed that monsters, especially those among human
offspring, were believed to have “resulted from the disorder of the maternal
imagination”. Instead of reproducing a
child resembling the father, monstrosity involved the erasure of paternity and
its substitution by a product of the mother’s whims, traumas, misguided desires
and imagination. The mother’s thoughts
and mental imagery during conception and pregnancy were somehow imprinted on the
infant.
Such
births were thought to be bad omens, both for the family and the society. Huet traces this very resilient idea back to
Aristotle, who believed that monstrosity was not due to physical deformity so
much as the child appearing markedly different from its parents—again, the idea
of monsters as being unfamiliar—that is, not
in the family.
Huet
notes that this idea of the mother’s role in creating monstrosity through the
power of her mental imagery still appears in literature and film, long after it
was debunked in the 19th century.
Two movies of a few decades ago come to mind in this context. In the 1980 film, The Elephant Man, the origin of John Merrick’s grotesque
disfigurement is explained as a result of his mother having been traumatized by
a rampaging elephant while she was pregnant.
In David
Cronenberg’s very disturbing The Brood (1979),
a young woman is able to produce “psychoplasmic” offspring by converting
intense suppressed emotions into fetal like growths—a kind of parthenogenetic,
fatherless birth. Here again is the
Renaissance idea that monstrosity, and its destabilizing effects on the family
and society, results from the erasure of paternity. The potency and recurrence of this notion
suggests it touches on some archetypal understanding about human relationships
and reproduction.
Also in
Gelder’s anthology of horror criticism is a discussion of Tod Browning’s
infamous 1932 film, Freaks. Mary Russo connects the concept of “freakiness”
that was appropriated by 1960s and 1970s pop culture with the deeper understanding
of deviance and ostracism as portrayed in Browning’s film. (The movie had been re-issued in the 1960s, and
again in 2004). People with genetic abnormalities
were no longer considered bad omens or divine messages after the late 19th
century, but were classified as “specimens” according their physiology, putting
some psychosocial distance between the “freak” and the rest of society. “I am not an elephant!” we can hear John
Merrick say, “I am not an animal! I am a human being!”
Yet
their interaction with the public—often in circus sideshows—rendered freaks the
creations of the surrounding culture, reflecting fears of racial and cultural
intermingling, nonconformity, and deviance, and later contributing to the
emerging eugenics movement. Russo quotes
another critic who saw the connection between the faux exotic histories of side
show freaks and the much uglier reality of racism, colonialism and cultural
chauvinism of the time:
We
find the freak inextricably tied to the cultural other—the Little Black Man,
the Turkish horse, the Siamese Twins…The body of the cultural other is by means
of this metaphor both naturalized and domesticated in a process we might
consider to be characteristic of colonization…On display, the freak represents
the naming of the frontier and the assurance that the wilderness, the outside,
is now territory.
Finally,
in an excerpt from Mark Seltzer’s Serial
Killers: Death and Life in America’s
Wound Culture (1998), there is disturbing commentary on the emergence of a
relatively new kind of monster, in many ways a product of mass media, celebrity,
narcissism and even the self-help industry.
Who knew that what distinguishes a serial killer from a mass murderer or
a murder spree is the number of victims, (4 or more), the duration of the
killing, (greater than 72 hours), and the presence of a “rest period” between
murders?
Seltzer
describes these individuals as soulless vacuums who absorb the psychologizing
and medicalizing of society in order to produce an externally determined sense
of self. Their horrifying activities are
a kind of performance art grounded in the expectations of their audience. Seltzer sites the chilling observation that in
a number of these cases that the killer is an avid reader, that he studies up on
his profession, as it were. “Serial
killers read many books about serial killing, and the pop-psychologists’
visions make up a part of their curriculum…‘There is some evidence that actual
serial killers may pattern themselves on fictional accounts.’”
So much
more can be said, and needs saying about the monsters in our midst. An examination of monstrosity is ultimately
an examination of ourselves and of our societies—it is about what we must reject as not family. The fearful study of monstrosity leads us
forward and backward in time, away from a center where we hope we are safe,
among those who are familiar and similar to us. Just a few steps behind us, or just a few
ahead, are creatures and creations ready to appear and reappear to terrify us whenever
the stars are right. But then again,
what’s back there? What’s up ahead? Shall we look?
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