Here’s the second half of the lecture I gave last weekend at the Monsters and Myths in the Making Conference at the University of Florida. I had such a great time, saw some former grad students and ate some good food (Gainesville is a cool town…shockingly vegetarian friendly as well).  We pick up with a discussion of the how the history of women’s bodies became inextricably intertwined with the history of witchcraft.

Clearly even in the age of exploration, the body represented the possibility of monstrosity and terror. We see this in the witch trials of the 17^th (and let me add of the 18^th) century. Since the 1990s and the important work of Carol Karlsen, the role of gender in the witch trials has had its rightful place. Karlsen further suggests that witchcraft had what she calls “an erotic content, “ so much so that Cotton Mather could claim that “a lewd and naughty kind of life “ was a ”probable” sign of witchcraft. What women did with their bodies became an occult text to be deciphered, a sign of their seduction by Satan.

The history of witchcraft is part of the history of the female body…indeed, I would argue that the modern, pervasive sexualization of the female body owes much to the history of woman as witch, woman as monster.  A creation of the erotic/demonic that we see everywhere emerges from this.

A longer history is at work here. The woman as monster also owes something to the medicalization of the female. Ancient and medieval theoreticians of the body created a scientific discourse that made very similar claims. The Aristotelian and Galenic female body was a site of reproductive mystery-a whole discussion about the ways in which the parts of women’s bodies are inverted versions of the male body. Indeed many of the pre-modern discussions of the female body seems like efforts to create a map of what was thought of as negative space combined with strong desire to make assertions about the Uterus—described as a sewer, as a place where poisons are developed, and as on the move and the source of so-called “hysteria.

The witch trials in both Europe and America are perhaps best seen as a drama of the erotic/demonic…the fruit of folk belief and scientific discourses of misogyny and a performance of the discourse of female wickedness that stretches back to Augustine and beyond.

There are two contemporary obsessions with scary bodies I’d like to unpack in the time remaining…the dismembered body and the zombie body (or what’s left of it). Both are cultural obsessions of the moment that are best understood, really only understood, when placed in a larger history.

First, the body as a subject of dismemberment, our fascination with gore and its representation. Most horror, across its varied subgenres, involves some experimentation and voyeuristic pleasure in the disassembling of the body. The genre that fans and critics have come call “torture porn” is a heuristic system of bodily destruction.

This is in part due to the longer history of the body as a mechanism that can be taken apart. Vesalius with his idea of the body as “living design” had exposed the ways in which the body was more complex than the animated soul of Christian theology, clockwork that could be broken down into its individual parts.

Once we have disabused the body of its notions of transcendence we can abuse it in all kinds of ways…perhaps we even desire such an abuse. The body then becomes both less and more of a mystery. The dismembered corpse represents a particularly provocative semiotic. Its “the remains,” literally what’s left over, a residue.

And yet it points beyond itself to some action that has taken place, is the humpty-dumpty that had a great fall, the masterwork of the slasher, monster, killer, psycho. Its no accident that detective fiction and police procedurals became one of the triumphant narratives of the last two centuries…the body as evidence that’s proper disposition is to be surrounded and enclosed by all manner of forensic, legal and judicial discourses.

But it not just the story of the body as abused sign. The Civil War has something to do with how we all became gore hounds. Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage famously represented the war as “a machine that produces corpses.” It also produced images of corpses and images of the traumatized body. Matthew Brady’s photographs of the war ignored the sentimental conventions of most early photography. As I say in Monsters, his photographs  “replaced sentimental comfort with shocking horror. Bodies lay on the ground, arms and legs in unnatural contortions.”

Gore then became intertwined with mourning, the dissolution of bodies with the effort to make sense of the history of violence. “Habeas Corpus” demanded American culture, in response to the unsolved case of more than three quarters of a million dead.

I would suggest that its no accident that American seized so readily on the news and imagery of the 1888 Whitechapel murders and Jack the Ripper. The dismembered body as public iconography appeared everywhere. Indeed, in the 1890s, America had its first celebrity serial killer in the story of H.H. Holmes and Chicago’s murder castle, a place that was presented to a nation undergoing the second wave of the industrial revolution as a kind of factory of death—like the war, a machine that produces corpses.

America’s wars and America’s fascination with the traumatized body forms an important sub-theme in the story of American monsters.  In the years after World War I, what James Goodwin calls “the visual grotesque” found a significant audience both on the sideshow circuit and in the enormous popularity of the films of Lon Chaney Sr. Chaney, the so-called “man of a thousand faces” portrayed everything from a deformed circus performer, to a paralyzed magician, to a morphologically bizarre vampire to a heavily scarred animal trapper, to most famously, the hideously deformed Phantom.

The birth of contemporary gore is also directly related to the experience of the corpses and traumatized bodies of war. In the aftermath of Vietnam, which included not only 58,000 American dead but also 75,000 physically disable veterans, the traumatized body represented a public iconography.

Much of our body horror has a direct link to Vietnam in the form of former army combat photographer Tom Savini. Drafted into the army just before he had his opportunity to do the make-up for his boyhood friend George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Savini carried a make-up kit with him through basic training and to the war.  What he saw in Vietnam directly informed his gory creation over several decades, including incredibly influential films such as Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Savini has frequently referenced the images he saw, and photographed, in Vietnam as influential on his art. Horror images for the next forty years have, in some literal sense, owed their power and terror to the Vietnam conflict, reminding us how our monsters are hardwired into our history.

Speaking of George Romero, why do we have such a fascination with zombie bodies? I hesitate even to get into this since it’s an obsession that’s almost overanalyzed at this point.

I would note that the zombie, and the very different creature that is still its monstrous cousin the vampire, are a key to the American obsession with the body over the last few decades.  These creatures, flesh eating or blood drinking, rotting away or forever young, have appeared as pop culture phenomenon at a historical moment when the body had become of central concern to American culture as a vehicle of pleasure, of theological meaning, of personal happiness and often of all three at once.

At the same time, these monsters with either perpetually beautiful bodies or utterly repugnant and decaying bodies became a paramount concern at a moment when there are all sorts of signs of our anxiety over threats to the body’s permanence as evidenced by the popularity of dieting and exercise regiments, public health campaigns and the growing acceptance of aesthetic plastic surgery.

The zombie is a special horror to a culture obsessed with the body. The vampire, in part because in most of its iterations it’s surrounded by various kinds of religious symbolisms (resurrections and life eternal born in blood are the most obvious), are often vehicles for transcendence, escape from the body or at least triumph over its corruptions).

The zombie, obviously does not transcend…either in their body or their appetites. They are eating machines that are also decomposing, mechanisms that are running down but that refuse to stop. Its hard not to wonder what Vesalius would have made of these anatomical clockworks. Culturally, its notable that we are obsessed with these things we generally call “gross”—and they are literally gross, the body as sum of all our posthuman fears, the body as abject consumer and consumable.

Monsters have been read by scholars mainly as metaphors, reflections of social anxieties or expressions of our psyches. Its not that I believe they are not these things…but I do believe they are more than these things. They are real, particularly in the way they have interacted with a variety of discourses that circulate in our history. In the monsters history, we read other kinds of histories and I certainly hope I’ve suggested some ways that the monster has an intimate relationship with our most intimate history…the history of bodies.

I recently had the chance to give the plenary keynote for the Monsters and Myths in the Making conference at the University of Florida.Sponsored by the Graduate Historical Society, the interdisciplinary conference included the work of some wonderful young scholars working on everything from constructions of race and criminality in relation to the electrification of southern towns to reimagining the chronology of the witch panic.

My keynote expanded a couple of ideas from Monsters in America and placed them in broader historical context. How do we use monsters to examine some of the more intimate and foundational concepts of human experience and history? What role have monsters played in defining the body and defining the human? Here is a redacted version of the first half of my keynote…the rest to come later in the week, as well as a bit more on the conference itself (I’m also working on a follow-up to my recent post of Cabin in the Woods).

———————————————————————————————-

Its not uncommon to see the history of the monster as primarily a history of the Unknown and the Other, the exotic and the repulsive. As Richard Kearny writes in his Strangers, Gods and Monsters, the monstrous lives at the boundary of our acceptable categories “those phantasmal boundaries where maps run out, ships slip moorings and navigators click their compasses shut.”

Maybe. This is certainly an important part of the story. Except that I have found in my own work that monsters are mental maps rather than the places where the maps run out. Though sometimes the parts of our inner geographies where longitude and latitude disappear—it’s also true that monsters function as a Baedekers guide to both the secret and secretive parts of history.

The history of the body is one of these areas. In fact, the idea of the human body as a medical, sexual and political subject and object is closely intertwined with the history of the monster. We could say that the western project of pulling the human body out of the context of myth took place over against the monster; the monster is what the body has been running from for four hundred years in its quest to be autonomous from the enchanted world. Defining the monster offered a way to define the human.

What I’d like to do is talk a bit about the creation of the human body as a subject to be discussed, as an entity surrounded by discourses that become increasingly self-referential in western culture.  Then, I’d like to move pretty quickly to talking about how the monster and the body have share conceptual space in American history and how this fact can illuminate our understanding of those histories.

Its not at all surprising that the monster would be linked to the body given that the very etymology of the word “monster” is linked to being put on display. Monstrum is the root of the word “demonstrate” and in Roman usage could often refer to omens and portents. Indeed, from the murdered body as portent to the sideshow to the horror movie, the monster has always been a thing to be seen and, like the human body, something that points to meanings beyond itself.

But didn’t the body become disenchanted after a certain point? Well, not exactly. In fact, the coming of the scientific revolution in 16^th century did not leave behind the monster, quite the contrary.  This is not to say that medical knowledge allowed the body to remain a mystery and a marvel. Vesalius, the 16th century Flemish anatomist and author of On the Structure of the Human Body, combined dissection and illustration in an effort to literally open the body up like a book. As Thomas Laqueur writes about one of the famous frontpieces to “Structure” “the new, extravagantly public theatrical dissection and visual representations advertised the conviction that the opened body was the font and touchstone of anatomical knowledge.”

During a period in which the anatomists of Padua and eventually of Edinburough began to disassemble the body into its component parts while applying all sort of mechanical metaphors to its operations, the monster as a question raised about the nature of the human became central to medical discourses. Indeed, its possible to talk about the development of branch of scientific inquiry that became known as “teratology” or the study of monsters. Often the object of this study became the maldeveloped body—and yet monster became, and remained, a terribly slippery term fraught with all kinds of meanings.

16^th century teratologist Ambroise Pare’ focused his study of monsters on an explication of reproduction, an explication that managed to combine the new scientific curiosity with a heady dose of folk belief, run through with the poison of misogyny (not to mention a criminal lack of empathy).  The monster was the malformed body, in his words “things that appear outside the course of nature. (and are usually the signs of some coming misfortune) such as the child born with one arm,  another with two heads.”

In an almost eerie precognition of some of the ideas prominent in Freud, Pare’ imagines the monstrous birth as the result of a kind of repressed guilt about improper sexual practices.  Conjoined twins are a “sinister sign.” At a time when the penitential manuals of the Catholic Church sought to regulate sexual intercourse of even the married faithful, sex before the Eucharist, on Sunday, right before a major religious festival could easily result in a monstrous birth, the body becomes an index of sinfulness while the monstrous represents the dangers of human sexuality.

Indeed Pare’ gives a set of explanations for the maldevelopement of human fetuses the rather shockingly mash-up the natural and the supernatural. Monsters may be the result of heredity, accidental illness or the mother suffering a fall. On the other hands, the mothers corrupt imagination, the Devil or “the artifice of wicked and spiteful beggars might be the cause.” The malformed was not simply a marvel, but it also remained open to the monster, could indeed slip back into the realm of the monster very easily.

H.R. Giger on the Marquis De Sade

A side note here. Foucault once argued that Sado-masochism “is not a name given to a practice as old as eros; it is a massive cultural fact that appears precisely at the end of the 18^th century and which constitutes one of the great conversions of the western imagination.” I wonder if historians of sexuality could explore this further and would they perhaps find that the birth of the fetish is a phenomenon of the scientific revolution and the post –Enlightenment since of the nature of the body as mechanism. There are frequently discussions of the monster as fetish object. Did this occur because the idea of the body as an assemblage of parts that could be reorganized and thus our desires for them good be reorganized in new ways, to desire differently based on the varied morphology of monstrosity?

So, Europe has a head full of monsters as its monarchies begin their expansion into the new world. Concepts of monstrosity intermingle with perceptions of the new world in early American history. Some of the first horror narratives of the new world have to do with European conceptualizations of native peoples that imagined bodies at risk and bodies that consumed other bodies.

So the monstrous had been grounded in the body. This conceptualization became a central part of the imagined new world, an empire that would have to be won in a struggle with monsters.

Pliny's Monsters

These discourses about the new world belong to a very long European tradition of monsterizing foreign races…Homer and Herodotus filled up their mental maps with Cyclops and troglodytes while Pliny’s Natural History can be said to have canonized European folklore about dog-headed people and “headless people” who lived in faraway lands.

This imagery fed into the notion of the new world as a place where the body was consumed by truly monstrous beings. The idea of cannibal America was, of course, common enough for Montaigne to satire it and indeed became a part of the folk humor about every place and race imagined as savage. This idea has never really disappeared. Indeed our pop cultural  fears of devolution in post-apocalyptic futures almost always includes, not only the radiated and mutated creatures, but also human survivors who have decided to turn their fellow survivors into a food source. In this way, the Fallout series reflects the old fantasies of imperialism.

It’s worth pondering how the fascination with cannibalism that this was also an age that transformed, by legal transubstantiation, the bodies of Africans and natives into chattel and consumed them in the slave trade. Its no wonder, that in this world of monster making, stories of white cannibals, vampires and witches ran up and down the length of the Gambia.

I’ll post the next half of the lecture in a few days that takes the monster discussion to American shores, locates the history of witchcraft in relation to the history of the female body,describes how the dismembered body became an American obsession and says a little bit bout the bodies of zombies and vampires.

I love Cabin in the Woods and want to marry it. If you are a horror fan and have not seen this movie, drop what you are doing (as in, reading this post) and just go see it. Now. Then make plans with all the significant horror fans in your life to see it again. And talk about what it means. And fall in love with monsters all over again.

Now that I’ve gotten the fanboy wanking off out of the way, lets talk about some of the things that this film might mean. And let me say, right away, that this has to be an ongoing conversation since it’s a film that can’t be encompassed in a brief space. One of the things to love about this film is that it’s less a valentine to the horror genre and more of a dissertation on it.

And yes, I am going to do this spoiler-free. I’m with those of you who thought the trailer already gave way too much away. I am not going to ruin a second of this great movie experience for you.

I will tell you that one of Cabin’s most interesting subthemes concerns supervision and surveillance. Francis Kranz, brilliant as burn-out Marty, tells us in the beginning that society is “filling in all the gaps,” that our lives are being blogged, cataloged and spied out. I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that Whedon and Goddard filled the film with images of surveillance, ranging from two-way mirrors to high-tech spy equipment. Its very concerned, as are many horror films, with what we want to look at and why.

Monsters in America readers will remember that at least one chapter riffs on the idea of the slasher film as a way to punish the young and that idea certainly appears in Cabin in the Woods. What’s more, it’s a film that, behind its mythpoeic narrative, imagines the deep structures of society as intertwined with monsters. This is exactly my own view of the meaning of monsters in American history. They are more than metaphors or psychological reflections of anxiety. They are hardwired into American experience and they rise up from beneath us demanding sacrifice. The darkest parts of our history are those moments when the nightmares have come out to play.

This is also a film that, like all metanarrative, interrogates our own gaze and our own tendency to steal the subjectivities of what we gaze upon. Horror has been dealing with the power of the image and the look for a long time. Wes Craven filmed Last House on the Left so that it had the feel of a grainy documentary and forced the viewer into the experience. Craven has frequently played with metanarrative, most famously of course in Scream, but I would argue more effectively in his earlier New Nightmare. More recently, the “found footage” phenomena(which has its modern beginnings in The Blair Witch Project) has also rearranged our perception of violence, death and engagement in the modern horror film .

Cabin intertwines these themes in ways that will put a lot of scholars who see it in a Foucaultian frame of mind. Michel Foucault is, of course, the French theorist who described the rise of what he calls “normalization” and the way that power functions subtlety in a society to “discipline and punish” various kinds of behaviors. The rise of the prison and the asylum (both phenomena of the early modern and Enlightenment eras) interacted with emerging social controls to shape a concept of normalcy that we find ourselves insistently ramming our head against in classrooms, work places and even households.

Whedon and Goddard may or may not have meant to take us to Foucault-ville but Cabin certainly extrapolates many of his ideas and raises some interesting possibilities for those of us who want to ponder horror films as something more than social myth. Perhaps these narratives are also sites of social power.

Finally, and it would give away too much of the narrative to talk about this in detail, I think we saw a bit of Joss Whedon’s oft-ignored misanthropy in this really pretty dark film. Whedon has always seemed to me to have a far gloomier sense of humor than even some of his fans realize. I remember a good friend and fellow Buffy fan telling me during the sixth and seventh seasons of that show that “something must be wrong with Joss.” I think in those  final seasons, to paraphrase a favorite line from the series, the subtext was rapidly becoming text.

The value of the universe, and of living in it, has always been a basic theme of the Whedonverse. Its possible to read the last two seasons of Buffy as a meditation on the meaningfulness of life, or perhaps its lack of meaning. Although the series repeatedly reaffirms the value of community and of self-sacrifice, it does so in the context of a nihilistic worldview that says  (with Buffy) “the hardest thing about this world is living in it.” I’m sure all you Browncoats are thinking about Mal’s often dour sense of the universe, the captain of Serenity sometimes wondering openly (and in dreams) if anything means anything at all.

But what I’ve always loved about this theme in Whedon is that it never becomes an outright expression of spiritual despair, never a renunciation of meaning that amounts to what Jean-Paul Sartre would call “bad faith.” What we see in the Whedonverse seems to be something more along the lines of Camus in La Peste. The willingness to fight a battle we know we will lose is, to quote Camus, to be a “saint without God.”

But you know the best thing about this Cabin the Woods? It’s about monsters…indeed a kind of celebration of the monstrous as a form. So many of the scenes become more clever, more creepy, more deeply meaningful the more you think about them.

Best of all, you’ll want nothing more than to watch Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, stat, once you see it.  And you’ll spend a lot of time thinking about the meaning of monsters.

Speaking of thinking about Monsters, I’m giving the keynote this weekend at the University of Florida’s Monsters and Myths in the Making conference. More later.

The UCF Book Festival sponsored by the University of Central Florida happened in Orlando over last weekend and turned out to be a great opportunity to talk monsters with some smart readers and writers.

I decided to drive down to Orlando, in part because I feel like I’ve seen the inside of enough airports the last few months (and I’m not the best flyer). It was a longer drive than I expected and, sadly, a little less reflective than I hoped it might be. Crazy traffic on I-95 all the way down. I did get to listen to music for hours and hours and hours and put together quite a concert…everything from the Shins to The Carter Family to Piedmont bluesman Brownie McGhee and lots and lots and lots of Tom Waits. I actually cannot get enough of the latter. Rain Dogs has to be on my top ten list of all time great albums and the new one, Bad as Me, also makes me awfully happy.

My panel was at 2:00 on Saturday with a signing to follow. I did a short presentation on the basic themes of the book, trying very hard to make the case for a historian writing a monster book. Great questions afterward that focused a lot on things like writing process, experimentation with other genres, etc. On the latter question, I simply said that I have a couple of novels no one is ever allowed to see and some poetry I only read to my dogs. Nobody seemed to want to know more about that, strangely.

But speaking of poetry, I shared the panel with the amazing Allan Wolf. Wolf has most recently authored The Watch that Ends the Night: Voices from the Titanic. A novel in verse, we get to hear the doomed voices from the past…including the ship and the iceberg who develop a kind of erotic dialectic as they begin their tragic dance. Great stuff.

Allan was also kind enough to bring along some of his monster drawings from childhood that I have been thinking about every day since I got back.

The signing that followed was great fun with crowds just swarming me. And by swarming me, I mean a handful of folks dropped by to chat and have me sign their copies of Monsters in America…or to tell me that they might get it someday.  I actually find both of these things to be amazingly kind. You have no idea how surprised and pleased I am whenever anybody, anywhere wants a copy of something I wrote.

Also, inexplicably, various stormtroopers, tie fighter pilots, Sandpeople and even Darth Vader himself wandered about the book displays. As I was signing someone’s book, a Sandperson came by and stood beside me and then left. I told the person kind enough to buy my book that “they would return…and in greater numbers.” She smiled politely and I know she had no idea what I was talking about. Do people not memorize every line from Star Wars anymore?

So, it turns out that Orlando is a comic book mecca. After the festival, I visited like four stores in two hours. I was on the hunt for some classic monster mags and here is part of what I came back with. Also found some old Weird mags.

I’m not travelling again til April 20^th when I’ll be going down to give the plenary keynote at the University of Florida’s Grad Student Symposium on Myths and Monsters. More on that soon.

Stick with the blog. I’m hoping to update a bit more frequently now that I’m not on the road as much for a while. Expect some upcoming book reviews (including of Jay Smith’s Monsters of the Gevaundan), updates on new projects and some reflections on some of the horror films I’ve been ruining my mind with lately (hi mom!).

Stay scary!

I’m in Buffalo the first part of this week to take part in a discussion at Canisius College called Monsters in the Closet.

I’ve had a lot of cool things happen to me since I wrote Monsters in America. Perhaps the coolest has been getting to meet Christopher Bram, the author of the novel Gods and Monsters (originally titled The Father of Frankenstein). Gods and Monsters tells the story of the final days of director James Whale, whose combination of humor, pathos and heart-breaking imagery made possible the classic Universal Studios monsters Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

You hopefully have seen the film Gods and Monsters, based on Bram’s novel. It contains an astonishing performance by Ian McKellen as Whale (he looks a bit like the director) and Lynn Redgrave as his maid/caretaker. Brendan Fraser unexpectedly shines as well. It received a well-deserved Oscar for best screenplay in a year when it was up against the ultimate Oscar-bait, Life is Beautiful.

James Whale and Ernest Thesiger on set of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

Get a copy of Bram’s novel. It’s a hard to put down evocation of old Hollywood, being gay in mid-century America and the very meaning of horror. Bram makes the all-important link between Whale’s time as an officer in the trenches of the First World War and the meaning of terror. The torn and shattered bodies of men in that war became the basis of bodies contorted, scarred and traumatized in the best horror films of the thirties.

In Monsters in America, I suggest that the link between war and horror has always been present.  In the years following the American Civil War, death was sentimentalized but the gored human body became central to the cultural imagination.

Much the same followed the Vietnam War that gave American history new imagery of dismemberment and found expression in the body horror and slasher films of the subsequent forty years.

Bram himself is a pleasure to be around though I suspect I’ve pestered him with too many Gods and Monsters-related questions. Tonight, we’ll be doing a roundtable with novelist Sheri Holman on horror movies and the nature of fear.

Give Gods and Monsters a read and then treat yourself to the film. And then, why not indulge yourself even more with a James Whale marathon and get to know his subversive and forlorn monsters.

I recently had the chance to sit on a roundtable with the amazing literary and cultural critic James Kincaid. We talked deviance, innocence and the kinds of cultural narratives we tell about kids and monsters. Thanks much to the College of Charleston’s English dept. for putting this together.

Robert Englund, who famously portrayed the supernatural sweater- wearing serial killer Freddy Krueger, once gave a tremendously disturbing and utterly honest answer to the question of how he created his signature boogeyman.  He explained that during a filming break on the set of Nightmare, he found himself watching and envying the hijinks of the young and beautiful star Heather Langenkamp, joking around with the equally young and beautiful Johnny Depp, then appearing in his very first feature. Englund says he felt something dark and jealous rise up in him at both their youth and their beauty and decided that his rage was something he could use. Indeed, it could help him portray what the film calls “that filthy child killer” Freddy.

If I can borrow an idea that appears frequently in Professor Kincaid’s Erotic Innocence, this is not the kind of story we like to tell or to hear. We want to be defenders and contemplatives of innocence, not the trench coat wearing old people with a rage against it. We want to mount the barricades against deviance much more than we want to step back and understand what narratives of innocence and deviance do to us or the culture we have a stake in.

As part of our enduring fascination with innocence endangered, a cultural mindset that seems to owe something to Wordsworth and something to De Sade, the figure of the Demon Child peeks out at us from behind creaking doorways, waits till we are on the stepladder to ride its tricycle around and around in circles.

“Did he who made the lamb make thee”…absolutely. In our culture, the little lamb has a tyger in its tank and may be plotting to kill us.

Conceptions of innocence endangered by deviance are hardwired into the history of the 20^th century. I would point out ways in which the rise of the National Security State in the years after the Second World War helped to structure our sense of innocence endangered, as well as the idea that extreme measures must be taken to protect it. The family, as many scholars have argued, became a site of containment reflective of the larger goal of containing communism, the phrase first used by George Kenan that has become an apt metaphor for much of the cultural work being attempted by conservative forces of the postwar era.

And we know what leaving it to beaver resulted in. The need of a newly imperial nation for strong-hearted cold warriors also excited and incited anxieties about deviants endangering and corrupting that possibility. Home became a place where women’s labor and women’s hopes were to be contained and where children were to be seen and not heard.  Children were imagined a passive subjects who made the trip from the containment of home to school and back to the safety of the home again. So much of the discourse of juvenile delinquency that develops in this era is a discourse about the dangers of “hanging out”—literally escaping the containment of the home.

Why it is that the child who symbolizes innocence has also become the monstrosity, literally the bad seed, the demon seed. The American horror film, from Rosemary’s Baby through The Exorcist and The Omen and into more recent iterations such as Insidious and The Woman, have made the child into an uncanny presence from another world, or maybe from hell.  What became of that “raised right child,” the hope of  nation of cold warriors, the product of the new domesticity of the 50s.

Children were always scary it turns out. Just scary for different reasons. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, American culture moves  from fearing the contained child to being terrified by the child of excess.

Consider the frights provided by the children of containment. The coldness of little Rhoda in Bad Seed is matched by the blank, impassive stare of the little blonde terrors of the 1960 Village of the Damned. Clearly one way to turn them into monsters has been to imagine them as the desiderata of many of our cultural fantasies about childhood—the moment before the Fall, the blank slate. How terrifying if the 1950s project worked, what would lurk in their silence?

Childhood and its meanings shifted in between Village of the Damned and 1973’s The Exorcist. The latter became a cultural phenomenon more than simply a scary movie. Like some kind of satanic religious revival, audience reactions were extreme with moviegoers becoming physically ill and/or literally running in terror out of theaters.

Meanwhile, lines stretched around city blocks with some New York and LA theatres having their first showings at 8:00 AM to accommodate crowds. As one person told a reporter as they wanted in line one frosty New York morning, they “wanted to see what all the throwing up was about.”

What was it all about? How do we account for these reactions? We are asked to read Regan McNeil as the contained child, a particular kind of product of containment—the charming, beautiful and dare we say seductive upper middle class girl. If The Exorcist were made today, Regan would have started out the movie with a vocal fry.

That is, of course the Regan of films first 30 minutes.   She becomes what so many in the period thought their own kids had become—straggly haired, impossible to manage demon children with filthy mouths and inexplicable behavior. She even pees the carpet on her way to 666-ville. Contained she is not and thus quickly crosses the liminal space between innocence and deviance.

Is the essential relationship between these categories what makes the child so frightening, that makes the so-called “bad child” into, as we sometimes off handedly say, “a living terror.” Is our sentimentalization of the child really just what it looks like, a sentiment about our own mortality or is there something more destructive at work? For example, are the gothic narratives we tell about child endangerment, sexual deviance and sexual predators a channeling of cultural rage, not unlike what Englund was able to do with Freddy?  Does it help our analysis of the new mommyism that Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels describe as both “accepting the claims of feminism while also repudiating its results”—women have a choice but the only meaningful and rational choice is to become bearers of these blessed creatures—who might later try to destroy you.

“1-2 Freddy’s coming for you” was, of course, a children’s rhyme written and often chanted by adults. Whose purposes does this serve, in what dark workshops of cultural need are these things fashioned?

Enjoyed my recent appearance on Coast to Coast (despite the bizarre hour) and was literally flooded with e-mail questions through the site, indeed before I appeared on the show.

Best e-mail so far: “There are werewolves, I don’t care what you say. I know what I saw. U need to read more.”

I hope he is right about werewolves. And I do need to read more.

Coast to Coast apparently has more of a following than I realized, particularly for a show that runs from 10:00 AM-2:00 AM Pacific time. A bafflingly large number of affiliates carry the long-form discussions that, as Bex and Proffitt from Good Girls Gone Geek explained to me, involves talks about everything from” the shadow people” to “Gnomes with jobs.”

Having heard that, and a quick look at previous guests, suggested to me that the program I was about to appear on was something like what the Lone Gunmen from the X-Files might produce. My own prejudices aside, I found Ian Punnett a charming host though one who wanted to talk more cryptozoology than I cared too.

Not surprisingly, he made the kind of arguments about cryptids that Monsters in America suggests is at the root of American mass culture’s misunderstanding of the nature of scientific evidence. Indeed, he and many of his listeners seem to be under the impression that science and religion are both acts of faith, rather than radically opposed modes of knowing. This is an all too common assertion made by Christian apologists. It ignores the fact that the claims of science ask for neither a leap of faith nor for obedience to authority. Its claims, unlike religion’s, are self-consciously falsifiable.

Given the terms on which this debate is conducted, its hard to make the argument I make. Here I am, a historical materialist, who also asserts that monsters must be taken seriously, indeed that they are real.

My own skepticism about the material reality of the monster, its empirical non-existence, almost always makes my assertions abut the reality of monsters as social constructions hard to explain. I suppose this outing was no exception though I did try to make the point that much of what motivates us, much of what we believe in most deeply, are really social constructions. I can’t put “democracy” in a test tube but I still believe its real in the sense that it affects the material structures of everyday life. We don’t have to attribute ontological subjectivity to something  in order for it to be real, real in the sense that it has actual historical results, real in the sense that it becomes part of the extended cultural conversation.

This is not enough for those committed to the ontological reality of monsters and it’s too much for those who like to have a menu of beliefs to marginalize and mock. Certainly the caller who claimed to have seen Bigfoot materialize before his very eyes or the one who spoke about “documented” cases of “skin-walkers” in the southwest had a very specific and limited conception of what constituted reality. And one that, in its own way, takes monsters with as little seriousness as those who like to debunk the claims of the “slack-jawed yokels” who have monstrous experiences.

I hope you got to listen to Coast to Coast…I will try to post a link over on our Facebook page. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the discussion.

I’m doing a roundtable this week with scholar James Kincaid where I’ll talk about deviance, innocence and Freddy Krueger. I will post my comments here.

 “I’m going to have to learn what the plural of Apocalypse is.”

This line, from my favorite TV show, has been much on my mind lately. It’s impossible to talk about the apocalypse singular in American culture. There are more than enough to go around, ends of the world brought on by zombies, Mayans, killer robots, killer contagion and even evolution itself.

Indeed our fascination with social and global nihilism is in no way limited to books and film. The apocalypse has become our sandbox. In computer and console games like the Fallout series, you get to be Mad Max minus the Mel…stockpiling weapons, fighting off the inevitable mutated creatures and also dealing with your fellow survivors, all of whom seem to either want your stuff or to eat you or both.  Lord of the Flies as eschatological schema.

 Despite our need to be entertained by the end of the human race, it occurs to me that we may be less interested than we once were in a good old-fashioned religious apocalypse. Something funny happened on the way to the rapture, it seems. Worrying about the hungry undead and unstoppable disease vectors seems to me to have moved the rapture, the seven year period of tribulation, the antichrist, the second coming into the utility closet of cultural history, if not its dustbin.

Does this speak to a basic sea change in the American experience of religion? We’ve tended to think of the premillenial dispensational craze launched by Hal Lindsey in the seventies and given institutional support by the Christian Right as simply part of American evangelical’s long war with modernity. Their conflict with American culture resulted in their sense that the United States represented a new Sodom and Gomorrah, ripe for fire from the heavens.

But that never made much sense anyway did it? After all, much of the Christian right was postmillennialist in practice while remaining premileenial in loudly asserted theory. Why work so hard to get prayer back into school and take a way a woman’s right to choose if you could, quite literally, be snatched out of this world any moment…if indeed this car would have no driver in case of rapture to quote a popular bumper sticker. Any Geertzian thick description of a conference or prayer rally among politically involved evangelicals would be hard pressed to find apocalypticism as a key historically transmitted symbol of meaning.

This decline of the religious apocalypse, by the way, would not necessarily signal the end of evangelicalism in America as I would argue that what’s replacing the religious right is not a suddenly rambunctious religious left but rather a new hipster fundamentalism, an outgrowth of the mega-church phenomenon.   And is this often tattooed and ironic Christian t-shirt wearing tribe an apocalyptic sect? In other words, who wants to think about seas turning to blood and locusts the size of apache helicopters if you get to drink a latte during church (made in your church’s own Starbucks or at least Christian knock-off of Starbucks)?

Why has this happened? Why has the Charles Scofield meets Hal Lindsey vision of the end of the world fallen on hard cultural times? In the aftermath of the runaway popularity of Lindsey’s “Late Great Planet Earth,” The Omen became one of the top-grossing horror films of the seventies, a film that Daryl Jones has called “The Exorcist for Protestants.” By the same token, after the Left Behind series and concerns about the alleged Y2k meltdown, it would seem that such images had enough cultural energy to survive and thrive a long time.

And yet, today, it seems like so much cultural detritus. Telling the kids in my freshman and sophomore class, my Satan class as its known, about the Left Behind books feels like telling them about the treaty of Westphalia or the halfway covenant. It’s a long time ago for them.

Perhaps, and this is a big perhaps that I present to us as a question to consider, our American need for monstrosity has overtaken millennial hopes.  Our love of zombies has trumped our interest in the rapture. Our pessimism has caught up with us and made the world seem messier than something that can be organized on one of those dispensational charts of old.

Is there a connection between this sense of being collectively hanged in the morning and our monster du jour on the apocalyptic menu? Perhaps zombies have struck you as the perfect embodiment of the end of human society since the very mechanism that animates them seems like a transparent metaphor for destructive human drives that could easily end with barricaded houses, all the electricity off and even the most  pacific of us developing an interest in shotguns and machetes.

But why the zombie?  This is an even more pertinent question when we consider that, in popular culture, the vampire apocalypse has better traction as the monster of the apocalypse. You are probably aware that Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (and the film Last Man on Earth) is part of the immediate background for George Romero’s vision of survivors battling it out against hordes of the undead.  Why did the vamps turn into zombies?

I think there are lots of reasons for this, an not to be ignored is the fact that tortured, brooding and very pretty vampires of Anne Rice came along in the same decade as Hal Lindsey’s proclamations of doom delivered west coast idiom. Vampires ended up with a different, and way sexier, cultural trajectory. But maybe the elision of the vampire from our apocalyptic scenarios also has to do with what makes the zombies such good monsters.

There is something basically pathetic about the zombie that we find both humorous and very recognizable. Yes, zombies are us…they are the monster that we could be in some way. But in so many narratives, such as the Walking Dead, Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead and Colbert Whitehead’s Zone One, they are vestiges of a world that never was, representations of loss that we don’t even have time to mourn.

In Whitehead’s brilliant novel there are two kinds of zombies or “skels”-the violent primal hungry kind and the “stragglers.” The latter wander the streets of lower Manhattan, going to fast food places and standing in line or standing at copy machines or ricocheting off the walls of a Human Resources meeting rooms. They are less apocalyptic monsters and more just us, wound down by ennui and pretty damn tired of the whole mess.

This brings me to the final depressing topic I’d like to mention. With comets colliding into us, seas rising and the cable going off, the epic nature of the apocalypse has always haunted most religious visions of the end.  But I wonder if we need micro-histories of the apocalypse, histories of these imaginings that will contemplate its sadness?  Could we as scholars explore the feeling of the apocalypse? What would a history of the “inner life of the apocalypse” or “the emotion of the apocalypse” even look like? I don’t know. But it might be another way to explore what we need these ideas for, why we hold them close.

We certainly know what it is looked and felt like in popular culture. Its been Jason Robards at the end of 1983s The Day After, weeping in the arms of another atomic survivor as they die of radiation sickness. And it’s a feeling that Colson White head has one of his characters communicate. “What does apocalypse mean?” a small child asks his dad. “It means that in the future things will be even worse than they are now” his father responds.

Sad news over the weekend. Ralph McQuarrie, concept artist most famous for his work on Star Wars, died at the age of 82.

If you are not familiar with McQuarrie’s work then you don’t know a big part of the story of how Star Wars became so great. His character designs are behind Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2-D2 and even Darth Vader himself.

In fact, other than Empire director Irving Kershner, I would argue that McQuarrie had more to do with the best parts of the saga than anyone else. I’d also note that, frankly, Lucas’ fingerprints are mostly on those parts of Wars that are the least appealing (and all over the prequels and subsequent changes for home video, DVD and Blu-Ray release).

Lucas himself noted this weekend that McQuarrie was the first person he turned to help envision what Star Wars would look like.

Some of McQuarrie’s original designs are arguably superior to what made it on screen. His famous lightsaber battle featuring a more streamlined and lethal appearing Darth Vader are one example of this.

In fact, a bust based on this image is one of my favorite parts of my own collection (nerd alert!) 

Final note, it’s hard to imagine some of the most important pop culture franchises of the last forty years without McQuarrie. He painted original designs for features ranging from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Some of his best work influenced the look of the original Battlestar Galactica series. Although featuring unbearable dialogue and plotting that makes it hard to enjoy today, the creatures, settings and ships of the original BSG still make it an interesting series to look at.

RIP Ralph McQuarrie and thanks for giving us so many gods and monsters over the years.