On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Kant was optimistic that whatever lay beyond the range of our frustrated minds was good (was God, actually), albeit inaccessible to our understanding. Other philosophers didn’t share that comfort. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) developed Kant’s philosophy further (some say he corrupted it) by suggesting that our own experiences with desire, craving, and striving, even in their brutal and cruel forms, are more in touch with reality (the noumenon) than are our logic, reason, and science. Art, according to Schopenhauer, has the unique ability to raise the usually submerged machinations of will to the surface, so we can see the world and ourselves in their naked primordial state of suffering. Art has the power to show us the suffering of the will-dominated real world, but also to break our servitude (if only temporarily) to the omnipresent will.8

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) extended Schopenhauer’s pessimism further and argued that the will-to-live is derivative of an even more primordial force, which he called the will-to-power. Nietzsche looked at the world as an expression of psychological forces, prince among them the psychological drive to be powerful. Underneath the day-to-day phenomenal realm (we go to work, find mates, have children, do art, fight wars, etc.) is the deeper truth of competing volitions and hidden motives. And this will-to-power is not simply human, but is the spring inside all nature.

  As we move from Nietzsche to Freud, we arrive at a mature, gloomy tradition of darkness, both metaphysical and psychological.9 For pessimists, reality is not a well-lit orderly place with occasional corners of shady superstition. Instead, reality is a sinister, haunted world of ill will, with fragile glimmers and flickers of human knowledge and safety. “The horror. The horror,” Kurtz says in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Even the Darwinian view of nature as “red in tooth and claw” was incorporated into Victorian pessimism. Like Schopenhauer (but out of a very different tradition), the evolutionist T. H. Huxley believed that “the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”10 Mirroring that external struggle and insecurity is the pessimistic internal world of monsters: desires, cravings, fears, anxieties so powerful as to make us feel alienated from our very selves.

  Freud tempered the speculative flights of the philosophical pessimists and treated the dark and hidden thing-in-itself as a feature of human psychology rather than a cosmic metaphysical force. Confining himself to the human experience, he argued that the veil of conscious representations (the realm of the manifest) concealed an enormous reservoir of emotional drives and impulses: the unconscious (the latent realm). Like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Freud claimed that the irrational, emotional, and instinctual dimensions of man were more powerful and constitutive than conscious rationality. He contended that disparate and seemingly unrelated events in our conscious life (behaviors and beliefs) are in fact tied together and coherent in the pseudo logic of the unconscious. We can access this deep reservoir of instinctual desires and fears only indirectly, through clues provided in dreams, hypnosis, art, linguistic slips, and so on. It may be safe to say that the unconscious becomes the twentieth-century home of the monsters. Having worn out their welcome in religion, natural history, and travelers’ tales, the monsters settled into their new abode of human psychology.11

  FREUD

  In 1919 Sigmund Freud wrote an influential essay titled “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”). In it he explored the spooky literary conventions of fiction writers (e.g., E. T. A. Hoffmann) but also derived a larger psychological category, the category of feeling strange, not at home, not secure, not quite right.12 Freud defined the uncanny as a feeling that is somewhat familiar but also foreign. It is a form of emotional and cognitive dissonance: “It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror.”13 The scholar of religion Timothy Beal says, “Monsters are personifications of the unheimlich. They stand for what endangers one’s sense of security, stability, integrity, well-being, health and meaning.”14

  In his essay Freud discusses some dominant elements of horror: severed limbs, disembodied spirits, evil doppelgangers, and the fear of being buried alive. These fears are explained by his psychoanalytic theory, which proposes that one’s early psychological life (the psyche) is dominated by the narcissistic pursuit of pleasure (the pleasure principle), whereas one’s later psyche is more accommodated to a world indifferent to one’s particular ego satisfaction (the reality principle). You come into the world wanting everything, but in short order you are dealt the repeated blows of the reality check: you are not the center of the universe. Repression, an internal punishment, is the mechanism by which the early narcissism is reeducated, overcome, and subsumed into the later psyche. Such repression begins externally, in the form of parents disciplining the child’s cravings and behaviors, but soon the disciplinary authority takes up residence inside the child’s mind, becoming the conscience.15 The original desires and cravings of Id and Ego do not, according to Freud, evaporate and disappear, but instead submerge below the conscious surface into the deep fathoms of the unconscious.

  Sigmund Freud, pioneer in the science of monstrous feelings. Courtesy of Photofest.

  Why are we so disturbed by horror stories of cloning and doppelgang-ers generally? Why are “evil twin” scenarios so commonly feared?16 The idea of another version of yourself, Freud argues, is a thinly veiled expression of your desire to extend your life. The desire to live on and not perish, to never terminate, is made manifest in the form of a fantasy about another you.17 Reality reminds us on a daily basis that we will die and everyone we love will die. So the universal urge to live forever must be repressed as we grow up. This repression means that the desire must be transformed from positive to negative. In order to grow up one must negate one’s urge to live forever.

  As mature adults we have, practically speaking, overcome our infantile desire for immortality, but, like everything that’s repressed, the craving has only gone deep underground into the unconscious. The doppelganger, as another self, was loved in our original psychological phase, but during repression it came to be regarded with suspicion, fear, and loathing. Evil twins, clones, and supernatural doppelgangers are experienced as uncanny rather than just fearsome because they simultaneously stimulate the older unconscious familiar feelings and the newer negative feelings of terror. It seems clear that this Freudian explanation applies equally well to our ongoing fascination with zombies.18

  Severed arms that crawl, jump, and choke their victims regularly inhabit our nightmares and our horror novels and films. Freud writes, “Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist…feet which dance by themselves…—all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition.” Ultimately Freud thinks that fears of severed body parts are coded instances of castration anxiety.

  In an essay entitled “Medusa’s Head,” Freud takes on the Greek monster myth. Recall that Medusa was originally one of the three Gorgon sisters, and her frightening, fanged, snake-haired visage could turn men to stone. The hero Perseus, using a mirrored shield to safely look at Medusa, killed the monster by decapitating her. Perseus made use of the head as a weapon, turning enemies to stone, before finally offering it to Athena, who in turn placed it on Zeus’s shield as a talisman. Freud ties this common Western monster to his psychoanalytic theory, in particular the castration anxiety. The severed head is just the manifest representation of the latent fear of castration, but the Medusa head is also a “mitigation of the horror” because the snakes symbolically replace the penis. Moreover, the Medusa head, which turns men to stone, symbolizes the psychological retort to emasculation by signifying rock-hard erect potency.19

  Whether or not Freud’s explanation of the uncanny is correct, few would dispute the phenomenon. In fact, in our day of computer animation and robotics, there is renewed interest in the uncanny because the attempts to create virtual humans
have stimulated new ways for us to feel strangely familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, noticed a common phenomenon that he calls the “uncanny valley,” referring to the feelings of empathy that viewers have toward virtual protagonists.20 If a robot or video game avatar looks humanoid we tend to have more empathy toward it. One could plot an empathy curve upward from the abstract creatures of an arcade game like Pac-Man to the more humanized creatures of Super Mario Brothers and Halo. Apparently viewers will report empathic feelings for increasingly humanoid features, but when the illusion is quite close, a drop-off in empathy occurs. When a replicant or an avatar is very close to human, but not quite exact, a distinct feeling of strangeness or creepiness rises. The phenomenon is called an uncanny valley because the empathy rises again dramatically once the representation crosses some mysterious incremental line into a more perfect depiction. The sensation indicates that “almost human” is more creepy and unsettling than a cartoonish or exaggerated representation of human. This would apply equally to the soulless eyes of otherwise well-rendered CGI characters and the particularly loathsome pseudo humans of the zombie genre.

  Freud’s general point, that we have anxiety after discovering that we are not God, is still compelling. Our narcissism is so satisfying when occasionally sated, but it grossly overexaggerates our power and control in the wider world, where it is eventually subdued by the inflexible and nonne-gotiable aspects of reality. There are forces out there (Freud uses the Greek word for “necessities,” ananke) that are stronger than us and overpower us (the weather, gravity, politics, fathers, etc.). Monsters can act as symbolic projections of all these frustrations rolled into one beast, or kind of beast. Like ananke, the monster is usually intractable and cannot be reasoned with. It is a symbol of opposition and therefore a great justification for our aggressions, something we can love to hate. When it cannot be conquered (like the elusive serial killer, the entrenched political tyrant, or the alien onslaught of science fiction stories) it demonstrates our limits, it curbs and checks our narcissism. But when the monster is conquered, as when St. George slays the dragon, Theseus kills the Minotaur, Dracula gets staked, or Perseus decapitates Medusa, it symbolically returns our narcissism and reaffirms, albeit temporarily, our infantile power.

  For Freud, the dark well of reality, which cannot be successfully processed by the intellect, is the unconscious, and this deep well holds our myriad repressed desires in a state of suspended animation. But they are occasionally awakened in dreams, horror movies, and altered states of consciousness and given momentary freedom in the realm of conscious awareness. Freud’s theory of the uncanny and Lovecraft’s cosmic fear share a common ancestor in Schopenhauer’s pessimistic notion of an overwhelming hidden force, which in turn owes its mutated descent to Kant’s sublime. In all these theoretical progeny one finds a common, though sometimes inarticulate investigation of human vulnerability. We are all impermanent ephemera.

  Whether you are confronting God in a religious ecstasy or confronting the onslaught of unstoppable monsters, you feel helpless, powerless by comparison. You identify with the film’s or the novel’s characters as they face the radically uneven and unfair power proportions. That awe-ful emotion, which I’ve been describing as a radical vulnerability, is the common reservoir from which religion and horror mutually draw. I take this sense of vulnerability to be the phenomenological seed experience that gives life to the diverse posited metaphysical causes (e.g., the will to power, the nou-menon) as well as the relevant psychoanalytic conjectures of Freud and the more vague speculations of Lovecraft. I’m not interested in defending one of these over another, although my tendency is to prefer less metaphysics rather than more. But I believe that all these diverse approaches, especially from Schopenhauer onward, are correct in their stress on the more emotional, instinctual, prelinguistic, noncognitive aspects of horror. Against Carroll’s rather intellectual view of horror as cognitive category jamming, this other tradition (especially Freud) gives us the more sensual or gut-felt aspects of horror.

  Furthermore, in defense of the sublime or cosmic thesis, I would suggest that an overwhelming sense of the sublime need not be tied to a theological entity like God, or even a mystical otherworldly force. The inexorable laws of nature alone will do nicely to crush my own egotistical sense of power in the world, and I don’t need to read the universal uncontrollable forces as being transcendental or wholly other. This is why, I think, the biological monsters created by H. R. Giger in Ridley Scott’s film Alien are so horrific: we are as helpless (at least in the first three acts) in the face of these natural selection machines as we are before any traditional deity (or at least the common narratives about those deities). Like Sartre, who redefined hell as “other people,” we can redefine awe-ful, nonnegotiable reality as nature itself. In this way, the metaphysical tendencies of earlier “vulnerability thinkers” like Schopenhauer are tamed and naturalized, such that they are consistent with the Freudian notion of an inevitably constraining reality principle.

  The most far-reaching idea of monsters during the twentieth century is probably Freud’s mature theory of aggression as an internal force that makes narcissism look charming by comparison. I take up the monsters of aggression extensively in the next chapter, but for the remainder of this chapter I should like to illustrate further some of the subjective states of vulnerability that emerge in the imaginative realm of modern horror.

  Maybe Freud is correct when he argues that uncanniness is caused by a return of the repressed, or perhaps some future breakthrough in neurobiology will reveal an “uncanny” neural network in the brain. But causal stories aside, there seems to be relative consensus about which writers, film directors, and other artists are good at producing the mysterious emotion. David Lynch, for example, seems to top most people’s lists of creators of the creepy and eerie. If he had done nothing but direct Eraser-head (1977) he would go down in the annals of spooky weirdness, but that proved to be just the start of a long career of highly disturbing films. Eraserhead is an impossible film to summarize, and its nightmarish surrealism has to be experienced to be believed, but suffice it to say that the film involves a mutant baby, a severed head that gets turned into erasers, a freakish woman living in a radiator, and a troubling vivisection on said mutant baby. The director Stanley Kubrick was apparently quite taken by the spookiness of Lynch’s film, and even showed it to his cast of The Shining to put them in the proper uncanny mind-set.21

  Lynch has given us a catalogue of memorable films and television shows, including The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks (1990–91), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006). Playing with surrealist techniques that date back to Dali and Buñuel, but also forging his own cinematic language, Lynch gives us an abundance of cosmic fear. His films are filled with psychopaths, severed body parts, vomit, blood, and characters whose motives seem as mysterious to themselves as they plainly are to the audience. Lynch seems interested in mining the ineffable micro-weirdness of mundane objects and events for their deeper, buried, unconscious root systems. As David Foster Wallace wrote, trying to crystallize the Lynchean aesthetic, “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”22

  Lynch’s films seem to be direct explorations of the permanently oblique unconscious, especially when compared with other creepy filmmakers, such as Tim Burton. By comparison, Burton’s gothic films are nostalgic references to the uncanny through the mediating lens of the horror genre’s earlier films (e.g., the Hammer Horror films of the 1950s–1970s). Burton’s films, which include Edward Scissorhands (1990), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and Sweeney Todd (2007), are self-conscious and self-referential about the horror genre, whereas Lynch’s films are more directly evocative of the uncanny itself. When asked in an interview if it is necessary that he understand something if he’s going to film it, Lynch replied confidently, “No, not one
bit. The reverse is true.”23

  There are monsters in Lynch films, some metaphorical (e.g., Frank Booth in Blue Velvet) and some misunderstood (e.g., John Merrick in The Elephant Man), but I’ve been trying to suggest a more abstract concept of monstrous throughout this chapter, one that Lynch illustrates well in his work. The angst that Heidegger claimed to have no specific object (unlike fear) and the cosmic fear that Lovecraft tried to articulate seem to me to be obscure but palpable expressions of a dispersed, diffused monster. The mundane and ordinary things of the world have been infused with an alienating, monstrous quality. Perhaps the most obvious and patent example of this immanent, not imminent, threat can be found in the short films of the Brothers Quay.