On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Stephen and Timothy Quay are identical twins and filmmakers, born in America but living in England; their films include Street of Crocodiles (1986), The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984), In Absentia (2000), and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005). They seem to have taken the uncanny aesthetic, which one finds in directors like Lynch, and pushed it to degrees of abstraction hitherto unexplored. In many cases, characters and stories are completely gone, but through the genius of the Quays’ animation sensibility the audience is often angst-ridden and uneasy at the repetitive twitching of a hair or a spoon or a calligraphy quill or some other mundane object. In an interview the Quays said, “What happens in the shadow, in the grey regions, also interests us—all that is elusive and fugitive, all that can be said in those beautiful half tones, or in whispers, in deep shade.”24

  TORTURE PORN

  Leaving aside these more subtle examples of uncanny horror, we need to acknowledge the mainstream film explorations of vulnerability, particularly the recent genres “splatter-punk” and “torture porn.” One might take the recent celebrations of torture in horror films, and the box-office popularity of such horror, as suggestive evidence for a Freudian understanding of the genre. We seem to have mysterious tastes and predilections inside us, which get satisfied only by indulgence in the grisly and macabre. Freud may have given us a new language for understanding this taste for the grotesque, but the taste itself is very old.

  In Plato’s Republic the human attraction to the grotesque is taken to be more evidence that the psyche houses a multifaceted set of desires and powers, sometimes working in confederation and sometimes at odds. “There is a story,” Socrates explains,

  which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.25

  Serial killers have probably always existed, and maybe they’ve always been fascinating and entertaining to those of us at a safe distance, but it seems fair to acknowledge a new grand-scale media celebration of such killers. Of course, public fascination and hysteria reached fever pitch with nineteenth-century monsters like Jack the Ripper, the famous slasher of Whitechapel, and the alluring mystery of Jack the Ripper was, and is, matched by the alluring grotesqueness of his disemboweling techniques.26 These days we have extensive media coverage of, and corresponding public appetite for, real serial killers, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Ed Gein, as well as the popular fictional characters Norman Bates, Sweeney Todd, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Leath-erface, and Michael Myers.27 Are we drawn to these gruesome stories and images, as Plato’s Leontius was drawn to the executed corpses piled up near the port of Piraeus? Why are so many of us repelled, disgusted, and morally outraged, but also willing to lay out cash to see psychotic murderers hang people on meat hooks, sever limbs, and eat their innocent victims?

  After the relatively high-brow cinematic forays into gothic horror in the 1990s, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Interview with a Vampire, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the first decade of the twenty-first century settled into a new focus on “torture porn” and “splatter-punk” horror, usually stressing the monstrous serial killer as the central protagonist. Recent examples include Dawn of the Dead (1978, 2004), Turistas (2006), Hostel (2005), Hostel II (2007), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and Saw (2004) and its many sequels. These films usually involve extended graphic depictions of sadism and cannibalism.

  Some critics, including the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon, have claimed that torture porn debases, by taking something away from, the people who view it.28 Stephen King defended the genre, particularly Hostel: “Sure it makes you uncomfortable, but good art should make you uncomfortable.”29 “You screw, you die” is the message of slasher films, according to the conservative critic E. Michael Jones.30 “The moral of all horror films” is that “sexual sin leads to death.” The narrative of earlier slasher and later torture porn films is numbingly predictable: eroti-cally charged young folks experiment with sexuality, libido rises, and sexual ecstasy is replaced with a violent climax of blood and death. Contrary to Freudian repression theory, Jones suggests that horror films are playing out a different subtext, a deep morality tale just below the surface of the filmmaker’s and the audience’s conscious awareness.31 “All monster stories,” Jones explains, “beginning with Frankenstein, the first of the genre, are in effect protests against the Enlightenment’s desacralization of man.” By which he appears to mean that modern scientific secular ideology has reduced humans to animals (or even machines), and sexuality has become just another animal function without sacred status (in marriage). Horror narratives, according to Jones, remind us of our betrayal of morality and reinforce a timeless ethic (more keenly felt before the Enlightenment) of sexual moderation: “If you violate sexual morals, you will be punished by death, and the city will be destroyed; tampering with sexual morals is a threat to civilization.” In Jones’s conservative account, horror gives us a virtual tour of the consequences of “leftist” sexual liberation.32

  The monsters from the sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Warner Bros.). Image courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.

  Though from a very different perspective, some liberal monsterologists also see civilization hanging in the balance. But now the danger comes not from too little self-control but from too much. Too much repression can cause neurotic individuals and societies, so horror films come to the rescue to release the pent-up pressures. The director of Hostel, Eli Roth, has defended his sadistic films on what appear to be Freudian grounds. Interviewed frequently in the media, Roth argues that horror films tend to crop up more when the country is undergoing severe social stresses; the Vietnam era produced the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Last House on the Left, and others, and the post-9/11 and Iraq war era also corresponds with an influx of violent horror films. (In contrast, according to Roth, the Clinton era produced fewer such films.) Political correlations aside, Roth argues that human fear and anxiety are held in check during our day-today functioning, but sometimes we need to exorcise these troubling emotions. Horror films allow us the opportunity to scream and release anxiety in a cathartic manner;33 according to Roth, they have a therapeutic effect. “There are soldiers in Iraq,” Roth explains, “that write me and tell me that Hostel is one of the most popular movies in the military.”

  They love it. I wrote back and asked, “Why on earth would you watch Hostel after what you see in a day?” And he wrote back and said that he was out during the day with his friends and they saw somebody’s face get blown off, and then they watched the movie that night with about 400 people and they were all screaming. But when they’re on the battlefield, you have to be a machine. You can’t react emotionally. You have to tactically respond to a situation. And these guys are going out every day seeing this horrible stuff, and they’re not allowed to be scared. But it all gets stored up, and it’s got to come out. And when they watch Hostel, it’s basically saying, for the next 90 minutes, not only are you allowed to be scared, you’re encouraged to be scared because it’s okay to be terrified.34

  Roth does not explicitly invoke Freud in his explanation, but that is only because the theory of the repressed and released Id has now attained the paradigm status of common sense. But if torture porn encourages a purging of anxieties, it certainly adds new, previously unimaginable images of vulnerability to the audience’s experience. When they encounter a grisly corpse, the father warns his son in Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road (2006), “Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever.”35 It remains to be seen whether or not the fears and anxieties
that torture porn takes out of viewers by catharsis is superseded by the new fears it puts in.36

  A compelling alternative to this theory of horror, the catharsis of dangerous inner drives, is the idea that slasher and monster films are just subspecies of the traditional morality tale. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argued that myths, whether ancient or cinematic, have very similar sociocultural functions. The purpose of the mythic narrative is to make the world intelligible, to use magical means to resolve the contradictions of life. Perhaps this general point can be applied to the horror genre. In many myths, heroes overcome monsters as a mechanism by which we resolve our anxieties about injustices in the world. Our daily experience is filled with bad guys who are winning and prospering while good guys are losing and suffering. Our films are cultural narratives that bring in justice where it otherwise seems fugitive. On this account, horror movies must end with a profound reckoning for the monsters, otherwise the “restoration of justice” thesis cannot hold. Of course, many horror films do indeed end with a final triumph of good over evil and may stand as evidence for this thesis. In addition, the popularity of first-person shooter video games such as Halo, wherein the gamer can fight monsters directly and blast virtual justice into place, seems to be evidence for a very satisfying moral application of aggression. Nefarious aliens and zombies populate a whole genre of “survival horror” video games, such as Resident Evil, and draw a large market of young men who want to punish monsters themselves. Why leave the meting out of justice to Hollywood stars when you can do it yourself?

  CREEPING FLESH

  Although much more could be said about the relationship between horror monsters and human vulnerability, I wish to briefly describe one other significant trend. The monsters of horror are ostensibly external agents of menace, but positioning them in the context of philosophical pessimism and Freudian psychology has, I hope, rendered their subjective inner dimension apparent. Freud explains the logic of projection in a way that explicitly connects the inner and outer monsters. “Phobias,” he explains, “have the character of a projection in that they replace an internal instinctual danger by an external perceptual one. The advantage of this is that the subject can protect himself against an external danger by fleeing from it and avoiding the perception of it, whereas it is useless to flee from dangers that arise from within.”37

  In twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror we have a relatively new aesthetic focus on the subjective revulsion and terror of the flesh—in short, the terror of all things biological. After Darwin we have a radically different theoretical picture of nature, and when we combine this with our age of time-lapse photography, electron microscopy, and penetrating nature documentaries, we have a new and chilling sense of biological suffering.38 Reflect for a moment on the Rhizocephala or “root-headed” barnacle that lives its life feeding inside crabs and other crustaceans. This complex organism attaches itself to the shell of the crab, bores a hole through the shell, and deposits a tiny seed of itself into the crab’s body, whereupon the outside attachment falls off the host’s shell and the seed begins to grow inside. Next the seed begins to spread throughout the crab in a series of complex root systems, often infiltrating, like a creeping vine, every limb of the crab. This root system castrates its host (thus precluding the crab’s continuation of the gene line), stops the crab’s molting cycle, and keeps it alive, all the while feeding off it, for years. Or consider the tarantula hawk, a giant wasp (Pepsis) that hunts tarantulas as a food supply for its larvae. The wasp paralyzes a tarantula with its powerful sting, then bites off its legs for easier transport and carries it back to a burrow, where it lays an egg on the spider’s paralyzed body. When the wasp larva hatches, it feeds slowly on the still living tarantula, even carefully avoiding at first the consumption of working vital organs to guarantee extended freshness. Not even the most inventive Hollywood writers can spin tales this fantastic, yet it is the bread and butter of biology.

  Predator-prey and host-parasite relationships are more detailed and documented than ever before. The contemporary imagination is flooded with images of the macabre side of nature, and our own bodies seem to be battlegrounds for viruses, bacteria, and other immunological nightmares. Not all the monsters inside us are psychological, but of course the sense of vulnerability stemming from this new biology is psychological.

  Should we thank the E. coli in our gut that helps us to digest? Should we alternatively blame the virus that is breaking down our immune system and spreading through the host population? These organisms are not evil or noble creatures, intentionally wreaking havoc or health; they are simply doing what comes naturally, surviving and reproducing. This is not meant to sound callous or insensitive, for it is obvious that our struggle with other organisms matters a great deal to us, causing real despair. But from the more general evolutionary perspective, this drama is value-neutral.

  Many science fiction horror films explicitly recognize this metaphysical position and build it into the deranged scientist character, who respects the adaptive power of the alien creature even as it devours his comrades and himself. The increasingly detached Dr. Carrington of the film The Thing (1951) proclaims a number of dialogue gems, many of which have echoed throughout this genre’s films, including “There are no enemies in science, only phenomena to study.” In a soliloquy to the alien at the end of the film, Carrington gushes about the superiority of this magnificent monster species, whose adaptive powers are far beyond our own. The alien responds to this admiration, of course, by bludgeoning the good doctor.

  Legions of mad scientists from sci-fi monster stories act as personifications of the Darwinian metaphysic. Our culture betrays its uneasiness with the Darwinian paradigm by making these characters slightly insane and definitely dangerous. These mad scientists understand the value-neutral character of natural selection; they understand that humans have no exalted place and are not insulated from a process that might eventually lead to their extinction. And they understand that this process knows nothing and cares nothing about the human tragedy that may result. The aliens of these films are destroying and even torturing human lives, but always inadvertently. Human suffering, in this genre, is an unintended outcome of the predator’s natural survival and reproductive techniques. It is this quality of innocence preceding the aliens’ destructive consequences that invokes the peculiar admiration of the scientists in these films. It also prevents us from applying the old lexicon of “evil” to these monsters.

  The original “thing,” part animal, part vegetable, all sinister. From Howard Hawk’s 1951 classic The Thing from Another World (RKO, Turner Broadcasting). Image courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.

  Recent horror, from Lovecraft to Cronenberg to H. R. Giger, tries to give us a subjective participatory experience of vulnerable flesh rather than just a spectator’s observation. The films make our skin crawl. The influence of evolutionary and paleontology data is clear in earlier bio-horror such as King Kong (1933), Godzilla (1954), and Them (1954),39 but a creepier focus on nauseating reproduction, disease, injury, and decay seems to have risen to dominance in the last quarter of the twentieth century. David Cronenberg’s 1979 film The Brood and Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien are good examples of this disturbing mixture of reproduction anxiety, parasite monstrosity, and human vulnerability. The scene in which Scott and Giger’s chest-bursting alien appears, “fanged, phallic, and fetal,” seems to have shaped over three decades of subsequent monster aesthetics.40 Was the film itself shaped by larger social anxieties surrounding abortion and reproductive rights during the 1970s? Are the current films and novels about apocalyptic, monstrous disease epidemics the result of contemporary anxieties over biochemical warfare? Do Americans feel more vulnerable after 9/11 and now seek to exorcise those emotions via torture porn? One suspects that the correlations are not entirely accidental.

  The aesthetic created by H. R. Giger for Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien (20th Century Fox) continues to set the tone for a whole genre of films interested in
exploring the vulnerabilities of post-Darwinian biology. Image courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.

  THE MORE HARDCORE FREUDIAN ARGUMENT eschews specific sociopolitical contextualization. In every civilization, emerging adolescent sexuality is always fraught with intense repression pressures, so that new and powerful libidinal impulses cannot be straightforwardly fulfilled. According to Freud, the urges themselves and their hard-won containment involve a high degree of aggression. In this view, torture porn is just an increasingly efficient catharsis of built-up adolescent sexual energy; thus it is unsurprising that the target demographic audiences for such films are teenagers.

  MY GOAL IN THIS CHAPTER HAS BEEN TO EXPLORE the recent emphasis on the subjective emotional and cognitive aspects of monsterology, aspects that parallel the rise of psychology and underscore the philosophy of human fragility and vulnerability. Monsters make up a significant part of the frightening underbelly of modernity, whether they are only hinted at in the uncanny experience or are chasing us with chainsaws. Monsters of contemporary horror are not like their medieval counterparts, who were more like God’s henchmen. That older paradigm held out the inevitability of monstrous defeat by divine justice, but the contemporary monster is often a reminder of theological abandonment and the accompanying angst. Nor are the more recent horror monsters like the monsters of the Enlightenment, products of human superstition that can be conquered by the light of reason. Monsters after Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud are features of the irrevocable irrationality inside the human subject and outside in nature.