Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  Popular culture in the next two decades mirrored real American anxieties over the Cold War, communist subversives at home, the changing nature of American adolescence, and the American family, as well as ongoing concerns about race relations. But in these pop culture mirrors, most Americans saw the world only as they wished to see it. Horror and science fiction became escapist in the worst sense of the word. The monster films of the 1950s in particular told tales that reflected certain aspects of real-world anxieties but that also urged viewers to forget their anxiety and to trust the military, political, and scientific establishment to chase the monsters away.

  Four

  ALIEN INVASIONS

  Someday something’s coming / From way out beyond the stars / To kill us while we stand here / It will store our brains in mason jars.

  —“Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” The Mountain Goats

  Legendary producer and director Howard Hawks’ 1951 The Thing from Another World featured a group of American scientists and military men at an arctic station who discover a giant craft frozen in the tundra. An Air Force captain suggests to the team that perhaps the craft belonged to the Soviets since “they are all over the Pole, like flies.” Attempting to extract the giant ship ends in its destruction, but the scientists and Air Force personnel manage to save a “Thing” trapped in a block of ice.

  The escape of the Thing from its ice prison sets off a debate between Dr. Carrington and the Air Force officers. Carrington believes that the creature can be a “source of wisdom.” Unfortunately, the Thing turns out to be a bloodsucking creature, an extraterrestrial Bela Lugosi that the Air Force men have to destroy (though not before it does violence to Dr. Carrington when he tries to communicate with it). After the struggle with the alien is complete, a reporter uses the base radio to announce the perilous incident to all humanity: “Here at the top of the world a handful of American soldiers and civilians met the first invasion from another planet,” he says. Triumphantly telling his listeners that the Thing has been destroyed, he ends with a warning. “Tell the world. Tell this to everybody, wherever they are. Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep Looking. Keep watching the skies.”

  The Thing from Another World Poster

  America in the 1950s lived in the shadow of the atom bomb. After the Soviet Union developed and tested atomic weapons in 1949, the possibility of a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers seemed both likely and imminent. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist behind the Manhattan Project who publicly lamented his part in creating such a weapon, described the two nuclear powers as “scorpions in a bottle” certain to “kill each other.”1

  Americans in the nuclear age tremulously watched the skies much as the final lines of The Thing had insisted. Most watched not for extraterrestrials, but for the sudden flash of an atomic weapon, the signal to “duck and cover” if they were not one of the families lucky enough to have a private bomb shelter. Many convinced themselves, with plenty of help from government and military officials, that a nuclear exchange was survivable, a war in which America would likely even come out on top.2

  American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security. The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle-class families to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation.3

  American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of “creature features” proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders in flying saucers, radioactive mutations, and giant creatures born of the atomic age wreaked havoc but were soon destroyed by brainy teams of civilian scientists in cooperation with the American military. These films encouraged a certain degree of paranoia but also offered quick and easy relief to this anxiety. Horror film scholar Andrew Tudor, after surveying the vast number of monsters raised and dispatched by science in the 1950s, concluded that such films did not so much teach Americans to “stop worrying and love the bomb” as to “keep worrying and love the state.”4

  America’s monsters did not disappear despite the best efforts of conformist 1950s culture. Popular culture produced monster tales that sought to rob monsters of their power, but a growing underground folklore of urban legend warned the nation that the monster might threaten the safe world of midwestern farms or suburban neighborhoods. America’s monstrous past even found its way into a post-World War II religious revival as communism and its agents became satanic monsters in the eyes of nervous Americans. And while millions of Americans turned to either to the Reverend Billy Graham or Bishop Fulton Sheen for spiritual succor, others sought out new religious movements that made monsters from beyond the stars into gods and explained the secret history of the world as a story of friendly alien invaders.5

  Mutant Horrors

  Post-World War II America put aside its interest in some of the monsters of yesteryear. The sideshow declined in popularity during the 1950s, as did the freak show that had been its central attraction. The freak shows of Coney Island, for example, closed down in the late 1940s as real estate developers sought to “clean up” area attractions. In 1947 the New York World noted that “freaks still attract curious stragglers on Coney Island midway” but also predicted “hard times ahead” for “the Mule Face Boy” and “the Turtle Girl.” 6

  Reformers used the rhetoric of “human dignity” against the sideshow during this era. The increasing medicalization of human abnormality led to the institutionalization of many of the people who would have once performed as freaks. A few found their way into the new monster movies of the 1950s. The 1953 classic Invaders from Mars featured eight-foot-six Max Palmer (“the world’s tallest man”) in an unconvincing green velour mutant costume.7

  The sharp dip in the popularity of the sideshow freaks grew out of the desire of many Americans to escape the horrors of history in the aftermath of World War II by creating a safe and sanitized public culture. A number of historians have argued that advisor and diplomat George Kennan’s notion of “containment” in relation to Soviet communism became a kind of metaphor for postwar culture as a whole. Conservative forces in American government, corporate culture, and religion sought to restrict access to impulses that would shock or produce discontent in American women and adolescents, as well as racial and sexual minorities. The whole culture sought containment from threats ranging from nuclear fallout to deadly microbes to, in popular folklore and popular culture, alien invasions.8

  This did not mean that monsters disappeared from public life. Fascination with the gothic fears of freakery at the sideshow seems to have been displaced in postwar America by a fascination with the monstrous mutant in the movie theater. Atomic age fears of the dangers of radioactivity and nuclear fallout awakened the possibility of a silent, unbeatable horror—an odorless, tasteless, invisible death that could twist human bodies into horrible shapes.9

  In February of 1956 the movie industry magazine Boxoffice described how “ever since the atomic explosions” the deadly possibilities of “mutations to animal life because of radioactive fall
out” had caused a boom for science fiction films. While middle-class America seemingly had little desire to view freaks for entertainment (and certainly not to see them on the streets), science fiction fantasies about mutants, usually created by radiation, became a major box-office draw. In the decades after World War II, American moviegoers saw the utter destruction of their major cities from fifty-foot women and giant insects, monstrous beings created by radiation or nuclear testing. American horror in the first years of the cold war raised creatures from under the earth and sea, gigantic destructive creatures frequently called forth by scientists and government officials but almost always defeated by scientific know-how and the national security state.10

  Fear of how the public would respond to the realities of radioactivity and fallout led to a massive disinformation campaign by the American government in the years after the Second World War. In the late 1940s historian Paul Boyer points out, government civil defense plans sought to “downplay the danger of radiation in an atomic attack.” Seeking to eliminate public fears about the dangers of fallout from atomic tests, official government educational pamphlets, such as How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, advised readers to ignore the “foolish stories” that they had heard of radiation’s dangers and to “learn not to be afraid of those words ‘radiation’ and ‘radioactivity.’”11

  Efforts to dismiss fears of radioactivity quickly found their way into Hollywood films. In 1954 Japanese filmmaker Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (Godzilla) used the Japanese Yokai (“monster”) tradition to tell a finely wrought tale of the dangers of the nuclear era. Using imagery borrowed directly from the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gojira contained a number of highly politicized digs at the United States and its atomic policy. The monster is raised by atomic testing and only destroyed, not by more scientific/military wizardry, but by the willingness of human beings to sacrifice themselves. A 1956 release of the film to American audiences chopped and slashed Hondo’s moving tale into unrecognizability. Using much of the footage from Hondo’s original, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (as the U.S. release was called) added an American reporter as a hero and sublimated the atomic theme. All references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were eliminated.12

  Survivors of America’s use of atomic weapons proved a more powerful image than Godzilla. In 1955 the so-called Hiroshima Maidens, twenty-five young Japanese women who as children had been horribly burned and disfigured by the first atomic bomb, came to the United States to receive corrective surgery. A Hiroshima minister, himself a survivor of the attack, joined with Saturday Review of Literature editor Norman Cousins in an effort to transform their visit into agitprop against nuclear weapons. Staying in host homes throughout New York City, the women received a significant degree of attention. The American government watched uneasily. Cold war historian Margot Henrikson notes that once-secret communiqués between Washington and American officials in Japan now reveal official concern over whether or not the Hiroshima Maidens represented communist agitation.13

  We now know Americans had more to fear from radiation than they ever realized. Secret tests by the U.S. government and major institutions of American medicine, not an all-out nuclear exchange, exposed thousands of American citizens to sickness and death. Between 1948 and 1952 the government released radioactive material on select American communities to “see how it moved.” In almost the same period, doctors connected with Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital fed small amounts of radioactive food to mentally retarded children in order to study its effects on human digestion and to determine whether an antidote for radiation sickness could be developed.14

  Exposing mentally retarded test subjects to dangerous radiation seemed perfectly reasonable to medical researchers in the postwar period. Strong cultural connections between mental and physical abnormality and the idea of the monster remained, even if the freak show had gone into decline. Mental retardation signaled both physical abnormality and social shame, an expendable class of Americans. In an era that fetishized normalcy, birth defects represented a kind of social death.15

  Ironically, the health of children was very much on the minds of the “baby-boomer” parents who, between 1946 and 1964, brought seventy-nine million children into the world. Given the amount of cultural attention being paid to the possibility of radiation creating mutant monsters, it is not surprising that the baby boom created its fair share of monster tales. Unfortunately for many Americans, these horror stories were real and affected tens of thousands of families and their children.

  In 1962 a tranquilizer known as thalidomide had been advertised to expectant mothers as a “cure” for morning sickness (and as a salve for anxiety). Soon afterward, the drug was discovered to act as a reagent for profound birth defects. Extreme craniofacial deformity became a common side effect, as were children born with stunted or missing limbs. A panic ensued. David J. Skal notes that tabloid newspapers “became actual sideshows” with photographs of “freakish” births and headlines like “New Thalidomide Monsters.”16

  Therapeutic abortion represented one humane option for dealing with this living horror, but state laws passed in the late nineteenth century made receiving a safe procedure next to impossible. In this context, Sherri Finkbine became the most public face of the thalidomide tragedy in America. Finkbine, the host of a local Phoenix, Arizona, version of the children’s program Romper Room, took thalidomide during the first trimester of her pregnancy. Discovering the dangers of the drug and counseled by her doctor, she attempted, unsuccessfully, to obtain an abortion in the United States. Amidst death threats, she and her husband traveled to Sweden to secure medical treatment. The fetus, remarked the attending physician, had no limbs or face and likely would have died at birth.17

  Mutations seem to threaten all the cornerstones of American domestic life. If they could live in the womb, they could certainly pay a visit to your neighborhood. The Love Canal tragedy, which unfolded over three decades, further underscored the dangers of scientific mutations. In the early twentieth century, William T. Love imagined a modern, industrial “dream community”—a utopia of middle-class American values and technological innovation in upstate New York. By the 1910s his dream had died, and by the 1920s, the site was used to dump chemical and industrial waste, buried beneath the earth like the monster of a late night drive-in feature. In 1958 the Hooker Chemical Company sold the waste site to the city of Love Canal for one dollar. The site became a thriving working-class community, though one with an unusual number of birth defects that became increasingly severe over time. By the late 1970s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that, for a twenty-five year period, eighty-two different kinds of chemical compounds (eleven of them carcinogenic) had leached through the soil.18

  The outcome of Love Canal seems like a monster tale. An official from the EPA who visited the community in 1979 found a landscape from a postapocalyptic nightmare. “Corroding waste disposal barrels,” he wrote, “could be seen breaking up through the grounds of backyards. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying … Puddles of noxious chemicals were pointed out to me in basements, others yet were on school playgrounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands.”19

  Americans had every reason to be afraid of monster mutations in the postwar era. Cultural fears can create strange refractions, a desire to deal with fear by transforming anxiety into desire. This combination of worry and fascination over the menace of mutation appears in the overwhelming popularity of the costumed heroes of Marvel Comics. Marvel’s history stretched back to the 1930s when the small company had been known as Timely Comics. Marvel found a large audience during World War II when legendary artist Jack Kirby created Captain America, a super-soldier who fought Axis evil with his allies Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch. In the postwar period, Marvel published popular war comics, as well as horror and sci-fi. Many of these titles dealt with the possibility of radiation creating mutated monsters.20


  Marvel’s line took a definitive turn in 1961 when editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby created The Fantastic Four, a comic that turned human mutations into heroes. The setting for the transformation of the four is a scientific experiment gone wrong, the soon-to-be heroes exposed to what Stan Lee called, in his original synopsis of the story, “cosmic rays.” These unidentified rays granted all four special powers and changed one of them into a super-powered monster, which Lee called “the Thing” (obviously a riff on the 1951 film). Thing, though a member of the four and a hero, was originally imagined by Stan Lee as so monstrous that his fellow superheroes worried that he might eventually lose control of his short temper and destroy humanity.21

  The popularity of Marvel’s new supergroup christened a remarkably creative era in which Marvel artists collaborated to produce a lineup of costumed heroes that became icons of popular culture. Almost all of these are mutated human heroes, created from some kind of radioactivity. Peter Parker as Spider-Man premiered in August of 1962, transformed into a human arachnid after being bitten by a radioactive spider. Daredevil, blinded by radioactive sludge, is also given extraordinary powers by the industrial accident. The X-Men, young people born with special powers, are actually referred to as mutants. Their strange abilities are seen by the larger society as a kind of birth defect, further proof that Marvel had channeled the nation’s collective nightmares.