Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  The story proved to have legs as well as giant feet and soon attracted the attention of a little-known subculture of monster hunters. The story hit Ivan Sanderson, a trained zoologist, like a lightning bolt. Sanderson’s career had always displayed a taste for the strange and exotic combined with a penchant for showmanship. Successful nature books in the late 1930s had made him well known, and his interest in “unexplained phenomena” led to his being a frequent guest on both radio and later television.

  Sanderson’s interest in “unexplained animals” went back to his student days. Walking the line between popularizing science and Barnumesque showmanship, Sanderson made it his goal to create a new field of study that would involve “the collection and examination of evidence for the existence of any creatures as yet unknown to and unidentified by zoologists.”58

  Sanderson pursued a strange path first cut by the amateur naturalist and failed novelist Charles Fort. In the 1920s Fort mounted a full-throated assault on scientific positivism. His Book of the Damned (by damned he meant “facts” excluded a priori by science) examined the question of sea serpents, strange climatic conditions, and unexplained wonders in the sky. Fort mastered a writing style that seemed skeptical and hard-nosed about strange phenomena while also poking at the scientific establishment for its allegedly hidebound notions of truth. His writings are so influential among those interested in unexplained phenomena that “Forteanism” has found expression in quasi-academic associations and popular magazines.59

  Sanderson saw in Fort’s writings a mirror of his own interests and worldview. By the early ’50s, Sanderson had used the Fortean approach to stake out a claim as a paranormal expert. He had also become a close friend and frequent correspondent with Bernard Heuvelmans, a French zoologist whose 1955 On the Track of Unknown Animals became a kind of bible for cryptozoological investigators. Both men served as advisors to Tom Slick, a multimillionaire who made his fortune in the Texas oil boom. Slick had used his fortune in the late 1950s to fund expeditions to the Himalayas in search of “the Yeti,” better known as “The Abominable Snowman” (a creature that both Heuvelmanns and Sanderson wrote about at length). Slick provided the funds for the first “Bigfoot expedition” in Humboldt County in the fall of 1959.

  Slick’s expedition caught the imagination of the public. In December, Sanderson published an article in True, a popular men’s magazine that featured pseudo-journalism and adventure stories, entitled “The Strange Story of America’s Abominable Snowman.” Bigfoot mania exploded. By 1960 several more expeditions, a Hollywood production company, and even some alternative religious groups had made the pilgrimage to Humboldt County. Teams of monster hunters and their yapping dogs filled the Bluff Creek area. The uproar in northern California lasted for close to two years, with funding for Bigfoot research drying up after Slick’s death in 1962.60

  Bigfoot quickly became America’s most famous “hidden animal.” Interest in his existence tended to blend into fascination with UFOs, sea or lake monsters, and various other cryptids. Sanderson formed “The Society for the Unexplained” in 1965, an organization that focused on unexplained creatures and phenomena of all kinds. In 1967 he wrote a book called Uninvited Visitors, which examined UFO sightings. Meanwhile his colleague, Bernard Heuvelmans, published In the Wake of Sea Serpents, which called on the scientific community to embark on a new hunt for the creature he insisted had “finished its wandering among the monsters of mythology and returned to the fold of zoology.”61

  These monster hunters represent a profound shift in American cultural attitudes toward science. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a growing cynicism about the scientific worldview and introduced new discourses about the unreliability of science as the final arbiter of significant questions. Belief in cryptids, and in the individuals who publicized them, offered the public an alternative vision of scientific knowledge. At its heart, the cryptid obsession provided a counternarrative to the idea that scientific experts connected to major universities and funded by the government had rationalized the world.

  The birth of modern creationism in the post-World War II era represents another strand of this phenomenon. Proponents of so-called scientific creationism rely heavily on the claim that mainstream science exerts excessive control over the basis for knowledge of the world. Creationists make, in essence, the same argument as Charles Fort, that science represents a system of control based on circular assumptions that exclude certain facts a priori. Recent efforts by proponents of Creationism (and of its new incarnation as the “Intelligent Design” movement) assert similar claims when they argue that creationism should be taught alongside evolutionary biology so that by “teaching the controversy” the classroom can become a democracy of ideas.62

  Mainstream science has responded to the claims of monster hunters and creationists much as it did to sea serpent mania. Data never collected and irreproducible can never be analyzed. Until empirical evidence for Bigfoot or an omnipotent creator deity turns up, such questions are not scientific questions at all. For many Americans then and now, these assertions proved unsatisfying and were perhaps even evidence of the inherent limitations of science.

  The cryptid hunters themselves became living counter-symbols to the increasingly untrustworthy men in white lab coats. Many of them seemed to embody the explorer and amateur zoologist of an earlier era, setting off on expeditions/safaris that were the stuff of men’s adventure magazines. Ivan Sanderson’s first claim to fame had been a book about his adventures in Africa. Tom Slick had a photograph of himself taken after his Himalayan Yeti expedition that made him look every inch the gentleman adventurer. Peter Byrne, a cryptid hunter funded by Slick in the late ’50s was described as looking as if he had “stepped out of a comic strip … in safari clothes, replete with ascot and bush hat.” A character straight out of central casting, Byrne had been a big-game hunter before he began hunting monsters.63

  The cryptid hunters seemed more Indiana Jones than Dr. Strangelove. Cryptid hunters on the search for the unexplained became a way for many Americans to express faith in science as an investigative system while also doubting the scientific establishment and its authority. Rather than cooking up monstrous creations in test tubes, these were men of science who explored the hidden parts of the earth and brought back tales of wonder. This image suited Americans who had begun to have doubts about the world science had brought them.64

  The cryptid mania of the ’50s and ’60s reflected changes in the images of science in American pop culture. A number of scholars looking at horror films from this same era have noted that the role of the “expert” begins to change in significant ways during this period. If the 1930s had been the apogee of the mad scientist and the 1950s the age of the heroic professional who makes use of science to defeat scientific threats, the 1960s fully embraced the idea of science out of control. Rather than a rebirth of “the mad scientist,” this seems to be the birth of “mad science,” chaotic forces outside the control of human agency. 65

  The American tradition of horror began to change in the new decade. By the 1960s alien invaders and mutant monsters departed the film screen and popular consciousness as quickly as they had appeared. Many younger Americans, adolescents, and teens, had already stopped watching the skies during the 1950s. Boomer kids began searching out monsters that came from the tomb (or that lived next door) rather than from Mars, rediscovering the creatures that had frightened their grandparents and finding new horrors in old dark places. America was about to go goth all over again.

  Night Falls on the Endless Summer

  In 1954 thousands of adolescents in the Los Angeles area sought to cajole their parents into letting them stay up after 11:00 p.m. If dubious parents could be convinced, boomer kids could watch, as if hypnotized, a visitor from another world. This was no alien from another planet or multieyed mutant menace, but rather an emissary from the world of gothic past and the future of horror to come. Amid the flying saucers, the giant bugs, and false optimism of the ’50
s, Vampira struck a sexy, discordant note.

  Vampira was Maila Nurmi, a former exotic dancer who had been offered the opportunity to host a block of late-night horror films for Los Angeles station KABC-TV. Dressed in a black rayon cocktail dress, with black nails and arched black eyebrows, Vampira dripped scary and inviting sensuality. Horror historian David Skal remembers her as a being with an “impossible waist-line” and “the cartoon bosom of a sex goddess,” who appeared out of the dry-ice mist to the sound of eerie organ music and introduced the children of the atom to a night of 1930s horror.66

  Nurmi drew on an underground 1950s subculture little known to most Americans. In all likelihood, parents would have locked the television away if they had known that Nurmi took her inspiration not only from the evil queen of Disney’s Snow White but also from an S&M magazine known as Bizarre. Campy and knowing, Vampira represented a cultural pastiche of American dreams and nightmares, Disney and bondage, the vampire and the vamp.

  Beloved by adolescents, Vampira struck out with parents who found her simply too shocking. Although appearing in a four-page photo shoot in Life, Vampira was cancelled after a wild eight-month run. Nevertheless, in that short time, she had created a cultural icon that reanimated periodically as Morticia Addams, Elvira the horror host, and Vampirella the sexy comic book vampire. America in 1954 was just not ready yet.

  Nurmi had drawn Vampira from the dark well of late twentieth-century American culture. At a time when it seemed that flying saucers had brought the monsters destined to take over the world, she heralded the return of a gothic sensibility that never entirely disappeared. Throughout the 1950s, some of the same kids that stayed up late watching Vampira enjoyed the horrific thrills of EC comics and their popular “Tales from the Crypt” series. In the final years of the decade, Vincent Price appeared in enormously successful films that featured apparitions, psychological mayhem, and twisted desires. The schizophrenic fifties, with its sunny optimism and paranoid watching of the skies, would soon worry about the things from the crypt.

  Vampira

  Gothic America revived, spinning in every direction through American culture like a spiderweb. Nurmi created her sex-drenched vampire goddess in an effort to attract the attention of another 1950s gothicist, Charles Addams. Nurmi hoped that Addams, a cartoonist for the New Yorker known for his macabre images and bleak sense of humor, might see Vampira and decide that his drawings had television potential.

  Addams himself represents the gothic undertow of the postwar era, foreshadowing a host of new American monster obsessions. In 1932 he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to take art classes. Soon after, he held his first media position retouching photographs for the popular men’s magazine known as True Detective (his job was to remove the blood in crime scene photographs). The same year he left college, he sold his first cartoon to the New Yorker, and by 1936, became a regular staff contributor. In half a century with the influential magazine, his macabre sense of humor created an iconography of American gothic, including the characters that became the basis for the television hit The Addams Family. Addams himself became an icon of the gothic style, with rumors circulating that he had periodic bouts of insanity (untrue) and that he collected medieval weapons and had been married in a pet cemetery (true on both counts).67

  Many of Addams’ cartoons skewered postwar America’s visions of consumer abundance and domestic bliss. These images walked the line between humor and horror, as in an example from his 1950 collection Monster Rally, which shows a wife sitting in a chair, munching on a box of chocolates. Her husband is coming up behind her as she says “Now don’t come back asking me to forgive you.” What the wife cannot see is that he carries a hatchet in one hand and a bag for her body parts in the other. In another mordant image of postwar married life, a wife looks on as her husband, in an attempt to hang himself, gets his arm caught in the noose. “Can’t you do anything right?” she scolds.68

  American consumerism’s relationship to the supposedly ideal family also received a gothic send-up from Addams. In one of his most commented on images, a happy housewife tells police investigators that she has found her own way of escaping Betty Friedan’s “feminine mystique”:

  I disconnected the booster from the Electro-Snuggie Blanket and put him in the deep freeze. In the morning, I defrosted him and ran him through the Handi Home Slicer and then the Jiffy Burger Grind and after that I fed him down the Dispose-All. Then I washed my clothes in the Bendix, tidied up the kitchen and went to a movie.69

  Addams’ cartoons exuded unease about the central icons of postwar America and challenged any notion of the 1950s as an era of simple consensus. Although powerful corporate, religious, and governmental forces in American life wanted to turn postwar America into a land of consumer bliss and traditional values, dissent appeared everywhere, bubbling to the surface in preparation for the ’60s explosion. Historian Weini Breines captures this mood perfectly when she describes the era as a time of “liberating possibilities masked by restrictive norms.”70

  The aliens had not landed, but monsters were everywhere. Even Freaks made a comeback. In 1962, the same year as Tod Browning died, the Venice Film Festival screened Freaks in hopes of stirring the growing fascination with “camp” cinema. Browning’s masterpiece quickly became a standard attraction on the art house circuit and encouraged numerous writers, theorists, and artists to reconsider the meaning of the freak show. A viewing of the film at the New York Theatre on the Upper West Side inspired the legendary Diane Arbus, whose photographic oeuvre became focused on the marginalized and abnormal. Arbus repeatedly viewed the film and eventually photographed Andrew Ratoucheff, a Russian midget who had starred in Browning’s celebration of abnormality.71

  Vampira’s brief and shadowy appearance, the macabre humor of Charles Addams, and the second coming of gothic freakdom signaled sundown for American cultural life, a coming gothicization that would become a part of American culture for the next half century. Serial killers soon became America’s monster du jour, while gothic horrors of all types made a triumphant return from the grave.72

  By the 1960s postwar social needs had created discourses about mental illness, fears of violence, and the impersonal nature of modern life. You did not have to go messing about in crypts and dungeons to find something lurking. The monster might live next door, might live in your house, or might even live inside you. Monsters stalked Americans in an age of growing dread. As Norman Bates said in Albert Hitchock’s 1960 Psycho, “We all go a little mad sometimes.”

  Five

  DEVIANT BODIES

  I finally convinced myself that it was good to do it, necessary to do it, and that the public wanted me to do it. The latter part I believe until this day. I believe that many were rooting for me.

  —David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam” killer

  Welcome to prime time, bitch!

  —Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

  The story of Marion Crane, a beautiful young woman having an illicit affair, seemed to follow the general outline of Hitchcockian narratives. Crane steals money from her boss in hopes of attaining the postwar American dream of domestic bliss and conspicuous consumption. Then she goes on the lam.

  Audiences came to see Psycho expecting a suspenseful thriller along the lines of North By Northwest or simply a big-screen version of the offbeat espionage and crime tales on Hitchcock’s popular television series. Packing in to theaters all over the country to see Psycho, the forty-seventh film by the “Master of suspense,” moviegoers received a shocking, blood-drenched welcome to the 1960s.

  Psycho’s opening scene titillated viewers with Crane (played by Janet Leigh) in white negligee, talking to her lover in a hotel room about their need for money. Audiences, though they would have likely disapproved of her when she steals from her boss, likely identified with her as she sets out for a new life. Viewers experienced a growing unease as Crane gets lost on a dark and stormy night and stops at a hotel with a frighteni
ng, California gothic house leering over it. The young proprietor Norman Bates, though strange, comes across at first as shy and even charming. Moreover, Tony Perkins played the role of the odd young man, and his previous film work had been in light comedy and romance, suggesting that he might become Crane’s ally and maybe even a new romantic interest.

  Suddenly, like thrill-seekers on a roller coaster that had slowly bumped its way to the top of the track, audiences felt their stomachs heave as the film took a precipitous and terrifying plunge. As Leigh, alone in her room, begins to take a shower, the curtain suddenly rips open and a shadowy figure with a butcher knife begins plunging the weapon repeatedly into Leigh’s naked flesh. Thirty-four segments, edited together at furious speed into a sequence lasting less than a minute, increased the feeling of the attack’s suddenness and brutality. Leigh’s body crumpled over the edge of the tub with blood swirling down the drain while audiences went from shocked screams to stunned silence.1

  Esquire called Psycho “a reflection of the most unpleasant mind, a mean, sly sadistic little mind.” Numerous reviewers exuded distaste and not a little anger at the director himself. The New York Times called the film “a blot on an honorable career.” One reviewer, after calling it “the most vile and disgusting film ever made,” added that he found it especially disheartening that a director of Hitchcock’s prominence had been responsible for it.2

  Early critical rejection did not prevent Psycho from changing American movies forever. A box-office smash, the film exercised enormous influence over American filmmaking, opening the door for young directors like Sam Peckinpah, who made use of explosive violence to create riveting human dramas. Psycho also prepared the way for the mainstreaming of violence in widely distributed horror films that gained a much larger audience than older drive-in, exploitation fare had ever succeeded in garnering.3