Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  Norman Bates became an early representation of a new American monster. The end of the twentieth century belonged to the murdering maniac, a creature not born from the supernatural shadows or cobbled together in a lab, but coming to deadly life in the midst of American family structures. As a debate simmered over cultural change, the horror film accused the American family of producing monsters. Psycho wielded its knife in the middle of a broad American conversation about mental health, crime, gender, family life, sex, and the societal changes of the 1960s.

  Tales of Love and Death

  The very title of Psycho shook Americans in 1960, especially given the amount of attention the nation’s public culture had given to mental health in the fifteen years since World War II. The growth of the psychiatric profession in those years, as well as the frequent prescription of tranquilizers, was a response to a growing number of Americans seeking relief from intense anxiety.

  Nervous Americans took over one billion tranquilizers annually during the 1950s. By 1956 patients seeking help with mental health issues took up more beds in American hospitals than any other category of complaint. Offhand references to the daily use of powerful drugs, such as phenobarbital, became common in films and television. In Psycho, Marion Crane’s coworker urges her to relieve an afternoon headache by taking powerful tranquilizers she happens to have in her bag.4

  Even the federal government became concerned about the mental stability of postwar America. In 1955 then-Vice President Richard Nixon used a photo op on the steps of the Capitol to proclaim “mental health week.” One civil defense informational film urged its listeners to stock their fallout shelters with tranquilizers “to ease the strain and monotony of life.”5

  American children keenly felt the strain of these years. Todd Gitlin, President of the Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s, remembered “duck and cover drills” combined with sudden air raid sirens that made him and his classmates wonder if “the world we had been born into was destined to endure.” Adults seemed unaware that adolescent anxiety was largely caused by the enormously dangerous state of the world. Rather than addressing those seemingly intractable problems, parents, teachers, doctors, and law enforcement sought more easily attainable solutions. Concerns about adolescent mental health found expression in PTA drives for mental health awareness and the growth of a discourse about so-called juvenile delinquency. Leaders in education, law enforcement, and psychiatry became convinced of a growing epidemic of violence and alienation among American teenagers. Concerned adults began to worry that the mischievous hijinks of “the Beave” masked the snarling face of James Dean.6

  Increasingly, their concerns centered on media and its influence over young minds. Fredric Wertham’s popular book Seduction of the Innocent (1954) made the case that comic books exerted a malicious influence on children, preparing them for a life of crime and delinquency. Wertham’s writing, which frequently made an appearance in magazines directed at middle-class mothers such as Family Circle, helped lead to a full Senate investigation of comics in the year of its publication.7

  Wertham and the Senate committee focused their ire primarily on horror and crime comics, many of them produced by a company known as Entertaining Comics or simply EC. Entertaining Comics deserves close examination, as their tales open a dark doorway into postwar American anxieties. These comics tapped into a rich vein of postwar angst about family, gender, and sex. The bloodletting of the imagination that followed created material that shocks even contemporary readers with its graphic display of gore combined with macabre humor and biting social satire.

  EC began its existence as a small breakaway comic company from DC comics, the comics behemoth that owned characters such as Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. EC, on the other hand, produced “Picture Stories from the Bible” and a line of books for very young readers with names such as Animal Fables and Tiny Tot Comics. When William Gaines reluctantly inherited the line from his father in 1947, EC had fallen deeply in the red.8

  Gaines attempted to revive the ailing company by bringing in young artists with a creative vision to draw in adults as well as teenagers. The new EC stable of artists turned to crime and horror stories that, while occasionally employing supernatural themes, more often portrayed human agency behind horror. In comics like Crime SuspenStories, Haunt of Fear, Vault of Horror, and Tales from the Crypt, husbands dispatched nagging wives and wives murdered cheating husbands in the most grisly and gory of fashions.9

  Charles Addams cartoons that hinted at murder and mayhem in the American home found full expression in EC. Gaines’ merry pranksters hauled in America’s allegedly happy domestic scene for a full interrogation under hot lights. The story “Who’s next?” from Crime SuspenStories featured a barber whose beautiful wife takes a lover. The barber takes revenge by giving the customer a deadly shave and his wife a “haircut” that ends with the removal of her head.10

  Betty Friedan wrote in 1963’s The Feminine Mystique that middle-class American women, trapped in a round of childbearing and domestic chores, felt a sense of “aching dissatisfaction.” EC took grisly note of that dissatisfaction in tales like “The Neat Job,” in which a harassed housewife, tired of her jealous and tyrannical husband’s insistence that she keep the house clean, kills him with an axe. Police investigators discover that she has done “a neat job” for him by placing his body parts in labeled jars. A similar story had a female axe murderer doing away with her abusive, alcoholic husband and stuffing his body parts into liquor bottles as a symbolic revenge.

  Children played a decisive role in EC’s tales of domestic mayhem. Stories of adolescents and teenagers taking vengeance on parents and other authority figures became a common trope. In the notorious tale “The Orphan,” an abused young girl murders her father and frames her mother, delightedly watching her die in the electric chair while she goes off to live with a loving aunt. In “Stick in the Mud,” an unlucky boy watches in horror as his disciplinarian teacher becomes his stepmother. After she murders his father for money, the boy kills her in turn. Blending the supernatural into these tales of intergenerational vengeance, one story features a young orphan who becomes the ward of a family of vampires who plan to feast on him. Luckily for him, he is a werewolf. He transforms and makes dinner out of his foster parents.11

  The increasing institutionalization of American life in postwar America provided more chilling tales for EC artists. Although significantly reformed by the 1950s, psychiatric hospitals, veterans homes, and homes for the disabled remained a little discussed part of American society even as an increasing number of Americans spent time in one of these institutions (as Norman Bates hints to Marion Crane that he had done). Spending time in an institution seemed shameful, an admission of failure, to many in the middle class. At the same time, concerns over deviance in society increasingly caused the public to see the institution as a way to police society, keeping it sane and sanitized for “normal” people.12

  EC took the side of the incarcerated. In early 1955 Tales from the Crypt featured a story entitled “Blind Alleys,” in which the inmates of a home for the blind take revenge on a cruel administrator by feeding him to his own dog. The 1951 Vault tale “Revenge Is Nuts” featured another cruel administrator whose mistreatment of the inmates leads to more bloody revenge. Tales of equally monstrous medical experts joined these stories of monstrous institutions. In 1950 Vault contained a story of an anatomy instructor who begins murdering townspeople to secure cadavers for his class, a story that tapped into the folklore (and reality) of “night doctors” and “resurrection men.”13

  The 1950s proved no more ready for EC’s sublime mix of bad taste, subversive humor, and full-on gross-out than it had been for Vampira’s blend of sex, death, and laughter. Not only did their horror line challenge every middle-class sensibility, its satirical titles cut American historical memory down to the bone. EC’s Mad magazine even made fun of beloved comic character “Archie,” the all-American high-schooler billed as “Amer
ica’s Typical Teenager” whose character fit perfectly into the safe, domestic dreams of the 1950s. Mad responded with “Starchie,” the story of an uptight teenager who finds himself lost in an American inner city and jailed as a juvenile delinquent. More disturbing for some, EC’s war comics looked at American history from the standpoint of its victims. EC artist Harvey Kurtzman told the tale of “Custer’s Last Stand” as the story of an inept criminal who needlessly murders native peoples. This was a provocative revision of an alleged hero still considered a national icon in post-World War II America. Other EC suspense comics portrayed the lynching of African Americans, and made pointed references to the frequency of the practice in America.14

  EC’s ghoulish fun did not last long. Wertham and the 1954 Senate hearings on violence in comics threatened outright censorship. Bill Gaines testified before the Senate and found himself attempting to explain how comic books featuring severed heads in their cover art exhibited “good taste.” Gaines gave as good as he got and took a direct shot at Wertham, noting that “it would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.”15

  Wertham gave equally passionate, if sometimes odd testimony. The psychiatrist asserted, in authoritative tones, that comic books led directly to juvenile delinquency (without describing the link). He also asked one of the strangest rhetorical questions ever entered into the Senate record. At one point in his testimony, Wertham held up a copy of The Crypt of Terror that contained a tale of a baseball team who murders its rivals and then plays ball with their body parts. “They play baseball with a dead man’s head?” Wertham screeched in his heavy German accent, “Why would they do that?”16

  The threat of censorship led Gaines to call a meeting of the major comic book companies in the United States. If Gaines had hoped to found a resistance movement, he found himself in the midst of a comic book Vichy. All of the other major companies (many of whom had seen their characters and style mocked by their scrappy, ironic competitor) had decided to adopt their own strict code of censorship before the government could attempt it.

  Gaines walked out on the deliberations that created the Comics Code Authority. In the CCA, the industry pledged itself to steer clear of tales of monsters, at least monsters that challenged the consensus view of American history and culture. According to the code, comic books could never portray established authority in a way that would “create disrespect.” In fact, comic books had to become purveyors of middle-class American values. Along with banning “walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism and werewolfism,” the code insisted that comics inculcate “respect for parents, the moral code and honorable behavior” as well as “emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.”17

  The Comics Code Authority ensured a decline in the creativity, and the popularity, of comic books. Comics by the late 1950s became a wasteland of childish stories about one-dimensional superheroes fighting giant robots and creatures from outer space. Superman appeared as “America’s Secret Weapon,” with covers showing him fighting alongside American paratroopers (presumably in Korea). Not until the 1960s, when Marvel began producing its more adult tales of angst-ridden mutant heroes, would comics be revived as a popular form.18

  As the 1950s drew to a close, America found itself hungry for monsters. America discovered the creature it had been waiting for outside the pages of comic books. The macabre tales of EC and the sense of mental and emotional instability in American life found their living incarnation in the serial murderer.

  Dead-Eyed Monster

  In 1957 police searching for a missing woman in the tiny town of Plainfield, Wisconsin, followed a hard lead to the home of Ed Gein. Inside, they found a veritable chamber of horrors that sent these adult men screaming and vomiting into the cold northwestern night.19

  Most of Gein’s nineteenth-century farmhouse had been walled off and left just as his mother had kept it at the time of her death in 1945. Contemporary newspaper accounts described these forbidden rooms as decorated in “the style of forty years ago.” Gein himself lived in two small rooms that included the kitchen. In these rooms, a shambles of garbage and detritus, police found evidence of Gein’s crimes and the gruesome trophies he had taken from them. Gein had a refrigerator full of human organs. Human skulls had been turned into bowls and decoration for his bedposts. Vulvas were discovered in a shoebox, one of them grotesquely painted silver. A chair and lamp had been made of human skin and bones. Gein had sewn masks and an outfit made of skin. The missing woman herself was found hanging on a hook, her body hollowed out in the manner a Wisconsin hunter would dress a deer.

  If Gein’s story sounds hideously familiar to readers, it is because it has served as the ghastly inspiration for films ranging from Psycho to Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Silence of the Lambs. A serial killer before law enforcement coined the term, Gein, and his brutal crimes, ushered in the aegis of the maniac murderer in American popular culture. The serial killer became central to American discussions of public order, criminality, celebrity, and the nature of sexuality in the final third of the twentieth century.

  Gein’s bloody crimes came to light just before the United States began an ongoing pageant of national trauma. The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 serves as only a symbolic beginning to a period of disillusion among many Americans, the sense that the democratic experiment had come apart at the seams. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 further underscored this sense of chaos. By the late 1960s, any given nightly newscast could contain a story about escalating causalities in Vietnam, an expose of the drug-fueled sex romp many middle-class Americans imagined American youth to be engaged in, or the tale of a civil rights protest being violently squelched in the American South. The white, middle-class America that Nixon would dub “the silent majority” watched it all with mounting anxiety.20

  The 1960s also, of course, represented a revolutionary period during which the struggle for minority and women’s rights registered significant gains. In 1965 the Voting Rights Act ensured African Americans the franchise, while acts of civil disobedience had crippled, if not destroyed, Jim Crow’s hold over public life in much of the nation. In 1966 the National Organization for Women (NOW) became instrumental in defining the political program of second-wave feminism that found expression in struggles for reproductive freedom and economic justice. By 1965 the small but growing gay and lesbian rights movement held public political demonstrations for the first time. The escalation of the Vietnam War in 1968 galvanized college students into mass protest of every aspect of American institutional life.

  By the early 1970s even those who had participated in the revolutionary struggles of the 1960s felt a growing sense of unease over the direction of American society. Incremental change had come with great effort and yet many elements of American life remained essentially the same. The desegregation of public schools proceeded slowly with many parts of the American South only moving to unitary school districts in the early 1970s. Controversy and violence erupted over busing and housing in the urban North. The pace of change seemed glacial to a generation that had sung of wanting a revolution.21

  In the midst of the seemingly glacial pace of change, the feminist movement won a major victory in the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. This decision can also be regarded as the beginning of the “culture wars” and the birthday of the “Religious Right.” The newly enthused Right created the Reagan Counterrevolution of 1980, a movement that fused a libertarian ideology of limited government that pleased big business with a raw, ahistorical assertion of “traditional values” that appealed to Nixon’s silent, and often very religious, majority.22

  Shadows quickly fell on the landscape despite Reagan’s assertion of “Morning in America.” Although serial murder has played a significant role in the history of American crime since the founding of the nation, an uptick in its frequency
is noticeable in the 1970s. Many analysts have argued that this was a return to the normal number of seemingly random homicides after a brief post-World War II decline. Others have noted that the growth of media—print, televised, and electronic—simply made statistics gathering easier. Even with the surge in serial murder cases, they only represented between 1 and 2 percent of the total number of homicides in the United States each year during the 1980s. Given that the United States has the highest murder rate of any industrialized nation, this still accounted for a significant number of deaths.23

  Although statistically tiny, serial homicide and its perpetrators became, during the Reagan years and beyond, the subject of a mountain of books and films. Sociologists and criminologists examined the phenomenon from every angle. Probably the majority of material on serial murder came from so-called true crime authors, such as Ann Rule, and from FBI agents who sought to publicize Bureau efforts at hunting down psychotic killers. These accounts often portrayed the serial killer as a monster who threatened not only the lives, but also the values, of middle-class Americans. These accounts, sometimes purposefully, provided ammunition for conservative proponents of a return to traditionalism.24

  By the Reagan years, FBI profilers became the most prolific source of popular information on the serial killer. In 1988 FBI agent John Douglas, a significant figure in the Bureau’s efforts to profile serial homicide, appeared in a television special called “The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper.” Douglas claimed that he had profiled the Whitechapel killer “as an asocial white male, perceived by others as a quiet shy loner and probably with a heavy-drinking promiscuous mother.” Douglas’ description represented the FBI’s basic template of a serial murder, one that defined it exclusively as a male activity with its origins in oedipal drama. Profilers held onto this definition with ferocity as the Bureau increasingly defined itself as the American institution best able to deal with this new American monster. Douglas inculcated future FBI agents with his views through a coauthored training manual called Sexual Homicide. He also became a best-selling author with books like Mind Hunter, Journey into Darkness, and The Cases That Haunt Us.25