Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  By the early 1970s, the Universal monsters had become an incredibly marketable commodity. Toy companies sought to capitalize on adolescent fascination with the horrifying fantastic. In 1964 Aurora attempted to market a toy guillotine that caused such a parental backlash that the company pulled the model after only a few months. In the early 1970s, Aurora tried to push boundaries once again by marketing a “Pain Parlor” torture chamber model complete with a scantily-clad female victim. Notably, this time they found themselves criticized by second-wave feminists rather than by parents. Aurora’s troubles did not prevent Mattel from selling the “Thingmaker,” which allowed kids to mold various insect-like monstrosities, or Hasbro from marketing a “Queasy Bake Oven,” a satire of its own “Easy Bake Oven,” in which kids could bake a “Bugs and Worms” mix or a “Mud and Crud Cake.”54

  The author had the opportunity to be part of the monster kid phenomenon as it took its last gasps in the mid- to late ’70s. His own interest in the classic Universal monsters grew from a local television station that owned the Shock Theatre package and showed it on Saturday afternoons (without, unfortunately, a horror host). This led in turn to a fascination with the monster kids commodities that included a plastic model of Lugosi as Dracula beside a gnarled tree (plastic bats flapping in the background), a cardboard haunted mansion with adhesive plastic images of the classic monsters and their accoutrements, and a “Mad scientist’s laboratory,” where plaster molds of the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy could be crafted and painted.

  Behind the fun was the serious business of social transformation. Monster kids are the kids who watched a complete restructuring of American family demographics. The divorce rate in the 1960s began to rise sharply. Economic slowdown in the 1970s created increased tensions in households already struggling with the changing nature of gender roles. During that decade, a little over half of all the marriages in the United States ended in divorce. By the 1980s, about 40 percent of all children in the United States had, by the age of eighteen, experienced the divorce of their biological parents. A significant number of these children saw subsequent remarriages and divorces and dealt with various stepparents and stepsiblings along the way.55

  Many of these changes in American family life are likely more positive than negative. The high divorce rate can be attributed in part to liberalized divorce laws in many American states that made it possible for women to leave unhappy or abusive partnerships. Nevertheless, there is no question that many adolescents experienced this period of instability and change in American social history as a kind of “crisis.” Monster culture gave them not only a fantastic world to escape into but also a subculture to be a part of, a community to belong to. The community of monster fandom offered an exciting alternative to the much-discussed “breakdown of the family” as well as the more general malaise in American institutions during the 1960s and 1970s. The monster kids are the first wave of a gigantic subculture still present in American life that is made up of comic book fandom, sci-fi and fantasy “geekdom,” and parts of the goth and steampunk communities. Los Angeles’ annual Comic-Con, attracting one hundred and twenty thousand fanboys and fangirls, had its origins in the alternative community of the monster kids. A network of similar conventions, websites, and comic bookstores have inherited Uncle Forry’s dream.56

  Not every monster kid enjoyed his or her ghoulish fun in a single-parent household. Fears about the transformation of America’s family does not account entirely for the monster kids. Like their parents in the ’50s, children of the late ’60s and early ’70s continued to live in the shadow of the bomb. The global political tensions of the 1970s made American children more certain of the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. As these kids became teenagers in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s blunt rhetoric reheated the cold war to a temperature it had not reached since the early 1960s and the Cuban missile crisis.

  Universal monsters perfectly suited kids who lived in a world of vast nuclear stockpiles. The classic monsters had told stories of death and decay combined with the promise of eternal life, at least of a ghastly sort. In an America where political leaders toyed with the possibility of global apocalypse, the black-and-white horrors of an earlier era offered minor frissons and an escape from a real world of horrors.

  The end of the monster kids phenomenon in the 1980s (the original Famous Monsters ceased publication in 1983) did not signal the end of a gothic fandom. The monster magazine received a gory makeover in Fangoria, a magazine dedicated to the gruesome narratives and effects of the new American monsters, the murdering maniacs discussed in the previous chapter as well as all manner of supernatural terrors that would emerge in the 1990s. Horror comics have grown in popularity, and newer magazines like Rue Morgue offer its readers a gothic lifestyle of clothing, music, art, and social opportunities that defines modern American experience through the eyes of the monster. Moreover, the Universal monsters did not disappear entirely. Almost all of the classic characters have reappeared in periodic remakes and reimaginings, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s stylish 1992 Dracula. These creatures of the classic American film tradition have continued to horrify audiences right alongside Jason, Freddy, and demonic creatures from womb and tomb.57

  American monsters at the close of the twentieth century were a diverse lot. Despite their differences, they shared a common origin in the national historical process. Devil babies competed with “the Hook” to elaborate social anxieties over abortion, religious conflict, the sexual revolution, birth control, single-parent families, intergenerational conflict, and women’s liberation. The revival of the Universal monsters showed the continuing power of the gothic in American historical experience. Horror showed an increasing tendency to subvert conservative values, causing commentators such as art scholar Henry Jenkins to draw attention to the horror film’s relationship to progressive politics and avant-garde art.58

  The end of the cold war in 1989–1991 did nothing to slow down America’s monster mash. George H. W. Bush’s pronouncement that a “new world order” had come, a world no longer defined by conflict between the United States and the now defunct Soviet Union, combined with the economic boom of the Clinton years, would seem to have created a sunny optimism that had no place for lurking creatures of the night. A sense of cultural optimism did inspire social philosophers such as Francis Fukuyama to proclaim “the end of history.” Liberal western democracy wedded to barrier-breaking entrepreneurialism had, according to Fukuyama, ended the long struggle of warring social and economic systems. The American ideal represented the most complete and the most successful form of government, triumphing over all its rivals.59

  The 1990s did not represent the escape from history that Fukuyama predicted. The bombing of the World Trade Center in 1992 and of the Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 offered ominous signs of a new kind of danger in the post-cold war era. America’s domestic culture became increasingly volatile as a host of cultural clashes centered on controversial moments in entertainment and politics. A twenty-four-hour media cycle brought narratives to America that were both gothic and ideologically incendiary, such as the O. J. Simpson trial, the Rodney King beating and the Los Angeles uprising, the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and the sex scandal that impeached a president.60

  Americans made their way through this labyrinth of sex, race, and power while being pursued by well-beloved monsters whose unnatural appetites did nothing to prevent their entry into celebrity culture. The 1990s saw the dawn of the hungry dead.

  Seven

  UNDEAD AMERICANS

  Ain’t no grave / Gonna hold this body down

  —Traditional Gospel hymn

  Wish me monsters.

  —Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

  “They’re coming to get you Barbara.”

  George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead opens in a cemetery in western Pennsylvania, well marked with flags honoring the recently buried Vietnam dead. A brother and sist
er, Johnny and Barbara, are visiting their father’s grave. Both siblings are uneasy. Johnny did not want to come, and Barbara is clearly still grieving their father’s passing. She kneels beside the grave to pray while Johnny, clearly uncomfortable, jokes about a man, perhaps an indigent, lurching toward them. “They’re coming to get you Barbara,” he says, doing his best Boris Karloff impression.

  They were coming to get Barbara, and everyone else. The shambling figure turns out to be a zombie who kills Johnny as Barbara escapes to a nearby farmhouse and becomes catatonic with terror. A young African American man named Ben also occupies the farmhouse as does, we learn soon, a family that has been hiding in the basement. The group, fighting among themselves, also must fight a horde of hungry zombies who surround the small house. Ben learns from a radio he has discovered that “those things” are a global phenomenon, a zombie apocalypse. Humanity has been besieged by hordes of cannibalistic, animated corpses.

  Dracula from Hammer

  Shot for a little over one hundred thousand dollars in rural Pennsylvania, Romero’s film was filled with local actors and friends from his native Pittsburgh. Filmed in black and white (for financial as well as aesthetic reasons), Night of the Living Dead became a staple of drive-in theaters around the country, and created, to date, five sequels and numerous remakes, tributes, and reimaginings.1

  Night of the Living Dead shaped the modern zombie genre, a new monster for the dark American pantheon. Zombies had played some role in African American folklore in the coastal South and appeared in Universal’s tellingly titled White Zombie and RKO’s I Walked with a Zombie. Both films borrowed the zombie figure from the religious traditions of the African Atlantic and its folklore about an evil papaloa (shaman able to channel spirits) that had the power to transform corpses into undead servants. Romero’s hordes of zombies broke with this tradition. He and his imitators imagined undead humans in various states of decay, driven by their hunger rather than by a necromancer’s will. The rising dead, in this new version, could create more zombies, passing on their infection through a bite. The whole human race could be transformed into monsters.2

  Zombies retained their popularity in American culture through the 1970s and 1980s in Romero’s follow-up films Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. Their popularity spiked in the early part of the new century. During the same period, American pop culture witnessed the ascendancy of a monster that, in some respects, never went fully out of style. A new version of the American vampire rose from its coffin in the ’70s, and followed a similar trajectory of celebrity as the zombie, his more proletarian monster cousin.3

  Night of the Living Dead Poster

  Like the zombie, the vampire had appeared in slightly different incarnations earlier in the twentieth century. Lugosi’s Dracula, a monster sophisticated enough to stalk his victims at the opera, had enormous popularity on his first appearance but soon found himself eclipsed by Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein and the barrage of mad scientist movies that followed. In 1958 American audiences thrilled to Christopher Lee’s new interpretation of the vampire in the British Hammer Studios’ Horror of Dracula. Lee’s version of the Count kept the sexual allure of Lugosi’s vampire king while adding an animalistic cruelty, and hungry, bloodshot eyes that transformed the Count into a bloodthirsty sensual Miltonic Satan.4

  Alluring and yet monstrous, the Lugosi–Lee vampire tradition would be replaced by Anne Rice’s Louis and Lestat in Interview with the Vampire. Rice’s 1976 novel framed its story around a young reporter listening to Louis relate his more than a century as one of the undead, a story that introduced the reader to a larger community of vampires and a secret vampiric history of the world. Rice told this tale of hunger and eternal life as one rich with pathos, passion, and exquisite suffering (so much so that at the end of the novel the reporter, who clearly stands in for the reader, begs to be made one of the undead). Rice followed up the best-selling Interview with a cycle of vampire tales centered on Lestat who, like Louis, is a tortured, glamorous, undead soul. The sexy sadistic monster had become the sexy sympathetic monster.5

  The mythologies and cultural meanings of these two creatures, zombies and vampires, are very distinct. At the same time, they have certain similarities that have led to their current joint reign as the undead monarchs of American popular culture. Both the zombie and the vampire draw on themes embedded in the history and theology of American Christianity and its struggles in the late twentieth century. Both are, in fact, heavily redacted versions of the American Christian millennialism’s hopes for immortality. They each articulate meanings theologically important to Americans since the Puritan era and are the walking, flying, roaming, and shambling embodiments of the “resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”6

  The vampire and the zombie are monstrous keys to American experience over the last three decades. These creatures, flesh eating or blood drinking, decomposing or forever young, appeared as pop culture phenomena at a historical moment when the body had become of central concern in American culture as the vehicle of pleasure, of theological meaning, or of personal happiness (or all three at once). Anxiety over threats to the body became a paramount concern as evidenced by the popularity of dieting and exercise regimens, public health campaigns, and the growing acceptance of plastic surgery as an aesthetic renovation of the aging or unsightly physical self.7

  Vampires and zombies are further linked with one another in their origins and popular mythologies. Unlike almost every other creature examined in this book, the vampire and the zombie as currently imagined have no analogue in American folklore and/or urban legend. These voracious living corpses are almost pure creations of American popular culture, their titles and motifs lifted from European and Caribbean legend and transformed into horrific celebrities. Perhaps more than any other monster, they are “made in America” as commodities for sale and distribution. This makes them important representations of what Americans fear, or desire, from the monster at the beginning of a new millennium.8

  The vampire and zombie are, like all monsters, shaped by their historical context. Historical events of the last third of the twentieth century helped prepare the way for the resurrection of the undead in movies and television. The legacy of the Vietnam War in particular became a silent partner in the birth of modern horror. Many conservatives saw the war as creating what Ronald Reagan later called the “Vietnam syndrome,” a profound loss of national confidence. Backlash against feminism would be motivated by the sense, sometimes inarticulate but always present, that American women and other minorities had gained political consciousness in the ’60s and ’70s while white men had lost a war. Returning veterans came home to a world where the ground had fundamentally shifted. For Americans who had watched the war from their living rooms and mourned the deaths of their children, parents, and spouses at tens of thousands of funerals, the war itself became a kind of undead monster, one that overcame every attempt to keep it in the ground.9

  Body Bags

  The entrance of the United States into a postcolonial conflict in Southeast Asia became a multidecade commitment that killed 58,000 Americans and wounded 153,303 more. An incalculable number of Vietnamese died in the conflict as well, victims of carpet bombing and chemical warfare.10

  This massive loss of life was born of the frustrated efforts of an imperial power trying to squelch an armed peasant revolution. General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968, implemented a strategy of “attrition,” or the killing of as many Vietnamese as possible in order to break the peasant revolution’s will to fight. The idea of attrition made the creation of a Vietnamese “body count” central to war-winning strategy. This attitude filtered down through the ranks to exert pressure on every officer that commanded a platoon. Former Marine Lieutenant Phillip Caputo remembered that “the pressure on unit commanders to produce enemy corpses was intense.” Platoon members took souvenirs of ears, noses, and even scalps to impress their commanders and sub
stantiate claims of a high body count. Some platoons actually padded their kill ratio (“box scores” some called it) by counting small blood traces and at least some unit commanders demanded severed body parts as clear testimony that their troops had performed their duty.11

  Bureaucratic pressure to produce Westmoreland’s desired rate of attrition degenerated into careless brutality. The infamous My Lai massacre represents the most egregious case of the everyday horrors American forces visited on their hidden enemy, the incident with the highest box score. On May 16, 1968, a company of U.S. soldiers entered the small village of My Lai, rounded up the inhabitants (mostly women and children), placed them in a ditch, and turned murderous gunfire on them. Army investigators later placed the death toll at between four hundred and fifty and five hundred people, some of them infants in their mother’s arms.12

  Wanton cruelty became the everyday result of American policy. One marine described the “fun game” of tossing candy out of the back of a transport truck, leading Vietnamese children to run for it and possibly be mangled by the next truck in line. A Vietnamese peasant woman remembered how passing soldiers in a truck grabbed her son’s hat and pulled him (it was held to his head with string) under the vehicle’s tire, killing him. These random acts by some individual soldiers are dwarfed by the death and destruction wrought on the Vietnamese people by the indiscriminate use of artillery and airpower.13

  The horrors American military personnel visited on the Vietnamese were replicated in the horrors they themselves endured, both in terms of bodily wounds and psychological damage. To the fifty-eight thousand American dead would be added seventy-five thousand physically disabled veterans. The trauma of the war left tens of thousands more with nightmares, severe depression, and other psychological maladies. In at least one case analyzed by anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson, a veteran came to believe he was haunted by the angry spirit of a Viet Cong fighter whose ID tag he had taken in 1968. The vet only found peace when he returned to Vietnam and gave the tag to the fighter’s mother.14