Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  American journalism made Vietnam the first truly televised war, and magazines such as Time and Life created a massive photographic record of wounded, dead, and dying Americans. Vietnam came to be known as “the Living Room War” with images of troops returning in body bags becoming an indelible image of the failure of American policy in Southeast Asia. Dismemberment entered the public record and became part of popular culture.15

  Romero’s zombies shambled on-screen as Americans became increasingly used to real-life images of graphic death, gore, and body parts blown to pieces. In January of 1968 the Tet Offensive inaugurated a new period in the Vietnam conflict and initiated house-to-house and hand-to-hand fighting. American causalities soared throughout the year with one week in February of 1968 bringing news of five hundred thirty-four American deaths. Romero’s images of rotting corpses on a violent landscape covered with entrails and viscera, and a band of survivors battling it out with faceless hordes and deeply divided among themselves, perfectly suited the American mood.

  In the years ahead, Tom Savini would do an even better job of bringing these rotted corpses to life. Savini had been friends with George Romero during their youth in Pittsburgh and would likely have worked with him on Night of the Living Dead had he not been called up to serve in the army the same year. Savini carried a makeup kit with him through basic training and even used collodion, a liquid plastic, to make up a drill sergeant who wanted to frighten his next platoon. Sent to Vietnam as a combat photographer, Savini brought home a blend of trauma and creativity that led him to become the greatest makeup effects artist since Lon Chaney Sr.16

  Savini’s first film assignment drew directly on his personal horrors. Deathdream (1974) told the story of a Vietnam casualty who returned home to his horrified family as a rotting zombie-vampire. Working with Romero on Dawn of the Dead, Savini brought the war home again with images of a zombie head exploding from a gunshot and arms and legs torn apart. These scenes of gore replicated what he had seen in the rice paddies. In his 1983 book Bizarro, which explains special effects techniques (with a preface by George Romero and introduction by Stephen King), Savini remembers a moment in Vietnam when he “nearly stepped on a human arm, one end of it jagged and torn, its fist clenched and grabbing the ground.” When not photographing horror, Savini visited friends in the hospital who had been catastrophically wounded by land mines. In Bizarro, he suggests that he trained his mind to see these things as special effects in an effort to deal with the trauma.17

  The Vietnam War did not create the zombie genre or make way for the vampire. However, like the Civil War, Vietnam produced a very graphic iconography of death and bodily dissolution that has remained a permanent part of American culture. Horror images for the next forty years, in a very literal sense, owed their blood and gore to the conflict. Unlike the Second World War, in which images of veterans seldom included evidence of wounds, the corpses and the physically traumatized human body became a focus of America’s memory of Vietnam. The zombie and the vampire (joined by the serial killer) feasted off these images, and Americans turned to these monsters that resonated with the national horror.18

  Vietnam created a sense of malaise in American society, the feeling that the dynamism of the post–World War II years had fully dissipated. The trauma of the war remained with veterans and the American public after a decade of body bags and what can only be described as the military defeat of the United States in 1973. Events of the 1970s only deepened the growing sense of gloom and prepared the way for an apocalyptic sensibility in American cultural life.

  Undead Apocalypse

  Night of the Living Dead offered a vision of horror that could not be contained. The beast could not be easily slain or the social order restored to the status quo ante-monstrum. At the end of the film, every character that took refuge in the farmhouse has been killed, including Ben, the hero we expected to make it out alive. Perhaps even worse, Ben meets his death at the hands of a redneck posse, local hunters who go after zombies with the glee of a lynch mob. This rifle-toting gang of white men with dogs actually mistake Ben for one of the undead, burning him alongside the zombie that attacked Barbra and Johnny at the beginning of the film.

  A few film scholars and critics have read the conclusion of Night of the Living Dead as a suggestion that order had been restored through mob violence. In fact, it suggests that the social order has broken down entirely, gun-toting vigilante killers replacing civil law and images of carnage and destruction everywhere. Romero makes this point more fully in his 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead, in which the zombie apocalypse has led to a general collapse of society, forcing human beings to run for their lives and battle one another over the remaining scraps of American consumer culture in a shopping mall. The 1985 Day of the Dead and the 2005 Land of the Dead reveal that the zombie plague has so utterly destroyed civilization that only a few human enclaves are left, and those are riven apart by various kinds of social strife.19

  The zombie managed what no other monster had ever been able to do: it destroyed the world. This new monster perfectly suited American culture that, in the ’70s and ’80s, entered into an apocalyptic mode, a widespread expectation that the clock had run out, on not only American society, but the whole human race. A number of social and historical forces generated this feeling. In the early ’70s came American defeat in the Vietnam War, and the crimes of the Nixon administration led to a collapse of the public trust. By 1980 anxiety ran rampant over the increasingly dangerous global situation brought on by worsening U.S.–Soviet relations and the Arab–Israeli conflict in the Middle East.

  Fears of a nuclear or environmental apocalypse, for many Americans, went hand in hand with theological conceptions of “the end of time.” A view of the end of history known as “dispensationalism” had long been influential among conservative evangelical Christians. In this interpretation of the book of Revelation and other key biblical passages, the world will not end suddenly but in a series of predestined theological events beginning with the “rapture” (or taking up) of all true Christians. This departure of God’s faithful inaugurates a seven-year period known as the “Tribulation.” During these seven years, plagues, warfare, and various kinds of environmental disasters batter the earth until the second coming of Christ and the battle of Armageddon. The second coming would include a resurrection of the dead and a final judgment.20

  This elaborate and baroque belief system remained marginal in American society until the 1970s. Hal Lindsey’s 1970 Late, Great Planet Earth changed that, rocketing to the top of the bestseller list and shaping views about the end of the world that proved influential far outside of fundamentalist sects. Lindsey, a recent convert to an informal, West Coast style of evangelicalism, combined a use of au courant 1970s lingo with a tendency to slide between biblical narrative and current events. He created a kind of hip theological techno-thriller that promised its readers secret knowledge of the meaning of world events. Troubles in the Middle East and conflict with the Soviets meant that the rapture would come soon with the Antichrist and the Tribulation period not far behind.21

  America’s apocalyptic tendencies grew throughout the 1980s and by the 1990s had become intertwined with technological fears regarding the new millennium. Early computer designers represented the year with two digits rather than four, raising the possibility that January 1, 2000, would become an event horizon that threatened to crash computer systems all over the world. As computer programmers worked to successfully prevent any severe consequences from this design flaw, the possibility of an “Y2K bug” creating a massive societal catastrophe generated hysterical responses. Conservative evangelicals sometimes latched on to fears of Y2K as further proof of theological armageddon. Jerry Falwell, in many ways the leader of the evangelical right, described Y2K as “God’s instrument for humbling this nation.”22

  The very complexity of modern society, the intricate support systems that keep the lights on, the water running, the gas pumping, and the ATMs dispensing cash, has
given a special twist to the theme of apocalypse in modern America. Fears of Y2K focused entirely on the results of the systems on which modern Americans depend breaking down. These fears were transferred after 2001 to the possibility of some kind of high-tech terrorist attack that would render modern conveniences inoperable. Zombie fictions took these anxieties and magnified them. Not only would the hungry undead wreak havoc on the social order, they would turn the human body against itself and transform human bodies into food. Zombies represented the end of the world, the complete breakdown of human society, and the cannibalization of humanity.

  Vampires have seldom been messengers of apocalypse, although the idea certainly forms a subtext in Stoker’s novel. Dracula’s purpose for leaving Transylvania and coming to London seems to be to create an army of vampires to overturn the social order. Stoker’s sexual cautionary tale never lets things go that far, and the vampire is driven back to his homeland. Dracula is, in some sense, the tale of apocalypse averted.

  Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, on the other hand, imagines what might become of the world after a vampire apocalypse. Protagonist Robert Neville has watched the entire world succumb to a plague that has transformed them into vampiric creatures, eager to drink blood and unable to go out in sunlight. Neville, who assumes he is the last human left, lives in a boarded-up suburban home in Los Angeles. During the day, he ventures out to kill vampires, gather supplies, and prepare his domestic fortress for the coming nighttime assault.23

  Matheson does not portray his character as a heroic monster-hunter keeping the flame of humanity alive. Instead, Neville’s hatred of the vampires makes him into more of a monster than they are. He is finally killed when he meets a woman who turns out to be a new breed of plague victim, a community of supervampires who have learned to integrate their humanity with their new condition. From her, Neville learns that he is seen by this emerging new society, not as a hero, but as a maniac killer who spends his days slaughtering and killing. The title of I Am Legend refers to Neville’s realization that he has become a nightmare story to be told by the people of the new world, the legend of a mythic monster that had to be slain. The zombie genre, especially in Romero’s iteration, relied heavily on Matheson’s novel, especially its explicit satire of human attitudes toward the monster.24

  In 1975 Stephen King’s modern American retelling of Dracula considered what might happen if a vampire created a mini-apocalypse and turned an entire community into its undead servants. Salem’s Lot tells the story of a small New England town visited by a “Master-Vampire” named Barlow. Riven by small-town conflict, a dark place full of secrets even before the coming of the undead, the vampire transforms most of the townspeople into monsters. The master-vampire is killed by the character Ben Mears, a writer who has returned to “the Lot” that was his childhood home and Mark Petrie, one of King’s prescient child-heroes. In a nod to the “monster kids,” Petrie knows how to kill vampires because he lives on a steady diet of late-night monster movies and horror comics.25

  King, who soon became not only America’s best-selling horror novelist but also its best-selling novelist, has said that Salem’s Lot drew part of its inspiration from his writing the novel just as the full story of Watergate unfolded on television in 1973–1974. King commented that his story of vampires remaking the social order of a small town came directly from the ongoing horror of Watergate:

  In my novel Salem’s Lot the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds … and all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of TV … Howard Baker kept asking “What I want to know is ‘what did you know and when did you know it?’” That line haunts me. It stays in my mind. That might be the classic line of the twentieth century.26

  The secrets hiding under beds and the thing in America’s closet became for King the sum of all fears. King has elsewhere compared Salem’s Lot to Invasion of the Body Snatchers with its conceit that the social order could collapse as one’s neighbors, one by one, become victims of a corrupting evil with which they seem willing to collaborate. King would go on to write a number of the most important monster tales of the twentieth century, including perhaps the definitive novel of the apocalypse, The Stand, published in 1978.27

  Vampires have usually offered a much more intimate kind of threat than the reanimated zombie. In an America anxious over the fate of the social order, the zombie offers a talisman, a laughably horrific symbol about a fake apocalypse that keeps at bay real fears about social degeneration and collapse. Max Brooks’ best-selling Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead presents itself as a civil defense manual for the zombie apocalypse, complete with strategies to kill zombies in every conceivable environment (even underwater) and descriptions of armor (including “tight clothes and short hair”). Meanwhile, zombie walks or zombie pub crawls, in which fans use simple makeup to turn themselves into zombies, are becoming increasingly popular in urban areas. Philadelphia zombie fans link the theological notion of resurrection of the dead with their favorite monster by holding an annual Easter zombie walk known as “Crawl of the Dead.” Advertised with an image of “zombie Jesus,” the zombie walk has grown enough since 2006 to become part of a schedule of annual events, including a zombie beach party in July.28

  If the zombie articulated fears of apocalypse while containing that fear with dark humor, the undead also encoded the anxiety of Americans over their bodies, and the threats and possibilities of those bodies, at the end of the twentieth century. The vampire’s desire for blood and the zombie’s hunger for flesh represented brutal articulations of the social and cultural dynamics of America’s politics of the body.

  Rotting Corpses and Bad Blood

  At the close of the twentieth century, Americans became increasingly concerned over the possibility of a personal apocalypse taking place within their own bodies. In 2001, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, 8,470,363 Americans had some form of aesthetic surgery. Fear that the effects of aging represented bodily decomposition drove this desire to reconstruct the self, along with the hope that the body could be transformed into a symbol of erotic appeal. Popular procedures used to achieve these goals included chemical peels using a powerful acid to remove a surface layer of skin, injections of the low-grade poison Botox that paralyzes facial muscles to give the appearance of smooth skin, liposuction that liquefies fat before removing it, and reconstructive surgeries, such as breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, and face-lifts.29

  All of these procedures, invasive and destructive, have grown in popularity over the last thirty years, with notable spikes in the early twenty-first century. The number of chemical peels in 2001, for example, represented a 2,356 percent increase over the number administered in 1997. Breast augmentation surgery grew from 20,000 procedures a year in 1992 to 200,000 in 2002 and climbing.30

  This mass desire to transform the body did not emerge organically from the availability of new aesthetic surgery techniques. Instead it represents a carefully orchestrated effort to create a new aesthetic by an industry that views divergence from a universal template of attractiveness as an abnormality and seeks to fully medicalize divergences from this template. Concerned over failing profits, The American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery began defining small breast size as a medical abnormality in 1983. An extensive advertising campaign, and the transformation of plastic surgeons into public figures who as authors and talk-show guests spread the gospel of bodily transformation, convinced many American women that face-lifts, tummy tucks, and breast implants could further their career goals, improve their mental health, and even save their marriages.31

  The promoters of reconstructive surgery found an unlikely ally in evangelical Christian culture’s growing obsession with the body in the 1980s. American Christianity’s interest in the body as a carrier of meaning and a
path to fulfillment fused theological themes and cultural yearnings in the late twentieth century. Millennialist Christianity, with its emphasis on “the glorified body” in the apocalyptic resurrection of the dead, sought to celebrate an eschatological destiny for the Christian body. A new movement toward Christian dieting and exercise, and even increased sexual fulfillment, suggested that the body could begin its glorification even now.32

  An evangelical dieting and fitness culture that focused both on the disciplining and glorification of the physical body as a spiritual act of devotion emerged in the 1960s and exploded in the 1970s. Books with titles like More of Jesus, Less of Me, Slim for Him and Help Lord! The Devil Wants Me Fat! encouraged evangelical Christian women to see eating and exercise as integral to their spiritual lives. While this principle may not sound radically different than older Christian ascetic disciplines such as fasting, these new dieting and fitness regimes promised the same rewards as secular fitness culture. God wanted evangelical Christian women to diet so they could enjoy a better self-image, increased sexual attractiveness, and a reversal, or at least a slowdown, of the effects of aging. In Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, one of an avalanche of Christian dieting texts directed at women, the author claimed that preventing weight gain is “a key factor in being a beautiful woman for God” and noted God’s special interest in “helping you get to and keep the weight that is right for you.”33

  Americans proved remarkably uncomfortable in their own skins at the dawn of the twenty-first century. An emphasis on the body’s aesthetics and the need to save the body from death (or save it for the resurrection) betrays a profound anxiety about physical experience. The obsession of physical aesthetics combined with concerns about infectious disease, the politics of the womb, cultural battles fought over alternative sexual identities, controversy over genetics, and the obsession with physical aesthetics have absorbed enormous amounts of media attention.34