Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  52 H. Taylor Burkner, “Flying Saucers Are for People,” Trans-Action (May/June 1966): 10–13.

  53 A detailed discussion of and critical response to this phenomenon appear in Morris Goran, The Modern Myth: Ancient Astronauts and UFOs (London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1978).

  54 Douglas E. Cowan, Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010), 180–88.

  55 Jason Colovito, The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2005).

  56 Frank De Caro, ed.. An Anthology of American Folktales and Legends (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe Press, 2009), 281; Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 41.

  57 Andrew Genzoli, “Giant Footprints Puzzle Residents Along Trinity River,” Humboldt Times, October 5, 1958.

  58 Michael McLeod, Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 25, 30–36.

  59 Charles Fort, The Complete Works of Charles Fort (New York: Dover Publications), 3.

  60 McLeod, Anatomy of the Beast, 52–57.

  61 Bernard Heuvelmans, In the Wake of the Sea Serpents (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), 44.

  62 A good discussion of the scientific creationism movement appears in George E. Webb, The Evolution Controversy in America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994). See esp. 154–79.

  63 McLeod, Anatomy of the Beast, 54.

  64 George Webb has argued that the growth of support for creation science, in some quarters, is in proportion to a decline in science education in the United States. See Webb, Evolution Controversy in America, 221–22.

  65 Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists, 143, 154.

  66 Skal, Monster Show, 239.

  67 Iain Topliss, The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 146–50, 178–80.

  68 Charles Addams, Monster Rally (New York: Pocket Books, 1950), 57, 122–23.

  69 Addams, Monster Rally, 114–15.

  70 Wini Breines, “Postwar White Girl’s Dark Others,” in The Other Fifties, ed. Joel Foreman (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 56.

  71 Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 162, 168. The film Freaks also inspired a significant new scholarship on the meaning of sideshow freaks in American cultural history. See Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 18. Fielder referred to Browning’s work as a “masterpiece.”

  72 Jancovich in Rational Fears sees this shift occurring by the mid-1950s, especially in the work of schlock-auteur Roger Corman. See esp. 262–84.

  Chapter 5

  1 See Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of the film Psycho in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso Books, 1992), 226–31.

  2 Reviews quoted in Kendall R. Phillips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2005), 62.

  3 A full examination of how Psycho’s critical reputation grew over time can be found in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook, ed. Robert Kolker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 61–100.

  4 William E. Leuchtenburg, Troubled Feast: American Society Since 1945 (New York: Scott Foresman, 1983), 104.

  5 Henrikson, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 107.

  6 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 22.

  7 For a complete history of hysteria over the comic book see David Nadju, The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008).

  8 History of EC taken from Grant Geissman, Foul Play!: The Art and Artists of the Notorious 1950s E.C. Comics (New York: Harper Design, 2005).

  9 Descriptions of comics taken primarily from Geissman, Foul Play!

  10 Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 148.

  11 Wright, Comic Book Nation, 149.

  12 Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2002). See esp. 169–75, on how social tensions and attitudes about nonconformity informed the treatment of the mentally ill, as well as the racist underpinnings of the treatment of African Americans by the mental health community.

  13 This representation of life in American mental institutions as oppressive and inhumane presaged Ken Kesey’s 1962 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: Viking, 1962).

  14 Wright, Comic Book Nation, 138–40, 145.

  15 Quoted in Wright, Comic Book Nation, 167.

  16 Description of Gaines and Wertham’s testimony taken from Wright, Comic Book Nation, 165–72.

  17 “The Code for Editorial Matter General Standards Part A and General Standards Part B,” reprinted in Robert Michael “Robb” Cotter, The Great Monster Magazines (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarlane Press, 2008), 12–13.

  18 E. Nelson Bridwell, ed., Superman from the 30’s to the 70’s (New York: Bonanza Books, 1979), 209.

  19 See Harold Schechter, Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). Schechter’s account is not as sensationalist as the title sounds and is mostly grounded in primary source research.

  20 Phillips Jenkins in Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) suggests that the seeds of conservative reaction can be found in the struggles of the sixties. He argues, for example, that just as “feminist politics sounded the alarm about sexual dangers to women,” conservatives in the coming decade would co-opt that language and use it to describe threats against the family and against children (often used as a metonym for family values). See 20–23.

  21 Andreas Killen notes that in the early seventies the “institutional failures of American society routinely evoked expressions of systemic, perhaps irreparable crisis.” See Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 261.

  22 The backlash really began in the ’70s with the 1976 Hyde amendment that forbade the use of Medicaid to pay for abortions. The ERA went down to defeat in several crucial states the same year. See Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares, 108–11.

  23 Phillips Jenkins, Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (New York: Aldine Transaction, 1994) offers the best discussion of these trends. See esp. 21–48.

  24 Newitz argues that the serial killer narrative since the 1950s has been structured by a “search for normalcy.” This search takes place within America’s “enraged confusion” over the relationship between society and economics.” See Annalee Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 27, 42.

  25 David Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 66–67, 96–106. Douglas has also profiled Lizzie Borden and, perhaps most bizarrely, the literary character Othello.

  26 Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities, 82.

  27 John Starr, “The Random Killers,” Newsweek, November 26, 1984.

  28 Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities, 196–200.

  29 Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities, 96.

  30 Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, The Only Living Witness: A True Account of Homicidal Insanity (New York: Signet, 1983), 6.

  31 Jane Caputi argues that terms applied to serial killers such as “monster” and “enigma” hide the way that American society has valorized the serial murderer and transformed them
into pop heroes. See Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture (Madison, Wisc.: Popular Press, 2004), 119–39. This argument assumes that the popularity of serial murder narratives is the same as valorization of those narratives. Discourses of mental illness and the true crime genre itself that identifies serial murder with social aberrance call this reading into question.

  32 Phillip Jenkins shows how popular representations of the serial killer in the ’70s and ’80s conformed to images of social degeneracy. He provides examples of how this imagery could be useful to both the Right and the Left as cautionary tales about alternative sexualities or as examples of societal misogyny. See Decade of Nightmares, 140–51.

  33 Scott Stossel, “The Sexual Counterrevolution,” American Prospect (July/August 1997).

  34 Scott Stossel, “The Sexual Counterrevolution.”

  35 Robert Lindsey, “Officials Cite a Rise in Killers Who Roam U.S.,” The New York Times, January 1984.

  36 Quoted in Jenkins, Using Murder, 125.

  37 Phillip Jenkins argues that “media rhetoric of ‘gay serial killers’ confounded homosexuals with both pedophiles and child killers, a powerful political weapon at the time of anti-gay reaction.” He notes that both the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar and the 1980 film Cruising portray gay subculture as having savage and homicidal tendencies. See Decade of Nightmares, 149.

  38 Dirk Gibson, Serial Murder and Media Circuses (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 95, 96.

  39 Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities, 224–26.

  40 Anne Schwartz, The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: The Secret Murders of Milwaukee’s Jeffrey Dahmer (New York: Carol Press, 1992), 115.

  41 A number of scholars have critiqued the film The Silence of the Lambs from this angle. See Elizabeth Young’s “The Silence of the Lambs and The Flaying of Feminist Theory,” Camera Obscura 27 (1991): 5–36; and Christopher Sharret, “The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 21, no. 3 (1993): 100–110.

  42 William Bennett, John DiIulios and John Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), and James Q. Wilson, “What to Do About Crime,” Commentary 98 (1994): 25–34.

  43 Kent Byron Armstrong defines the slasher genre in Slasher Films: An International Filmography, 1960–2001 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2003), 1–19. Armstrong does not include The Silence of the Lambs in his filmography.

  44 “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth,” Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the Ultimate Edition (Blu-Ray), DVD, directed by Tobe Hooper (Dark Sky Films, 2008).

  45 John Kenneth Muir, Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2002), 12–22, describes the controversial film’s complex box office history and its reception by audiences and American culture.

  46 Linnie Blake describes Chainsaw as “a degenerate vision of the American family” and connects its “apocalyptic climate of utter despair” to the general feeling that America was edging toward social collapse. See The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historic Trauma and National Identity (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008), 135.

  47 Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown, 80–81.

  48 Hooper quote taken from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth.” See Judith Halberstam’s discussion in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 146–260. The first two Chainsaw films provide Halberstam the opportunity to talk about the resistance of the horror film to psychoanalytic readings since they reject the humanist assumptions of that discipline and favor “abjection, loss, revulsion, dread and violence.”

  49 Alternatively Christopher Sharret suggests that Leatherface’s gruesome mask of skin “re-creates the lampshades of Buchenwald rather than the knife scabbards and buckskin jackets of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.” Even Sharret notes, however, that this is a tale taking place in Texas, “a state brimming with folklore and the key signifiers of the frontier experience.” The larger history of twentieth-century genocide is not suggested but rather a domestic American horror on which imagery of the American past is fetishized. For Sharret’s view, see “Apocalypse in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” in Christopher Sharrett, Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 300–320.

  50 This discussion of the symbolic reconstruction of American history in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre borrows Tony William’s interpretation in Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Madison, Wisc.: Associated University Presses, 1996), 185–87. I do disagree with William’s conclusion that the Sawyers are “Puritanism’s worst fears” (187). The Sawyers represent the natural outgrowth of the Puritans’ violent “errand into the wilderness.”

  51 For a close reading and analysis, see David A. Szulkin’s Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic (Guildford, UK.: FAB Press, 1997).

  52 See Adam Lowenstein’s discussion of Last House in Shocking Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 111–43. This is a very insightful interpretation, though I disagree with the amount of emphasis Lowenstein puts on advertising copy of the film, as opposed to audience response within the historical context of the final stages of the Vietnam War.

  53 See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender and the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 35–41. Sue Short makes a convincing argument for horror films’ relationship to fairy tale and, by extension, their role as portraying and replicating female initiation rituals. Horror films, particularly slashers, present “misfit sisters,” female heroes who discover resources within themselves and assert their independence from various forms of authority. See Short, Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rite of Passage (New York: Palgrave, 2006). She notes that many of these films are still politically problematic in that they often raise questions about “sexual assertiveness.” See 161ff.

  54 Alan Brinkley describes the suburbanization of the middle class as an attempt to “escape the diversity and abrasiveness of urban life.” See his discussion of uniformity in middle-class culture in “The Illusion of Unity in Cold War Culture,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), esp. 68–70. See also Bernice M. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 10–11 and 142–46. Murphy notes that Myers becomes “a blank slate upon which all the worst fears of the suburban parent can be projected.” He is both “the escaped mental patient” and “the boy next door gone terribly wrong.”

  55 A full examination of the “white flight” phenomenon, and its political implications, appears in Kevin M. Cruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), 54–58.

  56 An alternative reading of the slasher genre can be found in Jane Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters. Caputi sees the slasher genre as a kind of misogynistic fairy tale that has its origins in the sensationalistic tales of Jack the Ripper, whose latter-day incarnations are Jason and Freddy. Caputi ignores the complex question of audience identification and does not discuss Carol J. Clover’s interpretation of the film in relation to the importance of the final girl. Isabel Christina Pinedo, in Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), argues for “contradictory dynamics” within the genre. Pinedo argues for the use of Judith Butler’s “gender trouble” concept in interpreting the genre. See esp. 71–87.

  57 Criticisms of Carol Glover’s “final girl” thesis have tended to draw their examples from these inferior and much less influential sequels. For an example, see Tony Williams’ essay “Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror,” in The
Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 164–80.

  58 Schulman, The Seventies, 241–46.

  59 Deborah Knight and George McKnight claim that Easton’s novel makes the monster its central character and thus “our primary means of access to the events of the fictional world and in fact our narrator.” See Knight and McKnight, “American Psycho: Horror, Satire, Aesthetics and Identification,” in Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003). Of course, Mary Shelley had given us a novel at least partially narrated by a monster and, in some sense, a more trustworthy narrator than Patrick Bateman.

  60 Blake sees the “fetishization of the mass murderer” during the 1980s and 1990s as a product of the conservative Right’s insistence on the individual breaking the mechanisms of state control. See Wounds of Nations, 105–16. Mark Selzer makes a similar argument in Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998).

  61 Philip Jenkins, Using Murder, 150.

  62 Philip L. Simpson, in Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2000), argues that Ellis’ basic theme is ”the self-cannibalizing aspects of 1980s capitalism” (149).

  63 See http://www.murderauction.com (accessed April 15, 2010).

  64 Philip L. Simpson argues that Stone’s points are far more obscure than I argue here, noting that the film becomes dominated by “thematic tangents,” including the introduction of religious themes of Original Sin and Millenarianism. I would argue that Stone’s aesthetic triumphs over the sometimes uncertain plot and murky dialogue to ask difficult question about our fascination with “natural born killers.” See Simpson, Psycho Paths, 185.

  65 On the popular portrayal of the serial killer, see Tim McGirk, “The Monster Within,” Time, January 19, 2004; or “Murder: No Apparent Motive,” HBO documentary, April 24, 1984.