Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  66 On audience identification with Dexter see David Schmid, “The Devil You Know: Dexter and the ‘Goodness’ of American Serial Killing,” in Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television, ed. Douglas L. Howard (New York: I.B. Tauris Press, 2010).

  67 It is noteworthy that, in the early episodes, Dexter and Rita are shown as having a sexually dysfunctional relationship, a conceit quickly dropped by the end of the first season as Dexter’s daytime existence became increasingly normalized in relation to his nighttime crimes.

  68 The idea of the monster being shaped by historic conditions and economic structures borrows from Annalee Newitz’s idea that “humans turned to monsters through capitalism” as “one story that has haunted America.” See Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead, 2, 7.

  69 Schmid argues in “The Devil You Know” that in post-9/11 America, the terrorist has not replaced the serial killer but the serial killer has become a “sympathetic” figure, perhaps even a counterpoint to the terrorist.

  Chapter 6

  1 For the best scholarly reading of The Exorcist, see Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender and the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 65–72 and 83–90.

  2 Audiences in 1973–74 tended to read the ending of the film The Exorcist as a triumph for Satan since both Merrin and Karras meet their end. Friedkin and Blatty have insisted that this is not the message of the film and that the priests’ deaths should be seen as sacrificial efforts to free Regan. In the director’s cut of the film released in 1998, the triumph of good over evil is more clearly delineated. See “Director’s Commentary,” The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen, directed by William Friedkin (Warner Home Video, 2002), DVD.

  3 Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkley Books, 1981), 169; Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 111.

  4 Michel Foucault sees the policing of moral and sexual boundaries as part of the general effort to discipline the social order. See a thorough discussion of this in Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), esp. 137–49.

  5 Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), 159–89.

  6 A lively discussion and debate exists over the nature of the culture wars. A full examination of this debate appears in James Davison Hunter and Alana Wolfe, ed., Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life (Washington D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2006).

  7 See Barbara Creed’s “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 35–63. Creed argues that the feminine is constructed as monstrous within patriarchal discourses and that this sign of the monstrous feminine can be seen in films ranging from The Exorcist to Alien. She notes that this tells us nothing about women’s response to horror, although I think seeing such notions in a political context suggests that both men and women read these films as expositions of social and historical problems. See also Shelley Stamp Lindsey’s excellent essay on the film Carrie, “Horror Femininity and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty,” in Grant, Dread of Difference, 279–95.

  8 See Mary E. Williams, “Sexual Revolution: An Overview,” in The Sexual Revolution, ed. Mary E. Williams (San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 2002), 10–25.

  9 Morton Hunt, Sexual Behavior in the 1970s (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1973), 183–84; Phillip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, American Couples: Work, Money, Sex (New York: William Morrow, 1983), 232, 236.

  10 Blumstein and Schwartz, American Couples, 232–36.

  11 Saturday Evening Post, January 15, 1966.

  12 Toni Grant, Being a Woman: Fulfilling Your Femininity and Finding Love (New York: Random House, 1988), 11, 49.

  13 George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing, 1986), 111, 149. Consider the 1983 slasher and cult favorite Sleepaway Camp in which we meet a monstrous mom who raises a boy as a girl and transforms him into a killer. The final shocking scene manages to combine fears of violence, monsters, and transgender people.

  14 Gilder, Men and Marriage, 84; Joshua David Bellin, Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 115.

  15 A more complex, and certainly more friendly, reading of Cronenberg’s oeuvre appears in Lianne McLarty, “‘Beyond the Veil of the Flesh’: Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror,” in Dread of Difference, 231–52. McLarty notes that in the film The Brood, women “both cause and are the monster.” See also Adam Lowenstein, who argues that Cronenberg, especially in his 1975 Shivers, introduces the idea of a “non-heteronormative sexual community” that presents a revolutionary challenge to conservative images of marriage and family life.” See Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 145–75.

  16 David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1992), 298, 300.

  17 There are a number of good discussions of the film Alien and feminism. See especially Tomas Doherty’s “Genre, Gender and the Aliens Trilogy,” in Grant, Dread of Difference, 181–99. See also the discussion of Ripley in Patricia Melzer, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 108–48. Melzer concludes that Ripley represents a boundary figure who plays with the intersection of the female, the monstrous, and the technical in ways that challenge certain aspects of the more conservative tradition of science fiction.

  18 Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 204–64.

  19 Mary E. Bendyna, RSM, John C. Green, Mark J. Rozell, and Clyde Wilcox argue that, while Catholics have joined with Christian conservatives on a number of issues, they approach the culture wars with their own set of values that give them nuanced positions on the death penalty and social welfare programs. See their article “Uneasy Alliance: Conservative Catholics and the Christian Right,” Sociology of Religion 62, no. 1 (2001): 51–64. I would argue that, uneasy or not, a clear alliance exists, especially over what many religious conservatives view as core issues related to gender and sexuality.

  20 Quoted in Jessica Winter, “Gone to Seed: The Devil’s Playground,” Village Voice, January 21, 2003.

  21 Lucy Fischer, “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary’s Baby,” in Grant, Dread of Difference, 412–31.

  22 The classic definition of urban legend along with plenty of examples appears in Jan Harold Brunvand’s The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and their Meanings (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 1–16, 47–57.

  23 Steve Neal offers a reading of Halloween in his essay ”Halloween: Suspense, Aggression and The Look,” in Christopher Sharrett, Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 356–69. Neal examines the point of view of the film’s spectatorship to describe audience interaction and to connect the film to certain ideological premises. He does not examine the larger historical context or the role of urban legend in informing the film’s direction and plot.

  24 A detailed cultural history of the phenomenon of babysitting can be found in Miriam Forman-Brunell, Babysitter: An American History (New York: New York University Press, 2009). See especially her discussion of the cultural images of the babysitter, 139–58.

  25 Forman-Brunell, Babysitter, 2–5.

  26 Jan Harold Brunvand, Encyclopedia of Urban Legends (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 26.

  27 See “The Hook,” “The Boy Friend’s Death,” and “The Killer in the Back Seat,” in An Anthology of American Folktales and Legends, ed. Frank de Caro (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe Press, 2009), 328, 332
–34, for variants of this story.

  28 Bill Ellis, “Why Are Verbatim Transcripts of Legends Necessary?” in Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, ed. Gillian Bennett, Paul Smith, and J. D. A. Widdowson (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987); Bill Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts and Cults (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 187.

  29 Barbara Arneil, “Gender, Diversity and Organizational Change: The Boy Scouts vs. the Girl Scouts of America,” Perspectives on Politics 8 (2010): 53–68.

  30 Abigail A. Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxxvi–xxxvii, 153–54, 159–67.

  31 Bill Ellis “When Is a Legend Traditional?” in, Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts and Cults, 33–34.

  32 “Adventures at Camp Ranger,” http://www.campranger.com (accessed May 1, 2010).

  33 Quoted in American Nightmare, directed by Adam Simon (Minerva Pictures, 2000).

  34 See Harold Schechter’s discussion of the relationship between urban legend, folklore, and the horror film, in Bosom Serpent: Folklore and Popular Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 21–40.

  35 Libby Tucker, “Cropsey at Camp,” Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore 32 (2006).

  36 Cropsey, directed by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio (Antidote Films, 2009), explores the legends surrounding Cropsey and their inflection in the Andre Rand case.

  37 The satanic panic is is explored fully in W. Scott Poole, Satan in America: The Devil We Know (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 169–79.

  38 Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1993), 47–56.

  39 For more on the origins of the Christian Right, see Clyde Wilson and Carin Larson, Onward Christian Soldiers?: The Religious Right in American Politics, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2006), esp. 35–41.

  40 Victor, Satanic Panic, 219–21. These issues are explored in greater depth in Poole, Satan in America.

  41 Debbie Nathan and Micheal Snedecker, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witchhunt (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 84–87.

  42 Victor, Satanic Panic, 29.

  43 Robert Hicks, In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1990). See also Ben M. Crouch and Kelley Damphousse, “A Survey of Occult Cops,” in The Satanism Scare (New York: de Gruyter, 1991).

  44 Victor, Satanic Panic, 19–21.

  45 Jeff McLaughlin, “Haunted House Abortion Scene Ignites Protest,” Boston Globe, October 30, 1991; “Hell House Ignites Debate,” Denver Post, October 21, 1995.

  46 W. Scott Poole, “Jesus Goes to the Dark Carnival: Hell House Gets a Make-over?” in Religion Dispatches, October 31, 2009.

  47 Jason Bivins, Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press), 159, 166.

  48 Nina Auerbach points out how frequently the “monster kid” phenomenon has been gendered male. She describes her own experience with the “shadowy monsters” that became “a revelation” to her and what she calls a “secret talisman” against the dull conformism of teen culture in the late ’50s. See Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4–5.

  49 American Scary, directed by John E. Hudgens (POOB Productions, 2006), fully explores the “horror host” phenomenon with interviews and fan recollections. See also Elena M. Watson, Television Horror Hosts: 68 Vampires, Mad Scientists and Other Denizens of the Late Night Airwaves Examined and Interviewed (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2000).

  50 See Robert Michael “Robb” Cotter, The Great Monster Magazines (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2008), 33–41; Dante interview with David J. Skal quoted in Monster Show, 272–73.

  51 Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 150–51.

  52 Cross, Cute and the Cool, 150–51.

  53 Cross, Cute and the Cool, 151; Skal, Monster Show, 263; “The Return of the Monsters,” Look, September 8, 1964, 47.

  54 Cross, Cute and the Cool, 152.

  55 Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 10.

  56 See Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), 158–68.

  57 Cotter, Great Monster Magazines, 212–20.

  58 Henry Jenkins, The WOW Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 41–63.

  59 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 2006).

  60 Mark Edmundson, in Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of the Gothic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), finds tales of gothic terror everywhere in American public life in the ’90s. He suggests that the decline in popularity of gothic slasher films may have been due to the fact that the O. J. Simpson case offered a more compelling gothic narrative than anything even the best filmmakers could produce. See esp. 6–7, 12–17, 63–68.

  Chapter 7

  1 See Adam Lowenstein’s discussion of the film in Shocking Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 154–55.

  2 A full description of the Night of the Living Dead and its significance appears in Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 272–96.

  3 On the continuing popularity of the zombie film, see Gendy Alimurung, “This Zombie Moment: Hunting for What Lies Beneath the Undead Zeitgeist,” LA Weekly, May 14, 2009. See also Lev Grossman, “Zombies Are the New Vampires,” Time, April 19, 2009.

  4 Tim Kane explores the changing incarnations of the vampire in The Changing Vampire of Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Growth of a Genre (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2006). Kane emphasizes both the eroticism of the Hammer films and their willingness to show blood by the bucketful. See esp. 43–50.

  5 See Kane, Changing Vampire, 107–11.

  6 An interesting alternative explanation for our fascination with these creatures appears in Jorg Waltje’s Blood Obsession: Vampires, Serial Murder and the Popular Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 2005). Waltje uses Freudian categories to think about our cultural obsession with vampires and serial murderers. At the end of his study, he suggests the compelling notion that capitalism’s fascination with the replication of activity in consumerism and concomitant encouragement society gives to addictive behavior has its perfect embodiment in the serial killer and the vampire. Of course, the zombie would fit this paradigm as well, since their whole existence is driven by a replication of consumption. See 139–41.

  7 Both vampires and zombies should be read in connection with the serial killer. Philip L. Simpson points out that the narratives of serial murder “plunder the vampire narratives of the last century and a half” and that the mass murderer is frequently identified with biting and eating. See Simpson, Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 4–5.

  8 A complete history of the evolution of the zombie figure can be found in Kyle William Bishop, American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2010). Their increasing popularity can be seen in a USA Today story by Craig Wilson, “Zombies lurch into popular culture via books, plays, more,” April 8, 2009. For an interesting take on the zombie in relation to current American anxieties over change, see also Elizabeth Kent, “Zombie as Parody: The Misuses of Science and the Nonhuman Condition in Postmodern Society,” (M.A. thesis, Auburn University, 2009).

  9 A complete introduction to the social and cultural crisis of Vietnam appears in Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), 221–24.

  10 One of the best studies of the war in Vietnam is Christian G. Appy, Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). For reading on casualties, see 7–15, 247–48, 274–75.

  11 Jonathan Neale, A People’s History of the Vietnam War (New York: The New Press, 2004), 93; Appy, Working Class War, 156–57.

  12 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 469.

  13 Neale, A People’s History of the Vietnam War, 96–97. Arnold R. Isaacs points out that the majority of books and films about Vietnam show low-ranking soldiers engaged in acts of violence without representing the innumerable civilian causalities caused by the “unparalleled in human history” bombings of Vietnam. See Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 22.

  14 Keith Beattie, The Scar That Binds (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 13. A 2006 Harvard Medical School/Columbia University Study found that the effects of severe psychological trauma affected about 20 percent of America’s three million Vietnam veterans thirty years after the end of the conflict. See William J. Cromie, “Mental Casualities of Vietnam War Persists,” Harvard University Gazette, August 17, 2006. Mai Lan Gustafsson’s perfectly executed and beautifully written study focuses primarily on the experience of the Vietnamese people and how their folkloric traditions concerned with angry, vengeful, and unquiet spirits expressed grief over the millions of Vietnamese lives lost in their postcolonial conflicts. See Gustafsson, War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), see esp. 47–48, 142.

  15 See the discussion of war and photography by John Taylor in Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 160–88. Taylor discusses imagery of the Vietnam War in relation to the 1991 Gulf Conflict.