by Matt Kaplan
By the 1500s, this was no longer the case. Jewish mythology tells of a rabbi who fashioned a human-shaped structure out of clay and then made prayers that allowed it, through divine intervention, to function as a living creature. The story reportedly existed as oral tradition for centuries, but in 1909 a manuscript was found that was claimed to have been written by the Golem-creating rabbi’s son-in-law.72 This document detailed how the creature, which came to be known as the Golem of Prague, was created: “I continued circling the glowing figure in the mud, and soon lost awareness of the number of times I had encircled it. The outline of the Golem was glowing more and more intensely and the odor of scorched earth reached my nostrils… no sooner had we completed our slow, concentrated recitation of the verse in Genesis, when the Golem opened his eyes.”
The role of the Golem is well outlined in notes. The rabbi ordered it to protect the Jews of Prague from the constant persecution they were enduring from Christians, and it fills this role perfectly. The tales that are told in this work (including one harrowing story where the Golem jumps aboard a rushing wagon and wrestles with a man who is about to frame a Jew for murder) represent the creature as nearly invulnerable, incredibly strong, and always fighting to bring criminals to justice.
The Golem is undeniably alien in form, but classifying it as a monster is difficult because its behaviors are not outwardly harmful toward humanity. It does attack people, but we can all agree these people are villains. Does an aberration that regularly causes harm to evil humans count as a monster? Or does it count as something else? Technically, the mutants of the X-Men comic books and movies are also aberrations who frequently harm villainous humans. Are they monsters? In the comic universe within which they exist, they are not. Really, the Golem is more of a historic clay superhero than a monster.
From a believability standpoint, it is hard to see how anyone could think that a pile of wet clay can become animated by being shaped into human form and exposed to prayer. There are places in the world where clay can take on lifelike qualities, bubbling thermal pools being one of them, but the concept seems too far-fetched. The stories of the Golem do not have the creature sneaking about in places where people could have mistaken some natural event for a creature of this sort. The Golem’s activities always took place in towns or inside homes, and were easily seen during the day. So it could not have been a case of mistaken identity. What is possible is that there was a vigilante at large in Prague at the time this tale was recorded, something akin to a Jewish Dark Knight, and that the Golem mythology was invented as a form of cover story much as the masked Batman was invented as a cover for Bruce Wayne. For all we know, the rabbi who created the Golem, or his son-in-law who supposedly recorded the tale, could well have been the vigilante himself.
The story of the Golem of Prague ultimately concludes with anti-Semitic behavior coming to an end. The rabbi, seeing that all is finally well, declares, “I feel the golem must be destroyed. His mission is accomplished. If we keep him longer than necessary, we may fall into the danger of misusing sacred property.” And with this sentiment, the creature is done away with in prayer.
From synagogue to laboratory
If The Golem of Prague is something of a cautionary tale about creating artificial life only when the need is great and God consents, the 1818 publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was the cautionary nightmare. While a lump of human-shaped clay may have achieved only certain levels of horror, a creature built from scavenged body parts was another matter entirely.
Shelley’s writing is infused with dread and awe: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”
This contrasts rather starkly with more recent presentations of Frankenstein that portray Victor Frankenstein standing over a lab table hysterically shouting “It’s alive!” as lightning bolts strike and send electricity surging through the body of his creation. The original tale contains nothing of the sort. There is no lightning, no hysteria, and the story is all the more frightening for it.
The scene is dark, with the only candle nearly out. The rain is spattering against the windows and it is very late at night. But while the setting itself establishes fear, it is the eye that immediately establishes the creature as an aberration. Human eyes come in many colors, brown, blue, green, nearly black, but yellow is not an option. By specifically choosing a color impossible for humans to have, Shelley places the creature into the category of nonhuman. And she goes much further: “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”
Like Chimera, a lot of the fear generated here stems from asymmetricality. Perfection and rot side by side is dire stuff, but grotesque descriptions could take the horror of Frankenstein’s creature only so far. Telling somebody about a dreadful sight is nowhere near as frightening as suggesting that such a horror is real and potentially nearby. Because of where medical science was headed during Shelley’s day, she was able to make such suggestions very easily by tapping into recent developments in blood transfusion research.
Blood transfusions are a common part of modern medical treatment. If a patient loses a lot of blood, through either a traumatic accident or surgery, it is standard practice to replace the lost blood with blood that has been donated by other individuals. This sounds relatively simple, and today it mostly is.
Doctors know that the patient’s blood type as well as the donor’s must be identified and matched before transfusion. Failure to do this is extremely dangerous. The body has extensive defensive systems that are very good at destroying foreign materials, including new blood, even if it is vital to the body’s survival.
If infused blood does not match the patient’s blood, the immune system aggressively attacks under the mistaken assumption that it is a foreign invader.73 These reactions are devastating. They frequently lead to organ failure and can easily cause death. For this reason, during the early 1800s, when blood types were not understood, giving people blood from donors proved very risky. Even so, attempts were being made, and researchers in Britain were working out that blood did not need to be transferred directly from one body to another. During the 1820s, trial and error with women who were in desperate need of blood following childbirth revealed that blood could be placed into a syringe for a short time before being injected.
Thus, the crucial ingredients existed at this time for a belief that blood could be collected from a human, stored in a container, and then eventually used to sustain another person’s life, even after the donor’s death. Mind you, medical science was not far enough along to practically conduct this procedure in 1818, when Frankenstein was published, but the ideas were there. And if blood could be stored after death, why not body parts?
Today hearts, lungs, kidneys, and even, according to one recent study, tracheas can be moved from one person to another. During Shelley’s day, this was not the case; if people received transplants, they died. But tests with animals were being conducted and a lot of information was accumulated. So it seems plausible that readers of Frankenstein, during its first decade of publication, believed that, just like blood, organs could be collected and reused after death. It is this connection to reality that must have made Shelley’s monster not just a black-lipped, yellow-eyed horror but a science-made terror that could really be created at a research i
nstitute.
Sexual awakening
Frankenstein was only the beginning. Since the publication of Shelley’s novel, creatures crafted by the hands of humanity have continued to find their way into monster literature. The beast folk in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau are very similar to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster in that they are built by a scientist. Even though Dr. Moreau does not breathe life into them as clearly as Dr. Frankenstein does (they are living animals at the start and living animals at the end of the scientific process), he is effectively responsible for their creation. Dren, the monster featured in Vincenzo Natali’s 2009 film Splice, is another example. Using modern science to make the story believable, Dren is created from animal DNA that is spliced together with human DNA rather than stitched together from a combination of animal and human body parts (a method that would lead to a severe immune system reaction that would make foreign blood rejection look tame). Dren is effectively a genetically engineered creature with an alluring feminine face, legs like those of a quadrupedal beast, and a tail with a stinger on its end. This combination places her in the unusual situation of being simultaneously frightening and erotic. It also makes her something of a modern Chimera. The utterly lethal monster Sil in Roger Donaldson’s 1995 film Species is similarly created through genetic engineering, with scientists using genetic information sent to them from space to craft a new organism. Again like Dren, Sil is simultaneously sexually alluring and menacing. This is a far cry from Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and Dr. Moreau’s original beast folk, which were all entirely hideous, but it is not different from the modern adaptation of Dr. Moreau. The 1996 film version of Wells’s tale, which deviates substantially from the original text, includes a female member of the beast folk named Aissa, who is both attractive and fanged. So why is sex appeal being increasingly merged with dangerous creations?
Part of the answer presumably has to do with money. Create a frightening monster, and people come to see it. Create a frightening monster with boobs, and even more people come to see it.74 But there is more. Stitched-together corpses and animated clay structures are not the sorts of human creations being sexualized. The creations that are, tend to be formed by mixing human DNA with the DNA of some other species. With Dren and Aissa, the other species is a real-world animal; with Sil, the other species is an alien. In all three cases, the hybrid creature formed from the genetic blend is strong willed, sexually attractive, and more powerful than any normal humans.
It is going to sound absurd, but to come to grips with why sex is so strongly emphasized in Dren, Aissa, and Sil, it is worth considering the humble male peacock. Here is a bird that needs to grow feathers of ridiculous size and brilliant color to attract a female. The growth of these feathers demands that the male consume a lot of nutrients. Moreover, the feathers’ mere existence presents the male with a constant problem—they dramatically reduce mobility and make the bird more vulnerable to predators. Yet evolutionary logic dictates that any males that can survive such risks and still have huge and attractive feathers must be the best of the best and worthy of mating with. And the pressure is not only on male animals. Females of many species must also take care of themselves; just consider the blue-footed booby females that must keep their feet bright and blue or risk losing their partners.
People like to think of themselves as more highly evolved than peacocks and boobies but, honestly, the differences have not traditionally been viewed by psychologists as all that vast. Decades of studies reveal that humans are attracted to mates who present positive characteristics. Specifically, they show women to be keenly attracted to men who have money and power, while men are attracted to women who project health and strength, like good skin, symmetrical faces, and a favorable waist-to-hip ratio.75 This all makes perfect sense. From an evolutionary perspective, women benefit greatly from breeding with men who have the resources to take care of them, while men benefit from breeding with women who are healthy enough to survive childbirth and pass along good genes to children.
As for where this leaves Dren, Aissa, and Sil, they are female creatures infused with genes that make them stronger and healthier than any other humans. They are symbols of the ultimate in physical attraction, but they come with warnings. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, the old warning arises not to meddle in matters of creating life, but there is also a new warning: Beware deeply seated evolutionary instincts. These new sexual females and genetically engineered monsters hint of the dangers associated with falling prey to behaviors driven by attraction based upon millennia of natural selection and not upon logical thought. Their presence in films suggests that something many people fear in these days of increasing psychological awareness is being lured by physical attraction into a relationship with someone who is predatory. It is a fear of the femme fatale.
Yet as the science of psychology moves along, monsters like Dren, Aissa, and Sil may ultimately find themselves going the way of the dodo. The psychologists Eli Finkel at Northwestern University and Paul Eastwick at Texas A&M University are experts in the science of romance. As they examined what it is that attracts males to females, and vice versa, they found flaws in many of the older research reports.
The volumes of historic psychology studies that helped form the widely held belief that men want gorgeous women and women want wealthy and powerful men were almost entirely based upon information gathered from people who were seeking dates or about to go on dates. This was not because psychologists were lazy; studying human dating behaviors is difficult, and the best way to do it is to ask people what they were seeking in a partner. It wasn’t practical to follow people around as they went on dates and monitor what they said and did to one another. This changed with the invention of speed dating.
During speed-dating activities, one gender (usually female) is seated at tables around a room while the other gender (usually male) rotates, spending a few minutes with each woman before moving along. Afterward, participants select whom they want to see again, and if the person they selected chooses them too, the speed-dating system reveals contact details to the interested individuals and they can set up an actual date.
Eastwick and Finkel have effectively hijacked speed dating in the name of science. By offering speed-dating events with video cameras placed all over the room, recording systems on every table, and participants given a discount for consenting to have their activities captured, the duo have learned much. Specifically, they have found that what women and men say they want is often not what they really are attracted to when presented with actual people.
“It is like meeting someone who says she doesn’t like eggs but who then goes on to have cake made with egg but not complain at all. A woman may have a preference, but that preference may be entirely ignored when a complex person is presented in front of her,” explains Finkel. “The same is true of men. Our findings are showing that in live interactions, men care about finding someone who is personable and has good earning potential just as much as women do, they just don’t express these preferences when asked,” adds Eastwick.
The work is relatively new to the field and it will take time for it to become widely known, but as it does, it will likely erode the fear that we cannot resist the allure of an enticing but dangerous lover, and this, in turn, will likely drive the sexually terrifying aspects of creations like Sil and Dren to extinction.
Born to be bad?
Sexual aspects of monsters created by humanity aside, as terrible as Dr. Frankenstein’s creation might have been to look at, it is not just its looks that make it frightening. The creature commits several murders, becoming the terror that everyone initially feared. But it is worth asking whether it was actually “born” a monster.
Many of the early monsters, like Chimera and the Minotaur, were born both ugly and evil. This is not the case with Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. The creature is not initially a threat. It is most certainly a hideous aberration, but during its first months of life, when it has not yet attacked anyone, it is dif
ficult to classify as a monster since this, by definition, requires it to cause harm to people, and it doesn’t.
During its early days, the creature finds a hiding spot inside an old barn and observes a family on the outskirts of a small town. Without intruding, it studies them and develops a keen yearning to be accepted. The monster starts helping the family by chopping wood and shoveling snow at night, giving them the impression they have a guardian angel looking after them. In time, the creature approaches the family house when everyone but the blind grandfather is away. It speaks to the old man, telling him it has come to visit friends who have never seen it and that it is fearful of their reaction. The old man consoles the creature, but to no avail. When the younger members of the family return, they react badly, attacking the creature or fainting in fear.
It is from this experience that the creature decides that the only way for it to enjoy companionship is if it kidnaps a young child, who does not yet know fear, and teaches the child to accept its wretched form. By chance, the child it kidnaps is Dr. Frankenstein’s youngest brother. As the child screams that the Frankenstein family will avenge the kidnapping, the creature changes its plans and strangles the child as an act of revenge toward its creator. Not satisfied, it then frames a young girl in Dr. Frankenstein’s hometown for the murder. It is here, and during the series of killings that follow, where the creature evolves from being merely hideous to being a monster.
In many ways, the situation for Dren in Splice is similar. After being created for research and carted off to a barn where she is hidden from public sight, she slowly begins to grow bored and despondent. While she might not be entirely composed from human DNA, Dren is inquisitive and intelligent. Yet she is locked away like a prisoner and treated by her creators as more of a pet than a person. Over time, her frustration grows. She first lashes out at a cat, piercing its body with the stinger in her tail. Soon after, she pins down her creator and steals the key she needs to escape. The conflict quickly grows out of control and Dren becomes a monster.76