Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting Read online

  “With Monsters in America, W. Scott Poole has given us a guidebook for a journey into nightmare territory. Insightful and brilliant!”

  —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author

  of Patient Zero and Dead of Night

  MONSTERS IN AMERICA

  OUR HISTORICAL OBSESSION WITH THE HIDEOUS AND THE HAUNTING

  W. Scott Poole

  BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS

  © 2011 by Baylor University Press

  Waco, Texas 76798-7363

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

  Cover Design by Natalya Balnova

  Cover Image © Jim Zuckerman/Corbis

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Poole, W. Scott, 1971–

  Monsters in America : our historical obsession with the hideous and the haunting / W. Scott Poole.

  295 p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-60258-314-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Monsters. 2. Ghosts. 3. Ghouls and ogres. 4. Animals, Mythical. 5. Supernatural. 6. Popular culture--United States--History. I. Title.

  GR825.P626 2011

  398.24’54--dc22

  2010053273

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper with a minimum of 30% pcw recycled content.

  Dedicated to Niamh Margaret Carmichael

  Who is already learning that monsters are sometimes just shy creatures.

  I don’t see any American dream. I see an American nightmare.

  —Malcolm X

  It’s a perfect night for mystery and horror. The air itself is filled with monsters.

  —Elsa Lanchester, The Bride of Frankenstein

  CONTENTS

  List of Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  With a Warning to the Unsuspecting Reader

  Introduction

  The Bloody Chords of Memory

  1 Monstrous Beginnings

  2 Goth Americana

  3 Weird Science

  4 Alien Invasions

  5 Deviant Bodies

  6 Haunted Houses

  7 Undead Americans

  Epilogue

  Worse Things Waiting

  Filmography

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sometime around the age of eight, my parents banned me from watching Shock Theatre on Saturday afternoons. Shock Theatre brought the black-and-white “famous monsters” of the 1930s and 1940s into the lives of the kids of the 1970s. It also gave me a strange combination of hallucinatory nightmares and intense fascination only matched by my near-religious hysteria over the recent 1977 release of Star Wars.

  Their ban did not last, as evidenced by the endless stream of comic books, TV shows, and movies that soon came into my life. I appreciate my parents’ sometimes-harassed patience and hope this book helps them to understand why these things matter not only to me but also to the culture in which we live. I sincerely thank them for their unflagging pride in me, even when my work and interests go places they do not always understand.

  I’ve become a fanboy of Baylor University Press. I would especially like to thank Carey Newman for his unfailing support and indefatigable enthusiasm for the project. Seldom have I had an editor take such a personal interest in a project, including reading and commenting on early drafts. I also very much appreciate the work of Jennifer Hunt, whose helpful, detailed e-mails regarding the book’s production and design answered my concerns and helped prompt new ideas for photographs and images. Thanks to Diane Smith who quickly and helpfully dealt with all my questions and concerns about matters editorial.

  Numerous friends and colleagues take an avid interest in my work and have expressed excitement about this project. I would like especially to thank Cara Delay. Cara took time out from her own work on nineteenth-century women’s history to discuss this book with me and read some of the later chapters. Her friendship provides much needed workaday encouragement. Special thanks to Christina Shedlock who created an incredibly detailed and useful index for the book. I look forward to reading her own forthcoming scholarship.

  I’ve dedicated Monsters in America to my goddaughter, Niamh Margaret Carmichael. She is three years old but has already fallen desperately in love with books. I hope one day she will read and enjoy this one. I am excited to think about how her emerging sense of humor, her developing flair for the dramatic, her love for irony, and her already fiery temperament will respond to my monsters. I should also note that she is lucky to have parents, Noelle and Tim, who are already teaching her that monsters are for story time rather than symbols for religious and political enemies.

  This book would not have happened without my partner Beth Phillips. Her interest in my work never fails to encourage me. She willingly read every word of drafts, catching errors and making valuable suggestions. More importantly, without her I simply would not always have the courage to make my strange ideas a reality. She makes both my work and my life a good place to be. I love you Beth.

  Preface

  WITH A WARNING TO THE UNSUSPECTING READER

  Come now,

  My Child

  If we were planning

  To harm you, do you think

  We’d be lurking here

  Beside the path

  In the very dark-

  Est part of

  The forest?

  —Kenneth Patchen

  Entertaining Comics (usually known simply as “EC”) created some of the most subversive images of the 1950s in titles like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. These macabre tales of mayhem, taking place in the midst of middle-class American life, used the conceit of a host known as the “Crypt Keeper” to introduce the horror and mix in some black humor. Late night showings of horror films on local TV used the same convention. In 1954 the world met Vampira, a campy and seductive woman in black, who introduced each film with a bloodcurdling scream.

  Here is a favorite introduction to a tale of terror from the Crypt Keeper that seems germane to this book’s purpose:

  Welcome dear fiends! Come in! Come into the Crypt of Terror! I am your host the crypt-keeper … This one is sure to freeze the blood in your veins … Guaranteed to make little shivers run up and down your crawling spine! This little adventure in terror is about to happen to you! You are the main character.

  Right now, I am your crypt keeper and your Vampira. I am going to introduce you to monsters. I aim to give you unpleasant dreams.

  Since this is a book about monsters, you probably want to hear how I define the monster. Defining one’s terms, I am sure you have been told, is essential to any discussion. Setting out on our nighttime journey with a clear meaning of our terms might help us survive the night. A book about monsters should define its monsters.

  But I am not going to do it. At least, I am not going to give you a straightforward definition to underline or highlight. I prefer to take you on a wild ride through the darkness of the American past, galloping hard and fast like Ichabod Crane (and not making any ill-considered stops like poor Marion Crane) in hopes we can reach the bridge in time. Maybe if we do, we will have worked out our definition of the monster.

  Scholars like clear analy
tical mandates, that is, direct assertions of argument followed by supporting evidence. Since I hope at least some scholars of American history and culture will read this book, let me throw them a bone or two. I will even give them a scholarly citation to munch on like zombies with a nice meaty thighbone. I buy fully into Judith Halberstam’s argument that monsters are “meaning machines,” exuviating all manner of cultural productions depending on their context and their historical moment. In American history they have been symbols of deviance, objects of sympathy, and even images of erotic desire. They structured the enslavement of African Americans, constructed notions of crime and deviance, and provided mental fodder for the culture wars of the contemporary period.1

  You see why I did not want to give you a definition? Monsters have been manufacturing complex meanings for four hundred years of American history. They do not mean one thing but a thousand. Only by looking at a multitude of monsters can we come to understand something about them and, in turn, something about American history. This book proposes to examine American history through its monsters.

  So do not expect neat definitions when it comes to a messy subject like monsters. A monster is a beast of excess, and monster stories are tales of excess. Part of what makes the horror film so much fun is that it refuses to follow the narrative plot of a simple melodrama. It does not contain conflict and ignore contradictions in order to produce a happy ending. It blows conventions into a million pieces and makes a fetish out of excess. In this the horror film takes on the nature of its subject and its agent: the monster.2

  The subject of monsters contains too much meaning. It is the House That Drips Blood and the thing with 20,000 eyes. It is bigger than it should be, more insatiable than anything in nature; it desires more and frightens you with its yawning monstrous maw. The very messiness of the monster makes it the perfect entry into understanding the messiness of American history. If history were music it would not have the austere balance of a Bach concerto. It would be the opening assault of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK,” angry, discordant, and yawping at you in combative tones. History issues threats as much as it inspires reflection.

  Some historians will be less than happy with this book. Many of them will note that I spend more time on sea serpents than the Civil War, or that I dash past the American Revolution in my eagerness to talk about the American Enlightenment’s fascination with the homegrown, allegedly carnivorous mastodon. They are right that some events get short shrift and a very different kind of analysis than appears in most historical studies. Obviously a work like this does not aim to deliver the kind of heaping spoonfuls of nuanced historical fact we expect from good textbooks.

  As a trained historian, I share these concerns. Even a look at the chapter titles suggests that this author is up to no good. But I also worry that the historian’s profession has become deeply problematic because both a younger and older generation have become profoundly disconnected from their putative audience and, in a strange way, from their own topics. Professional historians sometimes see themselves as students and curators of a master narrative. Amateur readers of history, meanwhile, turn to popularly written books on historical subjects because they offer a damn good yarn and literally nothing else.

  Neither of these groups sees themselves as enfolded in history, sometimes as its agents and sometimes as its victims. The average reader keeps reading World War II books as if they tell a clear, uncomplicated story. Grad students learn the ropes and take their comprehensive exams and go on to pass the narrative onto their students (or drop the narrative on them like the metaphorical ton of bricks). None of these groups lets history enrage, implicate, and penetrate them.

  Master narratives are, by definition, lies and untruths. This is why we need to study monsters. They are the things hiding in history’s dark places, the silences that scream if you listen closely enough. Cultural critic Greil Marcus writes that “parts of history, because they don’t fit the story a people wants to tell itself, survive only as haunts and fairy tales, accessible only as specters and spooks.” The secrets and the lies, and perhaps most importantly the victims of history, are in those stories of monsters, those dark places waiting to be explored. These places became dark in the first place because they did not fit the historical story we wanted to tell ourselves.3

  So, I am wondering if maybe the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can explicate issues that a full-scale study of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policy cannot. Its lead character, Leatherface, certainly makes an impression, and his house of horrors has a lot to tell us about the American frontier. I am wondering if Frankenstein’s monster might offer us a new way to grasp the horrors of scientific racism or if Dracula can teach us something about the early twentieth-century Red Scare.

  I do not want to be misunderstood here at the beginning. This is not an effort to use some horrific examples from fantasy literature and film to illustrate important truths about American history. Instead, I am seeking to read the monster as what theorist Slavoj Žižek refers to as “a fantasy scenario that obfuscates the true horror of the situation.” The monster reifies very real incidents, true horrors, true monsters. This is why they are always complicated and inherently sophisticated. The monster has its tentacles wrapped around the foundations of American history, draws its life from ideological efforts to marginalize the weak and normalize the powerful, to suppress struggles for class, racial, and sexual liberation, to transform the “American Way of Life” into a weapon of empire.4

  The reader should also be aware that the author believes in monsters. They are real. Before you shut this book and write it off as Fortean propaganda, know that I do not see myself as a poor man’s Mulder from the television show The X-Files, here to tell you that the truth is out there. But before we start talking about “monsters as metaphors,” let’s examine that construction a bit and you will see why I would rather just assert my belief in monsters.5

  The problem is in the concept of metaphor itself. “My love is like a red, red rose” is metaphorical language expressing a desire to sing the beauty of the beloved (and to get laid by the beloved). But really, who cares? Metaphors can be beautiful, inexact, or just plain silly but, regardless, nobody takes them seriously. The phrase “just a metaphor” sounds suspiciously to me like “just a waste of time.”

  Lots of books are out there about monsters as metaphors for this or that social or psychological process. I do not think this approach works well when it comes to history. In American history the monsters are real. The metaphors of the American experience are ideas hardwired to historical action rather than interesting word pictures. If you stick with me on the path, I will explain more. Just be forewarned—I take my monsters seriously.

  I do not, however, take traditional historical chronologies seriously. Although this book engages in a chronological analysis of a kind, it also ignores some of the basic conventions of historical narrative. We will move back and forth between periods, and listen to voices in the seventeenth century and the twentieth century at the same time, generally mucking up any effort to read the American experience as a linear, and thus progressive, march through time. This is because I hope to trace the ways American monsters form a systemic network, or perhaps a cultural echo chamber, rather than something like a time line.

  It is also because I believe that seeing history as a stark glacial formation of dates and facts leads to viewing history as “dead” and definitively “in the past.” This, in turn, can make way for the tendency to monumentalize those events, to invest them with the immovable power of marble statues. History as memorizable event becomes at once detached from the present and the embodiment of a profoundly conservative pedagogy, markers of boundaries and parameters that can never be changed. History then becomes dead cultural weight the present must carry on its back rather than living events in conversation and debate. On the other hand, refusing to accept the idea that history is dead things on a time line frees us from the incredibly assertive arrogance
of the past, its lifeless yet grasping hand. If we do otherwise, we will feel that hand, cold and brutal, holding us tight and not letting us go.6

  And so we are going to pass a long night together. If you and I make it until morning and find our way out of this dark wood, we will not see American history the same way ever again. Seeing America through its monsters offers a new perspective on old questions. It allows us to look into the shadows, to rifle through those trunks in the attic we have been warned to leave alone. Not all of our myths will make it out of here alive.

  I hope one of the first victims, by the way, is that loudmouth “American exceptionalism.” This unfortunate philosophy has it that America has always been the innocent abroad, the new nation who teaches the world democracy. This sophomoric notion of world history since 1776 presents the United States as Little Red Riding Hood, setting off on the forest path of democracy and economic liberalism. A hard look at American history raises questions about whether the American nation has been the innocent in the woods or that other, more feral figure in the forest (Oh grandma, what hairy arms you have!).

  So let our midnight ride begin. We will start by figuring out the way monster narratives work and what others have said about them, and hardly catch our breath before we plunge into colonial America’s world of witches and wonders. Creatures of scientific nightmare will haunt us in the nineteenth century as we meet Hawthorne and Poe, two old hands at navigating this eldritch wood. The twentieth century seems to open out into a new vista, but we only briefly see some sunlight, and we are back in the dark wood again, hiding from escaped mental patients and seeing strange lights in the sky. We will begin to dream of home and yet also wonder if it is all that safe a place after all before we get chased by creatures of the night eager to chew on us and suck us dry.