On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (32 page)

T
HE WORD
HORROR
COMES FROM
the Latin verb
horrere
, to “stand on end” or bristle. The term is often used today to designate an artistic genre that began with the gothic literature of Shelley (
Frankenstein
, 1818), Polidori (
The Vampyre
, 1819), and Irving (
Sleepy Hollow
, 1820) and continues to the present with such authors as Stephen King and filmmakers George Romero, Sam Raimi, and Wes Craven. But
horror
has also found its way into ordinary language as the name of the ineffable emotion that one experiences when one is afraid of something unfamiliar; for example, a monster, or perceived monster, induces an experience that’s somewhat different from the fear provoked by a snarling dog. Horror is both the human emotion and the artistic genre designed to produce that emotion. It is the subjective arena in which we usually encounter monsters.

We are moving in our story from anxieties about external monsters to anxieties about inner monsters. Obviously, earlier eras felt the drama of inner alienation, but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries dredged the depths of the unconscious more deeply and tried to map their findings. In this chapter I want to analyze some of those psychological mechanisms that
respond
to monsters. In this way we’ll have better insight when we turn to the unique creatures ahead.

There seems to be some undeniable cognitive component to monster fear.
¹
Is a headless horseman particularly scary when compared with a moustache-less man or a hatless man because we’ve never experienced such an anomaly, or because we have some instinctual understanding that heads are essential for human life, so that the headless monster is an instance of multiple “category jamming,” both morphologically incoherent and also transgressing the categories of animate and inanimate?

The philosopher of horror Noel Carroll invented the term
category jamming
and makes an argument that fits nicely with findings from developmental psychology. Experiments demonstrate that animals and humans respond to their earliest experiences by internalizing a cognitive classification system based on the creatures they regularly encounter. After a certain time, however, the classification system “solidifies” into a cognitive framework, and any subsequently strange and unclassifiable encounter produces fear in the knower.
²
Categorical mismatch makes the knower very uncomfortable. Carroll arrived at his own mismatch theory by noticing that most horror monsters are
disgusting
as well as threatening.
³
He argues that human beings seem especially disgusted by “impurity.” Things that we find impure and consider to be abominations are usually interstitial entities, in between normal categories of being. For example, blood, feces, spit, snot, and vomit all blur the usual categories of
me
and
not me
, or
human
and
not human
. Pushing this idea of transgressing categories further, Carroll extends the unsettling aspect of interstitial awareness to our experience of monsters in horror genres. The argument is made more compelling by the fact that so many monsters are depicted as truly disgusting. One thinks of the mucus-like slime oozing off most aliens, the gelatinous blob monsters, the undulating goopy transformations of shape-shifters, or the viscous twisting of monster reproduction. Carroll thinks that it is this cognitive slippage invoked by monsters that explains why we are both repelled by and drawn to horror films and novels. The fascination produced by categorical mismatches is the solution to the paradox of why we seek out an experience that is at least partly unpleasant.

H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) is a name synonymous with horror, and many connoisseurs of the genre consider him the rightful heir to Poe’s distinguished mantle. His stories, such as the “The Call of Cthulhu,” were sometimes published in the pulp magazine
Weird Tales
during his lifetime,
but his influence has been acknowledged by many, including Jorge Luis Borges, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and even a small army of heavy metal bands.

In “The Call of the Cthulhu” Lovecraft describes a giant sea monster sleeping at the bottom of the ocean until accidentally awakened by foolish men. Allusions to Leviathan abound, but also the legends of the Kraken, the ship-smashing giant octopus or squid feared by northern sailors since at least the seventeenth century. The monster appears to draw on imagery from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1830 poem “The Kraken” in which Tennyson describes the beast’s “ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep.” Tennyson’s poem, it bears mentioning, also influenced Jules Verne’s 1870 novel
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
. Lovecraft’s monster Cthulhu is described as a green, sticky, mountain-size creature, with an “awful squid head,” “writhing feelers,” and “flabby claws.” When the monster’s head is rammed with a ship, it bursts with “a slushy nastiness” like a “cloven sunfish,” but then recomposes and regenerates of its own self-organizing power.

Lovecraft was a master at giving us these blood-curdling monsters, but it is the emotion of eerie dread he excels in producing that I want to examine here. In his 1927
Supernatural Horror in Literature
, Lovecraft argues that good horror evokes a unique subjective emotion, which he refers to as “cosmic fear.”
⁴
There is something in the horror experience, he claims, that resonates with a deep, instinctual awe of the unknown. “The one test of the really weird,” he explains, “is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes on the known universe’s utmost rim.” Lovecraft suggests that all human beings have an instinctual awareness (some more refined than others) of the paltry state of human understanding, especially when compared with the almost limitless domain of the strange and unfamiliar. That sense of fragility and vulnerability is a major aspect of this “cosmic fear” that horror triggers in us.

The same year that Lovecraft published
Supernatural Horror in Literature
, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger published his magnum opus,
Sein und Zeit
(Being and Time). From quite a different starting place, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other existential writers argued that there is a radical kind of human experience, which is like fear but in a way deeper. Heidegger calls this radical dread
angst
(anxiety). Fear, he argued, is different from angst, because fear is a response to a definite, identifiable threat. One will have a fearful response to an assailant in a dark alley, an approaching aggressive animal, or a felt earthquake or other natural disaster. But angst is the response to an indefinite threat; the danger is
nowhere in particular and yet everywhere. Like Lovecraft’s “cosmic fear,” Heidegger’s angst is an ineffable emotion of metaphysical proportions. Angst doesn’t make me aware of a particular threat, but draws me out of my ordinary utilitarian ways of operating in the day-to-day world and makes me aware of my existential quandary: Who and what am I? “Being-anxious,” Heidegger says, “discloses, primordially and directly, the world as world.”
⁵
It places human beings into a face-to-face crisis with their own authentic potentiality. Angst is that unsettling philosophical sense that you, and every other thing in the world, are just dust in the wind.

It is remarkable that thinkers as diverse as Lovecraft, Heidegger, and (as we’ll see) Freud were all trying to articulate a similar range of oblique irrational subjective experiences—dark, unsettling experiences that could not be discursively communicated except in the poetic and visual expressions of artists. When the horror genre pushes past the simple fear-based narrative of a monster chasing a victim and instead constructs an eerie world of foreboding, it seems to cross over into this more metaphysical pessimism of cosmic absurdity. Cosmic fear or angst or despair suggests, even if only temporarily, that the world
lacks
the secure structure and meaning that we ordinarily assume it to have. Every horror film, and there are a lot of them, that gives us a false ending of heroic triumph over the monster, but then shifts the camera to an unstoppable legion of such monsters now on their way to wreak further havoc challenges our deep sense of a just moral fabric to the universe. The same can be said about monsters like Love-craft’s Cthulhu or Hercules’s Hydra, who take a beating, even seem to be obliterated, but then reassemble their odious slime bodies into new and improved tentacles, claws, morphologies, or even clones. Both existentialism and horror, in their emphasis on human vulnerability, are critiques of rationalist Enlightenment-based modernity.

The description and theory of a cosmic fear, with its threatening “unknown spheres and powers…on the known universe’s utmost rim,” might be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s concept of
the sublime
. Sometimes we have an aesthetic experience that is both painful and pleasurable, and Kant calls this the sublime. Kant’s favorite examples usually involve huge, unintelligible magnitudes, such as contemplating the infinity of the universe as you peer out at the night sky, or experiencing some overwhelming natural disaster from a safe distance. If I am asked to think of the
whole universe
, I understand very well the request and I have some sort of
idea
of the whole universe, but I cannot actually
imagine
it. I imagine parts of it maybe, or I imagine some giant amorphous blob of matter contained in a larger empty space, but both of these are failures or frustrations of the imagination to follow through on the idea. “Hence the feeling of the
sublime,” Kant explains, “is a feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy, in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, for an estimation by reason, but is at the same time also a pleasure” because we experience (in this frustration) that
reason
itself has interests which are above and beyond our usual modes of experience and understanding. “In presenting the sublime in nature,” Kant states, “the mind feels
agitated
, while in an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful in nature it is in
restful
contemplation.”
⁶
All this becomes part of Kant’s larger project, which is to make room for the higher truths of ethics and religion (i.e., the moral law and the big ideas of God, freedom, and soul) that cannot be discovered directly by the common modes of human knowledge, but that can be inferred from these universally unattainable tasks or yearnings of reason.
⁷

Kant was optimistic that whatever lay beyond the range of our frustrated minds was good (was God, actually), albeit inaccessible to our understanding. Other philosophers didn’t share that comfort. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) developed Kant’s philosophy further (some say he corrupted it) by suggesting that our own experiences with desire, craving, and striving, even in their brutal and cruel forms, are more in touch with reality (the
noumenon
) than are our logic, reason, and science. Art, according to Schopenhauer, has the unique ability to raise the usually submerged machinations of will to the surface, so we can see the world and ourselves in their naked primordial state of suffering. Art has the power to show us the suffering of the will-dominated real world, but also to break our servitude (if only temporarily) to the omnipresent will.
⁸

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) extended Schopenhauer’s pessimism further and argued that the will-to-live is derivative of an even more primordial force, which he called the will-to-power. Nietzsche looked at the world as an expression of psychological forces, prince among them the psychological drive to be powerful. Underneath the day-to-day phenomenal realm (we go to work, find mates, have children, do art, fight wars, etc.) is the deeper truth of competing volitions and hidden motives. And this will-to-power is not simply human, but is the spring inside all nature.

As we move from Nietzsche to Freud, we arrive at a mature, gloomy tradition of darkness, both metaphysical and psychological.
⁹
For pessimists, reality is not a well-lit orderly place with occasional corners of shady superstition. Instead, reality is a sinister, haunted world of ill will, with fragile glimmers and flickers of human knowledge and safety. “The horror. The horror,” Kurtz says in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
. Even the Darwinian view of nature as “red in tooth and claw” was incorporated into Victorian pessimism. Like Schopenhauer (but out of a very different tradition), the evolutionist T. H. Huxley believed that “the ethical progress of society
depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”
¹⁰
Mirroring that external struggle and insecurity is the pessimistic internal world of monsters: desires, cravings, fears, anxieties so powerful as to make us feel alienated from our very selves.

Freud tempered the speculative flights of the philosophical pessimists and treated the dark and hidden
thing-in-itself
as a feature of human psychology rather than a cosmic metaphysical force. Confining himself to the human experience, he argued that the veil of conscious representations (the realm of the manifest) concealed an enormous reservoir of emotional drives and impulses: the
unconscious
(the latent realm). Like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Freud claimed that the irrational, emotional, and instinctual dimensions of man were more powerful and constitutive than conscious rationality. He contended that disparate and seemingly unrelated events in our conscious life (behaviors and beliefs) are in fact tied together and coherent in the pseudo logic of the unconscious. We can access this deep reservoir of instinctual desires and fears only indirectly, through clues provided in dreams, hypnosis, art, linguistic slips, and so on. It may be safe to say that the unconscious becomes the twentieth-century home of the monsters. Having worn out their welcome in religion, natural history, and travelers’ tales, the monsters settled into their new abode of human psychology.
¹¹