On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (49 page)

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of the light, but by making
the darkness conscious
.
CARL JUNG

T
HE IDEA THAT WE PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED
in monsters but now we don’t is a comforting illusion. In May 2008 eleven elderly people accused of being witches were dragged from their homes and burned to death by a mob in western Kenya.
¹
Down the coast, in Malawi, witches are believed to be cannibals who possess supernatural powers and use their unholy skills to harass, kill, and feed on the meat of their dead victims. Witch hunting has led to many vigilante killings and even large numbers of state-enforced incarcerations.
²
The tendency is to assume that such supernatural extremism is the result of illiteracy, yet the Malawian writer Pilirani Semu-Banda claims that “the witch-hunting activities are occurring in towns and cities where most people are educated.” Adding to the indigenous African traditions of witchcraft, Roman Catholicism, which is the religious majority in Malawi, has contributed its own mon-sterology tradition. Father Stanislaus Chinguo, chairman of the Catholic Commission for Justice in the Blantyre archdiocese, told Semu-Banda that witchcraft is real and the Church is working on solutions to meet the challenge head-on, including the renewal of exorcism practices.

Closer to home, in fact in my own hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, a woman confessed in April 2008 that she murdered her six-year-old daughter because the child was possessed by a demon. Nelly Vazquez-Salazar admitted to killing her daughter, Elizabeth, after the young child woke the
mother in the middle of the night. The mother had been in consultation with Elizabeth’s grandmother in Mexico because the child had recently been sleepwalking. Both mother and grandmother had come to the conclusion that the child was possessed.
³

Lest we think that such supernatural monsters are currently confined to the developing world and immigrant groups, we must recognize that large populations in the American Bible Belt are still literally haunted by demons and regularly employ exorcism as a defense. In June 2008 a Texas high court ruled against a woman who was seeking damages against the church that allegedly injured her during her exorcism.
⁴
Laura Schubert claimed that she was pinned to the floor for hours and received minor injuries and psychological trauma from her 1996 exorcism. In the 2008 decision Justice David Medina wrote that finding the church liable “would have an unconstitutional ‘chilling effect’ by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs.” So in effect, exorcism is recognized and protected by the law.

Contemporary cultural interest in monsters is still very strong. Most people reading this book are probably not overly worried about witches in their neighborhood or possessed family members. But other monster manifestations are of keen interest, even to the jaded and cynical hipsters who look down their nose at gullible bumpkins. My own students, who sometimes fancy themselves a part of the intellectual elite of American culture, are obsessed with cryptozoology, serial killer murderabilia, and monster-killing video gaming.

Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, may be the most famous cryptid purported to exist. Photos began emerging in the 1930s, and since then there have been more than four thousand sightings of the Scottish leviathan. The monster is such a tourist draw that it is estimated to bring twelve million dollars into the Scottish Highlands every year. The credulity index for cryptids continues to be shored up by truly amazing discoveries in real paleontology. In February 2008 a fossil of a record-breaking fifty-foot-long sea monster was discovered by a Norwegian team of paleontologists. This gigantic Jurassic pliosaur had dagger-like teeth the size of cucumbers and a mouth large enough to consume a small car. In December 2007 fossil experts in Germany found the largest bug ever discovered, a monstrous sea scorpion that measured more than eight feet long. Bigger than most crocodiles, the
Jaekelopterus rhenaniae
acted as a superpredator, chopping up fish and other arthropods with giant spiked claws. Our imaginations are obviously fired up by these wonderful fossil discoveries, and though the creatures are long extinct they continue to hold out the tantalizing possibility of monsters living in remote regions. Even without any serious
commitment to the reality of cryptids we still demonstrate a playful mania for monsters and marvels. “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids,” which is traveling from 2007 to 2012, has drawn huge crowds in New York and Chicago and is reported to be the most popular exhibit in decades at the American Museum of Natural History.
⁵

One of the more interesting examples of monster fascination in our contemporary culture, especially among the hip and sardonic set, is the collecting of murderabilia. Serial killers are so fascinating that their personal belongings and their “artistic” creations are fetishized and turned into highly valuable commodities that are traded and purchased by collectors of the macabre. The Internet has fueled a significant underground industry for monster property. Paintings by John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, and Richard Ramirez (the Nightstalker) and personal items of Charles Manson, among others, have all become hot commodities. When the journalist Michael Harvey visited my college class as a guest lecturer, he brought one of Gacy’s original clown paintings to class. Recall from
chapter 13
that Harvey was the last journalist to speak to Gacy the night before he was executed by lethal injection. Gacy gave him several paintings as a gift. When Harvey allowed my students to pass around the creepy painting they could barely contain themselves, and most of them took cellphone photos of the painting as a souvenir. I can’t pretend that I was above the weird sensation of horror and excitement, loathing and thrill, as I held the ominous picture.

It’s not clear that the average collector can even articulate why he or she collects such ghoulish material, although some superstitious curators claim that owning a murderer’s possessions is like having a talisman protecting them from misfortune. My own view is that murderabilia is just one more attempt, albeit circuitous, to de-monster our world. We live in a consumer culture, and consumption not only fulfills desires but also is a means of imposing order and control. Commodifying a horror is one way of objectifying and managing it. Just as a more religious culture might bring its spiritual paraphernalia and its priest class to bear on a monstrous threat, a consumer culture brings its
capital
to bear. If monsters (in this case, serial killers) churn the stomach, horrify the heart, and boggle the mind, we respond with whatever powers we possess. Buying a monster memento brings the unintelligible creepiness into the light of a quotidian transaction.

Other bourgeois approaches to monsters can be seen in our developed secular society. A whole new horror genre has emerged, for example, in our prosperous culture. The film theorist Barry Grant noticed a tendency in some movies to capitalize on our fears about losing wealth and status.
⁶
Films such as
Fatal Attraction
(1987),
Single White Female
(1992), and even
Crimes and Misdemeanors
(1989) can be read as economic horror films, in which the monsters bring financial ruin and middle-class catastrophe.

Middle-class monsters may not be as supernatural as the monsters of old, but they still harass their victims and keep them awake late at night. Since my son was born, I have watched an enormous amount of daytime children’s television. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. Entire cable networks are devoted to kids’ cartoons, and several times an hour the programming is interrupted to show commercials to the assumed audience. The demographers are convinced that two populations are watching these shows: kids and moms. For the kids, commercials range between unicorn dolls and racing cars, but for the moms the ads are astoundingly one-dimensional. In the relatively safe world of middle-class America, the one reliable phobia to which advertisers can appeal is poor hygiene. Every housewife’s phobia about germs is seized on and celebrated with Oscar-winning special effects. Only Brand X cleaning solution, represented as a purifying acid of goodness, can annihilate the invisible monsters. Computer animation has been enlisted to create seething green, tentacled hordes of bacterial monsters that crawl up out of the toilet bowl to overcome one’s precious children or grow ominously as an evil fetid gas from the kitty-litter box or seep up from the kitchen drain, with slimy fangs and pulsing tissue, to infect one’s whole family. One must remain equally vigilant about the creatures throbbing on the shower floor and those festering in the carpet. The animated representations of these threats to hygiene are increasingly taken directly from the drawer of monster movie special effects. The toilet bowl monsters look far more menacing than anything in premillennial horror films.

The monster concept also continues to do significant work in our contemporary political sphere. In 2008 Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisor, Samantha Power, referred to Hillary Clinton as “a monster” and promptly lost her job. Any word that causes you to get fired is still carrying some heavy connotative baggage. George W. Bush regularly referred to the bills proposed by Congress that he intended to veto as “monstrous pieces of legislation.” And 2007 saw the beleaguered Karl Rove casting himself to various media outlets as a character in the monster epic
Beowulf
. While Capitol Hill was pressing for Rove’s resignation, he told Chris Wallace on Fox News, “Let’s face it, I mean, I’m a myth. You know, I’m Beowulf, you know, I’m Grendel. I don’t know who I am, but they’re after me.”

I INCLUDE ALL THESE DIVERSE ANECDOTES
to illustrate that both the literal and the symbolic uses of monster are alive and well in our contemporary world. One will search in vain through this book to find a single
compelling definition of
monster
. That’s not because I forgot to include one, but because I don’t think there is one. I am a proponent of a cognitive science position called prototype theory, a theory that began with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that conceptual and linguistic meaning is more like “family resemblance” than we previously thought. In earlier theories, from Aristotle to logical positivism, we assumed that every instance of
bird
or
dog
or
bed
or
monster
must satisfy an abstract essential definition. For example, if I want to know whether this thing before me is a
circle
, I see whether it fulfills the essential definition of a plane-sided figure with all points equidistant from the center. Wittgenstein, however, noticed that most things were not connected by a common definition, but instead shared overlapping similarities. His classic example of the
game
demonstrated that although some games share properties (e.g., baseball and football both use a ball, chess and tennis employ two competing sides, golf and poker and charades have certain overlaps), no one defining criterion can be said to capture all games. Instead, we link all these activities together through overlapping similarities, in the same way we recognize that Carol, Edward, Daniel, and David are all members of the same family, some sharing a similar nose, others sharing similar hair, others similar eyes, but none of them with all the same features or properties.
⁷

In more recent cognitive science circles this way of thinking about categorization has come to be called prototype theory.
⁸
When I say or think
bird
, some more or less determinate bird comes into my mind’s eye; it looks more like a robin than an albatross or a penguin. For many people, a robinlike bird is the conceptual prototype of
bird
, and other birds are closer or further away from that prototype. The duck, falcon, and ostrich can be conceptually mapped in varying distances from my prototype image of a bird. Each bird fulfills some of the criteria of bird (e.g., has feathers, flies, is oviparous and beaked), but none of them fulfills all the criteria. There is no
definition
of bird that wouldn’t eventually leave some bird out.

The term and the concept of
monster
is a prototype category. Like
bird
, there may be environmentally specific archetypes for a clan’s central threat, and we might even draw up a general taxonomy of types: “crawlers” (spider-type monsters), “slitherers” (snake-like monsters), “collosals” (giant creatures), “hybrids” (mixed-species creatures), “possessors” (spirits, specters, etc.), and “parasites” (infectious blood-suckers, etc.). But functionally speaking they probably appear and reappear in our stories and in our artwork because they help us (and helped our ancestors) navigate the dangers of our environment. The monster archetype seems to appear in every culture’s artwork. This suggests that stories about monster threats and heroic conquests provide us with a ritualized, rehearsable simulation
of reality, a virtual way to represent the forces of nature, the threats from other animals, and the dangers of human social interaction.

In this book I have been touring the map of related properties or qualities that we call monstrous. Each era expresses different fascinations with monsters—medieval Christians focused on demons, the Gilded Age had a penchant for freaks—but some prototypical qualities unite the family of monsters, albeit loosely. We have seen throughout this book, for example, that most monsters cannot be reasoned with. Monsters are generally ugly and inspire horror. Monsters are unnatural. Monsters are overwhelmingly powerful. Monsters are evil. Monsters are misunderstood. Monsters cannot be understood. These recognizable monster qualities coalesce into cultural prototypes, such as Frankenstein’s creature and St. Anthony’s demons, and they reflect the fears of specific eras. But they also reflect more universal human anxieties and cognitive tendencies, the stuff that gives us human solidarity with the ancient Greeks, the medievals, and, as would be seen in more comparative histories, Asians, Middle Easterners, Native Americans, and others.