Earlier today, I reviewed Scott Poole’s phenomenal book on the prevalence of monsters in American culture. Now, I’m excited to provide you with a guest post from Scott on his own obsession with monsters. First, a brief bio of Scott, taken from his Web site:
Scott Poole grew up in love with monsters. Shock Theater on Saturday afternoon left him deliriously terrified as he watched Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man. Comic books like Tomb of Dracula and fan magazines like Famous Monsters offered even more frightening fun. After seeing Star Wars for the first time, monsters became a religious experience with Tuskan Raiders, the Cantina scene and Darth Vader all becoming beloved friends and nightmares.
Somehow — and even Scott’s not quite sure how — he translated his love for monsters into a career as a historian and pop culture critic. A tenured professor of American History at the College of Charleston, he teaches a popular class about the image of the Devil in religion and popular culture and, of course, a class on America and its monsters. He is the author of several books dealing with race, religion and pop culture including Satan in America: The Devil We Know
Twisted Desire: Why we Cant Get Enough of the Monster
I love monsters.
As a kid in the late seventies, I used to spend long hours in front of our giant console TV watching Shock Theatre. If you missed out on Shock, this was a package of movies marketed by studios to local TV affiliates meant for late weekend nights or as Saturday matinees. It was a wondrous bundle of films that contained everything from the masterpieces of Lugosi and Karloff to the giant bugs and fifty-foot women of 50s sci-fi cinema.
When I became a teenager, the slasher genre had taken over horror and I transferred my affection for Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman to Freddy, Jason Voorhees and Pinhead. Even when I passed through an embarrassingly intense religious phase at about 14-15, I was unable to shake the dark visions of the monster. I still have exceedingly happy memories of a youth retreat that turned into a surreptitious viewing of the original Nightmare on Elm Street.
So it makes sense that I turned out to be the historian who wrote a book about the history of American monsters. And when you write a book about monsters, you get two very different responses. Some display a combination of curiosity and delight, either nerding out with you about their own delicious love of horror or confessing their secret fascination.
But then others give you a look of concern mixed with repulsion, half moralism and half “you’ve got something gross in your teeth.” They tell you they don’t like that stuff, it too weird, its gross, disgusting or in some way problematic.
These two reactions actually tell us a lot about the nature of the monster in relation to American historical experience. The dialectic of attraction and repulsion is wrapped around the roots of the monster’s multitude of meanings.
The sea serpent is a case in point. Fascination with the possibility of such a creature obsessed Americans from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. Natural science debated its existence. American pop culture celebrated it, so much so that in the 1850s, a highly popular piece of sheet music called “the Sea Serpent Polka” became all the rage.
And yet, Americans invested this monster with widely divergent meanings over time. In the 1630s, a few Puritans claimed to have sighted the beast off the coast of Massachusetts. They saw it as an incarnation of the devil “the old serpent whose poison hath run down to us” one said.
In the 1810s, the heirs of the Puritans in Massachusetts saw the same creature in Gloucester harbor. They gave it a cute nickname, tried to capture it and talked endlessly about their excitement over it.
Beginning in the 1980s, the knife -wielding maniac has gotten the same treatment. In that decade, a serial killer panic swept across American society. And yet, feeding this anxiety, came a flood of popular books about the deeds of John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and other mass murderers. On the big screen, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees became national icons. And now of course we have Dexter, a handsome monster who gets his large audience’s full sympathy.
The monster threatens to rend and tear us and we run. The monster also delights, fascinates and even obsesses us, calling to us from the darkness on the edge of town. You know you like it that way.
Be sure to check out Scott’s web site which is full of additional resources.
