Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  Filmmakers seeking to transform social nightmares into successful film franchises are not the equivalent of social prophets. Their entertaining intervention in the culture wars did little to prevent deep anxieties over social change from spilling out into the real world. The moral panic, often with horrifying consequences, became a staple of American culture in the Age of Reagan. Urban legends transformed into public morality plays that found their way into the court system and into the ideological rhetoric of the New Religious Right.

  Halloween Poster

  The Monster and the Moral Panic

  Generations of New Yorkers who spent time at summer camp know the legend of Cropsey. In its usual version, told by camp counselors, Cropsey and his son lived near the camp where the tale is being told. Campers accidentally cause the death of Cropsey’s child. Driven insane by grief, Cropsey disappears into a shack in the most isolated part of the woods. One year later, on the anniversary of his son’s death, he returns to kill one of the campers with an axe, a meat cleaver, or a hook. As is always the case with such tales, much of their power is performative. Counselors would regularly end the story by saying: “Cropsey is still out in these woods. Tonight is the anniversary of his son’s death and he may pay a visit to your bunk at midnight. Good luck.”35

  The Cropsey narrative functions similarly to other gruesome campfire tales, encouraging group solidarity against an outside menace. Unfortunately, Cropsey found its way into the darkest paths of America’s forest of urban legend. In an America fighting the culture wars, monstrous metaphors frequently became actual monsters.

  In 1987 the kidnapping and search for twelve-year-old Jennifer Schweiger united the story of Cropsey with both an actual crime and rumors of new kinds of monsters. Staten Island residents became convinced that the stories they had heard of a hook-handed or axe-wielding maniac were not only true but had a larger, more conspiratorial dimension. Rumors of Satan worshippers hunting children for use in bizarre rituals joined with the legend of the hook to create a terrifying (if not altogether coherent) new narrative of horror. The arrest of Andre Rand, a local homeless person, for Schweiger’s kidnapping abated, but did not end, the belief that the worship of Satan played a part in the disappearance of Schweiger and other unsolved cases in the region.36

  The Staten Island panic is connected to a national moral panic that struck American culture in the 1980s. During that decade, American church leaders, social workers, heads of civic organizations, and even law enforcement officials came to believe that a widespread conspiracy of satanists provided the explanation for social problems as diverse as child abuse, teenage vandalism, missing children, teen suicide, and serial murder. Borrowing heavily from pop culture images of satanic covens, the satanic panic morphed from urban legend into a full-scale moral panic as day care workers, parents, and alienated teenagers found themselves accused in the court system of the most horrific crimes imaginable based on rumor, theological beliefs, and occasionally even something like the “spectral evidence” that had been used by witch-hunting justices in seventeen-century Salem.37

  Sociologists and anthropologists generally ascribe the cause of moral panics to anxiety produced by social dislocations. Sociologist Jeffrey S. Victor, in his brilliant and important book Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend, notes that factors that influenced these lurid stories in the ’80s and ’90s include the high American divorce rate, the anxiety produced by stepparents and stepchildren, and the sense, across the political spectrum, of corruption in the American experience. On the latter point, Victor points out that the ’70s and ’80s gave America Watergate, Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry’s lies about drug use, Pete Rose’s gambling and tax evasion, televangelist Jim Bakker’s and Jimmy Swaggart’s embarrassing fall from grace, and numerous Wall Street moral debacles, including the savings and loan scandal that called into question the basic integrity of America’s allegedly free-market system.38

  A sense that something had gone profoundly wrong with American society certainly contributed to the satanic panic, especially in its ability to find resonance with people across the political and religious spectrum. But the monsters created by the panic also had a profoundly political dimension shaped by the culture wars and the rise of the Christian Right. Conservative evangelicals began to organize themselves politically in the early 1970s, specifically in response to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. By the late 1970s, national conservative evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye assembled a network of organizations such as the Religious Roundtable and the Moral Majority to lobby representatives and mobilize voters.39

  Narratives of supernatural terror and danger have always been part of American Christianity, dating back to Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and the Puritan’s tales of devils and God’s wrath. The Christian Right created a powerful symbolic language out of that traditional message of hell and damnation combined with cultural unease over controversial social issues. Stories of a massive satanic conspiracy perfectly suited this worldview. Portraying themselves as the defenders of the American home proved especially powerful when the enemies of the traditional family could be constructed as satanists brainwashing, torturing, and murdering children. The powerful metaphor of satanic conspiracy allowed for extreme attacks on books, music, comics, and films viewed as baleful influences, attacks that saw these media as instruments of a sadistic, supernatural monster. Political debate and discussion became impossible when conservative evangelical rhetoric linked pro-choice advocates, feminists, liberal Democratic congressmen, and child-killing devil worshippers into a single web of diabolical conspiracy.40

  These beliefs did not exist simply as sermons or fragmentary folk belief. In 1983 accusations of child abuse against workers at the McMartin Preschool just outside Los Angeles included charges of cannibalism and forbidden rites dedicated to the devil. Several years of investigations and a twenty-eight month trial followed. Although no physical evidence of actual abuse ever surfaced, one of the accused spent five years in prison until he was able to post a 1.5 million dollar bail. Heavy media coverage of the McMartin case helped set off day care panics across the nation.41

  Moral panics over satanic monsters became a basic feature of life in 1980s America. In 1985 a sheriff near Toledo, Ohio, claimed that satanic cults had sacrificed fifty to eighty children and buried them in a wooded area near Holland, Ohio. What became known as the “Toledo dig” attracted significant media attention but no physical evidence. In 1988 absurd national rumors of a satanic cult that planned the kidnappings and sacrifices of blue-eyed virgins on May 13 (Friday the 13th) led to deeply irrational and dangerous behavior. Jeffrey Victor’s research on the small town of Jamestown, New York, during this rumor panic revealed that “alternative” teens had been bullied and beaten up, parents kept their children home from school, and more than a hundred cars appeared at a wooded location rumored to be a satanic meeting site, many of the cars containing parents and teens who came armed with guns, knives, and blunt weapons. Other incidents, usually centered on schools, blossomed all over the country.42

  Conservative evangelical churches and law enforcement often allied with one another in seeking out satanic cults and fomenting baseless rumors. The involvement of churches is easily explicable. Satanic panics did not have to be founded on concrete empirical evidence since beliefs about the devil depended on inviolate positions of faith. The willingness of law enforcement officials to believe and act on these rumors is more difficult to explain. A full study of so-called occult cops has shown that police officers that made themselves “experts” on satanic cults were usually themselves conservative Christians, many of whom had spent the 1960s involved in the surveillance of antiwar and civil rights groups.43

  The media’s need for monster tales to fill a twenty-four-hour news cycle further abetted these moral panics. In May of 1985 the television news magazine 20/20 ran a lurid special entitled “The Devil Wor
shippers” that provided a national platform for conservative evangelical ministers and occult cops to speak as experts on the topic of Satanism. Gothic claims of cannibalism and child sacrifice were accepted uncritically. The Toledo dig provides another example of the role of the media in the panics. Although only some doll’s clothing and a few curved knives were found at the site, alleged occult expert Dale Griffis’ insistence that these provided empirical evidence for satanic abuse at the site were widely reported with no alternative explanation offered.44

  The satanic panic of the 1980s drew on the worst aspects of the American monster tradition, the power of gothic language to construct cultural and political opponents as the ultimate other. Religion has always needed its monsters, but the ideological struggles of the late twentieth century increased the temptation to draw on monstrous imagery to describe political opponents. Americans already nervous over changes in family life and gender roles, especially those prone to think of these changes as “attacks on the American family,” proved easy targets for rumor panics that had the blessing of church and community leaders.

  Moral panic and the American monster tradition also appeared in the phenomenon of Christian-themed haunted houses that became popular in the 1970s, a cultural form that combined the gothic aspects of Christian theology with imagery from the battlefields of the culture war. Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church featured an event in 1972 known as “Scaremare,” a strange mixture of traditional haunted house frights (at least of the tamest sort) and a crucifixion scene, followed by the distribution of gospel literature. By the early 1980s other evangelical churches in Florida and New Mexico began including social and political imagery in their alternative Halloween productions.

  So-called Hell Houses and Judgment Houses owe a great deal to American monster culture, often referencing the gory effects of bargain basement slasher films and the demonic terrors of post-Rosemary’s Baby horror. Social problems that evangelicals perceive as part of America’s “moral degeneration” in particular are portrayed with a horror film aesthetic. Hell Houses almost always include an “abortion scene” in which buckets of fake blood and a cold, dismissive medical staff turn the patient into their victim. In 1991 one controversial Hell House in New England used animal intestines in a jar to represent an aborted fetus. Blood and other effluvia fly in scenes that replicate a school shooting, a teen suicide, and a drunk driving accident.45

  Hell Houses not only borrow images directly from horror films, they tell tales of cultural and theological monsters. Images from hell frequently employ an S&M sensibility with masked and leather-clad male demons whipping and torturing attractive teenage girls. These images owe something to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series of the late 1980s and early 1990s in which demonic spirits in bondage-wear rip the flesh of unlucky souls with a pain that becomes pleasure.46

  Author and religion scholar Jason Bivins reports from his site visits that exorcism and possession scenes are common fare in Hell House. These scenes often borrow directly from both Alien and The Exorcist, with demons exploding out of chests and heads doing a Linda Blair-inspired 360-degree turn. Bivins goes on to describe how the aesthetic of the Hell House makes liberal use of “blood and meat … The sets of Hell House are littered with broken bodies, blood, weapons and debris, with demons and malevolent spirits flitting between worlds to torment the waking who suffer through graphic portrayals of late-term abortion, murders, risen corpses and sexual trauma.” Ironically, one Hell House in Texas featured a scene in which a young woman, described as a lost soul who “directs horror films in Hollywood,” is sent off to hell for poisoning the minds of the young.47

  The Hell House phenomenon shows the usefulness of monster narratives in the American culture wars. The willingness to make use of the aesthetics of modern horror (a genre often deplored in official evangelical rhetoric as part of America’s moral depravity) suggests that America’s monsters are an inescapable part of the rhetoric of moral crisis. This is not exactly a cynical use of monster imagery since most evangelicals believe in a literal supernatural monster with monster allies—Satan and his demons. The moral panics are a conservative counterassault on the 1960s, informed by the literal belief that real monsters are stalking American kids.

  The Christian Right appeared at a moment of manifest changes in social and cultural history. Some children during these years turned to monsters and found them fun companions rather than terrifying apparitions. They certainly were not scarier than what was happening in their own homes.

  Little Monsters

  Children and adolescents in the 1960s and 1970s rediscovered the pleasures of the classic Universal Studios’ horror films and helped to create what has been called “monster culture” or the “monster kid” phenomenon. The impetus behind this was really twofold. In 1958 Universal sold fifty-two of its classic horror films as a package to local television stations across the nation, a package known as Shock Theatre. Featuring all of the significant Universal releases (and followed up with a second package called Son of Shock), late-night showings of these films made Dracula, Frankenstein, and all their pals suddenly cool again.48

  By the 1960s hosts for the late-night programs borrowed some of Vampira’s old tricks, mixing horror and laughter (though never quite attaining her level of camp and dark sensuality). John Zacherle, better known as “Zacherley the Cool Ghoul,” set the standard for the new horror hosts. The Philadelphia TV personality created a character equal parts mad scientist and vampire. In this persona he used wacky humor to introduce Universal’s classic monsters, intercutting himself into movie scenes and spoofing them. He soon had imitators like “the Gorgon” in Fort Worth, Texas; “Morgus the Magnificent” in New Orleans; Baltimore’s “Dr. Lucifer”; and Cleveland’s “Ghoulardi.”49

  The renewed popularity of the classic Universal films led to the creation of a magazine that gave style and structure to the monster kid phenomenon, Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. “Uncle Forry,” as Ackerman became known to his enormous fan base, filled his black-and-white publication with photographs of the classic monster films and simple fan tributes to every horror and science fiction movie of the 1930s and 1940s. Key to Famous Monsters’ success was its ability to create an imaginary community of fellow monster lovers, kids who cared more about Bela Lugosi than baseball and who in Famous Monsters had their own “private” club. Joe Dante, the horror director best known for The Howling, remembered his utter delight at finding a copy of Famous Monsters at a Safeway supermarket in New Jersey. “Here all of a sudden,” Dante told David Skal in a 1991 interview, “was this magazine that was a validation that there were other people out there like us.” Dante recalled buying as many of the magazines as he could and having them regularly confiscated by parents, teachers, and camp counselors concerned about his reading habits.50

  Changes in American toy production and design in the 1960s proved a boon for the monster kids. Prior to the 1960s, toy manufacturers assumed that their products should be miniature models of adult realities that prepared children for future tasks and solidified gender identities. Boys would play with dump trucks while girls would play with dolls. American toy makers also created products that children would play with in cooperation with their parents. Since the early twentieth century, Kodak marketed a toy camera for children that they could use to snap pictures, with parental supervision. Chemistry sets, such as Hasbro’s Chemcraft, promised to introduce boys to “industrial chemistry,” though they needed their dads supervising the experiments. Model airplane kits, also popular in the 1950s, were assumed to be father–son weekend projects. Parents would also be in on the fun of scale model trains and Erector sets.51

  Intergenerational conflict in the 1960s led toy makers to a different set of assumptions. Increasingly, toy manufacturers began to work off the theory that children desired toys that took them to the realms of the fantastic rather than to the world of workaday adulthood. Moreover, an adversarial relationship between parents an
d children over the nature of play came to be assumed by advertisers. Toys, and the worlds they conjured, offered an escape from parental oversight and even a subversion of parental values.52

  These assumptions found their clearest expression in Aurora Plastics’ “monster models,” which first appeared in 1962. Advertised in comic books and in Famous Monsters, these scale models of figures and scenes from the Universal horror cycle were marketed directly to kids, often with the suggestion that these toys would cause at least a minor domestic disturbance. “Decorate your room! Surprise your mother! Create your very own chamber of horror!” suggested one Aurora advertisement. Look magazine did a cover story on the phenomenon, writing that “Toyland ’64 looks like a charnel house … there’s a monster for every child, and toy dealers figure this ghoul game will pay a clammy $20 million this year.”53