Twilight also deals with the politics of the womb. Edward immediately impregnates Bella after their marriage in Breaking Dawn and, despite the risk to her own life, she brings a monstrous baby to term. Bella must allow her humanity to die in order for the baby to live, in a perfect allegorical symbolization of traditionalist expectations about motherhood. Bella’s willingness to sacrifice herself is matched by Edward’s ferocity at saving his spawn as he tears the baby from Bella’s womb with his teeth. Bella loses both her humanity and any semblance she had of control over her own body.
The religious themes in Twilight, combined with its traditionalist ideology, have made it appealing to the Christian Right, some of whom even see it as an ally in the culture wars. The Facebook site “Jesus Christ Is My Edward Cullen,” created by high school student Amanda Boyce in 2009, both praised the books for their traditional representation of romance while investing them with theological meaning. “Only Christ is the true gentleman, the one who will sweep us off our feet,” the site promises. The immature though reactionary cultural agenda of the page is made clear when the author encourages males who want to join to declare their heterosexuality by writing “No homo” on the page’s wall.51
Conservative evangelical youth minister Kimberly Powers sees in Twilight a kind of mythical analogue to her own cultural agenda. In her writings, Powers approvingly quotes the teenage girls who have told her that Edward is the “perfect boyfriend” because he “comes from a good family,” and “he continually holds himself back from getting too physically close to Bella.” Powers herself praises Edward’s “insatiable desire to know everything about Bella” and suggests to her readers that “you would be crazy over this too, if someone cared for your every interest, if he wanted to know each of your thoughts so that he could better protect and honor you.”52
Notions of male figures who “protect” and “honor” are key to patriarchal discourses about family, marriage, and sexuality. These views comport well with Powers’ broader agenda. Powers leads a series of successful weekend conferences she calls “In Search of a Princess: A Weekend Celebration.” In sessions entitled “Daddy, I need you” and “soul-tie to the Father,” Powers suggests that the failure of the patriarchal household leads to numerous social and psychological problems.53
The willingness of conservative evangelicals to either praise or borrow imagery from the Twilight series shows that Meyer has not so much created a new American monster as sought to defuse the monster’s subversive power. Meyer’s vampires are literally defanged, their immemorial associations with sex and excess fully domesticated. Twilight seeks to legitimize white, middle-class, heterosexual values by introducing elements that seem to test that normative worldview and then holding those elements at bay. Meyer fully conscripts the vampire into the forces of reaction. Women frightened of the demands of sexual and political liberation can have their vampire and not be eaten by him too.
The refusal to allow the monster to be the monster, more than its obviously reactionary politics, is the chief reason that Twilight will likely make no enduring mark on the American monster tradition (though there is no doubt that its popularity will continue for some years). It is a narrative that literally has nowhere to go except to the safe confines of an idealized married life. Robbed of its adolescent romantic tensions by the marriage of Edward and Bella in Breaking Dawn, Meyer’s cycle of stories is unlikely to produce a larger, cohesive mythology.
HBO’s True Blood, on the other hand, promises to become a major milestone in the development of vampire mythology. Often knowingly schlocky and over-the-top in its portrayal of extreme violence and polysexual eroticism, True Blood has also managed to create a truly American vampire.
Set primarily in the fictional Louisiana town of Bon Temps, True Blood intertwines its living dead in a rich regional mythology, a dirty Southern world of pickup trucks, juke joints, and evangelical religion as a patina for a seamy and steamy world of sex and violence. The series follows the fortunes of a Sookie Stackhouse and her beau, the century-old vampire and Confederate veteran Bill Compton. Bill and Sookie attempt to find vampire–human love in a modern America in which vampires have “come out of the closet” after the discovery and marketing of a blood substitute known as “Tru Blood.”
The modern American setting, and the willingness to explore sexuality with humor and frankness, has made the show, in its third season at the time of writing, both a controversial and a critically acclaimed hit. Series creator Alan Ball sees himself as not so much revising the vampire myth as returning it to its roots and giving it an American, indeed a Southern, accent. This has allowed for all manner of satire and comment, especially in relation to America’s struggle to come to terms with sexual identity and the rights of sexual minorities. In this, True Blood is the antithesis of Twilight, a point that series creator Alan Ball made when he told Rolling Stone, “Vampires are sex. I don’t get a vampire story about abstinence.”54
True Blood Cast
True Blood envelops its viewers in a sometimes uncomfortably alternative sensuality that encourages an equally uncomfortable social critique. Twilight represents a supernatural escape from the historic demands of feminism and the results of the sexual revolution. In some ways, the popularity of these franchises highlights the American cultural divide, the two Americas of the culture wars. The zombie genre has, meanwhile, taken a strongly political turn as well, becoming, since 2001, a standing (or rather shambling and stumbling) critique of America’s foreign and domestic policy since 9/11.
Zombie Crawl Through History
Zombie narratives have proven the perfect vehicle for social satire. This is not because of any inherent quality of the zombie as a character but rather because zombies always bring an apocalypse with them. Any apocalyptic narrative represents a deconstruction of the social contract, either as a complete revolution, a fairly severe redefinition, or, in the case of evangelical eschatology, a reactionary insistence that breaks with a traditional past have triggered God’s judgment. Imagining the world as we know it collapsing around us gives us the opportunity to take a long look at what that dead world valued and call it into question.
Moreover, zombies are, more than any other monster, truly human. The vampire is a fully transformed human being, in essence a superior being and the aristocracy of the monster world. Other creatures of the night have little or no human connection, born from beyond the stars or out of satanic darkness. The zombie, on the other hand, is one of us. They are recognizably human even as their bodies are always shown in varying states of decay. Romero’s films often emphasized this by making zombies representative of specific occupations and pastimes ranging from cheerleader zombies to zombie brides and zombie doctors.
Zombie films often force our identification with the walking dead by revealing human beings as the real monsters. In Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the besieged humans cannot put aside their own desire for power and control in order to help one another. Frequently, humans murdering zombies with abandon and relish are some of the more frightening scenes in the best zombie films. Almost every zombie feature ends in the death of the major characters because of their own pride, self-absorption, or tyrannical impulses.55
Apocalyptic narratives in which everyday people are transformed into monsters allows for significant social critique. Although George Romero has frequently insisted that Night of the Living Dead offers no political satire, audiences of the film have read it as a statement about both the Vietnam War and American racism. Romero’s later films suggest that he crafted them around efforts to critique American society. The 2005 Land of the Dead, for example, alluded both to the war in Iraq and to the American class structure. Diary of the Dead (2008)is a send-up of reality TV, celebrity culture, and America’s growing reliance on the Internet for news and social interaction.56
Horror auteurs in recent years have used the zombie genre not only to launch a broad critique of American society but also to comment on particular political issu
es. Joe Dante’s 2005 “Homecoming,” an episode in Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, features a right-wing commentator named David Murch. On a popular cable television show, Murch tells a mother who lost her son in Iraq that if he could have “one wish” it would be that her son would come back from the dead. Murch adds that if the distraught woman’s son could return, he would come back to remind Americans of the importance of the war. In the fairy tale logic of horror, the American war dead from Iraq do begin to return, not to feast on the living or to praise American foreign policy, but to “vote for anyone who will end this war.” Commenting on the Bush administration’s ban on photographs of body bags, dead soldiers, and even soldiers’ funerals, Dante has flag-draped coffins that burst open to reveal the walking undead veterans. The left-leaning Village Voice described “Homecoming” as “easily the most important political film of the Bush II era.”57
Zombie films have also proved adept at satirizing a number of issues in American society more generally. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later portrayed its “running zombies” as uncontrollable mobs and the infection as both an AIDS-like plague and a kind of terrorist threat. Zombies of Mass Destruction, as is clear from the title, references the war on terror and the Iraq War, portraying the inhabitants of a small island becoming zombified and turning on their neighbors. Director Kevin Hamedani shows us the action partially through the experience of an Iranian-American woman who local residents believe has ignited the zombie apocalypse as part of a terrorist attack. She is tortured, Abu Ghraib-style, by one of her hysterically paranoid neighbors.
The zombies of popular culture are situated in the trajectory of American history. Undead revenants from popular culture rather than monsters of folk belief, the zombie symbolizes for many Americans the current state of their own society or its eventual direction. The hopelessness of the genre, with its images of civilization’s dissolution, and human beings cannibalizing one another, captures a sentiment that, in retrospect, has been a theme in American life since the 1960s. The forced optimism of the Reagan years, the current glorification of the post-World War II generation (“the greatest generation”), and the generalized nostalgia for earlier eras points to profound unease about current American society and its place in global history. America after 9/11, a place that now must experience history with the rest of the world, is a veritable buffet for the hungry undead. They’re not just coming for Barbara. They’re coming for us all.
LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS
The Hilton sisters. Photofest publicity poster. Courtesy of Photofest.
Image of Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein. Courtesy of Photofest.
Cannibal Feast. University of Illinois. Image from Theodor de Bry’s Dritte Buch Americae (Frankfurt: Theodori de Bry, 1593). Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Cotton Mather title page from Boston Public Library. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts.
Sea Serpent Polka. American Memory Project, Duke University. “Sea Serpent Polka,” by Moritz Strakosch (d. 1887). Courtesy of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
Hydrarchos! Sea Serpent. American Memory Project (Printed Ephemera, Portfolio 119, Folder 31). http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html. Courtesy of the American Memory archive at the Library of Congress.
The New Frankenstein: A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in Store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster Rebellion. Vanity Fair, May 1862 (University of Michigan).
Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster. Courtesy of Photofest.
LeBron James and Gisele. Cover of Vogue (April 2008).
King Kong movie poster with Fay Wray. Courtesy of Photofest.
Dracula Takes a Bite Out of Mina Harker. Courtesy of Photofest.
The Thing from Another World poster. Courtesy of Photofest.
Scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Courtesy of Photofest.
Vampira. Author’s collection.
Jamie Lee Curtis—On the Set of Halloween. Courtesy of Photofest.
The Exorcist movie poster. Courtesy of Photofest.
Alien 3 by David Fincher. Courtesy of Photofest.
Halloween poster. Courtesy of Photofest.
Dracula from Hammer. Courtesy of Photofest.
Night of the Living Dead poster. Courtesy of Photofest.
Buffy. Courtesy of Photofest.
True Blood cast. Cover of Rolling Stone. September 2, 2010, print issue.
Terminator/Frankenstein juxtaposition. Courtesy of Photofest.
Epilogue
WORSE THINGS WAITING
The bats have left the belltower / The victims have been bled / Red velvet lines the black box / Bela Lugosi’s dead.
—Bauhaus
There are worse things awaiting man than death.
—Bela Lugosi, Dracula
In 1994 Freddy Krueger invaded America’s nightmares once again. Ten years after the trash-talking slasher first entered his victims’ dreams, New Nightmare reimagined the Elm Street mythology in a radical fashion. Director Wes Craven’s monster escapes the realm of imagination and stalks Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund, the actors who portrayed the final girl and Freddy himself in the first film. He even stalks his creator, Craven himself.1
New Nightmare was the first of the Elm Street films that Craven, a former literature and philosophy professor, directed since the series debut in 1984. In this revisionist reading of his own work, Craven proposes that Freddy was an actual being, a dream demon, whose power had been contained by the telling of stories about him (the first seven films in the series). Now that the character had dimmed in popularity, he was no longer bound by the narrative and freed himself from the prison of the script. This ingenious story makes the monster into something even more dreadful than the horribly burned child-killer who returns from the grave with a razor-fingered glove. He becomes an archetypal monster with many faces, appearing in different times and epochs and wearing many masks.2
New Nightmare’s use of metanarrative, narrative about narrative that implicates the audience in the story being told, proved unsuccessful with that very audience. Two years later, America seemed a bit more prepared for the postmodern monster. Craven’s runaway hit Scream took the basic premise of Halloween and deconstructed it. The film contained numerous references to other horror films, and the killers themselves are two slasher film aficionados whose fascination with the genre structures their mayhem. Audiences fell in love with Scream’s aesthetic, mirroring as it did other pop culture styles present in everything from MTV to The Simpsons and addressing itself to the increasingly blurred lines of media representation and reality. Audiences may have understood Craven’s efforts better than some critics, one of whom rather laughably described Scream as “highly derivative.”3
This has been a book about stories that a culture tells itself and how the line between “story” and “history” is highly permeable. Our creepy little survey has looked at how monster tales have been used as exhibitions of power over the oppressed. Yet we have also seen how they can be used by the oppressed and socially marginalized to unsettle and challenge the powerful. For almost every social group in American society, the monster has embodied the terrors of history and been part of a history of terror.
We have witnessed something even more disturbing. The monster in America has come to life. Metaphors of death, blood, and sex have had living analogues in the history of the United States. These metaphors are something more than reflections of anxiety; they are interstitially connected to events of American history and the structure of American society. Analyze the terrors of the colonial era, and the complexity of nostalgia for that era, and you will meet the shapeshifter and the witch. Ask the victims of the American pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry at Holmesburg Prison if they believe in Frankenstein. Consider the experience of Vietnam through the eyes of Tom Savini and you will better grasp the gory monsters he creat
ed. Hear the rhetoric of religious conservatives and how it shaped the politics of the AIDS epidemic and you will know the power of the vampire.
The American monster will not disappear. The Enlightenment bred hideous night things while Jefferson slept and, as cultural critic Mark Edmunds has argued, America entered a deeply gothic phase in the final years of the twentieth century that shows no sign of abating. The vampire and the zombie are likely to continue their reign in the American consciousness for some time. The themes that make them a current cultural obsession will create, and have already created, new monsters for Americans to see in their nightmares and embody in their history.
At least one future of the American monster can be discerned in the related anxieties over medicine, disease, death, and the body that influenced the vampire and zombie craze. Technology has lengthened life, made possible miraculous bodily renovations, increased sexual fulfillment for aging Americans, and linked society together in the new social and cultural arena of cyberspace. Embryonic cloning and medicine grounded in the idea of cell and tissue regeneration has raised the possibility of what author and futurist John Harris has called “a new phase in Darwinian evolution” in which “our descendants will cease to be human in the sense in which we now understand this idea.” We are wired, both as a society and, increasingly, in our bodies.4
Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting Page 29
