Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#10: Alien (Please scroll down and start with #1)
We will close out this gallery with the ultimate in the monstrous feminine, the Queen Xenomorph from Alien. Fear of motherhood, the womb of the feminine, that unknown again, the metaphor screams at us, just as Medusa or other deadly feminine classical stories, as Barbara Creed outlined in “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine:”
One of the more interesting aspects and subversions here is we have a very distinctive feminine force to combat this monstrous feminine: A strong woman, a Marine at that, but yet still a woman, a mother figure. She overcomes this almost cancer of the feminine figure, an abomination, a metaphor for frustration at the idea of the fear of women reproductional areas.
The Xenomorph hunts you in the dark, it penetrates you and forces birth upon you, male or female. It’s life cycle and form are foreign and frightening; our minds tell us it should not be, in a sane world. Luckily Ripley is here to vanquish the fear for us.
Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#9: Carrie
The tragic, monstrous female once again, we have the born of innocence story that is tied to tragedy; this time the tragedy being Carrie’s horrific upbringing by her insanely religious mother, while keeping her innocent from the real world and even her own body.
There is more guilt and invasion of safe space here, but her real horror is a representation of the female body as was said in “Our Bodies, Herself.” We start off with a menstruation scene that is paralleled with the pigs blood poured on her head at the end: The story was born in blood, and will end in blood. Not just Carrie’s but everyone who caused this horrific moment or allowed it one way or another.
Carries powers are created from anger and rage, confusion and betrayal. Her vengeance is horrific and swift, and we know any of us could be victim to her, because we have allowed such a person to be created without stepping up to protect her.
Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#8: Gremlins
And fear of the invasion of safe white spaces continue, as this streak of horror fascination takes many forms. In this case, we get a hybrid horror-comedy that makes you scream, laugh, squirm, and hits you over the head in a few places with the idea of The Other, as once again Coleman nails white fear on the head:
It is hard to tell exactly if Spielberg is parodying this cliche that shows up particularly in the haunting and slasher genres, or if he is simply reveling in it.
The comedy is like sugar to help the medicine go down, while the jump scares and the *surprising* amount of gore, while the invaders, dark and ugly, remind you when they torture Gizmo that they came from looking soft and snuggly, a reflection one could say of the rejection of even “tamed” African-American and “others” into white spaces in much of America.
Even the origins of Gizmo speaks of white mistrust; he’s received from the mysterious Asian, who we assume are willing to part with a town destroying animal to ignorant whites to “teach them a lesson,” truly a horrifying idea to the PG-13 white suburban audience.
Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#7: Rose Armitage
Now we flip the racial fear on its head, with fear of slavery, oppression and gentrification distilled into literally stealing the body of young black men.
Rose is such an effective use of the monstrous feminine and black fear, as there’s NOTHING to give away her true nature. She seems so empathetic and kinda funny and NORMAL that the reveal of this sociopathic black fetishist hunter (We see the trophies above her bed, driving the point home) is a truly unsettling moment. There’s this fear of the loss of black culture and identity, swallowed up by white colonialism, bubbling up bright and hot at the surface.
We also see a reflection of white guilt and overcompensation to appear non racist; this is, like in movies past, is awkwardly done and ham fisted, as Robin Coleman talked about in Horror Noire. Here it’s somewhat parodied through the eyes of the African American writer, so dead on you can hear white butts squirming at the white cheerful condescension disguised as solidarity.
When Rose’s reveal happens, this point is driven home even stronger, as many of the white audience identifying with the one seemingly non-shitty white person in this movie see her turn out to be maybe among the worst of them...well, there’s some self-reflection you might not want to make.
Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#6: Candyman
We can’t talk safe spaces without talking WHITE safe spaces, and now we get into race-based fear, the horrors of gentrification, and the gaurded regions of subcultures. If you went into the theaters to watch this in 1992 hoping for a brain-dead slasher film and left only with that, you weren’t paying attention very hard.
Slashers have ALWAYS dealt with white anxiety, as Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai, said in “How Much Did You Pay For This Place? Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose's‘ Candyman:”
“As such, the genrenotonly indexes white middle-class anxiety over the racial diversification of suburbanen claves due to trends in upward mobility, but also anxiety related to an obverse yet concurrent phenomenon: the displacement and subsequent dispersion of lower-in-come individuals from contained inner-city neighborhoods following Reagan's drastic cuts in public housing funds.”
Like our previous slasher, Candyman is born of innocence: not let drowned in a lake by neglectful teens but mutilated and killed for the “crime” of loving a white woman in the 1890s. His rage is justified like Jason’s; however his targets are the opposite: he goes after the innocent.
There’s a lot to unpack here: in terms of white fear of justified revenge from the gentrified, segregated, kept-poor black communities inhabiting “their” biggest and brightest cities, to the African-American fear of destroying their own communities, is just as palpable.
Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#5: Jason Vorhees
And while we’re on Slashers, I have to give the slot to the all around king (with apologies to Freddy and Michael, who made it to the podium), Jason Vorhees. Back with the invasion of safe spaces, we get a different kind of monster: he’s relentless, he cannot be reasoned with, and he specifically hates YOU.
Hard to believe when he started out, he wasn’t even meant to be the monster. It was his mother. We watch him evolve from a fucked up momma’s boy with sexual issues against naughty teens to an almost lovable tongue and cheek parody of himself by the end of his over 10 movie run.
- Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film
And thus, we have the primal root of Jason; he’s a repressed creature, a manchild not unlike his contemporary Mike Meyers. His repression becomes the oppression; his rage is infinite.
Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#4: Angela Baker
As we transition from sexuality to slasher, we cross themes with Sleepaway Camp and Angela Baker, a forced-transsexual killer operating in key “safe spaces” for middle class white teens, in this case summer camp.
Baker sums up fears of the monstrous feminine, homosexual fear, and adds a layer of transphobia all under the guise of a quiet, shy girl. When it comes to horror, the unknown and the misunderstood that could possibly be lurking in your own neighborhood, is true fear for our belief in keeping a “pure” society.
We ponder: Is she crazy because of the trauma of forced-transsexuality? Was it forced to begin with or did her crazy aunt go along with her? Her cousin most have known, and was he helping him? The movie leaves us with many questions, and we wonder on which side the monster may be here.
Perhaps the most monstrous to viewers in 1982 would be the forced contemplation of the female gaze and the squirminess that era audience had to have confronting the “gotcha!” of the ending, as Carol Clover talks about in Our Bodies, Ourselves. We see her be courted and respond in kind, perhaps we sexualized her body, all these feelings are turned on the head by the ending. Monstrous confusion to the sense of their normalcy and even sexuality.
Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#3: Countess Bathory
The Countess comes to us as a two-fold monster: The deadly homosexual and monstrous feminine. Daughters of Darkness was art-trash cinema; an incredibly difficult hybrid to pull off, and one could argue how well they did one way or the other, but you cannot deny Delphine Seyrig’s performance here as an ancient, seductive lesbian vampire.
“Lesbian sexuality is infantile and narcissistic; lesbianism is sterile and morbid; lesbians are rich, decadent women who seduce the young and powerless. But the fact that the lesbian vampire myth returned with such force and popularity in the films of the early 1970s suggests to me that an additional factor may have been added by the specific historical developments of the 60s and 70s: feminism and public awareness of lesbianism.” - Bonnie Zimmerman, “Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire”
Thus we are made to face the monstrous feminine of the LESBIAN, a horror that we barely understand but are uncomfortable with, the combination of homosexuality and feminism that disturbs and tittilates the Male Gaze audience and forces contemplation of the Female Gaze.
Our previous vampire entry talked of the context changing from class war to anti-semitism; now again the vampire story, still the same basics, recontextualized for the new public awareness of female homosexuality and feminism and facing societies dual fear and fascination with it.
Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#2 Coffin Joe
Coffin Joe is a fairly obscure character in US popular culture, but is known by hardcore horror fans and elsewhere abroad. An early 60s independent Brazilian film that reflected their culture, their times, much more than the western movies coming from Hollywood, which presented tropes and stereotypes of the country that usually didn’t represent the true Brazil.
This bourgeois mortician has a lot to unpack; his atheistic bend and scoffawing of Catholic and Brazilian cultural superstitions firmly reflect Brazil’s Catholic culture, as the belief of atheism as sociopathic and monstrously evil are on full display here.
But more importantly, he is a representation of fascism, the ruling class grinding the little guy under his heel, as Glauber Rochas “An Esthetic of Hunger” recounts. Brazil’s brutal dictatorship of the time reflected well in Joe, a bully that beats down the individual who would stand up to him, while the audience BEGS the town to band together to run him out on a rail at the very least, as he continues his evil rampage of assault, rape and murder. He is only finally defeated when in defiance of the old ways, he finds himself at the mercy of the spirits.
Monstrous: The monsters in all of us reflected in film
#1: Nosferatu
He’s not the first horror creature on celluloid, (there was a Frankenstein and other interpretations of Dracula that predate him) but he was the first true break out of horror cinema. He is, for all intents and purposes, Dracula, but the filmmakers didn’t want to pay for the rights, so he becomes “Nosferatu,” and most of the other characters get name changes (and the filmmakers still got sued, for otherwise the plot remains the same).
But in terms of using horror and storytelling in film, he is one of the earliest and best examples of reinterpreting text representing current social and political climates. As Franco Moretti wrote in his Dialectic of Fear, the original Dracula story frames good ol’ Vlad as a representation of the bourgeois class, feasting and dining on the poor working class, an object of fear and terror. This German reinterpretation adds a 1920s twist: anti-semitism post WWI, with the character becoming a physically deformed monster with exaggerated Jewish stereotypical characteristics. The battle for class equity is changed to a battle of culture/race/religion, while the sexual underpinning remain (and would throughout nearly every future interpretation of the vampire).
In the Reagan era, Dungeons & Dragons was beset by (now-debunked) allegations of Satanism, the occult, and suicides.
In the Reagan era, Dungeons & Dragons was beset by (now-debunked) allegations of Satanism, the occult, and suicides. The 1980s were the first golden age of the tabletop role-playing game. In 1985, 60 Minutes reported that there were between 3 and 5 million Dungeons & Dragons players, and TSR, the company that owned D&D, grossed over $30 million.
But as D&D grew in popularity, a moral panic rose to meet it. Organizations such as Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons linked the playing of D&D to suicide. A novel by Rona Jaffe entitled Mazes & Monsters was made into a TV movie starring a young and unlikely Tom Hanks. In the film, Hanks becomes befuddled by the imaginary world of a role-playing game entitled Mazes & Monsters, and engages in unlikely behaviors such as celibacy and trying to jump off the World Trade Center to cast a spell.
Other, organizations saw D&D as the frontline of Satanism, possession, and even human sacrifice. Like the Puritans of 1692 Salem, adults perplexed by the behavior of the young found the devil behind it. There is not a shred of truth to the allegations of course. Both the Center for Disease Control and Health & Welfare Canada found no link between role-playing games and suicide.
With D&D and role-playing ensconced in 21st-century culture, it is easy for us to look back on such insanity and laugh. But what was it like to be a gamer on the ground, just a kid, and live through the moral panic first hand? Gaming legends Bruce Cordell and Monte Cook remember it.
Bruce Cordell worked for 18 years on Dungeons & Dragons and recently created The Strange, a science fantasy role-playing game of alternate dimensions. Monte Cook is one of the creators of the iconic third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and is the creator of Numenera, a role-playing game set on Earth one billion years in the future. And in an amazing synchronicity, the two of them met in shop class in the 8th grade.
Bruce said, “Monte happened to notice my leather coaster project featured a sword crossed with an axe, and asked, ‘Do you play D&D?‘” Bruce did indeed play D&D, and the two struck a fast friendship.
Bruce sailed through the moral panic untroubled. He said his parents, “were thrilled that I was an RPG nerd. They loved my friends, and appreciated that I was hanging out evenings playing games instead of — I assume — getting up to the sorts of delinquent behavior that parents fear.”
Monte, however, had challenging waters to navigate. He said, “I was raised in a pretty religious (evangelical) Midwestern household. When I was a kid, my mom didn’t approve of D&D for some [of] the reasons we’ve all heard a million times: it dealt with ‘the occult,’ it involved demons and spells, and didn’t have a Christian outlook overall. Nothing really new or different. Pat Roberson’s ill-informed 700 Club speeches didn’t help the situation.”
His mother’s disapproval led to a crisis for Monte. He had invested a lot of money in his D&D books. (A 1st edition Player’s Handbook retailed for $15, which was a lot of comic books back in the 80s.) Throwing them away was obviously out of the question, but there were too many books to hide them. What to do? Bruce was the answer.
Monte passed the bulk of his D&D library on to Bruce. Bruce said, ” I got all Monte’s D&D books out of the deal… I think I still have some of them actually.”
Monte said, “Eventually, my mom and I pretty much came to terms with everything (writing for D&D professionally for years pretty much requires something like that) and our relationship is solid.”
After a distinguished career writing for TSR and then Wizards of the Coast, Monte struck out on his own, creating Monte Cook Games. Bruce followed him shortly afterwards, and if you want to see what these prolific veterans of the gaming industry are up to now, you should check out their current Kickstarter which is funding not one, but three different games translating the flexible, fast, and fun Cypher System into the genres of epic fantasy, time travel, and super-powered psychological horror.
While the moral panic surrounding D&D has largely subsided in the 21st century, there are still stalwarts of the movement to be found. Pat Robertson, for example, still repeats the old lie that D&D is demonic, and has done so as recently as 2013. Furthermore, the Waupun Correctional Institute in Wisconsin banned D&D and a judge upheld the decision, saying that D&D encouraged, “hostility, violence, and escape behavior.” With gaming culture ascendant, it is easy to laugh at these old bugaboos, but they are still real, still out there, and likely still making the lives of some young gamers difficult.
What are your memories of the Satanic panic of the 1980s? Do you have friends or family that still frown on your gaming habit now? Let us know in the comments section below.
“Only true 1980s Kids…”
I got into D&D in the 5th grade – picked up an AD&D Monster Manual at my old Catholic school’s used book sale – around the same time as the Lieth Von Stein murder case, which took place ~150 miles away and involved students at a university a little over an hour’s drive away. Interesting times. Mom was aware of the Moral Panic going on at the time, but that didn’t concern her; rather, her concern was me spending to much time reading D&D books and neglecting my schoolwork.
(Also: Mazes & Monsters caused me to have an irrational dislike of Tom Hanks for many, many years.)
Off the top of my head, there’s that one team up with Thor where he essentially lusts/crushes over him the entire issue. Maybe its HAW HAW GAY CHICKEN for a panel or two, but it was an entire comic.
Also, he was married to a large, green whale type alien for a few years.
And of course his well known crush on Octogenerian Bea Aurther.
I’d say his varied taste in what he finds attractive is well-documented and canon.
I have no idea if this is funny outside of my head but I’ve been talking about this exact scene for two years now and decided to scribble it now that I’m sick and everything seems like a great idea.
The car enthusiast, who is a member of the U.S. Military, hated the car’s silver color. One evening, he let his wife doodle on a few scratches on the bumper, and when the sun came up and he saw her stunningly intricate and elegant drawings, they knew they had to forge on. While he worked on tuning the insides, she drew on the car.
After roughly 100 hours of work and several clear coats to protect the design, they had an impressively beautiful car that they had tuned up as a team! (x)
