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Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images

Why Do We
Create Monsters?

With our current culture’s emphasis on reason and science, the notion of a monster seems quaint, possibly romantic-harking back to a time when people believed more readily
in fantastic phenomena. Yet the allure of monsters today is still strong.

Whether it is the vampire, the zombie, the werewolf, Frankenstein’s

creature, or some other being of a mystical but threatening character, the

twenty-first century does not seem to lack for monsters. Perhaps, as many

psychologists, historians, social critics, and others have suggested, we

need monsters to symbolize our fears. If so, we need to investigate how

monsters encapsulate those fears and what those fears suggest about

us and the values of our time. Vampires are as popular today as ever,

yet the vampire stories told by Stephenie Meyer are a far cry from the

one written by Bram Stoker in the nineteenth century. The zombie enjoys

wide popularity these days, but its close cousin, the mummy, no longer

resonates within the popular imagination. Why is the brain-eating zombie an

appropriate monster for today’s fears but a suffocating mummy is not?

Monsters reflect the anxieties of the cultures that create them. In

analyzing these monsters, we can learn something about the people of

those periods. Stephen King, perhaps the most famous and prolific horror

writer today, explains the attraction we have to being frightened. We cannot

always be calm and rational because inside all of us is the inner lunatic who

needs to be let out once in a while to race about and howl at the moon.

Mary Shelley anticipated the great upheavals that science and industry

would bring to the nineteenth century. She tells the story of Dr. Victor

Frankenstein, who builds a monster from the various parts of dead people.

animated by the power of electricity, the creature’s awakening horrifies

even its own creator. As Shelley would later explain, her creative inspiration

came not out of a void, but out of chaos: the chaos of her time. Susan

Tyler Hitchcock describes the political, social, scientific, personal, and

even environmental anxieties of the particular time in which Shelley wrote

photo: Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images

14

A B E D F O R D S P O T L I G H T R E A D E R

Frankenstein. A pair of contemporary filmmakers, Guillermo del Toro and

Chuck Hogan, examine the enduring popularity of the vampire myth,

which goes back to ancient times and is arguably as strong in modern

imaginations as ever. They point out that the vampire connects us to the

concept of eternity. Chuck Klosterman examines the zombie phenomenon

and argues that the zombie is a suitable metaphor for the obstacles we

must conquer just to get through our daily lives. Peter H. Brothers examines

the influences behind the making of the movie Godzilla in post-World War II

Japan. Director Ishiro Honda created a monster that seemed to encapsulate

the fears of a nation that experienced the trauma of atomic warfare and the

humiliation of defeat. The monster, with its destructive potential, serves as

a symbol of science — and human ambition — run amok. Clarisse Loughrey

discusses how the internet and other new digital technologies have given

rise to a new monster — Slender Man — a character whose roots are in

older tales but who comes with disturbing new twists. Examining threats at

a national level, Stephen T. Asma argues that events such as the terrorist

attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Great Recession drive our need for

monsters. The promise is that if we can control the monster, we can control

our lives.

The monster is a response to the world around us, and since the

world never stops bringing crises, threats, and uncertainties, our need

for monsters doesn’t end either. Sometimes we modify a long-standing

monster such as the vampire to fit the psychological needs of our times;

other times we construct a new monster, as Mary Shelley did in the

nineteenth century or internet users have done today. Whatever the case,

these monsters are sure to both frighten and, ironically, reassure us that

there may be a good reason for our fears after all.

15

Wh V We C rave Stephen King is one of the most
J # popular and prolific horror

H o r r o r M o v i e s writers of our time. His works
S t e p h e n K i n g i n c l u d e ( 1 9 7 4 ) ,

r & (1977), The Dead Zone (1979),
and Misery (1987), all of which

have been made into popular movies. A native of Maine, King began writing
for his college newspaper at the University of Maine. Later, he wrote short
stories for men’s magazines and received his first big break when he
published Carrie in 1974. The following essay, which initially appeared in
Playboy magazine in January 1981, is an excerpt from King’s book Danse
Macabre (1981). King argues that the horror movie performs a helpful task,
taking on feelings, urges, and impulses that don’t fit neatly into the rational,
reasonable, and sane parts of our lives. Indeed, King proposes that the
horror movie gives “psychic relief” because in most parts of our lives,
“simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness” are so rarely allowed. As
such, the horror film functions like a pressure-release valve for the inner
monster we must typically repress.

I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only
I hide it a little better—and maybe not all that much better, after all.
We’ve all known people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes
squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is
watching, people who have some hysterical fear—of snakes, the dark,
the tight place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and
grubs that are waiting so patiently underground.

When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row
center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.

y? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we
can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which
is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream
out o us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster
Wists t rough a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of

rop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the
specia province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one’s appe-
1 °U C twists or 360-degree loops may be considerably depleted.

e a so go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the hor-
thP h °V1ki1S in”atelY conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as

f 8 W°man in Die> Monster> Die! confirms for us that no
matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford
or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.
16

KING Why We Crave Horror Movies 17

And we go to have fun.
Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn’t it? Because

this is a very peculiar sort of fun, indeed. The fun comes from seeing
others menaced—sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro
football has become the voyeur’s version of combat, then the horror film
has become the modern version of the public lynching.

It is true that the mythic “fairy-tale” horror film intends to take away
the shades of gray. … It urges us to put away our more civilized and
adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things
in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic
relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irratio­
nality and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we
may allow our emotions a free rein … or no rein at all.

If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. If your
insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleve­
land Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither
of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if,
on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when
you’re under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you
are left alone to go about your business . . . though it is doubtful that you
will ever be invited to the best parties.

The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding saints, past and
present; but then, most saints have been crazy in their own ways), and
every now and then, he has to be let loose to scream and roll around in
the grass. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we rec­
ognize that it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone.
Certain of these emotional muscles are accepted—even exalted in civi­
lized society; they are, of course, the emotions that tend to maintain the
status quo of civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness these
are all the emotions that we applaud, emotions that have been immortal­
ized in the couplets of Hallmark cards and in the verses (I don’t dare call
it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy.°

When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive
reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as
children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all
the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, “Isn’t he the sweetest little
thing?” Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often
follow. But if we deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister’s fingers

Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015): American actor best known for playing Spock in the
original Star Trek television series. He later turned to poetry, music, and other artistic
pursuits.

18 Why Do We Create Monsters?

in the door, sanctions follow—angry remonstrance from parents, aunts
and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking.

But anticivilization emotions don’t go away, and they demand peri­
odic exercise. We have such “sick” jokes as, “What’s the difference
between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?”
(You can’t unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork … a

n joke, by the way, that I heard originally
The mythic horror movie . . . from a ten-year-old.) Such a joke may

deliberately appeals to all surprise a laugh or a grin out of us even
that is worst in us.” recoil, a possibility that confirms

the thesis: If we share a brotherhood of
man, then we also share an insanity of man. None of which is intended
as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity but merely as an explana­
tion of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be
reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.

The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It
deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained,
our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized … and it
all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good liber­
als often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most
aggressive of them — Dawn of the Dead, for instance — as lifting a trap
door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the
hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.

Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps
them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who
said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that.

As long as you keep the gators fed.

Understanding the Text
1. King states that when we see a horror film, we are “daring the nightmare”

(par. 2). What does he mean by that?

2. King uses the metaphor of “emotional muscles” that need exercise (par. 9).
borne of these emotions are seen as positive in that they maintain civilization.

f®SOn?e em°ti°ns that don’t maintain the social status quo,
and why do they still need to be exercised?

3′ whilmS h6hVily °n metaPhors and allusions to create a humorous tone
What iS the advanta9e Of approaching the topic

KING Why We Crave Horror Movies 19

4. How would you describe the tone King uses in this article? What advantage
does this give him in addressing his subject matter? In what ways might the
tone limit what King does?

Reflection and Response
5. Consider your own experience with horror films. Are you a fan of horror or

not? If so, what about horror attracts you, and if not, what repels you? Now
consider your response in light of King’s statement “We also go [to horror
films] to re-establish our feelings of essential normality” (par. 4). Does your
response to horror connect to your feelings of normality? If so, how?

6. King argues that we have some emotions that are affirming of civilization
and its norms and others that are not — or, “anticivilization emotions,” as
he terms them (par. 11). Identify and analyze how these negative emotions
are “exercised” (to use King’s metaphor, par. 9) in your own life experiences
beyond watching horror films.

Making Connections
7. Compare King’s essay with Chuck Klosterman’s “My Zombie, Myself: Why

Modern Life Feels Rather Undead” (p. 39). How does Klosterman differ from
King in his analysis of the need for horror in people’s lives? In what ways are
the two in agreement? Explain your responses using specific textual support
from both essays.

8. King reports that one critic said, “the horror film has become the modern
version of the public lynching” (par. 6). King continues the metaphor when
he claims, “The potential lyncher is in almost all of us” (par. 9). Do some
research on the history of lynching in the United States. After your research,
argue whether the comparison between public lynching and horror films
is either fair and accurate or overdone and exaggerated. Defend your
response.

From Frankenstein:
born in 1797 to celebrated radical

The Modern thinkers William Godwin and Mary
Prometheus WollstonecraMhe porting
r I w l l i c L i i c u o f e m i n i s t w r i t e r w h o d i e d j u s t d a y s

M a r y Sh e l l e y after Mary was bom. Godwin
recognized his daughter’s intellect

and gave her a rich education, raising her to follow his liberal political ideals and
become a writer. However, he withdrew his support when sixteen-year-old Mary
became attached to the twenty-one-year-old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who
was already famous and married to another woman. In 1816, Mary traveled with
Shelley to Geneva, where she answered a writing challenge with one of the most
enduring works and characters of Western literature. Her creation, Frankenstein,
was first published in 1818 and has lived on in the popular imagination ever
since. In this passage, after almost two years of hard work in his laboratory,
Victor Frankenstein beholds his own creation, only to react with horror at what he
has done.

11 was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment
I of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected
the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being
into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morn­
ing; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was
nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light,
I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and
a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate
the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored
to form? His limbs were in proportion, and 1 had selected his features
as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the
work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black,
and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only
formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost
of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his
shriveled complexion and straight black lips.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings
o uman nature. 1 had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole
purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived
myse of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded
ict? fIa ?^’ kut now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream van-

e , and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure

20

SHELLEY From Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus 21

the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room and con­
tinued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my
mind to sleep. At length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before
endured, and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavoring to
seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain; I slept, indeed,
but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth,
in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt.0 Delighted
and surprised, I embraced her,
but as I imprinted the first kiss
on her lips, they became livid
with the hue of death; her fea­
tures appeared to change, and I
thought that I held the corpse of
my dead mother in my arms; a
shroud enveloped her form, and
1 saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from
my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chat­
tered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow
light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I
beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held
up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were
fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds,
while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not
hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped
and rushed downstairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the
house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night,
walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively,
catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach
of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.

Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance.
A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as
that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then,
but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it
became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.

“By the dim and yellow light of the

moon, as it forced its way through

the window shutters, I beheld the

wretch — the miserable monster

whom I had created.”

Ingolstadt: a city in Germany along the Danube River.

22 Why Do We Create Monsters?

Understanding the Text
1. Immediately after he animates the creature, Frankenstein calls the act a

“catastrophe” (par. 2). Why? Examine the details of Frankenstein’s description
of the creature to support your answer.

2. Frankenstein awakens from a bad dream only to confront the reality of his
creation. What effect does Shelley create by juxtaposing the dream with the
curious monster’s invasion of Frankenstein’s bedchamber?

3. Why does Frankenstein call his own creation a “demoniacal corpse” (par. 3)?
If his creation is a demon, what does that say about Frankenstein as a
creator?

4. Sometimes authors will use allusions — references to other creative works,
events, or people — to advance an idea. This passage concludes with
Dr. Frankenstein referencing “Dante” (par. 4). Who was Dante, and how does
this allusion further develop the horror of Dr. Frankenstein’s observations?

Reflection and Response
5. Analyze Frankenstein’s immediate repulsion toward his creation. What is the

basis of his repulsion? Note that Frankenstein claims he had “selected [the
creature’s] features as beautiful” (par. 2). What is the relationship between
beauty and horror? Cite specific passages from the text to support your
position.

6. Frankenstein’s nightmare begins with a healthy Elizabeth (his love interest),
who then turns into the corpse of his dead mother in his arms. How does
this dream sequence relate to Frankenstein’s actions in giving life to the
creature?

7. How does the creature act? Does the lack of aggression surprise you, given
the typical popular culture depictions of Frankenstein’s monster? Describe
the action in this passage from the point of view of the monster.

Making Connections
8. In his essay “Monsters and the Moral Imagination” (p. 59), Stephen T. Asma

argues that there are cultural uses for monsters — that they somehow reflect
the anxieties of their time. Investigate the culture and time in which Mary
Shelley was writing (1816) and argue how time and place came to influence
the story of Frankenstein.

9. Compare the passage of the creature’s awakening with film depictions of
the same. Some choices include the classic movie Frankenstein (1931), an
updated version of Frankenstein (1994), and an even more recent take on the
story, I, Frankenstein (2014). What differences do you see from the original
story by Shelley, and what is the significance of those differences?

Conception Susan Tyler Hitchcock is a
book editor for the National
Geographic Society and an S u s a n T y l e r H i t c h c o c k
author of numerous books. In

this excerpt from Frankenstein: A Cultural History (2007), Hitchcock describes
two of the leading literary figures of their day — Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe
Shelley — and the challenge they took part in during the summer of 1816. The two
men — accompanied by Byron’s physician, John Polidori; Shelley’s young lover,
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and their newborn son; and Mary’s stepsister Claire
Clairmont — had settled in Geneva that summer. The weather was unusually cold
and rainy, probably the result of a volcanic eruption in far-off Indonesia. But the time,
place, climate, and personal relationships of the companions made possible the
creation of not one but two famous monster stories, neither by the famous poets:
Frankenstein by Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) and The Vampyre by John Polidori.

Archetypes make their way into the conscious part of the mind
seemingly from the outside and of their own accord. They are
autonomous, sometimes forcing themselves in overpoweringly.
They have a numinous quality; that is, they have an aura of divin­
ity which is mysterious or terrifying. They are from the unknown.

It would have been naive to think it was possible to have prevented
this.

The weather was strange all summer long in 1816. Twice in April the year before, Indonesia’s Mount Tamboro had erupted—the largest vol­
canic eruption in history—spewing masses of dust into the atmosphere,
which lingered and dimmed the sun’s rays throughout the northern lat­
itudes. Temperatures stayed at record lows. In New England killing frosts
occurred all summer. In Europe crops — deprived of light and bogged
down with too much rain—did not ripen. Grain prices doubled. In India
food shortages triggered a famine, which very likely led to the cholera epi­
demic that spread west during the next two decades, infecting thousands
in Europe and North America. Fierce storms of hail, thunder, and light­
ning swept through many regions. It was a dreary season indeed.

“An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house,” wrote
eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin to her half sister Fanny. “The thunder
storms that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen

— WILSON M. HUDSON, Folklorist

— IAN WILMUT, Embryologist Responsible

for Dolly, the Cloned Sheep

23

24 Why Do We Create Monsters?

before.” She wrote from a house on the eastern bank of Lake Geneva,
into which she had just moved with three fellow travelers: Percy Bysshe
Shelley, her twenty-three-year-old lover; Claire Clairmont, her stepsister,
also eighteen; and little William, the infant son born to her and Shelley
in January. Nearly five months old, the baby—”Willmouse,” as they
called him—would have been smiling and reaching out to grasp a fin­
ger offered to him. One calm evening when they had first arrived, just
the three of them — father, mother, child — had gone out on the lake in
a little skiff at twilight. They skimmed noiselessly across the lake’s glassy
surface, watching the sun sink behind the dark frown of the Jura Moun­
tains. Since then, though, storms had moved in. They did at least provide
entertainment. “We watch them as they approach,” Mary wrote Fanny,

observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heav­
ens One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The
lake was lit up—the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated
for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in
frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.

Beyond the weather there was an excitement simply in being in
Geneva, the intellectual birthplace of the French and American Revolu­
tions. Mary described in her letter to Fanny the obelisk just outside the
city, built in honor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, once banished from his
city but now recognized as an intellectual hero. Rousseau had declared
that the imperfections and suffering in human life arose not from nature
but from society. Human beings had only to free themselves from social
oppression and prejudice in order to regain their native joy and liberty.
A shared commitment to that idea had bonded her mother and father
in an all-too-brief partnership; had drawn the young poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley to her father, William Godwin, the radical philosopher he most
revered; and had flamed the passion between herself and Shelley from
the moment they met.

That first meeting had taken place in 1814, when she was sixteen and
he was twenty-one. Now, two years later, they were making a house­
hold together. She could find pleasure simply in that: In those two
years they had been such wanderers. First this odd threesome, she and
Shelley and Claire, had sneaked out of London on a dark night in July
1814 and trekked through France and Germany on barely any money.
Three months later they returned to London and found themselves
roundly shunned. Shelley was, after all, married to another and father
to a child. That November, Harriet Shelley had given birth to a second
c ild. Now, in the summer of 1816, the legal Mrs. Shelley was raising

HITCHCOCK Conception 25

Ianthe and Charles—a girl aged three, a boy eighteen months—on her
own. Shelley rationalized his behavior with a philosophy of free love.
“Love,” he would write, “differs from gold and clay: / That to divide is
not to take away.” His passions—Mary, liberty, poetry, atheism—meant
more to him than his responsibility for an estranged and earthly family.

Life with Mary, however, soon developed its own earthly obliga- 5
tions. She had become pregnant during the 1814 escapade and stayed
wretchedly sick through it all. In those times, and especially in Mary’s
own experience, birth and death mingled inextricably. Her own mother,
Mary Wollstonecraft, had never risen from bed after giving birth to her.
An infection developed, the fever never ceased, and Wollstonecraft died
ten days after childbirth. Fear certainly exacerbated young Mary God­
win’s condition. On February 22, 1815, a daughter was born prematurely,
“unexpectedly alive, but still not expected to live,” as Shelley wrote in
a journal. One week later parents, baby, and Claire moved from one end
of London to the other, from Pimlico to Hans Place. “A bustle of mov­
ing,” Mary wrote in her journal on March 2. Four days later she wrote:
“find my baby dead … a miserable day.” She managed to write
a letter to a friend: “It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke
in the night to give it suck[. I]t appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I
would not awake it — it was dead then but we did not find that out till
morning—from its appearance it evedently [sic] died of convulsions.”
The child was never given a name.

Meanwhile Harriet Shelley pleaded for help for her two children from
the fathers of both her husband and his runaway lover. Timothy Shelley,
a baronet of ample means, felt fury over family shame more than any­
thing else and clamped down viciously on his son’s access to any inher­
itance. William Godwin, now remarried, no longer enjoyed popularity
as a radical author. He and his wife barely made ends meet by running
a bookshop and publishing books for children. They shared the baronet’s
parental outrage, however, and Godwin turned Shelley’s kidnapping, as
he termed it, of his daughter and stepdaughter into an opportunity for
a gentlemanly sort of blackmail. By the summer of 1816, to meet the
demands of Harriet Shelley and William Godwin, not to mention his
own household obligations, Percy Bysshe Shelley was negotiating with
moneylenders and solicitors for post-obit bonds — loans against his
future estate.

Mary, Percy, and Claire moved restlessly, often hiding from creditors,
Shelley all the while corresponding frantically with William Godwin
about money. On January 25, 1816, though, at the end of a letter full of
logistics concerning loans and payments, Shelley wrote: “Mrs. Godwin
will probably be glad to hear that Mary has safely recovered from a very

26 Why Do We Create Monsters?

favorable confinement, & that her child is well.” Mary Godwin and Percy
Bysshe Shelley, unmarried, welcomed a son into the world. In a decision
rife with contradictions, they named him William, after her father.

As if that weren’t enough, now, in the cold and rainy summer of 1816,
there was a new secret to keep from the Godwins.

Claire Clairmont — Mary’s stepsister, the daughter of the second
Mrs. Godwin—had been the one who selected Geneva as the destination
of their upstart band. She was chasing after the outlandish yet irresistibly
popular poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Some speculate that early on
Claire, as well as Mary, had had her eyes on Percy Bysshe Shelley. But
by 1816 she was feeling like the odd woman out and, presented with
the opportunity to meet the notoriously libertine Byron, Claire Clair­
mont had plotted—and pounced. Exploiting a tenuous personal connec­
tion, she approached Lord Byron. “An utter stranger takes the liberty of
addressing you,” her first letter to him began. It grew more presumptuous
with every paragraph: “It may seem a strange assertion, but it is not the
less true that I place my happiness in your hands.” Rebuffed, Claire wrote
again, explaining that she had drafted a play and sought Byron’s advice
on her composition. “You think it impertinent that I intrude on you,”
she wrote. “Remember that I have confided to you the most important
secrets. I have withheld nothing.” Slyly she implied submission even
before he pursued her.

Claire was an annoying distraction during a troubled period of Byron’s 10
life. He had married Annabella Milbanke in January 1815, but the mar­
riage swiftly self-destructed, despite the birth of a daughter, Ada. The new
wife and mother could not ignore Byron’s fascination with his half sister,
Augusta, and she had heard rumors of his sexual relations with men. She
hired a doctor to investigate his mental condition. Byron was diagnosed
sane. If he wasn’t insane, he was immoral and dangerous, Annabella rea­
soned, and presented him with separation papers. Evidences of his incest
and sodomy were whispered, even published, throughout Britain. “He is
completely lost in the opinion of the world,” wrote one London socialite.
Byron decided to leave England. He would travel to Switzerland, birth­
place of the Enlightenment, tolerant of iconoclasts like Rousseau—and
himself.

So when Claire’s letters began appearing, Byron was not in a partic­
ularly amorous mood. Sometime in late April, though, Claire’s plot
achieved consummation. As Byron wrote a friend some months later, “A
man is a man, and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours
there is but one way.” It was a heartless fling, Byron said later: “I never
loved nor pretended to love her.” He probably thought he would shake
her loose once he departed from England, but Claire Clairmont did not

HITCHCOCK Conception 27

let go. Learning where Byron was going, she persuaded her friends to
head for Geneva, too.

Diodati Escapades

According to Byron’s physician and traveling companion, John William
Polidori, the Shelley party first encountered Lord Byron on May 27,
1816. “Getting out [of a boat],” wrote Polidori in his diary, “L.B. met
M. Wollstonecraft Godwin, her sister, and Percy Shelley.” Byron’s fame
made the younger poet somewhat diffident, yet Byron hosted Shelley
for dinner that very night. Polidori described him as “bashful, shy, con­
sumptive, twenty-six: separated from his wife; keeps the two daughters
of Godwin, who practise his theories; one L.B’s.” He got Shelley’s age
wrong by two years but immediately grasped the dynamics between
Claire and Byron.

The scene was set for the momentous summer of 1816. Byron rented
the Villa Diodati, an elegant estate house above Lake Geneva. John
Milton himself, the author of Paradise Lost, had stayed in the house in
1638, while visiting the uncle of his dear friend Charles Diodati. Byron
must have enjoyed communing with such an eminent forebear. Shel­
ley, Mary, and Claire rented a humbler house down the hill, closer to
the lake’s edge, and visited Villa Diodati often. One wonders whether
Mary ever brought her baby with her into that environment, electric
with testosterone and nerves. She hired a Swiss nursemaid, but she still
must have felt torn between her duties as a mother and her fascination
with her poet friends. Sometimes fierce lightning storms broke open
the skies above Villa Diodati. Together with the storms, sharp wit and
intellectual sparring may have kept her at the villa longer than she
planned.

They spoke of literature, debating the virtues of the writers of the
time. Robert Southey, then Britain’s poet laureate, had published Thalaba
the Destroyer and The Curse of Kehatna, passionate epics set in mysteri­
ous Eastern realms and peopled by unknown deities. Shelley so respected
these poems that he used them as models, but Byron mocked them for
their pageantry and melodrama. William Wordsworth presented an
entirely different aesthetic, finding poetry in the language of the com­
mon folk—shepherds, idiots, children. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poems
evoked powers unseen and unnamed. Meanwhile Walter Scott, already
revered for poems that sang of his native Scotland, was suspected of being
the author of Waverley. What a shock if it were true—that a popular poet
would descend to write a novel, a new and not altogether respected liter­
ary form.

28 Why Do We Create Monsters?

No poet of any renown would write a novel; no elevated per- 15
son would stoop to read one. Yet in the wee hours of the night, their
tongues unleashed by sherry or other elixirs, those present at the Villa
Diodati might admit a fascination with an occasional Gothic romance,
Mrs. Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho or Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The
Monk, perhaps. Set in a dimly imagined past, these popular books of the
time pitted established strictures against native human desire, raising the
very questions that radical philosophers had been asking about conven­
tion and society. Ghosts and spirits haunted the churchyards, vaults, and
abbeys; gore, horror, lust, and crime oozed onto the printed page. There
was something in the human imagination that made such stories irresist­
ibly fascinating.

Electrifying Science

Poetry was much on the minds of those gathered at the Villa Diodati,
but science charged the conversation as well. Polidori, after all, had
been trained in medicine, and Shelley had intended to become a doctor
when he entered Oxford in 1810. A friend described his college quarters
as cluttered with chemistry flasks and retorts.0 Early-nineteenth-century
advances in science opened up realms of thought as fantastic as any com­
ing from the imagination of a poet. In fact, to some, philosophy, poetry,
and science converged to promise revolutionary changes in human
knowledge and worldview.

Erasmus Darwin, for example, grandfather to Charles, had proffered
an early theory of evolution. “Organic life beneath the shoreless waves /
Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves,” he wrote in his epic poem
The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society, published in 1803. As Darwin
described it, life forms “new powers acquire, and larger limbs assume
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, / And breathing realms of
fin, and feet, and wing.” Notions of evolving life forms led logically back
to questions about the origin of life itself. Joseph Priestley, discoverer of
oxygen, used mold on vegetables to demonstrate the spontaneous gen­
eration of life. Darwin saw similar things going on in aging wheat-flour
slurry: “In paste composed of flour and water, which has been suffered to
become acescent [to sour], the animalcules called eels, vibrio anguillula,
are seen in great abundance.” The eggs of such creatures could not pos­
sibly “float in the atmosphere, and pass through the sealed glass phial,”

a vesseL commonly a glass bulb with a long neck bent downward, used for
distilling or decomposing substances by heat.

HITCHCOCK Conception 29

Darwin reasoned, so they must come into being “by a spontaneous vital
process.” Evolution and spontaneous generation may be concepts diffi­
cult to accept, Darwin granted, but “all new discoveries, as of the mag­
netic needle, and coated electric jar, and Galvanic pile” seemed just as
incredible.

Once Benjamin Franklin and others had managed to harness naturally
occurring electricity, experimenters went to work on devices to collect,
control, and generate electrical power. The galvanic pile, as Darwin called
it—precursor of the electric battery—was named for the Italian scientist
Luigi Galvani, whose famous experiments of the 1790s tested the effect
of electrical current on the bodies of animals. When a charged metal
rod caused disembodied frog leg muscles to move, Galvani glimpsed
that electricity motivated living nerve and muscle. His work advanced
understanding of what was called “animal electricity,” soon renamed
“galvanism.” By 1802 the Journal of Natural Philosophy announced that
“the production of the galvanic fluid, or electricity, by the direct or inde­
pendent energy of life in animals, can no longer be doubted.” Galvani’s
nephew, Luigi Aldini, toured Europe during the first years of the nine­
teenth century, demonstrating how electrical charges could move not
only the legs of frogs but also the eyes and tongues of severed ox heads
as well.

In a famous presentation to the president of the Royal College of
Surgeons, Aldini demonstrated galvanism with the body of a recently
executed murderer. Aldini connected wires from a massive battery
of copper and zinc to the corpse’s head and anus. As an eyewitness
described it:

On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased crimi­
nal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye
was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was
raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to
the uninformed part of the by-standers as if the wretched man was on the eve
of being restored to life.

London newspapers reported the phenomenon, and Aldini mounted
shows for the public. Even the Prince Regent attended one. It did not
seem farfetched to consider this newly entrapped natural force, electric­
ity, the quintessential force of life. “Galvanism had given token of such
things,” Mary Godwin wrote as she later recalled how discussions at Villa
Diodati of these scientific marvels had filled her with ideas. “Perhaps the
component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together,
and endued [sic] with vital warmth.”

30 Why Do We Create Monsters?

T h e C h a l l e n g e _

Poetry and science, Gothic horror and reanimation—those topics tingled 20
in the Geneva air that summer of 1816. Somebody pulled out a collection
of tales of the supernatural, Phantasmagoriana, which became one eve­
ning’s entertainment. The book had been translated from German into
French in 1812 and subtitled Recueil d’histoires d’apparitions, de spectres,
revenans, fantomes, &c. traduit de l’allemande, par an amateur—”a collec­
tion of stories about apparitions, specters, dreams, phantoms, etc., trans­
lated from the German by an amateur.” The book must have enjoyed
popularity at the time, because an English edition came into print in
1813, with the simple title Tales of the Dead. The group at Villa Diodati
read the stories to one another from the French edition.

Famille,” in which ancient portraits hanging on cold stone walls assumed
supernatural powers. “I have not seen these stories since then,” she wrote
in 1831, “but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read
them yesterday.”

After listening to a few of these tales, chilling yet clumsily written,
Byron challenged his companions. Any one of them could do better.
” ‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition
was acceded to,” Mary Shelley recounted in 1831. “There were four of
us,” she begins, although there were five. The one she left out was Claire
Clairmont—maybe Claire was not present, or she simply chose not to
write, or maybe Mary was deliberately ignoring her stepsister. Byron
only started a story, “a fragment of which he printed at the end of his
poem of Mazeppa,” Mary reported — a two-thousand-word passage that
introduces two Englishmen in a Greek landscape: Augustus Darvell, cele­
brated, mysterious, and haunted by “some peculiar circumstances in his
private history”; and the story’s narrator, younger, ingenuous, and mes­
merized by Darvell. “This is the end of my journey,” Darvell whispers.
He has led his young friend into an old Muslim cemetery, full of fallen
turban-topped tombstones. He hands him a ring engraved with Arabic
characters, with strict instructions to fling it into Eleusinian springs after
he dies. A stork alights on a nearby tombstone, a snake writhing in her

horror and reanimation —
those topics tingled in the
Geneva air that summer of
1816.”

“Poetry and science, Gothic
“There was the History of the Incon­

stant Lover,” Mary later recalled—its
French title “La Morte Fiancee”—which
told of an Italian courtier in love with a
woman whose identical twin had died
mysteriously the year before. “There
was the tale of the sinful founder of
his race,” as she called “Les Portraits de

HITCHCOCK Conception 31

beak. As she flies away, Darvell breathes his last. The narrator buries him
in an ancient grave. “Between astonishment and grief, I was tearless,” he
says—and at that, Byron abandoned the story.

Percy Shelley appears not to have composed even a fragment in
response to the challenge. His wife’s explanation, written after his death,
was that storytelling was just not his style. Spirits did seem to haunt
him—in 1813 he had fled a Welsh cottage, convinced that a ghost had
fired a gun at him—but grotesques were not the stuff of his poetry in
1816. Shelley, she wrote, was “more apt to embody ideas and sentiments
in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melo­
dious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a
story.” Ironically, therefore, Byron and Shelley—the two poets destined
for the highest echelons of English Romantic literature—fizzled out in
response to the ghost-story challenge, but their two companions wrote
pieces that would evolve into the two greatest horror stories of modern
times.

John Polidori was inspired to write two works, both published three
years later. One was a short novel, Ernestus Berchtold, little known by
anyone but professors of English today. The other, he freely admitted,
began with Byron’s unfinished story. “A noble author having determined
to descend from his lofty range, gave up a few hours to a tale of ter­
ror, and wrote the fragment published at the end of Mazeppa,” Polidori
explained. “Upon this foundation I built the Vampyre,” as he titled his
story. “In the course of three mornings, I produced that tale.”

Like Byron’s fragment, Polidori’s Vampyre tells the tale of two
Englishmen—Aubrey, a young gentleman, orphaned and innocent, and
Lord Strongmore, a shadowy nobleman “more remarkable for his sin­
gularities, than for his rank.” Strongmore suggests, much to Aubrey’s
amazement, that the two tour the Continent together. Repelled by
Strongmore’s appetite for sex and gambling, Aubrey takes off on his own
and falls in love with Ianthe, a Greek country maid, who soon turns up
dead, her throat pierced with “marks of teeth having opened the vein of
the neck.” “A Vampyre! a Vampyre!” the villagers all cry. The assailant
turns out to be Lord Strongmore, who next sets his sights on Aubrey’s
own sister. Aubrey warns his family and mysteriously dies at midnight,
leaving others to discover that “Lord Strongmore had disappeared, and
Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!” The story, borrowed
from a poet and written by a man of little talent, would in a few years
burst back on the literary scene and then proliferate through the nine­
teenth century, influencing Bram Stoker as he wrote Dracula, the vampire
classic, in 1897. Thus on the same night in Geneva in 1816 were born the
world’s two most famous monsters.

32 Why Do We Create Monsters?

While vampires populated Polidori’s imagination, Mary God­
win worried that hers seemed so vacant. “I busied myself to think of a
story,—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task,” she wrote
fifteen years later. Conscious exertion seemed to get her nowhere. “I
felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of
authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have
you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I
was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.” Her mind remained as
if a blank slate, and discussions between Byron and Shelley concerning
“various philosophical doctrines” including “the nature of the principle
of life” made impressions on it. They cited examples; they speculated
as to extremes — sometimes the discussion was detailed and technical,
sometimes visionary. Details of Aldini’s galvanic demonstrations may
have mingled with descriptions of gruesome phantasms or translucent0
fairies.

With such ideas swirling in her head, Mary Godwin went to bed. “I
did not sleep, nor could I be said to think,” she recalled. A story pre­
sented itself, as she described it, the life force less in her than in the
visions appearing to her.

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive
images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of
reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale stu­
dent of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the
hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some
powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.

To enter the original moment of the creation of Frankenstein’s monster,
strip away all the modern imagery created to portray it. No more white
lab coat, no more electrical coils and transformers, not even a dank stone
tower. The author herself gives us very little: a “pale student,” “kneeling”
on the floor; beside him, “the thing he had put together”—a “hideous
phantasm,” “some powerful engine” whose force only made him “stir.”

Granted, these few words are themselves just garments wrapped by
the author around wordless moments of inspiration. It is as if she, one
with her character, had gazed for the first time upon “the horrid thing”
standing at the bedside, staring at her with its “yellow, watery, but specu­
lative eyes” for, at the moment that she glimpsed this kernel of her
story, she opened her own eyes “with terror,” seeking the comfort of the
outside world.

translucent: clear, transparent.

HITCHCOCK Conception 33

The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I
wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I
see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the
moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and
white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phan­
tom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my
ghost story,—my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one
which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!

Soon the two thoughts merged into one: her waking dream was her ghost
story. “On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story,” Mary
later recalled. “1 began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night
of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking
dream.”

Mary Godwin Shelley’s account of the genesis of her novel, written
for its 1831 edition, may contain a few fabrications, a few exaggerations,
a few skewed memories. But it is still the most reliable rendition we have
of how the story of Frankenstein began, and therefore a good starting
point.

Understanding the Text
1. This article begins with two quotations. What is the significance of the

quotations to the text and to each other?
2. How is the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin

complicated by issues on both sides?
3. Identify some of the details of Lord Byron’s history as detailed in this

passage. In what ways did he come to embody the Romantic hero?
4. Hitchcock’s article can be best described as a history of the creation of

two great horror figures. How does knowing this background enhance your
understanding of Frankenstein’s creature and the modern vampire?

Reflection and Response
5. Hitchcock writes, “No poet of any renown would write a novel; no elevated

person would stoop to read one” (par. 15). In what ways are certain styles
or genres of art connected with class consciousness? What specific styles
or genres of art today are affected by awareness of social class, and how is
such art restricted or liberated by that?

6. Hitchcock takes some time to document the lives and celebrity of Lord
Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In particular, both Byron and Shelley were
notorious for their lifestyles, rejecting social conventions and morality, living
only for their art. To what extent does the lack of social conventions allow

34 Why Do We Create Monsters?

and inspire artists to be more creative? Consider this question given that in
the challenge, Shelley and Byron were not successful, but Mary Godwin and
John Polidori were.

Making Connections
7. Mary Godwin Shelley later wrote about how difficult it was “to think of

a story” (par. 26). Instead, the idea of Frankenstein came to her in a dream.
What kinds of connections are there between dreaming and the creative
imagination? Reread the excerpt from Shelley’s Frankenstein that describes
the creation of the monster (p. 20) and argue whether the scene has
dreamlike qualities or not.

8. Hitchcock cites the work of Luigi Galvani, who sent electric charges through
the bodies of dead frogs to watch their muscles move. How did scientific
experiments and advances shape the environment in which Mary Godwin
Shelley created the story Frankenstein? How do current developments,
such as the creation of genetically modified organisms or other advances in
medical technology, create the conditions in which scientists or doctors act
like God? Are developments in medical technology as threatening today as
they were in Shelley’s time? Why or why not?

Why Vampires
Never Die
Guillermo del Toro
and Chuck Hogan

connected to cannibalism but also a contemporary need. According to Guillermo
del Toro and Chuck Hogan in this New York Times column, the essential qualities
of the modern vampire — combining lust and death — still speak to deep desires
and fears. Fascination with the vampire is driven by the desire to move beyond
the mortal to the immortal and, in a way, regain the sense of wonder that the
modern world often removes. Del Toro is a writer and director of films such as
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), The Shape of Water (2017), and the Hellboy series.
Hogan is the author of such novels as Prince of Thieves (2004) and Devils in Exile
(2010). Together, del Toro and Hogan wrote The Strain vampire trilogy, which was
adapted into an FX television series.

Tonight, you or someone you love will likely be visited by a vampire — on cable television or the big screen, or in the bookstore.
Our own novel describes a modern-day epidemic that spreads across
New York City.

It all started nearly 200 years ago. It was the “Year without a Summer”
of 1816, when ash from volcanic eruptions lowered temperatures around
the globe, giving rise to widespread famine. A few friends gathered at the
Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva and decided to engage in a small compe­
tition to see who could come up with the most terrifying tale—and the
two great monsters of the modern age were born.

One was created by Mary Godwin, soon to become Mary Shelley,
whose Dr. Frankenstein gave life to a desolate creature. The other mon­
ster was less created than fused. John William Polidori stitched together
folklore, personal resentment, and erotic anxieties into The Vampyre,
a story that is the basis for vampires as they are understood today.

With The Vampyre, Polidori gave birth to the two main branches
of vampiric fiction: the vampire as romantic hero, and the vampire
as undead monster. This ambivalence may reflect Polidori’s own, as it
is widely accepted that Lord Ruthven, the titular creature, was based
upon Lord Byron—literary superstar of the era and another resident of
the lakeside villa that fateful summer. Polidori tended to Byron day and
night, both as his doctor and most devoted groupie. But Polidori resented

Why are vampires as popular
now as ever? The stories of
vampires — found in different
languages, cultures, and times
dating back to prehistory — have a
strength and power that suggest
not only an archetypal origin

35

36 Why Do We Create Monsters?

him as well: Byron was dashing and brilliant, while the poor doctor had
a rather drab talent and unremarkable physique.

But this was just a new twist to a very old idea. The myth, established 5
well before the invention of the word “vampire,” seems to cross every
culture, language and era. The Indian Baital, the Ch’ing Shih in China,
and the Romanian Strigoi are but a few of its names. The creature seems
to be as old as Babylonia and Sumer. Or even older.

The vampire may originate from a repressed memory we had as pri­
mates. Perhaps at some point we were—out of necessity—cannibalistic.
As soon as we became sedentary, agricultural tribes with social boundar­
ies, one seminal0 myth might have featured our ancestors as primitive
beasts who slept in the cold loam of the earth and fed off the salty blood
of the living.

Monsters, like angels, are invoked by our individual and collective
needs. Today, much as during that gloomy summer in 1816, we feel the
need to seek their cold embrace.

Herein lies an important clue: in contrast to timeless creatures like
the dragon, the vampire does not seek to obliterate us, but instead offers
a peculiar brand of blood alchemy.0 For as his contagion bestows its noc­
turnal gift, the vampire transforms our vile, mortal selves into the gold
of eternal youth, and instills in us something that every social construct
seeks to quash: primal lust. If youth is desire married with unending pos­
sibility, then vampire lust creates within us a delicious void, one we long
to fulfill.

In other words, whereas other monsters emphasize what is mortal in
us, the vampire emphasizes the eternal in us. Through the panacea0 of its
blood it turns the lead of our toxic flesh into golden matter.

In a society that moves as fast as ours, where every week a new “block- 10
buster” must be enthroned at the box office, or where idols are fabricated
by consensus every new television season, the promise of something
everlasting, something truly eternal, holds a special allure. As a seduc­
tive figure, the vampire is as flexible and polyvalent0 as ever. Witness its
slow mutation from the pansexual, decadent Anne Rice creatures to the
current permutations — promising anything from chaste eternal love to
wild nocturnal escapades—and there you will find the true essence of
immortality: adaptability.

Vampires find their niche and mutate at an accelerated rate now—in
the past one would see, for decades, the same variety of fiend, repeated

seminal: creative, original; containing the seeds of later development.
r»ana^y C pro^ess of transforming something ordinary into something special,
panacea, a cure-all; a remedy for all illnesses or difficulties,
polyvalent: having multiple powers of attraction.

DEL TORO AND HOGAN Why Vampires Never Die 37

in multiple storylines. Now, vampires simultaneously occur in all forms
and tap into our every need: soap opera storylines, sexual liberation, noir
detective fiction, etc. The myth seems to be twittering promiscuously to
serve all avenues of life, from cereal boxes to romantic fiction. The fast
pace of technology accelerates its viral dispersion in our culture.

But if Polidori remains the roots in the genealogy of our creature, the
most widely known vampire was birthed by Bram Stoker in 1897.

Part of the reason for the great success of his Dracula is generally
acknowledged to be its appearance at a time of great technological revo­
lution. The narrative is full of new gadgets (telegraphs, typing machines),
various forms of communication (diaries, ship logs), and cutting-edge
science (blood transfusions) — a mash-up of ancient myth in conflict
with the world of the present.

Today as well, we stand at the rich uncertain dawn of a new level of
scientific innovation. The wireless technology we carry in our pockets
today was the stuff of the science fiction in our youth. Our technological
arrogance mirrors more and more the Wellsian0 dystopia of dissatisfac­
tion, while allowing us to feel safe and connected at all times. We can
call, see or hear almost anything and anyone no matter where we are. For
most people then, the only remote place remains within. “Know thyself”
we do not.

Despite our obsessive harnessing of information, we are still ultimately 15
vulnerable to our fates and our nightmares. We enthrone the deadly vims
in the very same way that Dracula
allowed the British public to believe
in monsters: through science. Science
becomes the modern man’s supersti­
tion. It allows him to experience fear
and awe again, and to believe in the
things he cannot see.

And through awe, we once again regain spiritual humility. The current
vampire pandemic serves to remind us that we have no true jurisdiction
over our bodies, our climate or our very souls. Monsters will always pro­
vide the possibility of mystery in our mundane “reality show” lives, hint­
ing at a larger spiritual world; for if there are demons in our midst, there
surely must be angels lurking nearby as well. In the vampire we find Eros
and Thanatos fused together in archetypal embrace, spiraling through
the ages, undying.

Forever.

“Despite our obsessive
harnessing of information, we
are still ultimately vulnerable to
our fates and our nightmares.”

Wellsian: H. G. Wells (1866-1946); British writer best known for his science fiction.

38 Why Do We Create Monsters?

Understanding the Text
1. What are the two main branches of vampire lore that John Polidori fused

in his story The Vampyre? How does this relate to what the authors call his
“ambivalence” about Lord Byron (par. 4)?

2. How do vampires relate to practices of cannibalism? If cannibalism is far in
our past, why do vampires still have such popularity today?

3. According to the authors, “As a seductive figure, the vampire is as flexible
and polyvalent as ever” (par. 10). What do they mean by that? Explain, citing
specific examples.

4. This article originally was published in the New York Times. As is common
in newspaper writing, the paragraphs are short — many are only two or three
sentences long. Compare the paragraphs to those in Hitchcock (p. 23),
which are longer and more developed. What are the effects of shorter
and longer paragraphs in writing? How does the original publication form
(e.g., newspaper or book) affect how a work is written? Why?

Reflection and Response
5. Del Toro and Hogan state that Bram Stoker’s Dracula welded together

the old vampire mythology with the technological revolutions going on in
Stoker’s time. What about today’s technological advances can be looked
at as modern instances of the “new gadgets” (par. 13) of Stoker’s time, and
how do they influence more current renditions of the vampire myth?

6. The authors argue that “we are still ultimately vulnerable to our fates and our
nightmares” (par. 15). Have science and technology taken away our sense
of “fear and awe”? If so, how does the vampire myth help return that to us?
If not, has science become “the modern man’s superstition” (par. 15), as
argued by the authors? Use examples to develop your response.

Making Connections
7. The authors state that the vampire combines lust and death. Read the

selection from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (p. 190) and use specific details to argue
how that passage combines both of these elements. How do our current
cultural attitudes toward lust and death influence more recent vampire stories?

8. Using a current vampire myth, such as the Twilight series by Stephenie
Meyer, the Anne Rice books, or even Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s
Strain trilogy, show how it helps us, as the authors say, “regain spiritual
humility” (par. 16). Consider also the assumption in the same statement that
spiritual humility has been lost and that we now believe we have “true
jurisdiction over our bodies.” Is this belief a result of our advances in medicine
or technology? How does the vampire myth you have chosen serve to help
us regain that humility? Support your argument with specific examples.

9. Research the human history of cannibalism and the history of vampires in older
cultures and myths. (Del Toro and Hogan have named several that will give you
a good starting point.) Analyze how the practice of cannibalism, whether from
he prehistoric past or more recent times, relates to the stories of vampires.

10. Research past medical practices, such as the widespread use of leeches,
an argue how vampires can be seen as connected with disease.

My Zombie, Myself:
Modern

Life Feels Rather
Undead
Chuck Klosterman

The zombie is a relatively recent
monster, a creation that is not

Why Modern alive, is not particularly intelligent,
and simply seeks to eat the brains
of humans. It can also reproduce
itself. In this article that originally
appeared in the New York Times,
Chuck Klosterman argues that
the zombie is a metaphor for
our modern, task-filled world in

which the problems we face seem to multiply faster than we can solve them.
Thus, zombies neatly encapsulate our fears and anxieties about modern life.
Klosterman is a popular writer of nonfiction, including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa
Puffs (2003) and / Wear the Black Hat (2013). He has also written two novels,
Downtown Owl (2008) and The Visible Man (2011).

Zombies are a value stock. They are wordless and oozing and brain dead, but they’re an ever-expanding market with no glass ceiling.
Zombies are a target-rich environment, literally and figuratively. The
more you fill them with bullets, the more interesting they become.
Roughly 5.3 million people watched the first episode of The Walking
Dead on AMC, a stunning 83 percent more than the 2.9 million who
watched the Season 4 premiere of Mad Men. This means there are at least
2.4 million cable-ready Americans who might prefer watching Christina
Hendricks if she were an animated corpse.

Statistically and aesthetically that dissonance0 seems perverse. But it
probably shouldn’t. Mainstream interest in zombies has steadily risen
over the past 40 years. Zombies are a commodity that has advanced
slowly and without major evolution, much like the staggering creatures
George Romero popularized in the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.
What makes that measured amplification curious is the inherent limita­
tions of the zombie itself: You can’t add much depth to a creature who
can’t talk, doesn’t think and whose only motive is the consumption of
flesh. You can’t humanize a zombie, unless you make it less zombie-
esque. There are slow zombies, and there are fast zombies that’s pretty
much the spectrum of zombie diversity. It’s not that zombies are chang­
ing to fit the world’s condition; it’s that the condition of the world seems
more like a zombie offensive. Something about zombies is becoming
more intriguing to us. And I think I know what that something is.

dissonance: inconsistency between the beliefs one holds and one’s actions.

39

40 Why Do We Create Monsters?

Zombies are just so easy to kill.
When we think critically about monsters, we tend to classify them as

personifications of what we fear. Frankenstein’s monster illustrated our
trepidation about untethered science; Godzilla was spawned from the
fear of the atomic age; werewolves feed into an instinctual panic over
predation and man’s detachment from nature. Vampires and zombies
share an imbedded anxiety about disease. It’s easy to project a symbolic
relationship between vampirism and AIDS (or vampirism and the loss of
purity). From a creative standpoint these fear projections are narrative
linchpins; they turn creatures into ideas, and that’s the point.

But what if the audience infers an entirely different metaphor?
What if contemporary people are less interested in seeing depictions

of their unconscious fears and more attracted to allegories of how their
day-to-day existence feels? That would explain why so many people
watched the first episode of The Walking Dead: They knew they would be
able to relate to it.

A lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.
If there’s one thing we all understand about zombie killing, it’s that

the act is uncomplicated: you blast one in the brain from point-blank
range (preferably with a shotgun). That’s Step 1. Step 2 is doing the same
thing to the next zombie that takes its place. Step 3 is identical to Step 2,
and Step 4 isn’t any different from Step 3. Repeat this process until (a)
you perish, or (b) you run out of zombies. That’s really the only viable
strategy.

Every zombie war is a war of attrition.
It’s always a numbers game. And it’s
more repetitive than complex. In other
words, zombie killing is philosophically
similar to reading and deleting 400 work
e-mails on a Monday morning or filling
out paperwork that only generates more
paperwork, or following Twitter gossip
out of obligation, or performing tedious
tasks in which the only true risk is being

consumed by avalanche. The principal downside to any zombie attack is
that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is
that you will never be finished with whatever it is you do.

The Internet reminds us of this every day.
Here’s a passage from a youngish writer named Alice Gregory, taken

rom a recent essay on Gary Shteyngart’s dystopic novel Super Sad True
Love Story in the literary journal n + 1: “It’s hard not to think ‘death

rive every time I go on the Internet,” she writes. “Opening Safari is

“The principal downside
to any zombie attack is
that the zombies will never

stop coming; the principal
downside to life is that you
will never be finished with
whatever it is you do.”

KLOSTERMAN My Zombie, Myself 41

Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes in the zombie television series The Walking Dead.
AMC/Photofest

an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken
away from me.”

Ms. Gregory’s self-directed fear is thematically similar to how the zom­
bie brain is described by Max Brooks, author of the fictional oral history
World War Z and its accompanying self-help manual, The Zombie Sur­
vival Guide: “Imagine a computer programmed to execute one function.
This function cannot be paused, modified or erased. No new data can be
stored. No new commands can be installed. This computer will perform
that one function, over and over, until its power source eventually shuts
down.”

This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed. Zom­
bies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don t
want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and if
we surrender—we will be overtaken and absorbed. Yet this war is man­
ageable, if not necessarily winnable. As long as we keep deleting whatev-
er’s directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of
tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our
enemy is relentless and colossal, but also uncreative and stupid.

Battling zombies is like battling anything … or everything.
Because of the Twilight series it’s easy to manufacture an argument

in which zombies are merely replacing vampires as the monster of the

42 Why Do We Create Monsters?

moment, a designation that is supposed to matter for metaphorical, non-
monstrous reasons. But that kind of thinking is deceptive. The recent
five-year spike in vampire interest is only about the multiplatform suc­
cess of Twilight, a brand that isn’t about vampirism anyway. It’s mostly
about nostalgia for teenage chastity, the attractiveness of its film cast and
the fact that contemporary fiction consumers tend to prefer long serial­
ized novels that can be read rapidly. But this has still created a domino
effect. The 2008 Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In was fantas­
tic, but it probably wouldn’t have been remade in the United States if
Twilight had never existed. The Gates was an overt attempt by ABC to
tap into the housebound, preteen Twilight audience; HBO’s True Blood is
a camp reaction to Robert Pattinson’s flat earnestness.

The difference with zombies, of course, is that it’s possible to like a spe­
cific vampire temporarily, which isn’t really an option with the undead.
Characters like Mr. Pattison’s Edward Cullen in Twilight and Anne Rice’s
Lestat de Lioncourt, and even boring old Count Dracula can be multidi­
mensional and erotic; it’s possible to learn why they are and who they
once were. Vampire love can be singular. Zombie love, however, is always
communal. If you dig zombies, you dig the entire zombie concept. It’s
never personal. You’re interested in what zombies signify, you like the
way they move, and you understand what’s required to stop them. And
this is a reassuring attraction, because those aspects don’t really shift.
They’ve become shared archetypal knowledge.

A few days before Halloween I was in upstate New York with three
other people, and we somehow ended up at the Barn of Terror, outside
a town called Lake Katrine. Entering the barn was mildly disturbing,
although probably not as scary as going into an actual abandoned bam
that didn’t charge $20 and doesn’t own its own domain name. Regard­
less, the best part was when we exited the terror barn and were promptly
herded onto a school bus, which took us to a cornfield about a quarter
of a mile away. The field was filled with amateur actors, some playing
military personnel and others that they called the infected. We were told
to run through the moonlit corn maze if we wanted to live; as we ran,
armed soldiers yelled contradictory instructions while hissing zombies
emerged from the corny darkness. It was designed to be fun, and it was.
But just before we immersed ourselves in the corn, one of my compan­
ions sardonically critiqued the reality of our predicament.

“I know this is supposed to be scary,” he said. “But I’m pretty confi­
dent about my ability to deal with a zombie apocalypse. I feel strangely
informed about what to do in this kind of scenario.”

I could not disagree. At this point who isn’t? We all know how
this goes: If you awake from a coma, and you don’t immediately see a

KLOSTERMAN My Zombie, Myself 43

member of the hospital staff, assume a zombie takeover has transpired
during your incapacitation. Don’t travel at night and keep your drapes
closed. Don’t let zombies spit on you. If you knock a zombie down, direct
a second bullet into its brain stem. But above all, do not assume that the
war is over, because it never is. The zombies you kill today will merely be
replaced by the zombies of tomorrow. But you can do this, my friend. It’s
disenchanting, but it’s not difficult. Keep your finger on the trigger. Con­
tinue the termination. Don’t stop believing. Don’t stop deleting. Return
your voice mails and nod your agreements. This is the zombies’ world,
and we just live in it. But we can live better.

Understanding the Text
1. What are the inherent limitations of zombies, according to Klosterman? In

what way do those limitations make zombies different from other monsters,
such as vampires?

2. Klosterman writes, “When we think critically about monsters, we tend to
classify them as personifications of what we fear” (par. 4). What are those
fears, and how does Klosterman connect them to specific monsters?

3. Klosterman quotes Alice Gregory as stating, “Opening Safari is an actively
destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from
me” (par. 11). What is Safari, and what does she mean by this?

4. Klosterman makes use of the personal “I” in this article to prove his point.
However, some writing instructors frown on the use of the first-person point
of view. What is the advantage for Klosterman of his use of the personal “I”?
What are the disadvantages?

Reflection and Response
5. Analyze the difference between the zombie as a monster and the vampire.

What different fears do they represent, and how are those fears to be
combated? What does the presence of the zombie in popular imagination
say about people’s anxieties about modern life?

6. One metaphor that Klosterman uses is the computer, and in particular the
internet. Examine how zombies can be seen as a metaphor for the internet.
Based on your experience with the internet, do you think this is an apt
metaphor? Explain, using specific types of websites or other internet
functions to illustrate and support your answer.

7. Klosterman poses a key question in paragraph 6: “What if contemporary
people are less interested in seeing depictions of their unconscious fears
and more attracted to allegories of how their day-to-day existence feels?”
If we are attracted to the zombie as an allegory for a boring daily existence
filled with repetitive, seemingly meaningless tasks, do these tasks prove
more persistent and resilient than zombies? After all, Klosterman argues,
“Zombies are just so easy to kill” (par. 3), but real-life tasks often are not.
Give examples from everyday life to support your position.

44 Why Do We Create Monsters?

Making Connections
8. Read Matt Kaplan’s “Cursed by a Bite” (p. 91). Pay particular attention to

Kaplan’s argument about the origin of the myth of zombies. How does the
argument that zombies may have existed on plantations in the Caribbean
connect to contemporary society? Cite both Klosterman’s and Kaplan’s
articles in your response.

9. Klosterman references several movie and television versions of the
zombie myth: Night of the Living Dead (1968), World War Z (2013),
and The Walking Dead (AMC). View at least one of these and argue
whether his metaphor of zombies as incarnations of our daily challenges
(e.g., “reading and deleting 400 work e-mails,” par. 9) seems correct
or not. Develop your response with specific examples from both
Klosterman’s essay and the movie or television version of the zombie
myth you viewed.

Japan’s Nuclear
Nightmare: How
the Bomb Became
a Beast Called
Godzilla

One of the most popular monster
films of all time is Godzilla (1954),
made in Japan less than a decade
after atomic bombs devastated the
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Still reeling from the trauma
of atomic annihilation and the
subsequent effects of radioactive
poisoning, a team of Japanese P e t e r H . B r o t h e r s
filmmakers created a monster that
embodied the fears and anxieties

in Japan resulting from nuclear warfare. Originally conceived as a response to
other film beasts, especially King Kong (1933), Godzilla in many ways surpassed
them: the reptilian monster (and the film) stands as an enduring symbol of what
happens when people tamper with science in such a way that the consequences
extend beyond the imagination. Peter H. Brothers is an actor, director, lecturer,
and author of several books, including Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men:
The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda (2009), Devil Bat Diary: The Journal of
Johnny Layton (2011), and Terror in Tinseltown: The Sequel to “Devil Bat Diary”
(2012). This article was first published in 2011 in Cineaste, a magazine that
covers the art and politics of film.

In 1954, while barely recovering from a devastating defeat in the Second World War and a humiliating seven-year-long American occupation,
the Japanese were once again reminded of their unwilling participation
in the Atomic Age, which began with the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. In March of that year a Japanese tuna trawler named The Lucky
Dragon No. 5 returned to port after finding itself covered in radioactive
ash following the detonation of the first underwater nuclear explosion
from the American “Operation Crossroads” atomic-bomb tests, which
brought home to the Japanese the recurring and haunting images of
the death, destruction, and demoralization befalling them at the end
of WWII. It also gave Toho Studios producer Tomoyuki Tanaka a way to
save face, following an aborted coproduction film project with Indone­
sia, by initiating a Japanese production unprecedented in that nation’s
history.

Inspired by the success of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
and influenced by King Kong (1933), the film that resulted is singularly
Japanese. Godzilla (Gojira) is a film less about a giant dinosaur running
amuck and more about the psychological recovery of a people trying to

45

46 Why Do We Create Monsters?

rebuild their cities, their culture, and their lives threatened by radioac­
tive fallout. Just as those individuals who were once a part of America’s
“Greatest Generation” are rapidly fading from the scene, so too are those
Japanese for whom the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe was never
far away. Caught—if not in the cross hairs then decidedly in the line of
fire—between two feuding superpowers, Japan’s island nation had even-
reason to believe that their time could come again in dealing with the
terrifying consequences of the Atomic (soon Nuclear) Age.

Tanaka saw a way to make a monster movie and cash in on a current
craze while special-effects master Eiji Tsuburaya saw it as an opportunity
to make his personal tribute to King Kong, the film that had motivated
him to go into effects work in the first place. But for forty-year-old jour­
neyman director Ishiro Honda, who was handed the assignment after the
original director Senkichi Taniguchi turned it down, he resolved to use
the monster as a metaphor for the growing fears of a nation living in the
shadow of doomsday. As Honda said years later, “I wanted to make radia­
tion visible.” As a result, the Bomb became the Beast.

Honda knew firsthand the horrors of war. With over seven years of
duty as an infantryman in China behind him, he had not only experi­
enced combat but while on leave had also witnessed some of the fire raids
on Japanese cities. After the surrender he spent six months as a POW, and
after being repatriated he walked through the rubble of what was once
the city of Hiroshima. As a result of these events, this film (and it is every
inch his film) is a somber testimony of those experiences, continually
reinforcing the feeling that nothing can be settled by armed conflicts and
that potential destruction still looms over a Japanese populace helpless
to prevent it.

In later years Honda stated that a direct reference to the real-life Lucky 5
Dragon incident was intentionally avoided so as to not make an obvi­
ous connection and thereby upset and dismay the moviegoing public. He
wanted to make a film that was entertaining yet not preachy, to drama­
tize and not traumatize. Yet this intention is difficult to accept in light of
the film’s opening scene:

Japanese sailors are relaxing in the hot summer sun when suddenly a
bright flash of light appears that justifiably gets their attention. While getting
a closer look they are blinded for their efforts, and those staggering to get away
are awash in atomic fire, which will melt the flesh off their bones as the radio
operator sends a fervent, final, and futile message before he dies.

The bright light the sailors saw was a representation of a phenomenon
known to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the “pikadon” or
flash-boom” caused by the explosion of the atomic bombs, and the sink­

ing of the ship calls to mind the destruction of the Japanese Merchant

BROTHERS Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare 47

Marine by U.S. submarines during the war. The fact that we witness
the death of the radio operator is not a coincidence, for it was Aikichi
Kuboyama—the real-life radio operator of The Lucky Dragon—who died
of radiation poisoning from that fatal encounter just one month before
the film was released. If that weren’t enough, the life raft visible on the
ship’s railing in the film reads Eiko-Maru No. 5. A more direct parallel is
difficult to imagine.

Godzilla is in fact a virtual re-creation of the Japanese military and
civilian experience during the final months of WWII, even to Godzilla
itself, as Honda insisted that the monster’s roar sound like an air-raid
siren while its footsteps should sound like exploding bombs. Numerous
other WWII analogies in Godzilla (the WWII events are in bold and the
movie scenes are italicized) can be cited.

On the night of March 9, 1945, American B-29s laid down tons of
incendiaries on the city of Tokyo, destroying 250,000 homes, burn­
ing out ten square miles of the city, leaving one million homeless
and 100,000 dead.

The “sea of fire” engulfing Tokyo during Godzilla’s rampage. 10
The Japanese Home Defense mobilizes to fight the invasion

of the Japanese mainland from the sea in what was known to the
Americans as “Operation Olympic.”

The Japanese Home Defense gets ready to repel Godzilla’s second attack,
which is an invasion from the sea.

In the last months of the war the Japanese military is overwhelmed
by superior enemy technology and sheer weight of numbers.

The Japanese military is helpless in their attempts to stop Godzilla.
Japan will face America alone, Germany and Italy having already 15

surrendered.
Japan faces Godzilla alone with no other country giving or offering aid.
Radio bulletins warn of impending evening American air raids as

searchlights are employed and sirens alert residents to seek shelter.
Reports come over the radio notifying the citizens of Tokyo that the monster

is approaching, as searchlights slice through the sky and sirens wail.
The Kamikaze (Divine Wind) unit flyers wore hachimaki head­

bands, usually anointed with religious symbols and inspirational
words, in a desperate last-ditch attempt to defeat the Allied powers.

Ogata and Serizawa prepare to fight Godzilla with an unconventional 20
weapon (the “Oxygen Destroyer”) as they don their headbands.

Japanese cities are reduced to rubble by means of conventional
bombings, fire raids, and the atomic bombings.

After Godzilla’s final assault on Tokyo, the camera pans over a devastated
landscape of broken buildings and burning rubble.

48 Why Do We Create Monsters?

Hospitals in Japan are overflowing with victims, known as the
“gembakusha,” of the two atomic-bomb attacks.

After Godzilla’s second attack Japanese hospitals are filled with patients
suffering from terrible radiation burns.

Ironically, when the film was released in America two years later (as 25
Godzilla; King of the Monsters!), Boston Traveler critic Alta Maloney stated
of the hospital scenes: “They look suspiciously like actual films taken
after the dropping of the atom bombs in Japan. They are uncomfort­
able views.” This backhanded compliment is typical of the condescend­
ing attitude most Western critics had towards Japanese cinema at large,
yet Honda’s “uncomfortable views” were not pilfered from American-
occupation footage but were solely the work of Honda and his chief cam­
eraman Masao Tamai.

As it happens, these scenes are far less shocking and graphic than
the real thing and the reason for this was simple. Honda was a man of
extreme good taste and decency and did not want to disturb or horrify
his audience; it was for this same reason that the scars on the scientist
Serizawa’s face were toned down considerably in the film from their orig­
inal conception seen in production photos. Honda wanted his public to
concentrate on the suffering within the individuals and not be sickened
or distracted by their physical deformities.

Godzilla is a film that deserves to be taken seriously, but to accept
what the movie is saying on its own terms one must understand its sub­
tle anti-American tone and dissertation of destruction, which has been
difficult for American critics to acknowledge, for to do so is to admit the
guilt belonging solely to the society that had dropped the bombs in the
first place (in America the Bomb is viewed as a necessary evil; in Japan
the Bomb is evil, period).

To view this film objectively is to come face to face with the burden of
responsibility for having laid waste to entire Japanese cities with fire and
radiation. While it has been argued that there never would have been
a Hiroshima had there never been a Pearl Harbor, what is also true is
that without Hiroshima there would never have been a Godzilla. The rel­
evancy of Honda’s intention, however, has now faded with time. With
t e^end of the Cold War, and the beginning of Strategic Arms Limitation
a s and test-ban treaties, and with some (but not all) of the nations of
e wor d slowly dismantling their nuclear arsenals, the Black Shadow of

t at was the original conception of Godzilla has become merely
amp to some and corny to others. What they fail to see is the deeper

aning of the film, but because of the efforts of those involved with its
tnrp 10^ °dzdla remains a superbly-crafted and engaging motion pic-

wi more conviction, drama, and mood than any other so-called

BROTHERS Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare 49

RAGING THROUGH THE WORLD
R A G I N G i o N A R A M P A G E O F D E S T R U C T I O N !

RAYMOND BURR
A movie poster for the 1956 American adaptation of Godzilla,
World History Archive/Alamy

AWESOME!
-and then some!

starring Raymond Burr.

50 Why Do We Create Monsters?

“monster movie” before or since. King Kong may be considered the greater
film, but Godzilla is better.

While technically brilliant from an effects standpoint, Kon? is a styl­
ized melodrama suffering from dated dialog, stagy machismo overtones
and graphically-shocking images, whereas Godzilla is a subdued and con­
temporary film dealing with an issue that is pertinent and real, one that
hangs over our heads today as did the mushroom clouds over Japan in
1945. Kong is pure fantasy told in storybook style meant to entertain,
Godzilla is a window to an alternate reality meant to enlighten. Kong
is a film about a giant gorilla, Godzilla is a film about men. There is
a difference.

“[King] Kong is a film about
a giant gorilla, Godzilla is a
film about men. There is a
difference/’

Godzilla is also a far more emo- a
tionally powerful viewing experience.
In King Kong, as the giant ape shakes
screaming sailors off a tree trunk into
a deep chasm, we witness their deaths
from a distance, thus maintaining an
objective viewpoint and are not par­

ticularly appalled or saddened. Japanese commuters in Godzilla are
killed riding on their train into Tokyo and Honda pulls his camera in
close on the reactions of female onlookers, and as a result we are much
more involved, intimately experiencing their shock and horror. Kong is
an exaggeration of an ape representing the summation of the fears and
frustrations of a time long since passed, the Great Depression of the early
1930s, whereas Godzilla is a metaphor of man’s tampering with science,
as relevant a message today as it was over fifty years ago.

• • •

In America the film was altered substantially (to tone down, intentionally
or not, the Atomic Bomb connection), incorporating new scenes with
the American actor Raymond Burr so as to make the film more accept­
able for Western viewers (the distributor, Embassy Pictures, felt there was
no way Americans would attend an all-Japanese production just fifteen
years after Pearl Harbor). Even then director/editor Terry Morse handled

e 1 m with extraordinary care, retaining the spirit, if not the letter, of
e original (happily all of Ifukube’s brilliant score was retained, which

as not always the case, as his films were usually mutilated for their
American release).

•. differences between the two versions is worthy of an article in

! ‘ . u* essentiaUy the original ninety-eight-minute version was cut to
eig y minutes (which included the insertion of twenty minutes of

BROTHERS Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare 51

Americanized footage). Lost on the cutting-room floor were scenes focus­
ing on the “love triangle” relationship between Emiko (engaged to Ser-
izawa) and her lover Ogata, and the tension they feel in having to inform
Serizawa of their relationship, as well as the adoption of the Odo Island
native boy Shinkichi by Dr. Yamane after the boy’s parents have been

killed by Godzilla.
Also eliminated were important dialog scenes, which were substi­

tuted with new scenes of Burr —posing as newspaper reporter Steve
Martin—interacting with characters not in Honda’s film informing him
of what is happening; in some instances Burr simply narrates over the
source material. Burr also has “conversations” with the actors in Honda’s
film, thanks to intercutting between close-ups of the new and original
footage, with Burr often seen chatting with extras with their backs to the
camera clothed in wardrobes similar to the original actors!

The biggest alteration involves the distillation of the atomic bomb
connection, such as the deletion of a scene where train commuters com­
plain about Nagasaki and once again having to seek refuge in bomb
shelters, as well as Yamane’s crucial soliloquy at the end of the film in
which he warns the audience of the dangers of atomic experimentation.
Also deleted was an argument between Ogata and Yamane where the
younger man mentions the “atomic cloud that still haunts us Japanese.
The American “A-Bomb” becomes the Russian “H-Bomb” and the word
“radiation” — used consistently in Honda’s film — is never heard in the
new footage, with the scars the survivors are experiencing now referred
to as “strange burns” (for those interested in comparing the two versions,
they are available on the Gojira/Godzilla DVD “Collector’s Edition from

Classic Media).
Sadly, the film’s desperately serious message was disavowed by critics

both in Japan and in America, largely because they considered Godzilla as
a monster movie not worthy of serious consideration, whereas many able
to see beneath the surface discovered the film’s moral. Strangely, the fact
that Godzilla was a great commercial success may have worked against it,
spawning as it has over two dozen sequels of inferior quality that have
tended to cheapen the original film’s intent by simply attempting to cash
in on a major merchandising enterprise.

For his part, Honda felt most moviegoers missed the point by getting
caught up in the visuals, often musing that the kids would eventually
get it once they reached adulthood. He was right, yet Honda wanted it
both ways: by not making a direct statement and discreetly avoiding the
real issue, he nevertheless made a picture so stunning that it succeeds as
entertainment, thereby distracting many viewers from its moral compass.
Whether or not he ultimately succeeded depends on the interpretation

52 Why Do We Create Monsters?

gleaned by the individual viewer; some understand the “hidden” mean­
ing while others are simply captivated by the intriguing story, or just
enjoy watching the fantasy elements. In his later years, Honda acknowl­
edged his naive hope that the film would persuade the nations of the
world to cease and desist their nuclear development. He did live long
enough to see the end of the Cold War, nuclear tests, and the beginning
of nuclear disarmament treaties, but his hope for a world without nuclear
energy never came to pass.

There are a number of reasons to appreciate Godzilla’s role in film history,
one of which was its enormous impact on the Japanese film industry.
Godzilla was not only the first Japanese film to be made under a security
lid and the first to be storyboarded, it was also the studio’s most expen­
sive and daring production up to that time. More important still is that
before Godzilla all movies produced in Japan were indigenous products:
domestic stories made only for their domestic audiences and where sto­
ries involving monsters were not to be taken seriously as authentic liv­
ing creatures. The resultant production that premiered on November 3,
1954, was not only the first film in the longest running movie series orig­
inating from a single studio and the birth of a still-popular genre, but has
also become the greatest international success in the history of Japanese
filmmaking. It remains to this day the most famous Japanese film ever
made.

It was also a gamble without precedent as no such film had ever been
made in Japan before and there was no guarantee that Tsuburaya could
pull off the heretofore untried special effects; nor was there any way of
knowing how Japanese audiences would react to a thinly-disguised ver­
sion of the horrific events that befell them during the war.

As it happened, Godzilla drew in nearly ten million Japanese viewers
who were now able to deal with images that were indelibly integrated
into their national psyche. Indeed the cathartic effect0 the film appar­
ently had was quite possibly the main reason for Godzilla’s success; the
horrific sufferings of the past could be addressed and soothed by the
most horrific fiction of the present.

The film was a supreme collaborative effort created by individuals –
whose lives were forever changed by the specter of the mushroom cloud,
many of whom were either directly involved or profoundly affected by

cathartic effect: the release of strong emotions, such as pity or fear, especially through
an interaction with art.

BROTHERS Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare 53

the traumatic events of those times, including special-effects photog­
rapher Sadamasa Arikawa, who told a crowd at a screening of the film
in 2003 that “Godzilla was very much a picture of its time.” Just as the
explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were watershed moments in
the archives of the twentieth century, representing an initial gaze into
a frightening new world of terror, Godzilla will forever remain a portal to
a past many Americans would prefer to forget and that the Japanese can
never forget. It is now recognized as not only the cinema’s first antinu-
clear film but also the finest re-creation of the mood and desperation of
a civilian population devastated by the worst weapon ever used.

Moreover it stands as the greatest achievement of a team that would
collaborate on many more fantasy films, including the producer who
needed a last-minute replacement for an aborted coproduction, a special-
effects maverick and an iconoclastic musician, and, ultimately, a sensitive
and thoughtful director named Ishiro Honda, who made more films seen
by more people around the world than any other Japanese filmmaker.

The terrible irony in all of this is that if Godzilla is indeed the representa­
tion of the dangers of man’s tampering with atomic and nuclear power, it
has more recently surfaced in such places as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl,
and now in Fukushima, where at the time of this writing a possible nuclear-
reactor meltdown threatens consequences beyond even the imagination of
the men who brought such a terrible fiction to life (a recent e-mail sent by
one of the workers at the plant desperately trying to avert catastrophe reads
like dialog from Godzilla: “If we’re in hell now, all we can do is to crawl up
towards heaven. Who could stand this reality?”).

Regarded by many today as merely “pop culture,” at its time the movie
Godzilla was a warning about a newly-christened crisis, one which has
yet to be fully appreciated, and a legacy which should never be forgotten.

Understanding the Text
1. What is important about the movie’s opening scene with the Japanese

sailors? How does it create a context for the film?

2. Brothers details a number of parallels between the events at the end of
World War II and scenes in the movie. What connections does he point out
between the real events and the film?

3. Why did Ishiro Honda deliberately make the physical injuries and scarring to
victims “far less shocking and graphic than the real thing” (par. 26)? What is
the ultimate effect?

4. What are the principal differences between the original Japanese version
of Godzilla and the first remake for American audiences, starring Raymond
Burr? What were the reasons for those differences?

54 Why Do We Create Monsters?

5. Brothers argues that the important issues in Godzilla were not taken
seriously by its audience (par. 35). What is it about the monster/horror genre
in general that may prevent audiences from considering issues seriously?

Reflection and Response
6. Brothers asserts that Godzilla is more about people than a monster. In

what ways is that true? How does Godzilla the monster function as a
representation of the very real fear of atomic destruction as well as the
trauma of humiliating defeat in war?

7. Why has Godzilla had such staying power in people’s imaginations?
Consider that there are more than two dozen feature-length remakes or
sequels to the film, not to mention two separate American television series
and a large number of video games that feature Godzilla.

Making Connections
8. Brothers states that “Godzilla is a metaphor of man’s tampering with

science, as relevant a message today as it was over fifty years ago” (par. 30).
Compare and contrast Godzilla and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (p. 20),
another story that springs from anxieties about meddling with science. What
similarities are there in the creatures from Frankenstein and Godzilla, and
how does the fact that Honda’s Godzilla is a distinctly nonhuman monster
create differences between it and Shelley’s invention?

9. View the original Japanese version of Godzilla and compare it with a later
version, either the one with Raymond Burr, presented as Godzilla, King of the
Monsters! (1956), or a more contemporary version, such as Godzilla (1998)
or Godzilla (2014). How do they differ, and what is the significance of the
differences? Support your response with details from both films.

10. Godzilla was partially inspired by King Kong (1933). View the original King
Kong and research the background of that film and its era. Then compare
and contrast Godzilla and King Kong. How was King Kong an expression of
the fears and anxieties of its time, and how were those fears different from
the ones expressed in Godzilla? What in society has changed over time that
makes King Kong less popular than Godzilla today?

C l a r i s s e L o u g h r e y

Slender Man:
A Myth of the
Digital Age

Not surprisingly, the internet has
spawned its own monster, Slender
Man. In the same way that the
Frankenstein story originated
as a response to a challenge to
write a ghost story, Slender Man’s
origins can be traced to an online

Photoshop challenge to edit a normal photograph through a paranormal lens.
Slender Man sprang from the creative response of Eric Knudsen. However,
much like Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein, Knudsen’s Slender Man has
developed far beyond its origins. Clarisse Loughrey, writing for the Independent,
a British publication, examines the evolution of the Slender Man myth, the mon­
ster’s various manifestations and victims, and its surge in popularity, moving from
the online universe into the mainstream world of cinema and beyond. Loughrey,
the culture reporter for the Independent, also runs a weekly movie review channel
on YouTube, That Darn Movie Show, and has written extensively as a freelance
writer in both print and online formats. This article appeared in the Independent
on August 26, 2018.

It’s inevitable that the modern-day boogeyman would live on the inter­net. As birthed by forums, fan art, and shaky YouTube footage, the Slen­
der Man is a startling example of modern-day mythmaking. His form is
deep-rooted in tradition and folklore: a spirit of the woods, he’s largely
characterized as a claimer of young souls.

He appears as a tall figure with overstretched limbs and dressed in
a black suit, faceless. He has no motivation. He cannot be placated. And
to witness him often brings its own death sentence.

When any phenomenon arises, of course, Hollywood is keen to cash
in. With the myth first materializing in 2009, it’s a little surprising to see
that it’s taken until now, and Sony’s Slender Man, for it to finally skulk
onto the big screen.

It’s a story primed for the medium, especially in the context of its pop­
ularity within the world of “copypasta”: small, easily digestible stories
whose viral appeal is reliant on shock twists and intriguing hooks.

These are stories, also, that have the potential to be endlessly manip­
ulated and reimagined — a key ingredient in mythmaking, although the
peculiarity of Slender Man is that, thanks to the nature of the internet,
each of these retellings have been preserved; creating a digital trail that
can trace the myth straight back to its originator. And to a single author:
Eric Knudsen.

55

56 Why Do We Create Monsters?

Slender Man watches children at play in a still from the 2018 Sony Pictures film,
Slender Man.
Sony Pictures/Photofest

Under his username “Victor Surge,” Knudsen created the Slender Man
in 2009 as part of a Photoshop challenge on the “Something Awful”
forum, in which users were asked to manipulate real photos to give them
a paranormal edge. Knudsen submitted two examples, both black-and-
white shots of children with a haunting, spectral figure in its background.

One caption read: ” ‘We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them.
but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us

san^ time . . . 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.”
i- read: °ne °f tWO recovered photographs from the Stir-
Tmh ary blaze- Notable for being taken the day which fourteen

and f°r Wh3t iS referred to as ‘The Slender Man/ Defor-
lafer Art6 i *w «- defects by °fficials. Fire at library occurred one week
Marv Thrvm ? ° 0§raph confiscated as evidence.’ —1986, photographer:
Mary Thomas, missing since June 13, 1986.”

of Stenhen^in^3^011 T*S immediate,y arresting, a perfect combination

ious Beast” fromVte Mst^nddkeCt inSPiration was “That lnsid’
K n u d ^ n ‘ c . L o v e c r a f t ‘ s G o t h i c s e n s i b i l i t y .

nature and history were °f ^ S,ender ̂
into a massive process of ^

uo Hsensation-There«
antArt holds more than 113 oon ^ dlgltal art’hostin8 site Devi’
major conflicting attributes- somet,es °f s,ender Man), with several

metimes he has tentacles, sometimes not.

LOUGHREY Slender Man 57

At times his victims are solely children, becoming more reminiscent of
traditional folkloric beasts and faeries, at other times he stalks teenagers
in true urban legend style.

However, there have been two major forces (possibly three, if the Slen­
der Man film makes enough of a mark) that have significantly helped to
shape the Slender Man myth. The first is a freeware survival horror titled
Slender: The Eight Pages, released in 2012, which drops players into the
middle of a dense forest with only a flashlight to defend themselves with.

The objective, should you dare, is to collect all eight pages spread
across the map without locking eyes with the Slender Man himself, who
has a tendency to suddenly appear at the most inconvenient of times. It
was downloaded over 2 million times in its first month of availability.
A sequel titled The Arrival was released in 2013.

The second greatest influence on the Slender Man myth is Troy Wag- 15
ner and Joseph DeLage’s YouTube series Marble Hornets. The channel’s 87
episodes have amassed over 96 million views.

Told through found footage, its story concerns itself with a young
man who investigates the mysterious circumstances surrounding an
unfinished student film, only to become a target for a figure known as
“The Operator” — who appears as a clear iteration of the Slender Man.

A film adaptation, titled Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story, was
released in 2015, with The Shape of Water’s Doug Jones in the role of “The
Operator.”

In 2014, the Slender Man broke out of internet culture, and into the
wider consciousness, but only under the most tragic of circumstances. In
Waukesha, Wisconsin, two 12-year-old girls stabbed their friend 19 times,
later telling police it was under the orders of Slender Man.

They were picked up by law enforcement as they attempted to trek to
the Nicolet national forest, convinced they would find his home there.
Both girls were sentenced to mental institutions, with one eventually
diagnosed with early-onset schizophrenia

Since then, the Slender Man’s leg­
acy has been a complex one. It’s an
example both of the most wondrous
and most destructive parts of our digi­
tal age: of how digital mythmaking has
created a whole new collective force of
imagination and ingenuity, while further blurring the line between fact
and fiction, as has always been the danger of the myth’s hazy origins.

“Digital mythmaking has
created a whole new
collective force of imagination
and ingenuity.”

58 Why Do We Create Monsters?

Understanding the Text
1. Loughrey states, “It’s inevitable that the modern-day boogeyman would live

on the internet” (par. 1). What does she mean by the “boogeyman”? Why is
its presence on the internet inevitable?

2. What makes the myth of Slender Man modern? In what other w ays does the
myth draw from older tales?

3. What are the two forces that have worked to shape the Slender Man myth?
Why are they important?

4. Loughrey finishes her article by retelling the story from 2014 of two girs
who lured a third girl into a forest and stabbed her mult pie times. What
impression is conveyed by this story? How does it connect to the myth c;
Slender Man and its place in today’s collection of monsters?

Reflection and Response
5. Examine the influences on the character of Slender Man. You ma;, trace

several that Loughrey cites in her article as well as additional ones you find on
your own. How do these influences echo Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (p. 2C
or John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” — not just in the sense of the challenge, but
in the external influences that work their way into the stories?

6. Loughrey makes much of the role of technology in the Slender Man myth:
the Photoshop challenge, video gaming, online forums, and eventually the
traditional cinema. Discuss how technology helped create, promulgate, arc
even invent variations of the central myth.

7. The Slender Man usually victimizes young children or teenagers, depending
on the version of the myth. How does this myth relate to real-life stories of
missing children and the fear all parents experience for the safety of their
children? In your response, consider also the role of audience: is Slende-
Man a myth addressed to parents, or is it addressed to younger people?
How might the answer to that question complicate your understanding o’ the
fear created by Slender Man?

Making Connections
8′ m°”f1St°ries that have benefited from digital technology,

of^he firot ni09 ,P m.,ght be The Blair Witch Project (1999), which was one
new horrnr mnvU ar movies to use the digital environment to create a whole
new moS^w Pe”euCe- Argue how the online world * one in which

nes can 136 ‘nv©nted — and flourish. Cite multiple examples.

to the siPnH«S m 6 W°rkS °f StePhen Kin9 and H. P. Lovecraft as predecessors
other later wo^ks^nc^ Exarnine how some monster stories influence
back as vou can h Uh on. one m°nster myth and trace its influences as ‘2’
back as you can. How do those influences form new myths?

Monsters 9nd the In this article, Stephen T.Asma,
a professor of philosophy at

Moral Imagination Columbia College Chicago,
c. . a argues that monsters have a S t e p h e n T . A s m a

purpose — not merely to express
our fears but also to test our sense

of morality. Although the likelihood of a real-life zombie attack seems negligible,
other crises and traumas can and do occur. In fact, in our post-9/11 world,
monsters have seen a sort of resurgence. Perhaps, as Asma argues, we create
monsters as a reaction to the fears we experience and our inability to control the
world around us. This article first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in
October 2009.

Monsters are on the rise. People can’t seem to get enough of vampires lately, and zombies have a new lease on life. This year and next we
have the release of the usual horror films like Saw VI and Halloween II;
the campy mayhem of Zombieland; more-pensive forays like 9 (produced
by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov), The Wolfman, and The Twilight
Saga: New Moon; and, more playfully, Where the Wild Things Are (a Dave
Eggers rewrite of the Maurice Sendak classic).

The reasons for this increased monster culture are hard to pin down.
Maybe it’s social anxiety in the post-9/11 decade, or the conflict in
Iraq — some think there’s an uptick in such fare during wartime. Per­
haps it’s the economic downturn. The monster proliferation can be
explained, in part, by exploring the meaning of monsters. Popular cul­
ture is re-enchanted with meaningful monsters, and even the eggheads
are stroking their chins—last month saw the seventh global conference
on Monsters and the Monstrous at the University of Oxford.

The uses of monsters vary widely. In our liberal culture, we drama­
tize the rage of the monstrous creature and Frankenstein’s is a good
example — then scold ourselves and our “intolerant society” for alienat­
ing the outcast in the first place. The liberal lesson of monsters is one
of tolerance: We must overcome our innate scapegoating, our xenopho­
bic” tendencies. Of course, this is by no means the only interpretation of
monster stories. The medieval mind saw giants and mythical creatures
as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. For the Greeks and Romans,
monsters were prodigies—warnings of impending calamity.

After Freud, monster stories were considered cathartic journeys into
our unconscious; everybody contains a Mr. Hyde, and these stories give

xenophobic: relating to the fear of outsiders or foreigners.

59

60 Why Do We Create Monsters?

us a chance to “walk on the wild side.” But in the denouement1 of most
stories, the monster is killed and the psyche restored to civilized order.
We can have our fun with the “torture porn” of Leatherface and Freddy
Krueger or the erotic vampires, but this “vacation’ to where the wild
things are ultimately helps us return to our lives of quiet repression.

Any careful reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, will reveal
not only a highly sexualized description of blood drinking, but an erotic
characterization of the count himself. Even John Polidori’s original 1819
vampire tale The Vampyre describes the monster as a sexually attractive
force. According to the critic Christopher Craft, [the] Gothic monster
tales Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula,
[and] Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles rehearse a similar story structure.
“Each of these texts first invites or admits a monster, then entertains and
is entertained by monstrosity for some extended duration, until in its
closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the disruption
that he/she/it brings,” he writes.

A crucial but often-ignored aspect of monsterology is the role those bea
ties play in our moral imaginations. Recent experimental moral psvcho
ogy has given us useful tools for looking at the way people actually d
their moral thinking. Brain imaging, together with hypothetical ethici
dilemmas about runaway trolley cars, can teach us a lot about our re;
va ue systems and actions. But another way to get at this subterranea
territory is by looking at our imaginative lives.

Mcnsters can stand as symbols of human vulnerability and crisi
and as such they play imaginative foils for thinking about out OK
s that we t° T3″6; Part °f OUr fascina«°n with serial-killer mons.e.

violence °UI °ved ones) are potentially vulnerable to sadisti
Ilmost auuhThT T ‘ St3tiStiCal Polity renders such an attac

We to both th ‘- °nal fearS are decidedl>- unfunn> We are vulne
only draw us n whT” ^ °Uter f°rces’ ^es and fihr
and we tacitlv ask ” W<j ldentIfy WIth the persons who are being chasei
zombies out or seelTth6 ^ W°uld 1 board UP the windows to keep th
ate I hear the hum T” Water? W°uld 1 8° d« to the basenter

fireplace poker? WhatwiU I dc^when^’am vul^ratMe?1’0^1

denouement: the ending of a
explained and made clear. °r^’ chniax and resolution, when everything’s

ASMA Monsters and the Moral Imagination 61

The comedy writer Max Brooks understands that dimension of mon­
ster stories very well. In books like The Zombie Survival Guide and World
War Z, Brooks gives us painstaking, haunting, and hilarious advice about
how best to meet our undead foes. For its April Fools’ edition, the other­
wise serious journal Archaeology interviewed Brooks, asking him (tongue
firmly in cheek): “Does the archaeological record hold any zombie-
related lessons for us today? What can our ancestors teach us about meet­
ing and, ultimately, defeating the undead menace?” Brooks replied: “The
greatest lesson our ancestors have to teach us is to remain both vigilant
and unafraid. We must endeavor to emulate the ancient Romans; calm,
efficient, treating zombies as just one more item on a rather mundane
checklist. Panic is the undead’s greatest ally, doing far more damage, in
some cases, than the creatures themselves. The goal is to be prepared, not
scared, to use our heads, and cut off theirs.”

Brooks is unparalleled in parodying a well-worn monster tradition,
but he wouldn’t be so funny if we weren’t already using monster stories
to imagine strategies for facing enemies. The monster is a virtual spar­
ring partner for our imagination. How will I avoid, assuage, or defeat
my enemy? Will I have grace under pressure? Will I help others who
are injured? Or will I be that guy who selfishly goes it alone and usually
meets an especially painful demise?

In a significant sense, monsters are a part of our attempt to envision the
good life or at least the secure life. Our ethical convictions do not spring
fully grown from our heads but must be developed in the context of real
and imagined challenges. In order to discover our values, we have to face
trials and tribulation, and monsters help us imaginatively rehearse. Imag­
ining how we will face an unstoppable, powerful, and inhuman threat is an
illuminating exercise in hypothetical reasoning and hypothetical feeling.

You can’t know for sure how you will face a headless zombie, an alien
face-hugger, an approaching sea monster, or a chainsaw-wielding psycho.
Fortunately, you’re unlikely to be put to the test. But you might face sim­
ilarly terrifying trials. You might be assaulted, be put on the front lines
of some war, or be robbed, raped, or otherwise harassed and assailed.
We may be lucky enough to have had no real acquaintance with such
horrors, but we have all nonetheless played them out in our mind’s eye.
And though we can’t know for sure how we’ll face an enemy soldier or
a rapist, it doesn’t stop us from imaginatively formulating responses. We
use the imagination in order to establish our own agency in chaotic and
uncontrollable situations.

People frequently underestimate the role of art and imagery in their
own moral convictions. Through art (e.g., Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hitch­
cock’s Psycho, King’s and Kubrick’s The Shining), artists convey moral

62 Why Do We Create Monsters?

visions. Audiences can reflect on them, reject or embrace them, take inspi­
ration from them, and otherwise be enriched beyond the entertainment
aspect. Good monster stories can transmit moral truths to us by showing
us examples of dignity and depravity without preaching or proselytizing.

But imagining monsters is not just
Good monster stories can

transmit moral truths to us
by showing us examples of
dignity and depravity without
preaching or proselytizing.”

the stuff of fiction. Picture yourself
in the following scenario. On the eve­
ning of August 7, 1994, Bruce Shapiro
entered a coffee bar in New Haven,
Conn. Shapiro and his friends had
entered the cafe and were relaxing at
a table near the front door. Approxi­

mately 15 other people were scattered around the bar, enjoying the eve­
ning. One of Shapiro’s friends went up to the bar to get drinks. “Suddenly
there was chaos,” Shapiro explained in the Nation the next year, “as if a
mortar shell had landed.” He looked up to see a flash of metal and peo­
ple leaping away from a thin, bearded man with a ponytail. Chairs and
tables were knocked over, and Shapiro protected one of his friends by
pulling her to the ground.

In a matter of minutes, the thin man, Daniel Silva, had managed to
stab and seriously injure seven people in the coffee shop. Using a six-
inch hunting knife, Silva jumped around the room and attacked with
lghtning speed. Two of Shapiro’s friends were stabbed. After helping

some others, Shapiro finally escaped the cafe. “I had gone no more than
a few steps,” he recalled, “when I felt a hard punch in my back followed
ins ant y y the unforgettable sensation of skin and muscle tissue part­
ing. Silva had stabbed me about six inches above my waist, just beneath
my rib cage.” ‘ ‘

Standm™ the Pavement cried out, “Why are you doing this?’
hsietToTd /v P’unged the knife ‘”to Staphrt chest. i*neath
ftat Sdva off n u kiUed ™y m°ther” the incoherent response
rnd rode off h T’™’ ̂ the” pU”ed thc ^ife out of Shapiro
ts SihaTlT ,’ k’ WaS S°°n apprehended and jailed,

snapped and seem .A ” u 0t exact’y- He was a mentally ill man who

somPePobscure neTdlo a^ngeh^ (SheT ̂ f ^ ̂ Z
at the time, being treated fn h k ‘ Ct’ in 3 nearby h°SP
experience, this horrifying even^ta^ BU’ fF°m perspeC”Ve °’
monster attack. Shapiro and hi many qualities with the imagined
presented with a deadly i r r a t i o n a l tunate company were suddenh
for mere survival And vet th Powerful force that sent them reeling

to reach out and help each nthe?’WMTZT*’**1 ™ impressiveat>ilit!
• While the victims were l e a p i n g awa

ASMA Monsters and the Moral Imagination 63

from Silva’s angry knife blade, I suspect that he was for them, practically
speaking, a true monster. I would never presume to correct them on that
account. In such circumstances, many of us are sympathetic to the use of
the monster epithet.

One of the fascinating aspects of Shapiro’s experience is how people
responded to his story after the fact. I have been suggesting that mon­
ster stones are encapsulations of the human feeling of vulnerability—the
monster stories offer us the “disease” of vulnerability and its possible
“cures” (in the form of heroes and coping strategies). Few monster stories
remain indefinitely in the “threat phase.” When fear is at a fever pitch,
they always move on to the hero phase. Hercules slays the Hydra, George
slays the dragon, medicine slays the alien virus, the stake and crucifix
slay the vampire. Life and art mutually seek to conquer vulnerability.
“Being a victim is a hard idea to accept,” Shapiro explained, “even while
lying in a hospital bed with tubes in veins, chest, penis, and abdomen.
The spirit rebels against the idea of oneself as fundamentally powerless.”

This natural rebellion may have prompted the most repeated question
facing Shapiro when he got out of the hospital. When people learned of
Daniel Silva’s attack on seven victims, they asked, “Why didn’t anyone
try to stop him?” Shapiro always tried to explain how fast and confus­
ing the attack was, but people failed to accept this. Shapiro, who was
offended by the question, says, “The question carries not empathy but
an implicit burden of blame; it really asks ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’ It
is asked because no one likes to imagine oneself a victim.” We like to see
ourselves as victors against every threat, but of course that’s not reality.

• • •

Believers in human progress, from the Enlightenment to the present,
think that monsters are disappearing. Rationality will pour its light into
the dark corners and reveal the monsters to be merely chimeric.0 A famil­
iar upshot of the liberal interpretation of monsters is to suggest that
when we properly embrace difference, the monsters will vanish. Accord­
ing to this view, the monster concept is no longer useful in the modern
world. If it hangs on, it does so like an appendix—useful once but haz­
ardous now.

I disagree. The monster concept is still extremely useful, and it’s a per- 20
manent player in the moral imagination because human vulnerability is
permanent. The monster is a beneficial foe, helping us to virtually repre­
sent the obstacles that real life will surely send our way. As long as there

chimeric: mythical, illusory, or imaginary.

64 Why Do We Create Monsters?

are real enemies in the world, there will be useful dramatic versions of
them in our heads.

In 2006, four armed men in Kandahar, Afghanistan, broke into the
home of an Afghan headmaster and teacher named Malim Abdul Habib.
The four men held Habib as they gathered his wife and children together,
forcing them to watch as they stabbed Habib eight times and then decap­
itated him. Habib was the headmaster at Shaikh Mathi Baba high school,
where he educated girls along with boys. The Taliban militants of the
region, who are suspected in the beheading, see the education of girls
as a violation of Islam (a view that is obviously not shared by the vast
majority of Muslims). My point is c mply this: If you can gather a man’s
family together at gunpoint and force them to watch as you cut off his
head, then you are a monster. You don’t just seem like one; you are one.

A relativist might counter by pointing out that American soldiers at
Abu Ghraib tortured some innocent people, too. That, I agree, is true and
astoundingly shameful, but it doesn’t prove there are no real monsters.
It only widens the category and recognizes monsters on both sides of an
issue. Two sides calling each other monsters doesn’t prove that monsters
don’t exist. In the case of the American torturer at Abu Ghraib and the
Taliban beheader in Afghanistan, both epithets sound entirelv accurate.

My own view is that the concept of monster cannot be erased from our
language and thinking. It cannot be replaced by other more polite terms
and concepts, because it still refers to something that has no satisfac­
tory semantic0 substitute or refinement. The term’s imprecision, within
parameters, is part of its usefulness. Terms like “monster” and “evil” have
a lot of metaphysical residue on them, left over from the Western tradi­
tions. But even if we neuter the term from obscure theological questions
about Cain, or metaphysical questions about demons, the language still
successfully expresses a radical frustration over the inhumanitv of some
enemy. The meaning of “monster” is found in its context, in its use.

So this Halloween season, let us, by all means, enjoy our fright fest,
but let s not forget to take monsters seriously, too. I’ll be checking under
my bed, as usual. But remember, things don’t strike fear in our hearts
limb* hth tSf6,already seriously committed to something (e.g., life,
are great1 hdeol°§ies’ whatever). Ironically then, inhuman threats
our zomb ” ^ ̂ humanity- And for tha* we can all thank

semantic: relating to the study of meanings.

ASMA Monsters and the Moral Imagination 65

Understanding the Text
1. What are the different interpretations of monster stories that Asma cites,

including those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the medieval era, and
Sigmund Freud?

2. Asma connects monsters with the “moral imagination.” What does he mean
by this term? Cite specific examples from the article.

3. What is the point Asma makes with the story of Bruce Shapiro? How does it
connect to the idea of monsters? How does it relate to Shapiro’s statement
that “no one likes to imagine oneself a victim” (par. 18)7

4. What is the effect of juxtaposing monster stories with real-life incidents of
crime and war? What benefit does that give Asma toward advancing his own
argument? What is that final argument?

Reflection and Response
5. Asma speaks of learning from scientific “brain imaging” about people

presented with “hypothetical ethical dilemmas” (par. 6). Do you find him
convincing when he goes from real-life situations to situations regarding
monsters? Why or why not?

6. According to Asma, “The monster concept is still extremely useful, and it’s
a permanent player in the moral imagination because human vulnerability is
permanent” (par. 20). Apply this statement to a monster of your choice and
argue how that particular monster concept can be useful.

Making Connections
7. Is Asma’s thesis in “Monsters and the Moral Imagination” compatible with

other explanations of monsters in this book? Consider, for example, the
explanations given by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan for the popularity
of vampires (p. 35), Chuck Klosterman’s discussion about zombies (p. 39), or
Sophia Kingshill’s discussion of mermaids (p. 139). Do these ideas dovetail
with Asma’s, or do they contradict his assertions?

8. Asma makes the connection between imaginary monsters and serial killers
or other real-life monsters. Investigate the impact of serial killers in Chapter 5
of this book or in other sources. Do real-life monsters have the same impact
on the moral imagination as fictional creatures, or are there substantial
differences? Defend your answer.