Um... I've always liked werewolves best, and was thinking that even before I got to the part of the post where you mention werewolves, but wtf is this nonsense about the reader/viewer and our own unleashed power and agression? What werewolf stories did you grow up on? I've never in my life been afraid that I was a werewolf, I've been afraid that other people are werewolves. People who might smile and look friendly by day.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
And to the extent it *is* about you and me, it's about our horrible inner demons, not about "unleashed power and agression". Werewolves are scary monsters. You're thinking of the incredible hulk.
"I was a teenage werewolf"? From the Lais of Marie de France, Bisclarveret, where the werewolf is the hero? TeenWolf: who is more Everyman than Michael J. Fox?
Teen wolf is a bastardization of the genre that obviously deserves no acknowledgement. He didn't even kill people, he played basketball and stuff.
He killed that Miller Lite but good.
pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
— electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born — pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if — listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
Heck, look at Oz from Buffy: an unambiguously good character, whose problem is controlling his unleashed monsterhood. And even though it looks like a close call sometimes, he does.
I accept whatever consternations I've earned by quoting cummings, but whatever, y'all, the first line of that poem is so sweet.
Buffy is a similarly unserious source for authentic werewolf mythology.
Cool thread crossover: Minneapolitan found this work via the LibraryThing Unsuggester.
Although I've never seen the show, and don't know who Oz is.
Werewolves are all right--I'm thinking of Sirius Black and whoever the other werewolf in Harry Potter were now--but no monster is cooler than vampires, no matter how much Anne Rice does to mess them up.
Heh. I don't think there is a serious source. You know where the silver bullet as a werewolf specific remedy goes back to? According to a Medieval Lit professor of mine, a 1940's movie.
Also -- I can't really figure out why I never got into the undead in a big way -- lots of people I was and am friends with read Anne Rice and watch Buffy and were goths. I thought they were kind of interesting when I was playing D & D (another good predictor for being into the undead) but that was a pretty brief phase of my childhood. Don't find horror films all that moving either.
Buffy is a similarly unserious source for authentic werewolf mythology.
Pathetic objection.
15- I beg to differ.
I'm actually becoming unusually upset about this, and I'm not totally sure why.
15 -- I thought that was a "Lone Ranger" thing.
Thanks for the Warren Zevon earworm.
Could the downtick in vampirosity be a delayed response to sexual habits changing? The association between vampires and deviant sexual practices goes back at least as far as Stoker, and certainly Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite are reasonably transparent with the vampires = gay equation; vampires as AIDS metaphor were a thing in the '90s, but maybe we're all over that and are living in a more medicated, less fluids-swapping, brain-eating world now.
(Maybe a resurgance in the Lovecraftian Eldritch Horror school of monster, which I think actually is well-suited for the post-modern condition. It doesn't make sense; it doesn't have motivations; it doesn't even really care about you; it just makes your prose purple and you dead.)
(And werewolves were being used as icons of femininity gone amok and/or feminism for a few minutes there. See Ginger Snaps or that Pat Murphy novel.)
Dog soldiers isn't a great movie, but at least it's historically accurate. And none of the werewolves are playing basketball.
Oh, silver bullets for coolness, and even as a general anti-supernatural thing are older (there's an Angela Thirkell novel from the 40s that has a comic rustic talking about shooting a shape-changing witch with a silver bullet -- presumably Thirkell was reporting plausible folk myth rather than just making it up). But if you take the werewolf thing back to its roots, there's no special silver association until 20th C movies.
I'm actually becoming unusually upset about this, and I'm not totally sure why.
Full moon?
21: I think that the vampire problem is that Anne Rice thought that subtext needed to be made into (bad) text, and it's tainted the source material. In a few years we'll all forget about her and be able to move on.
5: Ogged, been hanging out with Rush? It's unkind to speak ill of the sick.
"I took my harp to a harpy;
Together we harped and sang.
No one can harp like a harpy;
Not with a whimp but a bang!"
(I can't remember who wrote that.)
Then there's also El Chupacabra. According to Wikipedia:
"there has been a surge of chupacabra sightings in the United States, specifically in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and outside of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. However, controversy exists whether these chupacabra sightings are legitimate."
Werewolves of London, meet the Beltway chupacabras.
So what's the next monster?
The succubus.
If you're going to bastardize some monster for your pop social theories, may I suggest "The Blob" instead?
(And werewolves were being used as icons of femininity gone amok and/or feminism for a few minutes there. See Ginger Snaps or that Pat Murphy novel)
Probably the moon thing. But of course, the 'were' in 'werewolf' is a gendered masculine root; it goes back to OE 'wer' for 'male human' rather than 'human generally'. Consistently, women should be wifwolves.
23 - Except isn't there a silver bullet in Emperor Jones? The werewolf-specific use may be a modern invention, but surely it dates back past O'Neil.
24 - Good, good. I await a return to heteronormative penetration.
what's the next monster?
China Mieville makes a surprisingly convincing case for moths.
may I suggest "The Blob" instead?
With Hastert stepping down from his leadership position, I think that window may have closed.
23- I knew that joke was coming, but I do find it awfully strange that this issue would get me noticably more animated and upset, than, say, anything else discussed on this blog in the last two years. I'm probing my mind to try and come up with some explanation for that, but having no luck. Weird.
If I was going to be humorless about it, which I usually am, I'd guess that it's a big deal to you for the same reason the post is interesting to me: monsters mean important things in people's heads. The werewolf comment was off the cuff, but I think I'm right about vampires/zombies -- that they symbolize something big about people's lives and fears.
Werewolves are your favorite monster, so they mean something serious to you -- I'm arguing with you because I think your interpretation of them is nonstandard, but I'm messing with an element of your personal symbolic structure by doing so, and that's threatening.
Well, re silver bullets and werewolves, 'Kipedia says a silver bullet was reportedly used on the Beast of Gévaudan. It also says the silver bullet never appeared in folk legends. So I surmise it was a flight of fancy which was picked up on in the 20C.
Silver is the most beautiful of the precious metals.
(Or rather, objects worked from silver are more beautiful, all other things being equal, than objects worked from other precious metals.)
33- What is nonstandard about my interpretation of werewolves? You honestly think they're supposed to play high school basketball?
I agree that part of the werewolf thing is that you might not know that you're the monster, what evil lurks in the hearts of men, blah blah see comment 3. I'm just arguing against all this self-empowerment garbage having any proper place in the werewolf legend.
I could make a joke about "humorless feminist" being a good monster metaphor for the next several years, but I won't.
If I remember correctly, the novel Short Timers, on which the movie Full Metal Jacket is based, is chock full of half-human/half-beast type metaphors (werewolves, centaurs, etc.). And with the way we're churning out combat vets now, I could see that contributing to the werewolf trend.
I'm just arguing against all this self-empowerment garbage having any proper place in the werewolf legend.
What, is the werewolf legend supposed to remain inviolate, and no one can adapt it? What's wrong with a modern werewolf doing modern day things?
you might not know that you're the monster, what evil lurks in the hearts of men, blah blah see comment 3.
Oh, I'm spinning it positively, but I think that a big part of it is that the monster is, or can be, me, the reader. (Which you, I think, agree with). And that having an internal monster doesn't make me bad, necessarily -- I have a shot at being able to control it. Read the Bisclaveret summary: while the hero is a monster, he's still the hero, and the villians are his wife and her lover who try to get rid of him.
"Even a man who's pure of heart,
And says his prayers by night,
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms,
And the moon is full and bright."
39 - For instance, looking for a place called Lee Ho Fuk's, going to get a big bowl of beef chow mein?
40. Whatever. I don't think we disagree, I just think you're spinning it too positively. Or, more precisely, I think the monster loses its most captivating elements when so spun. One ought not wish to become a werewolf in the moonlight; one ought to fear it. The werewolf is the monster behind Abu Ghraib.
I like LB's vertiginous take on werewolfery, and think that part of what makes Abu Ghraib horrifying (and I find it more horrifying than tales of the undead), is the fact that in a slightly different reality, I could be there mock-executing detainees myself.
Given the disaster we've created in the Middle East, Frankenstein's monster might be most representative. Also.
42: Comity and wolfbane for all!
Zombies are the new vampires, according to RMM.
44 -- Richard Perle as Dr. Frankenstein?
46: Wow. 6-months-pwned by 'Pants.
I could make a joke about "humorless feminist" being a good monster metaphor for the next several years, but I won't.
Maybe the next monster is the 50-foot woman, again.
I like LB's vertiginous take on werewolfery, and think that part of what makes Abu Ghraib horrifying (and I find it more horrifying than tales of the undead), is the fact that in a slightly different reality, I could be there mock-executing detainees myself.
Right, that the difference between Graner and any of us isn't that he's a monster and we aren't, but that his monster got out (whether through his culpability, or, for someone in a different situation, through the overwhelming force of circumstances) and ours are still under control.
Maybe the next big monster is Elric of Melnibone?
Robust McManlypants is the new Farber!
Actually, I'm kind of liking the humorless feminist monster idea. Rowr.
You could make it a werewolf: Most of the month, she's mildmannered Betty-Lou, a go-along-to-get-along type. But when the full moon rises, she becomes that most terrifying of all therianthropes, the Feminist Castrating Bitch! ("Woof.")
52 -- Foghorn Leghorn would make a good monster.
LB '40: but that's not unique to werewolves. Ordinary people can become werewolves, vampires or zombies (all through being bitten by one). The point is that, if you're a werewolf, you can change back: you can wake up on the floor surrounded by chicken feathers and scattered entrails thinking "What the hell was I doing last night?" So it's not so much "you could become one" as "you could be one RIGHT NOW and you wouldn't know".
No one's suggested any non-assimilative monsters - are there any really classic ones? (Even the Blob is assimilative. So is the Alien. Maybe that's the real horror - that if you don't watch out, you become one of them, your motivations get replaced by theirs.)
55 -- I'm pretty sure that (or something very similar) was done in a Mad Magazine parody in the 70's.
Of course, it might be frightening baked goods.
non-assimilative monsters: you mean like Godzilla?
Actually I want the new monster to be Daleks.
I agree that the ones who just show up and wreck things are not as scary as, for instance, pods.
The Frankenstein monster, going back to the Golem, is non-assimilative, and may become salient again if anyone ever makes real progress with AI.
you mean like Godzilla?
Have I ever explained my Godzilla theory here? It's a good one.
LB, I agree with you completely about the meaning of the werewolf — that loss of control is why I've always found them to be the most genuinely terrifying movie monster (although I agree with Brock that Buffy and Teen Wolf can't seriously be considered as part of the WW canon).
But the werewolf isn't going to become the next movie monster. It's been tried, and recently, too: see the Underworld movies. They were somewhat vampire-centric, but had plenty of wolfiness as well. But WWs can't become a dominant trend because they can't speak when they're in their monster forms. That's why vampires remain so popular, despite being well-traveled territory: you can give them dialogue, and they're easy to relate to.
I think you're also making a mistake in calling zombies the successors to vampires in pop culture. Yes, they can possess cultural resonance — but that happened back when Romero was making his movies. Now they're the internet non-sequitur of the moment, the successors to ninjas and pirates in the pantheon of zaniness. They don't mean anything (although the relatively recent switch to a viral cause for zombiehood does, of course).
Also, re: silver bullet — wasn't this cribbed from Bram Stoker? Haven't read the original, but The Historian attributes the silver bullet mythology to Stoker.
If we're voting on the new monster, my vote goes to Sasquatch.
On a vacation in Japan, I was vastly entertained by changing from an averagely tall skinny person to a hulking beast -- shopkeepers were placing themselves between me and fragile stuff in what looked like an unconscious attempt to protect their merchandise in case the monster should lurch. And that left me thinking about Godzilla.
Godzilla is a: (1) nuclear-associated, radioactive (2) giant, clumsily destructive beast that (3) destroys Tokyo but (4) is oddly goodhearted in later movies, defending Tokyo from other monsters, (5) in the post WWII period, and (6) is kind of khaki-green in color. Put it all together, and he's the occupying American GI. I can't find any holes in the theory.
69: No way man, Sasquatch is on our side. If we're gonna pick a new monster I'd say it's got to be based on fear of our fellow citizens committing acts of terrorism — something along the Cylon/Body Snatcher axis.
Though I'm loathe to give up on the succubus, I think I'm going to cast my vote for the old-school ghoul. It's the Muslim association that puts it over the top.
57 - Well, the Lovecraft, but I think the non-assimilitive nature of the Lovecraft stuff is one of the reasons it's always been at a low cultural boil but never become a huge phenomenon. When the brain-melting horror is a metaphoric extension of your fear of modernity and non-WASPs, it's hard to really make an impact in the twenty-first century.
68 - "The branch of wild rose on his coffin keep him that he move not from it, a sacred bullet fired into the coffin kill him so that he be true dead, and as for the stake through him, we know already of its peace, or the cut off head that giveth rest." I don't recall any references to silver bullets in Dracula itself, but there was a fair amount of Victorian vampire fiction floating around.
Sasquatch does have the virtue of being highly anti-scientific....
72: I can see that -- the ghoul has appeared in "Hellsing" and the works of China Miéville recently. It's only a matter of time before the collective unconscious develops a coherent picture of what the "ghoul" is. (answer: a vampire, except stupid. Possibly the result of the brilliantly evil business geniuses of the 80s being replaced by businessmen who get successful by bribing random government officials to no longer regulate their industries, allowing them to rampage around slowly and destructively)
74 -- does this serve to distinguish Sasquatch from the w3r3wolf?
Sasquatch is on our side
Yeah, didn't you people watch the Six Million Dollar Man?
I feel it does. The werewolf is purely a creature of legend. There are *photos* and footprint castings of the goddamn sasquatch, plus idiots who actually look for the goddamn things.
73: I won't argue that it's mainstream, but for a mainstream-compatible take on Lovecraftian themes, check out the Hellboy comics' main storyline. It ties those eternal, unspeakable horrors to evil, tiny men who've been forgotten by history and as a result are determined to end it entirely. I'm not particularly well-versed in Lovecraft, but Mignola's take adds a millennial urgency that I could see translating into a relevant pop-culture phenomenon. Maybe.
I nominate the Monster Cock.
(Possbily a werecock.)
77: How did Steve run with his pants that tight? Ouch.
adding on to 80: I realize, of course, that Lovecraft's monsters have human agents in the stories. But HB adds mad-scientist technology and Nazis. It's a winning formulation.
I agree with the Daleks -- between them and the Cybermen, the creepiest monster is the human being augmented by technology to an extent that his/her humanity has gone. Take out those damn Bluetooth earpods, people.
of course, in a cage match, the Monster Cock would totally subdue the Humorless Feminist Monster*.
*who would not find this comment at all funny.
And vampires make a wonderful stand-in for [Wall Street types]; glamorous, and powerful, and clever.
Not to mention having no souls.
Werewolves are fun, but they're a personal and individual horror. I think that a couple of other horror devices are more likely to surface (or resurface, actually). First, something like Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost", an evil force that arises in an urban or office setting and is partly scary because it seems so powerful and yet impersonal. James Hynes's Kings of Infinite Space might be a good example. Second, mind-control beasties, the kind that can turn you into, I don't know, a fanatic intent on destroying the fabric of society?
I think the creepiest monster is the monster who is clearly as intelligent as humans, and can communicate with its fellows, but we have no idea how it's communicating. Also of course it kills and maims and destroys. This is why I find the works of China Miéville so readable; there's a respect for all these races of intelligent life, some of whom happen to be monsters.
you might not know that you're the monster, what evil lurks in the hearts of men
Werewolves are on the side of good, people. They fight witches at night.
I agree with the Daleks
Does this mean "62 gets it exactly right" or "63 gets it exactly right"?
62 gets it exactly right, if you add Cybermen, who frankly are so creepy they actually make my gorge rise.
also, 70 is a great comment. Hopefully Ezra Klein will make it the third update to his post linking to this thread.
Can anyone explain Daleks to me? I've only ever caught a couple episodes of Dr. Who, and they've left me completely at a loss. Daleks are some sort of race of evil trashcans, right?
No, no, no. Daleks are horrifying because they used to be human, or humanish. Here, let me do LB's 70 with Daleks:
Daleks (1) decided they were superior to other races and other species so they (2) launched on a program of eugenic improvement of themselves and (3) extermination of inferior life-forms which they (4) effected principally by riding around in tanks and blowing things up.
They're Nazis, of course.
A friend who was too into vampires argued to me once that vampires, as evil undead, take on whatever the greatest fear of the society is at the time. In earlier vampire stories, there's no subtext of sex, but of plague and death. Once the Victorians get in charge, the worst thing that could happen is to show a bit of ankle, and vampires are reinvented as sexualized death.
I agree with LB's take on a werewolves. What makes a werewolf scary is not just that it's a violent monster, but that it's a violent monster with human cunning. Wolves themselves have sharp teeth but run away from people. People are vicious little bastard but with weak teeth.
But I don't think they'll be the next big monster as becostumed werewolves always look laughable.
Isn't our monster just Dick Cheney? Seriously.
So the R2D2s are actually the tank-like protection for intelligent humanoid monsters?
10 -- I haven't read the whole thread, but it's worth noting that there is a song titled "loup-garou" by this busy monster
Yeah -- IIRC they have a glass section at the top of the trashcan through which you can see a shrivelled humanoid form.
I think this guy, who scared me a lot as a kid, would fit in with the Dalek theme. He's not really part of a race, though. He's more given to robotic/brainwashed henchmen.
It makes me sad that Weiner will comment on a post linking to Unfogged, but not the real thing. We're going to have to kidnap and deprogram him, aren't we?
Isn't our monster just Dick Cheney? Seriously.
The thing about Cheney is, there's no chance you'll suddenly realize that you are Dick Cheney. Unlike werewolves, vampires, zombies, or Cybermen -- it's not catching. Cheney is more like Frankenstein's monster in this respect.
there's no chance you'll suddenly realize that you are Dick Cheney
Sure, but there's a good chance that lots of you fellow citizens will.
And we noticed that really, all the cool people these days are talking about zombies, whereas from the late 80s through the late 90's, the hip monster was vampires, from Anne Rice through Buffy.
Interestingly enough, they're filming a third version of Richard Mathison's I Am Legend, about...zombie vampires (or maybe vampire zombies...I forget). Alas, it stars Will Smith and the screenplay is by Akiva Goldsman, so it'll probably be pretty crappy.
Sure, but there's a good chance that lots of you fellow citizens will.
Yeah, but what's really awful about monsters, per se, is that they're you, in some guise. You're talking about an entirely external enemy, which is different, I think.
I've never heard of the distinction between "monsters" and "enemies" described in 107 before.
102: Huh. I never would've thought of Krang as funny. In the cartoons he was played as a buffoon. Anyway, I went as him for Halloween.
103: de s/b re
I'm pretty sure this is a standard lit-crit explanation of what a monster is. I use the word "standard" because I have exactly no authority for saying so, and may have made it up.
what's really awful about monsters, per se, is that they're you, in some guise
And I thought confession was on Fridays. I confess that I've never thought that.
I note that in my online dictionary (terrific scholarship, this), there are several definitions of monster, and those that do not mean giant mean deformed or mutant, so again, the monster is you, transformed.
91 -- Cybermen are however the cutest of the Dr. Who enemies.
Yeah, but what's really awful about monsters, per se, is that they're you, in some guise. You're talking about an entirely external enemy, which is different, I think.
I don't understand this. How are Dick Cheneys more external than werewolves?
Since all mosters are, as we know, really monstra, signs, warnings, it is wise of LB to consider what monsters are popular in the way she does here.
Here's a reputable online dictionary.
If you got bitten by a werewolf, you would change into a werewolf -- if you got bitten by Dick Cheney I think you would just die.
Dick Cheney isn't a very scary monster. He can even kill you by shooting you in the face.
so again, the monster is you, transformed.
I don't think that's the standard understanding.
Yes, but with respect, Tim, you're wrong. Follow Ben's link.
119: Maybe not. That's part of Cheney's essential scariness. He could choose to kill you by shooting you in the face, but then he stops just short, leaving you disfigured and forever afraid that he'll come back and fuck up the other side too.
the monster is you
I am now hearing this in Johnny Rotten's voice.
You're arguing that the possibility of becoming something makes it less external? That's too meta for me.
You're arguing that the possibility of becoming something makes it less external
Sure. You have within you the potential for x. You may be robbed of that which makes you, you, and turned to other, evil purposes. You may have your brain et and turn to eating brains. The result will be you and yet not you; that's the horror of it. After all, as people like to note, the zombies, though technically monsters, are not unreasonable.
I don't see how Ben's link shows Tim to be wrong. When confronted with monsters, I'm much more concerned with how similar or dissimilar the monster is from me, not about how distant I am from becoming the monster. Perhaps Tim and Brock have similar views.
For example, I would be surprised if a majority of people didn't agree that the threat of death by rabies is more horrible than the threat of death by having a piano fall on your head. Why? Because crushing-by-piano ends the you-that-is-you; infection-by-rabies transforms you into a monstrous, aggressive, disease vector; apparently and to some extent really you, yet not.
Perhaps the difficulty in accepting slol's thesis is resolved by changing "you" to "us."
slol, that seems a perfectly reasonable reaction to monsters, but it's just never been part of my experience of them.
Or by changing "us" to "them".
As long as we're on about monsters, I don't know where this picture came from, but it sure is cracking me up.
What? From w-lfs-n's link: "Originally: a mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more animal forms, and is frequently of great size and ferocious appearance. Later, more generally: any imaginary creature that is large, ugly, and frightening." Show your work, slol.
it's just never been part of my experience of them.
Hey, fair enough. I was just trying to bolster the argument about why monsters are significant in the public discourse and what specific psychological horrors they give representation to. YM, as they say, MV.
Tim, it's the part human and part not thing that makes it monstrous. I contend that falling pianos, while deadly, are not monstrous because they simply kill you, and the result is the end of you, period. Rabies is monstrous because it transforms you into an agent of itself, making you part you and part it, you and not-you. (See above in 127.)
119 - It's too late. You can't take that shit back. You will always be the guy who thinks that Dick Cheney can kill you by shooting you in the face.
The Daleks originally had no backstory, and little kids in England found them terrifying from Day One. I think a big part of their appeal is to children: you can bump around your house shouting "Exterminate!" over and over. I don't think there's any way that adults would ever find them scary, or a symbol of adult fears.
I really don't get the vampire thing, and I even kinda liked Anne Rice's first few vampire novels. After the sixties, how can repressed sexuality be a major source of anxiety? I could see if the appeal of vampires was restricted to the Bible Belt, but I knew many well-sexed urbanites who were into vampires.
131: I've seen that, also can't remember where, but it's just great.
The Daleks originally had no backstory
This is apparently not true, and anyway, shouldn't matter; they can represent, the same way Godzilla can represent, implicit fears.
Yay for link-love in the comments! However, I am not nearly smart enough to be the new Farber.
My personal opinion is that the next wave of horror stories will be cross-overs. Earlier this year I wrote a fun-to-write but not necessarily good-to-read story about a vampire caught with the rest of his homeowner's association in a zombie attack. That's the sort of thing that I think will be the next wave: self-consciously ironic, mix-and-match approaches to letting the viewer pick their own good guys and bad guys. The world is so scary at the moment and those fears are so in flux that I suspect it's impossible to nail down one overriding fear. Even terror fails to take the cake for a majority; if it did, the Republican talking point that the Democrats are incapable of handling national security would have carried the election for them.
I think the next wave will be stories about a supernatural element that threatens and a supernatural element that protects and the stuck-in-the-middle Everyperson who's unsure whether the medicine is worse than the disease.
Do we let the moon transform us so we can drive off the vampire's minions, even if we might go ballistic and kill our friends, too? Do we let the President have the power to arbitrarily classify people as terrorists, even if it effectively strips everyone of habeas rights? The best horror fiction of the next few years will ask those questions.
Rabies is monstrous because it transforms you into an agent of itself, making you part you and part it, you and not-you.
I thought rabies was monstrous because it was painful and took a while to kill you. Given a choice between dying by rabies or dying by having nails pounded into you in quarter inch intervals, starting at the extremities, which would you choose?
Dinosaurs. Preferably comic dinosaurs.
Rawr.
falling pianos, while deadly, are not monstrous
Indeed -- if anything they are comic.
136 -- I think you're getting me mixed up with joeo.
Earlier this year I wrote a fun-to-write but not necessarily good-to-read story about a vampire caught with the rest of his homeowner's association in a zombie attack.
Actually, really quite entertaining. (I'm a hopeless snoop. Anyone who's commented more than once or twice, if you have a linked blog I've read it, and odds are I've poked around the archives.)
As an alternative explanation, I'd submit that monsters need to be different from you to be really scary, but also the same as you insofar as we need them to be evil, and evil requires some sort of psychology, and the only one we tend to imagine is human. The scariness of the "youness" would be incidental, on this reading, anyway.
Tim, the question I asked is not which death is more painful, but which death is "more horrible." I take horror to be a psychological, not a physical, phenomenon.
Little monsters are scarier than big monsters.
147: How many comments will it take for you to define "horrible" as the "the feeling of self-revulsion one feels on being afflicted with rabies"? If two people were to come upon a third who had died by nail gun, and the first said, "How horrible," I assume the second would (a) find the statement appropriate, (b) find the statement comprehensible, and (c) not believe the first person was speaking about the horror of being the sort who would use a nail gun to murder someone.
That said, you've convinced me that there is something important about the "part human." I think it's that the monster therefore sits astride a category line: you can't kill him on sight, because he's human, but you know he'll do something terrible, because he's not human. See, also, Muslims.
125 - Ramping up the level of dorkiness about eight degrees, that's what defines all the good Batman villains (and I think is a significant reason most other Rogues Galleries suck).
136 - In the English tradition, the key is that vampires are deviant sex (note that this doesn't seem to be true for Nosferatu, although I'm not really familiar with the German literary tradition). Ruthven is the scandalous Byron; Carmilla is oddly fascinating to the Victorian women she preys upon; Stoker's Dracula was a foreigner (and typed as Catholic in the book) who came and sexually unleashed straight-laced Victorian Protestant women of reasonably good character. Rice's vampires pretty transparently owe something to the emerging post-Stonewall gay culture of the '70s. As the notion of deviancy evolves, how the vampires play out will evolve as well.
The yürei of Japanese horror (think The Ring) may or may not catch on in the U.S.; I'm wondering if they're too culturally specific.
147 - Would saying "uncanny" instead of "horrible" be helpful here?
Apologies to JM, but the monsters I worry about are Mormons. We're seeing them on their good behavior, before they've been able to consolidate power. Already the control the Knights of Malta, Las Vegas, and the water supply.
JM will be faced with a terrible choice: to turn on her old friends and become the seventeenth wife of a bishop, or else be dealt with as an apostate in the infamous Subbasement of the Temple.
Leaving entirely to one side Emerson's speculations, I'm just coming in here to take slolernr's side on the monstrous. Maybe you all disagree, but it's the near-recognizability of the monstrous that has commonly been interpreted as being the most psychologically troubling.
Saw III is horrible, but to create a lingering, disturbing monster, you've got to work the uncanny.
140 - We're all the new Farber. It's like Spartacus.
How many comments will it take for you to define "horrible" as the "the feeling of self-revulsion one feels on being afflicted with rabies"?
You're tempting me to say something rude, Tim. Rabies was a real-world analog to the threat posed by zombification, vampire- or werewolf-bite, upgrade by Cybermen, whatever. I'm 90 percent sure you knew that and were just baiting me.
150: Let the dorkiness be ramped! I'd argue that Batman's villains are that much more effective not just because they are how anyone can go wrong - which is true - but because they are also how Bruce Wayne could go wrong. Madness, obsession, wealth, vigilantism, psychological schisms, too clever by half, overwhelming strength, all things that describe Batman = The Mad Hatter, The Joker, The Penguin, Catwoman, Two Face, The Riddler, Bane. Batman must balance all the good and bad within himself; his villains are examples of what happens when any one of his own influences is taken too far. We, the viewer, get a double-whammy of the this could be you!
I agree with all the superdorks. Ask not why this would be; I recognize the monster within.
Rabies was a real-world analog to the threat posed by zombification, vampire- or werewolf-bite, upgrade by Cybermen, whatever. I'm 90 percent sure you knew that and were just baiting me.
I didn't know that. And, yet, I was still baiting you. And I still don't think of monsters as the thing we (or I) fear turning into. (And when did you become too proud to be rude?)
I'm with Tim. Mummies, the blob, the creature from the black lagoon — dictionaries' implications notwithstanding, these are pretty clearly monsters, but don't pose a transformative threat (although Buffy's take on TCFTBL added one, and made it much, much more frightening in the process). I don't think monsters are necessarily something we fear turning into, but the best/scariest ones all have that quality.
LB has either mentioned 70 on this blog before, or I've heard the same theory somewhere else. Honestly not sure which. Also not sure whether there's anything to the theory--seems a bit of a stretch--but interesting nonetheless.
I'm starting to wonder if perhaps my true life calling is to write the Great Werewolf Novel, since apparantly no one else has yet bothered.
My pet theory (not original) is that one of the terrors of zombies, mummies, vampires, and the undead generally is that they're resurrections gone horribly wrong. Poe did this very well, but Stoker's Dracula also plays on this theme: someone really wants the dead person to come back---just not quite like that.
160: I'm pretty sure I have, but the googleyahoohole didn't come up with it. Maybe it's wrong, but I like it a lot.
The thing about Cheney is, there's no chance you'll suddenly realize that you are Dick Cheney. Unlike werewolves, vampires, zombies, or Cybermen -- it's not catching. Cheney is more like Frankenstein's monster in this respect.
No, because nothing created him. He's more in the Lovecraftian vein, the great mad beast who longs to devour the world just for the sheer hateful violence of it all.
111: You don't have to think it for it to be true. "Monstrous" by definition means "like, but unlike." The completely other isn't monstrous; it's just other. A monster is something unnatural (which of course means natural, but we'd prefer to believe otherwise).
Not that whoever said that werewolves are scary b/c they have human intelligence is right. I'm pretty sure that the werewolf legend depends on the afflicted person's *losing* their humanity when they change. You don't have to identify with the monster for it to be scary; part of the pathos of the werewolf is that you might have to kill a human being in order to protect yourself from a monster.
OTOH, I think LB is right, that part of what's compelling about monster stories where the monster is (as monsters should be) part- or near-human is that they get at what Ogged is trying to deny in 111, that such monsters usually represent some aspect of human experience. I don't know if that's *necessary* for something to be scary--I'd say that the most frightening thing is simply the dark and a sense of being afraid of the unknown--but it seems to be at the center of most monster stories, anyway.
Oh, and for the record, 131 is hilarious.
Clive Barker, quoted in the introduction to the 1989 anthology The Book of the Dead (short stories in the same general setting as George Romero's zombie movies):
"Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, who you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you're trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies."
What he missed, of course, is that there's a conservative fear of liberal hive-mind that's very similar even if (to my mind) much less justified. I will comfortably go out on a ledge to say that we will keep seeing a fair number of zombie movies, books, games, and comics as long as the Bush-Cheney apparatus and its allies have anything like as much power as they do right now.
Count me also solidly on the side that endorses and favors reinterpreting the creatures of our imagination to suit modern needs. Some old vampire stories associate it with unconfessed sin; now we let ghosts handle that, and vampires cover other things. There is no primal truth to any of these creations, only the stories that speak to us or don't.
Barker again, this time the opening paragraph to his novel Weaveworld:
"Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales which preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making. Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys. Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may only have this in common; that among them is a filigree which will with time become a world."
And in this decade, there's more of a sense that shambling idiots control our lives: from Office Space, and The Office, all the way through the Bush Administration. We're smarter and better than they are, but they're going to eat our brains anyway.
This misses the point entirely. Zombies aren't the idiot elite who rule us; they're the unstoppable rage of the long-repressed masses rising up to devour the elites who've tried to hold them down for so long. From the classic Romero flicks up through Joe Dante's zombies-from-Iraq "Masters of Horror" episode, zombie movies have taken a generally leftist bent. Hell, in "Land of the Dead," you almost get the sense Romero wants you to root for his zombie revolutionaries.
I don't particularly care about monsters, but I find it odd that this thread has gone on for so long without a single mention of Grendel. Now there's a monster.
Grendel's a big mama's boy.
Also: what is Grendel, anyway? I came away with the impression that he looked like a really big, scary-looking muppet.
Hard to say. He's sort of human, but sort of not. Also his size seems to vary from scene to scene. I guess "monster" is the best way to describe him.
strasmangelo, the zombie is the failed, bad-faith revolution. It has risen up, but it can't rid itself of its corrupt past. (I'm thinking of all the great zombie imagery in the 18th Brumaire.)
172: The zombie revolution isn't a revolution we should welcome, JM, but it's certainly not carried out in bad faith. All zombies are equal in their zombieness; there is no Zombie Party Central Committee forming in the wings, abusing its brain redistribution powers and hording surplus flesh rations.
168 makes a good point. Plus in general dragons are a lot of fun as monsters and could make a good new hip monster -- though careful attention would need to be paid to differentiating them from ponies and unicorns.
But dragons are too awesome to be our new monsters. We'd have to let them win every time.
173: I don't know about that. I think you can have a zombie master/voodoo priest(ess)/superzombie directing the other zombies' good-faith efforts toward his or her own selfish ends.
"The zombie revolution isn't a revolution we should welcome, JM, but it's certainly not carried out in bad faith"
A zombie is haunting Europe - the zombie of Communism.
Not really sure what Grendel looked like. 'Beowulf' doesn't describe him in great detail. He has at least one arm, obviously (before Beowulf gets hold of him anyway) and feet (he leaves footprints). And he's monstrous.
177: The possibility may exist, sure, but there's little actual evidence in the text for your charismatic superzombie theory.
179: Well, I recently read Zombie Island (BoingBoing-recommended art: always a bad idea), and it had several charismatic superzombies. In fact, it outlined a sure-fire system for attaining superzombiehood. Not a primary source, but something to be considered, I think.
And the presumable source of zombie mythology — voodoo — does feature a zombiemaster. I'm sure that idea has filtered down through some subsequent zombie accounts, although I can't name them.
