Monsters and Halloween

Classic Universal Movie Monsters

As October winds down, and Halloween approaches, one can't help but wonder about the significance of the event and the monstrous costumes and themes that often accompany it; what is it about subversive holidays or celebrations that we find so appealing?

In the Western world at least, the month of October and Halloween often indicate a permission to explore and decorate with that which would normally be perceived as strange or even threatening. Houses are adorned with images of death, such as skulls, gravestones, corpses, and coffins, and also with monstrous elements like witches, ghosts, oversized spiders and bats. Pumpkins are carved with leering faces and placed, candle-lit on the porch, and candy- something which is generally perceived to be perhaps not ideal for a child's diet- is handed out in droves to some as young as one or two years old. And while some children (and adults) choose costumes that might be more fantasy than monstrously inclined, such as princesses, Greek gods, or superheroes, the most dark and frightening outfits are not only accepted but also expected, as are those which glorify notorious villains. Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, rotting mummies, Jack the Ripper and the Devil are all fair game on Halloween in a way they would not be at any other time of the year. 

            And in trying to explain this to my young daughters who find some Halloween decorations understandably disturbing, I found myself using the term "safe scary" as a way to designate the difference between harmless thrills and real, dangerous terrors. And this brings to mind Edmund Burke's "A Physical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" in which he discusses that very human need to feel awe and terror; as Simon Court says in his article, "Edmund Burke and the Sublime": "The sublime, then, is our strongest passion, and it is grounded in terror. Yet it is not exclusively an unpleasant emotion, for danger or pain can, in certain circumstances, give us delight" (1).

And it is this very delight that we seek on Halloween, perhaps to placate the terrible fears we might otherwise have about the very real and often inevitable threats in our lives such as disease (zombies, and in some cases, mummies); old age (rotting masks with white hair, wrinkled, warty witches); death (ghosts, the Grim Reaper, skeletons); violence (Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd, Freddie Kruger/Jason/Michael Myers, axe-murderers, etc.); technological advancements (mad scientist, Frankenstein's creature, IPhone costumes, and the like); Seduction and temptation (Dracula, vampires, the Devil, sexually-provocative outfits) and the Unknown, which is represented through obscure, frightening monster masks, haunted houses, and the event itself which takes place generally after dark. We need to play with these frightening ideas and themes, because otherwise they would overwhelm us, and we also need to accept them as potential realities in our lives. 

This is particularly why I consider Halloween to be such an important holiday, and why I insist my children experience it. I believe that our society today has become so removed from death and these other dark realities that they have become much more frightening than they would be if they were more regularly ingrained into our daily lives. A society in which a family is responsible for the caring and cleaning of a body of a relative or loved one, for example, may still fear death but will be less likely to fear a corpse. And this follows that graveyards and gravestones may be less likely to inspire foreboding when they are recognized as resting places and markers for those harmless, peaceful bodies. 

This is exactly the reason that today we often find Victorian post-mortem photography to be so disturbing, and often used as a trope in horror movies ("The Others", "A Haunting in Connecticut") rather than recognizing it as an attempt to remember a precious loved one in a time when photography was fairly rare. If we had more familiarity with bodies and with death, we would see these pictures as desperately sad and powerful mementos from grieving families, and grieve with them. Instead, we become preoccupied and frightened by the image of death, and dismiss their cultural significance.  

Vintage-Halloween-Costumes-Skeleton-Horses

So this Halloween, and every Halloween that I can, I will be decorating my home and sending my daughters out to celebrate the event with robust enthusiasm. It is only by recognizing what is "safe scary" that we can spot what is actually dangerous, and it is through an acceptance of unknown dangers that they become more familiar, and less anxiety-inducing; this is a concept I wish to instill in my children, and one that I hope our wider society continues to acknowledge as well. 

Happy Halloween!

Works Cited

Classic Universal Movie Monsters. Digital Image. Gunaxin, 31 October 2019. https://gunaxin.com/ranking-classic-universal-movie-monsters

Court, Simon. “Edmund Burke and the Sublime.” Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum, n.d. 27 Oct. 2019. 

Vintage-halloween-costumes-skeleton-horses. Digital Image. Meghan Walsh Gerard. 26 October 2015. https://mwgerard.com/31-days-of-halloween-october-26/vintage-halloween-costumes-skeleton-horses/

Eyes and the End of the World

This week in our "Monsters In The Western World" class, we discussed the Book of Revelations and the apocalypse; and how early Christian fears of the end of the world made the terrors predicted in Revelations seem plausible. And this lead to a natural conversation about more modern ideas of the apocalypse- what or who our monsters are, and why the horrible, graphic demise of humanity seems to be such an appealing concept.

In the Book of Revelations, the monsters almost defy understanding; they are both human and animal-like, as well as composed of entirely abstract images like one might see in a Salvador Dali painting; when John, receiver of the prophecy hears a loud voice speaking to him in Chapter 1, he turns to see: 

someone like a son of man, dressed in a cloak reaching down to his feet, and gird around at the pecs with a golden sash, except his head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes like flames of fire, and his feet like bronze as if made to glow in a furnace, and his voice like the sound of many waters, and he was holding in his right hand seven stars, and out of his mouth was coming a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in the strength of it. (6)

Further on, when John discusses viewing the thrones in heaven in Chapter 4, he sees:

in between the throne and the circle around the throne are four living beings, full of eyes, front and back. And the first being is like a lion, and the second being like an ox, and the third being has a human face, and the fourth being is like an eagle in flight. And the four beings, every one of them has six wings each, which are covered completely around with eyes, even inward. (12)

And though we are clearly meant to understand that the presence of the incalculable eyes represents an all-seeing nature, one cannot help but feel disgust and revulsion at the idea of so many clustering eyeballs staring, blinking, emoting. And this idea is perpetuated in more modern monsters, with characters such as Henry J. Waternoose in Pixar’s “Monster’s Inc” to the so-called Angel of Death in “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army”.

Henry J. Waternoose- Via Google Images

The Angel of Death

The latter work, directed by Guillermo Del Toro is not his first to feature a monster in which their eyes are elements of horror and revulsion— in 2008’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” his monster The Pale Man has an eyeless face, and sees his prey by placing eyeballs in his palms, which he then holds against his cheeks like strange, blinking crabs.

The Pale Man

But what does this mean for us? What does sight have to do with monstrosity, and how does this relate to fears of the apocalypse?

Arguably, one could say that as the future and death are the two greatest human unknowns, anything all-seeing, or omniscient opens the door to a world we do not genuinely wish to see or understand. In the western world, we are culturally afraid of death and the uncertainty it denotes; therefore, whether it is the eye-encrusted monsters of Revelations, or the creatures in Guillermo Del Toro’s universe, they undoubtedly provoke anxiety and fear through both our physical disgust and mortal terror.

And we can tie this directly into the Apocalypse itself; if Apocalypse means an unveiling, then it indicates a revelation from blindness— a terrible omniscience we hope to never look at fully. And to reveal it reveals our doom.   

Works Cited

Henry James Waternoose. Digital Image. Fandom: Villains. https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Henry_James_Waternoose_III

The Angel of Death. Digital Image. Cinemablend, 2017. https://www.cinemablend.com/news/1674579/where-hellboy-2s-angel-of-death-came-from-according-to-guillermo-del-toro

The Pale Man. Digital Image. Professor Ramos. 16 November 2018. https://professorramos.net/2018/11/16/the-realm-of-the-pale-man/

Sexuality, Part 1: Cultural Fears and Ancient Greece

I think one of the biggest questions I’ve had about monstrosity in history and literature, is how and why it frequently appears almost as a metaphor connected to some element of sexuality, seduction, or eroticism. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, the titular figure brings young, beautiful women into his thrall, and very seductively bites their necks to drink their blood. Later, they become his slaves (as seen in the characters of Lisa, the “brides” which live in Dracula’s Transylvanian Castle, and in his attempted seduction of Mina) which is a deeply sexual concept. Even Renfield’s obsession with Dracula, alongside his madness, could be viewed as an interpretation of early romantic infatuation.

These are easy points to make, but relevant ones I believe, in illustrating the more modern ties of sexuality and monstrosity. In reading that text (and others of its time) we have to ask ourselves if the monster is a metaphor for fears of the age, such as a common Victorian and pre-Victorian fear of the seduction of young, innocent women by scoundrels who leave them and/or their families ruined― an idea represented in many popular works of literature, from the character of Lydia Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, to Natasha Rostova in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

But what did the Ancient Greeks fear, to use Gods and Monsters so liberally (and often interchangeably) in their stories? Unlike our famous and more recent creatures, their monsters were not implied sexual beings but in fact overtly sexual and monstrous beings. In Hesiod’s Theogony, for example, the Monsters are often created through or as a direct result of intercourse and sexuality― after Gaia and Ouranos have many “most dreadful of children” (line 155) she entices their son Kronos to castrate his father with a serrated silver sickle, as punishment for Ouranos’ “unseemly deeds”, and Kronos completes the task, but through it many more Gods are created (lines 170-185). One of these, Aphrodite, is conceived when Ouranos’ dismembered genitalia fall into the ocean, and, as Hesiod describes, “around them a white foam from the immortal skin began to arise. In it, a maiden [Aphrodite] was nurtured” (lines 1190-193).

This Ancient Greek sexuality/monstrosity is further represented in Robert Graves’ “The Greek Myths” in which he describes the creation of the Minotaur as occurring when an enchanted Pasiphae falls in love with a white bull, and is provided with the tools to allow her to fulfill her “unnatural passion” with the animal. Consequently, she later conceiving the monstrous Minotaur― possessor of a bull’s head and man’s body (page 174). It bears the question: did the Ancient Greeks fear sexuality? Or were they joyfully obsessed with it? We tend to ascribe Victorian morals to cultures that came before our own, and it is easy to assume that our current sexual attitudes are the most liberal they’ve ever been. But in my experiences visiting The British Museum, The Louvre, The Rijksmuseum, and many other international historical exhibitions, I’ve noticed, as most will, that overt sexuality is everywhere throughout history and represented in every kind of medium, from sculptures, to paintings; books, panels, and tombs. Clearly, the ancients were not nearly as straitlaced about sexuality as one might initially assume (and this could lead to a discussion on other accepted forms of sexuality or eroticism, such as pederasty― but I’ll save that for another day).

So I have to wonder where the ties were first formed between sexuality, and monstrosity. Is it an attempt to control or possess, as both sexuality and monstrosity represent that which is perhaps untameable, or chaotic? Dana M. Oswald tries to answer this in her book, Monsters, Gender, and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, when discussing Alexander the Great’s conquest of the East. She says,

“…Humans are both fascinated and repelled by monstrous forms. …Like Alexander, humans want to witness strange bodies, but they also want to control, to circumscribe these bodies, in order to keep them somehow at a safe distance. This control is enacted textually and visually through the representation and erasure of the monstrous body. Through practices of erasure, the text allows both distance and proximity to the monstrous, standing in as a kind of protection for the reader or viewer that enables self-indulgence in the pleasure provided by the monstrous form.” (page 2).

Obviously this is all interesting food for thought. I will continue with part two of this discussion in another post, as I believe sexuality is too complex of a subject to be covered in just one!

References:

Oswald, Dana M. Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature. NED - New edition ed., Boydell and Brewer, 2010, pp. 1–26. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt14brr71.5.

Hesiod. Theogony. 700BC. PDF File. Retrieved from: https://myclass.ufv.ca/webapps/blackboard/execute/content/file?cmd=view&content_id=_1013373_1&course_id=_38794_1

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 1955. PDF File. Retrieved from: http://www.24grammata.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Robert-Graves-The-Greek-Myths-24grammata.com_.pdf