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Jan. 17th, 2011 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adiva_calandiaEventually I'm going to have to do a project on a monster of my choosing for Monsters class, and I'm really torn. The thing I'm most scared of, of course, is the zombie, and that's certainly a good monster for analysis: tracing what it is that makes them scary (uncanny valley, the implacable force, contagion/plague), finding their historical precedents (zombies in voodoo, the reanimated corpses of Frankenstein's monster and vampires, flesh-eating ghouls) . . . But I'm also tempted by Lovecraftian horrors, and Stephen King's It.
It in and of itself is a great monster. Not only is It the ultimate scary clown -- there's one research path -- but It plays on the Lovecraftian theme of Thing Man Was Not Meant To Wot Of. And why is Its final form something as simple as a giant spider? Not just any giant spider, of course, but a female, pregnant one. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out in Monster Culture that monsters very often transgress sexual and gender boundaries, and hoo boy does It do that, going from a homeless leper offering to suck cock for a dime to a pregnant female ready to produce more of itself. (And then there's that scene in the movie where Tim Curry comes up out of the drain of the shower to threaten . . . it's Eddie, isn't it?) Also, blood all over Beverly's bathroom, cusp of adolescence, the monster is menstruation, etc.
Actually, you can probably boil It overall down to anxiety about children and sex, in particular the fear of pedophilia. I said once that part of what's terrifying about It is Its omnipresence in Derry -- it doesn't matter if it's day or night, whether you're alone or with friends or with strangers, whether you're indoors or outdoors, asleep or awake, It can still get you -- which is very much something you can say about our society's idea of pedophiles. They are everywhere and anywhere and they're going to get your children.
Cohen also says that fear of the monster is also a sort of desire, and I guess that's expressed in It as a desire to return to the summers of our childhood. Part of defeating It is the white-hot belief of a child that silver bullets kill monsters and that awful-tasting stuff in your inhaler "is battery acid, fuckface!" What adult doesn't miss those powerful games of Let's Pretend? I might be stretching with that one, though.
Now, the desire expressed in Lovecraftian horrors is a little easier, I think: we desire knowledge because knowledge is power, even if it drives us mad. Whenever I read Lovecraft or Lovecraftian stories that involve the narrator discovering some unnamed and terrible secret, or seeing something indescribably horrible, I kind of want to know what it is he discovered or saw, even as I shudder at the idea of, say, the color from outer space turning me into a figure of crumbling gray dust oh god that story is creepy. That said, I'm not entirely sure you can boil the Elder Gods down to just a fear of knowledge; there's also a fear of madness, a fear of savages, a fear of chaos . . . hell, there's a fear of colonization, isn't there? But monsters are often patchworks: zombies express fears of a lot of things, as listed above; vampires express fears of foreigners, disease, sexuality; ghosts are a fear of danger in the dark, mortality . . .
Man, demons might be a fun one too, as long as I didn't have to watch The Exorcist. I could look at SPN, Buffy, Faust, the Bible, mythology . . .
Yeah, this is a fun class.
It in and of itself is a great monster. Not only is It the ultimate scary clown -- there's one research path -- but It plays on the Lovecraftian theme of Thing Man Was Not Meant To Wot Of. And why is Its final form something as simple as a giant spider? Not just any giant spider, of course, but a female, pregnant one. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out in Monster Culture that monsters very often transgress sexual and gender boundaries, and hoo boy does It do that, going from a homeless leper offering to suck cock for a dime to a pregnant female ready to produce more of itself. (And then there's that scene in the movie where Tim Curry comes up out of the drain of the shower to threaten . . . it's Eddie, isn't it?) Also, blood all over Beverly's bathroom, cusp of adolescence, the monster is menstruation, etc.
Actually, you can probably boil It overall down to anxiety about children and sex, in particular the fear of pedophilia. I said once that part of what's terrifying about It is Its omnipresence in Derry -- it doesn't matter if it's day or night, whether you're alone or with friends or with strangers, whether you're indoors or outdoors, asleep or awake, It can still get you -- which is very much something you can say about our society's idea of pedophiles. They are everywhere and anywhere and they're going to get your children.
Cohen also says that fear of the monster is also a sort of desire, and I guess that's expressed in It as a desire to return to the summers of our childhood. Part of defeating It is the white-hot belief of a child that silver bullets kill monsters and that awful-tasting stuff in your inhaler "is battery acid, fuckface!" What adult doesn't miss those powerful games of Let's Pretend? I might be stretching with that one, though.
Now, the desire expressed in Lovecraftian horrors is a little easier, I think: we desire knowledge because knowledge is power, even if it drives us mad. Whenever I read Lovecraft or Lovecraftian stories that involve the narrator discovering some unnamed and terrible secret, or seeing something indescribably horrible, I kind of want to know what it is he discovered or saw, even as I shudder at the idea of, say, the color from outer space turning me into a figure of crumbling gray dust oh god that story is creepy. That said, I'm not entirely sure you can boil the Elder Gods down to just a fear of knowledge; there's also a fear of madness, a fear of savages, a fear of chaos . . . hell, there's a fear of colonization, isn't there? But monsters are often patchworks: zombies express fears of a lot of things, as listed above; vampires express fears of foreigners, disease, sexuality; ghosts are a fear of danger in the dark, mortality . . .
Man, demons might be a fun one too, as long as I didn't have to watch The Exorcist. I could look at SPN, Buffy, Faust, the Bible, mythology . . .
Yeah, this is a fun class.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-17 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-17 11:06 pm (UTC)Hari sums up zombies pretty well, I think, though I think their meaning is a little more mutable than just "consumerism and ennui makes us all into zombies." I think part of what makes zombies scary -- and part of what makes Pontypool such a goddamn terrifying and effective zombie movie -- is that they can represent any kind of virulent idea. A lot of people read the zombies of Night of the Living Dead as communists; Dawn of the Dead is about consumerism; 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later can be read as being about the spread of violent ideologies.
I suspect there's also something that's just really viscerally satisfying about zombies because they're so (relatively) easy to deal with. Shoot 'em in the head -- boom, no more zombie. Vampires and werewolves and demons are complicated to kill, man.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-17 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-19 12:07 am (UTC)I've never been certain of that one, personally. Except insofar as the monster represents a repressed desire, which naturally would manifest as something to fear. But there are plenty of fears that are just plain fears -- the survival instinct kicking us into fight-or-flight because we have good reason to believe that otherwise we'll die.
Sometimes the monster is the prince, but sometimes it's just the wolf.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-19 06:00 am (UTC)