Monsters from the Subconscious
As a Horror writer I've been often and pointedly been asked why
I write this stuff. It's not ever said directly, but it's always
there: Is there something wrong with you? In my own defense,
quite a few people enjoy reading this same stuff and even more
get a thrill out of watching it on the big screen. Just to
hazard a guess, I'd say most people have in their life read a
horror book or seen a horror movie. The question then becomes:
What's wrong with us?
My first occasions to hear horror stories was as a child in
church. I was told that there was a man in a red suit and horns
who carried a pitchfork and watched everything I did and wanted
to send me to the worst, most horrible place ever if I did bad
things. Worse than this, I was told that there was something
called 'original sin' and just by being born I was on God's crap
list and if I didn't repent for things I'd never done, the man
in the red suit would still get me. It didn't seem quite fair to
me that my little three year old wrong-doings could earn me the
same trip to Hell that someone like Hitler got.
I was scared constantly. And that was the point of those
stories, to scare little boys into behaving as their parents
wanted them to.
Fairy tales have the same theme: Obey your parents, or bad
things will happen. I can't swear that I remember all of my
fairy tales, but I do remember as a child being - probably -
unreasonably worried about being eaten. For the time, being
eaten seemed about the worst thing that could happen to me and I
looked warily at strangers trying to evaluate in my mind whether
they would try and eat me. Fortunately, there were very few
cannibals in Wisconsin at that time. Jeffrey Dahmer was one, but
for the life of me, I can't think of any other Wisconsin
cannibals. Oh, wait. Ed Gein - but that's it.
Parents frightening their kids is one thing, but why do people
want to scare themselves? Did you ever wonder why you paid good
money at the bookstore and at the movies for this service that
your parents would happily provide you for free? Well, horror
stories are about fear, but it's not just about making yourself
scared - that alone is no fun. Horror stories are about
conquering your fear, and the way they do that is symbolically
by creating a monster that represents a fear and by having that
monster defeated. Thus it helps you to overcome your
subconscious fear/Monster by identifying with the destruction of
the one in the story. Works out pretty neat, huh?
Here's how it plays out in a few familiar scenarios.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, was thought to the first real
science fiction book, although it really is a horror story. In
the story Victor Frankenstein discovers the secret of life -
itself! As an experiment he creates for himself a man sewn
together from cadavers and then embues it with life, and then
seeing what an awful looking creature he's created, he abandons
it. He does this because it looks so hideous, though for the
life of me, I can't figure out why he had to make the thing out
of several icky corpses instead of just finding one beautiful
one and giving that one life. Anyways, the monster runs away and
then comes back to haunt him and he has to destroy it.
The explanation for Frankenstein is that the monster represents
science and the Victorian fear that science and progress had
gone too far. Science, once the obedient servant of mankind,
had, like Frankenstein's monster, broken free and turned against
its master - us. A hundred or years later this same theme is
echoed in the movie The Terminator, only this time the science
that breaks free is computer science. Computers, our formerly
docile servant, turn against us and band together to become one
giant warlike mind which for some reason or other decides that
all humans must perish throughout time. I guess we had it coming
to us.
Vampires, another popular monster, have represented the once
prevalent infectious disease that used to regularly wipe out
giant swathes of human population. In modern times, Vampires
have been reinterpeted to be kind of sexy, that is, they
represent the dark sexual impulses people have inside themselves
that they also think may destroy them. Vampire stories, then,
become our victory over our dark, forbidden desires. Which are
represented by those sexy, sexy vampires.
Sex is a constant theme in the slasher movies. The Scream movies
brilliantly satirize this by having the teen-agers in the movie
aware of the conventions of the genre they are living through,
yet helpless to change them as those conventions become their
fates. In the slasher movies young girls fear of their own
sexual maturity is confronted symbolically by the slasher who
represents teen-age boys through the menace of wielding the very
Freudian penis/knife. You'll notice that the heroine that
inevitably prevails in these movies is the virgin who never
succombs to the temptation of sex and not coincidentally, does
not succomb to the slasher, either.
My favorite monsters are the ones from the Japanese monster
movies, Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and, of course, Monster Zero.
The reason I love these monsters is that they are political
monsters. Think about it: Godzilla is a giant, super-powerful
radioactive monster who comes from over the sea who is created
by radioactivity and then attacks Japan with that same
radioactivity. Sound familiar? (Hint: It's America). All these
monsters from overseas are constantly attacking Japan and being
beaten up by the cohesion of the Japanese people.
Now, the obvious question for me - being a horror writer and all
- is: What are the symbolic monsters in my book, Breakfast with
the Antichrist?
Well ... I'm not telling.