Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (21 page)

Almost without fail, promoters of the “white slave trade” scare placed the blame on “the new immigrants.” Beginning in the 1880s, an
increasing number of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe began coming to American urban centers on the East Coast. After 1890 seventy percent of all new immigrants to the United States came from these regions of Europe, a sharp contrast to earlier waves of immigration from northern European countries. Americans of English and northern German backgrounds looked askance at these new immigrants, who shared few of their customs or religious ideas. A wave of nativistic thinking swept middle-class white Americans, who feared that traditional Anglo-Saxon values had come under assault.
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Social reformer Norine Law, in
Shame of a Great Nation
, described the new immigrants as invaders in American cities. “Our immigration has degenerated constantly,” Law wrote, “to the poorest breeds of the eastern and southern sections of the [European] continent.” Eastern European immigrants came in for special attention from writers who believed the cities had become dens of sin. Samuel Paynter Wilson described the immigrant section of Southside Chicago as a dingy place where “foreign taskmasters” held white American women in thrall whose “groans” (of pleasure or despair?) could be heard over “the discordant rasping sound of the rented pianos.”
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In 1931 Universal Studios’ first successful monster flick starred a foreigner who came from exactly the part of the world so often damned in anti-immigrant rhetoric. Tod Browning’s
Dracula
told the story of an undead immigrant, a foreigner on a mission to entice and damn pure Anglo-Saxon womanhood. His offer, which they find more than a little appealing, is an eternal white slavery.

Dracula
looked to be a flop rather than a film that would sink its fangs into the zeitgeist. Even casting proved a challenge. Browning originally wanted Lon Chaney Sr., early Hollywood’s “Man of a Thousand Faces,” to play the vampire. Chaney’s early death did not automatically place the relatively unknown Bela Lugosi in the role. When finally given the opportunity to become the immortal count, he was offered a pittance of what some of the supporting actors received.
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A shaky beginning seemed an omen of the first responses the studio received to the film. Early critical appraisals damned it as immoral and worried about the effect it might have on the public. “The Author must have had a distorted mind … I cannot speak too strongly against the picture for children,” opined one early viewer. Others worried about its influence on Americans already overwhelmed by the economic collapse of the 1930s. Reviewers wondered how Universal could bear to show the film’s “insane horrible details” to moviegoers “already bowed by human misery?” Even the head of the National PTA, Marjorie Ross
Davis, entered the fray, insisting that the film would be harmful to children as well as, borrowing the language of eugenics, “the weak-minded.”
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Warning signs from critics, and the fact that Universal seemed too embarrassed by the film to give it much advance publicity, should have quickly returned Dracula to his ancestral grave. Instead, the opposite happened. Runaway ticket sales made it the most popular film in early-Depression America. Americans of all backgrounds lined up to see the foreign monster seduce virginal white womanhood.
Dracula
sold fifty thousand tickets in two days, an enormous haul for 1931. It became Universal’s top-grossing feature, making over a million dollars in a few years time (at a time when many successful pictures made a quarter of that figure). The film, and the horror cycle that followed, kept the studio solvent throughout the difficult financial decade.
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Audience reception and understanding of any film is difficult, if not impossible, to determine. Few viewers would have, in their own minds, made the explicit links between the monster tales of the 1930s and their personal and collective anxieties about sexuality, gender, and the social order. However, as William Patrick Day puts it, stories of vampires are always stories of “sexual sensationalism.” They are certainly beings both sexual and monstrous, their penetrating (!) fangs clear references to the animal world of cannibal consumption. Lugosi understood this and tapped into the erotic possibilities of the vampire. Audiences
immediately responded to him with fervor. In a world of nervousness over flappers, worries about the disintegrating American family, coeds who attended college petting parties, and white slave rings, Dracula drank deeply from America’s sexual anxieties.
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Dracula Takes a Bite out of Mina Harker

But the very popularity of narratives of sexual danger, specifically the danger posed to “white womanhood,” shows the degree to which movies had become, by the 1930s, a powerful symbolic language that could mix fear with desire. They could, in fact, replicate elements of American society and history in the realm of the fantastic. The audiences in 1931 who watched Frankenstein’s monster likely included some who had taken part in lynch mobs themselves. Audiences who saw the strangely accented Lugosi seduce young white girls may have been members of the Ku Klux Klan who feared foreign immigrants doing the same. Middle-class women, who keenly felt the strictures of patriarchal mores, could watch their on-screen counterparts become, in the words of literary scholar Clive Bloom, “corpse brides and demonic sex sirens.”
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Obviously much of the audience simply sought escape from the Great Depression into fantasy worlds. This has been one of the most popular interpretations of the popularity of monster movies in the 1930s. Most of the fare that audiences sought out has been termed escapist, offering Depression-era Americans a way to ignore harsh realities of the ’30s for a couple of hours through an absurdly sentimental musical, a violent gangster picture, or a monster story. Films that dealt in any way with the Depression itself turned out to be, not surprisingly, box office poison.

No matter how fantastic and unreal they may seem at a distance, the horrors of the monster films of the 1930s mirrored the realities of American history. They certainly reflected the psychological anxieties of their audiences, allowing viewers to dream in their waking life their own monstrous fears about race, gender, and sexuality. But the creatures on the screen were more than a metaphor in an America where communities lynched human beings believed to be monsters. The growing popularity of films that dealt with “mad science” reflected scenes from a dark American underworld that grew from centuries of racist fantasies given the patina of scientific legitimacy.

The House of Pain

If American film audiences in the ’30s and ’40s found the vampire creepy and sexually enticing, the mad scientists and the monsters they unleashed on the earth became their primary totemic fear. Andrew Tudor’s statistical study of the themes of horror films reveals that only a
minority of films during this era dealt with “supernatural, external threats.” The overwhelming majority of movies during this classic age of horror imagined a threat created by a “mad scientist” whose moral presumption and lack of respect for human life creates monsters. Dr. Frankenstein represented the true terror.
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Frankenstein
inaugurated this trend in filmmaking, and numerous films followed that showcased the same theme. In 1931 Paramount released a version of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
starring Fredric March as a scientist whose hubristic exploration of good and evil brings forth a monster. Mr. Hyde is an abomination that seems a living embodiment of the Freudian id. Bestial and barely human, he replicates the “sexual beast” that generations of white Americans had racialized. This time, science had brought him forth.

In 1932 Universal released
Murders in the Rue Morgue
starring Bela Lugosi, a film with content that owes more to nervousness over science and the Scopes trial than to the Poe story of the same name. Lugosi plays a mad scientist who shatters the barrier between the human and animal world. He is an evolutionist so eager to prove a kinship between men and apes that he comingles their blood, transforming the once pacific beast into a murderous creature. A similar theme haunts Paramount’s 1933
Island of Lost Souls
. The island’s administrator, Dr. Moreau, experiments on humans and animals, blending them in distorted and disturbing ways. Vivisection takes place in a building the inhabitants call “the House of Pain” and brings about these transformations.

Nervousness over scientific knowledge is perfectly explicable in this era of American and world history. At least some of the supporters of eugenics backed away from the idea by the late ’30s since the thought of “breeding” human beings for perfection looked much like the racial theories emerging from fascism in the same era. World War II would see technology put fully into the service of the destruction of human life. Technology produced horrific weapons, while the Nazi doctors of the death camps became some of the world’s best known “research scientists.”
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Most Americans at midcentury remained unaware that numerous American medical researchers had engaged in behavior different in degree, but not in quality, to the actions of the experiments of the Nazi mad scientist Josef Mengele. Moreover, this had not occurred in isolated incidents but formed a significant part of medical research in the United States. Even more damning, given the country’s history, racism frequently played a significant role in this story of American mad science as “houses of pain” emerged across the country.

This is not a completely unknown story since many Americans today are aware of the Tuskegee experiments of the 1930s. Beginning in 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a series of experiments related to the treatment of syphilis. Drawing their subjects from poor sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama, researchers promised free medical treatment for the disease. But rather than providing treatment, physicians simply observed the progress of the disease and, after the sharecropper’s death, used his body as an autopsy subject.
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Few would dispute that the Tuskegee experiments represent a living horror. But few also know of the widespread abuses of African Americans and the poor by the American medical establishment in the early decades of its professionalization. In her award-winning book
Medical Apartheid
, Harriet A. Washington documents a pattern of inhuman research in American medical history that rivals any horror film. Washington and other scholars have shown, for example, that disinterment of bodies from African American burial sites became a common practice in antebellum America. Even more frightening, persistent legends among both black people and poor whites of “body snatchers” or “night doctors” found confirmation in an 1886 Maryland case in which it was found that a woman had been murdered and her body sold to the Maryland School of Medicine for fifteen dollars.
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Washington’s research uncovered numerous horrific cases of the abuse of African Americans by the scientific establishment, much of it occurring between the 1930s and 1950s, that ranged from involuntary sterilization to willfully exposing subjects to disease. These actions are rooted in scientific racism and white racist folklore, two powerful threads in American life that have shaped culture, society, politics, and economics. These are part of the American system, the underside of American history.

So deeply embedded are such ideas that the unethical use of human test subjects did not end with the Second World War, despite the worldwide outrage with Nazi medical experiments in the death camps. In the 1950s and 1960s dermatologist Dr. Albert Kligman performed thousands of experiments on prisoners, the vast majority of them African American, at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg prison. The results of these experiments made the researcher into a millionaire for his contributions to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
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A description of Kligman’s research makes for horrific reading. In order to produce skin care products for pimply white teenagers and middle-class women obsessed with clear, blemish-free complexions,
Kligman used forceps to remove large chunks of skin and fingernails from prisoners for testing. Washington describes the subject’s backs as “So covered by flayed, discolored and scarred skin” that inmates at the prison could be identified by a “distinctive checkerboard” pattern on their flesh. They literally became something out of Clive Barker’s terrifying short story “Books of Blood.” Kligman revealed his own attitude toward the suffering of his test subjects when he described imagining the prison population as “acres of skin.”
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