Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (50 page)

57
Andrew Genzoli, “Giant Footprints Puzzle Residents Along Trinity River,”
Humboldt Times
, October 5, 1958.

58
Michael McLeod,
Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 25, 30–36.

59
Charles Fort,
The Complete Works of Charles Fort
(New York: Dover Publications), 3.

60
McLeod,
Anatomy of the Beast
, 52–57.

61
Bernard Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea Serpents
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), 44.

62
A good discussion of the scientific creationism movement appears in George E. Webb,
The Evolution Controversy in America
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994). See esp. 154–79.

63
McLeod,
Anatomy of the Beast
, 54.

64
George Webb has argued that the growth of support for creation science, in some quarters, is in proportion to a decline in science education in the United States. See Webb,
Evolution Controversy in America
, 221–22.

65
Tudor,
Monsters and Mad Scientists
, 143, 154.

66
Skal,
Monster Show
, 239.

67
Iain Topliss,
The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 146–50, 178–80.

68
Charles Addams,
Monster Rally
(New York: Pocket Books, 1950), 57, 122–23.

69
Addams,
Monster Rally
, 114–15.

70
Wini Breines, “Postwar White Girl’s Dark Others,” in
The Other Fifties
, ed. Joel Foreman (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 56.

71
Patricia Bosworth,
Diane Arbus: A Biography
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 162, 168. The film
Freaks
also inspired a significant new scholarship on the meaning of sideshow freaks in American cultural history. See Leslie Fiedler,
Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self
(New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 18. Fielder referred to Browning’s work as a “masterpiece.”

72
Jancovich in
Rational Fears
sees this shift occurring by the mid-1950s, especially in the work of schlock-auteur Roger Corman. See esp. 262–84.

1
  See Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of the film
Psycho
in
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock
, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso Books, 1992), 226–31.

2
  Reviews quoted in Kendall R. Phillips,
Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2005), 62.

3
  A full examination of how
Psycho
’s critical reputation grew over time can be found in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook
, ed. Robert Kolker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 61–100.

4
  William E. Leuchtenburg,
Troubled Feast: American Society Since 1945
(New York: Scott Foresman, 1983), 104.

5
  Henrikson,
Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 107.

6
  Todd Gitlin,
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
(New York: Bantam, 1987), 22.

7
  For a complete history of hysteria over the comic book see David Nadju,
The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America
(New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008).

8
  History of EC taken from Grant Geissman,
Foul Play!: The Art and Artists of the Notorious 1950s E.C. Comics
(New York: Harper Design, 2005).

9
  Descriptions of comics taken primarily from Geissman,
Foul Play!

10
Bradford W. Wright,
Comic Book Nation
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 148.

11
Wright,
Comic Book Nation
, 149.

12
Robert Whitaker,
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
(Cambridge Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2002). See esp. 169–75, on how social tensions and attitudes about nonconformity informed the treatment of the mentally ill, as well as the racist underpinnings of the treatment of African Americans by the mental health community.

13
This representation of life in American mental institutions as oppressive and inhumane presaged Ken Kesey’s 1962
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(New York: Viking, 1962).

14
Wright,
Comic Book Nation
, 138–40, 145.

15
Quoted in Wright,
Comic Book Nation
, 167.

16
Description of Gaines and Wertham’s testimony taken from Wright,
Comic Book Nation
, 165–72.

17
“The Code for Editorial Matter General Standards Part A and General Standards Part B,” reprinted in Robert Michael “Robb” Cotter,
The Great Monster Magazines
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarlane Press, 2008), 12–13.

18
E. Nelson Bridwell, ed.,
Superman from the 30’s to the 70’s
(New York: Bonanza Books, 1979), 209.

19
See Harold Schechter,
Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). Schechter’s account is not as sensationalist as the title sounds and is mostly grounded in primary source research.

20
Phillips Jenkins in
Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) suggests that the seeds of conservative reaction can be found in the struggles of the sixties. He argues, for example, that just as “feminist politics sounded the alarm about sexual dangers to women,” conservatives in the coming decade would co-opt that language and use it to describe threats against the family and against children (often used as a metonym for family values). See 20–23.

21
Andreas Killen notes that in the early seventies the “institutional failures of American society routinely evoked expressions of systemic, perhaps irreparable crisis.” See Andreas Killen,
1973 Nervous Breakdown:
Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 261.

22
The backlash really began in the ’70s with the 1976 Hyde amendment that forbade the use of Medicaid to pay for abortions. The ERA went down to defeat in several crucial states the same year. See Jenkins,
Decade of Nightmares
, 108–11.

23
Phillips Jenkins,
Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide
(New York: Aldine Transaction, 1994) offers the best discussion of these trends. See esp. 21–48.

24
Newitz argues that the serial killer narrative since the 1950s has been structured by a “search for normalcy.” This search takes place within America’s “enraged confusion” over the relationship between society and economics.” See Annalee Newitz,
Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 27, 42.

25
David Schmid,
Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 66–67, 96–106. Douglas has also profiled Lizzie Borden and, perhaps most bizarrely, the literary character Othello.

26
Schmid,
Natural Born Celebrities
, 82.

27
John Starr, “The Random Killers,”
Newsweek
, November 26, 1984.

28
Schmid,
Natural Born Celebrities
, 196–200.

29
Schmid,
Natural Born Celebrities
, 96.

30
Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth,
The Only Living Witness: A True Account of Homicidal Insanity
(New York: Signet, 1983), 6.

31
Jane Caputi argues that terms applied to serial killers such as “monster” and “enigma” hide the way that American society has valorized the serial murderer and transformed them into pop heroes. See
Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture
(Madison, Wisc.: Popular Press, 2004), 119–39. This argument assumes that the popularity of serial murder narratives is the same as valorization of those narratives. Discourses of mental illness and the true crime genre itself that identifies serial murder with social aberrance call this reading into question.

32
Phillip Jenkins shows how popular representations of the serial killer in the ’70s and ’80s conformed to images of social degeneracy. He provides examples of how this imagery could be useful to both the Right and the Left as cautionary tales about alternative sexualities or as examples of societal misogyny. See
Decade of Nightmares
, 140–51.

33
Scott Stossel, “The Sexual Counterrevolution,”
American Prospect
(July/August 1997).

34
Scott Stossel, “The Sexual Counterrevolution.”

35
Robert Lindsey, “Officials Cite a Rise in Killers Who Roam U.S.,”
The
New York Times
, January 1984
.

36
Quoted in Jenkins,
Using Murder
, 125.

37
Phillip Jenkins argues that “media rhetoric of ‘gay serial killers’ confounded homosexuals with both pedophiles and child killers, a powerful political weapon at the time of anti-gay reaction.” He notes that both the 1977 film
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
and the 1980 film
Cruising
portray gay subculture as having savage and homicidal tendencies. See
Decade of Nightmares
, 149.

38
Dirk Gibson,
Serial Murder and Media Circuses
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 95, 96.

39
Schmid,
Natural Born Celebrities
, 224–26.

40
Anne Schwartz,
The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: The Secret Murders of Milwaukee’s Jeffrey Dahmer
(New York: Carol Press, 1992), 115.

41
A number of scholars have critiqued the film
The Silence of the Lambs
from this angle. See Elizabeth Young’s “The Silence of the Lambs and The Flaying of Feminist Theory,”
Camera Obscura
27 (1991): 5–36; and Christopher Sharret, “The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture,”
Journal of Popular Film & Television
21, no. 3 (1993): 100–110.

42
William Bennett, John DiIulios and John Walters,
Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), and James Q. Wilson, “What to Do About Crime,”
Commentary
98 (1994): 25–34.

43
Kent Byron Armstrong defines the slasher genre in
Slasher Films: An International Filmography, 1960–2001
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2003), 1–19. Armstrong does not include
The Silence of the Lambs
in his filmography.

44
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth,”
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
,
the Ultimate Edition (Blu-Ray)
, DVD, directed by Tobe Hooper (Dark Sky Films, 2008).

45
John Kenneth Muir,
Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2002), 12–22, describes the controversial film’s complex box office history and its reception by audiences and American culture.

46
Linnie Blake describes
Chainsaw
as “a degenerate vision of the American family” and connects its “apocalyptic climate of utter despair” to the general feeling that America was edging toward social collapse. See
The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historic Trauma and National Identity
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008), 135.

47
Killen,
1973 Nervous Breakdown
,
80–81.

48
Hooper quote taken from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth.” See Judith Halberstam’s discussion in
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 146–260. The first two
Chainsaw
films provide Halberstam the opportunity to talk about the resistance of the horror film to psychoanalytic readings since they reject the humanist assumptions of that discipline and favor “abjection, loss, revulsion, dread and violence.”

49
Alternatively Christopher Sharret suggests that Leatherface’s gruesome mask of skin “re-creates the lampshades of Buchenwald rather than the knife scabbards and buckskin jackets of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.” Even Sharret notes, however, that this is a tale taking place in Texas, “a state brimming with folklore and the key signifiers of the frontier experience.” The larger history of twentieth-century genocide is not suggested but rather a domestic American horror on which imagery of the American past is fetishized. For Sharret’s view, see “Apocalypse in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” in Christopher Sharrett,
Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film
(Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 300–320.