Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (52 page)

20
Quoted in Jessica Winter, “Gone to Seed: The Devil’s Playground,”
Village Voice
, January 21, 2003.

21
Lucy Fischer, “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary’s Baby,” in Grant,
Dread of Difference
, 412–31.

22
The classic definition of urban legend along with plenty of examples appears in Jan Harold Brunvand’s
The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and their Meanings
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 1–16, 47–57.

23
Steve Neal offers a reading of
Halloween
in his essay ”
Halloween
: Suspense, Aggression and The Look,” in Christopher Sharrett,
Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film
(Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 356–69. Neal examines the point of view of the film’s spectatorship to describe audience interaction and to connect the film to certain ideological premises. He does not examine the larger historical context or the role of urban legend in informing the film’s direction and plot.

24
A detailed cultural history of the phenomenon of babysitting can be found in Miriam Forman-Brunell,
Babysitter: An American History
(New York: New York University Press, 2009). See especially her discussion of the cultural images of the babysitter, 139–58.

25
Forman-Brunell,
Babysitter
, 2–5.

26
Jan Harold Brunvand,
Encyclopedia of Urban Legends
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 26.

27
See “The Hook,” “The Boy Friend’s Death,” and “The Killer in the Back Seat,” in
An Anthology of American Folktales and Legends
,
ed. Frank de Caro (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe Press, 2009), 328, 332–34, for variants of this story.

28
Bill Ellis, “Why Are Verbatim Transcripts of Legends Necessary?” in
Perspectives on Contemporary Legend
, ed. Gillian Bennett, Paul Smith, and J. D. A. Widdowson (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987); Bill Ellis,
Aliens,
Ghosts and Cults
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 187.

29
Barbara Arneil, “Gender, Diversity and Organizational Change: The Boy Scouts vs. the Girl Scouts of America,”
Perspectives on Politics
8 (2010): 53–68.

30
Abigail A. Van Slyck,
A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxxvi–xxxvii, 153–54, 159–67.

31
Bill Ellis “When Is a Legend Traditional?” in, Ellis,
Aliens, Ghosts and Cults
, 33–34.

32
“Adventures at Camp Ranger,”
http://www.campranger.com
(accessed May 1, 2010).

33
Quoted in
American Nightmare
, directed by Adam Simon (Minerva Pictures, 2000).

34
See Harold Schechter’s discussion of the relationship between urban legend, folklore, and the horror film, in
Bosom Serpent: Folklore and Popular Art
, 2nd ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 21–40.

35
Libby Tucker, “Cropsey at Camp,”
Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore
32 (2006).

36
Cropsey
, directed by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio (Antidote Films, 2009), explores the legends surrounding Cropsey and their inflection in the Andre Rand case.

37
The satanic panic is is explored fully in W. Scott Poole,
Satan in America: The Devil We Know
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 169–79.

38
Jeffrey S. Victor,
Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend
(Chicago: Open Court Press, 1993), 47–56.

39
For more on the origins of the Christian Right, see Clyde Wilson and Carin Larson,
Onward Christian Soldiers?: The Religious Right in American Politics
, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2006), esp. 35–41.

40
Victor,
Satanic Panic
, 219–21. These issues are explored in greater depth in Poole,
Satan in America
.

41
Debbie Nathan and Micheal Snedecker,
Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witchhunt
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), 84–87.

42
Victor,
Satanic Panic
, 29.

43
Robert Hicks,
In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult
(Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1990). See also Ben M. Crouch and Kelley Damphousse, “A Survey of Occult Cops,” in
The Satanism Scare
(New York: de Gruyter, 1991).

44
Victor,
Satanic Panic
, 19–21.

45
Jeff McLaughlin, “Haunted House Abortion Scene Ignites Protest,”
Boston Globe
, October 30, 1991; “Hell House Ignites Debate,”
Denver Post
, October 21, 1995.

46
W. Scott Poole, “Jesus Goes to the Dark Carnival: Hell House Gets a Make-over?” in
Religion Dispatches
, October 31, 2009.

47
Jason Bivins,
Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism
(New York: Oxford University Press), 159, 166.

48
Nina Auerbach points out how frequently the “monster kid” phenomenon has been gendered male. She describes her own experience with the “shadowy monsters” that became “a revelation” to her and what she calls a “secret talisman” against the dull conformism of teen culture in the late ’50s. See
Our Vampires, Ourselves
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4–5.

49
American Scary
, directed by John E. Hudgens (POOB Productions, 2006), fully explores the “horror host” phenomenon with interviews and fan recollections. See also Elena M. Watson,
Television Horror Hosts: 68 Vampires, Mad Scientists and Other Denizens of the Late Night Airwaves Examined and Interviewed
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2000).

50
See Robert Michael “Robb” Cotter,
The Great Monster Magazines
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2008), 33–41; Dante interview with David J. Skal quoted in
Monster Show
, 272–73.

51
Gary Cross,
The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 150–51.

52
Cross,
Cute and the Cool
, 150–51.

53
Cross,
Cute and the Cool
, 151; Skal,
Monster Show
, 263; “The Return of the Monsters,”
Look
, September 8, 1964, 47.

54
Cross,
Cute and the Cool
, 152.

55
Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth,
A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 10.

56
See Matthew J. Pustz,
Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), 158–68.

57
Cotter,
Great Monster Magazines
, 212–20.

58
Henry Jenkins,
The WOW Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture
(New York: New York University Press, 2007), 41–63.

59
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: Free Press, 2006).

60
Mark Edmundson, in
Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of the Gothic
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), finds tales of gothic terror everywhere in American public life in the ’90s. He suggests that the decline in popularity of gothic slasher films may have been due to the fact that the O. J. Simpson case offered a more compelling gothic narrative than anything even the best filmmakers could produce. See esp. 6–7, 12–17, 63–68.

1
  See Adam Lowenstein’s discussion of the film in
Shocking Representations
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 154–55.

2
  A full description of the
Night of the Living Dead
and its significance appears in Gregory A. Waller,
The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 272–96.

3
  On the continuing popularity of the zombie film, see Gendy Alimurung, “This Zombie Moment: Hunting for What Lies Beneath the Undead Zeitgeist,”
LA Weekly
, May 14, 2009. See also Lev Grossman, “Zombies Are the New Vampires,”
Time
,
April 19, 2009.

4
  Tim Kane explores the changing incarnations of the vampire in
The Changing Vampire of Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Growth of a Genre
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2006). Kane emphasizes both the eroticism of the Hammer films and their willingness to show blood by the bucketful. See esp. 43–50.

5
  See Kane,
Changing Vampire
, 107–11.

6
  An interesting alternative explanation for our fascination with these creatures appears in Jorg Waltje’s
Blood Obsession: Vampires, Serial Murder and the Popular Imagination
(New York: Peter Lang, 2005). Waltje uses Freudian categories to think about our cultural obsession with vampires and serial murderers. At the end of his study, he suggests the compelling notion that capitalism’s fascination with the replication of activity in consumerism and concomitant encouragement society gives to addictive behavior has its perfect embodiment in the serial killer and the vampire. Of course, the zombie would fit this paradigm as well, since their whole existence is driven by a replication of consumption. See 139–41.

7
  Both vampires and zombies should be read in connection with the serial killer. Philip L. Simpson points out that the narratives of serial murder “plunder the vampire narratives of the last century and a half” and that the mass murderer is frequently identified with biting and eating. See Simpson,
Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 4–5.

8
  A complete history of the evolution of the zombie figure can be found in Kyle William Bishop,
American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2010). Their increasing popularity can be seen in a
USA Today
story by Craig Wilson, “Zombies lurch into popular culture via books, plays, more,” April 8, 2009. For an interesting take on the zombie in relation to current American anxieties over change, see also Elizabeth Kent, “Zombie as Parody: The Misuses of Science and the Nonhuman Condition in Postmodern Society,” (M.A. thesis, Auburn University, 2009).

9
  A complete introduction to the social and cultural crisis of Vietnam appears in Tom Wells,
The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Bruce Schulman’s
The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics
(New York: Free Press, 2001), 221–24.

10
One of the best studies of the war in Vietnam is Christian G. Appy,
Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). For reading on casualties, see 7–15, 247–48, 274–75.

11
Jonathan Neale,
A People’s History of the Vietnam War
(New York: The New Press, 2004), 93; Appy,
Working Class War
, 156–57.

12
Howard Zinn,
A
People’s History of the United States
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 469.

13
Neale,
A People’s History of the Vietnam War
, 96–97. Arnold R. Isaacs points out that the majority of books and films about Vietnam show low-ranking soldiers engaged in acts of violence without representing the innumerable civilian causalities caused by the “unparalleled in human history” bombings of Vietnam. See Arnold R. Isaacs,
Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 22.

14
Keith Beattie,
The Scar That Binds
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 13. A 2006 Harvard Medical School/Columbia University Study found that the effects of severe psychological trauma affected about 20 percent of America’s three million Vietnam veterans thirty years after the end of the conflict. See William J. Cromie, “Mental Casualities of Vietnam War Persists,”
Harvard University Gazette
, August 17, 2006. Mai Lan Gustafsson’s perfectly executed and beautifully written study focuses primarily on the experience of the Vietnamese people and how their folkloric traditions concerned with angry, vengeful, and unquiet spirits expressed grief over the millions of Vietnamese lives lost in their postcolonial conflicts. See Gustafsson,
War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), see esp. 47–48, 142.