Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (53 page)

15
See the discussion of war and photography by John Taylor in
Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War
(New York: New York University Press, 1998), 160–88. Taylor discusses imagery of the Vietnam War in relation to the 1991 Gulf Conflict.

16
Tom Savini,
Bizarro! The Art and Technique of Special Make-Up Effects
(New York: Harmony Books, 1983), 11.

17
Savini,
Bizarro
, 12.

18
Linnie Blake argues in
The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historic Trauma and National Identity
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008) that the “bewildering array of traumatic happenings” at the end of the twentieth century” has been conjoined with an “escalating public interest in horror films.” Her discussion of America in the seventies closely examines Romero’s oeuvre, including his 1973
The Crazies
, which she sees as an embodiment of American defeat in Vietnam and the calamitous Nixon presidency. See
Wound of Nations
, 3, 4 and 82–88.

19
On the ending of the film see Kim Paffenroth,
The Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Vision of Hell on Earth
(Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006), 34, 40; and Paul R. Gagne,
The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George Romero
(New York: Dodd Mead, 1987), 38.

20
A good description of the origin of apocalyptic belief appears in George M. Marsden,
Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), see esp. 51–54.

21
Hal Lindsey,
The Late Great Planet Earth
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Books, 1970). See also Poole,
Satan in America
, 165–66.

22
Daniel Wojcik,
The End of the World as We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America
(New York: New York University Press, 1999), 110–12.

23
See Richard Matheson,
I Am Legend
(New York: Tor Books, 2007).

24
My own reading of the novel
I Am Legend
is heavily influenced by Walters in Bernice M. Murphy’s
The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture
(New York: Palgrave, 2009)
.
Walters shows that Neville is presented as living “a horrific parody of that experienced by the typical middle class male in the 1950s” even driving a station wagon, enjoying a martini, and smoking a pipe. At one point in his lonely rumination, Walters notes, he “holds a mock-philosophical debate with himself” in which he thinks of the vampire as a “minority element” and asks his imaginary debate opponent whether he would “let his sister marry one.” See 27–39.

25
An excellent discussion of
Salem’s Lot
appears in Nina Auerbach,
Our Vampires, Ourselves
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 155–61.

26
Bare Bones: Conversations in Terror with Stephen King
, ed. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (New York: Warner, 1985), 5.

27
On King’s output and technique, see Edwin F. Casebeer, “Stephen King’s Canon: The Art of Balance,” in
A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction
, ed. Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996): 42–54.

28
Crawl of the Dead,
http://www.crawlofthedead.com/crawls/info/philly_zombie_crawl
; Max Brooks,
The Zombie Survival Guide
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003).

29
Statistics are cited in Deborah Caslay Covino,
Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

30
Covino,
Amending
, 37.

31
Covino,
Amending,
38–54. Susan Bordo challenges the notion that plastic surgery represents an individual empowerment for women. She notes that “cosmetic surgery is more than an individual choice; it is a burgeoning industry” that invents the new norms of aesthetic beauty and proscribes certain looks as deformed and defective. See Susan Bordo,
Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural images from Plato to O. J.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 42–65.

32
Tim and Beverly LaHaye, two key figures in the foundations of the Christian Right, wrote
The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Married Love
, in 1976. This rather explicit guide is a Christian sex manual with detailed descriptions of foreplay and even mutual masturbation (sort of). Its patriarchal bias is also clear as it ignores any discussion of female orgasms and describes foreplay as the female’s preparation to “receive him.”

33
R. Marie Griffith’s
Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) explores the origins of Christian dieting culture and also has excellent material on the role played by race in the literature. She views this culture as an extension of earlier efforts at the reformation of the body. See 217, 225–38, 247.

34
See Dorothy Larson, “Machine as Messiah: Cyborgs, Morphs and the American Body Politic,”
Cinema Journal
36, no. 4 (1997): 57–75, for a reflection on the American obsession with the body and its connections to both constructions of the self and the state.

35
For more on the zombie as a kind of eating machine, locked in its own immanence and desire, see Kim Paffenroth’s brilliant reading of religious themes in the Romero oeuvre,
The Gospel of the Living Dead
(Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006).

36
Discussed in Kenneth MacKinnon,
The Politics of Popular Representation: Reagan, Thatcher, AIDS and the Movies
(Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1992), 27.

37
Time
, June 12, 1977, 20; David Pirie,
The Vampire Cinema
(New York: Crescent Books, 1977), 100; MacKinnon,
The Politics of Popular Representation
, 122–23; Bonnie Zimmerman, “Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film,” in
The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film
, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 378–87.

38
See Lloyd deMause’s
Reagan’s America
(New York: Creative Roots, 1984) for a full discussion of the various metaphors of toxicity and body fluids that became standard conservative political rhetoric during the era. Quote from Reagan in Joyce Carol Oates,
AIDS and Its Metaphors
(New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1989), 86.

39
James R. Kellar,
Anne Rice and Sexual Politics: The Early Novels
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2000), 34–35. For more on images of AIDS and vampirism, see “Blood Spirit/Blood Bodies: The Viral in the Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro” and “‘A Girl Like that Will Give You AIDS!’ Vampirism as AIDS metaphor in Killing Zoe,” in
The Fantastic Vampire: Studies in the Children of the Night
,
ed. James Craig Holte (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), 111–22 and 145–50. Richard Dyer shows that gay men have been able to co-opt images of the vampiric monster and give it positive associations. See Richard Dyer, “Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism,” in
Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction
, ed. Susannah Redstone (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999), 27–39.

40
The most detailed and comprehensive study of “real vampires” appears in Joseph Laycock’s
Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2009). A close study of fandom and vampire clubs can be found in Milly Williamson,
The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy
(London: Wallflower Press, 2006).

41
See Atlanta Vampire Alliance [AVA]: A Real Vampire House,
http://www.atlantavampirealliance.com/missionfaq.html
.

42
Eric Nuzum,
The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula
(New York: St. Martin’s, 2007), 162–64.

43
An insightful short introduction to the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
series and why it works so well appears in William Patrick Day,
Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 160–66.

44
Tom Carson, “So-Called Vampires: Buffy Battles Teendom’s Demons,”
Village Voice
, June 10, 1997, 51; Micol Ostow, “Why I Love Buffy,”
Sojourners: The Women’s Forum
24, no. 3 (1998): 20.

45
The best discussion of Buffy and feminism, in particular the ideas of third-wave feminism, can be found in Elana Levine’s “Buffy and the New Girl Order: Defining Feminism and Feminity,” in
Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer
ed. Elana Levine and Lisa Parks (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 168–90.

46
Wendy Love Anderson discusses the role of apocalypse in the Buffyverse in her excellent essay “Prophecy Girl and the Powers that Be: The Philosophy of Religion in the Buffyverse,” in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale
,
ed. James B. South (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2003), 212–26.

47
Contrary to my view of Buffy’s originality, Bruce A. McClelland argues strongly that Buffy “does not transcend in any significant way” the Vampire tradition that stretches back to Stoker and beyond. In fact, he compares the “Scooby gang” to Stoker’s “gentrified posses.” See
Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 178–83. Here McClelland does not recognize the yawning cultural gap between a representation of vampire hunters as bourgeois Victorian gentlemen and a community made up of a werewolf, a lesbian witch, and several reformed vampires and demons. Even Giles, the uptight British librarian, has a dark past that includes dabbling in demon worship (and in 1970s British punk culture).

48
Lev Grossman, “It’s Twilight in America: The Vampire Saga,”
Time
, November 23, 2009.

49
Twilight
is far from the first young adult vampire fiction to deal with vampire–human romance. Deborah Wilson Overstreet examines these narratives in
Not Your Mother’s Vampire: Vampires in Young Adult Fiction
(Lanham Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 45–59. Significantly, many earlier efforts at the genre let the monster remain a monster, forcing a doomed romance rather than following the interspecies couple into mundane marriage.

50
Christian Seifert, “Bite Me! (Or Don’t),”
Bitch
42 (winter), 2009.

51
“Jesus Christ Is My Edward Cullen,”
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=59988858896
(accessed May 1, 2010).

52
Kimberly Powers,
Escaping the Vampire: Desperate for the Immortal Hero
(Colorado Springs, Colo.: David C. Cook Publishers, 2009), 23–24, 171.

53
Powers,
Escaping the Vampire
(advertisement in book). See also website, insearch ofaprincess,
http://www.wttym.org/Walk_the_Talk_Youth_Ministries/Insearchofaprincess.html
.

54
“The Joy of Vampire Sex,”
Rolling Stone
, August 17, 2010.

55
Kim Paffenroth explicates these themes fully in
Gospel of the Living Dead
, 9, 10 and 21–22. He analyzes
Night of the Living Dead
on 27–44.

56
Paffenroth,
Gospel of the Living Dead
, 124–31.

57
Dennis Lem, “Dante’s Inferno,”
Village Voice
, November 22, 2005.

1
  The most striking scene in the film
New Nightmare
follows up what appears to be Heather Langenkamp’s encounter with the “real” Freddy with her appearance on a Los Angeles interview show where Robert Englund dressed as Freddy makes a surprise appearance. This shocks Langenkamp, and us, as we are not sure at first whether the celebrity is encountering the monster, or just another celebrity. The feeling of unease is increased as the studio audience is full of “Fred Heads,” horror fans dressed as their favorite killer and/or wearing Freddy t-shirts.

2
  In some respects this revision of the
Nightmare
series marks a return to a more original vision of Freddy as a “dream monster” rather than a more traditional slasher. Craven had sought to create both a mythic monster and a mythic heroine who would slay him. Later sequels expanded on this original idea and turned Freddy into a buffoonish monster, equal parts comedy and horror. See Craven quoted on this in Jane Caputi,
Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture
(Madison, Wisc.: Popular Press, 2004), 135. In the director’s commentary for
New Nightmare
, Craven notes that he wants to get back to Freddy as “primal terror” rather than as “jokester and buffoon.”

3
  Reynold Humphries,
American Horror Film: An Introduction
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 189. The film
New Nightmare
has been attacked more than it has been watched. The reasons for its box office failure are probably twofold. By 1994, the slasher genre had gone bust, and many audiences probably expected it to be a retread of a tired formula. Genre devotees likely dismissed it, wanting a nostalgic return to Elm Street rather than Craven’s philosophical scalpel applied to the genre. Notably, the film
Scream
also started out with small box-office returns. Ticket sales rocketed after its second weekend, contrary to usual audience behavior.