Fans of “The Twilight Zone” may remember the line by Dan Aykroyd from the 1983 movie based on the classic TV show. Aykroyd delivers it right before he transforms into a werewolf/monster/ghoul and eats his traveling companion.
And if I’ve ruined the first five minutes of a 35-plus-year-old movie, I’m sorry. But it’s Halloween, a good time to ponder stuff that’s really scary.
As a kid, monsters really scared me, and I spent more time than was healthy watching them late on Fridays courtesy of WJW’s Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show, when I could stay awake, and on Saturday afternoons via WUAB’s Superhost, when I could convince my mom that creepy movies were more important than chores.
My favorites were the old Universal monsters. Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, and Lon Chaney Jr. as the Werewolf were among my earliest exposures to “classic” cinema. The later Godzilla movies were all right, and they were the go-to programmers for Superhost, but I always preferred a more human scale for my monsters, thank you very much.
I read about monsters in comic books, magazines and those funny little paperbacks available only at school book fairs. I imagined monsters coming out of the woods behind my house, sneaking up on me while I played in the yard. I shivered at the thought of monsters lurking beneath the pine tree outside my bedroom, when every scrape of a branch on the window was some creature scaling the suburban heights of a one-story ranch house, eager to devour me.
I imagine my monster obsession is echoed by many kids, although perhaps not with the same fervor. (I’ve always been obsessive.)
Eventually, though, we grow up, and those pleasant shudders from tree branches on the shutters are replaced by more prosaic fears. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is transformed into anxiety over a flooded basement. Dr. Frankenstein’s lab in a lightning storm becomes dread over a higher-than-usual electric bill. Igor’s midnight prowling for body parts is overshadowed by distress over one’s own body — slowing down, malfunctioning, stopping completely.
I’m still a fan of monsters and, more properly, horror fiction and movies, but it’s harder now to miss the real-life connections in what once seemed like simple escapist fare. How those latex monster masks from films in the 1930s and ’40s reflected the country’s anxieties over returning veterans, some horribly scarred, from two world wars. How Godzilla is Japenese trauma over nuclear annihilation writ large and exported to the very nation that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or how “The Exorcist” at some level, is about the widening generation gap, and the inability of parents to comprehend these strange, smelly hippies that used to be their sweet children.
All genre fiction, at some level, codes beliefs and concerns about the present into symbolic language, even when the authors don’t recognize they are doing it. Maybe especially then. In horror, fear of the “other” — a different race, religion, ideology, or worldview — is at the bloody, beating heart of many a monster, and characters don’t rest — and audiences aren’t satisfied — until such creatures are beaten, burned or bombed into submission, and the prevailing order is restored.
At the risk of being accused of injecting politics into everything, I would argue that monsters have a tendency to be liberal, while monster movies (and books, comics, and whatnot) have a tendency to be conservative. It’s an interesting dynamic, endlessly exploitable, and no less true just because we never thought about it while watching or reading such stories.
Some of the best horror stories have politics and philosophy baked in — or, at least, half-baked. “The Twilight Zone” is a good example.
“Wanna see something really scary?” Dan Aykroyd asked. He could have been talking about the nightly news.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment