TheoFantastique: Dr. Flannery, thank you for your willingness to discuss GOLEM journal. What was the inspiration behind the beginning of the journal?

Frances Flannery: My research specialty is in ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, such as Daniel and the Book of Revelation. Monsters are everywhere in this literature, and I was really intrigued to discover their function and meaning. When I examined anthropological sources across an extremely broad band of cultures, both ancient and modern, I found monsters in every single culture I ran across, whether ancient Greece or modern Polynesia and Canada! I literally could not find a culture that did not have some being that was identified by the culture as a monster. Since I didn’t believe that all of these monsters actually existed, (although some probably did or do), it was obvious that societies have a great need to create monsters.

As I continued to research what Big Foot, Dracula, Frankenstein, Nessie, and the Dragon of Revelation have in common, I came across definitions of monsters by scholars from numerous fields, including anthropology, religion, aesthetics, and psychology. I finally settled on this definition: monsters are those socially constructed entities that either blur existing categories or that must exist between categories, where nothing else fits. For instance, Frankenstein is both living and dead, and Big Foot is only scary if he is both human-like and ape-like. A giant lowland gorilla species would not gather the attention that Sasquatch has attracted! In turn, this definition implies that the function of monsters is exactly, then, to allow a given society to express 1) the category formations that are important to it, 2) the boundaries that are being challenged in that culture, and 3) the very potent societal fears that exist about these boundary crossings. Monsters thus show us what a culture both cares about and fears, and the expression of those fears is usually a catharsis. Godzilla is an ancient creature awakened by atomic energy, which expressed the fears of Post WWII Japan and America in the nuclear age. Monsters are thus vital to the mental health of a culture, and they tell others what a culture values. I’d encourage readers to think hard about what monsters their culture currently finds fascinating, and why.

I started GOLEM out of a desire to create a forum for other scholars from a variety of disciplines to share their thoughts about monsters and religion. The remarkable diversity of approaches, topics and fields of interests of our contributors has affirmed my hunch that monsters are significant in a broad array of interdisciplinary areas, including religious studies, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, theology, and sociology. I would hasten to add that there is also a section for student publications in the journal, entitled “GREMLIN”.

TheoFantastique: I am pleased to see the focus of the journal as indicated in the subtitle with its look at “religion and monsters,” an interest that dovetails with part of the exploration of TheoFantastique. How did you arrive at this focus, and in what ways has the journal explored this topic?

Frances Flannery: Following sociologist Clifford Geertz, I consider religion to entail much more than just “beliefs,” but rather a whole cultural system: beliefs, symbols, ethics, worldview, rituals, and an entire construction of reality. Monsters are vital to the cracks and overlaps in the categories of cultural constructions of reality. Thus, they appear in the sacred literature or mythology of every traditional religion, whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or indigenous religions, as well as of new religions, such as Scientology.

As I mentioned, from the outset GOLEM journal has been committed to interdisciplinary methodologies that result in a broad range of topics for investigation, and this is clearly reflected in the journal’s contents. So far GOLEM has generated articles, to name a few, on monsters and otherness, disability, the construction of normalcy, horror films, posthumanism, ecological devastation, class, ethnicity, the Ancient Near East, and Christian Evangelicalism and intelligent design. I find this variety so exciting!

I would like to add that beginning with Issue Three, Rubina Ramji of Cape Breton University has replaced me as Senior Editor. I cannot say enough to support her excellent work and the direction in which she has steered GOLEM, which is evident in the fine quality of that Issue. Currently, the journal is seeking to explore the connection between monsters and violence, and monsters and terrorism, and I can hardly think of anything more timely.

TheoFantastique: How does the academic study of monsters in popular culture help us to “shed light on the particular societies and cultures that imagine them” as your website states?

Frances Flannery: Monsters appear in “popular” culture as well as in “elite” culture, in the art, literature, film, histories and religion of a vast array of societies. As I mentioned, monsters show us what a society values, what cultural categories it creates, and what chaos and fear feel like to its members. But perhaps most of all, monsters are simply uncanny . . . and that makes them innately interesting. Thus, the phenomenon of monsters speaks to the universal human societal condition. No culture seems to be able to make every experience or person fit neatly into its categories. Something will always blur or bleed over. That’s a monster.

TheoFantastique: Frances, thanks again for your fine publication, and for talking about it with my readers.

As I searched Amazon.com for reading materials related to the fantastic to add to my wishlist the description of Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) struck me as intriguing:

“Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.

“We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?

“In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.”

Monster Theory is edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen who is associate professor of English and human sciences at George Washington University. Dr. Cohen agreed to discuss the collection of essays that make up this book, and in particular his contribution to the volume.

TheoFantastique: Dr. Cohen, thank you for your willingness to discuss the book you edited that discusses monsters and their part in culture. With an intercultural studies background, and a personal interest in expressions of the fantastic and monstrous in pop culture, your book struck a number of chords with me. In the preface you note that “monstrousness” has become “a mode of cultural discourse.” This may seem strange to some who only see this as a fringe phenomenon that surfaces at Halloween or in horror films, but can you provide some examples of how this manifests itself?
 
Jeffrey Cohen: It’s funny, we’re used to thinking about monsters as fringe phenomena, but there is nothing ultimately all that marginal about them. Although we tend to place them at the world’s borders, at the edges of calendars, at the farthest reaches of outer space … they nonetheless reveal themselves as intimate to everything we do. Look at the adjective we both just used to describe the monster, fringe. That happens to be the name of a new television show I watched last night, a repackaged and gorier version of The X Files. The show is filled with monstrosities, like a baby that ages to a decrepit old man in a matter of minutes. I’ve also been watching the BBC series Primeval, about intrusions of dinosaurs into contemporary London. Horror films don’t appear only at Halloween: they represent one of the most perennially popular cinematic genres. So, even though we’re used to thinking of the monster as inhabiting some distant geography, it always turns up much closer to home, and much more frequently than you might expect.
 
TheoFantastique: In your chapter in the book you provide what you call “a new modus legendi: a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender.” How did this interest in cultural reading come about for you on a personal level?
 
Jeffrey Cohen: That’s a tough question! I suppose I could push my fascination with monsters all the way back to my childhood, when I was haunted by frequent dreams of stone giants, so much so that I developed an elaborate personal mythology about them. I also loved watching B grade monster movies: my Saturday afternoons were frequently lost to “The Creature Double Feature.” There is nothing more enjoyable than a badly done 1950s alien or monster film.
 
TheoFantastique: Can you provide a few thoughts about what America’s monsters say about us as a culture, and connect this to a few examples from popular culture?
 
Jeffrey Cohen: Not really. I don’t understand contemporary American culture very well because I live it. Being in Washington DC and feeling alienated from most of what goes on at the White House doesn’t help. Actually, I’ll offer this hypothesis: it is very difficult to come up with a monster that reveals much about our culture because at this point we’ve come to believe that we do not possess a common one — that is, we have been in an enduring state of thinking passionately about what sets citizens of the US apart from each other (red versus blue, believers versus secularists, liberals versus conservatives, and so on). We don’t really want a monster to give us unity, to organize us into a collective against something.
 
TheoFantastique: You also state that “monsters are never created ex nihilo,” and that they “must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) that generate them.” You then discuss this in light of the evolution of the vampire from Stoker’s literary creation to Anne Rice’s vampires to Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. What aspects of cultural development have impacted this metamorphosis in the vampire and how does this shift in the monstrous help us to understand our anxieties?
 
Jeffrey Cohen: You could argue that what Stoker explored through his rather xenophobic rendition of a vampire was contemporary national identities and what was for him the problem of foreign immigration. There is also a current of sexual fear in his monsters. Anne Rice’s sympathetic vampires are about the positive allure of the erotic. They are also, at least early on, a drinker’s paean to alcoholism. Each book was popular in its time because it managed to tap into the fears and desires of its audience: Stoker reacts against a historical reality, Rice responds positively to (and here I’ll pick up another theme from her work) the gay rights movement and offers an positive vision of homoeroticism.
 
TheoFantastique: In your discussion of “seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear,” thesis seven is “The Monster Stands at the Threshold … of Becoming.” Under this thesis you state that “monsters are our children” and that in a sense “they ask us why we have created them.” This thesis might make readers a little uncomfortable in that monsters for many are more fun as escapist entertainment. But if we want to understand ourselves, our social interactions, and our culture better by way of self-reflection in light of our monsters how might we take more ownership of them as our offspring even if we consider them our illegitimate children?
 
Jeffrey Cohen: Disidentification against the monster is too easy, and will never allow us to understand why children AND adults get so much pleasure from donning a frightening costume every Halloween. Prospero said it best at the end of The Tempest: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Monsters can be used for all kinds of evil, especially to demonize and dehumanize groups and cultures. To acknowledge the monster’s source in the self is not only to have a more capacious view of humanity, it is also to act responsibly to our fears and desires.

TheoFantastique: Thank you for your discussion of this interesting book. I hope as a result of our dialogue that it becomes a source for more reflection.

(Monster Theory can be ordered as part of the TheoFantastique Store selection of recommended books and other fine resources.)

Within the context of the nexus of the fantastic and popular culture one of the more interesting expressions of this is the Otherkin. Danielle Kirby has written on this fascinating community in Frances Di Lauro, ed., Through a glass darkly: reflections on the sacred (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2006). She also presented a paper on this topic at a conference titled Exploring the Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age in the U.K. in 2007. The paper was titled “Pulp fiction and the revealed text: an inquiry into the treatment of fantasy and science fiction narratives within the Otherkin community.” This paper was revised to become a chapter contribution as part of a forthcoming book to be published by Ashgate.

Kirby describes the Otherkin as “a loosely affiliated virtual community with an alternative metaphysical foundation” which can be found at websites such as www.otherkin.net. In her discussion of this community she notes that “The unifying feature of the Otherkin community is a shared belief in non-human, often fantastic or mythological, souls and selves.” As noted above, this understanding of self-identity is forged through the “conscious integration of explicitly fictional narrative into a sacred or spiritual context.” Here the fictional texts of the films of Star Wars informs Jediism, H.P. Lovecraft’s writings inform the Church of All Worlds, and the corpus of vampire mythology in literature and film informs vampires within the Otherkin.

One of the striking features of the Otherkin community is how their interaction with narrative fiction informs a sense of self-identity that goes much further than those involved with Jediism or various aspects of Neo-Paganism. Kirby says that the Otherkin “believe, primarily, that they are in some way other than human. The non-human aspects appear to have been largely drawn from mythology and fantasy literature,” and “[t]his relationship to the fantastic takes a variety of forms and can mean a non-human soul in a human body, multiple souls residing within the same person or inter-species reincarnation.”

In my exploration of the fantastic in popular culture as an academic, the existence of subcultures like the Otherkin with their neo-religiosity represent a fascinating path for research and understanding.

Hostel

The League of Tana Tea Drinks (LOTT D) elite group of blogging horrorheads is putting together another unity blog, and one of the topics for discussion involved an invitation to complete the following sentence: “The problem with today’s horror movies is…” Contributors were given the opportunity to finish this sentence in keeping with its negative connotation, or take another approach that completes it more positively. Given my perspective on the current state of affairs in American horror films I complete this sentence by writing, “The problem with today’s horror movies is our current social and cultural context of postmodernity and the influence of commodification.” No doubt at this point readers are scratching their heads and saying, “What?” Allow me to explain.

Horror is a complex genre involving multiple layers of interpretation, and as Stephen King has noted it “is extremely limber, extremely adaptable, extremely useful.” One of the ways in which horror demonstrates its adaptability is that it provides a means of not only entertainment, but also an expression and means grappling with some of our greatest fears as individuals and cultures. It should come as no surprise then that as individuals and cultures change so do their fears, and these changes result in differing cinematic expressions of horror. Earlier in the modern period horror helped express fears of the Other in its various manifestations that were symbolized in the monster. But with late modernity or postmodernity, a post-1960s phenomenon which is often tied cinematically to films like Psycho (1960), The Night of the Living Dead(1968), or The Exorcist (1973), there has been a shift from the monster as Other to an internalization process whereby the monster is us. The shift from the externalized monster as the locus of horror to an internalized terror is the result of social forces and perceptions that in turn colored interpretation of the self. Lianne McLarty discusses this in her chapter “‘Beyond the Veil of the Flesh’: Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror” as part of The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant (University of Texas Press, 1996):

This ‘delegitimization’ of social institutions and the ‘instability’ of subjectivity finds expression in the ways in which these films depict both the monstrous threat and its consequences for protagonists. In contemporary (postmodern) horror, the threat is ‘not simply among us, but rather part of us, caused by us.’ Institutions (like the church and the military) that were once successful in containing the monster and restoring order are at best innefectual (there is often a lack of closure) and at worst responsible for the monstrous. Contemporary horror also tends to collapse the categories of normal and monstrous bodies; it is said to dispense with the binary opposition of us and them, and to resist the portrayal of the monster as a completely alien Other, characteristics of such 1950s films as The Thing (from Another World) (1951), Them! (1954), and The Blob (1958). This tendency to give the monster a familiar face (the monster is not simply among us, but possibly is us) is tied, in postmodern horror, to the focus on the body as site of the monstrous.

This shift from modern horror with the monster as external Other to the internal us with a related emphasis on the body has resulted in the continued tendency toward the production of slasher films beginning in the 1970s and gaining steam in the 1980s and beyond. A further development of this may be found in more recent films where the monster is not the lone psychological deviant such as Michael Myers of Halloween, but a group dynamic (in terms of the perpetrators) of psychological deviance as in Saw (if not in the original at least in the sequels), and Hostel, where the body most strongly becomes the site of the monstrous through graphic depictions of torture and mutilation.

I am not a prude when it comes to violence in film, but I do have my preferences in expressions of horror, no doubt due to the influences of my social environment as I was growing up. I first encountered horror in the late 1960s and early 1970s through horror’s twins in science fiction and fantasy films that depicted the monsterous Other as alien invader, the result of science gone awry, or prehistoric beast meets modern society. Later I encountered the classic Universal and Hammer horror films which again depicted the monster externally, and it was only in my later teens that I engaged postmodern horror with its emphasis on psychological deviance, the internalization of horror, and bodily mutilation as the primary expression of the horrific. In essence I suppose I was inculturated in a particular expression of horror, the early modern expression with the externalized monster, and as a result I have always found this expression of horror more frightening, indeed, more appealing. I think I might also find the complete internalization of horror within myself extremely distasteful. I recognize that human beings are indeed a curious mix of greatness and tragedy, but for me, postmodern horror’s revelry in human evil and bodily mutilation presents an overly dark and nihilistic expression of human nature and horror that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Related to these social and cultural considerations that result in a struggling horror market is its connection to commodification. Horror films are commodities designed to provide the highest return on investment possible, at least in those films produced by Hollywood and mainstream studios, and the emphasis on horror as commodity often leaves creativity and good storytelling by the wayside. In my view, some of the best contemporary horror comes from independent filmmakers and from the international market, with directors from Asia and Mexico, not the United States. In regards to independent filmmakers, the priority is given to good stories and frights, and while international horror is just as connected to commodification as the American horror market, somehow they have manged to provide a fresh infusion of creativity and conceptualization into the American horror market.

I recognize that my preferences for horror cause me to lean largely toward the Gothic, although my preferences for an early modern form of horror certainly go beyond this specific expression of horror. I am not alone in such preferences, as evidenced by others such as Bruce Lanier Wright in his book Nightwalkers: Gothic Horror Movies (Taylor Publishing Company, 1995):

..I believe that ideas have consequences, and I do worry about the idea embodied both in gore-porn and a good many modern ‘horror’ films. The underlying theme of Grand Guignol entertainment can be stated quite simply: You and I are pieces of meat, and all our interactions – anything we do to or for one another – are merely the random collisions of pieces of meat, without meaning or significance. This is a legitimate artistic position, and one developed with some brilliance by George Romero and others. It’s also a tremendously popular idea in mass media. The handful of individuals how decide what appears on television and in our theaters, not being particularly altruistic by nature, must believe it’s what you want to see.

The Gothic position, by contrast, is that good and evil do exist, and that men’s actions carry a moral weight; that our choices count. And if our actions have some sort of importance, maybe we do, too. Maybe we’re more than just the some of our desires and hatreds.

This post will likely be a little more “heady” than many of my fellow LOTT D unity post bloggers, but I think there’s something worth thinking about here. If horror is indeed an adaptable and useful genre we might be thinking about not only why it entertains, but also why it changes in its expression, and what the internalized “monsterous us” of contemporary, postmodern, nihilistic horror says about us as individuals and as a culture.

(For those readers interested in reading more of McLarty’s thoughts on Cronenberg and the body as site/sight of horror, as well as the other contributors to The Dread of Difference, or Wright’s further thoughts on Gothic horror in Nightwalkers, these books can be found as part of the TheoFantastique Amazon.com store.)

TheoFantastique: Dr. Gilmore, it’s my pleasure to discuss your book with you as we explore the meaning of our monsters. To begin, you state early on that you have had an “endless fascination with monsters” and as your book continues you note how this is true of all cultures the world over. On a personal level, how did you come both personally and professionally to an interest in and study of monsters in various cultures?

David Gilmore: Some unconscious quirk made me do it! Ever since I could read I was drawn to sci-fi and to the thrill of the unknown, but especially the idea of pure “evil” as an embodiment, a living breathing “thing” arrayed against humanity. I guess I was a pretty lonely repressed kid and I must have felt a secret identification with the “alien” who gets back by attacking the world. Who knows whereof our nightmares come?

TheoFantastique: You note that monsters have a connection to “a divine source,” and that at times they even “[carry] profound, even spiritual meaning beyond just frightfulness.” This might seem a surprise to some in Western culture now that our monsters largely reflect our ambivalence toward religion, but can you comment on the connection between monsters and the spiritual or religious?

David Gilmore: If you reflect on the semantics, you will have the answer. The monster is “awesome,” “terrible” and “superhuman”–these are also words we use for our God, or our gods. There’s a certain ambivalence in the human mind about gods and monsters. Like Jehovah, the monsters of our imagination punish us for transgressions; they are omnipotent; we stand in fear of their awesome power. Monsters, however, are both super- and sub-human, divine and demonic, godlike and atavistic. In the Christian Middle Ages, monsters were thought to be instruments of God, messages, symbols, punishments, warnings.

TheoFantastique: As you put forward your methodology of studying monsters you state that while other academic disciplines have addressed this topic that anthropologists have tended not to do so. I have benefited from anthropology in my graduate studies and it was this perspective that most attracted me to your book. Why do you think anthropologists have been reluctant to apply their discipline to the study of monsters, and why types of unique perspectives might the anthropologist bring to a broader perspective on the topic?

David Gilmore: Anthropology started out as The Comparative Science par excellence. The idea was that by comparing the cultures of the world we could find out things about the bedrock nature of humanity underneath the surface variation. But this useful viewpoint has been superseded by specialized navel-gazing today: anthropologists now spend their entire life engrossed in the nuances of one single culture, rarely comparing anything. It’s a shame.

TheoFantastique: In your methodological analysis you draw upon a variety of theoretical frameworks, including the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas as she touches on the idea of “ethno-monstrosity,” Can you briefly touch on some of aspects that cultural anthropology can provide from this framework?

David Gilmore: Anthropologists have discovered that in virtually all cultures of the world, people tend to place their own order upon the world of nature,” providing a framework for negotiating reality and thereby taming it. But what about those rare instances that do not “fit” these schemes? That’s where monsters and all other ideas of pollution or “the unnatural” come into play. The surface details differ of course but the underlying psychological processes reflect a deeper human tendency–perhaps as Clause Levi-Strauss would have said, dealing with the exceptional, the anomaly, is “hard wired” in the cerebellum.

TheoFantastique: I was also pleased to see the application of Victor Turner’s work on ritual and liminality brought into the analysis. I have appreciated from his work as applied in other contexts but have never seen it applied to a study of the monstrous. How might Turner help us understand the function of monsters in our ritual and liminal spaces, particularly in Western contexts where monsters in film serve as symbolic texts for engagement?

David Gilmore: Turner wrote that all cultures have periodic “times out” (brief vacations from the rules) when people are allowed to think beyond the “normal” and to invent new images and concepts. This is psychologically necessary, he felt, for human growth as well as for social cohesion, as a kind of universal safety valve. One of the things that people give vent to in times of untrammeled freedom is that which most frightens them: their own unconscious fears and primitivity.

TheoFantastique: In your chapter on “Ritual Monsters” you touch on the function of monsters that assists young people in “awakening them to their own values and moral traditions.” The noted horror historian David Skal has made similar observations about ritual and horror in what he labeled as “Monster Culture” among youth. So might there be positive ritual aspects to our monsters for the youth (not to mention those a bit older) and more substance to such interests than the fears that are many times expressed about the gore aspects of many contemporary horror films?

David Gilmore: Yes, but in traditional cultures the monster has a didactic purpose” to teach youngsters about how they must conquer their own worst impulses and to work with others to slay the dragon of aggression and cruelty. I wonder if we are teaching our youth this valuable message. Previously the dragon-slayer was a “Culture Hero” because he/she saved the society from monsters; now the dragon-slayer is just playing a violent video game for amusement. Where’s the moral message?

TheoFantastique: Your book addresses monsters from a variety of sources in a number of cultures throughout the world, and readers will benefit from considering each of them as your book describes their various manifestations. But I’d like to highlight just a few aspects of your discussion that might be most relevant to Western consumers of monsters in popular culture. As Christendom continued to spread in influence throughout the West, how did it shape the presentation of the monster, especially as it surfaced in film?

David Gilmore: The Monster has always sprung from the unknown and the unexplored regions of the world: the unconscious, from the deep earth, from the darkest caves, from the bottom of the sea, and from outer space–the mysterious reaches of the imagination. The new realm of the Monster is Cyberspace.

TheoFantastique: I found your mention of contemporary monsters in folklore and popular culture of great interest as you mention the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot and your mention that “Western science has by no means relegated monsters to oblivion.” Whether we consider pre-modern, modern or post-modern cultures it seems as if human beings have a real need to create monsters. What positive contributions do they make to our understandings of ourselves, fellow human beings, our social circumstances, as well as our hopes and fears?

David Gilmore: The Monster is the embodiment of all that we fear–in the world and in ourselves. To be fully human, we all need to confront these fears and to conquer them: hence the endless narrative of the Hero (a la Joseph Campbell).

TheoFantastique: I was most intrigued by your statement that “monsters indeed help us to think and to imagine,” and that they are “are our guides, our entree into the mysterious worlds that lie both outside and within us.” Can you expand slightly on these ideas?

David Gilmore: By creating monsters and thinking about them, we give visual expression and an objective outlet to our imagination and we relieve our own anxieties. The monster represents a repudiation–through projection and distancing–of the deepest and most repellent parts of the self.

TheoFantastique: Dr. Gilmore, thanks again for sharing your thoughts as expressed in your book. They make a valuable contribution to our understanding of our monsters and ourselves.

David Gilmore: My pleasure. Remember the immortal words of Nietzsche: when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back.