Folklore around the world reflects mankind’s abiding interest in other-worldly creatures including vampires, werewolves, giants, fairies, and spirit beings. This easy-reading compendium will have a broad appeal among the general public. This book will delight everyone who is fascinated with tales of fairies, mystical beings around the world, and the legends and fairytales that feed our imagination.

Gary returns to discuss mythology and mysterious creatures.

TheoFantastique: Gary, thank you for coming back to discuss another of your research areas. As we consider fantastic creatures from various cultures throughout history, including in the present, how does mythological and folkloric studies help provide important considerations for us?

Gary Varner: Myth and folklore link all of us to a common thread. Our pasts in regards to our specific origins, ethnic roots and cultures may be different but we find many commonalities in our folklore and collective mythology. Because so many legends are almost identical, such as those connected with the Yeti, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch it is also very possible that these creatures did and possibly still do exist.

TheoFantastique: What is the basic thesis of your book Creatures in the Mist?

Gary Varner: I have pulled certain themes together to show that similar stories can be found the world over and throughout time concerning mermaids, sea monsters, gigantic bipeds and the little people or fairy. I am always interested in why the stories are so similar even though the geographic areas may be so far apart. Could it be that the “Hobbit” people of Flores Island may have been the origin for legends about little people? Or were there many such ancient groups around the world which resulted in such a widespread belief in these mystical creatures?

TheoFantastique: Can you share a couple of examples of creatures that appear in various cultures, and the types of similarities that may be found among them across cultures?

Gary Varner: The “wild man” or Bigfoot is perhaps the best known of a creature that is recognizable around the world. From the Pacific Northwest to the forests of Russia, China, Europe Central and South America these creatures are always described in the same fashion: very large bipeds with long fur or hair, tailless and normally dangerous. The little people are also well known around the world. They are normally said to be helpful to humans, fond of music and dancing and sometime can heal. But they have also been described as malicious or mean spirited and tricksters. Many Native American legends about the little people indicate that they live in or near water sources and in rock areas. Other than being very tiny, they are often described as appearing in human form but always with very long hair. Little people have become part of legend from North America, Polynesia, Ireland (of course), Wales, Canada, New Guinea, Russia and South America.

TheoFantastique: Do you see any similarities or relationships between the stories of the Wild Men or Giants of cultures in times past and contemporary stories of Bigfoot or Yeti?

Gary Varner: Yes although the Wild Men legends differ in that they sometimes describe creatures of small and sometimes dwarf stature and even appearing as goblins. Their appearances seem to vary depending on the region. Wild people in the forested areas of Europe were said to be of gigantic proportion while those in the jungles of Belize are only four feet six in height at the maximum. All, however, have hairy bodies, are powerful and often said to be extremely fast. The origin of the “Wild Man” legends seem to date to the Middle Ages and may have described bands of social outcasts, living on the fringe of society.

The other legends such as those about Yeti, Bigfoot etc., are entirely different in that they invariably describe a more primitive type of creature.

Giants, however, have and still do exist to some degree. In Greek mythology giants were primordial deities. Giants are common in Native American lore and while most of them are supernatural creatures there are a few legends that speak of giants as beings from other lands as human as you and I. The Cherokee, for example, have a legend of a party of giants that visited Cherokee villages in the 17^th century. Said to be twice as tall as common men with slanted eyes, they reportedly “lived very far away in the direction in which the sun goes down.” And, of course the Bible tells of a land of giants that were hunted down and slaughtered by the Hebrews. The interesting thing about these legends is how they were told as historical “events” and not as myth.

TheoFantastique: When I was growing up in the 1970s I enjoyed the program In Search of… that explored various paranormal phenomenon, including cryptozoology, and the contemporary program Monster Quest that does the same. Unfortunately, these programs are usually often disappointing in terms of holding out promise of the alleged existence of fantastic creatures that may inform our folklore and myths, but the evidence is usually lacking. Any thoughts on this?

Gary Varner: Yes, I enjoy Monster Quest now too but always know that any actual creature that they are looking for will never likely be found. They are entertaining and I think that they are worthwhile in that they provide “possibilities” that people should consider. We all need the unknown, the possibility that unusual creatures do exist, that the world is more than what we see everyday to keep ourselves grounded. We need to keep myth alive and who knows, previously unknown and thought to be extinct animals continue to be found so why not keep looking for these mystical beings?

TheoFantastique: Gary, thank you again for your book and your research interests that overlap with that of TheoFantastique.

Gary Varner: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure!

Patheos, a website exploring various facets of religion, recently featured an article by Jay Michaelson, a Ph.D. candidate in Jewish thought at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, titled “Demons, Dybbuks, Ghosts, and Golems.” The article provides an introduction to Jewish monsters from the Kabbalah, the Talmud, and folklore, including the female “demonic personality” of Lilith, the dybbuk and the phenomenon of possession with one soul connected to another (as depicted in The Unborn [2009]), the ibbur which is a possessing entity similar to the dybbuk, and the golem (most famously depicted in the expressionist film The Golem [1920]). For those interested in a brief introduction to cross-cultural considerations related to the monstrous this article is worth a read.

Hallab is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Central Missouri. She is also a painter with her work having appeared in art shows across the United States. It has been featured in River City magazine and Phoebe, and has appeared on the covers of The Connecticut Review and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

TheoFantastique: Thank you for a great read, Mary, and for your willingness to discuss the book here. I like to begin many of my interviews on a personal note. How did you come to be interested in vampires and make this a research focus?

Mary Hallab: I had been trying to think of a literature course that would attract non-English majors, and I found this idea at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The course did indeed attract students and was fun to teach. But reading the criticism, I was disappointed to find that almost none of it really defined or dealt with vampires as undead, but only as illustrations for some theory about sex or economics or whatever.

What makes vampires vampires is that they overcome death. They are all dead. But most critics of vampire literature seemed determined to avoid that truly taboo topic and so miss what the vampire uniquely has to offer. That is what I wanted to find out.

This study, however, is not at all based on my syllabus for the course or vice versa. In the course, I focused on the historical background of the vampire and the development of vampire literature in relation to literary movements like Romanticism and to literary figures, such as Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost.

I left it to the students to notice the Christian implications and the obvious parallel between Jesus and the vampire—which they did.

TheoFantastique: How would you summarize the thesis of your book?

Mary Hallab: Vampires are meaningful because they are undead. In folklore and fiction, vampires address the fear of death and the desire for immortality. By refusing to die, they help us contemplate our own mortality and answer our questions about death, about the soul and its survival after bodily dissolution, about the possible existence of an other life after this one. Vampires give us a chance to contemplate death without facing it at all, from all sorts of angles, personal, social, religious, and in all sorts of manifestations from vicious villains to annoying teenagers to hot babes to superheroes. Perhaps most important: uncanny and mysterious as they are, vampires express and respond to the spiritual need for transcendence of this world, for a sense of the sublime, that gives life meaning.

TheoFantastique: You discuss the vampire in a variety of ways and connections, but for me the most interesting was your exploration of this iconic figure in connection with religion. Religion functions at a number of levels, but it has been observed that Western Christianity tends to neglect the realm of everyday life where folkloric religion is more effective. Related to this, you state that “Folklorists tend to regard the vampire as part of a sort of supplemental system, filling in the gaps where institutional religion apparently does not function, at least in the minds of ordinary people.” Can you touch on some of the shortcomings in institutional religion and how vampires may fill this gap? In what ways does the vampire address important religious concerns?

Mary Hallab: Institutionalized religion is so vast and various and includes so many beliefs and practices that I do not want to get into seeming to criticize its possible shortcomings. All peoples all over the world observe all sorts of folk beliefs and practices that cannot be justified by religious texts or authorities, from knocking on wood to staking the dead, from praying to statues to hunting for demons.

Moreover, this topic is easier to discuss, as I did, in connection with particular folklore vampires in a particular place, which might have developed to explain problems that, say, the conventional church could not, such as unexpected deaths and plagues, even bad harvests. We can, these people thought, stop these calamities by staking a few warm corpses. It seems to work as well as prayer, maybe better.

This is, in effect, a scientific function of the vampire (along with other supernaturals): the vampire explains specific natural phenomena and offers some solutions for them. Today, science fills such gaps to the best of its ability.

Even the folk recognize that hardly anyone wants to die. (No one would do it on purpose.)

As for the modern literary vampire, an important religious concern is the concern about death and its why and how. Writers like Bram Stoker use the literary vampire to show why a normal death in the Christian manner is for the best, after all, no matter how comfortable our lives on earth may seem. But he also speculates about death in his novel. To what extent does institutionalized religion do that or allow that?

Both folklore and vampire literature are based in a concept of a direct relation and continued social interaction between the living and the dead, which institutionalized Christianity, as I understand it, has worked hard to stamp out. Here’s a gap:  We are devastated that we have lost our loved one forever—or at least until Judgment Day, as we are told, a dismal comfort. We are not to claim that we have talked to them or that they watch over us. But the whole vampire folklore is based on the belief that the soul goes right over and then hangs around a bit with all its friends and relatives—a very popular belief although not theologically correct, as I understand.

Still, the fact that institutionalized religion does not tell us what to think and do every minute of every day is not, in my view, a shortcoming.

TheoFantastique: One of the more unsettling aspects of your discussion is your recognition of an unfortunate dualism in popular thinking. This is fueled in great measure by what has been described in your book in a quotation of Neil Forsyth  as “the devil-soaked Protestant imagination” that often resembles Manichaeism. How has this dualism surfaced in vampire literature and film, and what are the ramifications as we move from the realm of fantasy and horror to the real world?

Mary Hallab: I don’t think I made any effort to blame Protestants over Catholics. All Christianity is pretty much devil-soaked, isn’t it? I have pictures from the paintings in medieval churches that are full of devils. If we say that old women are having “concourse with Satan,” (as both Catholics and Protestants have done) aren’t we positing a great evil figure outside of God who can cause people to behave the way he wants however innocent or good they might be? Aren’t we teaching people to believe in the Devil as an actual powerful god, uncontrollable by and dangerous to the Big Good God, who ought to be doing something about him?

Now, I don’t regard dualism or Manichaeism as necessarily “unfortunate” although some might. This is a very complex topic. Dualism might, for example, refer only to a conception of the universe as divided between the material and the spiritual; these need not be evil. The arbitrary division of the universe between absolute Good and absolute Evil and the insistence on labeling all things (or words or thoughts or people) as belonging to God’s party or the Devil’s party creates all sorts of unfortunate behavior. What is “unfortunate” is using this idea of Satan to declare our neighbors, for example, or unbaptized Indians or Muslims or people whose property or oil we want to take to be evil and worthy of annihilation in the name of rescuing humankind and even God from them. If God needs rescuing, then there is powerful force equal to him. Is that right? But God can look after Himself. Some of our neighbors cannot.

This dualism does not appear in the folklore I looked at. The vampire is just a family member or neighbor who won’t die. The staking is not regarded, so far as I could tell, as a punishment. It saves the community from a major nuisance and a danger, but not from damnation or annihilation. It is a physical, not a spiritual, threat.

Most early vampire literature is more like this. Polidori’s Ruthven is just a killer. Varney and Carmilla are simply following their own nature. But Stoker’s Dracula works for Satan, or so Van Helsing tells us, as he rallies his Christian knights, as he sees them, to destroy Dracula in the name of Jesus. He proposes a world of good versus evil, in which one must be one or the other. (Isn’t this what Christianity does when its God “judges” everyone at death and pops them into the Good or Evil bin to be eternally rewarded or punished?) We know Dracula is evil because he defies God’s orderly plan by ignoring death. This is not just a folkloric misdemeanor; this is heresy.

We know he is the equal of God, or nearly so, because he alone acts in the novel. God is not there, nor does He send an agent, as Satan does. This setup appears in any number of vampire works, where, for example, the evil vampire, serving Satan, is trying to undermine the church or destroy the universe.

What disconcerts me about these works is that they feed into and even encourage the kind of dualistic thinking I described above according to which it is all right to slaughter fellow beings on the suggestion that they are agents of Satan, or belong to the Dark Side as if this oversimplification was valid. We even see it in “kiddie” works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Where is God in that show? But some great Evil, called The One, threatens the universe at every turn.

This kind of Devil vs. God, Evil vs. Good thinking appeared in the rhetoric justifying our invasion of Iraq and the slaughter by us of thousands of people. It is repeated constantly in America in sermons, political speeches, and even the press, in the tendency to attack any other people who disagree with our policies.

TheoFantastique: You point out that vampire studies often neglect the subject of death and how it is treated in vampire literature and film. How does the vampire help us confront death?

Mary Hallab: Mostly, in vampire literature, the vampire’s hard life and many handicaps represent a “fate worse than death.” Often, he wants to die. In Browning’s Dracula film, Bela Lugosi says, “To be dead, to be really dead, that would be wonderful!”

To maintain life, vampires usually have to suck blood from the living, which deprives them of a normal social life. Their creators usually give them other difficult restrictions and limitations, even bad breath. The living are always trying to kill them, and they watch their friends and family die over and over again. That is, a good deal of vampire literature continues the argument that a normal death is the best, after all. Almost all of it affirms belief in an other world beyond this one to which we may go after death, although this may not be strictly Christian. At least, vampire literature asks the question: What would you be willing to do to live forever?

Usually, often the vampire dies too. Most vampire literature makes the point that you are not going to get to live forever on earth anyway, so you had better find a way to deal with it.

So another way the vampire helps us to accept death on the personal level is by standing for a self that lives on. The vampire may live or die, but he is not a sniveling, humble, passive being who bows before death and accepts eternal submission. As a strong, assertive, willful, fully developed, and even rebellious self, the vampire affirms the strength and authority of the human soul. Poe’s willful vampire women, like Ligeia, suggest strongly that we carry our personal being and strength into the other world. This, I think, is a comforting thought for many.

Vampire literature also insists on strong ties between the past and the present. The vampire brings a sense of the living past and reminds us that that past still does live, just as our present will live on in the future.  The past is not dead; our past is not dead.

TheoFantastique: In your description of the vampire you mention part of the appeal for it is its undeadness, the ability to cross the boundary between life and death, its ability to overcome death, its being both human and supernatural, and its connection to the archetypal dying god. I find it interesting that some zombie fans have drawn connections between a resurrected Christ and a zombie Jesus coming from the tomb without the transformation of the body. As I read some of these aspects of vampiric appeal it dawned on me that this is similar to Christian claims for the resurrected Christ here as well. Am I off base?

Mary Hallab: I am not sure what you are referring to with “this.” Nor am I sure that you are equating zombies with vampires. In my book, I very carefully avoided zombies, who are not, as I understand it, conscious beings. I cannot imagine why they are so popular. Jesus seems to be fully conscious when he comes from the tomb. Moreover, this does not make him a vampire either or a zombie. He lives in a different context, that of a god, the Christian God.

To take a pagan example, Persephone lives in the other world part of the year. She is a seasonal dying goddess. But she is not a vampire. She is a Greek goddess. When we look at Greek literature, of course, any being who has immortality is a god or goddess, although maybe a minor one, even if she/he did not actually die at any point. Calypso on her little island is a goddess.

What kinds of connections did these zombie fans draw? What difference does it make? Perhaps in our Christian dualistic way of thinking, we are putting too much emphasis on the great gap between the material and the spiritual. This is where Christians get into trouble, isn’t it?

Of course, Jesus too is a dying god. Look at how he dies—on a tree, with a sword piercing his side. He dies every year at Easter and is born again then and at Christmas. The difference is that Christianity made his rebirth permanent, no longer marking a new season (only) but a new world.

TheoFantastique: I was struck in your book about the frequent critique you bring, and that the vampire brings, in the face of a dualistic Christianity. In your final chapter you write:

Like folklore vampires, most literary vampires are not Satan or opponents of the Christian God. Rather, they have become minor gods of the cycle of life and death in a modern folklore pantheon, often but not always explicitly subordinated to the Christian God. Thus, the vampire stands for both the power of death and the triumph of life. We often forget that, from folklore to the present, the vampire’s real crime is his excessive love of life on this earth, his refusal to give it up for some vague promise of bodiless immortality. It is not only the demonic and the dark of the vampire that appeals to us; it is the energy and vitality — and humanity — set against a religion that, at its very best, offers self-denying contemplation and a remote, unattainable, incomprehensible mystery.

Do you see the vampire developing historically and culturally in reaction to perceived shortcomings in Christianity as the dominant religious expression of various cultures?

Mary Hallab: Actually, no. The folkloric peasants were probably not reacting against anything, just taking care of their own needs through some useful old pagan beliefs that Christianity could not entirely wipe out, try as it might.  The vampire has developed as part of a complex of beliefs about death and the human soul, etc., some that fit very neatly into Christianity and some that do not.  This is the case of old wives’ magic, too, for example.  They were not trying to be heretics or rebels.  They were just trying to cure warts.

In the complex of beliefs about death, for example, the belief in the possible return of the dead could help to maintain family and community relations in a way that orthodox religion does not always provide for. We honor our elders, for example, because, if we don’t, they may come back for us.

But, you may argue that the Romantics, who developed and promoted the vampires as a literary figure were rebels.  Yes, Byron, the model for most modern vampires, starting with Polidori’s story “The Vampire,” was sort of a rebel.  But in his poem, “The Giaour,” the vampire is cursed for his antisocial behavior.  In Polidori’s tale that gave us Byron-as-Vampire on a platter, the vampire is a nasty bloodsucker, but is not a rebel against anything.

“Christianity as the dominant religious expression of various cultures” covers a lot of people and a lot of territory.  Vampires are mostly popular in European cultures, especially in America. Most people do not take them as religious figures. They are just fiction that allows us to fantasize and to speculate. Many of my students were good Christians and did not see any religious issues at all; instead they had fun with this spooky character and, I suspect, fantasized a bit about having supernatural powers and good looks and living forever.  Also, lots of vampires are really sexy (thanks to Byron, I suspect).

They did, however, want to talk about death. As a subgenre of Gothic literature in general and a development from the old “Graveyard School,” vampire literature may be a reaction to our refusal in our culture to deal with the “dark side,” that is, the unpleasant stuff, mainly death.  Introduce the topic of sex at a dinner party. Then introduce the topic of death. See which one gets you invited back again. No doubt the institutionalized religion goes along with this, contributing to the smarming up of death as much as possible. Perhaps the church could help people find ways not to ignore their dying parents—or not to pretend that they will not die. This is possibly a result of our usual dualistic thinking in which death has to become entirely spiritualized.

Of all the deaths that appear on television, very few are natural. We don’t believe in natural death. Death can be avoided, we think. We can prevent murders, prevent automobile accidents; if we stop smoking, eat a lot of vegetables, jog, etc., we will not die. If we don’t recognize it, maybe it will go away.

But the vampire tells us that death is not spiritual; it is very physical, usually very unpleasant. It lurks and waits. Some young people do want at least to know this.

TheoFantastique: Mary, thanks again for your book and this discussion. I hope this interview helps create greater interest in what you’ve written.

Those interested in picking up a copy of Vampire God can do so at this link in the TheoFantastique store.

On Halloween, like many horror and Halloween fans, I spent a good portion of my day enjoying various horror films on television. I had several options to choose from, but one station did a better job than others for my personal tastes in providing a series of worthy options, and that was Turner Classic Movies. Over the course of the day TCM played a number of interesting pieces, including one I remember seeing as a child that I always enjoyed but which receives little air time or critical recognition, Diary of a Madman, starring Vincent Price. Although the film’s host for TCM provided less than flattering commentary for the film, I hope to elevate the film with a little additional commentary, as well as an interesting piece of folkloric and paranormal connection.

Diary of a Madman debuted in 1963 and it tells the story Simon Cordier, a magistrate, played by Price, who has recently condemned a man to death for the senseless murder of several human beings. The man is scheduled to be executed, but prior to his death he askes to see Cordier to whom he tells again, as he did during his trial, that he was innocent of his crimes because some type of invisible entity took him over and forced him to kill. Cordier finds the claims ridiculous, as he did during the man’s trial, and suddenly the prisoner lunges out at the magistrate who fights back in defense, only to accidentally kill the prisoner. This sets the stage for a series of strange occurences for Cordier, who soon encounters an invisible creature called a Horla, the same entity that had possessed the prisoner who now controls the magistrate and causes him to commit murder.

As stated above, this film receives little replay on television these days, and little critical mention by horror fans or writers. While it may not rise to the level of some of Price’s other works, in this reviewer’s estimation it is a solid and entertaining piece of horror some forty six years later.

I discovered another item over the last week that connects to this film and another area of research interest for me. On Halloween, along with Gordon Melton, author of  The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, I was a guest on The Drew Marshall Show, Canada’s largest spiritual radio talk show, with the subject matter of the paranormal. Over the course of the program I was asked if I had ever had an experience that really scared me, and I told of my fears of what I believed to be an entity in my grandmother’s closet which would appear at night and render me unable to move or call out. My research into coming to grips with my childhood experiences as an adult overlaps with the writer who provided the inspiration for Diary of a Madman.

Diary of a Madman is based upon the novel Le Horla by Guy de Maupassant. Today I discovered de Maupassant’s own description of an experience similar to my own:

I sleep – for a while – two or three hours – then a dream – no – a nightmare seizes me in its grip, I know full well that I am lying down and that I am asleep… I sense it and I know it… and I am also aware that somebody is coming up to me, looking at me, running his fingers over me, climbing on to my bed, kneeling on my chest, taking me by the throat and squeezing… squeezing… with all its might, trying to strangle me. I struggle, but I am tied down by that dreadful feeling of helplessness which paralyzes us in our dreams. I want to cry out – but I can’t. I want to move – I can’t do it. I try, making terrible, strenuous efforts, gasping for breath, to turn on my side, to throw off this creature who is crushing me and choking me – but I can’t! Then, suddenly, I wake up, panic-stricken, covered in sweat. I light a candle. I am alone.

The experience of de Maupassant, which has been shared by innumerable people across cultures, and which may have formed the basis for Le Horla, and later Diary of a Madman, is often interpreted in light of the paranormal folklore of differing cultures. This phenomenon, known as sleep paralysis and sometimes called the “Old Hag” syndrome or phenomenon, may account for paranormal experiences across the centuries such as the incubus and succubus, some reports of spirit or demonic sexual attacks, and contemporary UFO abduction narratives. In terms of the latter, Paul Meehan, interviewed here previously on UFOs and psychic phenomenon in cinema, will write a guest review here on The Fourth Kind next week wherein sleep paralysis may play a factor in the analysis and explanation of this film.

So when my experiences and research efforts over the last week come together, it may be that a neglected piece of Vincent Price’s horror film work finds its origins in a physiological and psychological experience that we explain with reference to the paranormal.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I recently discovered an interesting academic source that explores horror and which I have included in my Exploring the Fantastic links, the Irish Gothic Horror Journal. This is a publication available in totality on the Internet, and as I reviewed the contents for various issues one of the items that caught my attention was an article by Finn Ballard titled “No Trespassing: The Post-Millennial Road-Horror Movie.”

In this article Ballard explores contemporary road-horror films and contrasts them with their origins in road-horror from the 1970s in films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). The characteristics of this subgenre of film involve “the centralisation of a group of generally young protagonists; the journey of this group into an unknown and hostile location, and its resulting encounter with a murderous, perverse and often interrelated clan of killers, preceding vile and gory consequence.” Ballard attributes the post-millennial revival of road-horror to Jeepers Creepers (2001), which in turn spawned films like Wrong Turn (2003), House of 1,000 Corpses (2003), and The Devil’s Rejects (2005).

One of the more interesting facets of Ballard’s discussion is the connection of road-horror to the folklore of the European Middle Ages, particularly in the the fairytale known as Warnmarchen, “which encompasses those stories that involved an act of transgression followed by a delineation of consequences.” With these origins, contemporary road-horror films are similar to another aspect of folklore studies, that of legend-tripping. Folklorist Bill Ellis discusses this in his helpful book Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture (University Press of Kentucky, 2004) when he mentions the legend-trip as “a set of cautionary legends that both warn of the danger of a site, and then functions as a dare to visit the very place and carry out the ritual that leads to danger.” When we consider that the primary audience for road-horror films are youth, as acknowledged by Ballard, then it is clear that road-horror functions in folklorish fashion both in an expression of warning related to the “dire consequences of straying from the path,” and also as a rite of passage for youth to undertake symbolically in conquering the trip through forbidden places by the act of viewing of such films.

Overall I greatly appreciate Ballard’s discussion of the topic, but I do have one disagreement. As previously mentioned he considers Jeepers Creepers the first of the post-millennial road-horror films. In my view Jeepers Creepers is better classified as either a modern monster movie connected to teen travels, or perhaps a combination of the traditional monster film with elements of road-horror. This would seem the best interpretation or classification in light of Ballard’s own discussion, not only in the characteristics of the sub-genre as noted above, but also where he contrasts teen slasher films and torture porn with road-horror and states that, “the villain of the road-horror is motivated primiarly by bloodust, and enacts the logic of the teen horror by dispatching those victims who commit misdemeanors by initiating sexual contact, consuming alcohol or drugs.” The creature of Jeepers Creepers does not fit this definition of the road-horror villain, and in light of other aspects of Jeepers Creepers and the road-horror sub-genre, is probably best understood as a postmodern treatment of older monster figures such as the demon or gargoyle.

Ballard’s article represents an interesting exploration of a sub-genre of horror. I have never been a fan of road-horror, either in the 1970s or the present. Nevertheless, this sub-genre is worth understanding, and Ballard suggests that these films are “the last remaining constitutor of ‘otherness’ in post-millennial America. The ultimate fear for contemporary cinemagoers is not that of discovering a refined psychopath living next door, but of being utterly isolated in an unnavigable environment, without recourse to rationality and to the tenets of modernity.”