Aliens R Us: Science Fiction and the Other

Sean Cubitt is Director of the Media and Communications Program at The University of Melbourne. With Zaiudin Sardar he is the co-editor of Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction Cinema (Pluto Press, 2002). As the subtitle indicates, this volume looks at various expressions of science fiction and how the genre has served as a vehicle which portrays the “other,” many times in less than flattering fashion, and in so doing, revealing the worst of Western cultures and those influenced by them. Sean shares his reflections on various aspects of this book in the following interview:

TheoFantastique: Sean, thank you for your willingness to discuss Aliens R Us. I have been a fan of science fiction since my youth, and your book provides helpful materials for reflection on it as an adult in what it tells us about ourselves and our culture. One facet of science fiction that Western consumers of the genre may not reflect on much is the type of culture and civilization it projects into space, the future, and as a representation of humanity. Your co-editor Ziauddin Sardar discusses this in the Introduction to your book with his mention of the “science” of sci fi being that of the “psyche of Western civilisation, its history, preoccupations and project of future domination..” He also notes that sci fi does not exist outside of Western civilisation. Why do you think the West has gravitated toward sci fi as a narrative structure for storytelling, and what does our lack of awareness of its Western emphasis (bias?) tell us about ourselves?

Sean Cubitt: We found in our research that this isn’t exactly the case. Japan is the obvious exception, but Hong Kong has some interesting examples, and there are films and narratives using science fiction devices scattered through Bollywood (e.g. Mr. India where the eponymous protagonist is invisible, a clear political allegory in the film) and Latin American poetic realism. But a major response we heard was “We don’t write about the future because it may never exist for us. Poverty makes you think about survival, not futures”. In the West, we have the long tradition of fantasy as well as science fiction operating as satire, in fact in many of the most famous literary examples (Orwell, Huxley, Zamyatin). What is strikingly western is the space opera, from Edgar Rice Burroughs and EE Doc Smith on down. Some of that is deeply entrenched in colonial attitudes, for example the proximity of Burroughs’ Mars books to his Tarzan cycle. My reading of Zia’s phrase is that the drive of capital in the west is towards not so much domination in the future as domination of the future: the drive to make the future subject to the present, to make it as much like the present as possible. This it shares with Stalinism: both rely on the Five year Plan to ensure that the future is not the future. These Western futures are characteristically either just like the present (Philip K Dick’s hypercapitalist Californias of the mind) or just like the past (all the empires, from Foundation to A.E. van Vogt). There’s an odd convergence between the satirical and the dominating trajectories: both use the future as a way of narrativising the present, though one does it to ensure continuation of the onward expansion of capital, and the other to undermine it, to say that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can usually see the satire, though frankly I always preferred the imaginative aspect over the political or ethical allegories, especially when I got into SF in a big way in my teens.

What we can’t see so much is the normative function of futuristic SF where the ideals carried into the future are so deeply our own – as say in the ‘new frontier’ rhetoric that was so inspiring in the Kennedy era ­it simply was the new frontier, and critiques that said this was a way of extending the terra nullius doctrine of a genocidally expanding US imperium over the indigenous native Americans to the future would have been at least churlish, and at worst incomprehensible.

TheoFantastique: Another interesting aspect of the Introduction was the recognition that texts like Frankenstein take “up the narrative thread where alchemists, magi and witches left off.” The book even raises the question as to “how important science actually is the genre.” Some have said that sci fiis really the stuff of fantasy and magic but with a thin veneer of technology. Why do you think, in general, that Westerners have been more comfortable with sci fi than fantasy and magic when we consider that there is very little that distinguishes the two subgenres, and that which does separate them is questionable at best?

Sean Cubitt: There is of course Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The continuum lies I think in the power of secrecy. In ancient times, we might like to think, everyone in the tribe shared in what knowledge there was, and all forms of knowledge,­ hunting and cooking techniques, stories of the gods, healing properties of herbs was equal. Under the regime of the temple, some of that knowledge was removed from the commons, and given special status. The Enlightenment tore open the gates but rapidly professionalised knowledge and turned it into specialism, replacing the temple priests with guilds of experts who separated their knowledge through arcane languages and rituals of initiation like university degrees. In the process we have diminished the ancient respect fro common knowledge ­how to make things, how to do stuff, any knowledge that can’t be expressed in the mathematical or jargon-clad language of specialisation. That’s why hunters and cooks rarely make it as heroes and heroines in SF where technocrats do. The hierarchy of knowledge is reflected in the automation of the kinds of knowledge we undervalue: cooking by ATM aboard the Enterprise!

TheoFantastique: Before we talk about a couple of sci fi staples in the form of film and television, a statement by Jan Mair in the book struck me in connection with the process of “Othering” that goes on in sci fi (and horror too). Mair states that “The pornography of spectacle reigns supreme, and we are all voyeurs now desperately seeking out images of the unthinkable and unspeakable.” I think this is certainly true in certain expressions of horror, such as so-called “torture porn,” or road-horror films. What is it about our late modern or postmodern condition and context in the West that contributes to our desire for voyeuristic spectacle?

Sean Cubitt: Jan is drawing on some critical concepts in European social theory of the last fifty years or so. Guy debord’s Society of the Spectacle argued that capital no longer circulated in the form of money (exchange value in the expert jargon of economics) but in signs: some US sociologists called them symbols, or noted a move to buying things for status rather than use. Reality, Debord went as far as to argue, is a sham: like the stage sets in some of Dick’s novels. We are all rats in a maze of adverts and logos. Jean Baudrillard picked up this theme in the 1970s and 80s. His take on pornography is that it is excessively visible. In the first instance, this means making things visible that are normally hidden like the sexual organs.

But like debord he went much further. The excess of visibility concerned making everything visible all the time, not just sex or violence but everything everyone does everywhere all the time. So the idea of seeking out the unspeakable is a way of forcing the excessive visibility, the pornography of everyday life, to reveal its limits. If we are all voyeurs, and if we all present ourselves as intimately visible, there have to be limits, or the system can’t function. That at least is the theory. But this theory is wrong. It’s based on the idea that western civilisation represses sexuality and violence. Sadly, this is the exact opposite of what’s really the case: the West has, in the entire period since the Enlightenment, devoted itself to genocide, torture and rape on a global scale, from slavery to the genocides in Latin America, Australia, NorthAmerica . . . in a process which continues today in untreated pandemics and the industrialisation of death by drugs. There’s a great SF novel waiting to be written about the connection between the US’s last remaining great industries: software, entertainment and armaments. (And just to balance that out, let’s recall that software and kalashnikovs are not that far apart either).

I’ver never really liked horror. Suspense maybe, but I’m too squeamish. And I think the reason may be that I’m the son of a doctor. My brother is a doctor too. I have the hugest respect for their profession, but no desire to enter it. The respect and the lack of training go hand in hand to produce ignorance on my part. I don’t think that’s entirely autobiographical. My belief is that fewer and fewer of us in the developed world, and perhaps especially the teenage boys who are the biggest market for horror, have any inkling what goes on under our epidermis. Women have a different experience: their bodies have been thoroughly medicalised. But ours aren’t. They are in fantasy at least entirely without orifices (whence the recurrent threat of anal penetration as demeaning and terrifying). Body horror plays on this fantasy of integrity. It shows us bodies inside out, with the wet parts on the outside. This triggers feelings of disgust and shame, feelings that can be conquered. the pleasures of horror are, I think, sociologically about conquering disgust and shame at our own bodies and their frailty. People who are closer to death, who live closer to animals, are used to killing them, who see people die at home rather than in secure, separate spaces surrounded by professionals, have no need for that management of emotion.

TheoFantastique: Let’s talk about a few specific sci fi films to draw out what they tell us about ourselves. Mair’s chapter discusses Independence Day. The film did well at the box office in 1996, but in critical reflection it presented images of America as world redeemer and stereotypical characterizations of African Americans, homosexuals, and women. How is it that we are able to Other our fear of alien invasion (extraterrestrial or terrestrial) but not recognize the Othering of our national bravado and stereotypes that reveal some of the worst aspects of the American psyche?

Sean Cubitt: I can’t really talk about the ‘we’ of North America. I lived in Montreal for four years, but French Canada is very much not America; and I spent a stint at the University of Chicago. An odd institution, packed with Nobel prize-winners, it’s situated in the heart of the South Side ghetto. You can’t help feeling that the US is an apartheid state there ­so talking about an American psyche seems odd to me, though from news reports and movies, etc. we non-norte americanos do have a sense of what you mean.

So let me come at it a different way: In the West today, we live in a deeply managed society. From traffic regulation to the management of crowd movements through malls and stations and airports; from statistical aggregation of behaviour to the management of supermarket stock, our societies work on probabilistic predictions that tomorrow will be pretty much the same as today – within statistical variations which themselves can be planned for. In this kind of world, action is incredibly difficult. It’s even more difficult because we are told over and over in our stories that only individuals can take action. But how can little me make an action that changes global warming? I can’t. We feel like action is impossible. In SF, action is possible, heroism, sacrifice, generosity, making a moral choice, changing the course of history.

The alien other in cinema is always a special effect (even if the effects are sometimes cheesy). In one perspective, the alien is a technological artifact of the cinema who has to be somehow brought into relation with the human part. That might simply be a matter of explaining. It might be a wonderful; marriage of the species, as in ET. Or in can come as conquering. I always thought of Independence Day as a remake of Dr. Strangelove: it is a comic pastiche of the kind of heroism we know that US presidents are absolutely incapable of. On the other hand, it might also be that like the Black presidents of the TV series 24, they point towards a future we all wish was going to come true ­ lots of commentators say it’s because of these fictional presidents that it became possible to imagine Obama in the White House. There’s no doubt that the aliens of Independence Day are images of the colonial relation, and as Native American artist Jimmie Durham says, the Indians are always shown as the ones who do the scalping, raping and burning, when historically it was the colonisers. A film that to me is far worse ideologically and morally is Mars Attacks, where we are invited to identify with the attackers, and in my mind to identify with Columbus and the Conquistadors, to laugh at how simply we can erase the colonised other.

Alien mvies were often said to be about fears of communist invasion. I always thought they were about fears of immigration. Catholics coming and breeding all over the place. Nice quiet applicants turning into gremlins the minute they hit Manhattan. It’s odd because some of the most generous-hearted and inspiring SF is about aliens: I’m thinking here of Brin’s Uplift saga, one of my favourites. Really convincingly specific species, but with the extraordinary capacity to help one another. I’m a bit of a softy, but I like my future to have a little hope in it.

TheoFantastique: Christine Wertheim’s chapter looks at the film Star Trek: First Contact. As a Star Trek fan going back to the original series as a kid this was perhaps the most enjoyable chapter for me, and yet the most troubling in terms of the discussion of the human relationships with The Borg and with the android Data. Throughout the lifetime of the Star Trekfranchise it has claimed to present an idealized expression of future humanity that has “arrived” and moved beyond 20th and 21st century foibles. And yet Wertheim points out that in the character of Data the Other is the machine who seeks to be human, and yet in Data’s quest for humanity it is usually a quest that is only tolerated by humans when it is convenient, as in the example of Data expressing the emotion of fear generated by his emotion chip, and yet Picard suggests (commands?) he turn it off until a more convenient time. Doesn’t the Othering of Commander Data reveal, at least in part, our continuing struggle to come to grips with our interactions with technology, and in particular, issues related to the trans-human?

Sean Cubitt: Absolutely. Data is fascinating. He’s there in the same way Spock functioned in the original series: so there was someone to whom the others could explain what it is to be human. That seemed to be the central purpose of the first two ST‘s. In the best of the movies, First Contact, there’s a stunning scene when Data gets a skin graft from the Borg Queen. You could read that for weeks and still be extracting new layers of meaning and social significance, from the sexualisation of technology (and vice versa) to theories of humanity’s specifically sensual mode of cognition, and on and on. Again, the technology of cinema is driven to daring escapades to pull off the illusion, and part of the fun is that we in the audience are both convinced by the story and at the same time connoisseurs of the special effects. In one way every human actor who appears on a cinema or TV screen is a hybrid of human and technology. And of course actors don’t ‘really’ feel the emotions of their characters: they already have an emotion chip!

Then again it’s fascinating to think of Data in terms of Fanon’s analysis of the experience of being colonised; to be constantly aware that you will always be “un noir” before you are or can be anything else. Data has all the qualities of Fanon’s colonised people ­ except their desire to rise up.

In the Cantos, Ezra Pound says something like “I don’t know how they can stand it / with a painted paradise at the end of it all / without a painted paradise at the end of it all”. SF strikes me like that. The utopias it offers are usually just pretty pictures, and we know they are, but we need those pretty pictures to hope. Hope is believing that the future will be different. Not knowing what it will be or how it will be different, just knowing it will be. Much of the time, the management of capital suggests we have no alternative except Armageddon. SF says no. That’s why I think Vivian Sobchack is right in Screening Space when she says the starfield is the science fiction image of all images, the highest, the most open to all possibilities. The satire, at its best, is razor sharp about what’s wrong with today. But what’s most inspiring is the sense not only that the future can be utterly otherwise, but that we can make it so (to coin a phrase). Without going to the descriptive lengths of an Olaf Stapledon, we can sense, in those images of deep space, the capacity of our species to be utterly different to what it is today. Transhuman themes are for the most part satirical. But in some deft moments like the skin raft sequence, we can sniff at a more indefinite and infinitely more inspiring future.

TheoFantastique: Sean, thank you again for discussing this book. I found its chapters intriguing, and they added new considerations to my reflection on science fiction.

Sean Cubitt: And thanks to you for a great site.

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown Documentary – Director Frank Woodward Interview

The special Halloween double issue of Rue Morgue magazine included a number of interesting features, as usual, but one which caught my eye was a description of a new documentary on titled Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Wyrdstuff Productions, 2008). This fim was directed and produced by Frank Woodward, and after getting in touch he graciously and enthusiastically talked about this production.

TheoFantastique: Frank, thanks for making this great documentary, and for allowing me to screen it for this interview. How did you come to develop a personal fascination with Lovecraft and how did it lead to this documentary coming about?
 
Frank Woodward:  I first became aware of Lovecraft like most people, I expect.  It was the Call of Cthulhu role playing game, mainly the monsters within.  I’ve always been a monster fan and who could resist the tentacled beasties in CoC.

That led to my reading some of the major stories… Call of Cthulhu, Pickman’s Model, Rats In The Walls.  I have to admit, though, that my Lovecraftian knowledge was basic. 

The desire to make a documentary was a more recent one.  I occasionally produce DVD extras for Anchor Bay.  There was discussion of doing a short bio of Lovecraft for the Re-Animator special edition.  It didn’t happen for various reasons.  By the time that decision was made, however, I had done quite a bit of research on the man.  In some way I experienced what many of the people who’ve seen the documentary experienced.  I was reminded how much I enjoyed Lovecraft’s work and wanted to throw myself headlong into learning more. 

Making this documentary was almost like a college course. I think that’s how all documentaries should be made.  They should be a journey of discovery.  The desire to learn all you can is why you bother making the film in the first place.

The other thing that really brought Lovecraft about was the response I received from Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, and Peter Straub.  They were the first people we approached and all three were generous and passionate enough to sit down and talk about Lovecraft for an hour.  Peter Straub even allowed us to interview him in his home.

But, by the time they said ‘yes’, the plans to make a DVD featurette had fizzled.  So here I was with Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro and Peter Straub all willing to be in a piece about Lovecraft, but there was no more piece.  That’s when my producing partners Jim Myers and William Janczewski said, “Let’s just do it ourselves.”  So Wyrd was formed and Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown became our first documentary.

TheoFantastique: You have assembled an interesting group of commentators that provide their perspectives on Lovecraft. How did you assemble this group, and specifically, how did Guillermo Del Toro and John Carpenter come to be involved with this project?
 

Frank Woodward: I think each and every person we interviewed agreed to be a part of the film because they love Lovecraft.  It helped that they were also fans because, like many true genre fans, we delve into our favorite subjects and discuss them with others.

For the most part, the only thing we had to do was ask.  Obviously we had gained some respectability once Gaiman, Straub and others came aboard.

In the case of Guillermo, I first approached him at Comic Con in San Diego.  He had just told a packed hall about his plans for At The Mountains Of Madness (I believe he told us that we would cry and masturbate in a corner once we saw the designs he had in mind for the Elder Scientists – he’s right, by the way).  Guillermo said ‘yes’ there and then, but it took a lot of phone calls to actually schedule the interview.  This was right before Pan’s Labyrinth was nominated for a few Oscars so he was understandably busy.  Thanks to an assist from Andrew Migliore, the director of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and an associate producer on the film, we finally arranged a date.

John Carpenter was also made possible with Andrew’s help.  Andrew wanted to honor Carpenter with a Howie Award at the festival.  Carpenter couldn’t physically make it so Andrew arranged with me to help videotape an acceptance speech.  We timed our request to interview Carpenter for the documentary with this taping.  Carpenter was more than willing to answer a few questions.

This passion for all things Lovecraft was also responsible for convincing artists like John Coulthart, Paul Carrick, Tom Sullivan, Paul Komoda and others you’ll see in the film to loan us their work.  It also put me in touch with Mars, the film’s composer.  Mars put 30-plus years of being a dedicated cultist into the film’s score and I think you can tell.

TheoFantastique: You have screened this film at various festivals and conventions to the delight of audiences. Can you share some of these locations, how it has been received by viewers, and the awards you’ve won as a result?
 

Frank Woodward:  We’ve screened Lovecraft in Los Angeles (Shriekfest), San Diego (Comic Con), Portland (H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival), Erie, PA (The Eerie Horror Film Festival), Fargo (The Fargo Fantastic Film Festival), Sacramento (The Land Beyond), Montreal (Cinema du Parc) and Buenos Aires (Rojo Sangre).

We won Best Documentary at Comic Con.  That was all kinds of cool. Montreal’s Cinema du Parc gave us a week-long theatrical run in collaboration with the Fantasia Film Festival.  We’ve also received nice write ups in Rue Morgue, Dread Central, Horror.com and the Montreal press.

Audience reaction has been very positive.  Obviously fans of Lovecraft have the strongest reactions.  I’ve had a few people thank me for making the film.  One guy was so thrilled that he had something to show his wife and say, “See?  This is why he’s so important.”  I’ve also been receiving wonderful emails from people in Montreal.  Lovecraft fans are legion.

Even people who don’t appreciate Lovecraft’s writing have been complimentary.  I mean, you have to admit that the man, for all his eccentricities, is a captivating subject.
 
TheoFantastique: As the film concludes it notes how Lovecraft died in relative obscurity as a writer, and yet it also touches on the incredible influence of his writings on the horror genre as well as various parts of pop culture. Can you touch on some of these?
 
Frank Woodward:  The obvious aspects of pop culture that bear the mark of Lovecraft are the ones discussed in the film.  Alien and The Thing have definite ties to At The Mountains Of Madness.  Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean is clearly Cthulhu spawn.  Hellboy takes place in a Lovecraftian universe.  You also have the entire Chaosium line of RPGs and board games.

You can also see a fondness for tentacles on line.  Sites like Boing-Boing.net, Ectoplasmosis and i09 frequently have posts about Cthulhu inspired art, films and plush toys.

There’s also loose references to be found in Batman (Arkham Asylum), The Evil Dead movies (Necronomicon), Peter Jackson’s Fellowship Of The Ring (if the Watcher in the Lake outside the gates of Moria isn’t an Old One, I don’t know what is) and lost world stories such as King Kong.  Caitlin Kiernan pointed out the Kong connection to me.  I believe we posted a YouTube video about it.  They may not be as apparent as the ones in Hellboy, but the similarities do make you wonder.
 
TheoFantastique: Why do you think a man who was haunted by his own personal demons of various types has become one of the most influential horror writers of our time?
 
Frank Woodward: Lovecraft didn’t write stories about standard monsters like vampires and werewolves.  He invented his own universe with creatures unlike anything writers were conjuring at the time.  To paraphrase Guillermo, I think anytime someone creates a rich mythology like the Cthulhu mythos, it’s hard not to take notice.

The cosmic chaos at the heart of Lovecraft’s work is also something that resonates with people.  It’s the whole idea that mankind, for all of his accomplishments, is insignificant in the face of what may lie beyond.  If you go through any sort of existential period in your life, the thoughts Lovecraft expresses in his stories may suddenly make sense to you.

There’s also the unexplained.  For me (and many other horror aficionados), it’s the things we can’t describe that frighten us the most.  The things we don’t understand.  I mean, once you explain a monster or shadow, it doesn’t seem as scary. 

Think of the first people to experience a tiger.  Before its mystery was explained, a tiger was a striped demon with a thirst for human blood striking from the shadows of the jungle.  Before… it was a supernatural monster.  After… it was another big cat. It became something you could deal with… more or less.

The best horror doesn’t explain itself.  This is a lesson Lovecraft taught us.
 
TheoFantastique: What does the future hold for Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown in terms of future film festivals and wider distribution? Any chance it might get picked up by a national distributor or perhaps be shown on places like Bio, Chiller, or the Sci Fi channels?
 
Frank Woodward: I think we’re done with the festival circuit (though we did submit to Sundance and Slamdance, just in case).  Now our focus is on distribution.  Obviously we would love to have the film handled by a major distributor.  We have screeners at many such places. 

With regards to cable, we’re talking to the usual suspects.  Believe it or not, Sci-Fi Channel has already passed.  They passed on Doctor Who initially so we’re in good company.   Maybe they’ll reconsider.

Documentaries in general are a tough sell. One way or another, though, Lovecraft will be available to people soon. You can check our blog at www.wyrdstuff.com for updates on our crusade. 

TheoFantastique: Any plans for the next documentary or project through Wyrd Productions?
 
Frank Woodward:  Wyrd is currently editing a piece called The Splat Pack.  It was a term coined by British film critic Alan Jones to describe the new wave of horror filmmakers such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Darren Lynn Bousman.  Whether you respond to their brand of horror or not, these filmmakers were responsible for reviving R rated horror and showing Hollywood that such films could be well crafted as well as profitable.  The Splat Pack will most likely be our first foray into internet distribution.

We’re also in production on a non-genre themed documentary.  Something about a way of life in America that has come and gone.  That’s all I can say at the moment.

I’d love to do another piece on the weird tales genre.  Possibly something on Weird Tales magazine itself.  First things first, though.  Our primary goal is to get Lovecraft out in the world.
 
TheoFantastique: Frank, thanks again for this great work. I hope this film is disseminated as widely as possible and that more people become aware of the significance of Lovecraft to the fantastic in popular culture.

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown can be watched for free online here.

Van Norris: Surrealism in American Animation

A number of research sources have provided a variety of things to think about in my exploration of deeper levels to the fantastic. One thought provoking source was David Skal’s book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (Faber & Faber, 2001) where, among other things, he argued for a connection between horror films and Surrealism. Since I read that I have felt that this connection, as well as the influence of Surrealism in pop culture in general, is worth further exploration. I was therefore pleased to come across a book on this topic edited by Graeme Harper and Rob Stone, titled The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Wallflower Press, 2006). The contributors to this volume look at Surrealism in a variety of cinematic expressions, and one chapter that caught my eye dealt with the surrealistic influence in American animation in the early twentieth century. The chapter was authored by Van Norris of the School of Creative Arts, Film, and Media from the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. Mr. Norris spoke with me recently about the focus of his chapter, and his current PhD research.

TheoFantastique: Van, thank you for discussing your contribution to The Unsilvered Screen. How did you come to develop your interest in both American animation and Surrealism, and how did you connect the two in your research?

You’re welcome! I studied Classical animated forms during my undergraduate dissertation years back in the early 1990s, which in turn fed through the Masters programme completed in the late 1990s on animation aesthetics within American film and I’m currently completing a PhD thesis, ‘Drawing on the British Tradition’ on UK Television animation forms, that contextualises contemporary British social and cultural attitudes within mainstream settings and how these interact with extant ideas on comedy forms and narratives. Having long had an interest in how Surrealism is managed within mainstream cinema and throughout aspects of popular culture it struck me that many critics flirt with how these principles can be observed working in popular animation in a broad assumptive sense but often they seem to be perhaps more confident in discussing Surrealism separately and less specific or accurate when referring to the cartoons themselves in any detail – and indeed this occurs vice versa with animation scholars. What also is apparent when mapping surrealist impulses onto such works that the contexts are constantly shifting due to the nature of production circumstances, authorship situations etc so it is apparent that there is still much work to be done on how the form is read and misread in these contexts and I have to say this still all feels like just the beginning of moving towards a truly comprehensive understanding of how this is mapped out, historically, culturally, industrially and textually.

TheoFantastique: For the benefit of readers, can you define “Surrealism” as an artistic movement, and can you share your thoughts on how this came to be an influence in pop culture, including in animation?

Surrealism is a concept that, as The Unsilvered Screen highlights in each chapter, has become somewhat devalued and often misinterpreted in today’s culture. It’s a school of thought that seeks to discuss what lies beneath the surface of our reality (hence the ‘sur’ – meaning under) and expresses the dialogues of the subconscious, the hidden desires and feelings that we don’t express in our daily lives. It does so by using images represented through an adherence to photographic realism and placing them together in incongruous contexts or to produce a disturbing outcome. Andre Breton coined the term in his manifesto in 1924 and relied on a technique called ‘automatism’ by which he would detail unmediated, uncensored, unstructured thought onto a page. He deployed this tool to access what he saw as ‘the truth’ that lay beneath what he saw as the bourgeois construction that was ‘reality’. This unmediated approach to art construction thus offers up images that Breton felt should feed out of our dream landscapes and that then supposedly reveal interior narratives and produce ideas that should be, (if to be regarded as true surrealism) ‘shocking and disturbing’.

The fact that Surrealism has pervaded art to literature to film is hardly surprising. Contemporary culture has absorbed, appropriated and quoted so much of Andre Breton’s original conception that over the 20th century it’s become but one of Western society’s key background narratives. And the shifts in contemporary morality, the expansion of modern media and our late modern fragmentary take on visual culture have all contributed to a ‘flattening out’ and in fact a corruption what was originally an incredibly subversive form.

TheoFantastique: In your chapter you discuss animated cartoons that were used as “fillers” along with newsreels between double features at the cinema. It might be a surprise to some readers to think of these as serious art forms that, as you write, “responded to and articulated a range of complex ideas.” What types of cultural ideas were the animated features in the 1930s and 1940s responding to, and how did Surrealism play a part in that exploration?

Van Norris: In terms of American animation (and in the context of the chapter I’m thinking more about popular Classical forms of the 30s and 40s here) this has arguably always been a form that has flirted with what are in fact related types of dialogues, those which manage incongruous imagery, subversions of a given ‘reality’ and actualise internal desires through visual representations. This can be seen from the early works of J. Stuart Blackton through to Otto Messmer and his 1920s incarnation of ‘Felix the Cat’. Although due to the commercial nature of the form the degrees to how ‘shocking and disturbing’ these can be is obviously compromised.

The cartoon filler is also a form which has since its origins processed popular culture and replayed aspects of it in the public realm continually (see Messmer’s citation of Hollywood, celebrity, industry, the star-system and genre in the 1923 ‘Felix Goes to Hollywood’ for example). I think, using the Warners animation as a more detailed example, they were attempting to define an identity away from the monolithic success of the Disney ‘Silly Symphony’ shorts of the 1930s. In their ‘Looney Tunes’ and ‘Merrie Melody’ cartoons that emerged in the late 1930s they seized on the fact that popular culture, film, radio and literary references went down very well with their proletariat audience base. And often this went beyond mere quotation and moved into parodying items such as a then ongoing media-managed feud between broadcasters and radio personalities, Walter Winchell and Ben K. Bernie in Friz Freleng’s ‘Coo-Coonut Grove’ (1936) through to the compendium of references that mock contemporary values in Bob Clampett’s 1946 ‘Book Revue’ to Frank Tashlin’s 1944 ‘Swooner Crooner’, which is a cartoon that satirises both the entertainment industry through the presentation of a passive audience dominated by manufactured singers and, with the wry positioning of the Porky Pig character, the efforts of wartime industrial profiteers.

Now, animation is a form that crosses boundaries with cinema and art practice and, (like film itself), is preoccupied with continually transgressing recorded realities and thus makes it an obvious platform for the Surrealist. Importantly Franklin Rosemont also talks about how much impact artists like Salvador Dali had on the American psyche throughout the 1930s, whose own work was regarded by the original Surrealists as a somewhat bowdlerized take on the form that was dominated by commerce, self-promotion and was defined by a rationalisation, somewhat shorn of the original movement’s political intent. The Classical animators were all undoubtedly aware of this strand of thinking consciously and unconsciously and its no surprise that aspects of it informed their work. How much of it can be defined as truly ‘surreal’ is another question. And how this form has contributed to this corruption in terms is still another that requires a larger amount than 8000 words to fully assess.

TheoFantastique: How did Warner Brothers studios and their Looney Tunes draw upon Surrealism?

In terms of Surrealism much of Warner’s output dallied with the odd image or juxtaposition of incongruous ideas which appeared to be a stock in trade within Tex Avery’s early work before he left the company in 1941. Bob Clampett’s 1938 ‘Porky in Wackyland’ is perhaps the most celebrated cartoon of the period which explicitly allies itself to what appears a surrealistic register. I think of it as almost an untutored raw misreading of surrealism. In its attempt to push the boundaries of the form, (a preoccupation of Clampett’s) the short contains nods towards the popular misconception of surrealism that had entered the public sphere but also melded aspects of the absurd, (in itself a more nihilistic register) with the surreal by appropriating incongruous pairings of landscape details, using melted clocks in backgrounds and positing images of decay and death – yet in fact removing any potential deeper resonances. Through the combinations of naturalist, Absurdist, expressionist and cinematic grammar, in the flattening out of key surrealistic images and the fragmentary approach to narrative the film is in many ways an ironic, almost Lyotardian commentary on art practice, commerce and indeed popularised understandings of surrealism itself, which through time, cultural factors and simple geography was already moving away from the original Bretonian impulse. The aspects of the surreal here are posited as quotation. Its slickness and knowing quality mark it out with a kind of ‘distance’.

TheoFantastique: How did the Looney Tunes’s use of Surrealism compare with that of the Fleischer Brothers?

Van Norris: First Wave Austrian-Jewish immigrants, The Fleischer Brothers were making less polished shorts than Disney in the early 1930s but still were very highly regarded. These were animations that, too, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with popular cultural and mass audiences of the period. Often their works presented a slightly less ironic sense of knowing cultural quotation than exhibited by Warners. This process was often restricted to inserting jazz songs by Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong into narratives at odd moments and included bizarre unexplained appearances such as Frederic March’s incarnation as Mr. Hyde from Reuben Mamuolian’s 1932 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story in the finale of Betty Boop M.D (1932) – these are moments that jar and unsettle as much as operate as winks at the intended audience. The shorts also consciously and unconsciously referenced the values, mortality and the experiences of adult life in 1930s urban New York, they demonstrated a rougher, grittier, saltier aesthetic than Walt Disney’s folksy farmyard view of America and one which predicted the free-form cultural riffing of Warners.

Mark Langer refers to the pre-Hayes Code intervention ‘Betty Boop/Talkartoons’ shorts (1930-1933) as being pretty much all about “sex and death” and he’s right, in that whilst Clampett steers well clear of the really disturbing areas, The early Fleischer shorts are a miasma of distorted bodies, phallic objects, vaginal openings, fluid uncontrollable metamorphoses, inconsistent compostional sensibilities, dislocated sounds and all are contained within fractured dream-like narratives that exist as arranged sequences that appear as some kind of half-recalled afterthought. ‘Bimbo’s Initiation’ (1931) is an amazingly complex short which exemplifies this and replicates the dream state entirely through its subversions of space and time. Intriguingly it’s a film that is immersed in all sorts of Freudian totems that suggest acknowledgements around male performance anxieties and about becoming an ‘adult’ as much as any extension of what is permissible in terms of demarcating cartoon space. Like a number of films produced by the studio through this fertile period from ‘Old Man of The Mountain’ (1932) to ‘Is My Palm Read’ (1932) to the celebrated 1933 ‘Snow White’, it’s actually genuinely disturbing in places – which surely the pre-requisite of any surrealistic work. Clampett is more interested in popular culture while the Fleischers exhibit a more explicitly surrealistic approach. This is as much down to the haphazard ways they created their cartoons as it was their favouring of fusing a distinctly European approach to cartoon making to American industrial expectations.

TheoFantastique: In your chapter you also talk about the significance of Walt Disney’s animation, but he did not draw upon surrealism so much as his contemporaries. Where did Disney express Surrealism, and why did his expression of animation not draw upon it in greater ways?

Van Norris: There is something of a myth here, (and which I suspect the downplaying of Disney’s role within popular surrealistic animation in my own chapter in the book is adding to this!) in that the studio rejected this and other high art avant-garde practices. I think the rejection of a directly Bretonian register in such a commercial avenue would have had to have been inevitable as those ideas don’t really correspond with what Paul Wells refers to as the ”folksy Republicanism” that informs the studio’s overall ethos. However Disney experimented with limited/smear animations, abstract forms (which were tellingly rationalised beyond recognition in his 1940 ‘Fantasia’) and surrealism itself through his collaboration with Dali on the remarkable ‘Destino’ project began in 1945, but was never completed. All of this was laudable and certainly progressive in intent but inevitably appeared to be undermined by Disney’s own highly compromised nature as part artist and part business-man. Disney, like Clampett at Warners, seems happier to contain moments which conform to aspects of surrealistic practice (that occasionally could shock and disturb) within dream sequences, extreme moments and as contained within some space away from the universe in which his central characters operate. Which again points to this larger issue that often, as Rosemont points out, American art feels the need to quantify the irrational and the unexplained in terms of form and theme – that such a resolutely European idea as Surrealism inevitably would become transformed into something altogether less contentious.

TheoFantastique: Van, again, thanks for your discussion of an interesting topic. I hope it will give animation and Surrealism fans alike new things to think about.

Van Norris: Thank you.

Stephen King: Horror, Politics, Theology and Other Social Commentary

It is amazing to me how serious social commentary surfaces in films that are often dismissed as mere entertainment. A recent post from the message board for the Popular Culture Association that touched on research resources supporting the idea that popular cultural texts, such as Stephen King’s horror writings, now have become sources for articulating theological and theodical issues (a defense of God’s justice in the face of evil), led to my surfing the Internet today looking for my favorite clip from the film adaptation of King’s The Mist. Not only are King’s writings, and those of other writers of the fantasic and other forms of popular fiction expressive of the theological and theodical, they also find application to our political processes. We live in a time of great political and economic change and turmoil. Watching the clip associated with this post raises flags of warning for American culture, not only for the dangers posed by religion run amok, but for politics as well. We need to be careful not to create or become the monsters we fear and hope to keep in the closet, or at least under our beds. I do not offer these thoughts as a critique of any particular political party or commentary on the outcome of our recent election. Instead, consider this brief post food for thought in reflections on our election process and the great distance we have yet to travel as a country through the challenges we face at home and abroad.

Joshua Bellin: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation

I have read many books and academic articles that probe deeply into horror and science fiction film, television, and literature, but rarely can such analysis be found related to fantasy. For those interested in such an exploration seek no more. Joshua Bellin has done us a great service, providing us with both an academic exploration and a treat for fantasy film enthusiasts. Bellin is part of the School of Arts and Sciences at LaRoche College, and he is the author of a number of books including Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Thankfully he loves to talk about monsters and fantasy film, and he made some time to discuss these as they relate to his book’s thesis.

TheoFantastique: Josh, thanks for writing your book and addressing fantasy films. Some of what follows in our discussion as you flesh out your book’s thesis may be a bitter pill to swallow for some readers. So let’s begin where you begin in your book. Even though you offer a critique of fantasy films as perpetuating problematic social and cultural phenomenon, you are a fantasy film fan. In fact, the original King Kong is your favorite film. Can you share a little of your appreciation for fantasy films, and how this is nevertheless connected to an academic analysis of what might be considered the “dark side” of this genre?

Josh Bellin: I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t a fan of fantasy film. I’ve tended to mark watershed moments in my life via the fantasy films current at the time: Star Wars came out when I was on the verge of my teen years, Jurassic Park appeared just before I got married, The Fellowship of the Ring coincided with my first full-time academic job, and so on.But King Kong was special.I first saw it when I was five years old, and it absolutely changed my life.The combination of amazing visuals and compelling narrative gripped me, inspired me, made me believe that the world was alive with mystery and wonder.I drew books of monsters (most of them looking exactly like Kong!), I dreamed of becoming a stop-motion artist, I drafted countless (unfinished) fantasy novels.In a way, I think my love of fantasy led me to academia; my passion for research and teaching reflects my belief in transcendence, in limitless possibility, and this belief in turn can be traced to my lifelong love affair with worlds of fantasy.

But as I’ve grown, and as my academic training has encouraged me to read literary and cultural texts closely and critically, I’ve become more reflective about fantasy films and my own relationship to them.I’ve come to believe that fantasy films, as cultural texts, are invariably connected to their social, historical, and political contexts, which means they’re also connected to the prevailing prejudices of their time and place.And I’ve had to ask myself how I can love films that frequently promulgate social attitudes I find repugnant: racism, sexism, mistreatment of the mentally and physically different, and so forth.That was the germ of my book: asking myself that question, which is really a moral question more so than an academic question.So this book is the most personal of all my books, the one that touches not only on my research interests but on my history, my self-definition, and my sense of purpose as a human being.Because after all this, I’m still a diehard fan, and that means I need to reconcile my very different personal and professional responses to these films.

TheoFantastique: Can you summarize the thesis of your book?

Josh Bellin: The book’s thesis grows out of the question I just posed: how can I—or more broadly, how can we, as individuals and as members of past and present societies—be so strongly attracted to films that often promote our worst qualities rather than our best?My answer is that fantasy films are particularly adept at representing these negative qualities in ways that insulate viewers from recognizing them or, more specifically, from taking responsibility for them.Because fantasy films can so easily be dismissed as “pure” or “escapist” entertainment, because viewers and reviewers alike tend to divorce fantasy films from social and historical reality, such films become ideal sites for harboring the social and historical beliefs we most wish to distance ourselves from.So when Depression-era viewers watched Kong, which I situate within the context of twentieth-century racism and segregation, they were able to luxuriate in feelings of fear and hatred toward African Americans while simultaneously denying that they held such attitudes or that the film reinforced them.But of course, that’s what makes these films particularly powerful vehicles of social alienation, the phrase I use to suggest the whole range of processes by which marginalized groups are stereotyped, victimized, and scapegoated: fantasy films’ resistance to critical scrutiny enables them to perpetuate loathsome social ideologies under the guise of “harmless entertainment.”

I should also say here—and this has helped me in my own struggle to reconcile my feelings about fantasy films—that the very qualities that make these films such powerful vehicles of alienation can also make them vehicles of liberation: because the genre is steeped in histories of alienation, it can become a fertile ground for investigating, critiquing, and rejecting such histories.

TheoFantastique: You drew upon certain fantasy films as you argued for your thesis, including King Kong, The Wizard of Oz, Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad trilogy, and Jurassic Park. How are you defining fantasy in relation to sci-fi and horror films, and why did you select these films as illustrative of your thesis?

Josh Bellin: First, I tend not to draw hard-and-fast lines between fantasy, science fiction, and horror; I feel that there are too many conceptual problems in these generic definitions for them to be useful.Just to cite one example: what does one do with a film like Aliens?It’s science fiction, right?But it’s also a monster movie—so I guess it’s also either horror or fantasy, depending on where you fall on that ill-defined difference.You’ll see critics tie themselves into verbal knots trying to prove that these are three distinct genres—yet they always end up admitting that there are exceptions to whatever definitions they propose, and once the exceptions start to outweigh the orthodox examples, you realize that the definitions are attempting to create something that doesn’t exist in reality.It ultimately collapses into tautology: fantasy films become films that possess whatever qualities the particular critic defines as characteristic of fantasy.

That being said, my choice of films was guided by my desire to select films that seemed particularly unlikely candidates for the sort of social/cultural analysis I was conducting—films, that is, that have typically been treated as pure flights of fancy.I figured that if I could demonstrate that even these films are rooted in particular histories of social alienation, readers would be more inclined to see the value of my thesis than if I’d chosen more obvious, transparent, or critic-friendly films.But that also means that I’m courting a certain degree of reader resistance; though many readers would readily agree that a film like Blade Runner (which I don’t discuss in the book) speaks to a range of social issues, they might find it hard to believe that The Wizard of Oz was every bit as pertinent to its historical contexts as Blade Runner is to ours.But that was the challenge of writing this book: making an argument that fantasy films are socially relevant rather than socially redundant.And the payoff is that if the reader finds my analysis convincing, it’s a lot more powerful of an “a-ha!” moment than if I’d gone with more immediately plausible examples.

TheoFantastique: In the Introduction of your book you note that while sci-fi and horror films have been subject to academic scrutiny for their deeper levels of meaning, including the portrayal of the social other, fantasy films have been given a pass. Why is this, and what assumptions have been operating in fantasy films that aren’t present in the analysis of the cousin genres?

Josh Bellin: As I said before, critics have tried to distinguish fantasy, science fiction, and horror as distinct genres.In particular, they’ve tended to define fantasy and science fiction as simple antitheses.Sci-fi, according to this line of argument, relates in specific and identifiable ways to its social contexts; fantasy, by contrast, represents that which falls outside the social contexts of its time, that which is “timeless” or “archetypal” or “mythological.”Needless to say, I don’t buy this argument, which I think is both schematic and reductive.It not only fails to recognize that all cultural productions operate on multiple levels—the historical, the topical, the psychological—but it quite cavalierly categorizes as “fantasy” whatever the critic can’t connect to the social contexts of its time.To return to the example I used earlier, there’s no film so regularly dismissed (or exalted) as “pure fantasy” than The Wizard of Oz; critics either see it as an innocent children’s film or, at best, as an escapist vehicle for Americans caught in the throes of the Great Depression.But as I demonstrate in the second chapter of my book, The Wizard of Oz relates in quite overt and tangible ways to discourses of technological utopianism and class conflict that were pervasive during the 1930s.We don’t see these relationships today because we’ve lost the cultural context in which the film was originally viewed.But with a little historical archeology, reconstructing the era in which the film first appeared, those connections become manifest—in fact, they become so obvious and inescapable, you’re amazed you didn’t see them before.And what’s more, if you look at Oz this way, it becomes apparent that what we call a “fantasy” today would have struck Depression-era audiences as science fiction!So when you do this kind of historical research, you recognize very quickly that the separation of fantasy from its cousin genres simply doesn’t hold water; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and an excuse to avoid analysis rather than an analytical tool.

TheoFantastique: In your first chapter you begin with your favorite film, King Kong. At times the film is interpreted as escapist entertainment during the Depression, but you frame it within its “historical and cultural matrix” and thus connect it to the racism of the time. What was the racial situation in 1930s America, and how is some of this coded in the visuals and storyline of the film?

Josh Bellin: The 1930s were a period of great racial tension and transformation in America.In the South, lynch law was coming to a gory end, as its excesses were becoming the targets of journalistic exposés and legal challenges.In the North, meanwhile, the demographics of the region’s cities were undergoing significant changes, as thousands of African Americans from the rural South were relocating to the urban North.So throughout the nation, systems of racial apartheid were becoming strained, and this brought about a predictable backlash by the dominant culture in its attempt to reinforce the practices of de facto and de jure segregation that appeared to be under assault.The backlash manifests itself variously, in everything from racist representations of African Americans in minstrel shows to the rise of the eugenics movement to the mushroom growth of the KKK.I see King Kong as arising from that social climate: it’s not simply an “allegory” about enslavement, as James Snead has argued, but a film that speaks in very specific ways to the fears and anxieties of its time.Viewed historically, Kong becomes a film about protecting the privileges of white society against an overwhelming black threat; the golden woman, Ann Darrow, becomes at once a symbol of white womanhood carried off by a black ravisher and a signifier of imperiled white power and privilege.And in this context, the state-sponsored violence unleashed against Kong becomes justified as society’s necessary and appropriate response to quell such a monstrous threat.

TheoFantastique: Eric Greene makes a similar argument in his book for racism surfacing in the Planet of the Apes films, another collection of favorites of mine. Why do you think we tend not to see these elements?

Josh Bellin: The simple answer would be that we don’t want to see them, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that.But if we ask why we don’t want to see our own worst qualities, we come to recognize that it’s not only a private or personal matter, keeping up our own self-image or something like that.The fact is that whites during the Kong era benefited in every conceivable way from the system of racial apartheid that prevailed in their society; wealth, power, access, and all the other indices of social wellbeing were inextricably linked to the color of one’s skin.But if you come to recognize that—and by “you” here, I mean “society”—then you’re faced with the fact that all the social “goods” you enjoy are unearned, that the system is unjust, that it needs to be dismantled.That was precisely what the Civil Rights activists of a later generation argued, and in so doing they brought questions of race and social privilege into public discourse.But it took a catalyst like that to bring such issues to the fore; it wasn’t going to happen without a struggle.So one way of looking at a film like Kong is that it performed a palliative or even soporific function for its society; it enabled people to continue denying what the plain evidence of their senses should have shown them to be true, and as such it enabled them to retreat farther into the comfortable and comforting fantasies that favored their privileged status.

TheoFantastique: I was pleased to see you include a chapter devoted to Ray Harryhausen’s films. There are a wealth of treatments of his films not only by Harryhausen himself (at times with co-authors), but by his many fans as well. Yet his films have not been the subject of much critical treatment. Why is this?

Josh Bellin: First, let me say that I simply had to include a chapter on Harryhausen in this book!He was an enormous influence on me, second only to Willis O’Brien and King Kong, and it has always bothered me that his films haven’t received anything approximating the critical attention I feel they deserve.But if you accept my thesis about fantasy films in general, it’s not hard to see why Harryhausen has been so critically neglected: because his films seem so far removed from social reality, because they deal with figures from mythology and fable—rocs and hydras and dragons and Ymirs—it’s particularly easy to bracket them as miraculous works of “pure fantasy.”But I’m always skeptical when I encounter the adjective “pure.”It seems to me that the language of “purity” serves as a denial mechanism, and I always want to investigate not only what these “pure” products are but why we’re so heavily invested in insisting on their purity.

Parenthetically, I might add that it wouldn’t take much to argue that Harryhausen’s films should be analyzed in respect to their social contexts.After all, three of them are based on famous works of political satire, while others deal with topical issues such as the A-bomb, alien invasion, and so on.But again, there it is: we seem to have a particularly strong desire to protect fantasy from the dirty work of history.

TheoFantastique: As you situate Harryhausen’s Sinbad films in their cultural contexts of America over several decades you connect them to changing American views of the Middle East. Can you illustrate how you see this connection and its development from the 1950s with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and how this changes as we move to The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and later Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger?

Josh Bellin: It would have been fairly easy to demonstrate that the Sinbad films fit into a longstanding pattern in American popular culture of caricaturing and demonizing the Middle East, a pattern that has gained new strength in the post-9/11 era.But rather than showing the presence of what cultural critic Edward Said calls “Orientalism” in these films, I decided to zero in on how the films represent mobile, historically contingent relationships between East and West.In the immediate post-World War II era, for example, Western attitudes toward the Middle East were far more amorphous, ambivalent, than they would later become; most Westerners simply didn’t know much about the Arab world, and so it tended to be represented in Western popular and political discourse as a mysterious region, perhaps a future ally, but probably best left to itself.The first Sinbad film clearly manifests these emergent attitudes: Sinbad is a much more wary hero in this film than in the latter two, while the motivations of the villain and monsters are notably less straightforward than they would become as the series progressed.In the 1970s, however, a number of factors—including the OPEC oil embargo and the rise of Palestinian terrorism—helped bring into being the twin stereotypes we still hold today: the Middle East as an area of dreadful economic power and random, inexplicable violence.The second Sinbad film demonstrates these attitudes as surely as the first demonstrates an earlier mentality: Koura combines the qualities of terrorist and sheik, while virtually all the monsters are pawns in a deadly struggle for geographic and material domination that he orchestrates.Finally, Eye of the Tiger embodies a complementary or competing set of attitudes that arose in the seventies, as increasing sympathy for the Palestinian cause and the Carter presidency’s attempts to broker a deal between Israel and Egypt brought a more balanced assessment of the region’s difficulties and a corresponding hope that its conflicts could be resolved.You see this in Eye of the Tiger both in the internal conflict experienced by Prince Kassim, who must struggle to overcome his bestial self, and in the heroes’ appeal to the Temple of the Arimaspai, a pyramid—symbol of Anwar Sadat’s nation—within which a divine power for mediation and transformation resides.So though I would never be so bold as to say that each film expresses a single attitude toward the Middle East—popular culture is never that simple—I do feel that excavating the guiding philosophy of each film reveals how films we tend to take at face value exist in rich and complex relationships to their historical contexts.

TheoFantastique: In chapter four of your book you discuss gender, the feminine, and the idea of family values in connection with Jurassic Park. You take the position that this film actually confirms notions of patriarchy in connection with family values. Can you give readers a few threads of your argument and how dinosaurs like the rampaging T. rex might be construed as supporting patriarchy vs. the feminine seeking to rise above patriarchal subordination?

Josh Bellin: The book’s fourth chapter marks a shift from “classic” fantasy films to films of the past few decades; I was attempting to show that it wasn’t only in some supposedly benighted past era that fantasy films upheld processes of social alienation.So the fourth chapter, “Dragon Ladies”—a title I’m very proud of, by the way!—focused on the role of monstrous women in contemporary fantasy films.This is one of the most frequently discussed topics in studies of horror and science fiction film; the original Alien film touched off a flurry of feminist studies detailing how male discomfort with female sexuality manifests itself onscreen.But my concern with these studies is that they tend to fall into the trap of universalizing (and thereby de-historicizing) representations of the monstrous feminine; their argument tends to be that men are always and everywhere repulsed, and in identical ways, by female genitalia and reproductive functions.Though this may be true for all I know, such studies overlook the quite specific and historically shifting discourses surrounding women, reproduction, and the family that held sway during the era of the Alien series, the Jurassic Park films, Species, and the other monstrous-women films I discuss.The eighties and nineties were the heyday of the so-called “family values” crusade, when ideologues in or near the Reagan and Bush administrations popularized the belief that the collapse of patriarchal power, the rise of mother-headed families (especially among African American communities), and the degradation of a “culture of life” had destroyed the “traditional” family, with disastrous cultural results.And if you look at the first Jurassic Park, you see all the rhetoric of the family-values campaign: irresponsible men who dabble in reproductive processes outside the sanctioned family unit give rise to super-empowered females whom they are then unable to control.In this light, the whole subplot about Dr. Grant’s initial distaste for children and his subsequent heroic shepherding of Lex and Tim across the female-ruled Park (a subplot that, interestingly, plays next to no part in the novel on which the film was based) becomes an argument for the reassertion of male authority over a feminized wilderness.

As a closing comment, I should say that this kind of analysis is in no way meant to diminish people’s appreciation for the films, on any level—whether that be enjoyment of their special effects or immersion in their fantastic plots.On the contrary, I feel that it diminishes the films to call them “pure fantasies,” to treat them as if they are not products of human labor and history.As a fan, I think we owe it to these films, their creators, their societies—and not least, to ourselves—to acknowledge how complex and powerful they are.

TheoFantastique: Josh, thanks again for subjecting fantasy films to the same probings of analysis through historical and cultural reflection as other genres of film. I hope your thesis provides additional levels of meaning and understanding to the enjoyment of these films.

Coming Attractions

Plenty of items will be “screened” here in the near future, and in this post I’ll share a few textual trailers to let readers know what to look forward to.

In addition to my own reflections and commentary several interviews will find their way here over the days and weeks to come. These include an interview with Van Norris of the School of Creative Arts, Film and Media at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. Mr. Norris will discuss his chapter contribution to The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Wallflower Press, 2006), a chapter that looks at surrealism in American animation. The editors of this book, Graeme Harper and Rob Stone have also expressed an interest in discussion of the influence of surrealism in cinema.

Joshua Bellin of LaRoche College will talk about his book Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). While sci fi and fantasy films have been the stuff of academic exploration, fantasy films have often been divorced from their historical and cultural contexts. Bellin provides a corrective to this, and as a fantasy film fan he does not shy away from critical analysis of films including the original King Kong, The Wizard of Oz, Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad trilogy, and Jurassic Park.

Film director Frank Woodword of Wyrd Productions will discuss his documentary Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown. As the title indicates, this film brings together academics, fans, and some of Hollywood leading fantasy filmmakers as they look at the continuing influence and legacy of H.P. Lovecraft on horror, sci fi, and fantasy. See a trailer for the film here.

Sean Cubitt of the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne, co-editor with Ziauddin Sardar of Aliens R Us: The Other in Scienc Fiction Cinema (Pluto Press, 2002), will discuss this book’s fascinating thesis as to how the social other is constructed through the genre of sci fi. Other topics addressed in the book include technology, apocalyptic futures, xenophobia, and the role of women.

A recent trip to Barnes & Noble to peruse the shelves of various book categories revealed an interesting book by Eric Nuzum in the cultural studies section titled The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires: from Nosferato to Count Chocula (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007). This is an interesting personal journey of Eric. a self-described pop culture critic and VH1 pundit, in an exploration of the pervasiveness of vampires around the world. Eric and I will talk about his book and his journeys in a future interview.

My bibliographical research also led me to find a book addressing a neglected topic related to horror and pop culture, that of the mummy. In the near future Dr. Jasmine Day will talk about her book The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-speaking World (Routledge, 2006). This book is the most in-depth about “mummymania” in English. And to add another dimension, Day is an anthropologist who also has an appreciation for the growing body of academic literature on horror which she notes has also been an increasingly popular topic in the humanities in recent years. Our interview will make for an interesting interdiscipinary consideration of our fascination with mummy’s in horror cinema and beyond.

I hope my readers will find these and other topics of interest as TheoFantastique continues its celebration and exploration of the fantastic in popular culture.

Halloween Rewind

Of course, tomorrow is Halloween, one of my favorite holidays and times of the year. Therefore, this website would not be complete without some kind of commentary on the topic.

Over the last couple of years I have written on Halloween and related topics on another blog of mine, and I thought I’d use this opportunity to draw upon one of those previous posts with some revision for this website’s context. Halloween is fascinating in its development through history and its manifestations in various cultures. It incorporates a number of interesting facets, such as providing participants with an experience of liminality. social inversion, and festivity. Research for a series of presentations I gave in 2006 gave me the opportunity to research these in more depth.

A few years ago I was asked to speak at Cornerstone Festival in Illinois in their Imaginarium venue. The theme sought to engage aspects of differing cultures as they grapple with death through festivals, symbolism, ritual, and popular cultural elements as well, such as film and literature. My contribution to that year’s intellectual and artistic synthesis was a three-part cross-cultural look at North American Halloween and the Mexican Dia de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead.

In the first session I traced the historical and cultural origins and development of Halloween, from its earliest antecedents in Pagan Samhain as an agricultural and mythical festival, to the influence of Catholic All Souls’ and All Saints’ Day, to its continued development in North America as a form of public pranking and significance in courtship rituals expressions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Halloween continued to develop in response to the cultural and subcultural contexts of America, it eventually became influenced by popular culture, particularly in the 1970s through the horror film genre. Today it is increasingly popular, and functions as a means for children and adults alike to engage in costuming, identity exploration, and social inversion, existing largely as a secularized and consumer driven pop culture phenomenon far removed from any religious or spiritual aspects of previous Pagan influences.

My second session noted that the Mexican Day of the Dead is very different. This is a deeply religious celebration with some similarities to Halloween in the form of costuming, street requests for sweets and foods, and engagement with issues related to death, but the differences far outweigh the similarities. Celebrations include the making of sweets and special foods (such as “Bread of the Dead” and sugar skulls), the creation of family altars for the dead, and visits to grave sites. For Mexicans the Day of the Day is a marker of ethnic identity which encompasses festival, symbol, and ritual as a means for families and communities to both mock death and embrace it as a reality of life while also facilitating the continuing bond between the living and deceased ancestors.

One of the facets of my third session involved a contrast of Halloween and the Day of the Dead in North American and Mexican cultures. I noted that in America the Halloween celebration functions on a superficial level in the culture in ways that entertain aspects of popular culture from an individualistic perspective as participants engage in costuming and identity play. But the secular Halloween celebration really does not deeply and meaningfully engage death. By contrast, the Mexican Day of the Dead provides a religious festival for individuals and the culture to engage the reality of death and the continued connection of the living and the dead through a rich reservoir of symbol and ritual. It would seem that North Americans can learn a lot from our neighbors to the South in terms of cultural festivals.

Readers will benefit from consulting good sources on the history and cultural evolution of Halloween. Recommended resources include Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (Oxford University Press, 2003); Jack Santino, Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life (University of Tennessee Press, 1994); and David J. Skal, Death Makes a Holiday (Bloomsbury USA, 2002). See my interview with Santino on Halloween as folk festival from 2007 here.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: Frankenstein: A Cultural History

Not long ago I came across a book in the Cultural Studies section of Barnes & Noble that caught my eye. It was Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s Frankenstein: A Cultural History (W. W. Norton, 2007). Susan is a nonfiction writer and editor with a PhD in English. She has written a number of works, and after contacting her she graciously agreed to share her passion for Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.

TheoFantastique: I often begin my interviews on a personal note to find out more about the individual and why their areas of expertise connect with them so passionately. What is your personal interest in the Frankenstein myth? How did you get involved in researching and writing about it and how does it connect with you personally?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: I have for decades been drawn in by a fascination with the personalities of English Romantic literature. I studied English literature and wrote a PhD dissertation on Percy Bysshe Shelley. My last book was Mad Mary Lamb, about the early 19th-century children’s author Mary Lamb who, with her brother Charles, wrote the famous Tales from Shakespeare. In the 1980s I taught literature and humanities to engineering students at the University of Virginia. One day (it happened to be October 31) I was teaching Frankenstein in a course called “Man and Machine: Images of Technology in Literature.” To get the conversation rolling, I wore a dime-store monster mask — bright green, red gashes, bolts in the neck — and we talked about how different the current image of Frankenstein is from the novel itself. That was the beginning of my quest to understand how we got from there — a novel written by an English teenage girl in 1816 — to here — an icon recognized the world around in the 21st century.

TheoFantastique: It might be helpful to sketch a little of the history of Frankenstein for readers to set the context for your book and our discussion. Can you summarize the circumstances concerning the two main facets of the myth that helped birth it and make it grow, Mary Shelley’s story and the 1931 Frankenstein film with Boris Karloff?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: Wow. How about I write a book about it?

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, not yet married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, went with him (a married man and a father) and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, on a quest for poetry, meaning, and Claire’s lover, Lord Byron, to Geneva, Switzerland, in June 1816. Byron had just exiled himself, leaving behind a wife and child, and was traveling with a companion and doctor, John Polidori. The five would gather in the Villa Diodati, a 200-year-old estate house overlooking Lake Geneva. They read ghost stories, and Lord Byron (so Mary Shelley tells us years later) challenged his friends to write stories equally scary. From that challenge arose two finished works: Polidori wrote a novella, The Vampyre, which was the first English vampire story and certainly an inspiration for Stoker’s Dracula, written some 80 years later; Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley) began Frankenstein. Her novel was published in 1818. It was just another pulp Gothic novel to the publisher — it soon went out of print — but its story so captured the imagination that it was instantly adapted to the stage in Europe and America and reprinted in a “Standard Novel” series in 1831. By the end of the 19th century, most considered the novel a classic of literature. Many works of literature refer to it and spin off from it. Thomas Edison’s silent film company created a 20-minute Frankenstein in 1910. But the watershed event, the reason we all know the monster so well, is the 1931 Universal film starring Boris Karloff as the unnamed man made by man. That film, followed in the coming years by Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein — all three starring Karloff as the monster — struck deeply into the world’s psyche. The Universal film series was continued with others playing the monster, the story was retold in numerous other film and dramatic adaptations, and cartoons, comic books, television shows, and other pop media kept him alive to the present day as well.

TheoFantastique: How did the myth move beyond the 1930s horror films of Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein in the decades following to embed itself in the culture so deeply?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: The myth was already deeply embedded in culture by the time of the 1930s movies, as a matter of fact. For example, in early 1931, before the Karloff film came out, two different economists used the myth of Frankenstein as a way to express their concerns over what they considered a monstrous legal entity emerging onto the scene: the corporation. But the films certainly secured a look for the monster — the flat-topped head, sunken cheeks, bolts in the neck, drab suit too small, elevated shoes — and a certain character for the monster. Karloff’s monster grunts and is awkward; Shelley’s monster spoke eloquently and was nimble. Karloff’s monster also arises as evil from the start, remember: he is implanted with a criminal brain. In Shelley’s novel, the creature is formed capable of intellect and love, but his feelings of being abandoned by his maker and scorned by society evoke violence and hatred in him. What all this means is that when the Karloff monster became the prevailing representative of the Frankenstein myth — and, even more so, during the subsequent Universal and Hammer films retelling the story for a broader public — the moral message of the myth got solidified and, I would say, dumbed down.

TheoFantastique: One of things you discuss in chapter 7 struck me when you wrote:

“After his third Universal film, though, Boris Karloff never again played the monster in a feature film, despite scores of Frankenstein movies made after 1939. In his view, he was not the one abandoning the monster; the producers and scriptwriters were. They wanted a flat, unidimensional character — a clown, to use his expression — while he saw a figure full of contradictions, moral qualms, love and hate, good and evil, hope and despair. His monster embodied the existential loneliness and uncertainty of the twentieth century. ‘The most heartrending aspect of the creature’s life,’ believed Boris Karloff, ‘was his ultimate desertion by his creator. It was as though man, in his blundering, searching attempts to prove himself, was to find himself deserted by his God.'”

Karloff’s thoughts on the creature and its relationship with his creator seem rife with cultural and theological possibilities for reflection. Do you think in ways the Frankenstein myth has been so popular is that many times it reflects a modern existential angst about abandonment by God in terms of questions surrounding the viability of traditional religion in the West, or am I reading too much into Karloff’s thoughts and its possible ramifications?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: Actually, these meanings can be found all the way back in the novel itself, and no, I don’t think you are reading too much into the novel or into the James Whale-Karloff interpretation of it. Bride of Frankenstein is the film that most clearly shows how James Whale, the director, was fascinated by the religious meanings implied in the story of Frankenstein. Watch that film again with an eye to the references to Christianity. When the monster befriends the old blind man and lies down for his first night of sleep in a human bed, a crucifix hangs, glowing, on the wall above — a suggestion that this is a moment of Christian charity and human kindness. When the monster is chased out of that place of safety, he crashes through a graveyard, angrily pushing over tombstones. When the mob grabs hold of him, they lash him to posts and lift him up, his arms stretched out, as if he is crucified. Bride of Frankenstein, much more than Whale’s earlier Frankenstein, also has a thoroughly evil character: Dr. Pretorius, who convinces Dr. Frankenstein to create a female — an enterprise that literally explodes in his face.

TheoFantastique: In chapter 10 you discuss scientific developments in genetics and how the novel has been attached to debates on this topic so much so that people have expressed fears about “Frankenfoods.” You write that, “Scientists live and operate within a larger world of culture, and the myths that shape that world exert an influence on their beliefs, fears, and aspirations.” How does the Frankenstein myth serve as positively as a mythic foil in contemporary debates like those over genetics and cloning?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: By the time we were seriously discussing the issues of genetic engineering and cloning in the public forum, Frankenstein had lost its ambiguities and was received by most as having a unified message: Don’t mess with Mother Nature; don’t play God; don’t dare to overstep the limits of knowledge established by the status quo. My belief is that that is not what Mary Shelley originally had in mind when she wrote the novel, but it is what we have made of her story. So Frankenstein has become a code word for the idea that any effort to create life is going to make a monster that will haunt and ultimately destroy us. It’s an easy way to express the conservative argument against scientific experimentation in realms that are new and unknown, particularly those having to do with the manipulation or creation of life-forms.

TheoFantastique: Given the prevalence of the myth on a popular level I was surprised to read about the novel’s slow acceptance as a significant piece of English Romantic literature. Why do you think it has a history of negative reception, or at least being overlooked by scholars? Is it the taint of the horror genre? How has this situation changed more recently among scholars?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: Up through the 1970s, Frankenstein was considered pulp fiction written by a minor female author. I know, because I was a graduate student in English in the 1970s, and I had to justify my putting the novel on my doctoral reading list. These days, every graduate student in English has studied the novel many times over. The change came thanks to changing values in the scholarly world. Feminism swept the academic world in the 1970s, as did a new regard for popular culture as worthy of scholarly attention. 1974 was a watershed year for Frankenstein in the universities. That year, Donald Rieger published Mary Shelley’s original 1818 edition of the novel, with an introduction that explored how she had changed her novel between its original publication and its revision 13 years later. That year was also the publication date of a collection of essays, The Endurance of Frankenstein, that included the classic feminist essays “Female Gothic” by Ellen Moers, which used Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a key representative to discuss the special kind of Gothic novel written by women during the late 18th and early 19th century. Today, Frankenstein and Mary Shelley are now on everyone’s reading lists, from public high schools to the top graduate schools. And there are even easy-reader versions of the novel, not to mention all the picture books that use the monster as a lovable character.

TheoFantastique: In chapter 11 you discuss the monster and its myth in contemporary society. This has been expressed broadly in everything from Frankenberry cereal (which I had to pick up for the Halloween season) to Tim Burton’s film Frankenweenie. One of the more popular and iconic images of the monster comes from Boris Karloff as the creature in the Universal films. One of the more emotionally charged discussions in this chapter looked at copyright issues over the image as it relates to Universal and the Karloff family. Can you speak to that briefly?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: In 1993 four of the children of the Universal horror monsters met at a monster show: Sara Karloff, Bela Lugosi Jr., Ron Chaney, and Dwight Frye Jr. Lugosi is an intellectual property lawyer in California who had already made inroads into protecting the rights of heirs to the characters that their deceased parents created. He encouraged his newmade friends to work together and approach Universal Studios about their ownership of their parents’ monster looks. The heirs won out of court, and in Sara Karloff’s case, she won the rights to ownership not only of the Frankenstein monster but also the Mummy, both of which her father created for Universal. For a while there was a cordial business relationship, with realistic art portraying the monster and tagged with copyright not only to Universal but also to Karloff Enterprises. Then Sara Karloff learned that Universal was bypassing her in business arrangements, so she sued again — and won again. So what has Universal done? They have had illustrators redraft their official portrayals of the key Universal monster — the Frankenstein creature and Dracula particularly — so they no longer look like the movie originals, and so Universal can license the images without sharing the wealth with the heirs.

TheoFantastique: Two of the facets I really appreciate about your book given my background is its cultural and theological aspects (not to mention the mythic). These come together at the close of chapter 11:

“At its heart, Frankenstein speaks of an eternal conflict in the human condition. It is the tension between what we have and what we desire, between that which is firmly within our grasp and that which we can dream but not materialize. The story summons the universal dialogue between what our culture now calls red and blue, conservative and liberal, traditional and progressive, authoritarian and libertarian, conservative and radical.”

Shortly later you draw the chapter, and the book, to a close by stating:

“It was inevitable. Someone was going to slip back into the garden [of Eden] and pick fruit from the other tree [the Tree of Life in addition to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil]. That is the story told in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Surrounded by talk of poetry, atheism, and science, the imagination of this unmarried teenage mother in the early nineteenth century tapped into a mythic realm where a story had been standing, unplucked, for hundreds of years. She dared to approach the forbidden, ignoring conventional laws of good and evil; she went to the heart of the matter, to the secret of life. She wrote the story humankind had to have been waiting to hear and, having written it, sent it out in the world — her ‘hideous progeny,’ as she famously called it — to be heard, read, enacted, viewed, remembered, retold, analyzed, and interpreted.”

It would seem that as the Frankenstein myth continues to tap into our deepest mythic reservoirs and touches us on personal levels, so much so that like Victor Frankenstein we are repulsed by what we see, but at the same time we can’t look away because in the creature we see our reflection. Would you agree?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: It is amazing that this book and its story continue to fascinate us. Given how much it has been retold, turned into comic books and caricatures, simplified and misinterpreted, you would think the myth would have died. But it is still electric with meaning. Every Halloween season new interpretations — local and international — come onto the scene. I am thrilled to read that Guillermo del Toro, the director who created Pan’s Labyrinth, is at work on a film version of the story. And I am equally thrilled whenever I read of a local radio or stage interpretation. Every time we retell or reexperience the story of Frankenstein, we delve deeper into our own beings, asking the eternal questions: Is it better to risk everything in order to venture out into the unknown, or is it better to stay safe and not push the limits of our knowledge? Am I an angel or a monster? . . . or am I, as I hear Mary Shelley suggesting, a bit of both?

TheoFantastique: Susan, your book is a great read, and it provides an important dimension of consideration for fans of the Frankenstein myth. Thank you for the tools that enable an interesting exploration.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock: I always love sharing my thoughts about my favorite monster. Thank you.

Body Worlds: Art as Horrific Expression

Body Worlds is presently on display in Salt Lake City here in the state where I live. In case you haven’t heard of this before, Body Worlds is described as part art, part science, the brainchild of Gunther von Hagens. It involves the use of actual cadavers whose tissues have been injected with plastic in order that they might be preserved and posed as an art display. In the case of the current exhibit in Salt Lake City, Body Worlds 3, the bodies are presented in a wide variety of athletic poses, from deceased skateboarding to basketball playing. The process of preservation is called “plastination”, and those functioning as art are referred to as “plastinates.”

Throughout the history of modern medicine, human beings have been dissecting human bodies as a means of learning more about the body and how it functions. In order for medicine to progress this process has been necessary and important. It continues today as individuals donate their bodies for medical students and other scientists. But Body Worlds seems like something more than an activity facilitating the continuing advance of medical knowledge.

For me Body Worlds represents a curious and dark expression of the macabre in popular culture. In terms of it being a curiosity, on the one hand we often hear people decry violence in television and film, particularly in the horror genre, with its graphic depiction of bodily damage and mutilation. And yet the display of bodies carved into all kinds of configurations in the context of Body Worlds is considered a form of art which straddles both high and pop culture. On the other hand, as a dark expression of the macabre, I wonder why various cultures have made a value judgment against the Nazis for turning murdered Jews and other unwanted peoples into lampshades and other paraphernalia, and yet many people seem to laud the plastinates turned into poseable traveling displays as art. I understand that many of the deceased who are now Body Worlds art volunteered their bodies for use in this fashion, and thus they weren’t victims of genocide, but the question remains as to the ethical appropriateness of the use of human bodies for art or furniture. What view of human beings and sacralization related to human remains is attached to perceptions of the Body Worlds exhibit?

Another major ethical question looms in that allegations have been made that some of the bodies may come from executed prisoners in China, a country well known for human rights violations and questionable justice in speedy trials and immediate execution for a host of major and minor crimes. While von Hagens denies using such corpses in his exhibits at present, in 2004 he acknowledged such bodies were used which forced him to return them and stop the practice. Even so, news reports from this year indicate that questions remain concerning Chinese connections as the source for some the bodies.

Ultimately one’s views of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of Body Worlds and corpses as art comes down to a complex interplay between ethics related to cultural considerations. For my reflection on this phenomenon the images associated with the Frankenstein myth come to mind. (This is no doubt fueled by my forthcoming interview with Susan Tyler Hitchcock, author of Frankenstein: A Cultural History.) I envision Victor Frankenstein in his lab stitching together the pieces of cadavers in his own combination of science and art. The Frankenstein myth reminds us of the frequent human temptation to push beyond traditional boundaries of permissibility in relation to the body, science, and even art. The verdict of many readers and viewers of the various representations of the Frankenstein myth to such transgressions has been been a negative one. Is it applicable to Body Worlds? What does the use of bodies as art, whether those secured through ethical or unethical means, say about those cultures in which Body Worlds has been well received? Perhaps our sense of the Frankenstein story needs to be turned on its head: It was Victor Frankenstein who was the monster, not the creature he stitched together and brought to life. If this is so then it may be that our creation and enjoyment of plastinates reveals the monstrous in all of us.

David Wellington on Horror Fiction and Forthcoming Vampire Zero Novel

I recently had the privilege of connecting with David Wellington, a horror writer and author of a number of books including Monster Island, Monster Nation, 13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, and the forthcoming book Vampire Zero. David made some time in his writing schedule to discuss his passion for horror fiction and Vampire Zero.

TheoFantastique: David, thanks for the opportunity to talk about your writing, including your forthcoming book. I’d like to begin with some personal considerations. What is your attraction to horror, and how did you come to work your passions in this area as a horror writer specifically tackling the figure of the vampire?
 
David Wellington: My mother is a big reader–maybe five books a week–and a staunch enemy of censorship.  Back in the 70s, when I was growing up, she would check books out of the library, devour them, and then put them on the coffee table in case I wanted to read them, too.  When she started reading Stephen King and Peter Straub, she decided to let me make my own choices, as usual, but with one warning: “If you read this, it’s going to give you nightmares.  So think carefully before you decide.”  As you can imagine, with an introduction like that, the horror novels were the first things I read!  And of course, they did give me nightmares… and of course, that just made me want more.  I graduated from Salem’s Lot to Dracula pretty quickly, got my own library card and started devouring all the horror I could get my hands on.  There was one thing I noticed back then about vampires: they were scary!  I worry that people coming to vampire stories today are going to get the wrong ideas about vampires.  They’re going to think they’re sexy, and romantic, and that they never bite anybody.  Clearly somebody had to remind them why vampires should never be invited into your home.  That’s why I chose to write 13 Bullets, the first volume of my vampire series.
 
TheoFantastique: To probe another aspect related to the last part of my previous question, the zombie seems to be the most popular monster figure or archetype in Western culture at the moment, perhaps having pushed ahead of the vampire. In Monster Island you produced a piece of zombie fiction. What is it about the zombie and the vampire that make them so compelling for readers and for storytellers like you?
 
David Wellington:  Well, everyone is afraid of death.  None of us want to die–if there was a way to live forever, there would be a line around the block to get it.  So our mythology, our folklore, our popular fiction is full of stories about people who get to live again after the die, one way or another.  Horror fiction is inherently pessimistic.  It’s based on the idea that the universe is Not a Nice Place, and that it runs on rules that say not everybody gets a happy ending.  The zombie and the vampire (and the ghost, and the ghoul, and the revenant and the fetch and the banshee, etc.) represent our worries that if you could live on after your death, you really, really wouldn’t want to.  Zombies are an interesting case.  There have always been stories about reanimated corpses, going back to the first horror stories, told around campfires long before the invention of writing.  The zombie as it exists today, however, is the most contemporary of archetypal monsters.  Werewolves and witches date back to the Renaissance, if not earlier.  Vampires (in their modern form) and Frankenstein’s Monster were specifically nineteenth century creations.  But George Romero’s zombies have a distinctly twentieth century feel to them, and they’ve been updated for this century numerous times by various writers and film-makers.  They aren’t driven off by crucifixes, or garlic, or silver bullets.  They don’t represent some kind of deeply repressed sexual desire.  They’re consumers, plain and simple.  They exist to eat, to devour everything they see, and they just don’t stop.  They are a mirror for our society at its worst, and that’s why it makes us squirm to look at them.
 
TheoFantastique: Let’s talk about your forthcoming book, Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale (Three Rivers Press, 2008). Can you summarize the storyline?
 
David Wellington: Spoiler alert!  Vampire Zero is a direct continuation of the events of 13 Bullets and 99 Coffins.  Former highway patrol trooper Laura Caxton has come into her own at this point, having learned everything she could about how to kill vampires from her mentor, Jameson Arkeley.  At the end of the last book, to save her life he became a vampire himself… and then realized that no matter how noble your intentions might be, once you drink blood you only ever want more.  Now he’s stalking Pennsylvania, slaughtering innocent people and Laura has to stop him.  The problem is that he taught her everything she knows–but not everything he knows.  He still has secrets up his sleeves and he’s not afraid to use them.
 
TheoFantastique: How much of the corpus of vampire mythology serves as a backdrop and foundation for this book and your other vampire fiction? And in what ways might your vampires be part of the new breed of vampires in the modern refinement of the mythology?
 
David Wellington:  I like to draw on older stories in my fiction, but always I have to give them my own twist or they just aren’t interesting to me.  George Romero made the perfect zombie movie, so I had to change my zombies to make a good story of my own.  I’ve done the same with my vampires here.  These are not anything like the vampires Anita Blake or Sookie Stackhouse have sex with.  My vampires are huge, hairless, and snowy white.  They have glowing red eyes and mouths full of razor-sharp teeth.  If one kissed you, you would lose flesh, but of course they don’t have any interest in kissing you.  They don’t want to read you poetry, either.  They want to rip your head off and drink out of your bleeding stump.  They’re actually very similar to the original vampire stories out of Eastern Europe, but with some very contemporary twists.  There are no wooden stakes in these books, just lots of guns.
 
TheoFantastique: Is there anything special that you’d like to mention in Vampire Zero as a ‘sneak peak’ for readers? What’s going to keep them up at night as they read this?
 
David Wellington: It’s getting cold outside here in New York, and I want everyone to make sure they wear proper footwear outside.  You would not want to get frostbite of the toes.  When you’re reading Vampire Zero, keep that in mind.
 
TheoFantastique: David, thanks again for the conversation about your work. I hope Vampire Zero is as well received by readers as your previous works have been. All the best with this new volume.

David Wellington: Thank you, John.