Of God and Monsters
April 4th – 6th 2019
Texas State University San Marcos, TX
Judith Halberstam famously claimed that monsters are “meaning machines” that can be used to represent a variety of ideas, including morality, gender, race, and nationalism (to name only a few). Monsters are always part of the project of making sense of the world and our place in it. As a tool through which human beings create worlds in which to meaningfully dwell, monsters are tightly bound with many other systems of meaning-making like religion, culture, literature, and politics. Of Gods and Monsters will provide focused space to explore the definition of “monster,” the categorization of monsters as a basis of comparison across cultures, and the relationship of monsters to various systems of meaning-making with the goal of understanding how humans have used and continued to use these “meaning machines.”
The Religious Studies program at Texas State University, therefore, welcomes submissions for our upcoming conference on Monsters and Monster Theory. Through this conference, we hope to explore the complex intersections of monsters and meaning making from a variety of theoretical, academic, and intellectual angles. Because “monsters” are a category that appears across time and cultural milieus, this conference will foster conversations between scholars working in very different areas and is not limited in terms of cultural region, historical time, or religious tradition. As part of fostering this dialogue, conference organizers are thrilled to announce that Douglas E. Cowan will serve as this event’s keynote speaker, while archival researcher and cryptid expert Lyle Blackburn will offer a second plenary address. Conference organizers anticipate inviting papers presented at this conference to submit their revised papers for an edited volume.
If interested, please submit an abstract with a maximum of 300-words to TexasStateMonsters@gmail.com by November 1st, 2018. Final decisions on conference participation will be sent out by the first week of December. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact conference organizers Natasha Mikles (n.mikles@txstate.edu) or Joseph Laycock (joseph.laycock@txstate.edu).
S. Brent Plate has an interesting article at The Revealer titled “Battling our Demons, On Screen and Off.” The byline summarizes the thrust of the article in its discussion of “fighting the demonic stereotypes rampant in contemporary media.”
In the twenty-first century, as in centuries past, stories of the supernatural thrill and terrify us. But despite their popularity, scholars often dismiss such beliefs in the uncanny as inconsequential, or even embarrassing. The editors and contributors to The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History have made a concerted effort to understand encounters with ghosts and the supernatural that have remain present and flourished. Featuring folkloric researchers examining the cultural value of such beliefs and practices, sociologists who acknowledge the social and historical value of the supernatural, and enthusiasts of the mystical and uncanny, this volume includes a variety of experts and interested observers using first-hand ethnographic experiences and historical records.
The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History seeks to understand the socio-cultural and socio-historical contexts of the supernatural. This volume takes the supernatural as real because belief in it has fundamentally shaped human history. It continues to inform people’s interpretations, actions, and identities on a daily basis. The supernatural is an indelible part of our social world that deserves sincere scholarly attention.
There is a new trailer for a new zombie film, The Cured. It shows evidence of being influenced by the BBC television series In the Flesh, and follows an approach to this subgenre of horror wherein the alien “Other” is explored as they attempt to fit in or reintegrate with the normal “Us.” For my interests and money this is far more interesting than standard zombie survival horror fare.
The witch as a cultural archetype has existed in some form since the beginning of recorded history. Her nature had changed through technological developments and sociocultural shifts–a transformation most evident in her depictions on screen.
This book traces the figure of the witch through American cinematic history with an analysis of the entertainment industry’s shifting boundaries concerning expressions of femininity. Focusing on films and television series from The Wizard of Oz to The Craft, the author looks at how the witch reflects alterations of gender roles, religion, the modern practice of witchcraft, and female agency.
What makes you afraid? It may be more than what you think. Horror films have been exploiting our fears almost from the moment movies were invented. Lurking unseen in the corner of horror, however, is something unexpected: the Bible. Sit back while the curtain parts and watch as the Good Book appears in both supporting and starring roles in the most unlikely of cinema genres. Starting with Psycho and running up through the 2010s, horror films, monster movies and thrillers will flash across the screen with Scripture plainly in view. Holy Writ is not always what it seems. The Bible not only attempts to ward off evil, it often becomes a source of fear itself. Aliens, ghosts, witches, psychopaths, and especially demons haunt these pages as the Bible attempts to hold them at bay. Movies are a window into what people really believe. In a culture of high biblical awareness and low biblical literacy, horror movies become authentic sources of belief. In this book Steve A. Wiggins explores how it looks if we take seriously what horror tells us about the Good Book, as he brings together two unlikely subjects and shows how scary the Bible can be.
Aliens, flying saucers, ESP, the Bermuda Triangle, antigravity … are we talking about science fiction or pseudoscience? Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference.
Both pseudoscience and science fiction (SF) are creative endeavours that have little in common with academic science, beyond the superficial trappings of jargon and subject matter. The most obvious difference between the two is that pseudoscience is presented as fact, not fiction. Yet like SF, and unlike real science, pseudoscience is driven by a desire to please an audience – in this case, people who “want to believe”. This has led to significant cross-fertilization between the two disciplines. SF authors often draw on “real” pseudoscientific theories to add verisimilitude to their stories, while on other occasions pseudoscience takes its cue from SF – the symbiotic relationship between ufology and Hollywood being a prime example of this.
This engagingly written, well researched and richly illustrated text explores a wide range of intriguing similarities and differences between pseudoscience and the fictional science found in SF.
Andrew May has a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and a PhD in astrophysics from Manchester University. After many years in academia and the private sector, he now works as a freelance writer and scientific consultant. He has written pocket biographies of Newton and Einstein, as well as contributing to a number of popular science books. He has a lifelong interest in science fiction, and has had several articles published in Fortean Times magazine
The supernatural has become extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, witches, and wizards have become staples of entertainment industries, and many of these figures have received extensive critical attention. But one figure has remained in the shadows – the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in a variety of media from 1926 to 2014. Robin Roberts argues that the female ghost is well worth studying for what she can tell us about feminine subjectivity in cultural contexts.
Subversive Spirits examines appearances of the female ghost in heritage sites, theater, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles.
Roberts’s analysis begins with comedic female ghosts in literature and film and moves into horror by examining the successful play The Woman in Black and the legend of the weeping woman, La Llorona. Roberts then situates the canonical works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison in the tradition of the female ghost to explore how the ghost is used to portray the struggle and pain of women of color. Roberts further analyzes heritage sites that use the female ghost as the friendly and inviting narrator for tourists. The book concludes with a comparison of the British and American versions of the television hit Being Human, where the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity.
Robin Roberts, New Orleans, Louisiana, is professor of English and gender studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She is author of five books on gender and popular culture, including Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons and Ladies First: Women in Music Videos, both published by University Press of Mississippi.
The Shape of Water has won numerous awards, including various film festivals, eventually winning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Obviously, the film has been very well received, but no film is universally loved. There is always the subjective element, so it’s possible to find reviews from those for whom the film didn’t work. Even so, one negative review struck me as especially curious for two reasons. First, the review was overwhelmingly negative as it equated the film and filmmaker with spiritual evil, and second, because of the reviewer. The review was written by Brian Godawa, a screenwriter and filmmaker who approaches film from the perspective of conservative evangelical Christianity. Previously I have enjoyed some of Godawa’s work, particularly his ability to encourage evangelicals to tap into imagination, to recognize the importance of myth including when it is incorporated within the biblical text, and the importance of what he calls God’s use of a “redeemed pagan imagination.” Because of these facets of his prior work, I was amazed at the strongly negative stance he took in his review of Guillermo del Toro’s Shape. Godawa and I had a few exchanges on this in the comments section of his Facebook page, but with this post I will engage more fully with some of the major concerns that I have with Godawa’s interpretation of Shape, as well as some of the conclusions he draws in his analysis.
A sci-fi interspecies romance. A mute female janitor working in a 1960s top-secret government facility falls in love with an amphibious fish-man that looks like a modern Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Okay, so I have to give the Academy kudos for not giving the Oscar to the movie that celebrates adult sexual exploitation of teens. Instead, they opted for the movie that celebrates sex with animals.
That’s like kicking out Harvey Weinstein, but keeping Roman Polanski.
And it is entirely predictable.
A theater full of moral hypocrites, sexual predators and their enablers joke about how depraved they are, and avoid speaking truth to their power, while they award best picture to a Christophobic fantasy about sex with animals.
This quote gives the reader a feel for the tone and approach Godawa takes. In his view Shape incorporates stereotypical views of Christianity, denigrates the Christian concept of the “image of God” which he sees as the major thrust of the film, and it promotes bestiality, all under the auspices of a pagan evolutionary worldview. I’ll address each of these areas with the relevant quotes from Godawa’s article.
Stereotype of Christianity
Let’s begin with the allegation that Shape incorporates stereotypes of Christianity. To support this claim Godawa references the Strickland character in the film. He is the head of the government’s secret program to study and exploit the Creature for possible use in America’s space program, and perhaps even the military. For Godawa, “Strickland represents the Christian worldview in this story as he quotes the Bible and refers to ‘the image of God’ in the dialogue.” But Godawa sees through del Toro’s ruse: “What he actually is is a stereotypical caricature of Christianity. A demonized monster.”
But let’s step back for a moment. It is clear that del Toro wants us to see the influence of a form of Christianity and some of its teachings, at least as some may understand them, in the Strickland character. Does this necessarily mean that Strickland represents all of Christianity and the Christian worldview? Not necessarily. When we consider that del Toro is a self-described lapsed Catholic and agnostic, and that his work continues to incorporate the influences of his Christian upbringing, even while he engages it critically, and that the filmmaker continues to express appreciation for Jesus (as he does in the foreword of a book on the film), it is far more likely that Strickland represents a particular kind of Christian, one using skewed understandings of Christian teachings to further his own ends at the expense of others. Surely Godawa is familiar with the history of Christianity and that the faith and the Bible have been used to justify racism, abuses of power, and the exploitation of human beings and the world they live in. In my view this reading is more accurate, one in keeping with del Toro’s biograhy and the overall approach that del Toro taking through his use of fairytale (more on this below).
Image of God
One of the main concerns Godawa has with Shape and del Toro is his alleged treatment of the “image of God.” Strickland refers to human beings being made in image of God, which for him equates with a simplistic anthropomorphism, the physical form of human beings. In one scene he is willing for a moment to allow that two lower class women, a mute Latin and African American, might also be created in God’s image, but after a moment’s reflection he corrects himself in that it’s the white, upper class male that’s the best understanding of what it means to reflect this image. Certainly no grotesque Creature from the Amazon can be understood to fit the bill. Strickland’s understanding of his divine reflection is then used as justification for his racism, his abuse of power over others, misogyny, racism, and domination of other creatures in nature. Godawa sees this as yet another unfair stereotype and misrepresentation of Christianity and an important Christian doctrine. For Godawa, del Toro is opting for some kind of paganism as an alternative.
But again I have to ask the reader to step back and question Godawa’s interpretive assumptions. Rather than a blanket condemnation of a Christian doctrine, abuses of the idea seem to be in view. Christians in the past and the present have used the idea of the image of God and human “dominion” over nature as theological constructs through which they have then engaged in colonialism, racism, labeled other cultures as “primitive” and beneath them and exterminated their populations, misogyny, and destruction of the environment and animal life. This doesn’t mean that every Christian (let alone every evangelical) holds such views and engages in such practices, but there is ample evidence of this problematic connection. Why then is it out of bounds for del Toro to critique this? Isn’t it possible to raise concerns about particular abuses and related institutions and ideas without necessarily being understood as trashing a particular Christian teaching in favor of paganism? Godawa’s interpretive approach is again called into question.
Promoting bestiality?
As we saw with the quote from Godawa at the beginning of this essay, for him Shape promotes bestiality. Indeed, the film has been given the alternative title by some as Grinding Nemo, for its inclusion of not only romance between a human woman and an Amazonian amphibian fish-man, but also sex. For conservative evangelicals like Godawa, this must be understood as an endorsement of bestiality, and this must flow from del Toro’s paganism and rejection of a Christian worldview.
Two responses can be given here. The first has to do with how we interpret stories. Although Shape takes place in America in 1962, it is a fairytale, as del Toro has said repeatedly, one written for our troubled times of division. Further, it is a form of fairytale that draws upon magical-realism, a “Latin-American narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.” If we look more broadly, Shape is part of a long history across cultures of human mythical storytelling of romances and sexuality between humans and beasts. In fairytales the characters represent things, help us think self-critically, and teach us lessons. They aren’t meant to be taken literally. To complain that Shape promotes bestiality misses the mark in terms of good genre interpretation as much as leveling the charge that Beauty and the Beast or The Princess and the Frog promotes bestiality. Although the real-world setting brings the story of Shape closer to our reality, it is still to be understood as a fairytale and must be interpreted accordingly. Godawa brings an unwarranted literalism to the film. (For a good critical analysis of fantasy films see Joshua Bellin’s great book Framing Monsters.)
The second response to the bestiality allegation comes from a closer analysis of the film itself. Even if we grant Godawa’s idea that a fantasy film can or is promoting a literal sexual practice, it is not a foregone conclusion that Elisa’s character is human. She seems to have her origins and and ongoing connection to the sea, and may be some kind of lost princess, an amphibian herself. The film begins with an underwater scene that appears to be the outside of a castle before zooming into Elisa’s dwelling above the Orpheum movie theater. Her apartment’s colors and wall artwork incorporates water and underwater themes. As the film’s narrative unfolds we learn that Elisa was found on the banks of a river as a child, and she has strange scars on her neck, and she can’t speak. At the end of the film the Creature, who has healing but not creative powers, picks up an injured Elisa and jumps into the ocean. He touches her and not only heals her of her gunshot wounds, but also the “scars” on her neck. These regenerate into gills. One reading of this scene is that Elisa was not human, at least not completely so. She may have been a lost princess of the sea who was left on the banks of the shore and forgot who she was among land-based humans, only to reconnect with her true self as a sea creature after meeting the Creature from the lab. With this reading in mind the film is not depicting bestiality, but instead a natural act of sexuality between sea creatures. Regardless of whether one considers the fairytale context or a fresh reading of key elements of the film, bestiality is not in view.
False dichotomy
There are other things I disagree with in Godawa’s essay, and I’ll mention one briefly. He also takes exception to evolution, describing it as that “which relativizes morality into ever-changing subjective feelings or molecules in motion — which justifies all brutality.” This is a metaphysical interpretation of evolution, one connected to an unfortunate dichotomy between a Christian creationism and atheistic evolution which Godawa then connects to paganism. However, there are Christians who accept evolution and who see this as the way God has chosen to create. One need only think of figures like physicist-turned-priest John Polkinghorne and geneticist Francis Collins to know there are devout Christians and evangelicals who accept evolution and who do not read moral relativism into it. So the choice between pagan evolution and Christian creation is a false one. (Related to this, readers will benefit from Conor Cunningham’s exploration of how materialist evolutionists and Christian creationists get things wrong in his book Darwin’s Pious Idea.)
Really so far from Christian concerns?
Despite Godawa’s strongly negative concerns about Shape, and his claims that it undermines Christianity, I wonder whether it’s really so far from the concerns that Christians should have with the challenges of our times. Guillermo del Toro uses fairytale to tell a story about the power of love as marginalized, lonely people come together and challenge the forces in power in order to engage in an act of justice. It is a story that challenges racism, misogyny, bigotry against homosexuals, and the exploitation of nature. Aren’t these the kinds of things that Jesus’s message of the Gospel of the Kingdom can and should find resonance with? The Bible is filled with examples of God using things from pagan nations, even the nations themselves, to chasten and instruct his people. Even if we retain Godawa’s assumptions about “pagan del Toro” and his pagan fairytale film, perhaps we need to stand back and ask if it has something to teaching 21st century American evangelicals about love, kindness, and justice to outsiders in the age of Trump.
For those interested in another take on Shape I recommend Jess Peacock’s essay in Rue Morgue, and for a general exploration of del Toro I refer readers to my edited anthology The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro.
Of God and Monsters
S. Brent Plate has an interesting article at The Revealer titled 
I am busy co-editing a volume on the paranormal in popular culture for Routledge and came across this forthcoming volume.
