Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity: the Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media ed. by Andrea Wood and Brandy Schillace (review)

Zombies don’t drive or dance, but if they did, imagine that terrifying commute or block party! Indeed, monsters in literature, cinema, and media make good figures for many excellent things, above all spectacle. Yet three other critical qualities of monsters are conflict, character, and dramatic action. Fortunately, the terror and horrors any monster brings to a book, play, or movie is short-lived, at least within the work. Thank goodness. The escape and pleasure that fictional monster characters and their frightful conduct afford readers and audiences make great and lasting impressions. With dramatists and novelists, monsters stage villainy, bulk plot, and simultaneously portray good and evil at work. In poetry, monsters have permitted poets through the centuries to remove themselves from social blame by making them metaphors and also to circumvent and test the boundaries of censorship; remember Marlowe and Shelley.

Second, monsters make possible our storybook, theatrical and cinematic heroes and heroines. Without monsters we would not have classic creatures of horror and fatal-attraction like the mythical man-bull Minotaur, Homer’s female Scylla, and the mad, ecstatic and interrogating sphinx which Sophocles transposed from legend to develop dramatic character and conflict in Oedipus Rex. Further, without monsters, oral and scribal cultures are eschatologically-challenged to explain exile, punishment and death through artful storytelling, epics, songs and poems; consider the Ojibwa’s half-beast spirit Wendigo and the Milton’s distant and fallen but powerful angel, Satan.

Finally, modernism and post-modernism’s contrasting anxieties about tradition, technology and apocalypse would lose their appeal and force if not for the likes of Carrol’s Jabberwocky, Browning’s Dark Tower, Verne’s giant squid, Tolkien’s Balrog, Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West, Clarke’s program-flawed HAL 9000 computer (both cyber villain and savior), or Lucas’s human-cyborg Darth Vader. Amazingly, Stephen King’s larger-than-life authorial legacy is built on terrific monsters, including his possessed automobile Christine and Pennywise the dancing clown, while no monsters overshadow American film more than director and producer Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates and suspense novelist Thomas Harris’s Dr Hannibal Lecter. Still, due to monsters and their artificers, heroes, heroines and saviors like Hercules, Odysseus, Theseus, Jesus Christ, Childe Roland, Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, Gandalf, Dorothy Gale, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, plus a plethora of other brave and memorable characters writers would have been hard-pressed to create, develop, and anchor plot. Hence, because of monsters, marvelous protagonists, innocents, combatants, technologies, systems (including video games), and new worlds, not to mention and perhaps the least of all, grown-ups – all – who/that could and would not exist or survive on our library shelves, movie screens, television sets, desktops, and ipads.

Even creatures great and small have been adopted and adapted by writers to threaten and subdue monstrosity: Joey in the novel, play and film War Horse; Bambi; Scuttle the seagull and Flounder the fish; the wonderful and witty coyote and social organizing turtle, plus other animals from America’s forests, plains and deserts in Native American epics, stories, poems, songs, oratories, and chants. And let us not forget the most popular literary animal which artists have developed into heroic characters: dogs. The list of furry saviors in tales that wag our literary canon and film archives is long: Toto, Lassie, Benji, Pug of Men in Black (1997), the Jack Russell terrier Uggie in the Oscar-winning The Artist (2011), and many more canines.

For all of the above, monsters and their champions contribute to literature in multiple and far-ranging creative and cultural appropriations. Of these, Andrea Wood and Brandy Schillace present a new path of scholarship with Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity: the Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media. While the co-editors’ hefty text of 421 pages neither promises to be a history or guide, the book offers...