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1. Monstrous Beginnings
- Baylor University Press
- Chapter
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27 There are terrible creatures, ghosts, in the very air of America. —D. H. Lawrence The past is a wilderness of horrors. —Anthony Hopkins, The Wolfman (2010) Wes Craven’s 1991 The People Under the Stairs offers a parable of the power relationships of colonial America. Set in an American inner city, the film centers on the story of an African American teenager nicknamed Fool and his struggle with a pair of modern-day colonial overlords, white masters who exude an aura of supernatural evil and control over the economic fortune of their black neighbors. “Daddy and Mommy,” as the white slumlords call themselves, live in a strangely agrarian part of the ’hood, a kind of urban plantation house guarded by a vicious dog and locked behind steel mesh windows. The “people under the stairs,” who we expect to be the monstrous villains of the tale, are actually kidnapped white children zombified by the incestuous couple. Fool can only defeat Daddy and Mommy by joining forces with the much-abused white kids living in the nooks, crannies, and secret passages of the old plantation house. The divide of race proves less compelling than the divisions of class, and the master’s haunted house, and hegemony, is overthrown.1 One MONSTROUS BEGINNINGS Monsters in America / 28 An alliance of oppressed white and black people never came to fruition in the American colonial period as race became as great, arguably a greater, determiner of status as class. The latter variable created the monsters in The People Under the Stairs. Monsters in Craven’s tale are the products of socioeconomic conditions. The sadistic and perverse Mommy and Daddy are described by Fool’s Grandpa Booker as being twisted by their desire for money: “as they got greedier, they got crazier.” The house not only hides its secret of kidnapped children but mountains of ill-gotten gain. “No wonder there’s no money in the ghetto,” Fool says when he finds the twisted couple’s treasure trove. Like white elites since their first coming to the new world, Mommy and Daddy had built their mastery on fear, violence, and economic exploitation.2 As in Craven’s tale, the repressive power structure of colonial America became a forge of monsters. The white European master class exerted power over native peoples and Africans that sometimes seemed supernatural. European settlers, meanwhile, found the monster living in their own settlements and meetinghouses, beings animated by the power of the devil. These beliefs played a crucial role in shaping the American way of violence, the unremitting savagery toward enemies that became characteristic of the American historical experience. Monsters of the New World Christopher Columbus came to the “New World” seeking gold, slaves, and monsters. Columbus reported both in his personal diary and correspondence that the native peoples he encountered in the Caribbean in 1492 and 1493 told him of “one-eyed men and other men with dog heads” who decapitated their victims and drank their blood.” Michael Palencia-Roth notes that the Genoese explorer’s private diary of the first voyage shows that finding the monsters of the New World “became an obsession for Columbus.”3 A long tradition of legend and theological speculation about monstrous creatures informed Columbus’ beliefs about what he might find in the new world. Medieval mental maps of a world inhabited by monstrous races prepared Spanish and Portuguese explorers to encounter giants, dog-men, ape-men, and various creatures out of the medieval bestiary. Christian theological speculation about the work of the devil, combined with the ongoing geopolitical conflict with the Islamic powers of the Mediterranean world, encouraged European explorers to see these monstrous races as allied with the evil one, the enemies of God and of the church.4 Some scholars argue that the first European conquerors in the New World did not think of the native people themselves as monsters. [44.212.26.248] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:32 GMT) Monstrous Beginnings / 29 Contemporary historian Peter Burke, for example, contends that Europeans always saw the native peoples of Africa and the Americas as part of the human family, even as they categorized them as an uncivilized or even degraded branch of that family. Burke notes that, throughout the era of European expansion, a debate took place among churchly scholars over the ethnic origins of “the savages of America.” The very fact that such a debate was held meant that Europeans assumed the humanity, if not the equality, of the native...