Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting by W. Scott Poole (review)

There is now a growing fascination—I hope not a momentary trend—with the monstrous and the paranormal in the academic study of religion and popular culture. The historiography of diabolism, ghosts, and even zombies is expanding rapidly to match the equal public appeal of ghost-hunting and zombie television. Historian W. Scott Poole distinguishes himself by focusing on the American context, providing a history told through the personified expressions of our anxieties and fears. In the follow-up to his first book, Satan in America, Poole has now turned his attention to the monsters that inhabit American cinema and American imaginations.

Each chapter features another generation of American life and the monsters that serve to unveil the collective anxieties of the era. We are introduced to quintessential scenes from horror literature or cinema, a healthy dose of audience response (when it is available), and on-the-ground experiences, sightings, lore, and so on. Issues of gender, race, and sexuality are highlighted wherever possible. Religion is a constant sidebar along this narrative, sometimes moving onto centre stage as with the discussion of the Puritans in the colonial period, “flying saucer cults” in the 1960s, and the religious right in the 1980s.

Poole begins with a vast overview of colonial preternatural lore and how such ideas informed dealings with native peoples, women, and African slaves. In chapter two, he moves into a discussion of Gothic literature and anxieties over female purity. The third chapter introduces both the American fascination with the freak show and the emergence of Frankenstein. Poole very convincingly demonstrates the connections between eugenics and lynching in the post-bellum South and the monster-lynching and monstrous scientific creations of literature. Aliens are the theme of the fourth chapter, in which the Cold War has forged a paranoid public suspicious of government and technology. Chapter five features the rise of mental health care and its connections with a new monster, the serial killer as portrayed famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the slasher genre that followed. Chapter six draws connections between The Exorcist, the Satanic panic, Roe v. Wade, and the religious right based on questions of the female body. The final chapter interprets the United States’ current fascination with vampires and zombies as an outgrowth of Christian apocalypticism.

Poole openly acknowledges his own love for horror movies, and the excitement of a fan is evident throughout. Monsters in America is often beautifully composed, frequently employing detailed descriptions of movie scenes and monstrous attacks. It is also a highly accessible volume that will offer undergraduates a great deal to explore and discuss in the American studies or history classroom.

I was not always convinced by the ties that Poole constructed between his monsters and the American culture they inhabit. At times, he may be prone to exaggerating to make a point, and I was occasionally under the impression that the monsters served only as an aesthetic by which to tell the story rather than themselves being the data for analysis.

Perhaps more important, there is a very specific lens by which Poole’s monsters are understood. He begins his study with a dedication to his three-year-old goddaughter, whose parents “are already teaching her that monsters are for story time rather than symbols for religious and political enemies” (xii). Monsters in America generally presents the construction of the monstrous as part of a machinery of othering that enables the continued subjugation of the oppressed. Certainly Poole’s chosen examples seem to make this clear, but I tend to question whether all monster lore exists to engender discrimination and limit human progress. Stories of child molesters have certainly caused baseless witch hunts, but like much older stories of wolves lurking in surrounding forests, they serve to stimulate fear of a very real potential danger. Certainly, we should not underestimate Poole’s lesson of...