Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

Epilogue: Worse Things Waiting

219 The bats have left the belltower / The victims have been bled / Red velvet lines the black box / Bela Lugosi’s dead. —Bauhaus There are worse things awaiting man than death. —Bela Lugosi, Dracula In 1994 Freddy Krueger invaded America’s nightmares once again. Ten years after the trash-talking slasher first entered his victims’ dreams, New Nightmare reimagined the Elm Street mythology in a radical fashion . Director Wes Craven’s monster escapes the realm of imagination and stalks Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund, the actors who portrayed the final girl and Freddy himself in the first film. He even stalks his creator, Craven himself.1 New Nightmare was the first of the Elm Street films that Craven, a former literature and philosophy professor, directed since the series debut in 1984. In this revisionist reading of his own work, Craven proposes that Freddy was an actual being, a dream demon, whose power had been contained by the telling of stories about him (the first seven films in the series). Now that the character had dimmed in popularity, he was no longer bound by the narrative and freed himself from the prison of the script. This ingenious story makes the monster into something even more dreadful than the horribly burned child-killer who returns Epilogue WORSE THINGS WAITING Monsters in America / 220 from the grave with a razor-fingered glove. He becomes an archetypal monster with many faces, appearing in different times and epochs and wearing many masks.2 New Nightmare’s use of metanarrative, narrative about narrative that implicates the audience in the story being told, proved unsuccessful with that very audience. Two years later, America seemed a bit more prepared for the postmodern monster. Craven’s runaway hit Scream took the basic premise of Halloween and deconstructed it. The film contained numerous references to other horror films, and the killers themselves are two slasher film aficionados whose fascination with the genre structures their mayhem. Audiences fell in love with Scream’s aesthetic, mirroring as it did other pop culture styles present in everything from MTV to The Simpsons and addressing itself to the increasingly blurred lines of media representation and reality. Audiences may have understood Craven’s efforts better than some critics, one of whom rather laughably described Scream as “highly derivative.”3 This has been a book about stories that a culture tells itself and how the line between “story” and “history” is highly permeable. Our creepy little survey has looked at how monster tales have been used as exhibitions of power over the oppressed. Yet we have also seen how they can be used by the oppressed and socially marginalized to unsettle and challenge the powerful. For almost every social group in American society, the monster has embodied the terrors of history and been part of a history of terror. We have witnessed something even more disturbing. The monster in America has come to life. Metaphors of death, blood, and sex have had living analogues in the history of the United States. These metaphors are something more than reflections of anxiety; they are interstitially connected to events of American history and the structure of American society. Analyze the terrors of the colonial era, and the complexity of nostalgia for that era, and you will meet the shapeshifter and the witch. Ask the victims of the American pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry at Holmesburg Prison if they believe in Frankenstein. Consider the experience of Vietnam through the eyes of Tom Savini and you will better grasp the gory monsters he created. Hear the rhetoric of religious conservatives and how it shaped the politics of the AIDS epidemic and you will know the power of the vampire. The American monster will not disappear. The Enlightenment bred hideous night things while Jefferson slept and, as cultural critic Mark Edmunds has argued, America entered a deeply gothic phase in the final years of the twentieth century that shows no sign of abating. The vampire Worse Things Waiting / 221 and the zombie are likely to continue their reign in the American consciousness for some time. The themes that make them a current cultural obsession will create, and have already created, new monsters for Americans to see in their nightmares and embody in their history. At least one future of the American monster can be discerned in the related anxieties over medicine, disease, death, and the body that influenced the vampire and...