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235 Preface 1 Halberstam writes, “The Monster’s body is a machine that, in its Gothic mode, produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait that the reader feeds into the narrative.” I am here elaborating on Halberstam’s meaning and suggesting that American monsters, in the gothic mode, are productive and representative of meanings granted them by a particular epoch and its historical discourses. I also find useful Halberstam’s argument that the meanings of the monster are connected to “a particular history of sexuality” in which the other, the monster, becomes a sexualized foreigner. According to her reading, this begins in nineteenth -century gothic literature and continues through the modern slasher film. See Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 7–9, 21–27. 2 In the discussion that follows, it is important for the reader to remember the distinction between horror narratives and their most common subject, the monster. The monster, while most commonly showing up in the context of a horror aesthetic , is a being that moves in and out of these narratives and can find real-world incarnations. Part of this book’s argument is that the monster can become “materialization of ideology” (Slavoj Žižek, “Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach,” in The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright [Oxford: Blackwell, 1999]). 3 Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 24. 4 See Žižek, “Fantasy as a Political Category,” 91. 5 Ironically, Žižek uses the phrase “the truth is out there” to explain Lacan’s notion that “the unconscious is outside.” This book assumes something similar in its interpretation of cultural images of the monster. They assume a “corporeal form” in the events of American history and how that history shapes American culture. NOTES Notes to pp. xvii–6 / 236 In this way, their “external materiality renders visible inherent antagonisms.” They become for American historical consciousness what Žižek labels “the imp of perversity .” See Žižek, “Fantasy as a Political Category,” 89. 6 The historians among my readers will, I hope, recall the foundational social historian E. P. Thompson’s effort to free his subjects from “the enormous condescension of the past.” See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 12. This is the most basic goal of every historian and every work of history. Introduction 1 Account taken from Dwight Taylor, Joy Ride (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1959), 240–48. 2 Taylor, Joy Ride, 240–48. 3 A brief description of the film’s reception appears in Melvin E. Matthews, Jr., Fear Itself: Horror on Screen and in Reality During the Depression and World War II (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2009), 53–58. 4 This argument follows Nancy Bombaci, who suggests that films of this era, especially by Mayer, tried to create the ideal middle-class experience with an emphasis on idealized white female beauty. She notes the irony that the villain/victim in Freaks replicates the statuesque blonde heroine of most of Mayer’s films. See Nancy Bombaci, Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 81–83, 100–101. 5 A few have come close. Kendall R. Phillips in Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2005) looks at how the historical context of certain horror films affected and reflected their subject matter . Most of these are, however, post-1960. His excellent analysis does not deal with the larger story of the monster in America. My reading of late twentieth-century horror film is deeply influenced by Linnie Blake’s The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historic Trauma and National Identity (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008). It is outside of Blake’s purpose to examine the phenomenon of the monster in American history. 6 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that “the monstrous body is pure culture” or, in other words, is born of a very specific cultural moment. He notes, for example, that in the nineteenth century, “Native Americans were presented as unredeemable savages so that the powerful political machine of Manifest Destiny could push westward with disregard.” Much of my own view of the monstrous depends on Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” as well as other essays in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). See esp. Cohen’s essay...