Tellers of Weird Tales

The Totalitarian Monster Concluded

"The worst tyrants are those that establish themselves in our own breasts."

--Reverend William Ellery Channing (1830)

In 1940, you could have scared your children with images of Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo. A decade later, a picture of Stalin would have done the trick. Those men and their followers were effective monsters before mid-century. Thankfully they are all gone now, most done in by war and violence.

If there is one lesson the aspiring totalitarian should have learned from World War II and wars since, it is this: brute force will be met with greater force by people of courage and conviction. There are still old-fashioned totalitarians in the world, but they are old, like Castro, or small, like Assad, or even comical, in a murderous sort of way, like the latest dictator of North Korea. Each exists along the fringes of humanity. That's one reason why they have survived. They have been surpassed by a different kind of totalitarianism however. It is more subtle than before, creeping stealthily among the shadows of our society, or more accurately perhaps in the shadows of our own hearts and minds, for totalitarians have learned that the most effective and efficient way to impose totalitarianism upon people is for them to impose it upon themselves and each other. Put another way, if all people have a totalitarian impulse, and all people have some measure of political, social, and economic power, then all people can become totalitarians. We had a taste of that in The Lives of Others, a German movie from 2006 that showed what it was like to live in a society in which everyone spied on everyone else. Still, external force was necessary to sustain that society. In the end, it proved unsustainable. What was lacking was the desire among the people to establish a tyrant in their own breasts, to throw open the gates and invite the tyrant in.

Karl Marx was a crackpot in a long line of nineteenth century crackpots. He may have aspired to be like Charles Darwin, to explain human history using an overarching theory in the same way that Darwin used an overarching theory to explain natural history. Instead, Marx was more like Madame Blavatsky, claiming as he did that he had uncovered the secret history of the earth. (1) The difference is that Theosophy is harmless and has few followers, while Marxism became like a new religion and led to the murder of millions. (2, 3) There are still true believers in the world, but they have adopted more peaceful means to stifle dissent, control thought, and enslave their fellow human beings. Critical theory and political correctness are examples of that. There are now millions of people who have taken totalitarian ideas to their breasts, perhaps without even knowing that they have done such a thing. Hitler and Stalin would be both proud and envious.

In the nineteenth century, the psychopathic killer evolved into a city dweller. Like monsters of old, he still lives on the fringes of society, beyond the firelight, but only figuratively, for he is now inside the gates. Having learned to pass as one of us, the psychopath can now live among us while yet preying upon us. However, he is still weak because he is still an outcast. The idea that animates him is still repugnant to us. Perhaps most importantly, he doesn't have any and cannot recruit any followers. If the totalitarian is a monster, then he is unlike the monsters of old and equally unlike the lone psychopath, for he lives not only among us, but rules over us, and he has recruits and followers. In addition, he had made his animating idea attractive to the masses, despite the fact that it means their enslavement. The totalitarian is scary in himself. The face of Hitler is the face of a monster. What is scarier still is that great masses of men and women would follow a psychopathic god, that they would revere him, that they would enslave themselves and other people to him, that they would die for him. The totalitarian, made possible in part by mass movements of the nineteenth century, gave rise to another kind of mass movement for the twentieth century and today: mass monstrousness, shared among all the people. (4)

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Hitler made a similar claim: "The race question not only furnishes the key to world history, but also to human culture as a whole." Quoted in The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler by Robert G.L. Waite (Signet, 1978), p. 98.
(2) If you can trace the descent of Theosophy through the Shaver Mystery to flying saucers and Scientology, then maybe Theosophy wasn't so harmless after all--not that we should hold anyone but L. Ron Hubbard and his acolytes responsible for their own impulse to control totally the lives of their followers.

(3) Marx believed that history is a science and that extrapolations could be made for the future, essentially predicting the future. That future of course failed to materialize. The idea reminds me of Isaac Asimov's psychohistory, from the Foundation series. I can't say what connection, if any, there was between Asimov's and Marx's ideas, but Asimov came of age in the 1930s among a group of science fiction fans who were Utopian, socialist, or even communist in inclination. Asimov was also an atheist. He may have been the only contributor to Weird Tales to have been born under Bolshevism, although he would not have had any memory of it.

(4) I'm taking the long way around, but I'm getting somewhere with all this. Just remember that part about masses of monstrous people.

A cartoon by Cy Hungerford of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, an example of the scary dictator. Lewis is of course John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers. Hungerford had a talent for deflating self-serious men by making them ridiculous.

I have asked the question, "What is the monster of the twenty-first century?" Now here it is five weeks and eight parts of an article later and I still haven't proposed an answer. I hope to get to one soon. Maybe it's time for a survey of monsters.

Fritz Leiber called it "the era of cottage and castle." That era stretched unbroken from the early Middle Ages into the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution. The monsters of those many centuries were supernatural in origin and in character: vampire, werewolf, ghost, demon, and so on. (1) I suppose that in an Age of Reason, any culture would become more self-conscious. That's what happened when men and women of the mid-eighteenth century looked back upon their history with some nostalgia. The result was a Gothic revival. (They even created artificial "ruins" to go with their interests.) It probably wasn't the first retro movement in history. After all, the Renaissance was a revival of Classical learning. But Gothicism is still with us and still a powerful cultural force. You won't meet many true Renaissance men in your lifetime, but chances are you have seen a member of the Goth subculture some time in the recent past. Or maybe you are part of that subculture.

So the Gothic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reconnected us to stories of ghosts, demons, vampires, and werewolves. Curiously, it also gave us a science-fictional monster, one of the earliest of its type: Frankenstein's monster. In Mary Shelley's Gothic romance of 1818, the monster is one of the undead, but he is reanimated not by a supernatural force but by purely natural--that is, scientific, or what passed for scientific--galvanism. In America, Edgar Allan Poe followed Mary Shelley's example, marrying the settings, trappings, and themes of Gothic romance to nascent science fiction. "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845), in which the title character is kept alive after his death through the power of mesmerism, is an example. Other writers of the nineteenth century followed suit. Their monsters--Varney the Vampire, Carmilla, Wagner the Were-Wolf, Spring-Heeled Jack--were in the Gothic tradition, sometimes with a little science thrown in.

At the end of the nineteenth century, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampire--like the psychopathic killer before him--moved to the city. In Dracula's case, it was from rural Ruritanian Europe to the bustling metropolis of London, where he could so easily go about his business. Not many people today remember Varney or Carmilla, but the whole world knows of Dracula. He and his vampiric kin have been with us continuously since 1897, when Dracula first appeared in print. Two other monsters arrived in that same decade. (2) Also in 1897, space aliens, in the form of H.G. Wells' Martian invaders, arrived on Earth and in our imaginations. They have never left us, either. Half a decade before, Antoon Cornelis Oudemans published The Great Sea Serpent (1892), a scientific study of the phenomenon. Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of twentieth century cryptozoology, considered that book to be the first work in its field.

I have already written about two real-life monsters, the psychopathic killer and the totalitarian. If Jack the Ripper was the model for the psychopathic killer, then he predates the previously described monsters by only a few years, having done his work in 1888. The origin of the twentieth century totalitarian monster is harder to pin down. Part psychopath, part devil, and part god, he has probably been around since the beginning of time. As for his first occurrence in literature, I can offer two examples, "The New Utopia" by Jerome K. Jerome (1891) and Pictures of the Socialistic Future by Eugen Richter (1891). I haven't read either of those stories, but I don't believe the totalitarian monster was personified in either one of them. Maybe the example of the real-world totalitarian was necessary before he could cross over into literature. If anyone can propose the first totalitarian in literature, I would like to hear about it.

That leaves a few other types of monsters that I haven't talked about yet. Fitz-James O'Brien wrote about the invisible monster in "What Was It? A Mystery" (1859). Guy de Maupassant's story "The Horla" (1887) and Ambrose Bierce's story "The Damned Thing" (1893) are more well known. They also conveniently fall within the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, as does "The Invisible Man" by H.G. Wells (1897). The machine-monster has its origins in real-life automata of ancient times. If you were drawing a Venn diagram of machine-monsters, Frankenstein's monster might fall partially within your circle. The android would also, of course. The French writer Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, in L'Ève future (1886) was responsible for the first usage of that word as we understand it, that is, a robot in human form. Ambrose Bierce turned the game-playing automaton into a monster in "Moxon's Master" (1893). The word robot itself comes from the play R.U.R by Karel Čapek (1920). The computer-monster is just a later variation on the same type.

I don't know when the concept of the interdimensional being or monster came about, but ghosts, demons, and other supernatural monsters would have served that purpose in olden times. Cryptids, space aliens, and invisible monsters fit the bill today. The degenerate human is a kind of monster as well. I'm not sure you can point to his first appearance, although The Time Machine (1895) or The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), both by H.G. Wells (1896), are good candidates. My list isn't complete, but I'll close this part one with another type, the soulless monster, which can take various forms. For example, does Frankenstein's monster possess a soul? Does a vampire? More to my point, does the machine-monster have a soul? Or the space alien of the pod-person type? Or what about the monster du jour, the zombie?

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Once the Age of Exploration began, there would have been born a new kind of monster and one of the first monsters of science: the previously unknown creature out of terra icognita. Today we would call that creature a cryptid.

(2) The decade in which our current popular culture can be said to have begun.

Before science and reason, monsters were supernatural in origin, or they came from mythology and folklore. The nineteenth century gave us two new categories of monsters, the scientific monster and the real-life monster. If you want to play scientist, here is the beginning of a taxonomic scheme:

The Supernatural Monster--Devil, demon, ghost, vampire, werewolf, ghoul, incubus, succubus, etc.
The Mythological and Folkloric Monster--Giant, cyclops, dragon, kraken, ogre, troll, etc.
The Scientific Monster--Man-made monster (e.g., Frankenstein's monster), mutant, space alien, invisible monster, interdimensional monster, android, robot, cryptozoological monster or cryptid, degenerate human, etc.
The Real-Life Monster, explained and/or justified by science or pseudoscience--Psychopathic killer, totalitarian.

It's worth noting that many of the nineteenth century monsters date from about 1885 to the end of the century, mostly from the 1890s. That period coincides with the origins of our current popular culture, including movies, radio, pulp magazines (hence paperback books), newspaper comics (hence comic books), UFOs, and the popularization of sports such as golf and bicycling. Science fiction predates the 1890s, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that H.G. Wells, in his novels of the 1890s and early 1900s, fathered twentieth century science fiction. (1, 2) If that's the case, then a good deal of our genre fiction also comes from the 1890s. All of that may or may not be significant. More to the point, the stereotype of the fin de siècle is that it was a period of ennui, pessimism, and thoughts of degeneration and decadence, exemplars of which included Oscar Wilde and French poets such as Paul Verlaine. But the 1890s were also a period of hope, confidence, and optimism, especially in the United States. (3, 4)

So in the 1890s, there were those who looked behind them and saw their own times as decadent, while others looked forward to new worlds made possible by science and the idea of progress. (5) Those two poles--past and future--each has its own literature of the fantastic, and each type of fantasy has its own monsters. The fantasy of the past includes high fantasy, horror, and weird fiction. Its monsters are supernatural, mythological, and folkloric. (6) The fantasy of the future is science fiction. The monsters of science fiction are of course scientific. If you include dystopian fiction with science fiction, then the totalitarian may also be a monster of that genre. And if past and future are the poles, then maybe science fantasy or low fantasy is located at the equator (or perhaps no closer to one pole than 49° 51′ South, 128° 34′ West, the location of R'lyeh). Fantasy and science fiction also meet in stories like House of Dark Shadows (1970), in which vampirism is explained as a kind of blood-borne illness. In any case, a survey of monsters of the twentieth century swings between those two poles, past and future, fantasy and science fiction. There is reason to believe that we have swung pretty widely to one side. We'll have to take that into account if we're going to figure out a monster for the twenty-first century. (7)

The two real-life monsters about which I have written so much also came out of the nineteenth century, but they seem to have been real before they were imaginary (unless the Übermensch can be considered a prototypical totalitarian). I still haven't found a fictional totalitarian from before the rise of real-life totalitarians beginning in 1917. George Orwell's 1984 (1948) is probably the most well known depiction of the totalitarian in fiction, but it came well after we had encountered real-life monsters of that type. Likewise, I haven't found the first fictional portrayal of the psychopathic killer, certainly not one that predates Jack the Ripper, who carved up five women in 1888. I'm almost certain the pyschopath would have shown up in thrillers or detective stories of the 1800s. The character Svengali, from George du Maurier's 1895 novel Trilby, might be a psychopath, but I'm not sure he's a killer, as I have not read that book. Regardless, I'm open to suggestions. In the meantime, it's on to the twentieth century.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Those novels include: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901), The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904), In the Days of the Comet (1906), and The War in the Air (1908). Wells also wrote fantasy and Utopian novels.

(2) I have been looking for the first fictional totalitarian, for it seems to me that authors of fiction would have anticipated the career of the first real-life totalitarian. Rodrigo Borges de Faveri has proposed Nietzsche's Übermensch from Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885, translated 1896) as the first or prototypical totalitarian, but that work is visionary or philosophical rather than fictional. I have read only a synopsis of When the Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells, but Ostrog--whose very name is like that of a monster--may be a totalitarian. Can anyone comment?

(3) In Europe, there seems to have been more of an air of impending revolutionary change, hence the popularity of Utopian literature and revolutionary movements. Unfortunately, Utopianism and revolution too often result in oppression, murder, and totalitarianism, as the history of the twentieth century shows. In any case, I have a book called Looking Forward (1970), which reprints images from popular magazines of the turn of the century. The emphasis is on what life in the twentieth century would be like. Looking forward can hardly be called a decadent activity. The title echoes that of Edward Bellamy's classic Utopian novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887, published in 1888.

(4) In Also Sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche described the Übermensch and perhaps more importantly predicted the arrival of the Last Man. I'll have more to say about that guy later.

(5) The World's Columbian Exposition--the Chicago World's Fair of 1893--commemorated the 400-year anniversary of the discovery of the original New World. Despite the fact that Frederick Jackson Turner lectured on the closing of the American frontier--a decidedly backward-looking thesis--the spirit of the Chicago World's Fair was forward-looking and progressive. Another spirit haunted the fair that year, for H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer, was then on the loose in Chicago.

(6) Located at one extreme of fantasy fiction, weird fiction, it seems to me, is about decadence, be it personal, biological, cultural, or civilizational. Weird fiction as the fantastic, or at the very least outré, fiction of decadence is one possible definition of that term.

(7) I recently wrote about the question, Is science fiction dying? That question has some bearing on the monster of the twenty-first century as well. Hang in there.

One hundred years ago this month, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the good duchess, thus plunging Europe into a war from which it has never recovered. The war was probably inevitable. The nations of Europe had been preparing for it for years. Some were in fact spoiling for war. I say nations, but most were actually more than nations. They were empires, and at least seven--the British, French, Italian, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman--became belligerents. You might as well throw in the Belgians as well. Two emperors claimed the title Caesar. They were the tsar of Russia and the German kaiser. Both were deposed as a result of the war. Three empires were destroyed and one--the Russian--was reduced, only to expand again a generation later. It may have been that every one of those empires was attempting to become the great Roman Empire of classical history. That ambition would also have made war inevitable, for a continent the size of Europe can hardly contain seven or more empires. The point of all this is you can look at the last 1,500 years of European history as simply the aftermath of the fall of the Roman empire in which the last century or so has been marked by increasing decadence. We may today be in a final decadent age. If weird fiction is about the past and about decadence, then it's no wonder that it would be the first genre of fantasy to have its own magazine, nor that supernatural monsters--that is, monsters from the past--would stalk through most of the twentieth century.

Weimar Germany (1919-1933) is held up (or down) as the epitome of a decadent civilization. The origins of German decadence probably lie deep in the past, but even before the war, a German historian and philosopher, Oswald Spengler, set the tone for the Weimar Republic in his book Decline of the West. Published in the summer of 1918, Decline of the West proved popular in its author's home country. Spengler revised it in 1922 and authored a second volume published in 1923. I'm not a philosopher and won't go into Spengler's ideas very deeply. I have never read him, only about him. I simply offer his work as evidence that a spirit of decadence hung over Europe, especially Germany, after World War I.

Oswald Spengler was influenced by Nietzsche. Apparently like Nietzsche, he saw his own time as a kind of end time. He also apparently foresaw the rise of an Übermensch--he called the process Caesarism--in the twilight time of decline. Like Nietzsche, Spengler accurately predicted much of what we see among us today. In any case, a process of decay evidently wasn't enough for the German people, for less than a generation after one war ended, they chose a second war of self-destruction, a Götterdämmerung from out of their own folkloric past. It's worth noting that the German title of Spengler's book--Der Untergang des Abendlandes--refers to the West as the direction in which the sun goes down, in other words, the land of the evening or of twilight. Götterdämmerung is of course a German expression for the twilight of the gods.

The world's first fantasy magazine was also a product of post-war Germany. Called Der Orchideengarten: Phantastische Blätter (The Orchids-Garden: Fantastic Pages), it went into print in January 1919, the same month in which the Weimar Republic was founded and only two months after the armistice. Der Orchideengarten ran for fifty-one issues, from January 1919 to November 1921. Its editors were Karl Hans Strobl (1877-1946) and Alfons von Czibulka (1888-1969). Despite the supposed decadence of the time, fantasy and weird fiction were not highly esteemed in Germany (if I understand my correspondent Lars Dangel correctly). In addition, Strobl and Czibulka were later associated with the Nazis. They and their work very likely fell out of favor after World War II. That left things to Weird Tales, the first American magazine of fantasy and weird fiction and the preeminent magazine of its kind in the world. First in print in March 1923, Weird Tales lasted until September 1954 in its first incarnation. Like the undead, it has returned again and again and is still being published today. I think it safe to say that both magazines came about in one way or another because of World War I, the spirit of decadence in the postwar period, and a kind of looking backward that characterized the early twentieth century.

Weimar Germany is also known for its cinema, which, according to Wikipedia, "focused heavily on crime and horror," in other words, the subjects of fantasy and weird fiction. Among the movies of that period:

Algol, Tragödie der Macht (Algol: Tragedy of Power, 1920)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came Into the World, 1920)
Der Januskopf (1920)
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, 1922)
Metropolis (1927)
M (1931)

All feature monsters of one kind or another: the space alien and at least the concept of totalitarianism in Algol; the man-made monster in Dr. Caligari and Der Golem; the degenerate human or psychopath in Der Januskopf (a retelling of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story); the vampire in Nosferatu; the machine-monster and another treatment of totalitarianism in Metropolis; and the psychopathic killer in M. (1, 2) American moviemakers were paying attention to developments in German cinema of the 1920s. They--as well as Europeans who fled Naziism--would dominate the next decade of horror movies.

The interwar period was of course characterized by the rise of totalitarians. Lenin came to power in 1917 and was succeeded by Stalin in the 1920s. In China, a young Mao was watching and began his conversion to Marxist-Leninism in 1919. The Nazi party came into existence in 1920 (in part on a foundation laid by occultists with beliefs drawn from Ignatius Donnelly and Madame Blavatsky). Thirteen years later, its leader, Adolf Hitler, put the Weimar Republic in its grave. In the meantime, Benito Mussolini rose to the premiership in Italy in 1922. The word totalitarian itself is either Italian or German in origin and seems to have come out of the 1920s.

The 1920s were a decade for the other real-life monster as well. The movie M, starring Peter Lorre as a serial killer, would have been a familiar story to the people of Weimar Germany, for their country had been plagued by psychopaths during the decade previous to its release. Karl Denke, a cannibal and a butcher of humans, died by suicide in 1924. Carl Großmann, "The Berlin Butcher," was also a cannibal and a suicide. Friedrich Haarmann, known as "The Butcher of Hanover" and "The Vampire of Hanover," was guillotined in 1925. Peter Kürten, called "The Vampire of Düsseldorf" and "The Düsseldorf Monster," is supposed to have been the inspiration for Peter Lorre's character. He killed at least ten people before he, too, lost his head.

Oswald Spengler attached the idea of what he called Caesarism to a declining civilization, but is the serial killer also diagnostic of decadence? Both the totalitarian and the psychopathic killer are as old as time, but as we think of them today, they arose at the end of the nineteenth century, a period supposed to have been decadent. They also populated post-World War I Europe, again a time of decadence. So if our own time is decadent, then should we not have rampant totalitarian monsters and psychopathic killers? Maybe we do. But maybe they go by a different disguise.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Algol, which sounds like a fascinating movie, is about the discovery underground of a space alien that has access to a source of unlimited power. That sounds an awful lot like Bulwer-Lytton's Vril-Ya, about which I wrote recently.

(2) The robot in Metropolis is considered the first of its kind in film. The word robot had entered the lexicon of fantasy earlier that decade through the play R.U.R. (Rosumovi Univerzální Roboti or Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920) by Czech writer Karel Čapek.

In 1918, the Great War ended and Johnny came marching home again, except that some Johnnys didn't march. They limped instead, or hobbled on canes and crutches, or were rolled in wheelchairs because of their war wounds. The term basket case, still in use, dates from a war that began a century ago. It refers to quadruple amputees carried around in baskets.

After the war some men went about their lives. Others were forever scarred. Try as it might, the world could not have avoided seeing men mutilated and burned, scarred and dismembered, their faces shot away or their limbs reduced. Sometimes art anticipates life. Sometimes it reflects it. In the United States at least, perhaps no other artist was poised for the return of the mutilated as was Lon Chaney.

Leonidas Frank Chaney was born on April 1, 1883, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Both parents were deaf. In order to communicate with them, Chaney learned to express himself with face, body, and hands--perfect training for a future silent film actor. He also learned what it means to be an outsider because of physical disability. Chaney went on stage before his teen years were up. An actor, singer, dancer, comedian, choreographer, makeup artist, writer, director, and stage manager, Lon Chaney made his undying name in the movies. He arrived in Hollywood in 1910 and made his first movie short in 1912 or 1913. The first feature film with his name in the credits was Richelieu, from 1914. In all, he made about 160 movies. A well-disguised Chaney may have played more uncredited roles.

Known as "The Man of a Thousand Faces," Lon Chaney played character roles throughout his career. He is most remembered for his portrayals of grotesque, mutilated, and disfigured men. In 1919, that pivotal year in things large and small, Chaney put his skills at pantomime and contortion to good use as a "fake cripple" nicknamed The Frog in a movie short called The Miracle Man. A favorite among crowds and critics, The Miracle Man became a breakout picture for Chaney. He followed that up with a starring role in The Penalty, from 1920. In an extraordinary performance, Chaney played Blizzard, a man whose legs had been amputated in his youth. For the role, the actor had his legs tied up behind him and walked on his knees. His feat (no pun intended) astonished moviegoers.

The Penalty is a thriller, a sort of weird menace story made before the pulp genre of the 1930s carried that name. It is also considered a horror movie, one of the earliest feature-length horror movies made in America. Shorter films had preceded it: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1908, 1912, and 1913; Frankenstein in 1910; The Werewolf in 1913. John Barrymore recreated the roles of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a feature-length film from 1920, one of two American versions of the story from that year. Despite all that, the horror movies of the 1910s and '20s that most fans know are The Hunchback of Notre Dame, from 1923, and The Phantom of the Opera, from 1925. The star of both was Lon Chaney and his performances in both are again extraordinary. The scene of the double unmasking in The Phantom of the Opera (once for the camera, once for the damsel in distress Christine) is still shocking and frightening, even to us, nearly ninety years after it was first shown. It's hard to believe that the Phantom's countenance is merely a combination of makeup, lighting, and the actor's craft and not a real, though disfigured, face.

Lon Chaney died in 1930. He was of course irreplaceable, but the show must go on, and so Hollywood continued making horror movies, more in the 1930s than in the 1920s. The monsters of those movies are the supernatural monsters of the past (vampires, zombies, and other walking dead), monsters of science (Frankenstein's monster, beast-men, invisible men, etc.), and real-life monsters (murderers, maniacs, mad scientists, and psychopaths). Bats, cats, old mansions, mad scientists, and psycho killers abounded in bewildering array in the 1920s and '30s. So did vampires and even zombies. Every studio and many independent producers got in on the act. One among them was and is identified with monsters. Those monsters even have a name, or more accurately, a brand. They are called Universal Monsters.

Lon Chaney began his career with Universal Pictures. Although he worked as a freelance actor during the 1920s, both The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera were released by Universal. (1) By fate or design, Universal became the studio where monster movies were made: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Old Dark House (1932),The Invisible Man(1933),The Black Cat(1934), Bride of Frankenstein(1935), Werewolf of London(1935), Dracula's Daughter(1936), and Son of Frankenstein(1939) in the 1930s, many more in the 1940s. The Wolf Man (1941) was the last great Universal horror movie made before war once again descended. (It was released on December 12, 1941, less than a week after Pearl Harbor). Universal returned to greatness in the 1950s with a number of science-based monster movies. In the meantime, Hollywood, Universal included, churned out endless variations on the monsters of the 1930s and before.

I read once that a decadent culture is characterized by remakes, rehashes, attributions, and allusions of and to things of the past. You could add sequels and parodies to that list. If that's the case, then monster and horror movies--genres that are already about the past and about decadence--began showing signs of decadence in the 1940s and '50s. The trend was already apparent in the late thirties with sequels to Dracula and Frankenstein. In 1943, Universal released Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. Five years later, after war had intervened, those two monsters were reduced to comedy in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I like Abbott and Costello, but the expression "How far we fall" comes to mind. It's clear that monster movies of the pre-war type were running out of steam.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Chaney's third great horror movie of the 1920s, London After Midnight (1927), was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. That film is now lost.
Also note: "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" is a Civil War song, not a song from World War I.

PulpFest, "the summer's leading pulp convention," begins this evening, Thursday, August 7, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Columbus, Ohio. The official schedule of events opens with a presentation by author Laurie Powers on her grandfather, the prolific pulp author Paul Powers, at the Thompson Library at Ohio State University. One of the most notable events for fans of Weird Tales will be the auction of books, manuscripts, letters, and other items from the estate of Everil Worrell (1893-1969), to take place on Saturday, August 9. PulpFest continues all weekend, from today through Sunday, August 10. To find out more, see the website of PulpFest, here.

It has been awhile since I wrote. I hope to get back into the swing of things over the next couple of weeks by completing my series on the monster of the twenty-first century. Like a monster itself, this series has grown out of control. I would like to lay it to rest.

A blog without pictures isn't always very interesting. I have written most of this series without posting any images. I hope today's posting will make up for that.

I'll begin with "El sueño de la razon produce monstruos" ("The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters") by Francisco Goya, No. 43 in his series Los Caprichos (Caprices or Follies, 1799). We think of the eighteenth century as the second in an Age of Reason, yet the century closed with the French Revolution and the beginnings of Romanticism in art, literature, music, and politics. Significantly, the beginning of the Romantic movement (in as far as any such thing can be said to have a beginning) is dated to about 1800, or about the same time Goya published Los Caprichos. Romanticism in art, literature, and music is one thing. Romanticism in politics is quite another.

The totalitarian monster as a modern, political creature was born in the eighteenth century and was baptized in the blood of the French Revolution. The American Revolution was practically bloodless by comparison. Beyond that, our Constitution, a work of supreme reason, has outlived all the fevered dreams and Utopian fantasies of the Leftist, Statist, Marxist, Communist, Fascist, Nazi, Socialist, and Nihilist--in short, of the totalitarian.

Our fiction of monsters and of horror, terror, and fantasy dates from the 1700s as well. Gothicism--a kind of Romanticism--came in reaction to the Age of Reason. Curiously, one of the great works of Gothicism, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, was also a work of nascent science fiction. In that book, she gave us a new kind of monster, the man-made monster of science, and an icon for the twentieth century.

If the artist is like a canary in a coal mine, you can expect him to recognize the connection between human monsters and monsters of the imagination. Different artists exercise their power in different ways. Some use imagery of monstrous horror to depict the human monster. Others--particularly cartoonists--reduce the human monster through satire, ridicule, and parody. Few cartoonists were as capable of such things as Will Elder (1921-2008). In "Frank N. Stein," published in Mad #8 (Dec. 1953), the monster turns out to have the face of Hitler--and the brain of a bird.

Not to be outdone, Joseph Stalin, Hitler's one-time ally and then murderous rival, donned his monster suit to pose for this drawing of the creature. It comes from the back cover of Tales of the Uncanny, a parody or sendup of the superhero comics of the early 1960s, published by Image Comics in June 1993.

Our popular image of Frankenstein's monster comes of course from the Universal movies of the 1930s in which Boris Karloff played the creature. The makeup, by Jack Pierce (1889-1968), was green but showed up on black-and-white film as light gray.

If you were a kid in 1951, you might have spent your pennies on a set of gum cards called "Red Menace," issued by Bowman. There are forty-eight cards in the set. This card, called "War-Maker" and showing the image of Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung, is number forty-seven. (Mao had earned his gum-card moniker by sending Chinese troops into Korea the year before "Red Menace" was released.) Mao looks friendly enough in this picture, but the green tint to his skin would have been a signal to all that he was in fact a monster in the mold of Frankenstein's creation from a generation before . . .

. . . or like the Phantom of the Opera, whose portrait was painted by Basil Gogos in the 1960s.

By the end of the Great War, the totalitarian society was becoming a reality and the artist was there to give warning. Here is a poster or cartoon entitled "The Communist Monster Threatens to Undermine the Country," drawn by a German artist, Thomas Theodor Heine (1867-1948). I don't know the date, but I suspect it's from the period of the Weimar Republic, probably about 1918 or so, as Heine fled Germany in the year the Nazis came to power, 1933.

"Die Heimat ist in Gefahr!" ("Your Country Is in Danger!"), from 1918, warning of the advance of the monster of Bolshevism. (Note the word Bolschewismus in the first line under the title.) The artist was Carl Hachez (1880-1958). This is clearly a piece of propaganda . . . or is it? If propaganda begins where truth gives way to sensationalism, then how can any piece of art warning of the horrors of totalitarianism be more sensational than the reality of that system? The totalitarian is in truth a monster, a murderer, a destroyer. A piece of art that you might call propagandistic is actually an understatement when it comes to the horrors perpetrated by the twentieth-century totalitarian.

Another poster with the same slogan, obviously in the same series and presumably from about the same period. The artist was Victor Arnaud (1890-?). The date looks like 1919.

"Bolschewismus Bringt Krieg, Arbeitslosigkeit und Hungersnot" ("Bolshevism Brings War, Unemployment and Famine"), a poster from 1918 by Julius Ussy Engelhard (1883-1964). Again, the Bolshevist is depicted as a monster, a sort of apeman armed with a knife and a bomb. (Note the similar image, an ape with the sword, in the background of the Mao Tse-tung trading card above.) Is it propaganda or is it truth? Now, nearly one hundred years later, we know that Communism does indeed bring war and ruin, yet there are those who still cling to the fantasy that everyone can be made equal--and are willing to deprive people of their rights and even their lives to make it happen.

German artists of 1918 and after weren't the only ones to recognize the monstrousness of totalitarianism. Here is a poster created by a White Russian artist and against Trotsky, Lenin's left-hand man and head of the Red Army. The title is ironic: "Peace and Liberty in Sovdepiya" (presumably an early alternate name for the Soviet Union). Trotsky is depicted here as the devil, but there is also a strong suggestion of his Jewishness. Too often, those who oppose Communism have also been anti-Semitic, as with the Nazis. This image also appears on an atrocious anti-Semitic website.

I have not been able to find an image of Lenin depicted as a monster of any kind, but you don't have to use much of your imagination to see the demonic quality in his visage.

"Communisme Ennemi de la France" ("Communism: Enemy of France"). A lot happened between 1918, when the German posters above were printed, and 1942, the date of this poster by Michel Jacquot (dates unknown). The German people, instead of choosing freedom in their struggles against Communism, threw in their lot with the rabid anti-Communist (and anti-Jewish) Nazi Party. Certain elements in France did the same thing, forming the Parti Populaire Français (French Popular Party) in 1936. Except for his insignia, the man in this picture could be a Nazi. It's worth noting that he is throttling what appears to be a werewolf: near the end of the war, the Nazis came up with their project Werwolf, a scheme to carry on the fight after the war. It's also worth noting that the Parti Populaire Français was founded in part by former Communists. As Eric Hoffer noted in his indispensable book, The True Believer (1951), the easiest convert for the true believer (such as a Nazi) is simply another true believer (such as a Communist). Likewise, the true believer reserves his bitterest enmity not for the liberal (in the classical sense of the word, not in the contemporary American sense) but for other true believers.

When it comes to recognizing the monstrousness of totalitarianism, the Soviets were no less perceptive than the Nazis, as this poster, "Kill the Fascist Monster!" by Viktor Nikolaevich Deni (1893-1946), shows. (That translation may not be entirely accurate. I invite a reader of Russian to comment. The date by the way appears to be 1942.)

If the translation of the Russian title above is accurate, this American poster is equally unequivocal--and the enemy is even more obviously monstrous. The monster in this poster by Bert Yates (dates unknown) is two-headed: I suspect that it was executed after Mussolini. The image is propagandistic to be sure, but the caption--"this monster that stops at nothing"--is true of the totalitarian himself and of the totalitarian impulse.

The Allied victory in World War II (or the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call it) stopped the Nazis, the Fascists, and the Japanese warlords after all, but Communism survived and began to wage a new war, a Cold War, the outcome of which must have been in doubt for many years. The film I Married a Communist (1949, retitled The Woman on Pier 13) appears to have been drawn from the pulps: the genre, film noir, is from the hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s, while the confessional title comes straight from Bernarr Macfadden's True line of magazines. And, if you like drawing full circles, Rousseau, a progenitor of ideas that totalitarians have used against us, authored a book called Confessions.

The confessional title showed up again in I Married a Monster from Outer Space, from 1958. There were other movies with titles in the same vein, including I Was Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, both from 1957. There is significance in those titles and the ideas behind them, namely that a Communist or a monster from outer space might easily pass among us, look like us, fool us, moreover, that he or she might threaten to undermine us and our society (as in the early German illustration above), worse yet, that he or she might recruit us or make us one of his or her own. There was another film from that period with just that theme. It's one of the most important science fiction movies not just of the decade but of all time. It came from the postwar development of the science-fictional monster, and it leads pretty directly to what I think must be the monster of the twenty-first century. The film is called Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Early Science Fiction Monsters

Next month--September 2014--marks the sixtieth anniversary of the demise of Weird Tales. Against all odds, the magazine had survived for thirty-one years and 279 issues when it came to a close in September 1954. Few pulp magazines could claim that kind of longevity. After January 1940, Weird Tales went to a bimonthly schedule. In its last year, it shrank to a digest-sized magazine. If you knew nothing else about pulp magazines, you might think that Weird Tales had run out of steam by the summer of 1954. That's true in its way, but the 1950s were full of casualties, and though they were succeeded by digests, men's adventure magazines, and paperback books, the pulps, which had enjoyed a golden age stretching back to the 1920s or before, effectively reached their end in the first full decade after the war.

Weird Tales was a magazine of weird fiction (a seemingly indefinable genre), but it also published heroic fantasy, science fantasy, ghost stories, horror stories, monster stories, and even science fiction. Strangely enough, the first issue of Weird Tales showed on its cover not a vampire, werewolf, ghost, or other monster from the past, but a monster of the future, a man-made monster, a science-fictional monster before the term science fiction was even in use.

Weird Tales, March 1923, the first issue of "The Unique Magazine." The cover story is "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud, the cover art by Richard R. Epperly. The monster has an octopoid appearance in this illustration. In the story, it's actually a giant amoeba created by science. Renowned for being the first American magazine devoted exclusively to fantasy, Weird Tales began with an image and a story of science fiction.

Weird Tales was alone on the newsstand for some time after its debut, but then the first science fiction magazine came along in Amazing Stories (April 1926). Other magazines of fantasy, terror, and horror made a run at success in the 1920s and '30s, but few lasted very long. In strong contrast, science fiction pulps flourished. During and after the war, they proliferated, first in the traditional pulp format, then in digest-size. I read once that the last true pulp magazine was a science fiction title from the late 1950s. That may or may not be true. In any case, digest-sized science fiction survived well into the 1960s and early '70s. Analog, originally Astounding Science-Fiction (1938), remains, as do The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949), and a latecomer, Asimov's Science Fiction (1977). All are digests. Weird Tales is also still in publication, but not continuously since its inception. The current incarnation is its fifth, or sixth, or . . . .

Before World War II, science fiction had its devoted fans (short for fanatics). To the general reader, however, science fiction was just a bunch of "Buck Rogers stuff." There were few science fiction movies in the 1930s. The monsters in those movies were the typical mad scientist or man-made monster or degenerate fiend of the pulps. If you wanted monsters, you went to see monster movies, not science fiction movies. Universal Pictures specialized in that genre, and though there was a good deal of blending of science fiction and horror in the movies--Frankenstein (1931) is a perfect example--there were few if any truly science-fictional monsters. In other words, the monsters of science fiction were still mostly the monsters of the past, or of decadence, and as such they fell into the province of fantasy and weird fiction.

The monsters of the 1930s continued into the 1940s. The Wolfman, a truly great monster movie, wasn't released until 1941. Even as late as 1955, Universal released a new film starring an old--a very old--monster: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. By then of course, the Universal Monsters of the 1930s had fallen on hard times, but there was a new kind of monster from a new and very fresh genre to take their place. Surprisingly, it wasn't a new and up-and-coming studio that trumped Universal in the monster movie game, for Universal itself adapted to changing times and released some of the best science fiction monster movies of the 1950s.

To be continued . . .

Wars and Worlds, Past and Future

I began yesterday with an anniversary, the sixtieth anniversary of the last issue of Weird Tales. I'll begin today with another anniversary: seventy-five years ago next month, in September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, thus setting off the Second World War.

Before the war, science fiction was for a few fans. If the general public knew anything at all about the genre, it was in an offhand way. "Buck Rogers stuff" they called it. Science fiction was in the comics and in movie serials. It was something for kids. But in the run-up to the war, science fiction became serious, at least for one night in 1938.

In March of that year, Nazi Germany annexed Austria and immediately began agitating for annexation of the Sudetenland. The crisis continued into the summer and the spectre of war loomed. Then, in September, the European powers came upon a solution--or a dissolution. In the first weeks of October, Germany took control of German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia and war was averted--at least for another eleven months.

On the evening of October 30, 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a dramatization of H.G. Welles'War of the Worlds as a kind of documentary account of supposedly real, contemporary events. Some listeners who tuned in late believed that Martians really had invaded Earth--specifically New Jersey--and panic ensued. Just how many believed it and how much panic was caused by it is open to question. The point is that science fiction, perhaps for the first time, demonstrated its power over the popular imagination.

The First World War had been preceded by what is now called "Invasion Literature." That genre, new to the late nineteenth century, may have given rise to science fiction, as in the original book, The War of the Worlds (1896). The first war also saw advances in the science and technology of killing people, for example, airplanes, tanks, aerial bombs, submarine warfare, and poison gas. Science fiction came along during and after the war as well, but there seems to have been a kind of retrenchment (no pun intended) in fantasy fiction. Weird Tales, despite its first cover--a science fiction cover--turned to the past and to monsters of the past for most of its subject matter.

The Second World War is another story. After the advances of that war, there was no going back. The dreams of the prewar science fiction fan seemed to be coming about, for now there were rockets, guided missiles, radar, jet-powered aircraft, pressurized cabins (essential for space travel), and most importantly, atomic power. Those starveling fans of the prewar era tended to be visionaries. They were liberal, progressive, futuristic, technocratic, Utopian, even communist in their beliefs. The scientific and technological developments of the war seemed to bear out their faith in the future. (1)

Still, monsters out of the past continued to show up in movies of the 1940s, and science fiction was largely still in pulp magazines and comic strips. In the movies of the early and mid '40s, there were vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, apemen, madmen, ghosts, and zombies. (2) But if you look at a list of horror movies from the 1940s (Wikipedia has a list--yes, I know, it's Wikipedia, but it is a list), you'll notice the number of titles dropping off precipitously after the war. There are probably all kinds of reasons for that, but it seems to me that a populace that had just experienced real-life horrors--the horrors of war, mass death, genocide--would hardly have had a taste for fictional monsters. The number of science fiction movies was also low in the postwar era, but in the 1950s, science fiction took off like a rocket. If I had to guess, I would say two developments caused that. One--the splitting of the atom--was real but anticipated by science fiction. The other--flying saucers--was only partly real but otherwise made from whole cloth by a science fiction writer, Raymond A. Palmer.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) If fantasy is about the past and science fiction is about the future, then I wonder if there is any correlation between the authors of those respective genres and their political beliefs. It's really easy to pick out examples that fit a hypothesis: H.P. Lovecraft, a fantasist obsessed with the past and with decadence, was notoriously conservative, a Tory in twentieth century America. Frederik Pohl, a forward-looking science fictioneer, was liberal or progressive in his beliefs. Some of his cohorts were outright Communists, if only for awhile. But that hypothesis goes only so far. I would not put Robert A. Heinlein in the liberal or leftist category, for example.

(2) It seems to me that there is too little notice given to a new type of horror movie of the 1940s, that is, for want of a better term, the Weird Tales-type horror movie. I can think of three examples: Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Curse of the Cat People (1944). All were produced by Val Lewton, who had written for Weird Tales. The first two were directed by Jacques Tourneur.

Universal Monsters--1923-1955

When we think of movie monsters from Hollywood's golden age, the name of one studio comes to mind: Universal Pictures. That's partly because of a hugely successful campaign at branding. In truth, the popularity of Universal monsters goes all the way back to the original movies themselves. Their popularity has gotten a boost every so often. That boost has often been in some other medium besides film.

If the Aurora line of models from the 1960s is any indication, the first Universal monster was The Hunchback of Notre Dame, played by Lon Chaney in a movie of that same name from 1923. I'm not sure how monstrous the poor hunchback is. Nonetheless, he's thrown into the mix. Next came The Phantom of the Opera, again played by Lon Chaney in a film from 1925. The sound era for Universal monsters began in 1931 with the release of Dracula and Frankenstein. Both films, both monsters, and the actors who played them--Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff--have reached the status of icons in our culture. They have also spawned movies made and remade in the decades since.

There were still more Universal monsters and Universal horror movies in the 1930s and '40s. The Mummy, played by Boris Karloff, followed close on the heels of Dracula and Frankenstein's monster (1932). Then came The Invisible Man (Claude Rains, 1933), The Bride of Frankenstein (Elsa Lanchester, 1935), and The Wolfman (Lon Chaney, Jr., 1941). By the mid to late '30s, Universal monsters had become so popular that the sequels, team-ups, battles, and remakes had already begun. (Eventually there would be comedy take-offs as well.) The first sequel was The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Then came Dracula's Daughter (1936) and Son of Frankenstein (1939). The actors, too, were teamed up: Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff appeared together in at least five Universal horror movies from that period. Those two men would also team up with Lon Chaney, Jr., in movies of the 1940s. (1)

Universal released a few dozen horror movies and monster movies during the 1940s. Most of those (all but five by my count) came out before the end of the Second World War. I would guess that the films released in the immediate post-war period (1945-1946) had gone into production before V-J Day. That would leave just one made entirely after the war. The world had changed by then of course. Horrors had become real on battlefields, in bombed-out cities, and behind the walls and fences of Nazi concentration camps. True human monsters had held sway over the earth for six years. In some places they persisted even after the war. Cinematic horrors and movie monsters paled by comparison. For six years, people had looked to the future, to the end of the war and what that might bring. New technology developed during the war promised a better world afterwords. Maybe it would all be powered by nuclear fission. Maybe we would all have flying cars, live in automated houses, and have our work done by robots. Maybe we would even go into outer space, to the moon, and to the other planets. In the post-war period, we turned our gaze from the past and from the monsters of the past to the future. But there, too, would be monsters.

The last Universal Monster movie of the 1940s and the first of the 1950s were team-ups. The stars weren't some combination of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., however. Instead they were Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. In Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Bud and Lou encountered Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, and The Wolf Man. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was the curtain call for all three. The other Universal monsters ended their careers with the comedy duo as well, in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953), and finally Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). (2) With that, the Universal monster came to an end . . . but not really.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) It's worth noting here that the Universal picture Weird Woman (1944), with Anne Gwynne in the title role, was based on the novel Conjure Wife (1943) by Fritz Leiber, Jr., the author who got me started on this ramble. I haven't seen Weird Woman, but I wonder if it would have fallen into the category of the Weird Tales-like horror movie, like Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Conjure Wife originally appeared in Unknown Worlds in April 1943.
(2) Still using the Aurora monster models as my guide, I should say that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was not originally a Universal monster but based on Frederic March's performance in the Paramount release of 1931.

Universal Monsters Live

So, I'm following three threads to get to the monster of the twenty-first century:

The Horror Monster, which you might also call the supernatural monster, the monster of fantasy, or the monster from the past, represented here by the Universal monster;
The Science Fiction Monster, which you might also call the scientific monster or the monster of the future, and which arose in our popular culture after World War II; and
The Real-Life Monster, which includes the psychopathic killer and the totalitarian, both of which came out of the nineteenth century, and both of which thrive on mass movements and mass developments.

I believe the monster of the twenty-first century is woven from these three threads.

***

If you go by the number of movie titles released, Universal monsters weren't so popular after World War II as they were during and before. But that's only part of the picture. If you look at the whole thing, you begin to see that they continued to be popular for years afterward. After 1950, Universal Pictures made at least three smart moves in keeping its monsters alive and in the public eye.

As we all know, the world turned on the events of the Second World War. That was as true in movies and popular culture as in anything else. In the first full year after the war, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), an extraordinary film and one as true to life as any big picture of the previous decade or more, won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. (1) More movies treating real-life problems in more realistic ways followed. The post-war cinema was also characterized by film noir, that is, frank, realistic (though usually stylized) movies about crime, sex, terror, anxiety, and suspense, often filmed on location in the kind of city described by Fritz Leiber, Jr., in "Smoke Ghost,""The Inheritance," and "The Dreams of Albert Moreland." Interestingly, film noir had its roots in pulp fiction, in Universal monster movies of the 1930s, and before that, in German Expressionism of the Weimar period, among other things. (2) In any case, horror movies and monster movies may have declined in popularity after the war in comparison to true-to-life movies, film noir, crime dramas, and so on, but like the undead, they kept coming back.

***

In 1948, in the same year that the first Abbott and Costello-Universal monster team-up came out, CBS and ABC began regular network television broadcasts on the East Coast. They had been beaten to the punch by NBC television (1944) and Dumont (1946), but that didn't matter: there was plenty in the television business for everybody. There still is. There had been television broadcasts before. For instance, Hugo Gernsback, the father of magazine science fiction, began broadcasting television signals in New York City eighty-six years ago this month, on August 14, 1928. But TV didn't take off until after the war, when technology improved, the population (especially of children) rapidly increased, and Americans began enjoying the prosperity of the 1950s. In 1955, the last Abbott and Costello-Universal monster team-up--and the last Universal monster movie of the classic era--came out. I don't think it's any coincidence at all that in 1957, just two years later and a decade into the TV craze, Universal began syndicating its classic horror movies to American television stations as a package called Shock Theater. There was already a template for showing horror movies on the small screen. On May 1, 1954, actress Maila Nurmi (1922-2008), in her role as Vampira, became the first television horror host, on KABC-TV, Los Angeles. Soon there were horror hosts on TV stations large and small, and they all showed old monster movies and horror movies, a good deal of them from Universal Pictures.

Also in 1957, Hammer Film Productions of Great Britain released The Curse of Frankenstein starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The movie was an immediate success and the first of what would eventually be branded as "Hammer Horror." Bloodier and sexier than Universal horror, the Hammer movies had their across-the-pond counterpart in American International Pictures (AIP). Founded in 1954, AIP specialized in movies for teenagers and young adults. AIP's first monster movie was The Beast with a Million Eyes from 1955, but the company was most well known for its 1960s adaptations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe starring Vincent Price and directed by Roger Corman. Despite its reputation for making cheapies, AIP didn't always stint on the writing. Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and Ray Russell were among the scenarists for the Poe-Corman series. Matheson even contributed to the screenplay adaptation of his own book, I Am Legend (1954), a movie called The Last Man on Earth (1964), which was remade in 1971 as The Omega Man. More on that later.

In 1958, owing to the howling success of Shock Theater (and perhaps also Hammer films and AIP), James Warren and Forrest J Ackerman issued Famous Monsters of Filmland, a one-shot magazine that grew into a franchise and ran for a quarter of a century. After that there was a boom of monster magazines, including Monster Parade (1958-1959), Horror Monsters (1961-1965), Mad Monsters (1961-1965), Castle of Frankenstein (1962-1975), Fantastic Monsters of the Films (1962-1963), For Monsters Only (1965-1972), and so on. (4) In 1961, Aurora Plastics Company issued Frankenstein's Monster, its first model licensed from the Universal line. There is a special place in my heart for Aurora monster models, so I will list them all:

Frankenstein's Monster (1961)
Dracula (1962)
The Wolf Man (1962)
The Mummy (1963)
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1963)
The Phantom of the Opera (1963)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1964)
Dr. Jekyll as Mr. Hyde (1964)
King Kong (1964)
Godzilla (1964)
Salem Witch (1965)
The Bride of Frankenstein (1965)
The Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Maré (1966)

Not all of those were Universal monsters of course. The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde model was based on the Paramount picture of 1931 (I think), King Kong on the RKO Radio picture of 1933, Godzilla on the Japanese film of 1954, the Salem Witch on history and folklore, and the Forgotten Prisoner on a collaborative idea between Aurora Plastics and Famous Monsters of Filmland. Aurora also issued series of Monster Rods (monsters driving hotrods), Monster Scenes, and Monsters of the Movies, a line that included Rodan and Ghidra.

The licensing of Universal monsters didn't end with models. There were also toys, figurines, drinking glasses, ice cream spoons, and every other thing you can think of, including trading cards in the Creature Feature/You'll Die Laughing series. You might as well say there was a monster craze in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. Monster-themed shows included The Munsters (1964-1966) and The Addams Family (1964-1966), both of which had casts like an old Universal monster team-up. Those two shows were predated by The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), but that was mostly a show of science fiction and Weird Tales-like fantasy. However, it paved the way for The Outer Limits (1963-1965), a show known for its monsters. The Outer Limits in turn influenced the makers of Star Trek (1966-1969), the first broadcast episode of which, called "The Man Trap," featured an Outer Limits-like monster, the unforgettable salt vampire. Eventually there were enough monsters of Star Trek to fill a book of that title.

So, as television took off, Universal packaged its old movies for syndication, and once those movies started reaching a new generation of viewers, the studio began licensing its monsters for other media and other merchandise. Clearly, Universal monsters were not going to go to their graves. In fact they are still with us. Like I have suggested, part of that is because of branding, advertising, marketing, promoting, selling, etc. Part of it because of the continuing appeal of the Universal characters. But part of it, too, is because of nostalgia.

If you disregard the movies of the silent era and look only at monsters of the talkies, only a quarter century--one human generation--separated Frankenstein and Dracula (both from 1931), from the last of the Universal monster movies, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). If supernatural monsters or monsters of fantasy are also monsters of the past, then it seems to me that nostalgia--a sense that something from the past has been lost--would play its part in the popularity of those same monsters. (5) Supernatural monsters in the movies scare you. Afterwards, you are released from your fear, able to relax and to sleep without nightmares. Certain other monsters, monsters of science fiction as well as real-life monsters, don't allow the same kind of catharsis. Being of the present (real-life monsters) or of the future (science fiction monsters), they provoke feelings of anxiety, not of nostalgia or simple fright. There isn't any catharsis in anxiety. It goes on unrelieved.

***

Universal surely saw the writing on the wall in the early 1950s. In the previous two decades, the studio had built up a sizable body of work--a very valuable property--and they exploited it by syndicating and selling licenses for their monster movies and characters. They did more than that, though. In a canny move, they began making movies about a new kind of monster to take the place of the old. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy wasn't the last Universal monster movie. It was only the last of a certain type. You might have noticed that I have barely mentioned The Creature from the Black Lagoon in my discussion of Universal monsters. There is a reason for that, for the Creature doesn't really fit well with the movie monsters of the previous twenty-five years. He is after all not a supernatural monster but a monster of a new age, a monster of science. And he made his debut sixty years ago, in 1954, as the previous era was coming to its end.

Notes

(1) MacKinlay Kantor, a former pulp writer and editor, wrote the novella on which the movie was based.

(2) Theorists might like to separate film noir from fantasy genres such as horror or science fiction, but that's like comparing apples to oranges. Film noir is a form, an aesthetic, or even simply a series of techniques. Horror and science fiction are genres. They need not be exclusive. So for example, isn't Cat People (1942) film noir in its way?

(3) That was sixty years ago this year (and the same year in which Weird Tales came to an end--that's no mere coincidence), so Happy Birthday to Vampira and to television horror hosts everywhere.

(4) According to The Collector's Guide to Monster, Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Magazines by Bob Michelucci (1988), Screen Chills, from 1957, was "apparently" the world's first movie monster magazine.
(5) Supernatural monsters in literature began with Gothicism, which was an expression of nostalgia. According to Wikipedia, the word nostalgia was first applied to homesick Swiss mercenaries. Switzerland was of course the place of origin of the Gothic romance Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, of the book's title character, and of the monster himself. I don't remember now if Frankenstein's Monster ever feels homesick, but after his creation, he spends his life wandering over the world. This quote from the creature strikes me: "I am malicious because I am miserable." We have probably all felt that way in our lives, but most of us, thankfully, don't take it very far. Those who do, we may call monsters. Hitler was one of them. Eric Hoffer described the same feeling among the subjects of his book The True Believer. The True Believer, which often becomes a totalitarian monster, derives his animating idea in part from Rousseau. Like Frankenstein's Monster, Rousseau hailed from Switzerland, but that may be only the most superficial similarity between the two. If you would like to find out more, just do an Internet search on Frankenstein and Rousseau, but be prepared for some heavy academic reading.

Finally, to get all the anniversaries and birthdays in:

Happy Birthday

Vampira and Horror Hosts Everywhere (60 years)
American International Pictures (60 years)
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (60 years)
The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price (50 years)

Godzilla (60 years)

The Munsters and The Addams Family TV shows (50 years)

and

The Creature from the Black Lagoon (60 years)

In 1954, Universal Pictures released Creature from the Black Lagoon and a new monster was born. Filmed in 3-D (a response to the vast popularity of television), the movie was so successful as to spawn two sequels, Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). Creature from the Black Lagoon was also novelized by John Russell Fearn no less, under his pseudonym Vargo Statten. By the time Aurora Plastics issued its line of monster models in the 1960s, The Creature, also called the Gill-man, had reached a status equal to that of the classic Universal monsters. Today he is the only Universal monster of the 1950s to be part of that same pantheon. Or should that be panmonstrum . . . ?

***

The Mummy is one of the undead and embodies undying fears, that the dead will live again, that they will walk among us, prey upon us, and perhaps take their revenge upon us. Ghosts, vampires, and zombies are of course also among the undead. Dracula and The Wolfman (i.e., the werewolf) are supernatural in origin and date from at least the Middle Ages. A relative latecomer, Frankenstein's Monster is a monster of science and at the same time a monster of the Gothic romance (as well as one of the undead.) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came later still. Mr. Hyde is a monster of science or of the semi-science of psychology. He also falls into the category of the degenerate human or beast-man. The Phantom of the Opera is a kind of madman and might also be explained by science. Finally, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a monster in the original sense of the word, that is, a deformed person, thus no monster at all. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is altogether different. He is without a doubt a monster of science, but that science was a new one for the twentieth century.

Cryptozoology is the science--more accurately pseudoscience--of unknown animals. Unknown animals range from the quite real--for example, the okapi, which was not known to science until 1901--to the ridiculous, such as the chupacabra. There is a wide range in the type of people who look for unknown animals as well. Some are scientists. Others are crackpots. The field of cryptozoology was in fact founded by men of science. Anton Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943) is considered the the father of cryptozoology, a judgment based on the primacy of his book The Great Sea Serpent (1892). Bernard Heuvelmans (1916-2001) and Ivan T. Sanderson (1911-1973) were among the prominent cryptozoologists of the twentieth century. In fact, the term cryptozoology was coined by one or the other of them. All three men were trained as zoologists and distinguished in their work.

There have always been unknown animals. In the Age of Exploration, cartographers would mark unknown lands with the words "Here Be Monsters." Even into the twentieth century, parts of the earth remained unexplored. As late as 1920s or '30s, there was still a chance that unexplored regions would hold large fauna, or--in the popular imagination--even relict dinosaurs or prehistoric mammals. In the literature of fantasy, those unexplored places of earth became known as Lost Worlds. In hidden and unreachable valleys or plateaus, beyond high and impassable mountains, at the earth's poles, and even beneath the earth's surface, Lost Worlds awaited discovery. I don't think it's any coincidence that cryptozoology and the Lost Worlds genre date from about the same period, that is, to the end of the Age of Exploration and to the beginnings of the Age of Science. (1, 2)

The Age of Exploration continued into the twentieth century as Roald Amundsen, Richard E. Byrd, and other men penetrated into the heart of the last unknown places on earth. On a more popular level, Frank Buck made a name for himself as a collector of animals from exotic places. Like the Universal monsters, he even teamed up with Abbott and Costello in Africa Screams (1949). The Lost Worlds genre and the related genres of safari, jungle, and South Seas adventure thrived during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, even as the world was shrinking. During World War II, American servicemen and merchant sailors were stationed in the South Pacific, New Guinea, the Philippines, Africa, and Latin America. They brought back with them indelible memories of the tropics. James Michener wrote of those places. His book Tales of the South Pacific, published in 1947 and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, opens with an unforgettable passage:

I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description.

In the postwar, Tiki culture, a kind of kitsch, but still popular today, spread across the land. Les Baxter, Arthur Lyman, and Martin Denny set the exotic to music--and if you have never listened to Exotica, you should at your first opportunity. I think you're in for a treat. Under the title South Pacific, Michener's book was adapted to Broadway, then to the silver screen. Other entertainment set in lower latitudes included King Solomon's Mines (1950), The African Queen (1951), Beat the Devil (1953), Mogambo (1953), The Naked Jungle (1954), Watusi (1959), Hatari! (1962), The Naked Prey (1965), Born Free (1966), and The Pink Jungle (1968). On television, there was Tarzan (1966-1968) and of course Gilligan's Island (1964-1967). (3)

That's a long way to go to get to The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but it seems to me that the movie was drawn from a stew of ingredients and not just from Universal monsters and the post-war ascendancy of science fiction. The Creature from the Black Lagoon inhabits a Lost World in miniature. The people searching for him are scientists, more specifically, cryptozoologists. The Gill-man himself is a cryptozoological creature (or cryptid) and a relic from an earlier age. Like Bigfoot, he is bipedal and has some level of intelligence that approaches the human. Also like Bigfoot, he lives on the edges of human habitation. The implication is that his world will become smaller and smaller, finally to disappear before civilization. In the end the Gill-man is a tragic creature. Like King Kong (who also comes from a Lost World), he is drawn to and ultimately killed by his attraction to a beautiful woman. (4)

I have made a list of ingredients in the making of Creature from the Black Lagoon. Take what you like from it. In addition to Universal monsters, postwar science fiction, and the effects of television on moviemaking of the 1950s, it includes: jungle adventure, safari adventure, South Seas adventure, pulp fiction or a general pulp sensibility, the genre of Lost Worlds, science and pseudoscience, the Age of Exploration, animal collecting à la Frank Buck and Ivan T. Sanderson, men's adventure out of the pulps and out of World War II, Tiki, Exotica, and even Abbott and Costello (5). Few who saw the movie at the time would have known anything about cryptozoology, but that's part of the mix, too.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) In its entry on "Lost Worlds," the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction lists some works in that genre. Some of the earliest: Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (1863); The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1871); Atlantis, The Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly (1882); King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1885); The Phantom City: A Volcanic Romance (1886) and A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People (1887) by William Westall; A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James de Mille (1888); The Aztec Treasure House: A Romance of Contemporaneous Antiquity by Thomas Janvier (1890); and of course The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (1912), which lent its name to the genre. I would add Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from 1915.

(2) It might be more accurate to say the Age of Pseudoscience or the Age of Scientism.

(3) Maybe you can include McHale's Navy (1962-1966) and Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980) in that category as well. As for literature, it seems like there was less to read than to watch. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) wrote of Africa of course. So did Robert Ruark (1915-1965). I'm not sure who else to put on that list.
(4) One of the highlights of Creature from the Black Lagoon is the underwater photography of the female stand-in, Ginger Stanley, a swimmer of extraordinary power, beauty, and grace.

(5) To promote the film, the Creature appeared with Abbott and Costello on live television on The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1954. I guess you could call that another team-up.

The End of the Cryptid

I'm looking for the monster of the twenty-first century. By using the Cat in the Hat's process of calculatus eliminatus, I hope to strike one type of monster off the list.

The Gill-man from Creature from the Black Lagoon is a cryptozoological monster and one of the first new Universal monsters of the 1950s. By the time the movie was released in 1954, supernatural monsters were being displaced by scientific monsters, that displacement owing to the scientific and technological advances of World War II, the coming of the flying saucers, and the postwar popularity of science fiction. The Gill-man wasn't the first of his type. King Kong is also a cryptozoological monster, as is Godzilla. Like so many monsters of the 1950s, Godzilla's origins are tied up with the use of atomic weapons and atomic power. More on that in the future.

Originally, monsters were from the outside. They lived in the wilderness, in dark forests, deep caves, dank jungles, dusty ruins. They inhabited all the darkened, outer places and came no closer than the edge of the firelight or lamplight. Like the monsters of old, the cryptozoological monster is a monster from the outside. The problem for him is that civilization is pressing in upon him and he has very little power to resist. There is very little left of the outer edge. There is no outside anymore. Some monsters have adapted by entering the city gates and by passing among us as one of us. The cryptozoological monster, by his very nature, can't do that. Like the dodo and the passenger pigeon, his days are numbered.

Cryptozoological monsters had a good run for awhile. Before the 1950s, Bigfoot was kind of just a foot. Only later did he became Big. Roger Patterson shot his famous footage (or should that be Bigfootage?) in 1967. Nine years later, Bigfoot appeared in The Six Million Dollar Man (featuring a character who, like Bob Heironimus, the guy in the ape suit in Patterson's film, had an artificial eye). In 1987, Bigfoot starred in his own movie, Harry and the Hendersons. Like E.T. (1982), he had become a child's friend rather than a menacing monster. By then we were beginning to recognize the limits of the monster's powers and to lament the loss of something vital or necessary in our lives. Lost Worlds are called that because they are hidden, secret, lost from the outside world. We might also call them lost because they are disappearing, a thing of the past, a subject for nostalgia.

There were other cryptid monsters in the 1970s. The outsized great white shark from Jaws (1975) is an obvious example. There were two sequels to Jaws, plus lots of other movies trying to cash in on its success. They included, from 1976: Eaten Alive (crocodile), Grizzly (an 18-foot-tall bear), Rattlers (rattlesnakes), and Squirm (worms); from 1977: Day of the Animals, Empire of the Ants, Kingdom of the Spiders, Orca: The Killer Whale, The Pack (feral dogs), and Tentacles (octopus); and, from 1978: Piranha, and, in a sign that the trend was coming to its end, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. You might say the animal-attack movies of the 1970s were related to environmentalism, but the fan of cryptozoology can claim them as well.

In the 1920s and '30s, Aldo Leopold began developing the concept of wilderness. Today we have designated wildernesses in our national parks and forests. I like the idea of wilderness, but it seems strange to me that a wilderness has become a geographic unit rather than an actuality. After all, doesn't a true wilderness draw a line around you rather than the other way around? To put it another way, we exist at the pleasure of a true wilderness, not vice versa. If the cryptozoological monster is a creature of the wilderness, then it, too, has been circumscribed. Like Harry from Harry and the Hendersons, it can no longer be a threat and is no candidate for the monster of our times.

The Science Fiction Monster-Hope and Fear

According to Wikipedia, the last Universal monster movie of the 1940s was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, from 1948. That may have been the only Universal monster movie of the 1940s made entirely after the war. After a gap of three years, Bud and Lou returned in the first Universal monster movie of the 1950s, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, from 1951. After a couple of standard horror/thriller/mystery movies (1), Universal finally released its first science fiction monster movie, It Came from Outer Space, in 1953. Abbott and Costello would return for a couple of more movies, paired with the Universal monsters of old. Otherwise, all but two of the Universal monster movies of the 1950s were actually science fiction monster movies. (2)

You might say popular culture lives and dies by imitation. What is popular today is gone tomorrow. In the meantime, there are piles of money to be made by following fads and trends. But there is a difference between a trend or a fad and a cultural development of some significance. For example, science fiction monsters were extremely popular in the 1950s, almost to the exclusion of supernatural monsters. Faddishness and imitation were obviously at work, but I think there was something more to it than that. There is reason to believe that the science-fictional monster was in reality the monster of its time and represented the spirit of its age.

So what was that spirit? I wasn't alive then. I can't say for sure. But as the outcome of World War II became more and more certain, people began having hope again. They began talking about what they would do after the war. In other words, they began looking to the future.

There was reason for hope, too. Though most of the world lay in ruins, the United States was largely untouched (except for hundreds of thousands of missing and maimed men). After a decade and a half of economic privation, Americans were ready to get back to work, to marry and raise families, to live more normal lives. They could be excused for not wanting to look back. (3) The war years also brought on scientific and technological advances, every one of which had applications in civilian life. Not only would postwar life be better in economic terms, it would also be materially better, because of automation, because of improvements in electronics, transportation, energy, and so on. Two wartime developments were of special interest to storytellers and moviemakers. After the war, they helped boost science fiction out of the pulp jungle and into the mainstream. Those two developments were rockets and atomic power.

I have tried to make the point that supernatural horror is the fantasy of the past and of nostalgia (3), while science fiction is the fantasy of the future and of hope (or, on the other hand, dystopia). After World War II, Americans turned from the past and to the future. As a consequence, I think, science fiction took off, for it had become obvious that science fiction wasn't just a bunch of Buck Rogers stuff. It was real. Rockets falling on London and atomic bombs dropping on Japan proved that. Science had provided horrors in a world at war. The hope--and vision--was that after the war, it would provide equal wonders.

If you look at science fiction movies of the postwar period, from the late 1940s and into the 1950s, you're likely to notice a pattern, or maybe three patterns. The development of real-life rockets during that time suggested that we would soon put a man into space, and perhaps not long after that, on the moon or on other planets. What would we find there? Would the moon or other planets be inhabited? And if we could send a man into space, couldn't somebody from another planet come here? The flying saucer craze, which began sixty-seven years ago this summer, only fed that curiosity and those fears.

This summer marks another anniversary: sixty-nine years ago, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and a new age was born. Controlled atomic power promised a world with virtually unlimited energy. Uncontrolled, it was likely to be the end of us. That, too, fed fears.

In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first bomb. By then, a Cold War was on between the West and East, the latter a euphemism for the Soviet Union, its satellites, and--before the year was up--Red China. I have already written about communism as a type of totalitarianism. The threat represented by communism was (and is) not simply military or political. It was (and is) also intellectual and spiritual. In fact it goes to central questions of what it is to be a human being. People in the postwar era would have understood that, and even if they didn't at some conscious level, they could see it at the level of the unconscious. Whatever the case--and despite the decline of the supernatural monster--there were still fears, fears of the unknown outer reaches of space, of atomic energy gone out of control, of the dehumanization, regimentation, and soullessness of totalitarian society. Even after the defeat of fascism, nazism, and militarism, there were still fears, and because there were still fears, there would still be monsters.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) The Strange Door (1951) and The Black Castle (1952).

(2) They were Cult of the Cobra (1955) and Curse of the Undead (1959). Again, this is by Wikipedia's list.

(3) I remember many years ago being at a buffet restaurant and hearing an older woman turn down macaroni and cheese. "That's Depression food," she said. It was something from the distant past and she didn't want any part of it.

(4) As are weird fiction, heroic fantasy, high fantasy (like Lord of the Rings), and related genres. Weird Tales dealt in those genres. In the 1940s and '50s, it was virtually alone among an ever-growing number of science fiction magazines in the United States.

Science Fiction Movies: Boom

Margaret Atwood famously (or infamously) said that science fiction is "talking squids from outer space." That's a strange construction considering that it comes from a writer of science fiction. Ms. Atwood would claim, of course, that she doesn't write science fiction, that she is instead a writer of "speculative fiction." In that, she may just be following the lead of Judith Merril and other postwar writers. Or maybe she has a kind of school-marmish distaste for the things boys like. After all, the popular view is that science fiction (in its early days at least) was a man's genre, or worse yet, something for twelve-year-old boys. Only after the war did it become more serious, hence more "significant." That's when Judith Merril got ahold of it anyway. (1)

In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the popular audience would probably have agreed with Ms. Atwood about science fiction, that it's about rocket ships, blasters, interplanetary travel, little green men, bug-eyed monsters, and other such things. There were science fiction movies before the war. Frankenstein (1931) is an obvious example, but Frankenstein is more horror than science fiction. Usually when we think of science fiction in the movies, we start after that, with Things to Come (1936) perhaps, more likely with movies of the postwar. Some of the common themes of those postwar movies are alien invasion, interplanetary (or interstellar) exploration, out-of-control science and technology (usually atomic power), and a loss of human identity. And among all that, there were lots of monsters.

If we can believe Wikipedia, the first Universal science fiction monster movie of the 1950s was It Came from Outer Space, from 1953. Though filmed in black and white, the film is--like Creature from the Black Lagoon--in 3-D. Both movies were directed by Jack Arnold. Despite the lurid title, It Came from Outer Space is an intelligent and well-done movie. It has touches of Ray Bradbury's poetic writing (the movie was based on his story) and some very creepy and frightening scenes. The scene in the alleyway is particularly memorable, as is the scene in the cave with the pencil laser that slices through rock as if it were whipped cream. But then, just when you're starting to build a case for seriousness or at least quality in science fiction, you get to the monster, which is more or less a talking squid from outer space. Margaret Atwood would say, "See, I told you so!" The monster doesn't matter, though. It Came from Outer Space is not some simplistic science fiction monster movie thriller. On the contrary, it's a serious and thought-provoking--though admittedly small--film. It also touches upon a theme that has become central to the question of a monster for the twenty-first century, namely, that of the monster who is disguised as a human being and who passes among us, but lacks emotion, a capacity for love, or a human identity.

***

It Came from Outer Space was not the first American science fiction movie of the postwar. I won't try to identify the holder of that honor. Instead I'll just list some films from that golden age of movie science fiction, and give some indication of where they might fall. And I'll disregard serials, stories of Lost Worlds, and movies about pulp-type heroes or superheroes.

First, it's interesting that two of the earliest postwar science fiction movies are about the exploration of space rather than alien invasion or the perils of atomic energy. These were Rocketship X-M and Destination Moon, both from 1950. Maybe ideas take awhile to percolate. Rockets of the V-2 type (1944) are older than atomic bombs (1945), which are in turn older than flying saucers (1947). In any case, in 1951, The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still came out. Both featured flying saucers from outer space, one flown by a monster (The Thing), the other by a Christ-like being (Klaatu). In The Thing, the threat is that we will become simply prey to a bloodsucking super-carrot. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, we are in fact the threat, not only to ourselves, but also to other planets should our technology (in other words, we ourselves) go out of control. And should that happen, a technological monster, Gort, the robot, will himself go out of control and destroy us all. Neither result is very encouraging for the frail human ego.

Five (1951) is supposedly the first movie about a world laid waste by atomic warfare. When Worlds Collide (1951) is also about disaster, but is far more hopeful. In it, salvation comes because of the indomitable human spirit and our use of technology. The War of the Worlds (1953), one of the best of the alien invasion movies, is also hopeful and closes with scenes in a church. Unlike When Worlds Collide, our technology is useless before the Martian menace. The Martians are instead defeated by microbes, placed here, the narrator tells us, by God "in His infinite wisdom," a message you would hardly hope to hear in a movie of today. This Island Earth (1955), another Jack Arnold film from Universal Pictures, also carries a message of hope. Although it includes flying saucers, super technology, bizarre aliens, spectacular interplanetary scenery, and a crab-clawed monster with a rugose cranium, This Island Earth is not a some simple science fiction adventure. It is instead--and not at first glance--a sort of rumination on what makes us human, and because we are human, what gives us strength, courage, and a kind of heroic quality.

There were still more science fiction movies in the 1950s, more each year as the decade wore on, more featuring monsters of a type I have already described as the science-fictional monster: the space alien, the manmade monster (i.e., robot, mutant, etc.), the degenerate human, the cryptozoological creature, and so on. Monsters awakened by atomic bomb blasts or generated by atomic radiation proliferated. Some of the movies in which they appeared, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) or Them! (1954) for example, have become classics. Some science fiction movies of the 1950s were serious and significant in one way or another. Others were mere entertainments. Most ended with a message of hope. That is to be expected in movies from the 1950s and before. But hope is also about the future, as is science fiction. The end of the Great Depression and the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II would have given the people of the postwar world hope. So, too, would advances in science and technology. They would also have enjoyed a renewed vigor, for America was alone as an advanced and prosperous technological nation. Those vitues--hope, strength, courage, vigor (or vigah, as John Kennedy would say)--put Americans on the moon and the U.S.S. Enterprise at the edge of the galaxy. But there was a worm in the apple, and science fiction--a reflection of our society--went into decline. Or, to use a adjective from earlier in this series, our society became--has become--more decadent. (2)

Notes

(1) I'm reminded of a quote from and about the newspaper cartoonist Lillian Weckner Meisner:

She [Meisner] is critical of editorial cartoonists who are amusing but fail to make a "real statement," and she has called such cartoonists "little boys" who like to draw funny pictures because they do not have to be realistic.

--from "Seven Cartoonists" by Lucy Caswell Shelton in

The 1989 Festival of Cartoon Art (1989)

The implication is that whatever form or genre it might be, it should be taken away from people who are having fun with it and given to the people who are "serious" about it, hence "speculative fiction" or "SF" instead of science fiction, "real statement[s]" instead of "funny pictures," and "graphic novels" instead of mere comic books.

(2) An example of decay in science fiction movies of the 1950s: the decade ended with the release of Plan 9 from Outer Space. Described as one of the worst movies ever made, Plan 9 has some enjoyable aspects--enjoyable in a terrible way, I guess. I'm not sure that it's worse than Battlefield Earth (2000), which I haven't seen, or A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), a fascinatingly bad movie, so bad that you can't turn your eyes from it, like a horrible, gory trainwreck. By the way, Plan 9 from Outer Space was released ten years almost to the day before the first moon landing.

Vampires and Body Snatchers

On Friday I wrote about a few science fiction movies from the 1950s. I could hardly do justice to them all. For instance, I didn't mention Forbidden Planet, a 1956 extravaganza from MGM and a forerunner to Star Trek. Like other science fiction movies of the 1950s, Forbidden Planet includes a robot, a flying saucer, the attractive daughter of a widowed scientist, the exploration of another planet, a man-made monster (in the form of Morbius' embodied id), and of course out-of-control technology, which is really just shorthand for an out-of-control humanity. Forbidden Planet is in color, like the TV show Police Squad! from later in Leslie Nielsen's career. The special effects are very good and the monster truly frightening. It's also an intelligent and literate film--more or less The Tempest in outer space--and definitely worth a look.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), one of the best and most significant of 1950s science fiction films, is also conspicuously absent from my posting on Friday. That's for good reason. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a big enough topic for a book. I'm forced here to limit my discussion to a blog entry or two. But I have reached a point where, if I am going to suggest a monster for the twenty-first century, I'll have to talk about Pod People and the movie that made their name a household term. First another digression.

A couple of weeks ago, I read two books in two days, first I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, then The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. Both stories were first published in 1954, Matheson's work as a paperback original, Finney's as a serial in Collier's magazine. I Am Legend has been adapted to film four times since then, as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price in 1964, as The Omega Man with Charlton Heston in 1971, as I Am Legend with Will Smith in 2007, and as I Am Omega, a direct-to-video quickie, also in 2007. Richard Matheson was still in his twenties when I Am Legend was published. I haven't read enough of his early work to say, but even in 1954, he had hit upon a theme that would continue in his work for decades to come, that of providing a scientific explanation for what would previously have been in the realm of the supernatural. (1) The monsters in I Am Legend are like the supernatural monsters of the past--the narrator, Robert Neville, calls them vampires--but their condition is explained by bacterial spores carried upon the wind. Little by little, Neville uncovers the chain of events that has led to the current plague and recounts it in his narrative, concluding:

Process complete.

And all without blood-eyed vampires hovering over the heroines' beds. All without bats fluttering against estate windows, all without the supernatural. (2)

Like Fritz Leiber, Jr. in his stories of the early forties, Richard Matheson had struck upon the problem of the weird tale, namely, how to keep it relevant in an age of science. His solution was to have human beings transformed into monsters by the actions of mere microbes. (3)

The scientific explanation for a phenomenon previously thought supernatural was not necessarily an innovation. However, there was something new in I Am Legend--or at least I think it was new. In the movie It Came from Outer Space (1953), monsters from outer space disguise themselves as human. They pass among us, but they are unable to duplicate the human personality. They are without emotion; their voices are without inflection. They are also limited in that they don't readily increase in number. In other words, they can't recruit new members. In I Am Legend, the process is reversed. In that book, human beings have become monsters, leaving behind everything that makes them human. There is no love or emotion, only the desire to feed upon living things. What's worse, their numbers increase in the way that a rampant disease increases. In other words, the vampires in I Am Legend are capable of recruiting new members, potentially at an exponential rate. Their numbers are limited only by the number of living, breathing human beings who remain. Sound familiar?

Like I Am Legend, The Body Snatchers has been adapted to film four times, in 1956, 1978, 1993, and 2007. The first two adaptations came under the title Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The book is somewhat different from the first movie. At the end of the book (spoiler alert), the pod creatures leave "a fierce and inhospitable planet," i.e., Earth. That fierceness is in the human beings who have resisted them, those "who had fought, struggled, and simply refused to give up." The narrator, Miles Bennell continues:

. . . a fragment of a wartime speech moved through my mind: We shall fight them in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight them in the hills; we shall never surrender. True then for one race, it was always true for the whole human race, and I understood that nothing in the whole vast universe could ever defeat us. (4)

That is clearly an expression not only of fierceness, courage, and strength, but also of hope and confidence. It reminds me of so many episodes of Star Trek, which was made of course in an age of confidence and before science fiction began to give way to something else.

The movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not as clearly and unambiguously hopeful. For one, the heroine becomes a Pod Person. For another, the original ending has Miles (Kevin McCarthy) in the roadway, trying to warn humanity of the menace. I have never seen that version of the movie, but I presume that it ends with Miles looking directly into the camera, yelling, "You're next! You're next!" The more conventional ending is part of a framing device added after the main filming was completed. Though still somewhat ambiguous, it is far more hopeful.

Like I Am Legend, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a story of the great masses of humanity being turned into monsters--not bloodsucking, flesh-eating monsters, but monsters nonetheless. The movie emphasizes more the loss of humanity brought about by being podified versus the book. I think that was a good move on the part of the moviemakers. Also like I Am Legend, the Pod People are capable of increasing their numbers, again at an exponential rate. In short, both stories share certain themes:

In both books, there is the threat of a loss of humanity or of human identity, including a loss of emotion, personality, and most importantly a capacity for love.
In the novel The Body Snatchers, the Pod People also lose human drive and initiative. Their world begins to decay for lack of any effort to keep things going. Projects go unfinished; streets fall into disrepair; everything becomes seedy and run-down. I Am Legend is of course set in a rapidly decaying, post-apocolyptic world. In a word, there is decadence in both.
In both books, there is a struggle among those who remain to survive, to resist, to assert their humanity and their individual identities in the face of monsters that would subsume them.
Similarly, in both books, human beings must face the threat of becoming just one among the undifferentiated masses, all equally soulless, all equally without individuality or identity.
Finally, in both books, those masses are able to recruit new members at ever-increasing rates: "'. . . those who were changed recruited others, usually their own families . . . .'" and "'. . . it's an accelerating process, ever faster, always more of us, fewer of you . . . .'" (5)

In short, in I Am Legend and The Body Snatchers, the fear is that the individual will lose his humanity and his individual identity, thereby becoming one among a mass of monsters that look like human beings but clearly are not.

Apologists for socialism, communism, and other forms of statism like to say that the book 1984 is a satire of a gray and economically austere postwar Britain. Likewise, they spout that Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about conformity and McCarthyism in 1950s America. I'll say this: it should be clear to any thinking person that 1984, first published in 1948, is a piercing description, critique, and warning of totalitarianism. (6) It's less clear to me that Invasion of the Body Snatchers is allegorical in any particular way. Rather, I think it's about something larger than conformity, McCarthyism, the 1950s "organization man," Cold War paranoia, Stalinism, or communism. In 1953, when the story was first serialized, World War II was only eight years past and the Cold War was on. Although nazism and fascism had been defeated, communism, in which the individual is reduced to a cipher, undifferentiated among the masses, was still a very real threat. It was expanding as well, into China, Eastern Europe, and other places, all at alarming rates. "Always more of us, fewer of you" would have been a very real fear among the free people of the world, those who had not yet been podified or zombified. In North Korea, perhaps for the first time, American soldiers encountered a mass enemy in the Chinese. I'm not sure that at any time before or since, we saw anything as much like masses of advancing zombies, vampires, or aliens as we saw in the Chinese offensive of 1951-1952. In 1951, Eric Hoffer described and diagnosed the problem of mass man and mass movements in The True Believer. To read it, and to read history and now contemporary events, you can't help but see that there is a desire among men to give up their identities, to lose themselves among the masses, and to recruit still more men to be their co-religionists. And when they do, as in Iraq and Syria today, they almost always make themselves into monsters.

Notes

(1) See my earlier articles called "Dark Shadows, Star Wars, and Richard Matheson" and "Richard Matheson and Hell House"

(2) From the Berkeley Medallion edition (1971), p. 86.

(3) A far cry from The War of the Worlds (1953), in which bacteria save humanity from the invading Martians.

(4) From the Dell edition (1967), pp. 188-189.

(5) Pp. 159-160 and 163.
(6) Invasion of the Body Snatchers ends with a warning as well: "You're next! You're next!" The original role of the monster was to serve as a warning, to let us know that something has gone wrong, that the universe is out of order.

I have wondered about the first psychopathic killer and the first totalitarian in literature. I have candidates for both now. First the killer.

A story has come out that the identity of Jack the Ripper is now revealed. The suspect was named Aaron Kosminski, and he was a Polish-Jewish émigré to London. (1) Forensic evidence unavailable at the time supposedly places him at the scene of the murder of Catherine Eddowes, on September 30, 1888. Kosminski was a prime suspect at the time, so today's allegations aren't new. I'm not a Ripperologist, so I can't say how sound the case against Kosminski might be. He was without a doubt mentally ill and died in an insane asylum on March 24, 1919. Whether he was in fact Jack the Ripper is another story.

Aaron Kosminski worked as a barber, but he wasn't the first tonsorial specialist to terrorize London. That honor is reserved for Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sweeney Todd as we know him today is a fictional character, but he was supposedly based on a real person. According to Wikipedia, "Sweeney Todd first appeared in a story titled The String of Pearls: A Romance," a penny dreadful published in serialized form in eighteen issues of The People's Periodical and Family Library, from November 21, 1846, to March 20, 1847 (numbers 7 through 24). The murderer's modus operandi is to drop his victims through a trap door into the basement of his shop. If the fall doesn't kill them, Sweeney does so by slitting their throats with a razor. Once relieved of their valuables, victims are cut apart and baked into meat pies by Sweeney's associate, Mrs. Lovett. The story of a murderous barber and cannibal pie-making goes back before 1847, but Sweeney's story is the one everyone knows. It has been adapted to stage and song, and to books, movies, radio, television, and comic books again and again over the last 167 years.

Sweeney Todd has all the makings of a psychopathic serial killer. Although he appeared forty years before Jack the Ripper and forty-five before H.H. Holmes, he is still of the nineteenth century and still of the city. He is the earliest psychopath that I have found in literature. I can't rule out that there was an earlier example, but if there was, it could not have been very much earlier. For one, the psychopath is a character of popular fiction, and popular fiction isn't very much older than the nineteenth century. For another, the psychopath as we know him is an inhabitant of the modern city, which also isn't very much older than the nineteenth century.

***

It's worth noting that the barber was traditionally not only a person who cut hair and beards, but also a surgeon, a dentist, and--by our terms--a quack doctor. The barber pole represents a wrapping of bloody bandages. There are those who believe Jack the Ripper to have been a physician or surgeon. H.H. Holmes passed himself off as a doctor. Josef Mengele was in fact a medical doctor. In my posting of May 12, 2014, I quoted Ivan Turgenev and his book Fathers and Sons (1862):

"For what do you want frogs, barin?" asked one of the lads.

"To make them useful," replied Bazarov. . . . "You see, I like to open them, and then to observe what their insides are doing. You and I are frogs too, except that we walk upon our hind legs. Thus the operation helps me to understand what is taking place in ourselves."

"And what good will that do you?"

"This. That if you should fall sick, and I should have to treat you, I might avoid some mistakes."

"Then you are a doctor?"

"I am." (1)

One way of thinking about the psychopath is that he is essentially a materialist, a person who sees human beings as machines and wishes to open us up to see what makes us tick. Every time, the ghost in the machine eludes him, and so he goes on killing. (3)

Notes

(1) If Kosminski was in fact the Ripper, he would have fit the role of the outsider, being a Pole--in other words, an Easterner--and a Jew at a time when both would have been suspect. We should remember that Dracula, from Bram Stoker's novel (1897), was also an Easterner and a killer who moved from the country to the city. In her book Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors (2011), Sara Libby Robinson links fears of vampires to fears of Jews, especially Eastern Jews. One of those links has to do with the accusation that Jews are bloodthirsty, the notorious blood libel that is as old as time and as new as the events of this summer. Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd's associate, is not obviously Jewish; nonetheless, she bakes blood (and meat) into her wares, as Jews have been accused of doing. Some psychopaths of the twentieth century also sold human flesh as meat to their customers. Others consumed that flesh themselves.

(2) Quoted in Lenin by Michael Morgan (1971), p. 12.

(3) People who believe that aliens are mutilating livestock point to the "surgical" precision of the wounds in question. Maybe aliens don't know what animates life on Earth, either, and are engaged in the same activity as earthly psychopaths.

A Dying Science Fiction

I feel like Michael Douglas' character in Wonder Boys. He types the page numbers 2-6-1, then adds another 1--his novel has grown into a monstrosity of 2,611 pages and there's no end in sight. I have been working on these two series--What Is the Monster of the Twenty-First Century? and A Survey of Monsters--for several months now. I can tell you, there is an end in sight. But first I have to bring in another series . . .

A few months ago, I looked into this question: Is science fiction dying? I wasn't sure then, and I'm not sure now of the answer. If science fiction isn't dying, it may still be in pretty bad shape. Or maybe what's dying is a certain world of science fiction, that 1940s and 1950s world of a small and devoted (and maybe homogeneous) fandom, a world dominated by a few well-known names (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, etc.), a world in which science fiction magazines hung on the newsstand like ripe fruit from a fecund tree. Now, like everything else, science fiction is extremely varied, each facet has its own well-known names and fanatic devotées, and--while science fiction magazines might be hard to find--science fiction is everywhere and in everything, including our daily lives. As an example, I am writing to you now on a machine of science fiction, while you are reading my words on a machine that is perhaps even more science-fictional.

I'm working with the idea that fantasy (high fantasy, heroic fantasy, weird fiction, supernatural horror, etc.) is a genre of the past, while science fiction is a genre of the future. If fantasy is about the past, it might very easily slip into a chronicle of decadence. Also, if fantasy is about the past, then it might be partly about nostalgia and partly about fear. Science fiction on the other hand is more likely to be progressive, hopeful, and confident--unless of course it's dystopian. Science fiction, at least in its early days, believed that the future was going to be better than the present. It had to be. After all, what we think of as science fiction came out of the Great Depression and the war years, when all its writers came of age and most of its magazines were first established. Finally, in a large part, fantasy is escapist. I imagine that people read Tolkien or Robert E. Howard to escape their own mundane existence and to immerse themselves in a fully imagined world, right down to maps of Middle Earth and of the Hyborean Age. Science fiction on the other hand tends to be about the real world. There is space opera of course, but that amounts to outer space fantasy. (I would not call Star Wars a science fiction movie.) Hard science fiction--the real stuff--takes people of today and puts them into an imagined future to see how they will live. It's why, when you read a science fiction story from the 1950s but set in the future, people smoke cigarettes, talk on the telephone, read the paper, and hand each other written notes, typed files, and so on. Authors of the 1950s did not predict the world of today, but it's a kind of science-fiction illiteracy to believe that science fiction is supposed to be predictive. Prediction is not the point at all. The point is to say something about today, or about the people of today--in other words, the people of all time--by placing them into the future. So if you're looking for the spirit of an age, look at its science fiction (or fiction in general, or more general still, at all of art).

The spirit of an age . . . that's the phrase I have used in looking for the monster of the twenty-first century, for my idea is that the monster of any given age represents the spirit of that age. So what does the science fiction of after the 1950s say about the times in which it was made? The other day, I wrote about Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That's as good a place as any to start.

Released in 1956, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was based on the magazine serial The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (1954). The serial--soon after a book--is a work of hope and confidence. In the end, humanity wins out and drives the Body Snatchers from Earth by a combination of strength, courage, and determination. The underlying theme is that there is a special humanity, that we possess something that sets us apart in this universe. That confidence and the assertion of a special humanity was still in science fiction as late as the 1960s in the television show Star Trek. More on that in a minute.

In the serial and book The Body Snatchers, there isn't any ambiguity. Instead, ambiguity set in with the screening of the movie, first with the original ending, in which the outcome is so much in question, then with the revised ending, which is more hopeful, but still not entirely happy. After all, Dana Wynter gets turned into a Pod Person. If you want something even less hopeful, watch the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, released in 1978. It's still a very good movie, but the ending is entirely without hope. So what happened between 1954 and 1978? And has very much changed since the 1970s? Those questions are not just about our society. They're also about science fiction, a reflection of every age in which science fiction is written.

You don't even have to stretch it out that far. For example, compare War of the Worlds, from 1953, with Soylent Green from just twenty years later. Both movies end in or in front of a church. War of the Worlds, a movie about strength, courage, and persistence, ends in hope. There is even mention of God and a kind of gratitude for His presence and His wisdom. The monsters in War of the Worlds come from the outside. Contrast that with Soylent Green (1971). Soylent Green is also about real virtues--friendship, a questing for truth and justice--but it is also cynical and dystopian. The monsters are more human than alien. As in the first ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you're not quite sure how things are going to turn out with Soylent Green. Gone is the certainty and the special humanity of the 1950s. Now we're merely food for each other.

The Thing from Another World (1951) was also remade, as The Thing, in 1982. The first movie is brimming with confidence in America and in humanity at large. The ending is unambiguous, full of hope and triumph. The ending of the grungy, cynical remake is none of those things.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was remade in 2008. The first movie is a sort of warning: we might still save ourselves. The remake reflects the spirit of our age in its hatred for humanity. In Keanu Reeves' version, we are already lost. Only the animals shall be saved.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) was essentially remade as Alien (1979). In the first movie, the monster is the monster. In the second, the monster is a monster but also a kind of red herring, for an earthbound corporation, seeking to retrieve the alien for its own purposes, is the real force behind all the mayhem. In other words, human beings, more specifically corporate men, are now the enemy. (1, 2)

When Worlds Collide (1951) is full of positive human values. Although the Earth is destroyed (a kind of cruelty), humanity is saved and enters into a new Eden. The movie ends in glorious hope. Melancholia (2011), on the other hand, reflects the moviemaker's despair, his sense of doom, his nihilism, and his hatred for himself and for the rest of humanity. In Melancholia, humanity doesn't do a thing to save itself. We go passively to our destruction, believing we deserve it. It's worth noting here the words of Lars von Trier, the writer and director of Melancholia:

For a long time I thought I was a Jew and I was happy to be a Jew, then I met [Danish and Jewish director] Susanne Bier and I wasn’t so happy. But then I found out I was actually a Nazi. My family were German. And that also gave me some pleasure. What can I say? I understand Hitler . . . I sympathize with him a bit.

The totalitarian monster rears its ugly head.

In the original television show Star Trek (1966-1969), the crew of the Enterprise are confident, hopeful, bold, daring. They are very human, too. They love, they fight, they are warm- and sometimes even hot-blooded. They venture into the unknown galaxy, full of courage and strength. They solve problems. They don't doubt themselves or the rightness of their cause. The crew of the Enterprise under Captain Picard have some of those virtues, though a warm, loving, or emotional nature seems to have been expunged among them. More recently, in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), the crew of the original Enterprise, played by new actors and loose in a new universe, share a great deal with the originals. They're emotional for sure. Every one of them cries like Andrea Martin playing Marsha Mason. But they lack a certain something of the original. That lack reflects the spirit of our age, for the crew in Star Trek Into Darkness don't know how to solve their own problems. They lack confidence in themselves. They run to the old Spock like a child running to his mother. Moreover, they save Khan and his people for a future war because they themselves realize that these people from an earlier era have something that the people of Captain Kirk's time lack. In other words, the people of the Federation and the Federation itself have become decadent, as we in our own times have become decadent. They seem on the verge of giving up the cause of freedom and of embracing totalitarianism. Their Nazi-like uniforms are emblematic of that. Into darkness indeed.

After World War II, science fiction promised so much. It promised a better world, with limitless atomic energy, universal prosperity, distant horizons, a united humanity, an end to war, and because of all that, greater human happiness. In the seven decades since, science has achieved wonders, yet we have also had Chernobyl and Fukushima, intractable poverty, an end to American manned spaceflight (we now rely on the Russians, i.e., the Klingons, to get us into space), an evermore Balkanized humanity, and a continuation of our warring ways. I would hazard a guess that people are no happier now than they have ever been, and in some ways are probably a good deal less so. We are cynical, disillusioned, and in despair. We hate ourselves and each other. Science has proved a disappointment. It has failed to give us everything we thought it would give. We believe that the future will be worse than the past. It's no wonder that so much science fiction of today is dystopian or post-apocolyptic, and why people want to escape in fantasy to an imagined past. If science fiction is dying, it may be only because we have lost hope.

Without hope among humanity and without a vision of a better future through science, science fiction can hardly hope to survive. The props and the themes of science fiction permeate our society and culture. They aren't going away. The monster of the twenty-first century would reflect all that. For instance, the monster of our times might be explained in scientific or material terms rather than by some supernatural agency. But I don't think the monster of our times can be a purely science-ficitional monster. The cryptid monster is gone. The science fiction monster is still with us. But I think it's a hybrid, made for our decadent, cynical, and nihilistic age.

Notes
(1) The theme is repeated in Aliens (1986) and in Avatar (2009), otherwise known as Dances with Smurfs and Ferngully in Space. Both are from director James Cameron, who has enriched himself through the same kind of corporations he has demonized in his movies. He and Al Gore must be pals. But you have to understand, rules and policies are made for you, not for them. Or as the saying goes, some animals are more equal than others.
(2) To read more on the idea of corporate dystopia, see:

Robot Monster

One recurring theme in the original Star Trek is the machine or computer as the enemy of human beings. At least seventeen of the seventy-nine episodes play on some variation of that theme. Today's episode of This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow, called "Captain Kirk vs. the Internet," does as well, just in time for this article.

Machines and computers have been the enemy in lots of TV shows, movies, and science fiction stories. There were even machine-monsters on the cover of Weird Tales. I'm still on the trail of a monster for the twenty-first century, a monster I think could be a hybrid. Machines and computers may contribute some genetic material to that hybrid.

Metropolis (1927), one of the earliest science fiction movies, is many things, one of which is an industrial dystopia in which men are made parts of their machines. The inventor Rotwang creates a robot double for the heroine Maria. The double, called a Maschinenmensch (Machine-man), is sort of an evil twin. She is also the first robot in movies. Although there had been machine-men in popular culture before 1927, the word robot itself was then new, having been introduced to the world in Karel Čapek's 1921 play R.U.R. The title stands for Rosumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The word robot refers to forced labor or serfdom and comes from the word rab or "slave." The robot is the first of two monsters that began as a slave but has since turned the tables on humanity. The other is the zombie, a monster for another posting.

There have been lots of robots, androids, cyborgs, machines, and computers to assume the role of the monster or the enemy of humanity. A short list:

Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks--Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
Westworld (1973)
The Stepford Wives (1975)
The Black Hole (1979)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

The title of this posting comes from the 1953 "classic," Robot Monster.

The machine-monster plays the same roles that flesh-and-blood monsters play: as the alien invader (Daleks), the psychotic killer (HAL 9000; the Gunslinger from Westworld), the totalitarian (Colossus), the seeming human that passes among us but is not one of us (the Stepford Wives; the androids from Blade Runner), the demon or devil (Maximillian from The Black Hole), and the ruler over a dystopian future (The Terminator movies and The Matrix movies). In Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), the crew of the Enterprise encounter the Borg, machine-monsters capable of recruiting new members to their collective. In that, the Borg aren't very much different from the vampires in I Am Legend, the Pod People in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or the zombies of today. What one of the Pod People says is as true for the Borg or today's zombies as it is for Pod People: "Always more of us, fewer of you."

My sense is that machine-monsters can be effective villains, but that they're only a variation on flesh-and-blood monsters. I wonder if there has ever been a machine-monster that is truly machine-like, truly alien to us, like the planet Solaris is alien. I suspect it's impossible for a machine-monster to be truly alien, because all the things that make a monster monstrous are also within us as human beings. Put another way, a machine has never done anything to us that we have not done to ourselves or to each other.

Machines began as tools or as servants or slaves, like the original roboti. The threat represented by them has always been threefold: that they might rebel and murder us, that our machines might become the masters and we the slaves, and perhaps most significantly, that we might become more like them and less like ourselves. Captain Kirk always fought against the dehumanization and enslavement of human beings by machines and by the human enablers of machines. That's the subject of today's cartoon by Tom Tomorrow. But will Kirk fail this time? Are we not now in the process of dehumanizing and enslaving ourselves and each other with our machines? Are we not creating a dystopian world in which the individual counts for less and less, the collective for more and more? And are we not becoming monsters, making monsters, and recruiting monsters against our own humanity?

In Which We Reach the Present Day . . .

The 1950s were a decade of monsters, some supernatural, some science-fictional. Although science fiction boomed in that fabulous decade, supernatural monsters didn't exactly fade from view. After all, during the '50s, horror hosts and creature features came to television, monster magazines went into print by the dozens, and Hammer Films of Great Britain began producing its famous line of horror movies. The popularity of supernatural monsters continued in the 1960s with more movies and magazines, plus bubblegum cards, plastic models, Halloween costumes, glow-in-the-dark posters, and so on. Although monsters were no longer allowed in the comic books, kids of the '60s had to wait only until the early '70s before the Comics Code died and monsters lived yet again.

***

I have an issue of American Heritage magazine from 1969 in which the author talked about the then-current taste for things nostalgic. Not nostalgic as in the American Revolution or the Civil War, two subjects seemingly worn out over the years, but for the popular culture of the 1920s through the 1940s. The word nostalgia refers to a kind of homesickness. I imagine that the editors, writers, and readers of American Heritage were then all of an age to look back upon their youth and the things of their youth with exquisite feelings of loss and remembrance.

At the time, The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century (1969) was in all the bookstores. Although it shortly became "the king of remainders," that oversized hardbound reprinting of a comic strip that began in 1929 was a kind of emblem of 1960s nostalgia. By the time Buck Rogers was published, Ace Books had been reprinting for more than a decade the authors of Golden Age of Science Fiction and before. In the mid '60s, Ballantine did the same with J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series, which became wildly popular, especially among youth and the counterculture. Thirty years after their deaths, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft were also reprinted. They, too, became very popular and have remained so to this day. Leo Margulies, owner of the Weird Tales property, got in on the act with four reprint editions, beginning with Weird Tales in 1964. Robert A.W. Lowndes made his own homage to "The Unique Magazine" with a series of titles, including Magazine of Horror (1963-1971) and Startling Mystery Stories (1966-1971). And of course Sam Moskowitz published four new issues to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Weird Tales in 1973-1974.

***

My contention is that supernatural monsters are monsters of the past and of nostalgia. Put another way, nostalgia and the supernatural go hand in hand. That was as true with the first Gothic romance, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, as it was two centuries later with the revived Gothicism of the 1960s. I'm not sure when a nostalgia for the Gothic started. Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1939), and "The Birds" (1952), all by Daphne du Maurier, were in the Gothic mode, as were Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), and Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies of the same period. In any case, in 1966, Dark Shadows made its debut and a Gothic revival began in earnest.

The star of Dark Shadows was Jonathan Frid as the vampire Barnabas Collins, but in its five-year run, the show also told stories of ghosts, werewolves, witches, and man-made monsters. The writers of Dark Shadows also dipped into Gothic works of the past, including "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft. Barnabas Collins is from the eighteenth century, a time when Gothicism, which began as a kind of nostalgia, was new. Barnabas was of course nostalgic for his own time, and we, the viewers, joined him in his nostalgia, not only by watching the show, but also by wearing clothing and hairstyles inspired by Dark Shadows and the Regency Era (in the broadest sense of that term). I remember watching television and looking at magazines in the early '70s and noticing women's clothing and hair. I could not have known then that I was seeing something of a Gothic revival in women's fashions.

There were other trends in the 1960s and '70s, including witches, devil worship, and demonic possession. Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Mephisto Waltz (1971), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), and The Sentinel (1977) are among the most well known movies in that trend. There were also plenty of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other assorted undead, demonic, and evil characters. They continue to today and may be as popular now as they have ever been.

Supernatural monsters are so familiar to us that we need not go into long lists of books or movies, or long explanations about their nature and origins, to know them and understand them. The point is that--despite the advent of science, rationalism, and the science-based monster--the supernatural monster persists. Maybe the supernatural monster has subsumed the science-based monster. In any case, I think the monster of the twenty-first century is a combination of the supernatural monster, with which we are so familiar for having known them for so long; the real-life monster, with its origins in the nineteenth century; and the science-fictional monster, which began with Frankenstein's monster (a Gothic creation), but is as current (no pun intended) as the science of today.

Next: A Return to the Monster of the Twenty-First Century

What Is the Monster of the Twenty-First Century?--Part Eight

A Survey of Monsters--Part One

A Survey of Monsters--Part Two

A Survey of Monsters--Part Three

A Survey of Monsters--Part Four

PulpFest This Weekend

The Totalitarian Monster in Art

A Survey of Monsters-Part Five

A Survey of Monsters-Part Six

A Survey of Monsters-Part Seven

A Survey of Monsters-Part Eight

A Survey of Monsters-Part Nine

A Survey of Monsters-Part Ten

A Survey of Monsters-Part Eleven

A Survey of Monsters-Part Twelve

A Survey of Monsters-Part Thirteen

Demon Barbers

A Survey of Monsters-Part Fourteen

A Survey of Monsters-Part Fifteen

A Survey of Monsters-Part Sixteen