Book Review

Book Review

The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror

by David J. Skal

    No one can deny that horror movies played a significant role in 20^th century popular culture. It was a century plagued by wars, genocide, cultural upheavals, drug addiction and so on. It was also the century when the movie camera became a central part of our lives. It was an age of anxiety and the masses coped with their fears by confronting them in the form of monsters flickering on a movie or a television screen. In The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, David J. Skal argues that monsters symbolize fears that people can not face directly. His concept mostly succeeds but it falls apart in the latter sections of this book.

     Without saying as much, Skal takes a semiotic approach to the concepts of “monsters” and “horror”. These concepts are fields with fluid boundaries and shifting definitions that encode symbolic representations of collective cultural fears. These signs are displayed to the general public in films, books, and other media like comics or Halloween costumes for the purpose of containing and controlling anxiety. Such participation in “horror” is a ritualistic act that summons demonic signs, confronts them, contains them, and controls them. This systematic action of processing horror signs is largely done unconsciously but by consciously analyzing the characteristics of monsters, we can gain a deeper understanding of what was collectively bothering people at any given time and place. Therefore, understanding the psycho-social framework in which horror culture is consumed is important. In our time it may be a mystery to some why the hokey monster movies of the 1930s were so terrifying to audiences; they do not terrify us now because the social conditions of our society have gone through transformations and our cultural reference points have shifted.

     David J. Skal writes from a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. He uses the underlying theme of sexual anxiety as an explanation for horror. He also claims that war is the beginning of all horror. So, for example, the sight of soldiers returning from World War I with bodily injuries and mutilated faces evoked the feeling of being sexually undesirable in the viewer. Therefore, movies depicting monsters with physical and facial deformities became popular, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. Skal also identifies four horror archetypes that he uses as a framework for interpreting manifestations of horror culture that came later. He starts off with circus freaks as portrayed by Tod Browning in his landmark film Freaks. The predatory vampire , the sleek and elegant symbol of sexual domination and fear of death gets introduced and paired with the polar opposite of Frankenstein’s monster, the composite man made by technology, the plodding symbol of the working-class proletariat unable to comprehend his relationship to his creator. The dark and light sides of the human psyche are signified in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. All the monsters that came after these were variations on those themes. But Sigmund Freud believed he was teaching the world about the functioning of the human mind but really he was mistakenly explaining his own mind instead and the same can be said for David Skal. Some of his claims about the symbolism of monsters are not easy to swallow but there are times when he is genuinely insightful. To be fair, movie directors after World War I were familiar with Freud and psychoanalytic themes were deliberately incorporated into their art so there is some merit in understanding horror from that point of view.

     This psychoanalytic method of interpretation in The Monster Show works well, or at least it does for the parts of the book most distant from the lifetime of the author. Horror as a reaction to the fear induced by the two world wars, changing gender roles, the Cold War, the atomic bomb, and advances in medical science gets a thorough and lucid treatment. Along the way we learn about controversies involving censorship as regulated by the Hays Production Code as the Catholic church and women’s activists groups did what they could to prevent film makers from having freedom of speech. Personal details about industry figures like Bela Lugosi, Tod Browning, and Vampira, all unique characters in their own rights, add a human face to the narrative. The most insightful part of the book comes with the chapter on horror films dealing with anxiety over pregnancy, birth, and child rearing and also a section on how the Goth counter culture has embraced the vampire as a signifier of a rebellious social identity.

     Then The Monster Show crashes and burns. Vampires drink blood and AIDS can be transmitted through blood therefore vampires signify a fear of AIDS. Stephen King wrote horror novels during the 1980s and that was a time when people felt economic anxiety so Stephen King’s books express fears about economic instability. Towards the end, Skal’s argument becomes less coherent and he arbitrarily makes connections between things that do not appear to be connected. He may have been on to something but he does not give enough details to make his conclusions sound. Just because two things occur at the same time that does not mean they caused each other to happen. Instead of insight into the collective fears of the 1980s and 1990s, Skal gives us some angry tirades about Reagan-era economics, the politics of the medical industry during the AIDS crisis, and the increasing problem of anorexia. He even makes the bizarre claim that plastic surgeons are no different than the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele without acknowledging that plastic surgery is done on voluntary subjects who, nonetheless, are not put to death after the surgery is over. You can argue about the stupidity of nose jobs and breast implamnts all you want but there is no way you can honestly say that a plastic surgeon’s operating room is the same as Auschwitz. Like Freud, Skal ends up revealing more about himself than he does the culture of horror.

     Overall thought, The Monster Show is an interesting history. The majority of the book is historical narrative and the analysis part is there to provide context. Even when disagreeing with these ideas, a lot can be learned about the horror industry and the fascinating people who have kept it alive. It also makes you think about what kind of monsters we will be remembered for in our time. We are faced with the existential threat of global warming, Donald Trump and the possible end of American democracy, the forced politicization of every aspect of our lives, the worst era for music ever, and the hordes of cell phone users who resemble lobotomized zombies; if this is not a great time for the creation of new monsters, then I can not conceive of when it would be better.

Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. Faber and Faber Inc., New York: 2001.