Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (36 page)

The Christian Right appeared at a moment of manifest changes in social and cultural history. Some children during these years turned to monsters and found them fun companions rather than terrifying apparitions. They certainly were not scarier than what was happening in their own homes.

Little Monsters

Children and adolescents in the 1960s and 1970s rediscovered the pleasures of the classic Universal Studios’ horror films and helped to create what has been called “monster culture” or the “monster kid” phenomenon. The impetus behind this was really twofold. In 1958 Universal sold fifty-two of its classic horror films as a package to local television stations across the nation, a package known as
Shock Theatre
. Featuring all of the significant Universal releases (and followed up with a second package called
Son of Shock
), late-night showings of these films made Dracula, Frankenstein, and all their pals suddenly cool again.
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By the 1960s hosts for the late-night programs borrowed some of Vampira’s old tricks, mixing horror and laughter (though never quite attaining her level of camp and dark sensuality). John Zacherle, better known as “Zacherley the Cool Ghoul,” set the standard for the new horror hosts. The Philadelphia TV personality created a character equal parts mad scientist and vampire. In this persona he used wacky humor to introduce Universal’s classic monsters, intercutting himself into movie scenes and spoofing them. He soon had imitators like “the Gorgon” in Fort Worth, Texas;
“Morgus the Magnificent” in New Orleans; Baltimore’s “Dr. Lucifer”; and Cleveland’s “Ghoulardi.”
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The renewed popularity of the classic Universal films led to the creation of a magazine that gave style and structure to the monster kid phenomenon, Forrest J. Ackerman’s
Famous Monsters of Filmland
. “Uncle Forry,” as Ackerman became known to his enormous fan base, filled his black-and-white publication with photographs of the classic monster films and simple fan tributes to every horror and science fiction movie of the 1930s and 1940s. Key to
Famous Monsters’
success was its ability to create an imaginary community of fellow monster lovers, kids who cared more about Bela Lugosi than baseball and who in
Famous Monsters
had their own “private” club. Joe Dante, the horror director best known for
The Howling
, remembered his utter delight at finding a copy of
Famous Monsters
at a Safeway supermarket in New Jersey. “Here all of a sudden,” Dante told David Skal in a 1991 interview, “was this magazine that was a validation that there were other people out there like us.” Dante recalled buying as many of the magazines as he could and having them regularly confiscated by parents, teachers, and camp counselors concerned about his reading habits.
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Changes in American toy production and design in the 1960s proved a boon for the monster kids. Prior to the 1960s, toy manufacturers assumed that their products should be miniature models of adult realities that prepared children for future tasks and solidified gender identities. Boys would play with dump trucks while girls would play with dolls. American toy makers also created products that children would play with in cooperation with their parents. Since the early twentieth century, Kodak marketed a toy camera for children that they could use to snap pictures, with parental supervision. Chemistry sets,
such as Hasbro’s Chemcraft, promised to introduce boys to “industrial chemistry,” though they needed their dads supervising the experiments. Model airplane kits, also popular in the 1950s, were assumed to be father–son weekend projects. Parents would also be in on the fun of scale model trains and Erector sets.
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Intergenerational conflict in the 1960s led toy makers to a different set of assumptions. Increasingly, toy manufacturers began to work off the theory that children desired toys that took them to the realms of the fantastic rather than to the world of workaday adulthood. Moreover, an adversarial relationship between parents and children over the nature of play came to be assumed by advertisers. Toys, and the worlds they conjured, offered an escape from parental oversight and even a subversion of parental values.
⁵²

These assumptions found their clearest expression in Aurora Plastics’ “monster models,” which first appeared in 1962. Advertised in comic books and in
Famous Monsters
, these scale models of figures and scenes from the Universal horror cycle were marketed directly to kids, often with the suggestion that these toys would cause at least a minor domestic disturbance. “Decorate your room! Surprise your mother! Create your very own chamber of horror!” suggested one Aurora advertisement.
Look
magazine did a cover story on the phenomenon, writing that “Toyland ’64 looks like a charnel house … there’s a monster for every child, and toy dealers figure this ghoul game will pay a clammy $20 million this year.”
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By the early 1970s, the Universal monsters had become an incredibly marketable commodity. Toy companies sought to capitalize on adolescent fascination with the horrifying fantastic. In 1964 Aurora attempted to market a toy guillotine that caused such a parental backlash that the company pulled the model after only a few months. In the early 1970s, Aurora tried to push boundaries once again by marketing a “Pain Parlor” torture chamber model complete with a scantily-clad female victim. Notably, this time they found themselves criticized by second-wave feminists rather than by parents. Aurora’s troubles did not prevent Mattel from selling the “Thingmaker,” which allowed kids to mold various insect-like monstrosities, or Hasbro from marketing a “Queasy Bake Oven,” a satire of its own “Easy Bake Oven,” in which kids could bake a “Bugs and Worms” mix or a “Mud and Crud Cake.”
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The author had the opportunity to be part of the monster kid phenomenon as it took its last gasps in the mid- to late ’70s. His own interest in the classic Universal monsters grew from a local television station that owned the
Shock Theatre
package and showed it on Saturday
afternoons (without, unfortunately, a horror host). This led in turn to a fascination with the monster kids commodities that included a plastic model of Lugosi as Dracula beside a gnarled tree (plastic bats flapping in the background), a cardboard haunted mansion with adhesive plastic images of the classic monsters and their accoutrements, and a “Mad scientist’s laboratory,” where plaster molds of the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy could be crafted and painted.

Behind the fun was the serious business of social transformation. Monster kids are the kids who watched a complete restructuring of American family demographics. The divorce rate in the 1960s began to rise sharply. Economic slowdown in the 1970s created increased tensions in households already struggling with the changing nature of gender roles. During that decade, a little over half of all the marriages in the United States ended in divorce. By the 1980s, about 40 percent of all children in the United States had, by the age of eighteen, experienced the divorce of their biological parents. A significant number of these children saw subsequent remarriages and divorces and dealt with various stepparents and stepsiblings along the way.
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Many of these changes in American family life are likely more positive than negative. The high divorce rate can be attributed in part to liberalized divorce laws in many American states that made it possible for women to leave unhappy or abusive partnerships. Nevertheless, there is no question that many adolescents experienced this period of instability and change in American social history as a kind of “crisis.” Monster culture gave them not only a fantastic world to escape into but also a subculture to be a part of, a community to belong to. The community of monster fandom offered an exciting alternative to the much-discussed “breakdown of the family” as well as the more general malaise in American institutions during the 1960s and 1970s. The monster kids are the first wave of a gigantic subculture still present in American life that is made up of comic book fandom, sci-fi and fantasy “geekdom,” and parts of the goth and steampunk communities. Los Angeles’ annual Comic-Con, attracting one hundred and twenty thousand fanboys and fangirls, had its origins in the alternative community of the monster kids. A network of similar conventions, websites, and comic bookstores have inherited Uncle Forry’s dream.
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Not every monster kid enjoyed his or her ghoulish fun in a single-parent household. Fears about the transformation of America’s family does not account entirely for the monster kids. Like their parents in the ’50s, children of the late ’60s and early ’70s continued to live in the shadow of the bomb. The global political tensions of the 1970s
made American children more certain of the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. As these kids became teenagers in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s blunt rhetoric reheated the cold war to a temperature it had not reached since the early 1960s and the Cuban missile crisis.

Universal monsters perfectly suited kids who lived in a world of vast nuclear stockpiles. The classic monsters had told stories of death and decay combined with the promise of eternal life, at least of a ghastly sort. In an America where political leaders toyed with the possibility of global apocalypse, the black-and-white horrors of an earlier era offered minor frissons and an escape from a real world of horrors.

The end of the monster kids phenomenon in the 1980s (the original
Famous Monsters
ceased publication in 1983) did not signal the end of a gothic fandom. The monster magazine received a gory makeover in
Fangoria
, a magazine dedicated to the gruesome narratives and effects of the new American monsters, the murdering maniacs discussed in the previous chapter as well as all manner of supernatural terrors that would emerge in the 1990s. Horror comics have grown in popularity, and newer magazines like
Rue Morgue
offer its readers a gothic lifestyle of clothing, music, art, and social opportunities that defines modern American experience through the eyes of the monster. Moreover, the Universal monsters did not disappear entirely. Almost all of the classic characters have reappeared in periodic remakes and reimaginings, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s stylish 1992
Dracula
. These creatures of the classic American film tradition have continued to horrify audiences right alongside Jason, Freddy, and demonic creatures from womb and tomb.
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American monsters at the close of the twentieth century were a diverse lot. Despite their differences, they shared a common origin in the national historical process. Devil babies competed with “the Hook” to elaborate social anxieties over abortion, religious conflict, the sexual revolution, birth control, single-parent families, intergenerational conflict, and women’s liberation. The revival of the Universal monsters showed the continuing power of the gothic in American historical experience. Horror showed an increasing tendency to subvert conservative values, causing commentators such as art scholar Henry Jenkins to draw attention to the horror film’s relationship to progressive politics and avant-garde art.
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The end of the cold war in 1989–1991 did nothing to slow down America’s monster mash. George H. W. Bush’s pronouncement that a “new world order” had come, a world no longer defined by conflict between the United States and the now defunct Soviet Union, combined
with the economic boom of the Clinton years, would seem to have created a sunny optimism that had no place for lurking creatures of the night. A sense of cultural optimism did inspire social philosophers such as Francis Fukuyama to proclaim “the end of history.” Liberal western democracy wedded to barrier-breaking entrepreneurialism had, according to Fukuyama, ended the long struggle of warring social and economic systems. The American ideal represented the most complete and the most successful form of government, triumphing over all its rivals.
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The 1990s did not represent the escape from history that Fukuyama predicted. The bombing of the World Trade Center in 1992 and of the Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 offered ominous signs of a new kind of danger in the post-cold war era. America’s domestic culture became increasingly volatile as a host of cultural clashes centered on controversial moments in entertainment and politics. A twenty-four-hour media cycle brought narratives to America that were both gothic and ideologically incendiary, such as the O. J. Simpson trial, the Rodney King beating and the Los Angeles uprising, the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and the sex scandal that impeached a president.
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Americans made their way through this labyrinth of sex, race, and power while being pursued by well-beloved monsters whose unnatural appetites did nothing to prevent their entry into celebrity culture. The 1990s saw the dawn of the hungry dead.

Ain’t no
grave / Gonna hold this body down

Wish me monsters.

“T
hey’re coming to get you Barbara.”

George Romero’s 1968
Night of the Living Dead
opens in a cemetery in western Pennsylvania, well marked with flags honoring the recently buried Vietnam dead. A brother and sister, Johnny and Barbara, are visiting their father’s grave. Both siblings are uneasy. Johnny did not want to come, and Barbara is clearly still grieving their father’s passing. She kneels beside the grave to pray while Johnny, clearly uncomfortable, jokes about a man, perhaps an indigent, lurching toward them. “They’re coming to get you Barbara,” he says, doing his best Boris Karloff impression.