Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
In horror fiction,
monsters originate from only a handful of sources:
- Natural
- Physiological (e. g., mutation or birth defect)
- Natural catastrophe
- Human
- Psychological
- Social
- Scientific/Technological
- Supernatural
- Angelic/Demonic
- Divine
Within this framework, the
specific contents of these categories change, sometimes vanishing (at
least for a time) or being replaced by newer understandings of the
concept of the monstrous.
For example, among the
ancients, hermaphrodites were considered omens from God. Signs of his
displeasure, humans with both male and female sex organs were viewed
as warnings form God. Their existence bespoke His wrath and the
punishment that He would soon visit upon his sinful people.
Today, hermaphrodism is
understood as an effect of male hormones, an adrenal glans disorder,
or aromatase deficiency. In other words, the condition results from
natural, not supernatural, causes. In male-to-female or
female-to-male transgender transgender cases, the cause of gender
dysphoria is corrected through hormone therapy, gender-confirmation
surgery, and other surgical or medical procedures. Its cause is
psychological; its remedy is medical and surgical.
With the change in the
understanding of the causes of hermaphroditism and transgender
conditions, intersex individuals are seldom cast as “monsters” in
contemporary horror fiction, and, when they are cast as such, as in
Sleepaway Camp (1983), critics, like much of the general
public, movie-going and otherwise, are offended by such
representations.
Likewise, zombies,
as they are depicted today, more often result from radiation, mental
disorders, pathogens, or accidents during scientific experiments than
from voodoo or magic. These fundamental changes, both in the way we
view the world and the basis of epistemology, have led to changes in
the nature and origin of the zombie.
In short, the category of
horror “monster,” which once included hermaphrodites as omens of
God's displeasure and imminent wrath, are now more frequently seen as
having experienced a hormonal or glandular problem or as having
experienced gender dysphoria. Their conditions are caused by
physiological or psychological, not supernatural or divine, agencies.
Zombies, likewise, have been given a natural, rather than a
supernatural, origin.
Frequently, horror movie
monsters are seen as representing metaphors for political, social, or
cultural events typical of particular time periods:
Godzilla (1954) has
been seen as representing the nuclear
bombs that the United States dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
Japan, in 1945.
Them!
(1954) ends with a caution about the dangers of “the Atomic Age,”
as myrmecologist Dr. Harold Medford warns, “When Man entered the
Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually
find in that new world, nobody can predict.”
The 1966 science
fiction-horror movie Invasion of the Body
Snatchers,
in which people were replaced with alien look-alikes, has been
regarded as an
allegory for both McCarthyism and communism.
Some critics regard The
Fly (1986) as a metaphor for AIDS, although
director David Cronenberg said he intended the horror movie to be a
metaphor for “aging
and death.”
Although
no horror movie seems to sum up more recent decades, a film in which
political figures instigate armies of ordinary citizens to go to war
against one another might be just the type of film to symbolize the
current state of affairs in the United States, wherein Antifa and
Democratic protesters, encouraged and emboldened by otherworldly or
demonic, hypnotic versions of Senator Maxine Waters, who exalts the
public confrontation of individuals who disagree with her party, and
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who claims civility is
impossible between Democrats and those who oppose them, attack their
opponents in the street, confront political appointees during meals
in public restaurants, disrupt Senate hearings, and attack the
Supreme Court Building, eventually precipitating a war that endangers
the entire country. Such an allegorical film, called, perhaps,
Demonic Uprising
would certainly capture the spirit of our age.