David J. Skal. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. London: Plexus, 1994.
"A good deal of this book has dealt with the long shadow of war reflected and transformed in the shared anxiety rituals we call monster movies. Wars tend not to resolve themselves , culturally, until years after the combat stops. The same is true of economic depressions, fatal epidemics, political witch-hunts -- the traumas can linger for decades." (p.386)
"World War I found a persistent symbolic expression in horror entertainment, a tendency that never really ended, and was only replaced by the symbol-distillations of World War II. The American nineties are still haunted by the Vietnamese seventies; the belief in the survival of Vietnam-era MIAs remains a powerful fixation in many quarters, a tenet of faith that psychologically concretizes at least one truth: that the Vietnam War was never really resolved, not in the world not in our minds" (p.386)
"She [Diane Arbus, photographer] saw that 'monsters' were everywhere, that the whole of modern life could be viewed as a tawdry side-show, driven by dreams and terrors of alienation, mutilation, actual death and its everyday variations. Working-class families, through Arbus' unforgiving lens, emerged as denizens of an existential suburban sideshow. Society dowagers were close cousins to Times Square transvestites. Caught at the right moment, almost anyone could look retarded. america, it seemed, was nothing but a monstershow. It was a revelation, a cause and a creed" (p.18)
"There are four primary icons on this carousel, which turns to a calliope dirge: Dracula, the human vampire; the composite, walking-dead creation of Frankenstein; the werewolfish duality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and, perhaps most disturbing, the freak from a nightmare sideshow - armless, legless, twisted or truncated, now shrunken, now immense - it changes every time we look, a violation of our deepest sense of human shape and its natural boundaries. The carousel turns slowly, but steadily; if one looks long enough, one monster eventually blurs into another." (p.19)
"Caligari was derivative, no doubt, but it shared one honest source of inspiration with the new art movements, namely the Great War just past. The war had a tremenduous influence on the expressionist, dadaist, and emerging surrealist artists during the 1920s. In her recent book Anxious Visions, art historian Sidra Stich links the surrealist preocuppation with deformed and desfigured bodies to the sudden presence, following the war, of a sizeable population of the crippled and mutilated. Modern welfare had introduced new and previously unimaginable approaches to destroying or brutally reordering the human body." (p.48)
"Horror has always had a certain affinity for modern art movements and has often quoted their manneirisms, possibly because, at root level, they are inspired by similar cultural anxieties." (p.55)
"Dracula is a story about a particulary destructive and compulsive form of drinking; in the ensuing decades vampire stories would be colored increasingly by the metaphors of addiction." (p.124)
"By the time the MMPDA had the chance to view the finished version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Universal's Frankenstein had just opened to astonishing business, leading the industry to realise the Dracula was not a fluke, and 'horror movies' (the term was not widely used previously, and was in many ways an invetion of 1931) formed an important and profitable new category." (p.144)
"With Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the psychic landscapes of castle, crypt and laboratory were definitively mapped." (p.145)
THE MONSTER SHOW uncovers links between horror entertainment and the great social crises of our time, as well as horror's function as a pop-cultural counterpart to surrealism, expressionism, and other twentieth-century artistic movements. Ultimately focusing on film, the predominant art form of the modern world, Skal examines the many ways in which this medium has played out the traumas of two world wars and the Depression; the nightmare visions of invasion and mind control engendered by the Cold War; the preoccupation with demon children and mutants that took hold as thalidomide, birth control, and abortion changed the reproductive landscape; the vogue in body-transforming special effects that paralleled the development of the plastic surgery industry; the link between the rise of the AIDS epidemic and a renewed fascination with vampires. The author looks at horror's popular renaissance in the last decade, a thought-provoking inquiry into America's continuing obsession with the macabre.
Skal also offers the reader some insights into the struggles that the rival studios faced during the horror film boom of the 1930's and the effects of the demarcation enforced by the Production Code. In addition the author explores Hitler's fascination with the symbol of the wolf, E.C's vastly popular and extremely graphic comic books and the works of Stephen King.Interestingly Skal reinforces the theory that the public appetite for horror movies seem to grow in proportion to actual horrors experienced at the time. The biggest booms in the horror product occured during the Depression of the late 20's, the advent of World War II, the Red Scare, the growing threat of nuclear war and finally to the AIDS epidemic of today.
