Speaker 1: Oh, hey, it's your friend who gets terrified trying to
Speaker 1: drive in a round about Ali Ward and oh, we've
Speaker 1: got a good one. Oh boy, absolutely stellar, instant classic here. So,
Speaker 1: this guest is an author of many, many books, and
Speaker 1: his writing is gorgeous. Even the titles are top shelf
Speaker 1: like Monsters in America are Historical obsession with the Hideous
Speaker 1: and the Haunting, and his latest book, Dark Carnivals, Modern
Speaker 1: Horror and the Origins of American Empire. Just every sentence
Speaker 1: is beautifully descriptive and heavy with vibes in his observations
Speaker 1: of human behavior. He has a deep reservoir of cultural knowledge.
Speaker 1: He's just ugh, He's the perfect guest. He got his
Speaker 1: PhD at the University of Mississippi and he teaches courses
Speaker 1: such as Monsters in America, Horror, Narratives of Fear and
Speaker 1: Violence in American History, and Histories of Death, the Gothic
Speaker 1: and Social Revolution at Charleston College. And my friend Max Oswald. Hey,
Speaker 1: Max put us in touch, and I was it was
Speaker 1: so jittery. I was so worried because she's so cool
Speaker 1: that I would just blow the whole thing. And the
Speaker 1: first half of this episode is a lot of monster
Speaker 1: theory and sociological causes and effects of monsters. And then
Speaker 1: after the ad break, we get more into Patreon questions
Speaker 1: and more about specific monsters. And you can submit questions
Speaker 1: ahead of time if you want via patreon dot com
Speaker 1: slash ologies for as little as a dollar a month,
Speaker 1: and you can sport ologies shirts and hats and toads
Speaker 1: via ologiesmerch dot com. You can also support the show
Speaker 1: for zero dollars just by leaving us a review. I
Speaker 1: read all of them, such as this still wet one
Speaker 1: from M four, whose therapist recommended the show and who
Speaker 1: wrote I particularly gravitate Towardologies on darker days when I
Speaker 1: need a reminder that life is incredible and there's so
Speaker 1: much to appreciate. And I appreciate that M four and
Speaker 1: everyone who left reviews, and everyone who just spreads the
Speaker 1: word and tells your friends and your enemies about the show. Okay, terrotology,
Speaker 1: Oh boy, Okay. This is a real word. It comes
Speaker 1: from the Greek from me monster, and it is the
Speaker 1: study of monsters in folklore and fiction. It is also,
Speaker 1: horrifyingly the term used to describe the study of physiological
Speaker 1: developmental quote abnormalities, but obviously I prefer the term that
Speaker 1: is applied to the study of the myths of monsters
Speaker 1: and fantastical creatures, which again is another legit use in
Speaker 1: the literature, territology, scary movies, and monsters. The creatures are
Speaker 1: the what the spooktoberus the one, So let's get into it.
Speaker 1: Rise from your crips, turn your ears on for Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: Frankenstein's Monster, the Bride of Frankenstein's Monster, Zombies, Chubicabras, Bigfoots, werewolves,
Speaker 1: Babaduk's folk, stories of helpful ghosts, monsters on various continents,
Speaker 1: horror versus monster movies, secret messages and scary movies. The
Speaker 1: director's cuts that your government may not have wanted you
Speaker 1: to see. How monsters mirror our fears. What to do
Speaker 1: if you suspect you have one under the bed, Very
Speaker 1: tall ladies, sea snakes, Hollywood production secrets, special effects, makeup,
Speaker 1: and more with professor, acclaimed author, horror fan, monster experts,
Speaker 1: and territologist doctor W.
Speaker 2: Scottpool.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm glad that he recommended me because I was
Speaker 3: very excited to be able to talk with you. I've
Speaker 3: enjoyed your work as well, so oh my gosh, it's
Speaker 3: kind of a cool thing for me to get to do.
Speaker 3: So I will try not to fan the wape.
Speaker 1: But no, when I got the email back that you're in,
Speaker 1: I was trying not to fan. I was really nervous.
Speaker 1: That's really funny.
Speaker 3: Well see now we don't have to be nervous.
Speaker 1: Now we're good friends. Okay, we got our nerves out
Speaker 1: of the way, so onto less scary stuff like body
Speaker 1: horror and monsters.
Speaker 3: So this is Scott Poole.
Speaker 1: He him and doctor.
Speaker 3: Doctor Pool or Professor Poole. But I really love it
Speaker 3: when people call me Scott, so let's do that.
Speaker 1: All right. Sounds good, doctor Pool. So now, Professor, you
Speaker 1: teach courses. I do.
Speaker 3: I teach monster courses. I absolutely do, And you know
Speaker 3: it's the most fun thing, sort of, I guess fun
Speaker 3: in italics to say when people at parties find out
Speaker 3: that I'm a history professor and they ask me what
Speaker 3: my topic is, and I respond, not Civil War reconstruction
Speaker 3: or the American Revolution or Han China, but monsters. I
Speaker 3: do monsters and popular culture. So yeah, and they are
Speaker 3: history courses. What I kind of build my classes around
Speaker 3: is the idea that part of why monsters are so
Speaker 3: important to us, is that they are ways that we
Speaker 3: talk about all kinds of other stuff that's really important
Speaker 3: to us, gender politics, the way that we construct society.
Speaker 3: Even economic inequality is an issue that comes up when
Speaker 3: you talk about monstrosity, and I think this is true
Speaker 3: with kind of the monstrous film tradition as well, because
Speaker 3: monsters are quite literally out there, They're beyond the margins.
Speaker 3: It's just crazy stuff. For that reason, it's like this
Speaker 3: little space that we can talk about things that, you know,
Speaker 3: it's difficult to talk about when it's sort of done straight,
Speaker 3: when we're not using these kinds of very very strong images.
Speaker 1: Are monsters in one way metaphor? Are they portals into
Speaker 1: these discussions?
Speaker 3: They are there, definitely portals into the discussions. I think
Speaker 3: that they are something stronger than metaphors. And what I
Speaker 3: mean by that is this, when you use a metaphor,
Speaker 3: you always know you're using it. You know that you're
Speaker 3: not talking about a real thing. And one of the
Speaker 3: things that I emphasize to students in my classes when
Speaker 3: we talk about these kinds of things is that for
Speaker 3: many people, not for me and not for many of them,
Speaker 3: but for many people, different kinds of monsters are very real,
Speaker 3: and the kinds of anxieties that these kinds of monsters
Speaker 3: express are certainly very real. So, for example, you can
Speaker 3: have a conversation with someone and you end up talking
Speaker 3: about vampires, and they say, well, of course I love vampires,
Speaker 3: but I don't believe in vampires. Then let's say the
Speaker 3: conversation turns to Bigfoot. Well, they're big, big believers. You know,
Speaker 3: if you don't believe in Bigfoot, you don't know what
Speaker 3: you're talking about, right, And this is true of so
Speaker 3: many of these things. One of the things I tell
Speaker 3: my students is that in the American context, because of
Speaker 3: the influence of religion, particularly evangelical religion, the idea of
Speaker 3: Satan and demonic forces are these are probably the monsters
Speaker 3: that you know, are most widely believed in in the
Speaker 3: American context, And yet they also show up in our
Speaker 3: horror films.
Speaker 1: And going back in terms of historically, that's such a
Speaker 1: good point about religion and the stories that we have
Speaker 1: used to try to teach each other. How far back
Speaker 1: do monsters even go, and what's the difference between something
Speaker 1: that is posed as reality versus something that we know
Speaker 1: as story.
Speaker 3: I think that they are in many respects, and I
Speaker 3: think there's evidence that they are older than Homostens, that
Speaker 3: sort of our prehistoric ancestors one hundred thousand years ago
Speaker 3: had a experience of the monstrous. The reason that I
Speaker 3: say that is that most scholars are pretty sure that
Speaker 3: the first experiences of religion were related to ceremonial burial.
Speaker 3: In fact, that may go back like three hundred thousand years.
Speaker 3: So like leaving gifts for the dead, I got you
Speaker 3: something and dislikely held meaning in terms of grief, in
Speaker 3: terms of community solidarity. Politics probably entered into it. You know,
Speaker 3: who gets a proper ceremonial burial, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: For more on these subjects, we linked in the show
Speaker 1: notes episodes on anatology about death and dying, desertology about
Speaker 1: mortuary makeup. Taphology is about headstones and burial grounds and
Speaker 1: cemeteries and of course amproology.
Speaker 3: But there's also these kind of ritual of terror that
Speaker 3: surrounded those prehistoric burials, the kind of the idea of like, well,
Speaker 3: what if they come back and what if they're mad
Speaker 3: when they do. So, there's a sense in which things
Speaker 3: like the leaving of gifts, the burial of people with
Speaker 3: gifts there's these feelings of guilt and placation and maybe,
Speaker 3: you know, even kind of a search for absolution from
Speaker 3: these creatures and from our former kinfolk, like what will
Speaker 3: happen if they return? And I don't think that there's
Speaker 3: a lot of light between those truly truly, truly ancient
Speaker 3: ideas and the idea of the monster.
Speaker 1: What exactly is defined as a monster? What's a monster?
Speaker 1: What's a demon? What's a zombie? What's a cryptid? When
Speaker 1: it comes through the terror itological? How do you define that?
Speaker 1: As an expert in this.
Speaker 3: So here's the thing about me that drives some of
Speaker 3: my other monsterlogists crazy. Okay, I don't define the monster. Now,
Speaker 3: let me back up.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, well, I guess his interview's over.
Speaker 1: That's been great. Yeah, so.
Speaker 3: Don't yeah, don't cut me off yet. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 3: I got something here. So, so hanging here with me,
Speaker 3: I think that the monster, by its very nature is
Speaker 3: definition defying. One of the things that when I first
Speaker 3: became interested, really especially in kind of the academic study
Speaker 3: of monsters, like thinking about them as a scholarly topic.
Speaker 3: It's just the fact that it's kind of this category
Speaker 3: that completely ignores categories. And so for example, I mentioned vampires, Okay, vampires,
Speaker 3: we count those as monsters. We also count Godzilla as
Speaker 3: a monster. We also throw serial killers in there in
Speaker 3: kind of our spectrum of the monstrous. And so what
Speaker 3: do any of these different kinds of expressions of horror chaos,
Speaker 3: what do they have really in common? And as I
Speaker 3: looked at it through time, and as I looked at
Speaker 3: it as a historian, like what's going on when people
Speaker 3: are afraid of these particular things? And so what I
Speaker 3: decided is that it's really sort of the context itself,
Speaker 3: the political, the historical, the cultural context that defines the monster.
Speaker 3: One example of this would be that in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 3: for about sixty years, Americans, most Americans, certainly middle class Americans,
Speaker 3: were obsessed with the idea of the sea serpent.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: And when I say they were obsessed, I mean they
Speaker 3: loved reading accounts of sightings. There were lots and lots
Speaker 3: of Americans that were absolutely sure that they had seen one.
Speaker 3: There was an incident in the eighteen thirties in Gloucester, Massachusetts,
Speaker 3: in which about one hundred and thirty people claimed that
Speaker 3: a sea serpent showed up in Gloucester Harbor and they
Speaker 3: all saw it. There was even sheet music that you
Speaker 3: could play on the piano at home, is called the
Speaker 3: Sea Serpent Polka. Is a really and no, I can't
Speaker 3: play that for you, Ali. If I could, I definitely would.
Speaker 1: That was a clip from the eighteen fifties banger Sea
Speaker 1: Serpent Polka, which was composed by Eastern European born pianist
Speaker 1: Maurice Straikosh and covered by Jamie Winters via SoundCloud one
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy years later. So, according to the eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven New York Times obituary of Maurice Strakosh, he
Speaker 1: was a musical prodigy and began making really good money
Speaker 1: performing concerts at the age of eleven, but his parents disapproved,
Speaker 1: so he got out a Dutch Like later losers, he
Speaker 1: high tailed it to Vienna at the age of twelve,
Speaker 1: with about reported by the New York Times two bucks
Speaker 1: in his pocket, which is like, how is this little
Speaker 1: man even going to eat? Then I realized that that
Speaker 1: was reported in eighteen eighty seven, so I looked it
Speaker 1: up and adjusted for inflation, and that's like two grand
Speaker 1: in today's money. So this kid was loaded like a
Speaker 1: little tiny Justin Bieber who got emancipated and wrote a
Speaker 1: polka about a sea serpent. I was shocked to find
Speaker 1: that his oh bit and Wikipedia page both neglect to
Speaker 1: mention this composition. So maybe it was a blip in
Speaker 1: his other, otherwise very noteworthy life. But also, I mean,
Speaker 1: come on, name a better song about a sea serpent.
Speaker 1: Name any song about a sea serpent.
Speaker 3: Hopefully you know that. Where I'm going with this is
Speaker 3: who's scared of sea serpents today? Nobody that I know.
Speaker 3: We're not watching films about them, we're not reading books
Speaker 3: about them, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But in
Speaker 3: the nineteenth century, the sea serpent was it. The sea
Speaker 3: serpent was their vampire, was their zombie film. It was
Speaker 3: all those things. And when I really looked into it,
Speaker 3: one of the things that I discovered is that there's
Speaker 3: so much talk and so much interest in the possibility
Speaker 3: of these kinds of creatures because it's at a time
Speaker 3: when the nature of scientific evidence. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: discussion of the nature of scientific evidence and what counts
Speaker 3: as scientific evidence, and the sea serpent became kind of
Speaker 3: a perfect forum to discuss those kinds of things. It
Speaker 3: became a forum to discuss darwin Zon became a forum
Speaker 3: for scientists themselves to talk about what it meant to
Speaker 3: do professional science, so like the actual professionalization of the profession.
Speaker 3: So sea serpents don't have a lot to do with vampires,
Speaker 3: but they're both monsters, and so I think it's in
Speaker 3: many respects the historical contexts that creates our monsters.
Speaker 1: And did they ever figure out what that sea serpent was?
Speaker 1: Was it like an oar fish? Was it just a
Speaker 1: one of those big wiggly ones.
Speaker 3: So I'm pretty sure that they were seeing a wave.
Speaker 3: The oar fish has been suggested as for the actually
Speaker 3: kind of hundreds of worldwide sea serpent sidings. And there
Speaker 3: was actually a New England whaling ship I believe this
Speaker 3: was in the eighteen forties that they claimed that they
Speaker 3: had close to the Antarctic circle. They had managed to
Speaker 3: get their hands on the corpse of a sea serpent,
Speaker 3: and they were going to bring it back to New
Speaker 3: York City, and like runners had come like in advance
Speaker 3: kind of say, announcing that this was happening. So there
Speaker 3: were stories in the New York Times. And then they
Speaker 3: got back home and they were like sorry, we missed Blast.
Speaker 1: How do you miss la?
Speaker 3: We well, you know, you just lose stuff, right, so
Speaker 3: and so. Yeah, but I think that shows you like
Speaker 3: kind of the level of fascination that you know it's
Speaker 3: been lost to us. It's also a little bit like
Speaker 3: in a class that I teach on the twentieth century
Speaker 3: horror film, my students are like pretty insistent to me
Speaker 3: that nineteen thirty one's James Wells Frankenstein is not scary
Speaker 3: at all. You know, bel Lagosi's Dracula is not scary
Speaker 3: at all. Film are much scarier now, and you know,
Speaker 3: they were really terrifying in the nineteen thirties. And it's
Speaker 3: not that people in the nineteen thirties were naive or
Speaker 3: that they were less smart than us or had less
Speaker 3: exposure to I mean, these were people going through the
Speaker 3: Great Depression and about to face the Second World War.
Speaker 3: So they're aware that the world's a challenging place. It's
Speaker 3: just that a part of it, at least part of it,
Speaker 3: is that there were elements of the Frankenstein story that
Speaker 3: pushed certain kinds of buttons in the nineteen thirties that
Speaker 3: it does not in quite the same way today. So
Speaker 3: I do think that monsters are very much born out
Speaker 3: of the historical contexts and out of the culture that
Speaker 3: creates them.
Speaker 1: What do you think that Frankenstein or Frankenstein's monster. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you have thoughts on what we should
Speaker 1: call him, but what buttons do you think he was
Speaker 1: pushing at that time?
Speaker 3: Well, I tell you, as a horror film fan and
Speaker 3: a historian, one of kind of the most eye opening
Speaker 3: moments that I really kind of ever had in doing
Speaker 3: this kind of work was watching a scene specifically in
Speaker 3: actually maybe my favorite classic horror film, The Bride of
Speaker 3: Frankenstein in nineteen thirty five, just a wonderful fantasy horror film.
Speaker 3: There is in that film a moment in which the monster,
Speaker 3: you know, very famously, there's always the villagers with the
Speaker 3: pitchforks and torches, and he's being chased. Get him alive,
Speaker 3: if you can get him such every ravine, every crevice,
Speaker 3: what the fiend must be found. And then he's actually
Speaker 3: tied up and raised up on this hole amid this
Speaker 3: really scary crowd that has gathered around him, and I realized,
Speaker 3: oh my god, this is the nineteen thirties. This is
Speaker 3: the heart of the moment when African American men in
Speaker 3: particular were being lynched across the country. This is a lynching.
Speaker 3: And then next step there are people who watched this
Speaker 3: film in nineteen thirty five who had participated in a lynching,
Speaker 3: or consider this, who had had a family member who
Speaker 3: had been murdered by a white mob. And for a
Speaker 3: while I thought, well, you know the old thing of like, well,
Speaker 3: you're reading too much into this. And then as I
Speaker 3: was looking at reviews of the film, actually when I
Speaker 3: was researching Monsters in a America and wanting to write
Speaker 3: about it and say what reviewers said at the time,
Speaker 3: no comment about this in American papers, but in the
Speaker 3: foreign press, specifically a review in a British paper, I believe,
Speaker 3: in fact it was The Times. The London Times noted
Speaker 3: that there was a scene in the film that will
Speaker 3: remind viewers of nothing so much as a Georgia lynching.
Speaker 1: Oh my God. For a very brief primer on this
Speaker 1: horrifying facet of America, you can visit the NAACP's article
Speaker 1: History of Lynchings in America, which recounts that a typical
Speaker 1: lynching involved a criminal accusation and arrest, and the assembly
Speaker 1: of a mob, followed by seizure, physical torment, and murder
Speaker 1: of the victim. Lynchings were often public spectacles attended by
Speaker 1: the white community in celebration of white supremacy. Photos of
Speaker 1: lynchings were often sold as souvenir postcards, and the atrocities
Speaker 1: were common even in the early twentieth century and the
Speaker 1: American South, and there was an anti lynching bill posed
Speaker 1: to Congress in nineteen eighteen, but it was defeated by
Speaker 1: a filibuster in the Senate, and lynchings finally started to
Speaker 1: decline toward the nineteen thirties after the NAACP waged this
Speaker 1: campaign and persuaded Southern newspapers to publicly condemn lynchings, and
Speaker 1: then white businesses were boycotted in the South, which changed
Speaker 1: some tides. So in America, money talks the loudest.
Speaker 3: And so you know, monsters can be great, fine, but
Speaker 3: part of the horror of the monster is that it
Speaker 3: can also become a way for us to experience the
Speaker 3: terror of the times in which we live in. I
Speaker 3: actually later learned that the director James Swayl, who directed
Speaker 3: both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, that he had become
Speaker 3: close friends, interestingly enough, with Paul Robson, the musician, civil
Speaker 3: rights activist, very strong advocate on the American left in
Speaker 3: the thirties and forties. He worked with him on the
Speaker 3: film Showboat a few years later. He's very famous for
Speaker 3: the song Old Man River in that pretty lavish Hollywood production.
Speaker 3: But Paul Robeson, who was really a true radical and
Speaker 3: the very best sense on these issues, probably did, you know,
Speaker 3: influence James Well to think about that imagery, and in
Speaker 3: part because that imagery is actually not in at least
Speaker 3: in the same way in Mary Shelley's eighteen eighteen and
Speaker 3: eighteen thirty one Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: Have sociologists or historians looked into what the effect might
Speaker 1: have been on the public, either consciously or subconsciously, of
Speaker 1: that imagery being a mirror to what was happening in
Speaker 1: society at the time.
Speaker 3: I have tried to find responses to it, and not
Speaker 3: only actually in relation to those films or that particular issue,
Speaker 3: but really just sort of how people responded to sort
Speaker 3: of what we might call the politics of the horror
Speaker 3: film in earlier ages and even our own time. One
Speaker 3: thing I always like to tell people about this and
Speaker 3: that we always talk about in class is that we
Speaker 3: should never assume this is true of anything. We should
Speaker 3: never assume that people are picking up what's been put down, right, Like,
Speaker 3: there are certainly plenty of people, I'm certain who managed
Speaker 3: to watch the Barbie film without learning very much about
Speaker 3: fourth wave feminism, right, I mean, like they thought the
Speaker 3: color palette was great and the songs were fine, and
Speaker 3: that was kind of it, you know, they missed it.
Speaker 3: So certainly, like even things that are much more implicit,
Speaker 3: it's really difficult to see. Where I think it becomes
Speaker 3: more interesting is as we get closer to our own time,
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties specifically, and horror films become much more
Speaker 3: explicitly political. George Romerow, employing an African American male lead
Speaker 3: in Naida Living Day ad a protagonist. The He wrote,
Speaker 3: really of the piece, all persons who die during this
Speaker 3: crisis from whatever cause.
Speaker 2: Would come back to life to seek human victims, telling
Speaker 2: you they can't get in here.
Speaker 3: And so I think it becomes much more striking than
Speaker 3: often I found in particularly in politically progressive horror in
Speaker 3: the thirties, forties and fifties, there's almost this feeling of
Speaker 3: it being a kind of an end joke for the
Speaker 3: people who get it, and then everybody else kind of doesn't.
Speaker 1: Going back to director James Well, his Hollywood career started
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty with a film called Journey's End, and
Speaker 1: then he directed Frankenstein Invisible Man The Bride of Frankenstein
Speaker 1: look him up and he was also weirdly gorgeous, like
Speaker 1: David Bowie in CPA.
Speaker 3: Tones Whale, who was an out gay man in Hollywood
Speaker 3: in the nineteen thirties. He also included a lot of
Speaker 3: en jokes for his own community that very much went
Speaker 3: over the head of everybody that saw the film. Plenty
Speaker 3: of people who still see the film don't really see
Speaker 3: how it's kind of clearly queer coded in certain ways.
Speaker 1: One such way is the Bride of Frankenstein's original plot
Speaker 1: point of doctor Frankenstein bailing on his new wife on
Speaker 1: his wedding night to harvest a human heart from his
Speaker 1: new bride and then working alongside another male doctor to
Speaker 1: create life. And the Hayes Code was this thing. There
Speaker 1: were content guidelines for entertainment and they were in place
Speaker 1: from the mid thirties to the late sixties, and they
Speaker 1: forbade anything that would compromise the sanctity of marriage. And
Speaker 1: this is nearly one hundred years ago, but these discussions
Speaker 1: are still taking place, especially regionally in the United States.
Speaker 1: I tend to have like a pretty sensitive ear and
Speaker 1: it's really subtle. But I noticed that you might maybe
Speaker 1: be from the South. Yes, I know that you have
Speaker 1: a very subtle accent. Just kidding. It's very obvious, which
Speaker 1: is wonderful. Now, what's a little bit of your upbringing
Speaker 1: in your intersection with this? How long have you been
Speaker 1: a horror fan too?
Speaker 3: Oh? Like since I was six? Oh my god, no,
Speaker 3: I really have. So here's the thing, and you know, gosh,
Speaker 3: we have to talk about like my accent and my
Speaker 3: because here's the deal. So, when I was an old
Speaker 3: kid in late nineteen sevens, on Saturday afternoon, my local
Speaker 3: rural South Carolina television station had an afternoon series film
Speaker 3: series that they called Shock Theater. Oh my god, okay,
Speaker 3: And Shock Theater was actually something that went back to
Speaker 3: the nineteen fifties because what had happened is that Universal
Speaker 3: Studios as well as some other studios, but mainly Universal,
Speaker 3: had sold a lot of their old archival films like
Speaker 3: The Great Monster mash films of the nineteen thirties and
Speaker 3: forties to local TV stations, and so for especially as
Speaker 3: late as the seventies. Now, you know, it was just
Speaker 3: a really easy thing for a small station to throw
Speaker 3: together like a double feature of the nineteen thirty one
Speaker 3: Frankenstein and the nineteen forty one Wolf huh. And so
Speaker 3: for years, all on Saturday afternoons, I just was absolutely
Speaker 3: glued to the set and saw everything from you know,
Speaker 3: just true incredible classic films like Bride of Frankenstein to
Speaker 3: just absolute garbage like the Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman,
Speaker 3: which I have to say is still a terribly guilty pleasure.
Speaker 3: Attack of the fifty Foot Woman incredibly huge, with incredible
Speaker 3: desires for love and vengeance.
Speaker 1: The most grotesque monstrosity of all, a gorgeous and powerful
Speaker 1: woman breaks through the roof of a building. Did it
Speaker 1: have a glass ceiling? Perhaps terrifying?
Speaker 3: And that was also the era. It wasn't really kind
Speaker 3: of the golden age for this, but magazines like Famous
Speaker 3: Monsters of Film Land were still around, and so when
Speaker 3: it was you know, I could talk to my mother
Speaker 3: into going and picking me up a comic book at
Speaker 3: the drug store. There was also like these wonderful monster
Speaker 3: magazines that had all these photographs of films I had
Speaker 3: not been able to see, and stories about the actors
Speaker 3: and stories about the directors, and I just loved it.
Speaker 3: And I actually think I loved it in part because
Speaker 3: I did live in a small, not very interesting, very
Speaker 3: conservative and also very religious community, and so the kind
Speaker 3: of just like wide open, imaginative landscape that that kind
Speaker 3: of stuff opened up in that otherwise kind of sort
Speaker 3: of dreary time and place was just really wonderful.
Speaker 1: How did your family feel about you, a tiny tot
Speaker 1: being glued to horror films on Saturdays?
Speaker 2: Not good.
Speaker 3: It was a real problem, Allie. It was a real problem.
Speaker 3: And so there were at least several times that Shock
Speaker 3: Theater was banned several different times going into my teenage years.
Speaker 3: The comics and the magazines were also banned. One of
Speaker 3: the most fun things about that side of it, though,
Speaker 3: is that in the nineteen eighties, if you were a
Speaker 3: big horror film fan, by the eighties, it wasn't Famous Monsters.
Speaker 3: It was a magazine called Fangoria.
Speaker 1: I remember that.
Speaker 3: I remember that, and Fangoria is still with us. Chef
Speaker 3: Fngoria they had these really true honestly, like, I completely
Speaker 3: understand why my parents were so upset because the covers
Speaker 3: were just horrible. You know, they was just bloody and
Speaker 3: they're like just faces melting and just you know, all
Speaker 3: this stuff. And so of course, when my mom managed
Speaker 3: to find these, you know, even though I did sequester
Speaker 3: them away and all that kind of stuff, she located
Speaker 3: them and they were banned from that sure, and looking back,
Speaker 3: I totally get it, Like I actually do kind of
Speaker 3: understand that. But here's the thing. Fast forward to let's
Speaker 3: see about twenty sixteen and Fangoria did a feature about
Speaker 3: my lovecraft book, and my mom was like, with her
Speaker 3: little old lady friends, she was like, oh, my son,
Speaker 3: look at this SE's in this magazine. Look, yeah, that's
Speaker 3: a separated on the cover, but it's my Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: I'm sure.
Speaker 1: At the time though, she was like, why can't he
Speaker 1: just be in a playboy's Why can't I find out?
Speaker 3: I know, yeah, I almost think it's funny you say that,
Speaker 3: because I almost think they would have been a little
Speaker 3: bit more comfortable with that because I was always if
Speaker 3: you had can't tell I already was kind of a
Speaker 3: weird kid. You know, and so like I think that, well,
Speaker 3: it's at least it's like a normal RS. You know,
Speaker 3: it's something we get what's going on there, but we
Speaker 3: don't know what all this is.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm sure in a parent's worst fantasies, if you've
Speaker 1: got a you know, a magazine with limbs and blood,
Speaker 1: you think, like, okay, he's training to be a homicidal person.
Speaker 3: Right, some kind of professional killer is kind of his
Speaker 3: career goal.
Speaker 1: So I wonder, how did you, instead of being someone
Speaker 1: who put bodies and dumpsters, how did you become professor Poole.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's a couple of things about that. One
Speaker 3: of the things that interests me, I think from a
Speaker 3: scholarly perspective as well as from a personal one, is
Speaker 3: how frequently people I know who love monsters like like
Speaker 3: I do, often like me, turn out to be vegetarians,
Speaker 3: I turn out to be quite non violent people, both
Speaker 3: politically and also in their personal lives. And although I
Speaker 3: do sort of try to stay away from doing sort
Speaker 3: of psychotherapy with monsters, I don't think of them as
Speaker 3: really kind of psychological phenomena primarily. But I do think
Speaker 3: it's true that having a space where the darkest parts
Speaker 3: of yourself, but also the darkest parts of your culture.
Speaker 3: You can talk about those things, and I mean with
Speaker 3: oneself in one solitude as much as with other fans
Speaker 3: that it does give you a different kind of perspective.
Speaker 1: Heads up, we have a two part scholarly episode examining
Speaker 1: the sociology of fandom with legit panthropologist Marathi and yes,
Speaker 1: we'll link it for you. In the show notes.
Speaker 3: You end up, not, for example, glorifying violence in the
Speaker 3: way that films, say a superhero film in which we
Speaker 3: witness the destruction of an entire city, but there's no blood. Now,
Speaker 3: there's no bodies, like the whole city's been flattened by
Speaker 3: a US based superpowered individual and somehow there's no casualties
Speaker 3: that we see. But there's that level of violence that
Speaker 3: seems to have kind of mainstream appeal, which interestingly has
Speaker 3: I think a connection to the way that we think
Speaker 3: about war in this country, the way that you know,
Speaker 3: since the Persian Gulf War, going back to the early
Speaker 3: nineteen nineties, there's been this sense that well, it's it's
Speaker 3: something that lights up on CNN, it's something that happens
Speaker 3: on the screen. It's like watching a video game, don't
Speaker 3: actually see any of the bodies. We don't see any
Speaker 3: of the casualties. It's something very different than to watch
Speaker 3: a film in which, well, there aren't mass casualties. There
Speaker 3: are maybe three or four characters that you've developed some
Speaker 3: kind of attachment to that suffer something really terrible, and
Speaker 3: so I think it gives you a different sensibility about violence,
Speaker 3: causes you to think about death as something that is
Speaker 3: not just simply nameless and faceless.
Speaker 1: You know, I've wondered before how there's an escalation almost
Speaker 1: of specifics, visual specifics when we might look at Bell
Speaker 1: Lagosi's version of Vampire not scary, but then our horror
Speaker 1: films get more and more suspenseful and more specific. Where
Speaker 1: we've then seen a wave of true crime being popular
Speaker 1: is like the next horror genre.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a really really bright line for me
Speaker 3: between the horror film and true crime. I think they're
Speaker 3: doing very different things. I think they're often appealing to
Speaker 3: very different audiences. I actually can abide true crime. I
Speaker 3: don't watch true crime documentaries, and really the entire reason
Speaker 3: is that it is viewing the suffering of actual others
Speaker 3: as opposed to what is the imaginative experience of violence,
Speaker 3: grief and human suffering. And so it's interesting. I mean,
Speaker 3: in talking about how either my parents felt about the
Speaker 3: horror film or the churches that they went to, or
Speaker 3: the community that we lived in, there was always this
Speaker 3: discussion of becoming desensitized to violence. I sort of feel
Speaker 3: like I became The horror film and monsters in general
Speaker 3: kind of sensitized me in a lot of ways to violence.
Speaker 3: And what it means this is it's actually quite true
Speaker 3: crime and the popularity of it disturbs me is that well,
Speaker 3: I think that this is maybe what all of my
Speaker 3: elders were worried about when I was a kid, Like,
Speaker 3: this is the being desensitized, This is the suffering of
Speaker 3: others being turned into coin. I actually find that trend
Speaker 3: deeply troubling, and I think that it has a larger
Speaker 3: political meaning. I think that it's important that we ask
Speaker 3: questions like, why are we consuming and binging hours and
Speaker 3: hours and hours of true crime in a country that
Speaker 3: imprisons a larger percentage of its population than any other
Speaker 3: country in the world. Is that essentially reinforcing some of
Speaker 3: our ideas about law and order, reinforcing some of our
Speaker 3: ideas about like dangerous others, essentially giving us real monsters,
Speaker 3: embodying monsters very often in people who are marginalized already.
Speaker 3: So I do separate the love of and interest in
Speaker 3: monsters in horror film from true crimeaning.
Speaker 1: For sure, we did an episode called Victimology with doctor
Speaker 1: Kelly Renaissan who discusses this and how victims of homicide
Speaker 1: in the US are overwhelmingly black men, but that's not
Speaker 1: reflected in most documentary crime entertainment. And for more on
Speaker 1: victims advocacy, you can see that episode linked in the
Speaker 1: show notes. But getting away from the actual suffering of
Speaker 1: real people, I'm back to fiction. Where do you think
Speaker 1: the line is between monsters and horror? Because I think
Speaker 1: of monsters and I think of them being intact, and
Speaker 1: then I think of horror and I think of blood,
Speaker 1: and so where's the line.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, you're absolutely honest, and there is
Speaker 3: I think a tie between what we think of as
Speaker 3: gore and horror that is very particular to really the
Speaker 3: last hundred years of global history. My sense of it
Speaker 3: is that what we think of as the horror film
Speaker 3: is actually born in the aftermath of the Great War
Speaker 3: of World War One. This is when you see the
Speaker 3: first usage of the term horror film. Supernatural Films that
Speaker 3: had come before that were of a different type tended
Speaker 3: not to make use or make reference to Gore, to
Speaker 3: the reanimated dad, to the literal supernatural. And so I
Speaker 3: think that what we think of as horror is a
Speaker 3: very twentieth twenty first century experience. One of the things
Speaker 3: that happened with the world wars and post colonial conflicts
Speaker 3: that have followed is that essentially there's sort of the
Speaker 3: progress of combat medicine at the very same time that
Speaker 3: there's all these new terrible ways of killing and mutilighting
Speaker 3: the human body. World War One is the early example
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 1: World War One side note lasted from nineteen fourteen to
Speaker 1: nineteen eighteen, and it marked the real shift from wars
Speaker 1: fought on the backs of horses to the birth of
Speaker 1: the modern military industrial complex via innovations of weapons of
Speaker 1: mass destruction like the tank and chemical weapons, improved submarines
Speaker 1: and machine guns, and the MK two pineapple looking hand grenade.
Speaker 1: Weapons manufacturers are like, what great war? But if you're like, wait,
Speaker 1: what about that? Twenty twenty two Taylor Swift bonus track
Speaker 1: on the album Midnight's called the Great War? Is this
Speaker 1: about military trenches? The lyrics go your finger on my
Speaker 1: hairpin triggers soldier down that icy road, looked up at
Speaker 1: me with honor and truth, broken and blue. So I
Speaker 1: called off the troops, and then some stuff about love.
Speaker 1: And this song inspired by a world war, then inspired
Speaker 1: a course at the University of Ghent with Professor Ellie
Speaker 1: Mclausland and it's titled English Literature Taylor's version. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the global rise of tearing up each other's bodies for
Speaker 1: money and land and resources and religions was the future
Speaker 1: shit that fertilized the growth of monster and horror genres
Speaker 1: as we know them now.
Speaker 3: This continued all the way down to the present. So
Speaker 3: I think that, like, it's actually not an accident that
Speaker 3: in the United States, it's in post Vietnam America, a
Speaker 3: country that had become used to seeing the reality of gore,
Speaker 3: the reality of the mutilated human body, that you have
Speaker 3: the explosion of interest in the slasher film films dealing
Speaker 3: with war and horror, And in fact there's a very
Speaker 3: direct connection there. One of the great many would argue,
Speaker 3: the great makeup artist sort of The star of Fangoria
Speaker 3: magazine was Tom Savini, who worked on films like George
Speaker 3: Romero's Down of the Dead, The First Friday, the Thirteenth Film,
Speaker 3: a number of the classics of the horror genre. He
Speaker 3: was a combat veteran of Vietnam. Oh gosh, and has
Speaker 3: spoken about this. Actually he was very specifically a combat photographer.
Speaker 3: And one of the ways that he dealt with that
Speaker 3: experience is while it was happening, he essentially imagined it
Speaker 3: as special effects. He just sort of called it special
Speaker 3: effects in order to endure, you know, seeing what was
Speaker 3: happening to his friends and to his comrades, and you know,
Speaker 3: then in certain respects this was therapeutic for him in
Speaker 3: later years. But one of the real geniuses, you know
Speaker 3: of gore effects and the modern horror film. He brought
Speaker 3: that with him from Vietnam. I mean that was quite
Speaker 3: literally sort of the war coming home.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 1: I found a nineteen eighty four clip of Tom Savini
Speaker 1: doing a show and tell of his ghoulish effects for
Speaker 1: one David Letterman, and I got to say, Tom saunchras
Speaker 1: out with this jaunty Saturday night fever swagger. He's got
Speaker 1: tight jeans a mustache, he's chewing gum and just has
Speaker 1: this cool confidence of your older brother's friend letting you
Speaker 1: check out his trans am. This man could get it.
Speaker 1: Even Letterman was clearly enamored.
Speaker 3: Or what is it.
Speaker 1: Special makeup effects?
Speaker 3: It's called I see And what does that when we
Speaker 3: go to a film, what of your work do we see? Oh?
Speaker 1: Well, anytime somebody's head is blown off or a cutthroat
Speaker 1: or little creature runs around.
Speaker 3: That's me nowad having a head blown off? It comes
Speaker 3: under makeup, special makeup effects. Well, let's take a look at.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that was just a way to deal
Speaker 1: obviously with the trauma, compartmentalize it.
Speaker 3: I think so, And I think that, you know, it's
Speaker 3: mostly anecdotal evidence. I also just have a sense that
Speaker 3: that's why that generation also is particularly interested in those
Speaker 3: films and the seventies and eighties. Are you know, films
Speaker 3: today don't have the same amount of gore and blood
Speaker 3: and etc. As you would find in the era of
Speaker 3: Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the First Halloween and the Friday
Speaker 3: the Thirteenth films, and the Nightmare on Elm Street films.
Speaker 1: We've covered Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, the Son of Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: Donn of the Dead, Zombies, fifty Foot Women, Sea Serpents, Godzilla,
Speaker 1: Friday the thirteenth, So it's never been a better time
Speaker 1: to explore more of the gools Halloween monster connection. October monsters.
Speaker 1: Why is this such a good month for them?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, it's interesting. I think that the answer
Speaker 3: to that is that dating back to the earliest Christian
Speaker 3: celebrations of All Halla's Eve of Halloween, the day before
Speaker 3: the Feast of All Saints, it is a vigil day
Speaker 3: for the dead. It's always been a time for ghosts.
Speaker 3: It's always been a time for unquiet spirits. I mean
Speaker 3: maybe going back to the third and fourth century of
Speaker 3: the Christian era. Now it's interesting though, because, if, as
Speaker 3: some scholars do, you wanted to do a really strict
Speaker 3: kind of taxonomy of monsters, like our monsters and ghosts
Speaker 3: really the same thing.
Speaker 1: I was wondering that, and how do hungry ghosts in
Speaker 1: some Asian cultures factory?
Speaker 3: Right? Well, and here's the thing I think you could
Speaker 3: be if you wanted to, you know, draw us strict
Speaker 3: line for whatever reason you were doing that between unquiet
Speaker 3: spirits and monsters maybe you could do that. Maybe you
Speaker 3: could say, well, a ghost is always forever. In always,
Speaker 3: we're talking about a human being once alive who isn't anymore,
Speaker 3: who now can't find rest, and a monster is well.
Speaker 3: I guess if we were doing this for reals, we
Speaker 3: would just say, well, a monster's just anything else that's
Speaker 3: supernatural and scary. But I actually think that in the
Speaker 3: human experience and thinking about this and just kind of
Speaker 3: deep anthropological time, I do think that the ghost is
Speaker 3: in a lot of ways, and the idea of the
Speaker 3: ghost is at the root of our idea of the monstrous.
Speaker 3: One of the places you actually see this is in China,
Speaker 3: where there are these traditions that go back at lead
Speaker 3: to the Han dynasty of the so called hopping vampires,
Speaker 3: the jang Shei, the hopping vampire, and these vampires are
Speaker 3: your kin, your loved ones. Nice to say, again, how's
Speaker 3: a family who are going to return? If they have
Speaker 3: been improperly buried, if you buried them in the wrong place,
Speaker 3: if they're burial rights have been performed at the wrong time.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of ways to mess this up. In
Speaker 3: other words, and they're going to come back, and they're
Speaker 3: going to be swollen with blood because they are blood drinkers.
Speaker 3: They're called hopping vampires because well, they're actually the physically
Speaker 3: resurrected dead, and you know, they they have kind of
Speaker 3: a calcium deficiency, like their bones aren't what they're supposed
Speaker 3: to be, so they can't walk like they did, and
Speaker 3: they're going to come after you.
Speaker 1: They're thirsty, right they.
Speaker 3: Are, And it does, at a later moment, several centuries later,
Speaker 3: blend into the Buddhist tradition that then spreads into Korea
Speaker 3: and Japan of the idea of the hungry ghost, a
Speaker 3: reanimated loved one who, for a variety of different reasons,
Speaker 3: is still desiring something that they have lost in life.
Speaker 3: So the question is, you know, are we talking about
Speaker 3: ghosts or are we talking about monsters. It seems like
Speaker 3: they're kind of acting the same. They're both creatures that
Speaker 3: represent a kind of a chaos, a kind of imbalance,
Speaker 3: our own fear of death, our fear of having a
Speaker 3: bad death. I think that's one of the more interesting
Speaker 3: things about the monstrous is that we can say, like, well,
Speaker 3: they embody death, and they do, but none of us
Speaker 3: are able to escape that. I mean, we're all going
Speaker 3: to face death, but they tend to embody sort of
Speaker 3: the wrong.
Speaker 1: Death right the worst case scenario.
Speaker 3: The worst case scenario death by violence, which is in
Speaker 3: some ways the very essence of what we think about
Speaker 3: when we think about the nature of evil, the use
Speaker 3: of violence to cut life short, to give someone or
Speaker 3: someone's a wrong death. So all that to say, I'm
Speaker 3: not really too interested in the distinctions between ghosts and
Speaker 3: monsters because I think they kind of root around in
Speaker 3: that same part of our subconscious and come from the
Speaker 3: same kind of needs that we have to think about
Speaker 3: our own finite and often chaotic experience.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting how the more we find out about
Speaker 1: life's mysteries, the more we can just say it's fine, like,
Speaker 1: you know what, thanks, don't worry about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, whatever, that's fine.
Speaker 1: We're on to something else, something else is scarier. Can
Speaker 1: I ask you questions from listeners?
Speaker 3: Yes, let's do that.
Speaker 1: Oh, they're so excited, and we're excited to make a
Speaker 1: donation in doctor Pool aka Professor Pool aka Scott's name,
Speaker 1: and this week he showse the International Rescue Committee or IRC,
Speaker 1: which was founded at the call of Albert Einstein in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three. And is now at work in over
Speaker 1: fifty crisis affected countries, helping to date nearly thirty three
Speaker 1: million people. And they provide healthcare, learning resources for children,
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Speaker 1: more at Rescue dot org. And thanks to sponsors on
Speaker 1: the show for making that donation possible. In Scott's name. Okay,
Speaker 1: you can submit questions before the interviews by becoming a
Speaker 1: patron at patreon dot com slash ologies for as little
Speaker 1: as a buck a month. I may say your name
Speaker 1: on the show possibly correctly. Let's hear some of your questions.
Speaker 1: They were a scream connor. They them had a great question,
Speaker 1: and can you talk about humanoid monsters versus non humanoid
Speaker 1: like you know, humanoid like werewolves and zombies and mummies
Speaker 1: versus non humanoid like dragons in the Kraken And they said,
Speaker 1: it seems like ancient societies tended to have more animalistic monsters,
Speaker 1: while modern societies have more humanoid monsters. Is that true?
Speaker 1: Is there any psychology to explain that?
Speaker 3: I do think that for many ancient peoples there was
Speaker 3: often the sense that a monster embodied chaotic elements of
Speaker 3: the natural world. We can see this, for example, with
Speaker 3: a pop culture monster that has an ancient past Pazuzu
Speaker 3: from The Exorcist.
Speaker 2: Oh well, then let's introduce ourselves, and I'm that devil.
Speaker 3: Not kindly undo these stretch. If you're the devil, one on,
Speaker 3: make the stretch disappear.
Speaker 1: That's much too well. Good display a book.
Speaker 3: Before Pazuzu made his big screen debut back in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy three, he was an ancient Sumerian kind of demon god.
Speaker 1: Okay, so Pazuzu was considered a son of God and
Speaker 1: also the reigning monarch of the demons of the wind.
Speaker 1: So maybe he was also the king of arts. But
Speaker 1: in The Exorcist, a priest finds an old statue of
Speaker 1: Pazuzu on an archaeological dig and is like, cool, hope
Speaker 1: this doesn't follow me and possess a girl in a
Speaker 1: nightgown who stabs herself in the crash with a crucifix.
Speaker 1: Later on, how wrong he was. Pasuzu does not fuck around.
Speaker 3: And he was connected with sickness and also with desert winds, oh,
Speaker 3: which are both chaotic in their own way. But also
Speaker 3: we're believed to bring sickness and to kind of bring
Speaker 3: a sort of impersonal death. So one argument has been
Speaker 3: that as the world as you know at post scientific
Speaker 3: revolution four hundred years ago, and then increasingly as our
Speaker 3: experience it becomes kind of google mapped, and you know,
Speaker 3: there's sort of no hidden corners out there anymore, we're
Speaker 3: turning more and more to more human like creatures. But
Speaker 3: I also find evidence of people of the distant past
Speaker 3: using their monsters in very sophisticated and very interesting ways.
Speaker 3: Can I tell you about a monster I really love?
Speaker 3: That's a good example. So in Tibetan Buddhism, there's this
Speaker 3: really scary guy named yaman Taka Okay and he's quite horrifying.
Speaker 3: According to some accounts, he has I believe, thirty four
Speaker 3: different hands. Some they said he has thirty six each one.
Speaker 3: He's got this razor sharp dagger in them. He wears
Speaker 3: a necklace of human heads, and which is not what
Speaker 3: you want right, not what you want to see. Here's
Speaker 3: the thing, though, he is actually a teacher of enlightenment.
Speaker 3: He is Yamataka is actually the avatar of a particular Bodhisatfa,
Speaker 3: an enlightened being whose goal is to free human beings
Speaker 3: from the terror of death, and so the daggers in
Speaker 3: those many, many hands, however many he has, they are
Speaker 3: to cut through the ties to the ego that is
Speaker 3: keeping one from experiencing freedom and bound to the will
Speaker 3: of karma. The different heads actually represent different stages of
Speaker 3: one's life in which you've been destructive or in Buddhist terms,
Speaker 3: you've been unskillful when it comes to your own egocentric
Speaker 3: desires that have tied you to car And so he's
Speaker 3: absolutely terrifying. But even his sort of physical manifestation is
Speaker 3: meant to turn you to a more spiritual path. And
Speaker 3: you know, this is an idea that is many, many
Speaker 3: centuries old, So it is a little hard for me
Speaker 3: to get completely on board with the idea that, well,
Speaker 3: at one time monsters were just expressions of things we
Speaker 3: didn't get about, you know, because thunderstorm scaredness or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and now it's serial killers. I think that ancient people,
Speaker 3: as peoples of every area, have been able to think
Speaker 3: in complex ways about their monsters.
Speaker 1: That sounds like the scariest therapist ever, but effective. They're like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to help you get over your fear of death.
Speaker 1: But I am going to have a lot of hands
Speaker 1: with raisors on them right.
Speaker 3: Well, And just to be clear for all of your listeners,
Speaker 3: you know, if your therapist is wearing a necklace of
Speaker 3: human heads, I would call that a just a sea
Speaker 3: of red flats, you know, so I would I would move.
Speaker 1: It's like, but they're covered in network.
Speaker 3: Right, right? What am I going to do? Right?
Speaker 1: We had so many questions form so many listeners. I
Speaker 1: will list them in an aside about cryptids, okay, so
Speaker 1: quick definition. Cryptids are creatures that some cryptozoologists swear really exist,
Speaker 1: such as the big hairy Bigfoot of North America, the
Speaker 1: big hairy Yetti of the Himalayan Mountains, the winged hooved
Speaker 1: dragon looking Jersey Devil, which nearby Philly residents could probably
Speaker 1: take it a fight, all while not spilling their beer,
Speaker 1: or the long necked dinosaur looking aquatic monster in Scotland's
Speaker 1: lock Ness. I think my favorite might be something called
Speaker 1: the Mongolian death worm, which is a two foot long
Speaker 1: poisonous alive sausage, or this thing called the Loveland frog
Speaker 1: of Ohio, which was a four foot tall humanoid frog
Speaker 1: man that's gampered across roads and just scared the swamp
Speaker 1: water out of local residence until a cop shot it
Speaker 1: and it turned out to be an old escaped pet
Speaker 1: iguana that had lost its tail and it deserved better
Speaker 1: to be honest. But other patrons who had cryptid questions
Speaker 1: included Addie mcbatty, Jessica Fowler, Lily Mackenzie King, Ellie Schaeffer, Slopi,
Speaker 1: Sarah Mead and Connor. They them the ren you know,
Speaker 1: Kayla Pilcher, Bethan Greer Carson and Britney Corgan. What is
Speaker 1: a cryptid? What's the difference between a cryptid and a monster?
Speaker 1: Meghan well Sterard wants to know what is the best
Speaker 1: cryptid and why is it mothmanned? For plenty of mothman discussion,
Speaker 1: please see the Creepy Crawley's episode AKA Forest Entomology with
Speaker 1: doctor Kristen Wickert linked in the show notes, and we
Speaker 1: discuss his gleaming steel butt. But anyway, do you believe
Speaker 1: in cryptid? So where does a cryptid come into all this?
Speaker 3: Do I believe in encryptids? Well, I've never so this
Speaker 3: is gonna upset people probably. I don't believe in anything
Speaker 3: that is not falsifiable. Okay, it's sort of not incumbent
Speaker 3: on us on me in this case. To you know,
Speaker 3: believe in something that there's not evidence for, you don't
Speaker 3: even have to say, well, maybe there is, because you know,
Speaker 3: of course, that's kind of a game. We could play
Speaker 3: about everything all day long. There's a jar of mayonnaise
Speaker 3: in my refrigerator that created the universe, proved me wrong
Speaker 3: the night of June twenty seventh. It became sentience. You know,
Speaker 3: how do you know that's not true? But I love cryptids.
Speaker 3: I do love the Mothman story. I love the Bigfoot story.
Speaker 3: I love one of our local cryptids. There's actually going
Speaker 3: to be a Hulu special coming up about the lizard
Speaker 3: Man of Skins or Swamp of South Carolina.
Speaker 1: See the twenty twenty three release The Legend of Lizard Man,
Speaker 1: which has everything night shoots teenagers in an old van.
Speaker 1: It's got claw marks, narrow escapes, and dubious reports of
Speaker 1: a green, wet like, seven foot tall reptilian man with
Speaker 1: three fingers, red eyes, and snakelike scales according to an
Speaker 1: official witness report taken in nineteen eighty eight. You can
Speaker 1: still get commemorative T shirts. You can.
Speaker 3: I might I love them because to me, they are
Speaker 3: kind of just these expressions of kind of a hope
Speaker 3: for wonder in the world, and often it's very explicit,
Speaker 3: almost a kind of a religious impulse behind the desire
Speaker 3: for these things to be true. And I again think that,
Speaker 3: in going back to part of our earlier discussion, in
Speaker 3: a world that does sort of feel like there's you know,
Speaker 3: not the edges of the map anymore, that says, here
Speaker 3: be dragons, things like Bigfoot and the lizard man and
Speaker 3: the moth Man can kind of fulfill that role. Seldom
Speaker 3: have I seen these kinds of beliefs, as opposed to
Speaker 3: other beliefs circulating out there, cause very much harm. You know.
Speaker 3: It seems to be just kind of a weird hobby
Speaker 3: for a lot of people. And you know, God's know,
Speaker 3: I'm into weird hobbies, so I think it's fine. I
Speaker 3: think it's great. Let me also add that I would
Speaker 3: absolutely love it if it turned out that there was
Speaker 3: a sasquatch or whatever, like he could show up at
Speaker 3: my door and I would be really excited about that.
Speaker 3: But I just so far, you know, we got nothing
Speaker 3: on that.
Speaker 1: For those who asked about Bigfoot looking at you Sharon Maffield,
Speaker 1: Lindsay Mayer, Ed Metzovik, Cole Irwin and Mary Everhart and Lily.
Speaker 1: You can see the Forensic Ecology episode with doctor T. R.
Speaker 1: Moore about her work in a Pacific Northwest forest sequencing
Speaker 1: DNA of a species of hominid that did not sequence
Speaker 1: as Homo sapiens but something just from the genus Homo.
Speaker 1: And she's known in her lab as a scientist who
Speaker 1: has found molecular bigfoot evidence, but she says it's most
Speaker 1: definitely just degraded human DNA, like an old trail turd.
Speaker 1: But still it's cool bragging rights. I guess, if nothing else,
Speaker 1: it's a good way for people to get out, get
Speaker 1: into the woods. Yeah, get some low impact cardio you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I get you still.
Speaker 3: Looking for Yeah, that's I think that's the best. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, they're going to find that people who believe in
Speaker 1: bigfoot are among the most cardiovascularly healthy people. I know. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean that's another thing, And you know, there is
Speaker 3: that whole argument that like, hey, it's the practical effect
Speaker 3: of your beliefs that matter. So yeah, go go bigfoot hunting.
Speaker 3: Yeah sure, yeah, do a lot worse things. People get
Speaker 3: up to so you know, go for it.
Speaker 1: Very true, which was my whole point in the which
Speaker 1: Ology episode, But some of you took it too literally
Speaker 1: and suck the fun out of it. Not that I'm
Speaker 1: disappointed or bitter, just disappointed and a little bitter. But
Speaker 1: let's change the subject to happier things like a prehistoric
Speaker 1: reptile the size of a thirty five story building whose
Speaker 1: name means gorilla whale and is the reigning king of
Speaker 1: monsters who would not flinch. It's pushing you like a
Speaker 1: rotting tomato. Becky the Secret Scientist wants to know thoughts
Speaker 1: about Godzilla.
Speaker 3: So Godzilla is one of my favorite monsters, in part
Speaker 3: because Gojia, the original film that the americanized version really
Speaker 3: sort of ripped off. Gajira is sort of one of
Speaker 3: the most political monster films of the twentieth century. It
Speaker 3: came at a moment in Japan right after the Second
Speaker 3: World War when, of course they're still dealing with the
Speaker 3: legacy of Hiroshima and Naksaki. The survivors of those events
Speaker 3: were still very much a part of public life, and
Speaker 3: it's a film that's quite literally about a destructive horror
Speaker 3: that is raised by American atomic testing. Wow, And it's
Speaker 3: a very, very powerful There's some imagery in the original
Speaker 3: Japanese film that actually borrows very directly from some of
Speaker 3: the more famous photographs of Hiroshima.
Speaker 1: Just picture vistas of rubble, a panorama of unfathomable destruction,
Speaker 1: and the horrors of a giant city smashing monster get
Speaker 1: pulled into pretty sharp focus.
Speaker 3: And I talked about this a lot in Monsters in America.
Speaker 3: It is interesting that a few years later, nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 3: I believe, when a dubbed American version was released, much
Speaker 3: of that material was censored out. References to the atomic bomb,
Speaker 3: references to atomic testing. You know, an American was made
Speaker 3: the main character, even while much of the original footage
Speaker 3: was used. So it's a deeply deeply political film in
Speaker 3: its origins.
Speaker 1: I did not know that about Zilla.
Speaker 3: I had no idea, right, And it's interesting what American
Speaker 3: films have done with Godzilla subsequently, the generally accepted as
Speaker 3: terrible nineteen nineties Godzilla film did this really interesting thing
Speaker 3: where this is Roland Emerick did this thing where it
Speaker 3: was nuclear testing that raised Godzilla. But it wasn't us.
Speaker 3: It was the French, okay, sure, as their fault. Yeah, Frenchman, right,
Speaker 3: that's why we call them freedom fries because godzilla.
Speaker 1: Oh, we have so many questions. I have a couple
Speaker 1: more from listeners, if that's okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm going at no.
Speaker 1: I love this. I'm like, oh, well, good. Nicole s
Speaker 1: and many others, including Abby Lawson who else asked about
Speaker 1: monsters and horniness, Christine Winzel, Kendall, m Dylan Weitsch, are
Speaker 1: yearning to know, in Abby's words, what's to deal with
Speaker 1: monsters and horniness? Everyone is so horny for monsters, and
Speaker 1: let's be honest, I'm no exception, Abby said. They want
Speaker 1: to know is there a psychological reason behind this?
Speaker 3: Monsters are really sexy? Your listeners are absolutely right about this,
Speaker 3: and this has been true of the horror film going
Speaker 3: back to the nineteen twenties. For anyone who thinks that
Speaker 3: it was either Belle Lagosi's Dracula or Pattinson's Edward that
Speaker 3: may made vampire sexy, they can go have a very
Speaker 3: weird experience, yes, watching the nineteen twenty two film Nosferatu. Oh, Nosferatu.
Speaker 3: Of course, a lot of people now about him from SpongeBob,
Speaker 3: more than more than that of Weimar era silent film Just.
Speaker 1: A side note. Scott mentioned this as though it were
Speaker 1: an understandable pop cultural fact, but I was like, excuse me,
Speaker 1: I need to know how No. S Faratu turned up
Speaker 1: in SpongeBob SquarePants. So I found a twenty twenty two
Speaker 1: article titled how No. Sparratu Turned Up in SpongeBob SquarePants,
Speaker 1: and it explained to me that Jay Lender, a SpongeBob
Speaker 1: writer and storyboard artist, would read horror film magazines in
Speaker 1: his youth and a still image from the No. Speratu
Speaker 1: film just got burned in his brain, so we added
Speaker 1: it in there. And with fifteen million SpongeBob viewers every
Speaker 1: week at the time of No. S Ferratu's cameo flicking
Speaker 1: some lights off and on No Saratu, it's possible that
Speaker 1: this pretty chance and random reference to the vampire is
Speaker 1: what's kept it so popular among younger generations. And also,
Speaker 1: Jaylender knows that the ghoul's real name is Count Warlock,
Speaker 1: not No Sparatu, and he doesn't want to hear it
Speaker 1: from you. Okay, And yes, we talk more about nos
Speaker 1: Fratu and Count Warlock in the two part Vamproology episode
Speaker 1: with doctor Jeff Holder, who teaches courses on vampires because
Speaker 1: he is cool.
Speaker 3: You know, nos Fratu looks like a rat. Nos Faratu,
Speaker 3: he looks like an elderly rat. I think it's probably
Speaker 3: the best right to describe his face, and has these talons,
Speaker 3: you know, and has this just absurdly like distended frame
Speaker 3: and arms that just look like they're ten feet you know,
Speaker 3: in length. And yet Ellen, the female protagonist of Nosparratu,
Speaker 3: has a very very clear fixation on him as he
Speaker 3: does her, and in fact, a fixate on him that
Speaker 3: exceeds her connection to her young husband. She is not
Speaker 3: interested at all in what he's up to you, but
Speaker 3: she's all about not sperati.
Speaker 1: Okay, quick story. So recently Jarrett and our friend Jason
Speaker 1: were hayan on the couch watching this nineteen seventy nine
Speaker 1: version of nos Faraci. Well, my friend Catherine and I
Speaker 1: were doing a puzzle at the kitten table. It was
Speaker 1: a wild Saturday night, but Kat's back was turned and
Speaker 1: for a moment she earnestly thought that they had switched
Speaker 1: to watching porn in our living room together while we
Speaker 1: did a puzzle. Ten feet away, monsters have been putting
Speaker 1: the bones in Boning for Ian's.
Speaker 3: This turns up again and again, you know, I mean
Speaker 3: where Woll films the wonderful nineteen nineties version of the
Speaker 3: film Candy Man with the gorgeous Tony Todde playing the monster.
Speaker 2: Game for you.
Speaker 3: But is this very very sexy monstrous figure. And one
Speaker 3: suggestion that has been made, and this maybe getting a
Speaker 3: little too theoretical, but I do feel like you tell
Speaker 3: me after I say this, because I do feel like
Speaker 3: there's something to this in the Monster film, kind of
Speaker 3: the two out groups, that the two marginal groups are
Speaker 3: the women who are the victims, right, and the monster
Speaker 3: that the male heroes are trying to kill. Yes, and
Speaker 3: so one theory and it's not mine, and again I'm
Speaker 3: not even sure it's true, but I like it. One
Speaker 3: idea is that there's just kind of this natural alliance
Speaker 3: between the woman and the monster. Both of them are
Speaker 3: kind of like subject to, you know, kind of the
Speaker 3: patriarchal violence that's going on in the film. Again, don't know,
Speaker 3: I think it's a really really interesting idea.
Speaker 1: I think so too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you throw in that too, you know. Jennifer
Speaker 3: Kant's Baba Duke, where you know, you have the queer
Speaker 3: coded monster.
Speaker 1: See a Tumbler post suggesting that the top headed, hollow
Speaker 1: eyed monster, silhouetted by his trench coat was a metaphor
Speaker 1: for the outsider status experienced by so many LGBTQ IA
Speaker 1: plus folks and suddenly amid these sunny Pride parade celebrations
Speaker 1: or babaduks merrily marching along. Director Jennifer Kent has said
Speaker 1: she thinks it's sweet and she's honored, which kind of
Speaker 1: is an understatement because being a queer icon arguably more
Speaker 1: enviable than Oscar, But okay, Jennifer.
Speaker 3: Which also was, as I mentioned, a phenomena with Frankenstein,
Speaker 3: and I think that's part of the attractions as well.
Speaker 3: I think it's also tied into just the very fact
Speaker 3: that there is an element of the human psyche that
Speaker 3: kind of can't look away from what it's disgusted by.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, there's a lot going on there for sure.
Speaker 1: Also given that the very word terrotology has been used
Speaker 1: and is still used in some cases rather horrifically to
Speaker 1: describe people with physiological abnormalities, and films like Candy Man
Speaker 1: in its twenty twenty one remake, feature a villain with
Speaker 1: a sharp hook fashioned as a prosthetic. This next query
Speaker 1: submitted by Grace Robashow, janettasaur Fondo Dondo thirty five and
Speaker 1: Catherine Bend touches on an upcoming episode we have on
Speaker 1: disability sociology, and a few people actually asked about that
Speaker 1: intersectionality between disability and illness and monsters and how that's
Speaker 1: another marginalized group that's been kind of monsterified, and I wondered,
Speaker 1: like Kiya Kshimoto wants to know, I'd love to hear
Speaker 1: a discussion of the intersection of monsters and disability. Do
Speaker 1: we find that that's changed over time at all?
Speaker 3: Well, in some ways I think that it has accept
Speaker 3: you know, going back to the nineteen twenties, but then
Speaker 3: also really caring forward into our monsters in the present.
Speaker 3: The idea of disfigurement as of any kind as representative
Speaker 3: of the other, I think that that's still an unfortunate
Speaker 3: part of the horror tradition. I would say, on the
Speaker 3: more positive side though, the fact that not unlike folklore,
Speaker 3: actually so, I don't think that this is new and
Speaker 3: some attempt to be progressive or something. I think that
Speaker 3: the idea of the sympathetic monster has always been open
Speaker 3: to people, open for people who are looking for figures
Speaker 3: to identify with. We've talked a couple times about Fangoria magazine,
Speaker 3: and actually a few months ago there was this really
Speaker 3: wonderful article by a frequent writer for fangal Or who,
Speaker 3: in dealing with cancer, had found both solace and identification
Speaker 3: in David Cronenberg's body horror films as she began to
Speaker 3: experience her own body as alien to her. I think
Speaker 3: there's a lot in that that people can find solace in.
Speaker 1: If you're looking to watch more body horror films by
Speaker 1: David Cronenberg, please enjoy hits such as Shivers aka The
Speaker 1: Parasite Murders or They Came from Within, which features the
Speaker 1: barfing of a botfly larvae looking parasite. But there's also Rabid,
Speaker 1: featuring a woman who, according to your friend Wikipedia, develops
Speaker 1: an orifice under one of her armpits that hides a
Speaker 1: phallic C literal stinger she uses to feed on people's blood.
Speaker 1: But let's also not forget scanners, which originated the cinematic
Speaker 1: device of a human head exploding. Cronenberg also remade The Fly,
Speaker 1: in which Jeff Goldblum's actual magnetism is rather challenged by
Speaker 1: a tendency to vomit acid on people before eating them.
Speaker 1: So maybe just skip the popcorn. Let's venture outside two
Speaker 1: warmer climates. At the behest of patrons Shalan Whippert Connor
Speaker 1: to them and Fondo Dondo thirty five and a ton
Speaker 1: of other people. In Fondo Dondo's words, you have to
Speaker 1: ask about the cubacabra. What up with that chubacabra? Is
Speaker 1: it just a coyote with mange?
Speaker 3: I mean probably, yeah? I think, yeah. I wish that
Speaker 3: I could say that, No, it's an ancient creature of
Speaker 3: Machica legend that mayan ruins have images of. But my
Speaker 3: sense of it in terms of what is described that
Speaker 3: people are saying that it either looks like it sounds
Speaker 3: like maybe it's a small dog with mange or I think,
Speaker 3: you know, maybe more likely coyotes. Yeah, I do think.
Speaker 3: And this gets into a whole other area. But it
Speaker 3: is interesting that over the last forty years or so,
Speaker 3: there's been kind of this interest in what we might
Speaker 3: call border horror, all the way back in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: which became kind of the first decade of people losing
Speaker 3: their mind over immigration.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: There were urban legends that circulated about satanic circles that
Speaker 3: were operating just right over the border, that some bodies
Speaker 3: that had been found the so called Matamoras slayings, that
Speaker 3: this was the work of a Satanic cult. And to me,
Speaker 3: chupicabre seems to kind of fit into some of that
Speaker 3: kind of monstrous language.
Speaker 1: I had not heard of the slayings in Metamoras, Mexico,
Speaker 1: but they involved dozens of ritual homicides by a drug lord.
Speaker 1: And similarly, when livestock started dying in parts of Puerto Rico,
Speaker 1: communities suspected either blood draining by a cult or possibly
Speaker 1: a large reptilian creature, hence the chupicabre, which means goatsucker.
Speaker 1: In northern parts. In the United States, chupa copper sightings
Speaker 1: tend to be described as more doglike, and experts agree
Speaker 1: they're just free range canines with a little bit of
Speaker 1: skin disease. They're like, get off my back, I have
Speaker 1: a fucking rash, and yeah, I will eat your goats,
Speaker 1: And who could blame them? But moving along, or rather
Speaker 1: looping back to Frankenstein's as we mentioned in the Vampirology episode.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixteen, there was this volcanic eruption and the
Speaker 1: resulting atmospheric effect led to a year without a summer.
Speaker 1: So a bunch of hot goth writers hold up in
Speaker 1: an Italian villa, and among them were Mary Shelley and
Speaker 1: Lord Byron, and they were like, what if we have
Speaker 1: like a ghost story writing competition between us and show Blam.
Speaker 1: Lord Byron makes a vampire tale that changes pop culture
Speaker 1: and Mary Shelley writes a book about a reanimated corpse.
Speaker 1: And I know we've touched on Frankenstein a bit. Susan
Speaker 1: c Lester and Verna ren Stadler need to know definitively Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: Frankenstein's monster, what do you call it?
Speaker 3: Well, here's the thing now, so it's absolutely proper to
Speaker 3: say Frankenstein's mot okay, So I can definitively say that. However, however,
Speaker 3: I think that like it also has made this certain
Speaker 3: kind of sense that the monster and the creator have
Speaker 3: kind of shared their name, and this is actually referenced
Speaker 3: in some of the sequels to Frankenstein. So many of
Speaker 3: your listeners probably haven't seen Son of Frankenstein and Son
Speaker 3: of Frankenstein, which I think is nineteen thirty nine. There's
Speaker 3: actually this whole discussion that kind of lays it out, like, Hey,
Speaker 3: you know, everybody says Frankenstein, but that's my dad's name.
Speaker 3: The monster was his monster.
Speaker 1: Doctor Frankenstein was my dad. Please call me mc Frankie dink.
Speaker 3: I think that it's almost more interesting to me that
Speaker 3: the creator that unleashed something that couldn't be controlled, and
Speaker 3: then the monster that we're mostly sympathetic for, we use
Speaker 3: the same word and everybody knows what we mean.
Speaker 1: Do you think that has anything to do with dysfunctional
Speaker 1: parenting and a father putting too much pressure on a
Speaker 1: son to carry on a lineage?
Speaker 3: I think in the original version of the novel, not
Speaker 3: the one that she released in eighteen thirty one when
Speaker 3: she became a little older and a little more conservative,
Speaker 3: But in the original version of the novel, my sense
Speaker 3: is that it's God and human beings. Yeah, that doctor
Speaker 3: Frankenstein is quite literally the creator that gives his creature
Speaker 3: his creation something the creation never really asked for a
Speaker 3: right and then kind of like said, well you didn't
Speaker 3: turn out quite like I quite like I wanted, So
Speaker 3: you know, good luck to go live in the woods,
Speaker 3: you know. So yeah, I think that James Swail in
Speaker 3: the films is aware of that, because there's a lot
Speaker 3: of interesting religious and actually anti religious imagery that I
Speaker 3: speaking of, things that I don't think people picked up
Speaker 3: all at the time.
Speaker 1: See, for example, all the crosses in the cemetery, the
Speaker 1: doctor Frankenstein's cocky attempt at creating life and resurrecting his monster,
Speaker 1: who could be interpreted as kind of a blasphemous symbol
Speaker 1: of Jesus Christ. Also the not so subtle appearance of
Speaker 1: Milton's epically long poem Paradise Lost, which some people consider
Speaker 1: kind of like fanfic about Satan fallen from the graces
Speaker 1: of God and launching his own hell hotel of Agny
Speaker 1: in the afterlife. Also, did you know that the actor
Speaker 1: who played Frankenstein so wonderfully in James Wales's versions was
Speaker 1: actually born William Pratt, But he thought it sounded too boring,
Speaker 1: so he went by Boris Karloff and he was broke
Speaker 1: until he landed that role in his mid forties and
Speaker 1: then became a famous Hollywood's How about that? So sometimes
Speaker 1: the star power of a monster's just right under our noses,
Speaker 1: but hey, what's under our beds? Patrons asked such as
Speaker 1: Anna Thompson in an Easton, Sophie Philpot, Francesca Huggins eating
Speaker 1: dog hair for a living, Pickles, Jenna Brener, and Ebbie
Speaker 1: You're an average pie, Stephen Lee, Holly Cole, and Sarah
Speaker 1: kork Henderson. A lot of people wanted to know monsters
Speaker 1: under the bed? Have you ever had one under the bed?
Speaker 1: Why are they under the bed? And then uh? Christine Gailarski,
Speaker 1: first time question asker, said, I can't believe I'm asking this.
Speaker 1: When I was in the fourth grade, I had an
Speaker 1: experience with a monster that I cannot convince my brain
Speaker 1: was not real. I remember so many vivid details. I'm
Speaker 1: almost forty and I still believe this is real. I
Speaker 1: know it's weird, and a ton of people wanted to know.
Speaker 1: Baloney Shoes wants to know what is the best way
Speaker 1: to explain to my very curious and mature three year
Speaker 1: old that monsters are not real? But the monsters we
Speaker 1: have our stories? So are they under the bed? What
Speaker 1: happens if you think one's real? And what do you
Speaker 1: tell your kids?
Speaker 3: So I saw monsters? Oh oh, I was a little good. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I used to say, again, you know, I'm like consuming
Speaker 3: like all those horror films from the thirties and forties,
Speaker 3: and so, you know, I had these experiences where I
Speaker 3: thought I was seeing things, and sometimes it terrified me.
Speaker 3: Most of the time it terrified me. Occasionally it kind
Speaker 3: of delighted me. You know. Actually, one thing I would
Speaker 3: say to your listener, this is going to be really counterintuitive,
Speaker 3: and maybe they could simply chalk this up to that
Speaker 3: I'm not actually a parent, so you know, maybe this
Speaker 3: is bad advice, but don't tell your kids that monsters
Speaker 3: aren't real yet.
Speaker 1: The opinions expressed by the ologist are those of theologists.
Speaker 1: Don't write me letters.
Speaker 3: They're probably going to have nightmares because my understanding as
Speaker 3: children do that, and guess what, they're also going to
Speaker 3: have nightmares when they're fifty. Like, you're not going to
Speaker 3: make that go away. Their bodies and brains. Our bodies
Speaker 3: and brains are doing something that's important when that's happening.
Speaker 3: So I don't think that, like as much as I
Speaker 3: myself am not a believer in the supernatural, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't think that we need to do like the
Speaker 3: disenchantment of the universe for a three year old or whatever,
Speaker 3: like they're going to figure out themselves that, you know,
Speaker 3: the really scary things are not under the bed and
Speaker 3: in the closet. So let them have, you know, the
Speaker 3: scariness and the wonder of the Adaman. But I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm just talking out of my head. I don't have kids.
Speaker 3: I'm not the one who I stial with the screaming
Speaker 3: non right, So I say they want to at this.
Speaker 1: I don't have kids either, but I have a dog
Speaker 1: that sometimes goes buff uff. Yes, same, So I let
Speaker 1: her dream about whatever she wants.
Speaker 3: To well see, And actually our dogs were not really
Speaker 3: clear if they're having a nightmare or if they're engaged
Speaker 3: in some kind of man chase, right, And honestly, I
Speaker 3: think that might tell us something about dreaming and nightmares
Speaker 3: and those kinds of experiences in general for humans, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, I think we need to be able to
Speaker 3: have those kinds of things to make sense of the world.
Speaker 1: Clearly, we do not know how to parent. Do not
Speaker 1: take our advice. But you know who might know how
Speaker 1: is authors of the twenty twenty study Monsters at Bedtime
Speaker 1: Managing Fear in bedtime picture books for children, which cites
Speaker 1: a nineteen ninety six study saying that the monster always
Speaker 1: signifies something other than itself, while a twenty fourteen study
Speaker 1: poses that monsters have a distinct function as psychological tools
Speaker 1: to help children cope with problems and anxieties. Okay, but
Speaker 1: what do you do about them? It depends on how
Speaker 1: old the kid it was. There was a two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine study titled Scaring the Monster Away. What Children
Speaker 1: Know About Managing fears of real and imaginary creatures, and
Speaker 1: it found that younger kids like under seven don't do
Speaker 1: well with reality affirmation, saying there is no monster, but
Speaker 1: rather it helps to reframe things like sure, maybe there
Speaker 1: is a monster drooling under your bed, but she's tired
Speaker 1: just like you and eats dust bunnies not People older
Speaker 1: than around seven responds better to nope, Nope. Monsters are
Speaker 1: not real unless they're HeLa monsters, which are cool lizards
Speaker 1: that will chomp your arm so hard you'll wish you
Speaker 1: were never born. All right, Love you at night night.
Speaker 1: Also for more on dreaming and nightmares, see the onorrology
Speaker 1: two parter from January and if you're still like okay,
Speaker 1: but who decides monsters were under anyone's bed. The answer
Speaker 1: is your ancestors who use these folkloric kind of scare
Speaker 1: tactics to get kids to bed at an earlier time.
Speaker 1: Although in Japan, where it's more common to sleep with
Speaker 1: a mat and a mattress on the floor, maybe you
Speaker 1: have to tell kids that the boogeyman is chilling in
Speaker 1: the hamper, being like, get some shut eye, sweety peatie oo,
Speaker 1: I smell like socks, which sounds honestly like more friend
Speaker 1: than foe. Well, Margo Lewis, Diana, and Manuel gil all
Speaker 1: wanted to know, in Margo's words, are there monsters who
Speaker 1: are not scary at all and might even be cute?
Speaker 1: And another patron asked about pokemon pocket monsters. So any
Speaker 1: lore on benevolent monsters.
Speaker 3: I have one that I really like. One example of this,
Speaker 3: It would be our friend with the human head necklace.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, So now I don't know that we would
Speaker 3: necessarily call him cute, but he's definitely good. There is
Speaker 3: kind of this sweet monster called a leshie. This is
Speaker 3: Siberian folklore. Their name means something like the tree people,
Speaker 3: and they're often portrayed as being kind of scary. When
Speaker 3: he's not kind of real scary when you see them,
Speaker 3: but also weirdly sweet. They actually like help shepherds and cowherds,
Speaker 3: and they protect sheep from wolves. And if you hear
Speaker 3: noises in the trees, it's a leshie that's weeping because
Speaker 3: one of their favorite trees was cut down, So that's
Speaker 3: kind of nice. Now, on the other hand, they are
Speaker 3: cloven hoofed and covered in long tangled black hair and
Speaker 3: occasionally still children, and also can turn you to stone
Speaker 3: if they get angry with you. So there is that.
Speaker 3: But their emotional intelligence seems to be really hot, That's
Speaker 3: what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I still don't want to match with them on tender though,
Speaker 1: you know, well.
Speaker 3: No, I mean, I don't know that that would work out.
Speaker 3: But oh, and here's the thing. I guess when you
Speaker 3: said tender, this might be think of this, so like,
Speaker 3: if you make them mad, if they don't turn you
Speaker 3: to some one of the other things they might do
Speaker 3: is they might tickle you till you die. I'm not kidding.
Speaker 3: This is part of the lower like coming back hundreds
Speaker 3: of year and yeah, and I don't know, like I
Speaker 3: don't think it's actually possible to like tickle someone todayth
Speaker 3: but like that's what the less she the less she do.
Speaker 1: I guess. Also the last app a tree would be
Speaker 1: on his tender probably right right?
Speaker 3: Something burning?
Speaker 1: That's not okay, that's such a good one.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, last questions I always ask, guess is the
Speaker 1: hardest thing about your job and the easiest. But I'm
Speaker 1: gonna take a pivot and ask what monster just makes
Speaker 1: you give an exasperated side? Just like not this one again?
Speaker 1: Which one do you hate the most? Uh?
Speaker 3: I still can't take Twilight? So okay, just real quick.
Speaker 3: So a number of my students of like this particular
Speaker 3: generation are kind of part of the Twilight fan community
Speaker 3: that has tried to kind of do reparative work on
Speaker 3: that and find something empowering in it, and so they
Speaker 3: have a few I have kind of made it their
Speaker 3: task to you know, educate me on this and to
Speaker 3: particularly try to reclaim the films. But I'm just you know,
Speaker 3: and I entertained it for a while, and I'm also
Speaker 3: glad that people have found things in it that are empowering,
Speaker 3: But I just really still think it's just reactionary garbage.
Speaker 3: I just everything from making the vampires toothless or at
Speaker 3: least fameless to you know, using an actual first nation's
Speaker 3: mythological system and changing it around, you know, and turning
Speaker 3: them into were wolves. I mean, like to the point
Speaker 3: that tourists you know, apparently want to talk to them
Speaker 3: about their werewolf mythology. And that's just something you know,
Speaker 3: that Meyer came up with. Obviously, the general portrayal of
Speaker 3: a very patriarchal romance and you know, a very weird
Speaker 3: power dynamic with the whole would we say May December romance,
Speaker 3: It's something more than that, right, because she's like two
Speaker 3: hundred and she's like nineteen or whatever.
Speaker 1: Well, and it's got kind of a pro chastity message
Speaker 1: as well, right.
Speaker 3: It does. It does the very famous feminist essay on
Speaker 3: Twilight that referred to it as chastity porn. It actually
Speaker 3: first appeared in the midstuff, the so called purity movement
Speaker 3: among evangelicals, the True Love Weights stuff, and it very
Speaker 3: definitely I think has a gendered politic. So, you know,
Speaker 3: more power to students of this generation that are finding
Speaker 3: queer coding and feminist messages. But this is I am
Speaker 3: one unconvinced old lefty that still thinks it's just garbage.
Speaker 3: I can't do it.
Speaker 1: Well, maybe that makes it the scariest monster movie of
Speaker 1: all in different ways.
Speaker 3: It is a scary, and I have you know, I
Speaker 3: read the books and I watched one of the films.
Speaker 3: I couldn't do. I couldn't get passed. The films are
Speaker 3: better than the books.
Speaker 1: What about your favorite monster? There's got to be one
Speaker 1: that if you had to, if you were going to
Speaker 1: buy a monster T shirt, this would be the one.
Speaker 1: If you have a Halloween costume, you'd have to decide
Speaker 1: on forever every year, this would be the one. Which
Speaker 1: one is it?
Speaker 3: I love and I mean in a weird way. The
Speaker 3: Bride of Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: Oh that's great.
Speaker 3: The film, but also her In fact, I'm wearing a
Speaker 3: Bride of Frankenstein T shirt. So yeah, so that was
Speaker 3: an easy one. Yeah, I mean again, playing off of
Speaker 3: some of the religious undertones of that story. She's sort
Speaker 3: of Eve that said no to the plan for her.
Speaker 3: She doesn't want to be anybody's helpmate. She turns that
Speaker 3: down pretty strongly. And also just the impact that else
Speaker 3: Lancester's portrayal of her head on kind of the iconography
Speaker 3: of mont I mean just like Frankenstein. If I say
Speaker 3: Bride of Frankenstein. You see that hair, and you see
Speaker 3: that extraordinary kind of art deco design of her. And
Speaker 3: she's only in the film like five minutes. You know,
Speaker 3: at the end, I didn't realize it's some of the
Speaker 3: best five minutes of film in the whole horror tradition. Anyway,
Speaker 3: Bride Frankenstein, for sure.
Speaker 1: I'll have to send you a picture. I went as
Speaker 1: her for Halloween. I have very curly, voluminous hair. You
Speaker 1: might say it's got a sendio fiction.
Speaker 3: Well please do. I actually have a collection of friends
Speaker 3: that have done the Bride of Frankenstein, and so I
Speaker 3: have quite a collection because people have always gotten me
Speaker 3: like sort of bride. Almost have too much? Really, but
Speaker 3: can you have too much of or I don't think so?
Speaker 2: Apparently not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, she's extraordinary.
Speaker 1: And my friend Catherine taught me that if you have
Speaker 1: long enough hair, you can put a leader bottle on
Speaker 1: top of your head and then put a ponytail on.
Speaker 3: How smart.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're just kind of you just nestle the
Speaker 1: bottle on a ponytail on the very top of your head,
Speaker 1: and you're halfway there. All you need is some baby
Speaker 1: powder or something.
Speaker 3: So Jack Pierce, who did the bankup for Elsa Lanchester
Speaker 3: in thirty five, he actually used a part of a birdcat. Yes,
Speaker 3: and it I guess like with you, Ali, it was
Speaker 3: her hair, that was Elsa Lancester's hair.
Speaker 1: That was her Actually, I always would have thought that
Speaker 1: was like an appliance.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is not any kind of appliance. That is
Speaker 3: her hair just partially dyed. I think that it's actually
Speaker 3: you can't tell this in the film, but it's actually
Speaker 3: dyed red so that it would have some texture kind
Speaker 3: of on black and white film, and also so that
Speaker 3: sort of the white like kind of lightning streaks, you know,
Speaker 3: would kind of show off. To advantage, they.
Speaker 1: Need to do some sort of comedy mashup, like the
Speaker 1: Bridesmaids of Frankenstein. That'd be a great one suspend night.
Speaker 3: And like they're all angry at like how much they
Speaker 3: had to pay for their lab garment exactly. Their burial
Speaker 3: shrouds were so expensive that they had to take out
Speaker 3: a student loan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, I'll never wear this shroud again, right right,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this has been a joy. I cannot
Speaker 1: tell you.
Speaker 3: Well for me too, Ali I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so ask smart people spooky questions and enjoy doctor
Speaker 1: Scottpool's latest book, Dark Carnivals, Modern Horror and the Origins
Speaker 1: of American Empire. He also authored Monsters in America, Wasteland,
Speaker 1: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror and
Speaker 1: In the Mountains of Madness The Life an Extraordinary Afterlife
Speaker 1: of HP Lovecraft. All are linked in the show notes,
Speaker 1: so get them on your reading lists. Again, gorgeous writing,
Speaker 1: so much knowledge. Thank you so much for being on
Speaker 1: Scott and again. A donation was made to Rescue dot
Speaker 1: org in his name, which is also linked in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Our web page for this episode, aliwaard dot
Speaker 1: com slash ology slash Territology is linked in the show notes.
Speaker 1: It has tons of links to clips and research as well.
Speaker 1: We're at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali
Speaker 1: Ward with one l on both. Eric Talbert Adminciologies podcast
Speaker 1: Facebook group. Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Emily White
Speaker 1: of The Wordery makes our professional transfer. Susan Hale is
Speaker 1: our managing director and did a ton of producing on
Speaker 1: this as well. We also have Smology's episodes available for
Speaker 1: the Kiddos in Your Life their shorter, clean, classroom safe
Speaker 1: versions of classic episodes. Thank you to Mercedes Maitland of
Speaker 1: Maitland Audio and Secredriguz Thomas and Jarrett Sleeper of mine
Speaker 1: Gem Media for working on those. Kelly Ardwire makes our
Speaker 1: website and can make yours too. Thanks to the electriflyingly
Speaker 1: wonderful lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio for the
Speaker 1: hard work in assembling and bringing this to life. Nick
Speaker 1: Thorburn of the band Islands made our theme music. And
Speaker 1: if you stick around until the end of the episode,
Speaker 1: I tell you a secret, and this week it's that
Speaker 1: I've been drinking a lot of Chai tea. I've told
Speaker 1: you before, spicy chi, add a little cayenne, add a
Speaker 1: little black pepper in there. So good. Yesterday I was
Speaker 1: writing this episode and I microwaved the same cup of
Speaker 1: tea no fewer than six times. I just kept microwaving it,
Speaker 1: walking away forgetting and I just kept redoing it. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm about to hop on a flight back to California.
Speaker 1: I've been in Connecticut. I went to an apple orchard,
Speaker 1: we carved pumpkins. I curled up by a fire I've
Speaker 1: been having a real holiday, but now I'm back to
Speaker 1: La where I think it's about ninety degrees. Okay, see
Speaker 1: you next week for our finals.
Speaker 2: Ooktober Okay for bye Pacadermatology, Homeology, r doo, Zoology, Lithology, Technology,
Speaker 2: Meteorology and Pedatology, Anthology, Seriology, elidology, A children sea musters
Speaker 2: not like be