In 2022, I found myself reaching back to my childhood’s favorite monster for literary inspiration.

That year’s midterm elections had brought with them another round of angry MAGA candidates promoting the Trumpian lie of a stolen 2020 election. Part and parcel of their rhetoric was—yet again—an attack on immigrants and anyone who just didn’t fit in with their image of “real” Americans.

Trump’s wrathful rallying conjured images of the torch-bearing mobs of black-and-white horror films. I thought about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 tale—and the inherently political implications of being a “monster” in a society that created you on the one hand and is repulsed by you on the other.

Like that, Chicano Frankenstein was born. In the tradition of novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, animators, and graphic artists before me, I wanted to use Frankenstein to explore how, under the right circumstances, anyone can become a destructive force in society. And that sometimes it can be difficult to know who the monster really is.

My first exposure to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus came from the 1931 classic Universal Pictures film adaptation. That celluloid creature imprinted itself on my 5-year-old psyche like no other horror movie of my 1960s childhood.

What was it about the monster—gamely played by Boris Karloff—that captured my imagination from the start? Was it the drooping eyes added by makeup artist Jack Pierce at Karloff’s suggestion that made the creature look half-dead? Or perhaps it was the flat skull shaped in such a way to ease the implantation of a cadaver’s brain? Or maybe the monster’s grunts and growls? I wonder if even back then, lurking in my young mind, there was some connection to, and sympathy for, this monster, who didn’t really mean to hurt anyone, right?

When I read Shelley’s novel for the first time in high school, I was surprised, like so many, to discover that the monster remains nameless throughout the book (the name Frankenstein belonged to his obsessed creator, a doctor who dared play God). But the real shock came when I realized that in the book, the monster learns to read and eventually speak rather eloquently. While the creature of the movie evokes fear and sympathy with his grunting monosyllabism, the monster of Shelley’s novel explains in perfect English what drove him to murder: “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?”

In both the original Shelley novel and all the adaptations that followed, it’s telling that one plot point has remained more or less the same: Dr. Frankenstein’s creation is eventually shunned by both his creator and society, and it is this rejection that turns the creature into a monster.

I wanted to reflect on that theme in my modern retelling. As I planned my novel, I envisioned the creature not as a singular entity but as a class of people—reanimated corpses who’ve been brought back from the dead to replenish an aging workforce. After a decade’s worth of reanimation, 12 million of these cruelly mocked “stitchers” now walk among us in the United States—including the hero of Chicano Frankenstein. Other than having been brought back to life after a horrific car accident, our hero is just like any other person holding down a job: He earns a paycheck, attends work-related events, rents an apartment, and runs each evening. But having also lost his left arm and leg in the car accident, the man—described as brown-skinned—has had a replacement arm and leg, both of which are white, “stitched” onto his body. The mismatched limbs flag him as a reanimated subject, marking him for jeers from people who disdain the reanimated population as monsters created by science, who threaten to replace “real” Americans. The story follows his journey, as he attempts to maneuver a world that both needs and resents him.

In my worldbuilding, I determined that the reanimation process should wipe the subjects’ first lives while saving their education and skills. By setting that rule, I could mirror the immigrant’s journey of leaving behind home, family, and friends to become a stranger in a strange land. The “stitcher” epithet also let me explore how those who resent immigrants often rely on dehumanizing language (such as “illegals”) to strip people of their individuality. The irony, of course, is that our country needs immigrants at all levels of employment to replenish our aging population.

For those of us whose “belonging” is constantly questioned, Shelley’s monster is a kindred spirit. As a Chicano, I have experienced too many situations where my presence in this country was questioned, and my self-worth challenged. For example, I remember the time when my football coach in high school called me a “stupid Mexican,” or when police stopped and frisked me when I was just walking in my neighborhood in my teens. My parents and I were born in the U.S.—still, on an Amtrak trip from Los Angeles to San Diego a few years ago, an ICE agent asked what city I was born in.

Writing Chicano Frankenstein, I reckoned with the enduring question Shelley left for us: Who is the real monster? Put another way, what person is truly free from bias? Even the most open-minded person carries assumptions, accumulated at home, work, and the world beyond. It can take great effort to see another person’s full worth.

In Chicano Frankenstein, I present an extreme through a virulently bigoted president concerned with her “legacy,” who wields the specter of the unfamiliar to goose her midterm numbers. But even my character Faustina Godínez, the hero’s love interest, wonders at one point if she could ever have a life with a person who has no history.

This range of behavior makes sense to me. I am a writer, but I’ve also been a practicing lawyer for almost 40 years. I’ve learned in that time that there is seldom a “slam dunk” case. Most disagreements come in shades of gray, and there are two (or more) sides to every conflict. I’ve also observed how an irrational fear of difference is often the driving force behind such behavior. Like the fictional president in Chicano Frankenstein, people throughout history have weaponized “the other”: through slavery, Jim Crow laws, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the so-called “Operation Wetback” immigration enforcement campaign of the summer of 1954, which resulted in the mass deportation of at least 300,000 Mexican nationals.

Most people at least attempt to quell their biases. But fearing those who are different appears to be an intractable human trait that continues to be used to turn others into monsters. Regrettably, I suspect that the monster may very well be within each of us.

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While selecting just 10 essays from the scores we’ve published this year is no easy task, the ones we’ve highlighted below reflect the best of Zócalo’s special, eclectic blend of ideas journalism with a head and heart. From a first-hand account of incarceration, to a case for how the global fight against authoritarianism can begin in your backyard, to even why, when feeling adrift, one might consider passage by container ship, here, in no particular order, are our staff’s favorite essays from 2022:

The Valley’s Last Camaro

San Fernando Valley aficionado Andrew Warren and automotive writer Tim Moore pen an ode to the last Camaro to leave the Van Nuys General Motors assembly plant before it closed in 1992. Today, the cherry red Z-28 lives on, serving as a time capsule to a bygone era of life and labor in the Valley.

Van Nuys General Motors assembly plant’s “Last Camaro” became a “memento of what that plant had meant to [workers] and their community,” write Andrew Warren and Tim Moore. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

How Horror Helps Your Brain

Mathias Clasen, director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, Denmark, studies why we’re drawn to the things that go bump in the night. “Recreational fear,” he explains, is a form of play behavior that prepares our brains to handle real-life horrors.

How the Kids Are Getting to All Right

As the youth mental health crisis worsened in recent years, young adult fiction writer Bree Barton decided to speak directly to young people to better understand the challenges they faced. For Zócalo and “State of Mind,” a partnership of Slate and Arizona State University, she shares what she learned—and the power that comes with letting tweens and teens shape their own narratives.

If You’re Latinx, Loving the Dodgers Is Complicated

USC professor Natalia Molina’s relationship with Los Doyers has never been easy. As someone who grew up in the shadow of the ballpark, she reflects on Dodger Stadium’s dark history of displacing Latinx communities, and how she still finds community in the bleachers.

When the Public Narrative Fails

In a fractured nation, writer David L. Ulin finds consolation in literature. He explains why today, amid the breakdown of American consensus, writers provide lucidity: “In staring down their circumstances directly, with grace and clarity, they offer a model of how I want to think and to behave.”

With the collapse of society’s public narrative, writer David L. Ulin looks to literature for consolation. Illustration by Be Boggs.

How You Can Spot—and Stop—the Next Putin

With his column “Connecting California,” Zócalo’s Joe Mathews has tirelessly chronicled the inner workings of the Golden State for 10 years. Now, Mathews is introducing a second column, Democracy Local, exploring how everyday people, all over the world, govern themselves at the local level. The spirit of the column is embodied by this piece, which makes the case for why, amid the rise of authoritarian leadership around this world, you—yes, you!—can stop the next Putin-in-the-making.

How My Republican Grandfather Helped Legalize Abortion

Editor-at-large Caroline Tracey weaves personal and intellectual histories to highlight how an unlikely coalition came together in Colorado in the 1960s to support abortion rights. In her essay, Tracey considers the motivations behind the players in this fight for reproductive freedom—one of whom was her own grandfather.

Why Food Vendors Belong in the Prison Yard

Food sales “remain the closest thing to direct contact that C-yard inmates have with the community,” writes David Medina, an inmate at the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran, California. For the Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation Inquiry “What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns?,” supported by the California Wellness Foundation, Medina writes about how these sales have had a positive impact inside and outside of prison walls.

Where I Go: A Big, Slow-Moving Boat

In 2013, Elena Legeros quit her publishing job in New York City to travel around the world as a passenger on container ships. Legeros shares how, out in the middle of the ocean, life aboard a container ship gave her “the space and time” to embrace herself.

What We Miss When We See the Plight of the Refugee

Our ongoing Zócalo/Mellon Foundation inquiry delves into complicated histories around the world, confronting the past in order to better understand it, and to forge paths forward. In response to the central question, “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?,” political economist Mausumi Mahapatro draws on her work with Rohingya refugees in the world’s largest refugee camp, in Bangladesh, to highlight the social and political lives they carry with them and create anew.

Mausumi Mahapatra works in refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, which house close to 1 million Rohingya, like the woman photographed here. Courtesy of Saiful Huq Omi/Counter Foto.

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Popularized by Charles Dickens in his 1843 A Christmas Carol, as well as in the yuletide editions of his literary magazine, All the Year Round, ghost stories were regular Christmas fare for the Victorians. “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters,” writes Jerome K. Jerome in the introduction to Told After Supper, his 1891 anthology of Christmas ghost stories.

In our contemporary moment, Halloween has supplanted Christmas in the popular imagination as the time of year best suited for tales of terror. However, as in bygone eras, there is no bad time for a good ghost story. We perennially delight in tales of the restless dead. But if ghost stories are scary and being scared is unpleasant, why consciously seek discomfort? What conjures our ghostly desire?

Scholars have many theories to explain the apparent paradox of what we might call the “pleasurable fear” of horror. Denial theorists, such as Kendall Walton, simply reject the proposition that we are ever actually scared—they posit that we know we are safe and it is all just make-believe. Competition theories of horror enjoyment, in contrast, suggest that scary stories elicit actual emotions—more than one of them. This is philosopher Noël Carroll’s proposition in The Philosophy of Horror, where he argues that the fear and disgust evoked by what he calls “art-horror”—artistic works that intend to evoke a horrified response—are offset by the enjoyments of narrative and the interest elicited by monsters. When consuming scary tales, our curiosity and fear compete. The emotion that wins determines if we keep reading or watching or call it quits and pull the covers up over our head.

And then there is Mathias Clasen’s “biocultural” approach. In Why Horror Seduces, he explains that the perpetual allure of scary stories is in fact evolutionarily conditioned. “The most effective monsters of horror fiction mirror ancestral dangers to exploit evolved human fears,” he explains, and we enjoy this because they evoke strong emotions in a safe context, and sometimes can prepare us for real-life horrors.

But these debates don’t quite capture the particular allure of the ghost story because they side-step our deep-seated desire for the supernatural. We need our ghosts, even if they frighten us.

Ghost stories are, of course, scary. In the way of all monsters, ghosts—even benevolent ones—threaten the stability of the conceptual categories we use to organize our experiences of the world. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains in his important essay, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” monsters are “disturbing hybrids” that complicate our attempts to make sense of things. Ghosts are a perfect example: Neither living nor dead, fully present nor absent, they are remnants of the past intruding upon the present, scuttling notions of linear chronology in the process. From our contemporary perspective, which tends to disavow the actual existence of ghosts, vampires, and things that go bump in the night, they are things that should not be, yet are.

Nevertheless, beneath the dread of the ghost is our intense desire for them—even scarier than ghosts is the prospect of their absence. The diaphanous quasi-presence of the ghost testifies to the persistence of consciousness after death. For most, few things are more terrifying than the idea of simply winking out of existence at the moment life ends. The ghost consoles us with the possibility of an afterlife. It is the evidence that something of us persists beyond physical dissolution.

In a world riddled with injustice, our ghost stories also comfort us with the idea that justice will be served, even if the universe has to enable the violation of its governing principles to ensure it. This is the message of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which begins with the appearance of the ghost of the murdered King, who returns to reveal the cause of his demise and spur his son to vengeance. It’s also the premise of Jerry Zucker’s 1990 blockbuster, Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg, in which the ghost of the murdered Sam (Swayze) lingers to protect the love of his life, Molly (Moore), and to see that those responsible for Sam’s death are punished. In Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 Crimson Peak, it is the ghosts of murdered brides that haunt the isolated heroine, leading her to the revelation of their undoing and the outing of the culprit. “Murder will out” is the message of these stories and many others, even if a ghost has to do the outing.

These functions of ghosts—confirming the afterlife, ensuring cosmic justice, providing consolation for the living—are evident in the pop culture representations that saturate fiction, film, TV, and other media such as podcasts and videogames. In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, for example, ghosts pester young protagonist Cole Sear (“see-er” of dead people, get it?) because they have a story to tell about abuse and murder. There is only one degree of separation between the living and the dead in Stir of Echoes, starring Kevin Bacon, in which a ghost leads the living to her bones in the basement and the murderer who buried them there.

The intense desire we have for ghosts is at the heart of a personal favorite film of mine: Mikael Håfström’s 1408 starring John Cusack. In this expanded version of Stephen King’s story of the same name, Cusack’s Mike Olin is a confirmed skeptic who disingenuously writes guidebooks to haunted places. What we discover though is that Olin never recovered from the death of his daughter and now travels from one purportedly haunted place to another desperately seeking confirmation of life after death. His encounters in a truly haunted hotel room leave him shaken, but also reassured.

At the end of Zucker’s Ghost, the murderers have been dragged to hell and Sam and Molly are granted what was denied them when Sam was murdered: a moment to say goodbye. Near the end of Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Cole shares with his mother his grandmother’s answer to his mother’s question, “Do I make you proud?”: “Yes, every day.” And in a particularly devastating moment in Håfström’s 1408, Cusack’s melancholic Mike Olin is able to take his dead daughter in his arms once more and tell her that he loves her.

These moving moments illustrate the power and profundity of our ghost stories: They respond to the deepest of human needs. Ghosts are frightening, of course, but even more terrifying is the thought of their absence. With this in mind, one can do no better during the long hours of dark winter nights than to gather with family and friends, and invite along the ghosts.

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Fear gets a bad rap. It’s a so-called negative emotion, one that supposedly stands between us and our dreams. It is certainly true that pure fear doesn’t feel good, but that is the whole point of the emotion. Fear tells us to get the hell out of Dodge because Dodge is a bad place. Fear evolved over millions of years to protect us from danger. So, yes, a feel-bad emotion, but also, and perhaps paradoxically, the engine in a whole range of pleasurable activities and behaviors—which inspire what we can call recreational fear.

Once you start looking for it, you’ll find recreational fear everywhere. From a very early age, humans love being jump-scared by caregivers in the form of peek-a-boo, and being hurtled into the air (and caught). They get older and take great pleasure in chase play and hide-and-seek. They are drawn to scary stories about monsters and witches and ghosts. They perform daredevil tricks on playgrounds and race their bikes toward what, from a parent’s perspective, is certain and violent death. A little older and they get together for horror movie nights, stand patiently in line for roller coasters, and play horror video games. Indeed, most of us never quite lose our peculiar attraction to recreational fear—even if we eschew slasher flicks or dark crime shows brimming with murder, death, and gore.

So even though Dodge may be a bad place, we still keep visiting it, at least from the safe distance of play and make-believe. How come?

One hypothesis is that recreational fear is a form of play behavior, which is widespread in the animal kingdom and ubiquitous among humans. When an organism plays, it learns important skills and develops strategies for survival. Playfighting kittens train their ability to hold their own in a hostile encounter, but with little risk and low cost, compared to the real thing. Same with humans. When we play, we learn important things about the physical and social world, and about our own inner world. When we engage in recreational fear activities specifically, from peek-a-boo to horror movie watching, we play with fear, challenge our limits, and learn about our own physiological and psychological responses to stress. In other words, recreational fear might actually be good for us.

To investigate whether that is indeed the case and why, my colleagues and I have established the Recreational Fear Lab, a research center at Aarhus University, Denmark. We do lab studies, survey studies, and real-world empirical studies to understand this widespread but scientifically understudied psychological phenomenon.

The Recreational Fear Lab conducts investigations to understand the scientifically understudied phenomenon of fear—and why it might actually be good for us. Courtesy of author.

In one ambitious research project, led by my colleague Marc Malmdorf Andersen, we set out to investigate the experiences of guests at a very frightening haunted house—Dystopia Haunted House in Denmark. We mounted surveillance cameras in the house’s scariest rooms, strapped participants with heart rate monitors, and distributed a bunch of questionnaires. The surveillance footage allowed us to see how guests responded to frightening events, such as a chainsaw-wielding pig-man chasing them down a dark corridor. The heart rate monitors told us about their physiological responses to such events, and the questionnaires allowed us to understand how they felt about it all.

They told us they perceived their experiences as a kind of play, supporting our notion of recreational horror as a medium for playing with fear. But we also wanted to go deeper into the relationship between fear and enjoyment. You might think that relationship is linear—the more fear, the better. But when we plotted the actual relationship between fear and enjoyment, it looked like an upside-down U. In other words, when people go to a haunted attraction, they don’t want too little fear (which is boring), and they don’t want too much fear (which is unpleasant). What they want is to hit what we call the “sweet spot of fear.” That doesn’t just go for high-intensity haunted attractions either. When you hurtle a kid into the air, you don’t want it to be too tame or too wild; when teenagers joyride their bikes, they need just the right amount of tummy-tickling arousal; when you pick a horror movie on Netflix, you try to go for the one that sits just at the right point on the scare-o-meter.

So, there is pleasure to be had from these vicarious visits to Dodge, but are there any other benefits? In several past and ongoing studies of the psychological and social effects of engagement with recreational fear, we’ve seen it improve people’s ability to cope with stress and anxiety. For instance, one study—led by my colleague Coltan Scrivner—found that people who watch many horror movies exhibited better psychological resilience during the first COVID-19 lockdown than people who stay away from scary movies. Presumably, the horror hounds have trained their ability to regulate their own fear from playing with it. We know from another Dystopia Haunted House study that people actively use a range of coping strategies to regulate their fear levels in pursuit of the sweet spot, and it makes sense that we get better at using those strategies through practice.

You can think of recreational fear as a kind of mental jungle gym where you prepare for the real thing, or as a kind of fear inoculation. A small dose of fear galvanizes the organism for the big dose that life throws at it sooner or later. So even though fear itself may be unpleasant, recreational fear is not only fun—it may be good for us. My colleagues and I even have preliminary results to suggest that some people with mental health issues, such as anxiety disorder and depression, get relief from recreational horror. Maybe it’s about escaping anhedonia—emotional flatlining—momentarily, and maybe it’s about playing with troublesome emotions in a controllable context. For fear to be fun, you need to feel not only that the levels are just-so, but that you are in relative control of the experience.

With research findings such as these in mind, we should maybe think twice about shielding kids and young people too zealously from playful forms of fear. They’ll end up in Dodge sooner or later, and they will be better equipped if they’ve at least pretended to be there before.

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So it may come as a surprise—though it shouldn’t—to learn that women have always been at work behind the scenes, aiding in the development of the horror genre across numerous media. Milicent Patrick was the costume designer behind the Gill-man from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); Daphne du Maurier wrote the short story that Alfred Hitchcock adapted as The Birds (1963); TV horror hosts Maila Nurmi (Vampira) and Cassandra Peterson (Elvira) reshaped how audiences engage with horror films through the lens of camp and kitsch; Stephanie Rothman worked alongside B-movie legend Roger Corman for several years before going on to direct the cult horror exploitation film The Velvet Vampire in 1971. More recently, Nia DaCosta made history when Candyman (2021) became the first film directed by a Black woman to debut in first place at the box office, setting a vital precedent for the future of the horror genre.

Decades earlier, as we chronicle in our new book, Comic Book Women: Characters, Creators, and Culture in the Golden Age, women were also at the forefront of the horror genre. Between the 1920s and 1940s, pulp magazines, seen today as an ancestor of horror cinema and B movies as well as a direct precursor to comic books, emerged as the forum for fantasy, science fiction, and horror tales starring women in peril. While the bylines were dominated by male writers like H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch, it was a woman who defined the aesthetic of one of the most influential pulp magazines during its most iconic and memorable era.

Margaret Brundage, who began her career as a fashion illustrator for various Chicagoland newspapers, began painting for Weird Tales in 1933. Initially hired by editor Farnsworth Wright to produce illustrations for the adventure pulp Oriental Stories, Brundage was soon tasked with providing cover art for Weird Tales, the more popular of the two Wright-helmed publications. In total, Brundage was responsible for 66 of the magazine’s cover illustrations between 1933 and 1945. She is the artist most associated with Weird Tales—and, arguably, the shudder pulp genre.

Beautiful women in danger were a favorite subject of Brundage, and the stories published in Weird Tales contained no shortage of damsels in distress to inspire her. While her painterly, colorful covers often feature nude women cowering as they were beaten, chained up, or pursued by some kind of beast, a key element of her style was that she depicted women as aggressors, as characters with power and control, in frequent, if not equal, measure. Her artwork was so popular with readers that authors sometimes wrote scenes into their stories in hopes of inspiring a Brundage-illustrated cover. Nevertheless, she was the one who bore the brunt of criticism for performing the very task that her job called for: depicting eroticized, violent scenes featuring beautiful women. H.P. Lovecraft himself criticized the sexual overtones of many of her cover illustrations as a cheap ploy by Weird Tales’ editors to attract a larger audience. In a letter to fellow sci-fi author Robert Bloch, Lovecraft called Brundage’s covers “irrelevant” and “even worse” than some of the fiction that appeared in the pages of pulp magazines, claiming not to understand the relevance of her work to the weird fiction genre.

Despite such criticism by others in her field for depicting women in vulnerable, erotically charged situations, Brundage never stopped—or paid much attention to naysayers. In a 1973 interview, Brundage commented that she had been asked by Weird Tales to “make larger and larger breasts…larger than [she] would have liked”; otherwise, she seems to not have taken much issue with the work assigned to her by the magazine. In fact, Brundage is alleged to be one of the few Weird Tales illustrators who took the time to read the magazine cover-to-cover, with her eyes peeled for scenes that would make for eye-catching cover art that aligned with her style and interests. Brundage’s legacy as a figure in the history of the horror genre goes far beyond her cover illustrations for Weird Tales, though; as a woman artist who openly created sexually charged, violent works, she paved the way for women with untraditional, perhaps “indecent” perspectives to find homes for their work in the developing horror comics genre.

Weird Tales, November 1934, cover by Margaret Brundage. Courtesy of Flickr CC BY 2.0 / Tom Simpson

Brundage is just one of a number of women creators who helped develop the horror genre. June Tarpé Mills was another pioneer, but she had to drop her first name when signing her work in order to create a masculine sounding pen name. Best known for creating the early female action hero Miss Fury (who some argue is the first female superhero), she also created “The Purple Zombie,” one of the earliest ongoing horror characters in comics. Mills’s horror resume also includes “The Vampire” and “The Ivy Menace,” two horror tales that appeared during the late 1930s, well before horror comics gained widespread popularity. “The Vampire” even included a twist ending—an uncommon device for comics at the time, but which became a staple of EC horror comics by the 1950s and in cinema decades later.

EC Comics dominated the horror genre with such well-remembered series as Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, but it’s thanks to artist Lily Renée that horror comics gained new ground. Renée worked on “The Werewolf Hunter” between 1943 and 1948, creating plot ideas and drawing all manner of supernatural terrors for stories that regularly featured powerful female villains in relatively empowered roles for the era. EC’s distinctive touch was also thanks to Marie Severin, EC’s lone female creator. The colorist for the publisher’s gory, gruesome images, she had a substantial influence on the publishing house. Severin was a pioneer of the genre, often using dark color palettes to define the aesthetic of the most popular horror comics of all time. By obscuring the ghastliest panels with shadowy tones, EC could get away with publishing its most shocking content.

These women are just a few examples of genre pioneers who today have been largely neglected by modern fans because of the male-dominated way in which comic book history has been told. In more recent years, it’s become much easier to identify the contributions women creators are actively making to the horror genre, thanks to the work of directors like Nia DaCosta, Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark), Mary Lambert (Pet Cemetery), Mary Harron (American Psycho) and Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), and novelists like Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire) and Alma Katsu (The Hunger). Horror comics are also experiencing a renaissance thanks to the award-winning work of Emil Ferris (My Favorite Thing is Monsters) and Marjorie Liu (Monstress).

Still, to hear some tell it, horror isn’t a genre that women are interested in. A few years ago, contemporary horror hitmaker Jason Blum caught flack for denying that there were any—or enough—women who wanted to direct horror movies, though he insisted he was “always trying” to find one. As Blum’s comments demonstrate, when it comes to the horror genre, women continue to be thought of as victims first and foremost. But with respect to scream queens like Jamie Lee Curtis—whose latest entry in the Halloween franchise opened this month—we must not forget that women have been in horror from the beginning, using the genre as a forum to have their voice heard in ways that are louder and more resonant than the visceral scream.

The post The Women Who Built the Horror Genre appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On the other hand, horror seems an ideal forum to take on a world increasingly full of anti-immigrant rhetoric, authoritarian leaders, and a peculiar brand of billionaire populism that’s taken hold everywhere from Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro has been christened “the Trump of the tropics,” to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where his party has dismantled the constitution. And it’s lurched from the shadows in the United States with President Trump’s chilling refusal to agree to a peaceful transfer of power.

So it’s not that surprising that some of the most interesting cultural work, in the U.S. and internationally, is emerging in the horror genre, which is ready to respond to the politics of wounded rage that propel the new authoritarians. Horror can directly address violence, employ rather sneaky satire, and force conversations about racism, classism, and the meaning of democracy in an era of vast chasms of social power. Audiences expect a horror film to rattle them, and they sometimes find their worldview taking a bumpy ride in the turbulence. But horror films have just as often served to legitimize the chaos on which right-wing populisms thrive. Audiences have left theaters or turned off their screens feeling the same sense of vertigo they get from the nightly news.

The roller coaster ride probably serves as the most frequent metaphor for a horror flick’s effect on us. While it’s true horror films may offer an adrenaline jolt, from their very beginnings they’ve also carried deeply political messages. The horror tradition of the 1920s, born largely from German Expressionism’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, engaged directly with the death toll and mental trauma of World War I.

Beginning in the 1960s, George Romero invented the modern zombie genre in a trilogy that successfully parodied American materialism, searingly castigated racism, and even portrayed the American army as dangerously predatory amid Reagan-era cinematic celebrations of testosterone-fueled military fantasies. Legendary horror directors John Carpenter and Larry Cohen made parables of American inequality and consumerism in cult classics like 1985’s The Stuff and 1988’s They Live. In a recent interview for a Shudder TV documentary, Carpenter explicitly said he made the film to satire the country’s “unrestrained capitalism.”

It’s the genre’s longstanding willingness to deal with the grotesqueries of our nightmares that gives writers and directors the chance to autopsy our current age of real-world horror—and capture it with frightening precision. As Victoria McCollum, the editor of Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, puts it, horror has a “uniquely sensitive relationship to points of cultural tension and conflict.” McCollum, who is a professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Ulster, told me she thinks of the years since 2016 as roiling with such political turmoil that audiences, and filmmakers, have naturally made connections between the nightmares on screen and in real life.

Over the past five years, a covey of American horror films has forced all manner of American attitudes down under a hot light for interrogation. Robert Eggers’s The VVitch, set in New England in 1630, proved to be less a period piece and more a feminist parable about the inherent silliness of male toxicity and the possibilities of liberation. Ari Aster jokingly called his terrifying Hereditary “a family drama,” but it uses a grandmother’s haunting and possession to tell a story of something rotting beneath the floorboards of upper-middle-class privilege and a supernatural question mark added to the American dream. And Jordan Peele’s 2019 Us may be the ultimate American statement about class and privilege in an era when the most vituperative nationalism also has a relationship to the vast growth in American, and global, wealth inequality. The entire story of a literally underground world of “the tethered”—soulless doppelgangers of regular Americans—works as a bleak metaphor for the pressures of class and the original sin of systemic racism. Some of the film’s most terrifying moments emerge when the sunny banalities of middle-class life are forcefully shattered by the tethered, unleashed by the American dream turned American nightmare.

Horror has long been able to critique the culture that produces it because, and not in spite of, the fact that it has not always been taken seriously. Horror films can play the bad kid in the back of the class, able to test the limits and mock authority in ways more reputable genres can’t manage. Of course, occasionally this also means that the creators of horror use their bumptious latitude to see how many sick jokes they can tell their audience before they laugh, become ill, or perhaps both. In the U.S., this has meant that the horror tradition sometimes drifts into political know-nothing-ism. Take the seventh season of Ryan Murphy’s long-running hit American Horror Story, which attempted to parody the era of Trump but became something more like a primary source that future historians can use to puzzle over the chaos and confusion of the era. The series features members of the alt-right dressing up as ghastly clowns and embarking on homicidal rampages. But the liberals, including the same-sex couple at the center of the season, are so triggered by the events of 2016 that they, well, dress up as clowns and go on homicidal rampages. The confused mess the season becomes leaves audiences with a message not too dissimilar from Trump’s infamous claim that “there were very fine people on both sides” after white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to face counter-protesters.

Horror, of course, is a global phenomenon, and the U.S. has neither a monopoly nor does the best work in the genre. Japan probably has become the best known for its tales of paranormal terror, both because of the inherent genius of films like Ringu and Ju-On and Hollywood’s propensity to remake them for American and global audiences. Nigeria, Mexico, France, and Australia are known for films that frighten while leaving audiences thoughtful as well as spooked. Take The Babadook, the 2014 Australian film by Jennifer Kent offers a meditation on loneliness and the meaning of monstrosity, as well as just being a real damn scary movie about motherhood. Indeed, it’s complex enough to achieve all this while becoming an important film (and a meme) for the LGBTQ+ community, with the monster as an outsider who wants to tell his story becoming a symbol and a costume for Pride Day celebrations across the country.

South Korean cinema, in particular, has long offered an impressive counterpoint to the idea that horror has to spiral into political nihilism. Park Ki-hyung, Bong Joon-ho, and Park Chan-wook are just a few examples of Korean filmmakers who have made horror socially relevant. Much of Korean horror, even older films, are particularly suited to our political moment.

South Korea has a decades-long history of repressive regimes bringing the country massive economic development at the expense of very basic civil liberties. Once the doors of censorship creaked open ever so slightly, horror made its death rattle heard in the political arena. Park’s 1998 Whispering Corridors is at once a ghost tale set at a strict boarding school with a potent subtext about the dangers of an authoritarian environment. Premiering in the aftermath of a national general strike and student protests against government repression and maleficence, its social commentary was hard to miss.

Bong’s Parasite has, of course, garnered the most international attention for using an increasingly horrific scenario to expose the social and psychological wounds of upper class wealth and working class immiseration on neo-liberal Korea. But it was his breakout film The Host, 14 years before his historic Oscar wins, that first showed Bong’s obsession with social class and its effects on marginalized people. The family at the center of the film barely hangs on to some sense of status at their tiny, riverside snack bar. And this implicit critique of Korea’s adoption of America’s free-wheeling economics is just the start. The film goes on to become one of the best “creature features” ever made, with references to the country’s efforts to create a participatory democracy and an American military base dumping the toxins that create an imaginatively terrifying monster.

The global renaissance of horror signals that we are all having bad dreams, or think we are living in one. To paraphrase the late Wes Craven, a master of horror for half a century: People don’t go to horror films to be frightened—they are already frightened, and the horror film restages their anxieties.

It is all the more complicated as audiences bring along different varieties of fears to sit beside them in the dark. Horror can produce a contemplative iconography of death, and the best of the genre points us to ponder the cruelties of human experience. Fear can also become incendiary, burning off a high-octane surge of inchoate rage. It’s a dangerous alchemy. But directors from Peele to Bong to Kent have become arcane masters of transmuting unseeable darkness into a bleak, but vibrant, midnight sun.

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Let’s start with the blade-wielding clowns lurking in American woodlands (And not only there: One even showed up in my adopted hometown in rural Slovenia). Yes, I know that this is a fad, stoked by over-enthusiastic fans anticipating the new film version of Stephen King’s It, but it is outrageously creepy. Citizens are fleeing in terror and calling the police, and evil clowns are being arrested.

Monsters might be scary, but we humans need monsters—because they are far less frightening than the unknown. Our need isn’t new; it has been a consistent characteristic of humans since time immemorial. The recent discovery of a lost 16th century illustrated manuscript filled with illustrations of mythical apocalyptic beasts, now known as “The Book of Miracles,” is a case in point.

73 BC, Golden balls.

 
The near-vanished manuscript came to scholarly and popular attention when it was auctioned in 2007 in Munich to British fine art dealer James Faber. In 2014, Taschen released a facsimile of the book, presented in an artfully designed box. The original, whose author and illustrator are unknown, was published in 1550 in Augsburg, Germany and contains 169 strange, wonderful, and monstrous watercolor and gouache illustrations. They depict purported miracles of the natural world, with strong reverberations from the “Book of Revelation,” with its descriptions of allegorical monsters.

1496, Tiber monster.

 
In “The Book of Miracles,” the First Beast of Revelation, for instance, is an ocean-dweller with seven heads and ten horns, the feet of a bear, the mouth of a lion, and the body of a leopard. The Great Dragon also has seven heads and ten horns—and a tail that can sweep a third of the stars out of the sky.

It is revealing that “The Book of Miracles” focused on the supernatural at a time when Europe was ripe with all too real monstrosities: Plague, war, lawlessness, massacres, bloodshed between Protestants and Catholics. Perhaps there was some combination of comfort and escapism in shifting focus from the imminent dangers at the door to otherworldly signs and wonders.

The sea monster and the beast with the lamb’s horn.

 
Of course, these monsters were plausible concerns for some of the contemporary populace. The manuscript provides what appears to be a “factual” account of reported miraculous events: A sort of 16th century eyewitness bestiary, with dates and locations, and an artist’s strikingly modern interpretation (if you had told me these were painted by Rousseau, I might have believed you).

1533, Dragons over Bohemia.

 
We have, for example, a 1496 appearance of the “Tiber monster” shown with the torso of a woman, a bearded man’s head for a rump, the right leg of a horse, the left leg of a rooster, a dragon-headed tail, and what looks like a kangaroo’s head (though the historian in me is guessing that it’s not). A 1531 earthquake at Lisbon is depicted as a whale (though it more closely resembles an angry seal) emerging from billowing blue-white waves. In 1533, it seems that a swarm of snake-like dragons was spotted over Bohemia, while several undated creatures are also featured, including a “sea monster and beast with the lamb’s horn” and a “beast from the bottomless pit,” both likely drawn from Revelation (though it’s tough to tell: I’m pretty sure the biblical sea monster had seven heads and ten horns).

The beast from the bottomless pit.

 
You may have sensed a theme. Monsters of old are not created wholesale from scratch, but are patchworks of existing, real creatures sewn together like Frankenstein’s creation. This method echoes Hieronymus Bosch’s famous hellscapes, populated by hybrid human-animal or multiple-animal creatures. And it is part and parcel with Freud’s theory of the unheimlich, or the uncanny—beings or beasts or places that straddle the boundary between two opposites, a liminal zone, part of the dream world, part of the real.

Celestial swordsman, castle and army over Strasbourg.

 
We like to think of ourselves as so enlightened that monsters have become our playthings. But the truth is that we need them. Even today. Perhaps not as we once did, but as an integral part of how we process life, and particularly the bad things.

Consider how much easier it is to think of modern human monsters, like Hitler or Stalin, as two-dimensional cartoon super-villains—so evil we don’t even consider humanizing them by thinking of them as people with feelings and origins, cuddled by mothers and teased by schoolmates, maybe, until evil grew from decency. It is easier to pen them up, dismissing them as outliers and inhuman monsters, than to admit that they are just a hair’s breadth away from us.

The post Even the Ghastliest Monsters of Old Were Better Than Real-Life Horrors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rawhead and Bloody Bones
Steals naughty children from their homes,
Takes them to his dirty den,
And they are never seen again.
—Traditional Nursery Rhyme, Yorkshire, UK

Ours was a safe neighborhood. Postwar cinderblock cottages stood unlocked in the shade of date palms that in summer cluttered our yards with vinegary, fermenting medjools and at trimming time offered their branches to boys for secret forts and clubhouses. Older children ran wild until evening dinner call, extending their explorations far afield to distant canals and vacant lots, disobeying their parents by ditching their toddler siblings who, somehow, always found their way home.

When the sun went down, the world changed: Elongated shadows trembled on concrete sidewalks, inchoate shapes lurked in dark alleys, eldritch rustlings shook the oleanders, bogeys and bugaboos squatted in the drear corners of fenced yards, and nameless terrors crouched like gargoyles in the tops of trees. Malevolent phantasms swooped low, and things went bump in the night.

Such horrors were irresistible to the imaginations of nine-year-old boys. After dinner we would sneak outside, daring to confront the night in rites of passage that put our bluster and moxie to the test. Our most dangerous adversary was the Booger Man who wandered abroad in search of wayward children who stayed out after dark. It was said that he wore a black trench coat and a broad-brimmed hat that hid a face no one had ever seen. Venturing into the neighborhood’s most isolated enclaves, we invoked him in games that ended with imagined sightings and full-scale retreats to the safety of brightly lit front porches.

Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim tells us that children find a symbolic resolution of their fears in traditional fairy tales, where the monstrous is clearly delineated and escape is assured in Happily-Ever-After endings. Certainly, we were no strangers to the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen, but our truest monsters in the Phoenix, Arizona of 1959 were those in our imaginations.

The Booger Man was one of these, but in time he proved too much an abstraction, lacking the intimate presence necessary to all ghouls who strive to terrorize the young. He was a faceless shadow lurking in the shrubbery and nurturing a dark agenda of “getting” whoever came within reach of his long, grasping hands. What he did when he got you was uncertain, for he was slow and easy to escape—no one, to our knowledge, had ever been gotten.

Literary great, and master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe personified our propensity for courting the unthinkable. In the Imp of the Perverse, he made us consider a malevolent goblin who whispers in our ear tempting us to stand on the edge of a cliff and consider the consequences of jumping. We may never follow through, but the exhilaration of pushing the envelope of sane thinking can lead us into the sublime. A supreme heightening of the emotions can be achieved though the contemplation of the horrific, said the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke.

After a time, our encounters with the Booger Man no longer took us to this place, but we found a successor who himself had pushed the envelope, and paid a dire price for his hubris.

In the late 1950s, the Kiva Theater in Old Town Scottsdale supplemented its usual fare of European art films with Saturday afternoon children’s matinees. On one of these Saturdays, after crawling through the aisles in search of fallen change and throwing melted M&M’S on the heads of unsuspecting viewers in the front rows, we watched First Man into Space, a science fiction/horror flick cheesy in premise and execution but filled with possibility for young adventurers who played games with the night.

It told the tale of a test pilot who flew higher than any man had flown before. Losing control of his craft, he bailed out into a suspicious cloud of extraterrestrial particles. Encrusted in meteor fragments and hideous to behold, he survived his re-entry and roamed the countryside in search of human blood. First, he broke into blood banks but afterwards pursued the citizenry, killing several before being brought down by clever scientists.

That night, the Booger Man went on sabbatical and First Man into Space made his debut. As with the rituals that called forth his predecessor, we sought him out in the neighborhood’s darkest recesses, wary of the moment when one of us would be possessed by the tortured soul of the test pilot who had disobeyed his superiors and ventured into the unknown. In our imaginations, the boy who had chosen to host our newest tormentor morphed into a vile, misshapen thing that lurched and clawed and slavered like a rabid dog. Arms outstretched, he came for us, and with a collective shriek of “First Man into Space!” we scattered once again for the sanctuary of our well-lit homes.

First Man into Space, like the Booger Man, faded into memory as we approached adolescence. But for a while he gave shape to our fears where his faceless counterpart fell short. Being “gotten”—the horrific consequence of succumbing to the temptations of Poe’s imp—was palpable in the bloodlust of an irradiated zombie with a backstory and a physical presence in a possessed victim. He joined a distinguished cadre of childhood terrors, such as La Llorona, the ghoulish Weeping Woman who abducts and drowns children who get too close to water, or the Mogollon Monster, the devourer of Boy Scouts who wander too far from their campsites after dark. Like the venerable English bogey Raw Head and Bloody Bones, they all were hideous, immediate, and supremely threatening—in other words, perfect for the dark play of children.

The allure of shadowy places and the creatures that inhabit them doesn’t end with childhood. Today the Booger Man’s cyber-cousin Slender Man lurks in both his home on the internet and the waking world, challenging millennials to participate in the dialogue between belief and disbelief that characterizes the urban legend.

Legend tripping—the visiting of haunted houses, cemeteries, and other locales connected to extraordinary or supernatural happenings—has long been popular with teens and young adults. If those of us who have left our childhood behind approach such experiences with an uneasy, obligatory cynicism, we would do well to think back to the joy of the screaming retreat to the safety of the front porch, and, when contemplating the question of “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties,” hedge our bets by invoking the last line of a traditional Scottish prayer: “Good Lord deliver us.”

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