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