REVIEW OF THE MONSTER SHOW: Over the weekend, I read David Skal’s Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (quoted below). Some scattered thoughts follow. In general, if you want a cultural history of horror movies, Skal’s your man and you should check out TMS. It suffers from almost all of the expected flaws of the genre–most prominently, 1) tortured, heavy-breathing prose spiced with academic Freudianisms, and 2) lefty bias that affects the book more and more as we approach the present day (it goes in chronological order), until the Reagan-hate genuinely throws off the analysis. Despite these problems, the book has a lot of terrific insights. It avoids the “nothing buttery” (thanks Brink Lindsey) that reduces everything to Freudian psychology and sex-obsession. There are especially fine analyses of horror films that worked out cultural anxieties about war and about reproduction. (The slew of films that pit women against fetuses and children is truly remarkable. At some point these movies stop merely reflecting cultural anxieties and begin reinforcing them, making women view our own children as alien invaders, parasites, enemies, inexplicable and frightening burdens.) Many of the anecdotes are well-chosen (especially in the earlier, less-Marxist sections). Although he uses the term “phallambulism,” which ordinarily would lead me to throw the book across the room, he manages to invoke Freudian terms and analyses only when they’re actually relevant and illuminating.

The book flags after the reproductive-horror chapter though. Partly this is because Skal’s leftist obsessions get in the way. He knows that Reagan had a castration fixation (doesn’t that sound like a band name?) because Reagan liked to watch a movie in which he played a man whose legs get accidentally amputated. Eh? Hello, maybe Reagan just thought he did a good acting job in the movie! Maybe he thought it featured a hot actress. Maybe it has nothing to do with castration–hard to believe, I know. More annoyingly, Skal makes economic and demographic claims (horror fans are more likely to be blue-collar or downwardly mobile; “there is little evidence that Americans are more likely than other peoples to transcend the castes into which they are born”) with no footnoting or backup at all. These statements are, in my view, basically credibility-free.

But the book also suffers because the men who made the earlier horror flicks were just more screwed up, and therefore more interesting to read about (and, perhaps, more insightful). Skal himself notes that the men who spent their days creating Fangoria-style horror effects in the ’80s and ’90s were eminently well-adjusted, nice happy people. Stephen King certainly has some dark shadows, but they’re really not explored in this book, so he too comes off as a slightly resentful (Skal writes, in the King section, as if only poor people ever feel alienated) but basically staid American Gothic type of guy. This is boring when compared to earlier sections on Tod Browning, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Maila Nurmi, etc. (Why no chapter on Hammer Horror, I wonder? Oh well. It’s his book, he can write about what he wants.) The metaphors being worked out in the movies also seem to get less complex and nuanced–yeah, Freddie Krueger kills kids, he mocks the idea of celebrity, we get it. The movies (or Skal’s interpretation of same) begin to feel one-dimensional, as opposed to the earlier movies which admit of multiple interpretations, at times complementary, at times conflicting and conflicted. One comes away from Skal’s book with the impression that horror feeds on repression, and since we repress less, our horror loses its impact and vitality. Now, I don’t actually endorse this view–I am unconvinced that we repress less than they did in 1930, though we repress different things; and I can’t really speak about contemporary horror because a) I almost never watch movies right when they come out, and b) it’s too soon to tell which new movies will have a lasting influence on their viewers. But b) is one other reason Skal would have been well advised to end his book in 1980.

Anyway, I highly recommend all but the introduction (which smacks of art-elitism and unrecognized cruelty) and the last four chapters. “Tod Browning’s America,” “‘You Will Become Caligari’: Monsters, Mountebanks, and Modernism,” “‘I Used to Know Your Daddy’: The Horrors of War, Part Two,” and “It’s Alive, I’m Afraid” are especially good chapters. Skal is good at selecting epigraphs for his chapters; and he can even occasionally justify the punning that is epidemic in lit-crit prose, as when he calls hokey horror “corn-on-the-macabre.”