The notion that a monster should prove to be a fraud is a fairly recent idea. The warriors gathered around the scop reciting Beowulf would have brooked no scene where the mighty Geat pulled the mask from Grendel’s face to find Unfurth hiding underneath. How the beer halls would have burned if such an atrocity were committed! The average Anglo-Saxon warrior enjoyed a good monster story.
Ancient people needed a way of dealing with the hostile world. There were diseases, natural disasters as well as human armies that killed and pillaged. To see adversity as something tangible (and defendable against) had value to the ancients, whether living in the world of Homer or the Beowulf poet, or even as late as the Age of Shakespeare. (The Bard knew the value of a good ghost and used them as frequently as possible. Hamlet’s father’s ghost, old Banquo or the magical sprite Ariel, and the fairies of Oberon and Titania’s realm, none of these turn out to be frauds.)
The monster falls upon hard times shortly after this though. The Age of Enlightenment—the very names speaks of a bunch of monster-haters. Scientists, rationalists, philosophers, not ones to suffer things that go bump in the night. Even the fraudulent type of monster is missing from 1700 to 1760. Where do you go when your philosophy is that all things are knowable (through Science and Logic) then nothing is monstrous? No monsters allowed!
Fortunately help is on the way! Good old Horace Walpole, the self-stylized lover of old architecture and all things Gothic would pen the outrageously unreasonable The Castle of Otranto (1765), a tale of falling giant helmets, lost heirs, evil barons and dark tunnels. In an age of sterile, monsterless sanity, it is no wonder Otranto was a huge hit, spawning dozens of imitators, and a whole school of storytelling known as the Gothics (a trend in its prime lasting from 1765 until 1820, with the publication of Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin. The Gothic influence continues after 1820 to the present day.)
At last we get to the guilty parties! One of the best writers of Gothics to follow old H.W. was Ann Radcliffe, who hit the ball out of the park with her humungous opus, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Ms. Radcliffe was fond of black veils and ridiculous family curses but not real monsters. The howling in the night proves to be a mad wife imprisoned in the cellar (not a werewolf), the evil ghost is actually creepy Uncle Manfred (not a vampire) and in the end all is explained. The Age of Reason is thwarted but only for a moment. (I mean, nobody believes in monsters anymore, do they?)
So the Gothic tradition begins. The false monster is born for an age that wants thrills but can’t stomach the actual belief in the fantastic. The 18th Century Man had no need of Beowulfian creatures to symbolize death. The world was a logical place and you could pretend it wasn’t but eventually all would be revealed. The followers of Newton, Kant and Thomas Payne had no need of monsters, demons or angels, only test tubes. This fence-sitting position would persist until the Victorian Age would come screaming in like an express train from Charing Cross Station.
The Victorian is a different breed than your Enlightenment type. She’s got new problems from all that Logic and Science and the old monsters will do nicely for dealing with them. The culprit—technology. All that reasoning has resulted in new technology and the world is changing quickly. (A mere snail’s pace by today’s standards but you’ll just have to wait until we get there!) The railroad, the sailing ship, the Global Empire, industry and growing cities, it has brought England to the World and the World to England. And along with foreigners and the “White Man’s Burden” comes monsters.
Let’s take a look at a typical Victorian real monster—Count Dracula. He looks human but he isn’t. He’s a seductive foreigner who wants English women. He can turn into smoke or a wolf (The bat thing was Hollywood. Rubber bats on a string are cheaper than trained wolves.) It takes three Englishmen and a German to kill Old Drac and only at the very end. He’s a tough bugger to put down because he’s supernatural, smart and oh-so sexy. When he gets the shiv at the end of the novel all the Victorian gentlemen can cheer, “There’s one for the old school tie!” (The women all have wet panties and know there’s little chance of getting anything half as interesting as old Drac in the sack.)
Now the false monster serves a similar purpose and the Victorians are as fond of them as the Gothic readers of old, but perhaps for a different reason. The Age of Reasoner is saying, “Yes, I know that couldn’t be real.” The Victorian sees the false monster as a device of evil foreigners, criminals and anarchists, all types who threaten old Blighty. Probably the most famous evil foreigner to use such devices was Dr. Fu Manchu, created by Sax Rohmer in 1912 in “The Zayat Kiss” (The Storyteller, 1912), later incorporated into the novel, The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu (1913). Whether using an unknown poison, constrictor snakes or a deadly spider, Fu knew how to cast a supernatural aura about himself. His legacy lives on in the spy thrillers of Ian Fleming.
The most famous example of an insidious “false monster” trick has to be in the Sherlock Holmes classic, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1906). The hound proves to be a weapon of an insidious killer, Stapledon, using the best Gothic touches (the spectral hound, the family inheritance and creepy moors) but the truth seems a much more modern villain, greed and the breakdown of a good, honest country family. The stalwart detective figures out the mystery (using logic and reason worthy of that age), restoring good old Henry Baskerville to his rightful place as Lord of the Manor. The Gothic histrionics are gone but many of the trappings remain.
The sheer popularity of A. Conan Doyle’s yarns –who really cribbed it from the American, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murder in the Rue Morgue”(1841) –would push the false monster into the Mystery genre where it remains to this day. This new genre (perfected by Poe) allows the reader both the supernatural thrill and the logical premise to explain away the horrors. Later writers like Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers would dress up their Mysteries with Gothic images, a type of supernatural red herring to distract the reader while Hercule Poirot, Father Brown or Lord Peter Wimsey apply their “little grey cells”. The horror reader feels cheated, for they seek the thrill of the impossible, while his less imaginative brethren sigh happily when the mask comes off.
Most writers fall into one school or the other (including Edgar Allan Poe who wrote psychological horror tales and very few supernatural ones.) Only the occult detective writers like E. & H. Heron and William Hope Hodgson play both sides of the street, using both real and false monsters, sometimes both in the same story! The reader never knows until the end whether the Whistling Room is inhabited by abhuman horrors or clever fakes. This type of fiction proved popular (along with all occult detectives) into the early 20th Century, borrowing much from the beliefs of Theosophists and spiritualists. Oddly, the more the author believed in real monsters the less convincing their fiction became, as in the case of Algernon Blackwood. Horror writing purist M. R. James reviled the fake supernatural story in his introduction to Le Fanu’s Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Stories (1928), despite the fact that Le Fanu virtually invented the sub-genre of the occult detective.
New entertainment mediums are also big at this time. Readers plunked down their dimes for Shudder Pulps like Horror Tales, Terror Tales, Spicy Detective and Dime Mystery that offered up supernatural-sounding plots like “Blood For the Vampire Dead” by Robert Leslie Bellem (Mystery Tales, March 1940 ) which ultimately proved mundane enough, but allowing the curvy females in the story to lose their clothing. Cartoons, films and radio all supplied fresh doses of false monsters whether it was a Warner Brothers’ cartoon like “Prest-O Change-O” (1939), a Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard comedy like The Ghostbreakers (1940) or the radio show I Love a Mystery (1939-1953). A young Fred Silverman would be listening to the adventures of Jack Packard, Doc Long and Reggie York and later use the same formula to create Scooby-Doo in 1969.
Two World Wars and things change. Publishing after WWII was etched in metal and gears. Science Fiction replaces horror, bringing in the second Age of Reason. Once again the monsters become friendly aliens or social commentary. The A-Bomb horrors are stalking euphemisms for nuclear annihilation. The quaint occult detectives of the 1920s are old fashioned and forgotten. The Victorian fears of alien lotharios are shunted aside by a new regime of technology. More vampires and ghosts will not suffice to allay these fears. These become the cast offs, which always end up in the nursery. Vampire and werewolves now chase Abbott & Costello, The Flintstones and, of course, Scooby and Shaggy around creepy castles, evoking laughs instead of screams. The monster is, of course, Principal Dingwell in a rubber mask (we learned that ages ago!) In fiction it is the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and comic books.
Real monsters would return with a Vietnam War haze that included The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and eventually the bestsellers of Stephen King. The terrible specter of real war and death drove readers back to the true monster stories, finding possessed children and killer psychics just the remedy to the Nightly News. For those who preferred their monsters friendlier there was the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien, filled with hobbits and dragons, and tales of long-ago. Those who liked a bit of both could always turn to the short-lived Sword & Sorcery revival that would put Robert E. Howard back in print.
No new “false monster” sellers have assailed these giants of real horrors. The closest we have come in our post-modernist age is the “serial killer” novel, a type of suspense thriller featuring lunatics so insane they take on supernatural-appearing powers. Is Hannibal Lector the Udolpho for the 21st century? Perhaps. All the earmarks are there. Thrilling without straining credibility to actual supernaturalism. Not surprisingly it is a sub-genre closely related to Mystery fiction. The serial killer novel, exemplified by The Silence of the Lambs (1988), lets us stare at the new urban reality, a hostile world that would like to kill, mutilate or sexually violate us and our families. So not much has really changed in fifteen hundred years. How is our modern fears all that much different than that of the Anglo-Saxons of 499 A.D. or even that of the caveman who told stories around the fire? Life is tough, but we go on. Our monsters follow obediently behind us.
