2023 Festival of Monsters Academic Conference Abstracts
Panel E1: Monstrous Desires / Panel E2: Remaking Monster Myths / Panel F1: Monstrous Women / Panel F2: Cultures of Female Monstrosity / Panel G1: The Political Effects of Contemporary Horror / Panel G2: Race, Representation, and Monstrosity / Panel H1: Reanimating Old Monsters / Panel H2: Monsters, Technology, and Precarious Humanity
Panel E1
Monstrous Desires: Queer Embodiment and Transformation
Moderator: Analola Santana (Dartmouth College)
Panelists: Sam Langsdale, John Edward Martin, Spencer D.C. Keralis
Sam Langsdale, “‘Werewolf by night, bisexual delight?’: A Queer Reading of Marvel’s Werewolf by Night TV Special”
In response to Marvel’s TV special Werewolf by Night (Giacchino 2022) on Disney+, I received the following text from a friend: “Werewolf by night, bisexual delight?” I emphatically agreed but upon further reflection, I began to wonder what made us both so confident that this was a queer text resonant with bisexual experience. Was it director Michael Giacchino’s choice to shoot the majority of the film in black and white, evoking the aesthetics of classic Hollywood horror films that “[demarcated] a space of psychosexual transgression” (Benshoff 1997, 36)? Was it that as two bisexual women, i.e., people situated “outside a patriarchal, heterosexist order and the popular cultural texts that it produces,” we “more readily acceded” to “the cinematic monster’s subjective position” (Ibid., 12)? Was it the nature of monsters as being simultaneously indicative of fears and desires (Cohen 1996)? Yes! All this! As this paper suggests, these aspects of Marvel’s TV special make a queer reading possible. Further, in highlighting how temporality affects others’ perceptions of the main character, Jack Russell/Werewolf by Night, I argue that the film may be read as an exploration of bisexuality. Just as Jack is initially accepted and treated without suspicion in his human form, and later feared and hunted in his Werewolf form, so too are bisexuals accepted as “normal” when they appear monosexual and rejected as “deviant” when their preferences for both the same and other genders become clear (San Filippo 2018). Finally, I discuss how the focus on searching for a “cure” in Werewolf narratives (Ransom 2014) resonates with heteronormative discourse that frames bisexuality as a “phase” that will diminish with the “right” sexual or romantic encounter. Refreshingly, Werewolf by Night queers this narrative convention by eliding discussions of a “cure” for Jack and instead, emphasizes the need for human beings to treat monstrous Others with compassion and dignity. Delightful!
Sources:
Benshoff, Harry. 1997. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Giacchino, Michael. 2022. Werewolf by Night. Marvel Studios.
Ransom, Amy J. 2014. “Werewolf.” In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, pp. 577-587.
San Filippo, Maria. 2018. “The Politics of Fluidity: Representing Bisexualities in Twenty-First Century Screen Media.” In The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality, edited by Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood, and Brian McNair Smith, pp. 70-80.
Sam Langsdale (she/her) is an independent feminist scholar whose work focuses on the cultural politics around representation of gender, sexuality, and race in visual culture. Her comics research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and in award-winning volumes like Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero (UT Press, 2020). She is particularly proud of being the co-editor of Monstrous Women in Comics (UPM, 2020). You can read more about her work here: https://www.samlangsdale.com/
John Edward Martin, “A Beautiful Monster”: Race and Queer Monstrosity in Two Werewolf Tales”
What do werewolves tell us about race and identity? In Stephen Graham Jones’s novel Mongrels (2017), we learn that “Being a werewolf isn’t just teeth and claws…it’s inside. It’s how you look at the world. It’s how the world looks back at you.” In Jones’s novel, as in his experience, how one looks at the world and how it looks at you is never separate from race, family, or communal identity. It just happens that his teenage protagonist is both a Native American and a werewolf, though which of those perspectives shape his identity more is never clear. Everything from his life on and off the rez to his marginalization in school to his grandfather’s stories (“a story that keeps changing”) seem to reflect both aspects of that dual identity. But it is the werewolf that he longs to embrace, because he believes, “If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager.” (Jones, 2017). For him, being a werewolf represents both an escape from the mundane life of a marginalized person and a transformation into his true, beautiful, powerful self. Of course, being a werewolf isn’t always beautiful. Micheline Hess’s web-comic, Diary of a Mad Black Werewolf (2019) acknowledges the violence and horror of being a werewolf, but also sees the need that this monstrous identity fills for her main character, a Black woman living in New York City and experiencing the real-life horrors that have become all too familiar: police violence, racist “Karens”, predatory men, and more. Her werewolf is, explicitly, “the embodiment of Black rage,” bringing a kind of vigilante justice to those who have avoided it (Elyssee, 2019). So how do we reconcile the beauty and horror of our “monstrous” identities when those identities are shaped by our experiences of race, injustice, and marginalization?
Sources:
Elysee, Greg Anderson. 2019. “Oh, the Indie Horror: Diary of a Mad Black Werewolf.” Bleeding Cool (Oct. 23, 2019).
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/oh-the-indie-horror-diary-of-a-mad-black-werewolf/
Hess, Micheline. 2019. Diary of a Mad Black Werewolf. Michmasharts.com. https://www.michmasharts.com/diary-of-a-mad-black-werewolf
Jones, Stephen Graham. 2017. Mongrels: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
John Edward Martin (he/him) is a Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of North Texas and a scholar of horror literature, film, and comics. His scholarship has been published in Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision (Lehigh UP, 2023), Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings (Lehigh UP, 2013), and Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror (McFarland & Co., 2013).
Spencer D.C. Keralis, “Disease, Desire, and the Monstrous Queer Body”
In 1987, supermarket tabloid Weekly World News ran a story with the headline “Vampire attacks have reached an all-time low as AIDS terror sweeps Eastern Europe.” Declaring that vampires are particularly high-risk for contracting AIDS because the majority of the undead are “flaming homosexuals,” WWN mixed crass homophobia and AIDS-baiting sensationalism to titillate their readers, tropes that were hardly surprising at the height of the epidemic and which were picked up by more mainstream papers like the Chicago Tribune (Peterson). While WWN was hardly a credible source for news on the AIDS epidemic or the undead, versions of the idea connecting vampirism to communicable disease remain remarkably persistent. In the popular Western imagination, the figure of the vampire has been associated with transgressive sexuality since Stoker, but pre-modern vampire scares were generally associated with outbreaks of disease like tuberculosis (consumption). Before germ theory these outbreaks were seen as providential, with a spiritual or moral cause which manifested in the diseased body (Bell). Discussions of AIDS likewise saw the epidemic as a moral crisis, since intravenous drug use and gay sex were two of the main vectors of transmission. In this paper I’ll explore connections between disease, in particular HIV/AIDS, and vampires in the popular imagination from the early years of the AIDS epidemic, to Reddit boards in which posters earnestly query whether vampires can contract HIV/AIDS, to an HIV scare attributed to “vampire facials” (BBC), to conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 vaccination can transform you into a blood-sucking monster (Zinoman), concluding with an examination of Anne Rice’s iconic vampire characters in the recent streaming adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, in which the erotic queer (vampire) body is exultantly reclaimed.
Sources:
Bell ME. Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires. Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 2001.
Jones, Rolin, creator. Interview with the Vampire. 2022. AMC+ https://www.amc.com/
Petersen, Clarence. “Vampires Halted By AIDS Scare.” Chicago Tribune, April 30, 1987. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-04-30-8702020109-story.html
“Vampire facials: After HIV scare, is beauty fad actually safe?” BBC, May 2, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/48114494
Zinoman, Jason. “Why the Vampire Myth Won’t Die.” New York Times, October 30, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/style/vampires-coronavirus.html
Spencer D. C. Keralis (they/them) is an independent media historian and digital humanist whose current work examines the mediation of the HIV-positive body in DIY publications. Their scholarship has appeared in the journals Book History, American Periodicals, hyperrhiz: new media cultures, and in the collections Disrupting the Digital Humanities (punctum books, 2018), Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned (Routledge, 2023), and Debates in Digital Humanities (U. of Minnesota Press, 2023).
Panel E2
Remaking Monster Myths
Moderator: Kim Lau (UCSC)
Panelists: Ariane Helou, Sharon King, Francis Auld
Ariane Helou, Cathy Thomas, and Jessica Calvanico, “Immor(t)al U: Creating and Critiquing a Feminist Comic Multiverse”
Medusa is the protagonist of the planned first issue of Immor(t)al U, a comic book series that reimagines mythological figures in the context of the contemporary university. Through retelling their stories, we interrogate how the power dynamics that shaped their origins also formed and continue to sculpt modern academia. Our Medusa subverts the long (and deeply misogynistic) tradition of reading her as a “monstrous” woman, a rape victim whose transformation and exile is a punishment for perceived sexual transgression. Through Immor(t)al U’s setting on a contemporary college campus, we conceptualize the monstrous through a socio-political and pop cultural lens, reflecting on current trends in academia such as state bans on curricula; the threat of “omnipotent” ChatGPTs; and inconsistent messaging between campus stakeholders on issues ranging from sexual assault to how students develop competencies for a changing world. Immor(t)al U is an analog of this changing world wherein the figure of the woman has changed but little since the time of Ovid. This comic’s depiction and reclamation of the “monstrous” woman illustrates the paradoxical nature of her/their seduction, abjection, and power by engaging various feminisms embodied in our diverse array of characters. As a satire, it is also a commentary on racial, gender, and social representation. Our presentation will discuss our process for worldbuilding of our original collaborative comic and a meta-analysis of the themes addressed in the first issue, as well as some conceptual artwork.
Dr. Ariane Helou is a scholar whose research focuses on drama, music, and poetry in early modern Italy, England, and France; her secondary research field is culinary history. Dr. Helou was a faculty member at UCLA in the department of French & Francophone Studies, and at UC Santa Cruz (where she also earned her Ph.D. in Literature) in Theater Arts, Classical Studies, and French. She currently works as a grant writer at Caltech’s Beckman Institute.
Sharon King, “‘This IS a Tasty Burgher!’: Bigorne and Chichevache, Medieval Monsters of Comedy”
Bigorne and Chichevache, comical mirror-image monsters of the later Middle Ages, will feature in a mixed-media presentation intended to introduce this medieval pop-culture duo and their very specialized, overtly misogynistic taste for humankind to 21st-century audiences.
Bigorne is a giant, often human-faced chimera whose custom it is to dine on compliant husbands; because of their abundance, he faces a surfeit of delectable nourishment, even turning away some who ask for an end to their henpecked existences. His hybrid compeer Chichevache, a near-moribund, starveling "thin cow," seeks in vain for the meek wives that make up her diet, having encountered and devoured only one in all of her miserable though immortal life. I'll begin with a brief powerpoint presentation of images and texts from French, English, and Italian sources about the duo (14th-16th-centuries), with a nod to previous scholarship on issues of misogyny and appetites (Jones & Sprunger, J. J. Cohen, Denny-Brown). I will conclude with a short, live-action piece, adapted from my original translations of French poetry about the monstrous duo (based on the Recueil de poesies francoises des XVe et XVIe siècles, tome II, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon, pp 187-203).
Writer and scholar Sharon Diane King (Ph.D., Comparative Literature) is Associate at UCLA’s Center for Medieval/ Renaissance Studies, where she organized the conference The Comic Supernatural (2017). Her troupe Les Enfans Sans Abri has performed medieval/Renaissance comedies since 1992. Her 2012 short Plant Life screened at numerous festivals, winning Best Mockumentary.
Francis Auld, “Monstrous Rabbits, Children, and Authors: The Abject Wonder of Winterset Hollow”
“Battle not with monsters lest you become a monster” — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) John Edward Durham’s 2021 novel, Winterset Hollow, is a poetic, dark fairy tale that reveals the gruesome reality behind a fictional children’s book (Winterset Hollow). As in a fairy tale, the monsters are mythic and metaphorical and disturbingly familiar. Durham traps modern characters in the exquisitely elegant waste of early 20th century’s consumerism and they can only hope to survive the monsters created a century ago by the book’s abusive author. The terrible beauty of the novel is less the protagonist’s disillusionment at understanding the violence and appetites of the man who wrote such charming children’s literature, and more that character’s abject wonder that the creatures from his favorite children’s book exist. His world is literally rewritten by the fairy tale animals from the beloved children’s book. But, of course, they are monsters. Horror critic Noel Carrol’s idea that in a fairy tale “the monster is an ordinary character in an extraordinary world” works, in this case, to rewrite the nature of the world that the human characters know (52). The monsters, whether they be maimed and tortured once-humans or fantastic animals commodified and warped by abuse, function in their medieval sense to de-monstrate. The truth these monsters tell, the truth the human characters experience, is the revelation and abject wonder of the real world’s horror hidden in a child’s story.
Dr. Frances Auld is a Professor of Language and Literature at State College of Florida where she teaches fairy tales, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and writing. In her copious amounts of spare time, she writes horror and dark fantasy and cooks vegan cottage pie. (No rabbits.)
Panel F1
Monstrous Women
Moderator: Gina Konstantopoulos (UCLA)
Panelists: Marcos Damian Leon, Ekaterina Traschel, Henry Kamerling
Marcos Damian Leon, “Haunting as an Act of Justice: Indigenous Women in Horror”
Since 1980, over 4000 Indigenous women have disappeared or been murdered. This crisis is referred to as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), and it is an issue that receives little attention outside of Indigenous circles. This paper presentation explores the ways that two Indigenous writers have used women monsters in their recent horror novels to bring attention to MMIW. White Horse by Erika T. Wurth follows an urban Indian haunted by her mother’s ghost, and The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones presents the perspective of the Elkhead Woman as she hunts the men who killed her and her child—in both, the “monster” is a woman seeking justice against the men who murdered her. Using Avery Gordon’s theory of hauntings in which she argues that ghosts are manifestations of unseen systemic oppressions or trauma, I argue that these novels are examples of how horror and monsters can be used to bring attention to ignored or intentionally hidden societal violence. I will connect these Indigenous horrors to Jordan Peele’s Get Out, a film that resonated with the general public, to expand on what hauntings reveal to the audience about hidden violence experienced by oppressed communities. There is very little writing outside Indigenous circles on MMIW, and an equally small body of writing on Indigenous horror novels—thus, this paper will serve to continue conversations on MMIW, to contribute to studies of Indigenous genre fiction, and, importantly, to expose a general audience to MMIW and Indigenous writers.
Marcos Damián León is a writer from the Salinas Valley. He holds an M.F.A. from UC Riverside and is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University. His work is forthcoming in Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories, and has appeared in LA Review of Books, Monterey County Weekly, and others.
Ekaterina Traschel, “The Monstrous-Feminine in Performances by Florentina Holzinger”
In the early 1990s Barbara Creed notes in The Monstrous-Feminine. Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, that “[...] when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive function.” In my presentation I will explore the extent to which both the mise-en-scène of the figure of the "mother" and the idea of "reproduction" – both in a sexual and figurative sense (reproduction of already existing artistic strategies, for example) – determine the order of Florentina Holzinger's dance performances Tanz (2020) and A Divine Comedy (2021). The focus of my analysis lies on the monstrous dramaturgical orders of her stagings of female bodies that question established orders and conventions within dance and art history, popular culture and within society in general. It is my hypothesis that the analysis of the monstrous in Florentina Holzinger's performances produces a "[...] gain in knowledge about the frames through which perception is controlled."
Dr. Ekaterina Trachsel is a theatre scholar and theatre-maker. Since October 2022, she has been a research assistant to Prof. Dr. Gerald Siegmund at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen. She studied Scenic Arts (B.A.) and Staging of Arts and Media (M.A.) at the University of Hildesheim and is a founding member of the theatre collectives VOLL:MILCH (vollmilch.me) and nota e.V. (verein.nota.space). Her research focuses on contemporary dramaturgies, the production and reception aesthetics of the process of de-montage in theater, institutional change and theatrical staging of monstrous bodies and orders.
Henry Kamerling, “‘For the first time, she is free’: The Monstrous Women of Marvel’s Early 1970s Horror Comics”
Marvel’s January 1974 issue of Haunt of Horror has Satana, the Devil’s daughter, travel to Hell to confront her father. The Devil commands Satana to claim the soul of a good man. Part demon, part human, Satana is conflicted. She eventually sides with her human half, rebuffs her father’s demand, and is banished by Satan to earth as punishment. The comic ends with Satana on a rooftop surveying a lonely city, as the narration explains, “for the first time, she is free.” Satana’s struggle against her father is also a contest against male authority. It is a storyline repeated in one way or another throughout Marvel’s early-to-mid 1970s horror titles. This paper takes a deep dive into the world of these horror comics, foregrounding an analysis of the ways that political contests over second-wave feminism and a rising new right conservative movement found expression there. As Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody explain, “monstrous women” _both “evoke damaging cultural norms in patriarchal contexts,” _and at the same time, “contain within them the potential to destroy the system of thought that are productive of such norms” _(5). Created by male artists for largely male audiences, the feminist perspective in these early horror tales were often threadbare. Nevertheless, in the contest between a feminist movement in decline and an ascending conservative counterrevolution, Marvel’s horror comics sided unequivocally with second-wave feminism. Whether battling male demons, devils, or vampires as symbols of patriarchal authority or simply being hectored by an endless array of male henchmen, these monstrous female superpowered heroines challenged, and often bested, male authority and power!
Henry Kamerling is a professor of history at Seattle University. He studies prisoners, monsters, and monstrous superheroes. His most recent article, “‘Men Have Sentenced This Fen to Death’: Marvel’s Man-Thing and the Liberation Politics of the 1970s” appeared in Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books (Routledge, 2022). His current book- length research project explores the question: are zombies superheroes?
Panel F2
Cultures of Female Monstrosity
Moderator: Elizabeth Swensen (UCSC)
Panelists: Trung Nguyễn, Blake Overman, Ivy Chen
Trung Nguyen, “‘Ma Nữ’: Why the Ghosts in Vietnamese Horror Films are Female”
It all started with Mười: The Legend of a Portrait (2007), when a co-produced Korean-Vietnamese horror production debuted as the first of its genre in Vietnam. Not only did the movie mark its footprint in the box office success, but it also left a significant impact on the later coming Vietnamese horror figures many years after. The eerie ghost lady wearing long black hair and white clothes that weeps and jump scares become the common motif for films such as Vengeful Heart (2014), The Housemaid (2016), Nhà Không Bán (2022), The Ancestral (2022), Vietnamese Horror Stories (2022), etc. Even though their storylines are different, the tropes of female ghost formations in these movies are almost synonymous, narrowed down to three motives: jealousy of other women, societal pressures, and femicide. These narratives are not always clean-cut yet reflective of the outlooks of mostly male directors on topics of women’s lives in a heteropatriarchal society. Using transnational feminist theories and cultural analysis of film and media studies, the paper offers a closer look at the constructions of the female virulent ghosts in many Vietnamese horror movies. These ghosts of monstrous fiction figures are in fact socio-cultural productions of misogynistic practices that view women’s tragic stories as centering around men. On the other hand, the movies are also a cry for help in issues relating to women’s health, wellbeings, and survival in the Vietnamese context. Looking at these intersections, the paper addresses ways in which Vietnamese ghostly monsters could be saved.
Trung M. Nguyễn (he/she/they) is a Ph.D. student in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. They have Masters degrees in Performance Studies and TESOL. Trung’s academic and artistic projects center on feminist, queer, and trans subjects in Southeast Asia.
Blake Overman, “Whatever Happened to Miss Havisham? The Campification of the Victorian Monstrous Female”
Robert Alberich’s 1962 film, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? repurposes the character of the ghostly Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ 1861 novel, Great Expectations. The film accentuates her camp sensibilities and queer resonance through the Baby Jane Hudson. In Dickens’s Great Expectations, Miss Havisham’s undying hatred and obsession with vengeance corrupt herself and those around her. She is redeemed only through her traumatic death. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? takes key characteristics of Miss Havisham, such as her monstrosity and melancholia, and fashions them into the character of Baby Jane Hudson. The film places Baby Jane at the center of the narrative and provides sympathy for the aged spinster that does not also demand her death. Miss Havisham’s divergences of expectations warrant punishment; for Baby Jane Hudson, they find her an enduring resonance with gay audiences. Understanding Baby Jane Hudson as a repurposing of Miss Havisham allows for a reimagining of Dickens’ treatment of the character and the Victorian influences on modern film.
Blake Overman (he/they) is a Ph.D. student in literature at Indiana University-Bloomington. His scholarly work focuses on monster literature of the long nineteenth century and its continued resonance with contemporary queer audiences. He is most interested in the affective power of monsters as agents of empathy. Their work often overlaps with intersecting interests such as queer theory, aesthetics, and narratology.
Ivy Chen, “Feminine Monstrosity in China”
Throughout Chinese history, a vast body of literature featuring monsters has been produced, and there is a static pattern to how the monster’s gender impacts its characteristics. Female monsters, who in Chinese folktales are usually animal spirits turned into human forms, are always created to be irresistibly seductive and horribly scheming and harmful— luring men to their beds and taking out their organs. Meanwhile, the scariness of male monsters comes merely from their violence and repulsive appearance. Journey to the West, one of the four greatest Chinese literary classics, has two main male characters who are good-willed and beloved animal spirits, while the first female character that comes to mind is a skeleton spirit who seduces men and eats them to remain youthful. The notion that femininity is a symbol of the danger of beauty and desires remains alive to this day, with terms like 狐狸精†(fox spirit), 妖精†(monster spirit), 妖里妖气†(having characteristics of Yōkai, a type of evil spirit) being regularly used to connect women’s physical presentation to their immorality. By analyzing Chinese works featuring monsters, this paper attempts to investigate how the feminine monsters in old Chinese literature impact and remain in contemporary Chinese society. There will be an analysis of the evolution of the folk legend, Tale of the White Snake, and its implications into the changing position of women throughout Chinese history. Further, the concept of feminine monstrosity and its role in reinforcing and creating misogynistic social structures will also be discussed.
Ivy Chen studies Cognitive Science at UC Santa Cruz. Her interest areas include the role design plays at the intersection of art / education / augmented reality and how design can help people take better care of their mental health.
Panel G1
The Political Effects of Contemporary Horror
Moderator: Cecilia Abate (Independent Scholar)
Panelists: J. Marshall Leicester, Jr., Johanna Isaacson, Scott Hamilton
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. Hammer Rereads Dracula: The Second Time as Farce, or Keeping a Stiff Upper Lip in the Ruins
The standard critical reading of Hammer Studios’ Dracula, (Fisher 1958) has come to be that despite its transient improprieties, Dracula offered audiences temporary refuge from the strains of contemporary British life by having absolute good (vampire hunters) triumphing over (absolute evil) vampire. My reading explores the film’s agency through its self-conscious relation to its pre-texts in novel and films, showing how its plot conspicuously alters former cultural expectations and assumptions about the “rules” of vampirism.This deliberate slippage in the stability of prior conventions generates tension between two modes of reading Dracula—as a conventional horror movie about the melodramatic struggle between good and evil—or a depiction of domestic life as a tissue of improvisations that highlight the instabilities and contradictions of desire and gender, family organization, personal and class relations. The reading shows how the filmic text of Dracula gradually shifts emphasis from the melodrama to agential improvisation, rereading the horror movie and its pretensions in order to blur the distinctions between good and evil in both its imagined Victorian fiction and modern life.
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. is Professor of English Literature at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of several articles on Chaucer and medieval literature.
Johanna Isaacson, “A Monster of Many Masks: Leatherface Beyond the Masculine Proletariat”
Virtually every critic who has commented on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has noted that the debasement of the cannibalistic Sawyer family reflects bourgeois society’s monstrous view of the rural proletariat. What is more difficult to settle is how to square this analysis with a feminist reading of the film. Bourgeois women, argue Carol Clover, Mark Steven, and others, are often the targets in slasher films, and this complicates our readings of these films as allegories for working class vengeance. Is the “working class” always to be coded male? And are its “soft” middle-class antagonists doomed to be feminized? If so, does this render a class conscious, feminist position untenable? The famous monster of TCM, Leatherface, is not simply a mutant hillbilly attacking bourgeois women and men, but a man who wears the face of a woman as a mask, a man who serves his family dinner, a man who is harassed by his brother for failing at his domestic chores. In short, he is not just symbolic of a proletariat expelled from productive labor, but an abject and exploited feminized worker in the sphere of reproduction. This paper will look at how Leatherface represents the monstrousness of surplus labor, and how this transforms his gendered encoding. This rethinking of Leatherface frames him less as an antagonist to Sally’s “final girl,” than as a mirror. The ending that focuses on both of these characters’ wordless expressions of both power and impotence, shows the surplus worker and the feminized victim of violence to be intertwined, parallel actors in a world that defies reason, and whose hope lies in a horizon of refusal.
Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror from Common Notions Press and The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books. She has published widely in academic and popular journals iincluding, with Annie McClanahan, the entry for “Marxism and Horror” in The Sage Handbook of Marxism (2022). She runs the Facebook group, “Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films.”
Scott Hamilton, “Monstrous Divisions: Zombies versus Undead Neoliberalism”
The zombie is, among other uses, traditionally utilized to examine the various detrimental aspects of capitalism. However, in the current context, the zombie offers a means to examine the neoliberal ideology that governs capitalism. The zombie, for economic theory, represents the mindless and detrimental collective thought of neoliberal ideologies and of a market-based social identity. Such uses of the zombie are beneficial for analyzing the problems of geopolitical capitalism. However, instead of presenting the story of survivors as aspects of human society that may be worth saving, certain zombie narratives, especially those produced in recent decades, depict the survivor narrative as maintaining a world governed, and subsequently ruined, by neoliberal ideals. Hence, especially the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil, neoliberalism unchecked would facilitate the endless pursuit of profit and power until the complete exhaustion of resources and decimation of the environment. For the neoliberal northern-hemisphere elites, socialist movements are the monstrous other, the zombie horde, that threatens to devour neoliberal hegemony. That hegemony perpetuates the divisions of conservative and liberal is a tactic to perpetuate insidious divisions, instead of exploring the value within commonalities and differences. Concerned primarily with the Gothic aspects of Resident Evil (Netflix 2022), and others, this paper will argue that in the neoliberal context, the zombie and zombie hordes potentially represent the perceived threat a unified and monstrous mobilized public pose to the economic, political, and biological power of neoliberalism responsible for the decimation of communal society (conservative and liberal) and environmental sustainability. In other words, the zombie is the potential solution to the impending social and environmental catastrophe of an insidious divisive monster, undead neoliberalism.
Dr. Scott Hamilton is an English Lecturer at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and has published on Irish literature and Zombies. Hamilton co-founded the Theorizing Zombiism conference series and The Zombie Studies Network.
Panel G2
Race, Representation, and Monstrosity
Moderator: Lisa Lampert-Weissig (UCSD)
Panelists: Katya Vrtis, Shadow Zimmerman, Michael Kobre, Michael Chemers
Katya Vrtis, “The Triple Coded Monster: Teaching Bigotry in Classic Horror”
Horror films and their starring monsters are core sites for the negotiation of cultural anxieties around difference, power, and the de/humanization of marginalized populations. These dynamics drive the queer, crip, and raced coding of the classic horror movie monster as documented in works such as Harry M. Benschoff’s Monsters in the Closet, Angela M. Smith’s Hideous Progeny, and Robin R. Means Colman’s Horror Noire. This triple coding of movie monsters and villains as queer, disabled, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) has its history in the display of colonial subjects, gender non-conforming individuals, and those with extraordinary bodies in the American freak show. However, this triple coding of the classic – and contemporary – monster does not merely reflect the significance of these modes of difference as sites of cultural anxiety. The simultaneous identification of the monster with disability coding, queer coding, and race or Black coding elides the difference between forms of "deviance," teaching the assumed normative audience to view all target populations as inchoate, utterly inhuman monsters to be feared and rejected absolutely. Additionally, those who may sympathize with one monsterized population would still fall prey to other biases and be conditioned into the collective abjuration of the targeted groups. The triple coded monster spreads cultural bigotry by linking unrelated groups together and attaches the associated stereotypes to against each monsterized group to all of them, marking all three as innately dangerous and deviant threats and thus ensuring that the power of heterocissexual able-bodied White men continued unabated.
Dr. Catherine (Katya) Vrtis is an independent scholar studying freakery and monstrosity as modes of de/humanization. Recent work appears in Monsters in Performance, Freak Inheritance, Journal of African American Studies, and Theatre History Studies. Katya is the co-founder and chair of Disability, Theatre, and Performance (DTaP) and MATC’s Accessibility Officer.
Shadow Zimmerman, "More than Monsters: Her and Nope and the Whole Humanity of Black Horror"
Her, a self-described “Mystery Play in One Act,” was anonymously submitted to the Opportunity Literary Prize Contest of 1925, an outlet hosted by the journal for increased artistic expression among Black Americans. The drama, though defined by its titular monster both in name and climactic structure, is deeply domestic: the ghostly woman who haunts the unit upstairs only appears in the final lines of the play’s eighteen pages. Rather, the play primarily concerns its protagonist, Martha; her business as a seamstress, her relationship with her invalid husband, and the socio-economic concerns that demand their daily attention. Though unique in her ability to persist in a space made uninhabitable by the monster’s presence, Martha is not defined by this persistence. Thus the play serves as a noteworthy example both for the types of strong characters Willis Richardson promoted in Opportunity and the type of representation which more fully captures the Black American experience, per Martine Kei Green-Rogers. Importantly, Her resonates with contemporary examples from the “Black horror” genre, notably Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), which also features two Black Americans defined not by the monster which h(a)unts them, but by their fraternity and their media-fueled, fame-driven desire to capitalize. In this essay, I propose an analysis of both Her and Nope which argues for the value of both case studies and their protagonists: Her and Nope are compelling horrors, not because of their monsters, but because Martha and the Haywood siblings live despite these monsters.
Dr. Shadow Zimmerman is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre History, Literature, and Criticism at Northern Arizona University. His research explores the limits of liberalism and the racial relationships of the historical avant-garde. His scholarship has been featured in Theatre Symposium, The Black Theatre Review, and How to Teach a Play.
Michael Kobre, “‘This Man, This Monster!’: Golems, Tough Jews, and the Torment of Benjamin J. Grimm”
In 1975, after Jack Kirby had moved to California and joined Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, he drew a Hanukkah card with a picture of Benjamin J. Grimm, the monstrous Thing from Fantastic Four, wearing a yarmulke and a prayer shawl. “It’s a Jewish Thing,” Kirby would say about a copy of the picture that he hung in his studio afterwards, at once telling a joke and tacitly acknowledging a subtext that Marvel Comics would make official in an issue of Fantastic Four 27 years later, when The Thing came out as Jewish. But Ben Grimm’s Judaism wasn’t just another reflection of his creator in the character that Kirby identified with most (even drawing himself as The Thing in one of his very last stories for Marvel in What If? #11 in 1978). In the particular torment that defined Ben Grimm, transformed into a rock-like creature with enormous strength and trapped in a monstrous body that he loathed, The Thing offered a transfigured version of the body shame and fantasies and the conjoined yearning for and fear of power that had riven the psyches of European Jews and their children for generations. This paper will examine the representation of Jewish body images in The Thing, tracing his cultural ancestry back through the Golem of Prague, the new Muscle Jews imagined by turn-of-the- century Zionists, and the tough Jews of the Lower East Side of New York City, where Jack Kirby was born.
Michael Kobre is Dana Professor of English at Queens University of Charlotte. His essays and stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, South Atlantic Review, Tin House, TriQuarterly, West Branch, MAKE, and other journals. He’s the author of Walker Percy’s Voices. His writing has also been featured in the anthologies Reading the Boss: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Works of Bruce Springsteen, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer at Fifty, and Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation.
Michael Chemers, “Monster in the Closet: The Golem and the Dramaturgy of Empathy”
Tracking the startling transformations of monsters over time can provide resonant recognitions of how societies evolve and individuals act. This kind of investigation is hardly new – it was not even new in 1996 when the renowned medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen inaugurated the field of “Monster Theory” with his book of the same name. Monster Theory is not a wholly self-contained critical model – it’s better described as a discrete subsection of multiple fields of inquiry. Its central focus is to inquire into cultural practices that contribute to identity construction, recognizing that the appearance of monsters is particularly revelatory of the processes by which societies define and punish difference and deviance. What I have done that is perhaps new is to apply monster theory to the creation of spatial histories of monsters in performance. These reveal that our social progress is sometimes less progressive, and less teleological, than we might hope, and as a species we remain uncomfortably well prepared to call up ancient horrors to justify modern marginalization, persecution, and even atrocities, driving home Faulkner’s famous line: “the past is never dead: it’s not even the past,” as anyone visiting the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2017 can affirm, when violent protesters shouted "Jews will not replace us!" However, these studies also reveal that some modern problems have ancient solutions – that we, like our forebears, have a choice: either to be victimized by the monsters in our heads, or to employ them in our ongoing quest for self-discovery and a more harmonious and empathic society. I’ve chosen to talk about the rise in anti-Semitism not only because of its topicality but also because of its strange relationship to the emergence of a particular monster, the Golem.
Michael Chemers (M.F.A., Ph.D.) is a Professor of Dramatic Literature in the Department of Performance, Play and Design at UC Santa Cruz. His work on monsters includes The Monster in Theatre History: This Thing of Darkness (London, UK: Routledge 2018) and Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Disqualification (Routledge 2022). Dr. Chemers is the Founding Director of the Center for Monster Studies.
Panel H1
Reanimating Old Monsters
Moderator: Jalondra Davis (UCR)
Panelists: Devan Schnecker, Elizabeth Kurtzman, Jessica Pressman, Shannon Scott
Devan Schnecker, “Transgothic Spaces in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”
Transgothicism deepens a body of Gothic criticism that explores a spectrum of gender and notions associated with femininity and masculinity. Specifically, transgothicism is an idea predicated upon liminal states of transition, becoming, and embodiment, and this often culminates in a destabilization of binaries. I argue that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus is a radical transgothic text that contains a series of transgothic spaces wherein notions of monstrosity create realities outside strict binaries. Transgothic spaces in Frankenstein, both natural and humanmade, embody anxieties related to identity and monstrosity, and I argue that such spaces function as areas of transformation that eschew normative Romantic-era conventions of society and gender. A transgothic approach to a text like Frankenstein prompts a critical look at these spaces, combining queer and feminist theory with the horror and terror of the Gothic. Transgothic spaces such as Victor’s laboratory and the Creature’s hovel at the De Laceys harbor possibilities for transgression, transformation, and transcendence. I explore how these transgothic spaces represent a disengagement from conventional notions of gender in a restrictive social sphere, and how the “monster” as observed in both Victor and the Creature is a transgothic figure in and of itself. Victor’s dark and sterile laboratory and the Creature’s small and dirty hovel at the De Laceys exist beyond the boundaries of the novel, and they are spaces within which Shelley can twist narrative structure while her characters explore identity and their own perceived monstrosity.
Devan Schnecker (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. Her areas of interest include Romantic and Victorian literature, and she is particularly interested in the portrayal and exploration of gender and sexuality in such literature, along with related questions regarding space, place, and embodiment.
Elizabeth Kurtzman, "‘Til Death Do Us Part: The Preoccupation with Matrimony in Vampire Tales"
The vampire has captured the fevered imaginations of people all over the world for hundreds of years, appearing in nightmarish tales of death, terror, and exsanguination, and yet has also been featured in many bodice-ripping tales of romance and sexuality. More than any other gothic character or monster, the vampire has come to embody the forbidden and the erotic, a cautionary tale of giving into passion and suffering the consequences. Though the vampire’s origins are more zombie than debonair gentleman, much of the modern understanding of the figure is born from popular stage adaptations that eschewed the more unpleasant aspects of the vampire mythology in order to attract audiences—figuratively and literally. In particular, J. R. Planche’s 1820 play The Vampyre: or The Bride of the Isles and Hamilton Deane’s 1927 adaptation of Dracula recast the vampire as a charming figure who was at home in the respectable parlors of the upper class, making him not only more appealing as a character, but a more insidious threat to domestic life and to the heteronormative expectations of society. In this essay, I will consider how Deane and Planche’s plays serve as dark reflections of the marriage plot, illuminating the misogyny and imbalances of power just under the genteel surface, in order to ask whether the vampire is husband material or just meant for a bloody good time.
Elizabeth Kurtzman is a doctoral student in the Theatre and Performing Arts department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her studies focus on the performances of fear, particularly in live horror events such as scare attractions, as well as the acting and embodiment of monsters and villains onstage and onscreen.
Jessica Pressman, “Our Mermaid Craze: Mermaid Horror”
We are in the midst of a mermaid craze. From literature to film, fashion to social media, mermaids are omnipresent. We can chart the reemergence of these ancient monsters to the mid-2000s, particularly around 2010, when they rise from the depths of our collective consciousness to adorn t-shirts, star in TV shows, and propel narratives of all kinds. Our mermaid craze is a signal in both senses of the word: an emergency alert and a medium for transmitting a message about our climate crisis and posthuman condition. Contemporary mermaid tales published in the last decade range widely across genres, readerships, media formats, and aesthetic purposes—from horror to erotic novels, children’s picture books to Young Adult novellas, web-based fan-fiction to digital literature. In this talk, I introduce mermaid horror as a meaningful subgenre and consider a specific subset of exemplary narratives from across media formats— including a television show, Siren (U.S., 2018-2020), and a novel, Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant (2017) — that each use mermaids to depict the horrific effects of global capitalism. Collectively, these mermaid tales reflect our culture’s most pressing anxieties and concerns— climate change, racial and social justice, science and algorithmic culture, and more— and illuminate the importance of taking seriously contemporary fiction and, yes, mermaid within it.
Jessica Pressman is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, where she co- founded (with Joanna Brooks) and and co-directed (with Pam Lach) SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative. She focuses primarily on 20th and 21st-century experimental literature and digital poetics. Her most recent book, Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age, was published with Columbia University Press in December 2020. She is currently at work on a passion project about 21st-century mermaid narratives.
Shannon Scott, “Dark Faeries in Horror Literature and Film”
You Are Not My Mother (2021) directed by Kate Dolan and The Hidden People (2016) written by Alison Littlewood utilize folk horror, specifically the phenomenon of faerie changelings, to explore issues of mental illness and domestic violence. The Hidden People is set in northern England but based on a real case in Tipperary, Ireland in 1895, where a husband burned his wife because he believed she was a faerie changeling. In You Are Not My Mother, the main protagonist, Char, is supposedly stolen by faeries when she was a baby. Her grandmother then forces the faeries to return the real Char by placing the changeling in a bonfire. The film takes up when Char is a teenager, and her mother disappears. Because her mother suffers from mental illness, everyone fears suicide, but instead she returns invigorated, healthy, changed. This time Char’s mother is the changeling, a false double that threatens the family. To bring back the real mother, the false one must be burned. Although one text is neo-Victorian horror literature and the other contemporary horror film, both rely on the folklore motif of the changeling to explore familial dysfunction and violence. These problems occur within families, but the behavior is also condoned by insular communities. In both texts, we are meant to doubt appearances, to wonder if a wicked changeling has indeed replaced a wife, a daughter, a mother; to question if this is a delusion or psychosis.
Shannon Scott is a Professor of English at several universities in the Twin Cities. She has contributed essays on wolves and werewolves to collections published by Manchester UP. In addition, Shannon has published short fiction in Nightscript, Coppice and Brake, Dark Hearts Anthology, Hawk & Cleaver, Oculus Sinister, Nightmare Magazine, Midnight Bites, and Water~Stone. She is co-editor of Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction, 1838-1896.
Panel H2
Monsters, Technology, and Precarious Humanity
Moderator: Michael Dylan Foster (UCD)
Panelists: Yasheng She, Brandon Callender, Ryan Fay, Adam Golub
Yasheng She, “Conjuring Precarity through the Sublime Bodies of Japanese Giant Monsters”
Evoking the sublime as an aesthetic condition and a political apparatus, this paper looks at the bodies of "Godzilla," "Mechagodzilla," and different giant monsters in the Japanese animated series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-1996) to understand how the legacy of WWII, namely the reconstruction of the modern Japan and the atomic bombings, influence the ways we understand nationhood, subjectivity, and trauma. The 1990s sees the end of Japan's miraculous economy with the bursting of the Japanese asset price bubble. Anne Allison argues that the stagnation of Japan's postwar miraculous economic recovery and the government's failure to address other social issues reminded the Japanese people of the similar precarity Japan faced after the Second World War. Allison defines the temporality of this modern precarity as "post-postwar" while others have claimed that Japan has been in a state of persistently postwar. The post/post-postwar Japanese popular media have conjured different iterations of precarity through various monstrous bodies - fictional giants who overwhelm the beholder's senses with their scale and power. This paper focuses on the globally recognizable creatures in Japanese media. Using Godzilla and Evangelion as examples, it will identify them as vehicles of Japanese post-postwar reflections on precarity, nuclear anxiety, and masculinity. This paper enacts the sublime to think about how these giant figures work against institutionalized memories and then will bring in the giant female figure in Evangelion and expand on how femininity works in this context.
Yasheng She (He/Him or They/Them) is a Ph.D.. Candidate at the UC Santa Cruz Film and Digital Media Department with a designated emphasis on Computational Media. Yasheng has published several articles and chapters in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections from the lens of postwar Japan, globalized media, gender, and race.
Brandon Callender, “In Space, No One: The Case for Black Life in the Expanded Alien Versus Predator Universe”
Like V. Castro’s revisionary novel Aliens: Vasquez (2022) or the indigenous centered predator film, Prey (2022), the four anthologies of short stories that comprise Tales from the Expanded Alien Verses Predator Universe (2017-2022) have helped to expand the franchise in more multiculturally affirming ways. By portraying marginalized characters heroically fighting predators, or fighting aliens alongside predators, they offer readers of color humanizing sites of identification that culturally root them in the franchise. Rather than tracing identification through these multicultural figures, however, this paper argues for the value that the alien holds for black artists who reject altogether the figure of the human in the franchise as a force simply colonizing the galaxy in their image. Instead of siding with the human, or the no less humanoid predator, the writers I study identify with the alien because of what its black body most represents: the fear of rape and rampant production and the desire for humans to enslave it. My argument is broken up into two parts. The first analyzes the importance of multicultural humanism in the extended Alien Verses Predator universe of films, comics, stories and novelizations, and the second examines how poets like Gloria Anzaldúa, Justin Phillip Reed and Evan J. Peterson have abandoned that humanism to take up, instead, the figure of the alien as a monstrous critique of white, colonial futurity. Such monstrous identifications not only depend upon how fittingly these two creatures allegorize racial fears, but also how they were both originally played by black actors.
Brandon Callender is an assistant professor of English at Brandeis University where he teaches black queer literatures and horror studies, including classes on “Blackness and Horror,” “The Ghosts of Race,” and “Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood.” He is completing his monograph, The Charge of the Other in Black Gay Men’s Literatures.
Ryan Fay, “Misogyny in Monsters and Machine Learning: From Elsa to M3GAN and Beyond”
Men—despite their inherent fear and inadequate understanding—have always sought to control the female body through force, manipulation, legislation, or technology. The idea of leveraging technology to control women has been around in horror and science-fiction films since The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), reappearing 50 years later in Weird Science (1985), and most recently in M3GAN (2022). The advertising for The Bride of Frankenstein revolved around the female monster’s appearance (“What will she look like?”), rather than her actions. Played by the lovely Elsa Lanchester, the Bride was an object of physical desire for both Victor Frankenstein and his monster, but she was not able to speak. Through this lack of clear communication, she reacts with clear emotional intelligence, refusing to be relegated to the role of a side character in a man’s story. Let us compare the Bride to M3GAN—a doll just as realistic in her interactions as she is uncanny in appearance—whose artificial intelligence and machine learning create her violent tendencies. M3GAN responds to teenage male violence in kind, and later rampages in reaction to a man trying to make money off her. Despite their differences, both the Bride and M3GAN gain their “monster” status in their rejection of misogynistic men. This paper will examine the role of misogyny in the Bride’s creation and M3GAN’s turn toward the monstrous, the importance of artificial emotional intelligence in machine learning, and misogyny’s influence on AI-based technology in reference to the recent deep fake discourse.
Ryan Fay is an education consultant with experience teach- ing high school and college. He is currently the editor-in-chief at Enfrightened Press, which is focused on publishing accessible horror academia
Adam Golub, “Seeking Doubles: Doppelgängers and the Digital Uncanny”
This presentation explores the figure of the doppelgänger in American digital culture. In the past decade, we have seen a renewed fascination with the doppelgänger as both a pop culture character and a kind of uncanny leisure pursuit, whereby we seek out our doubles online. This contemporary doppelgänger moment has been both playful and dark. We search for our stranger twins on the Internet, we watch as celebrity lookalikes and deepfakes go viral, we generate our own AI avatars, and we even play doppelgänger party games. Meanwhile, fictional stories about “second selves” abound in the popular culture, such as Us, Dual, Annihilation, the Paul Rudd comedy Living With Myself, Stephen King’s The Outsider, and Matthew Salesses’s novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. At the same time, there have been real-life instances of doppelgänger crimes, such as the German woman who killed her lookalike in an attempt to fake her own death, and the Russian woman living in New York who tried to poison her double with tainted cheesecake in order to steal her identity. How do we make sense of this current obsession with the second self? My presentation analyzes selected instances of digital doppelgänger culture, including the analog horror web series The Mandela Catalogue (2021) and the trend it inspired on TikTok, and the growth industry of apps and services that offer to help you find your “twin stranger.” I examine how these popular doppelgänger phenomena resonate with broader cultural anxieties about fragmented anxiety, technologies of duplication, and the divided body politic in the digital age.
Adam Golub is professor of American Studies at Cal State Fullerton, where he teaches courses on popular culture, mu- sic, monsters, and childhood. He is co-editor of Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us (McFar- land, 2017) and the author of numerous essays on topics including fandom, true crime, zombies, and 1950s film and literature. He is currently writing a book on the cultural his- tory of the doppelgänger.