School of horrors

Hamline professors weigh in on the influx of monsters in literature and television.

By: Ashley Wirth-Petrik

Posted: 1/26/10

Vampires, zombies and werewolves have become ubiquitous figures in our popular culture and some think they serve to tell us about ourselves. Several Hamline professors gave their own ideas about the monster phenomenon.

Gender and Class
Associate Professor of English Michael Reynolds said he read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer and was most interested in adolescent females' relationships with Twilight.

"There is no more heavily-marketed and heavily-criticized group in the country than adolescents, and adolescent females are down at the bottom of that hierarchy. Young women readers are both the object of a tremendous amount of marketing and messages about how they ought to look and behave," Reynolds said.

Reynolds said he noticed how Twilight captures the social contradiction that 12-16 year old females should be both sexual and abstinent.

"Given that contradiction, is it surprising that a really smart pop fiction would exactly capture that contradiction and allow various readers to play around with how they engage with it," Reynolds said.

Philosophy and Women's Studies professor Nancy Holland wrote in an e-mail interview that current vampire stories have focused on redeeming the vampire.

An example she used was the relationship between Buffy and Angel in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which she said is an image of the 'lost soul' being saved by a 'good woman' and a popular one in our tradition.

Reynolds said vampires tend to be targeted at women and zombies are targeted at male "gore hounds." He said zombies represent the idea of marching consumption that destroys everything.

On the other hand, he said, vampires are about a controlled thirst, which is allegorical to desire. Vampires capture sexual desire and the desire for upward mobility.

Reynolds also said vampires represent the upper class while zombies represent the masses. He said vampires become the death-like monster that you want to be and zombies become the death-like monster you worry you might be.

Fears
Professor of Religion Timothy Polk said a monster's power to destroy its enemies is appealing to us because we all, at least internally, have enemies that we fear or know that we will never overcome.

He said the recession may have fueled the phenomenon's popularity and he thinks the enemies that we wish the monsters could harm would be the CEOs and the big banks.

Polk said both science and religion agree the world will end someday. He said we, as a culture, are obsessed with dying and these immortal monsters speak to our fear of dying.

Other professors agreed.

"We fear wild animals, other people, unknown forces. Clever people have created monsters to represent several of these fears in one kind of monster," Professor of Psychology Kim Guenther wrote in an e-mail interview.

The Other
Reynolds said monsters are symbolic vessels; you can make them mean anything because simplistic narratives bind them. He said we place our unattractive desires onto an "other" figure.

"[For example,] we are being told to consume by everything around us, so we create monsters who are all about consumption and then we destroy them," Reynolds said.

Assistant Professor of Religion and Social Justice Earl Schwartz said we are entertained by the idea that there is an untamed side of ourselves that we have suppressed and these monsters reflect a reengagement with that self.

"We are entertained by the possibility that we're more dangerous than everyday circumstances might suggest. In other words, they [the monsters] provide the opportunity to slip through the network of restraints and constraints that hold us to normalcy with no risk," Schwartz said.

Media Patterns
Associate Professor in Communication Studies and International Journalism Suda Ishida wrote in an e-mail interview that the reason why we seem to be preoccupied with these monsters is that the story lines used in these media products (violence, sex, romance and comedy) are very easy to replicate and are known to sell.

She said this strategy makes the mass media market lack diversity in media content.

"Teen culture currently dominates mass media market," Ishida wrote. "Once this generation of teens is bored of zombies and vampires, I predict that the media companies will find something else to recycle. But they sure will come back after a while. In short, zombies and vampires in popular media culture do live up to their mythical power. They never really die."