7. Monster Movies: A Sexual Theory

WALTER EVANS

AS HAS ever been the case, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the wolf man, King Kong and their peers remain shrouded in mystery. Why do they continue to live? Why do American adolescents—of all ages—keep Dracula and his companion monsters of the thirties and early forties alive, yet largely ignore much better formula movies of the same period, westerns (Stagecoach), gangster movies (Little Caesar, Public Enemy), and others? What is the monster formula’s “secret of life”? Is this yet another of the things which “man was not meant to know”?

The formula has inspired a plethora of imaginative theories which attempt to explain the enduring popularity of these movies: contemporary social prosperity and order¹; political decay²; the classic American compulsion “to translate and revalue the inherited burden of European culture”³; the public’s need for “an acceptance of the natural order of things and an affirmation of man’s ability to cope with and even prevail over the evil of life which he can never understand”⁴; the “ambiguities of repulsion and curiosity” regarding “what happens to flesh, . . . the fate of being a body”⁵; our “fear of the nonhuman”⁶; the social consequences of “deviance from the norm,” particularly physical deviance⁷; and “mankind’s hereditary fear of the dark.”⁸

Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, King Kong, and others have been fruitfully approached as cultural symbols, but their power and appeal are finally much more fundamental than class or political consciousness, more basic than abstractions of revolt against societal restrictions, yet more specifically concerned with certain fundamental and identifiable features of human experience than such terms as darkness and evil seem to suggest. A film like Return of the Vampire may make timely allusions to the Nazi menace, but the classic horror movies deemphasize such nonessential material. Their power, it seems to me, is finally and essentially related to that dark fountainhead which psychically moves those masses in the American film and TV audiences who desperately struggle with the most universal and in many ways the most horrible of personal trials : the sexual traumas of adolescence. Sex has a central role in many popular formulas (Andrew Sarris has said, “There are no nonerotic genres any more”⁹), but sexuality in horror movies is uniquely tailored to the psyches of troubled adolescents, whatever their age.

Adolescents find themselves trapped in an unwilled change from a comparatively comprehensible and secure childhood to some mysterious new state which they do not understand, cannot control, and have some reason to fear. Mysterious feelings and urges begin to develop and they find themselves strangely fascinated with disturbing new physical characteristics—emerging hair, budding breasts, and others—which, given the forbidding texture of the X-rated American mentality, they associate with mystery, darkness, secrecy, and evil. Similarly, stirred from a childishly perfect state of nature King Kong is forced into danger by his desire for a beautiful young woman, a dark desire which, like the ape himself, must finally be destroyed by a hostile civilization. Also, stirred from innocence and purity (see the wolf man poem which appears below) by the full moon which has variously symbolized chastity, change, and romance for millennia, the wolf man guiltily wakes to the mystery of horrible alterations in his body, his mind, and his physical desires—alterations which are completely at odds with the formal strictures of his society. The mysterious, horrible, physical and psychological change is equally a feature of Frankenstein’s monster, of Dracula’s victims, the Mummy and his bride, and countless other standard monster movie characters.

The key to monster movies and the adolescents who understandably dote upon them is the theme of horrible and mysterious psychological and physical change; the most important of them is the monstrous transformation which is directly associated with secondary sexual characteristics and with the onset of aggressive erotic behavior. The wolf man, for example, sprouts a heavy coat of hair, can hardly be contained within his clothing. Comparatively innocent and asexual females become, after contact with a vampire (his kiss redly marked on their necks) or werewolf (as in Cry of the Werewolf), sexy, aggressive, seductive—literally female “vamps” and “wolves.”

The transformation is less obvious, and perhaps for this reason more powerful, in King Kong (1933). Kong himself is safe while hidden deep in the prehistoric depths of Skull Island, but an unappeasable sexual desire (made explicit in the cuts restored in the film’s most recent release) turns him into an enemy of civilization until, trapped on the world’s hugest phallic symbol, he is destroyed. The psychological transformation of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) is much more subtle. While alone immediately after exchanging vows of love with a tough sailor she closes her eyes and, as in a dream vision, above her appears the hideously savage face of a black native who takes possession of her in preparation for the riotous wedding to the great hairy ape. Significantly, only when civilization destroys the fearful, grossly physical beast is she finally able to marry the newly tuxedoed sailor.

As adolescence is defined as “developing from childhood to maturity” so the transformation is cinematically defined as movement from a state of innocence and purity associated with whiteness and clarity to darkness and obscurity associated with evil and threatened physical aggression. In the words of The Wolf Man’s gypsy:

Even a man who is pure at heart

And says his prayers by night

May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms

And the moon is full and bright.

The monsters are generally sympathetic, in large part because, as remarked earlier, they themselves suffer the change as unwilling victims, all peace destroyed by the horrible and psychological alterations thrust upon them. Even Dracula, in a rare moment of self-revelation, is driven to comment: “To die, to be really dead. That must be glorious. . . . There are far worse things awaiting man, than death.” Much suffering arises from the monster’s overwhelming sense of alienation; totally an outcast, he painfully embodies the adolescent’s nightmare of being hated and hunted by the society which he so desperately wishes to join.

Various aspects of the monster’s attack are clearly sexual. The monster invariably prefers to attack individuals of the opposite sex, to attack them at night, and to attack them in their beds. The attack itself is specifically physical; Dracula, for instance, must be in immediate bodily contact with his victim to effect his perverted kiss; Frankenstein’s monster, the wolf man, the Mummy, King Kong, have no weapons but their bodies. The aspect of the attack most disturbing to the monster, and perhaps most clearly sexual, is the choice of victim: “The werewolf instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best" (Dr. Yogami in The Werewolf of London). Draculas Mina Seward must attack her fiancé, John. The Mummy must physically possess the body of the woman in whom his spiritual bride has been reincarnated. Even more disturbing are the random threats to children scattered throughout the formula, more disturbing largely because the attacks are so perversely sexual and addressed to beings themselves soon destined for adolescence.

The effects of the attack may be directly related to adolescent sexual experimentation. The aggressor is riddled with shame, guilt, and anguish; the victim, once initiated, is generally transformed into another aggressor. Regaining innocence before death seems, in the best films, almost as inconceivable as retrieving virginity. It is interesting, and perhaps significant, that the taint of vampirism and lycanthropy has an aura of sin and shame not unlike that of VD. The good doctor who traces the taint, communicable only through direct physical contact, back to the original carrier is not unlike a physician fighting VD.

Many formulaic elements of the monster movies have affinities with two central features of adolescent sexuality—masturbation and menstruation. From time immemorial underground lore has asserted that masturbation leads to feeblemindedness or mental derangement: the monster’s transformation is generally associated with madness; scientists are generally secretive recluses whose private experiments on the human body have driven them mad. Masturbation is also widely (and, of course, fallaciously) associated with “weakness of the spine,’”¹⁰a fact which helps explain not only Fritz of Frankenstein but the army of feebleminded hunchbacks which pervades the formula. The wolf men, and sometimes Dracula, are identifiable (as, according to underground lore, masturbating boys may be identified) by hairy palms.

Ernest Jones explains the vampire myth largely as a reflection of a mysterious physical and psychological development which startles many adolescents—nocturnal emissions: “A nightly visit from a beautiful or frightful being, who first exhausts the sleeper with passionate embraces and then withdraws from him a vital fluid: all this can point only to a natural and common process, namely to nocturnal emissions accompanied with dreams of a more or less erotic nature. In the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen . . .” And the vampire’s bloodletting of women who suddenly enter into full sexuality, the werewolf’s bloody attacks—which occur regularly every month—are certainly related to the menstrual cycle which suddenly and mysteriously commands the body of every adolescent girl.

Monster movies characteristically involve another highly significant feature which may initially seem irrelevant to the theme of sexual change: the faintly philosophical struggle between reason and the darker emotional truths. Gypsies, superstitious peasants, and others associated with the imagination eternally triumph over smugly conventional rationalists who ignorantly deny the possible existence of walking mummies, stalking vampires, and bloodthirsty werewolves. The audience clearly sympathizes with those who realize the limits of reason, of convention, of security; for the adolescent’s experiences with irrational desires, fears, urges which are incomprehensible yet clearly stronger than the barriers erected by reason or by society, are deeper and more painful than adults are likely to remember. Stubborn reason vainly struggles to deny adolescents’ most private experiences, mysterious and dynamic conflicts between normal and abnormal, good and evil, known and unknown.

Two of the most important features normally associated with monster movies are the closely related searches for the “secret of life" and “that which man was not meant to know.” Monster movies unconsciously exploit the fact that most adolescents already know the “secret of life,” which is, indeed, the “forbidden knowledge” of sex. The driving need to master the “forbidden knowledge” of “the secret of life,” a need which seems to increase in importance as the wedding day approaches, is closely related to a major theme of monster movies: marriage.

For the adolescent audience the marriage which looms just beyond the last reel of the finer monster movies is much more than a mindless cliché wrap-up. As the monster’s death necessarily precedes marriage and a happy ending, so the adolescent realizes that a kind of peace is to be obtained only with a second transformation. Only marriage can free Henry Frankenstein from his perverted compulsion for private experimentation on the human body; only marriage can save Mina Harker after her dalliance with the count. Only upon the death of adolescence, the mysterious madness which has possessed them, can they enter into a mature state where sexuality is tamed and sanctified by marriage.

Psychiatrist Anthony Storr has discussed a precursor of monster movies, fairy tales, in a similar context:

Why is it that the stories which children enjoy are so often full of horrors? We know that from the very beginning of life the child possesses an inner world of fantasy and the fantasies of the child mind are by no means the pretty stories with which the prolific Miss Blyton regales us. They are both richer and more primitive, and the driving forces behind them are those of sexuality and the aggressive urge to power: the forces which ultimately determine the emergence of the individual as a separate entity. For, in the long process of development, the child has two main tasks to perform if he is to reach maturity. He has to prove his strength, and he has to win a mate; and in order to do this he has to overcome the obstacles of his infantile dependency upon, and his infantile erotic attachment to, his parents. . . . The typical fairy story ends with the winning of the princess just as the typical Victorian novel ends with the marriage. It is only at this point that adult sexuality begins. . . . It is not surprising that fairy stories should be both erotic and violent, or that they should appeal so powerfully to children. For the archetypal themes with which they deal mirror the contents of the childish psyche; and the same unconscious source gives origin to both the fairy tale and the fantasy life of the child.¹¹

The marriage theme, and the complex interrelationship of various other formulaic elements, may perhaps be best approached through a close analysis of two seminal classics, Frankenstein and Dracula.

Two events dominate the movie Frankenstein (1931), creation of the monster and celebration of the marriage of Henry Frankenstein and his fiancée Elizabeth. The fact that the first endangers the second provides most of the conflict throughout the movie, conflict much richer and more powerful, perhaps even profound, when the key thematic relationship between the two is made clear: creation of life. As Frankenstein’s perverse nightly experiments on the monstrous body hidden beneath the sheets are centered on the creation of life, so is the marriage, as the old Baron twice makes clear in a toast (once immediately after the monster struggles out of the old mill and begins wandering toward an incredible meeting with Henry’s fiancée Elizabeth; again, after the monster is destroyed, in the last speech of the film): “Here’s to a son to the House of Frankenstein!” (The line is followed by a close-up of a painfully embarrassed Henry Frankenstein.)

Frankenstein’s fatuous father, whose naive declarations are often frighteningly prescient (he predicts the dancing peasants will soon be fighting; on seeing a torch in the old mill he asks if Henry is trying to burn it down), declares, when hearing of the extent to which his son’s experiments are taking precedence over his fiancée: “I understand perfectly well. Must be another woman. Pretty sort of experiments they must be.” Later, after receiving the burgomaster’s beaming report on the village’s preparations for celebration of the marriage, he again associates his son’s experiments with forbidden sexuality: “There is another woman. And I’m going to find her!”

There is, of course, no other woman. The movie’s horror is fundamentally based on the fact that the monster’s life has come without benefit of a mother’s womb. At one point Frankenstein madly and pointedly gloats over his solitary, specifically manual, achievements: “the brain of a dead man, ready to live again in a body I made with my own hands, my own hands!”

Significantly, a troubled search for the “secret of life” is what keeps Henry Frankenstein separated from his fiancée; it literally proves impossible for Henry to provide for “a son to the House of Frankenstein” before he has discovered the “secret of life.” Having learned the “secret of life,” he ironically discovers that its embodiment is a frightening monster horrible enough to threaten “normal” relations between himself and Elizabeth. Henry’s attempts to lock the monster deep in the mill’s nether regions are finally thwarted, and, in a wholly irrational and dramatically inexplicable (yet psychologically apt and profound) scene, the monster—a grotesque embodiment of Frankenstein’s newly discovered sexuality— begins to move threateningly toward the innocent bride who is bedecked in the purest of white, then quite as irrationally, it withdraws. On his return Henry promises his wildly distracted fiancée that there will be no wedding “while this horrible creation of mine is still alive.”

Significantly, the monster himself is pitifully sympathetic, suffering as adolescents believe only they can suffer, from unattractive physical appearance, bodies they don’t understand, repulsed attempts at love, general misunderstanding. Though endowed by his single antagonistic parent with a “criminal brain,” the monster is clearly guilty of little but ugliness and ignorance, and is by any reckoning less culpable than the normal human beings surrounding him. He does not so much murder Fritz as attempt to defend himself against completely unwarranted torchings and beatings; he kills Dr. Valdeman only after that worthy believes he has “painlessly destroyed” the monster (a euphemism for murder) and as the doctor is preparing to dissect him; the homicide which propels his destruction, the drowning of the little girl, is certainly the result of clumsiness and ignorance. She had taught him to sail flowers on the lake and, flowers failing, in a visual metaphor worthy of an Elizabethan courtier, the monster in his ignorant joy had certainly meant only for the girl, the only being who had ever shown him not only love, but even affection, to sail on the lake as had the flowers. His joyful lurch toward her after having sailed his flower is, beyond all doubt, the most pathetic and poignant lurch in the history of film.

The monster is, of course, finally pitilessly destroyed, and Henry is only ready for marriage when his own body is horribly battered and weakened, when he is transformed from the vigorous, courageous, inspired hero he represented early in the film to an enervated figure approaching the impotent fatuity of his father and grandfather (there is plenty of fine wine for the wedding feast, Frankenstein’s grandmother would never allow grandfather to drink any), prepared to renounce abnormal life as potent as the monster in favor of creating a more normal “son to the House of Frankenstein.”

The message is clear. In order to lead a normal, healthy life, Henry Frankenstein must—and can—give up dangerous private experiments on the human body in dark rooms hidden away from family and friends. He must learn to deal safely and normally with the “secret of life,” however revolting, however evil, however it might seem to frighten and actually threaten pure, virgin womanhood; only then, in the enervated bosom of normality, is it possible to marry and to produce an acceptable “son to the House of Frankenstein.”

Dracula’s much more mature approach to womankind is clearly aimed at psyches which have overcome Henry Frankenstein’s debilitating problem.Dracula, obviously enough, is a seduction fantasy vitally concerned with the conditions and consequences of premarital indulgence in forbidden physical relations with attractive members of the opposite sex.

Of all the movie monsters Dracula seems to be the most attractive to women, and his appeal is not difficult to understand, for he embodies the chief characteristics of the standard Gothic hero; tall, dark, handsome, titled, wealthy, cultured, attentive, mannered, with an air of command, an aura of sin and secret suffering; perhaps most important of all he is invariably impeccably dressed. With such a seductive and eligible male around it is certainly no wonder that somewhere in the translation from novel to film Dr. Seward has become Mina’s father and thus leaves Lucy, who also lost the two other suitors Bram Stoker allowed her, free to accept the Count’s attentions. Certainly any woman can sympathize with Lucy’s swift infatuation (“Laugh all you like, I think he’s fascinating”) and Mina’s easy acceptance of Dracula as her friend’s suitor (”Countess, I’ll leave you to your count, and your ruined abbey”).

Having left three wives behind in Transylvania, Dracula is obviously not one to be sated with his second English conquest (the first was an innocent flower girl, ravaged immediately before he meets Lucy and Mina), and he proceeds to seduce Mina, working a change in her which does not go unnoticed, or unappreciated, by her innocent fiancé: “Mina, you’re so—like a changed girl. So wonderful—” Mina agrees that indeed she is changed, and, on the romantic terrace, alone with her fiancé beneath the moon and stars, begins, one is certain, the first physical aggression of their courtship. John is suitably impressed. “I’m so glad to see you like this!" Discovered and exposed by Professor Van Helsing, Mina can only admit that (having had relations with Dracula and thus become a Vamp) she has, indeed, suffered the proverbial fate worse than death, and shamefully alert her innocent, naive fiancé: “John, you must go away from me.”

Only when John and his older, respected helpmate foil the horrible mock elopement—Dracula and Mina are rushing to the abbey, preparing to “sleep,” he even carries her limp body across the abbey’s threshold—only when the castrating stake destroys the seducer and with him the maid’s dishonor, is Mina free to return to the honest, innocent, suitor who will accept her past, marry her in the public light of day, and make an honest woman of her.

Lucy, who has no selfless suitor to forgive her, marry her, and make an honest woman of her, is much less successful. When last seen she has become a child molester, a woman of the night who exchanges chocolate for horrible initiations.

The thematic importance of innocent victims turned monster, like Lucy and Mina, Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, King Kong, the wolf man and others, points directly to one of the most commonly observed and perhaps least understood phenomena of monster movies, one which has been repeatedly noted in this paper: in those classics which are best loved and closest to true art the audience clearly identifies with the monster. Child, adult, or adolescent, in disembodied sympathetic fascination, we all watch the first Karloff monster who stumbles with adolescent clumsiness, who suffers the savage misunderstanding and rejection of both society and his creator Henry Frankenstein, and whose fumbling and innocent attempts at love with the little girl by the lakeside turn to terrible, bitter, and mysterious tragedy.

Clearly the monster offers the sexually confused adolescent a sympathetic, and at best a tragic, imitation of his life by representing a mysterious and irreversible change which forever isolates him from what he identifies as normality, security, and goodness, a change thrusting him into a world he does not understand, torturing him with desires he cannot satisfy or even admit, a world in which dark psychological and strange physical changes seem to conspire with society to destroy him.