Interdisciplinary Essays on Monsters and the Monstrous

Since the rise of rationalism (Bond, 1935) the imagination has often been considered too subjective, and at times regarded with scholarly skepticism (Burke, 2008). Yet, imagination seems to provide basic psychological functions for the human intellect and our understanding particularly of large problems (Hillman, 1975), (Winnicott, 1971). More than the mere ‘fancy’ criticized by Dr Johnson (Havens, 1943), the imagination serves both speculative and interpretive functions, displaying distinct use of cerebral imagery to solve complex environmental and interpersonal challenges. Yorke (2013) argues that humans experience the world dialectically, interpreting everything as cause and effect. Imagination plays a vital role in these universal narratives, shaping our cultural heritage, expression and experience (Zittoun & Gläveanu, 2018). Our oldest tales feature monsters, creatures who are often more interesting and memorable than the heroes who fight them. Halberstam (1995) theorises that monsters are meaning machines. Monsters serve an admonitionary role, and their transgressive nature defines them while displaying a distinct visuality. Like imagination, monsters enable us to analyse and approach difficult topics in innovative ways.

H. P. Lovecraft is one of the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century (King, 1985). Imagination, the visual and the monstrous find a unique balance in his works. Using Lovecraft's copious correspondence, his drawings and his 1927 short story The Call of Cthulhu as a lens, the relationships between imagination, the visual and the monstrous are examined. These postulate an underlying mutual interdependence between the normative and the monstrous and suggest Lovecraft's imaginative use of the visual and monstrous to transgress the bounds of conventional epistemologies and experiences, thereby displacing the anthropocentric focus of conventional narratives.

The first season of HBO's Lovecraft Country is based on Matt Ruff's 2016 novel and explores the horrifying world of H.P. Lovecraft and the very real Jim Crow-era racism that plagued the United States in the 1950s. The series, developed by Misha Green and produced by Jordan Peele, places Black protagonists at the centre of a Lovecraftian horror story. The Black characters have to face shoggoths, grand wizards and magic but they also have to deal with and escape very realistic horror, in the form of racist police violence and white supremacy. By bringing the Black characters into the centre – often the metaphorical villains of Lovecraft's stories – the series allows for a new layer of meaning to Lovecraft's fear of the other. Atticus, Leticia, Uncle George, Hippolyta and the rest of the cast are struggling to escape the everyday real and supernatural manifestations of racism. Their struggle can be seen as a reflection of the actual struggle of the Black communities today, who are trying to liberate themselves from the shackles of oppression and systemic racism once and for all, so all people regardless of the colour of their skin, gender, race and ethnicity can finally be free. Lovecraft Country can be read as a symbolic yet crucial contemporary representation of this struggle for freedom. The series was created before George Floyd's and Breonna Taylor's murders, but it came after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile and Sandra Bland. Once the viewers search deeper and look past the dark mansions, the wicked wizards and the shoggoth monsters, they can understand that the supernatural and fictional land of Lovecraft Country is not a distant place after all.

The front page of the Toronto Sun displayed an image of Karla Homolka bruised and battered and read, ‘Bernardo Did This to Karla: Crown’. In 1993, Karla Homolka entered into a plea deal in exchange for the testimony against her then-husband Paul Bernardo. Though Homolka pled guilty to two counts of manslaughter, Canadian media outlets painted Homolka as a subservient and battered woman fearful of the abusive Bernardo's reprisal. Then, during Bernardo's trial, rumoured videotapes finally surfaced that exposed Homolka's seemingly wilful role in the gruesome murders of the young girls Kristen French, Leslie Mahaffy, and her sister Tammy Homolka. Although Tammy Homolka's death had been deemed accidental, her body was exhumed, and autopsy reports found lethal traces of sedative drugs in her system. While sedated, both Bernardo and Homolka raped her as she choked and died on her own vomit. After these videotapes surfaced, media representations shifted drastically – referring to Homolka's plea deal as ‘the deal with the devil’.

This chapter outlines the crimes committed by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka – also known as the Barbie and Ken Killers. Furthermore, it employs a qualitative literature review to document the evolution in the media representations of Homolka and exposes the media's role in the creation of this ‘monstrous’ woman in Canadian history. As this chapter outlines the representational shift of Homolka in the media, it deconstructs the hegemonic notions of proper femininity that often characterise women as deviant. Moreover, from a social constructivist lens, the brutality of Homolka's crimes are considered and examined in the context of the normative ideologies surrounding ideal womanhood and sexuality. I will argue that by dismantling these socially constructed ideologies, the significance of Homolka's whiteness also becomes apparent. As Homolka seems to deviate from her whiteness, media depictions illustrate an incitement of hysteria. Thus, this article questions the validity of the media representations that once depicted Homolka as ‘the girl next door’ – who was acting in accordance with her whiteness – but also inevitably paint her as the ‘devil’.

Monsters, from ghouls and zombies to shoggoths and Cthulhu, have always fascinated humans and have a prominent presence in cultural production. This is made clear by how much people enjoy Halloween events and dressing up as their favourite monster or the most recent trend of horror themed escape rooms, that include haunted houses, a zombie apocalypse or Lovecraftian monsters. Monstrous creatures represent the fears and desires of society and often embody the allure of danger, transgression and power. Monsters have long been used to construct certain images of the different/unconventional and thus represent anything diverse as the Other. Monsters, however, can be employed to invert or even overturn this relationship by empowering the Other and thus provide us with a more critical view on society in regard to our values, fears and attitudes. The stories and folklore about monsters and the monstrous that incite fear and remind us to always check under our beds before we sleep have also found their way into our everyday lives. Within the mainstream media, criminality is indicative of moral corruption, and is attributed with notions of monstrosity. These monsters do not have claws, instead, they are unpredictable, different and deviate from social and cultural norms. Like the mythical creatures in folklore, monstrosity in its human form reminds us to fear the future, the unknown, Others and society. The monstrous is centrally defined by its unfixedness, its resistance to conformity or to convenient schematic identification. It is somatically and intellectually uneasy, a restless disturbing embodied thought that unsettles, and whose greatest value to us is its very indeterminacy. This chapter illustrates the shifting shapes of the monstrous, their makers, and offers insight about what we can learn from studying these cautionary noetic chimeras. Drawing on the diversity of our academic backgrounds, ideological perspectives and the research from our individual chapters, we address the contemporary narrative of the figure of the monster. Rather than an essay style examination, our chapter explores this narrative through a question and answer format. The flexibility of this format allows readers an intimate glimpse into the ways in which the monstrous can be conceptualised and understood in various frameworks.

In Western Culture, feminist campaigns have acted as a catalyst behind major societal changes regarding women's rights. Throughout history, feminism has encompassed a range of social and political movements aiming to establish and define equality of the sexes in societies where the male point of view is prioritised, and injustices occur towards women, solely because of their gender. This inequality in turn reinforces harmful gender stereotypes, roles and dynamics. Although this advocacy primarily focuses on women's rights, many feminists argue for the inclusion of men's liberation as men are also harmed by the perpetuation of traditional gender roles within themselves, which holds the power to harm women if these roles are broken.

Feminist efforts fight to change such marginalising constraints. However, this fight is far from over – especially in Ciudad Juàrez, a Mexican border city experiencing a femicidal crisis where women are being murdered solely because they are women. This is likely due to toxic machismo and marianismo reinforcing the women's lack of rights to body autonomy and free thought. This chapter analyses and examines the many potential contributing factors to these heinous acts such as drug trafficking, organised crime, the emergence of the maquila industry and sociocultural factors like gender roles, and how these factors result in women being othered and viewed as deviant to their society which is so deeply rooted in traditional Catholicism and the gender roles that often apply to those who practice within the area. This notion of deviance ostracises and demonises women who are simply trying to get by, labelling them as monsters in their own society solely for breaking traditional gender roles.

The competition reality television show Dragula (Boulet Brothers, 2016-present) features a parade of monsters from the horror canon. Each episode, queer drag artists present outfits based on the show's aesthetic tenants: horror, filth and glamour. Nearly every outfit presented by the show's contestants, dubbed ‘drag monsters’, features some element of monstrosity and many pay specific homage to monsters from horror cinema. In drawing the monster figure into the world of gender performance, Dragula showcases the vast queer possibility of the monster figure. Like queerness itself, these drag monsters prove monstrosity is fluid and need not by associated to any one specific gender; the monster figure provides a canvas on which these artists can move between both human and non-human and male and female. This chapter traces the show's horror lineage – most notably the text from which it queers its name, Bram Stroker's Dracula (1987), and Stephen King's Carrie (1974) as well as the alternative precedent set by the drag legend Divine. Its analysis demonstrates Dragula's creative power in reimaging gender beyond the binary of man/woman by way of the monster figure.

X-Men is a movie franchise spanning 11 films centered on monsters and mutants (Braidotti, 1996), that is, the superheroes that appeared in the Marvel comics (Lauren Shuler Donner, 2000–2017). The franchise includes a rich compendium of male and female characters. Characters from both gender categories are gifted with powers and enjoy a remarkable focus from the plot. However, there are fewer female characters than male, and the former's powers are mainly related to the mind, rather than physical strength. If it is possible to immediately criticise the above-mentioned male focus, or the unequal distribution of powers, at the same time it is impossible to deny that both gender categories – male and female – reintroduce the gender binary that structures everyday reality in our current society (Butler, 2015). Such binary is a structural part of the cisgender and heteronormative system, inside which human beings carry out their existence. For these reasons, X-Men was interpreted by many transgender movements as a possible monstrous reclamation because it confers visibility to those bodies which are outside the norm (Preciado, 2020b) and it includes them in the context of a possible recognition as part of the cultural imaginary. This analysis, therefore, glimpses a possible liberation from the epistemological and material violence of the cisgender norm. This chapter will focus on the way in which the X-Men saga isn't faithful to a revolutionarily monstrous possibility, but rather carries out, through an apparatus of capture (Deleuze & Guattari, 2009), the reenactment of cis- and heteronormativity. In fact, those mutant and monstrous bodies represented here can be part of a highly popular franchise because they are part of the cisgender and heterosexual norm (Wittig, 1992) and because they put their monstrosity not outside the devices of power (Foucault, 2015), but at their service.

What relation does the monster figure have to gender? It is widely accepted that monsters in television, cinema and literature commonly stand in for the Other, be that a social, political or racialised Other. To consider monsters and monstrosity through the lens of gender is to investigate the links between the monster figure and the Others that exist under the system of patriarchy – most notably women, gender-diverse people and queer folks. In this collective chapter, Francesca Lopez, Russ Martin and Chloe Olivo explore how the monster figure relates to gender via a conversation that traces the links between three individually written chapters – X-Men: The Normative System Disguised as Mutant, Dragula and the Expansive Queerness of the Drag Supermonster and Femicide on the Frontier: Analysing Motives Behind the Femicide Crisis in Ciudad Juàrez. Each of these chapters investigates social norms relating to gender and those who challenge or defy them. Ultimately, the authors argue, it is those whose gendered and sexual identities are not associated with social power that are made monstrous by the patriarchy. This conversation-based chapter considers both real-life situations in which real people are made monstrous and monsters from fiction films and reality television. Ultimately, the authors suggest that the monster figure can be powerful and transformative for those who exist on the margins of the patriarchy – though, as this chapter documents, such is not always the case.

It is easy to imagine some monstrous other embodying the unknown that is under one's bed, but hardly anyone imagines that the monster is the one tucking you into bed. The one you call mom. Departing from Cristina Santos's work, in this chapter, I will be examining the role of ‘pre-social’ news media (pre-Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) in depicting the ‘monstrous mother’, the mother who kills her own children. The television news medium holds large potential for the construction and maintenance of stagnant hegemonic values. Women, predominately mothers, continue to be characterised in media as nurturing, gentle and comforting. With a strategic absence of discourses surrounding the ‘monstrous mother’ in the early 2000 news media, it is important to consider the ways these mothers are constructed when these sweet caretakers turn into murderous villains. By examining the cases of Patsy Ramsey and Casey Anthony, I will be discussing how their stories were presented in the media as doubly monstrous, since they both committed crimes that contradict the expected role of a mother. Regardless of the time gap between these cases, ultimately, until ideas about women, women's bodies and women's roles change, women and mothers will continue to face constant scrutiny as media reflects current beliefs, ultimately allowing women and mothers to be equated with the monster.

Del Toro's adult fairy tales create their horror via a disruption in the familiarities of place and identity using a connection between a purposeful mise en scène and techniques of sound design world-building that he borrows from the long tradition of horror filmmaking. Though the discussion of the relation between image and sound in del Toro's films would (and do) fill a number of volumes and monographs, this chapter will focus on one particular technique long-employed by horror film sound designers, music supervisors and composers: extra-diegetic sound. Where diegetic sound is the audio that is part of the world of the film and non-diegetic sound its inverse, extra-diegesis points out that these bits of audio effectively collapse the world of the character with the world of the audience. Extra-diegetic audio is a diegetic audio effect (the source being clearly seen or pointed to in the visuals) that has been sweetened, enhanced or noticeably processed to include extra audio elements that are non-diegetic, making the whole of the audio both of the world of the film and simultaneously of the world of the audience. The audience notices and can clearly hear the extra enhancements, though in the stress and horror (which is the point) of the moment these distinctions may collapse and lead the audience to confuse the real with the pretend.