Babel Clash

Leaving aside the wrong-headedness of my peers for a time on this whole mash-up business, though both Enge and Chris Roberson (in the comments to Enge’s post) raise some pseudo-convincing arguments), I’d like to move on and talk about the monsters that are so prevalent in today’s mashups (zombies and vampires) and the monsters that have currently fallen by the wayside.

Boris Karloff in The Mummy

It’s not a new idea that our monsters are metaphors for our collective fears. Giant mutated ants and Godzilla were the fears of a population addled by the Atomic Age. Frankenstein was a stand-in for the Victorian discomfort with science’s potential overthrow of religion. What’s interesting today is how we have addressed our new fears not by creating new monsters, but by re-inventing the existing ones. And that’s left a few of them stranded in the past.

Take zombies. Zombies are everywhere today and rightly so, for they are an excellent metaphor for several of our collective boogeymen (boogeymen, alas, also having fallen out of fashion). There’s one kind of zombie that is the collective of mindless drones that rises up and slowly consumes the populace. We have no shortage of armies of mindless drones to fear these days, whether they’re religious extremists (or communists, as was once the fear, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers), or just the press of mediocrity, the ineluctable surge of humanity that surrounds most of us on all sides, beaten into complacence and dullness by tedious jobs, mass media, knee-jerk ideology, you name it. We fear that those around us have lost their individuality; the person at the other end of the customer-service call is an automaton, parroting answers but expressing no genuine humanity whatsoever. The bland bank teller, the audience of American Idol. Everyone on the street is a stranger, faceless. It’s everywhere.

The other kind of zombie is our fear of disease and epidemic. 28 Days Later, The Omega Man (the new one), and The Walking Dead are all fine examples of this twist. In all of these it is the fear that some small bug somewhere, even if well-intentioned, is going to shred society, doing worse than kill us.

And beyond that, perhaps, zombies are just fun. You can beat the crap out of them with a guilt-free conscience; they’re a perfect foil upon which we can take our aggressions toward the very society that has spawned them. The hapless loser in Shaun of the Dead becomes a hero because he’s handy with a cricket bat in the cause of smashing in the skulls of the people who until recently were his unknown, bland neighbors.

Now, vampires. There was a time when vampires represented the fear of human depravity, the depths of human evil. The novel Dracula makes that pretty explicit. It’s all about sin and seduction, about crossing the boundaries of morality. With my scant knowledge of 19th century England, I can see why this might have been a serious conern. The repression endemic to that world led to its expression in all sorts of nasty ways, culminating in two fine monstrous examples of repression exploding in violence: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the bugaboo that Jack the Ripper came to become in the popular consciousness, whatever his true motives might have been.

Keifer Sutherland and the Coreys!

Today’s vampires, however, have shed those Victorian trappings. The current vampire may have his basis in history, but he is thoroughly modern. The first example of this that springs to mind (though I’m sure not the first to be penned) is the movie The Lost Boys which is an extraordinarily clever film that’s partially ruined by its desire to be cool. And yet that is also its strength. The vampires in Lost Boys don’t represent the adult longing to be free of morality; they represent an adolescent society’s inability to become adults in the first place. The title alludes to a very different kind of abomination: the children in Neverland who don’t want to ever hit puberty; Edwardian fears of shedding childhood and becoming repressed adults. These new vampires, however, have embraced adolescence and never want to give it up. Current popular culture is littered with man-children, adult adolescents, the worship of youth. Would Spencer Tracy have be cast in the male lead of a romantic comedy today?

But I’m getting off on a tangent. Vampires have morphed into figures of romance, unapologetic fantasy mates, and cool kids. Look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer: its monsters aren’t ancient enemies, they’re hip and current. Spike and Angel openly mock the old-fashioned bad guys they encounter. And let’s not even start on Ann Rice or her 21st century descendant, Twilight. You get the idea.

So a by-product of is that some of our favorite monsters just don’t apply anymore. I’m thinking specifically of mummies and ghosts and haunted houses. The monstrousness of these critters is, I think, borne from a fear of the old and of death. In a bygone age, the old and dead were more conspicuous by far. We’ve channeled our fear of aging into a positive embrace of youth and we ignore death as often as possible. That is a modern idea, though. In the days when mummies and ghosts could really scare the crap out of people, it was because they were symbols of things visible. Haunted houses sat on hilltops, their frightening pasts steeped in rumors of death and murder. These days all of those houses have been torn down and replaced with apartment complexes. (See Poltergeist for the watershed moment when that type of fear made its last dying gasp against the onslaught of progress.) The landscapes of ghost stories are replete with tumble-down moss-covered manses, old families steeped in guilt and perversity, and old money that’s able to hide it.No Poe or Lovecraft story was ever set in a sparkling new tract home. So if the ghosts of the past no longer haunt our darkest fears it’s because we’ve done so much to eliminate any evidence of them around us.

And mummies. Oh, how I loved mummy stories when I was a kid. The notion of something dark and ancient and dead stirring beneath the earth, waiting to be uncovered by the well-intentioned historian. Raiders of the Lost Ark has some of the trim of a mummy story. The archaeologist unearths something ancient whose wrath forms the climax of the tale. The mummy is the shambling horror of the impossibly far past, the suspicion that the ancient are not completely finished with the world. What an exciting time it must have been when Egyptian tombs were springing open at the touch of European plunderers! All that past, just waiting to be dredged out and pondered and creeped out by.

But our age, at least popular culture’s vision of our age, has no use for the past. I’m sure you could dredge up a statistic that tells you how eight out of ten children couldn’t tell you where Egypt is on a map, or where the Pyramids are located, or what embalming is.

But I’m not going to go out as a fuddy-duddy here. Things continue on apace and old horrors are replaced by new, or reinterpreted fresh with every generation. I loved Buffy. I thrilled to Shaun of the Dead. I like where things are, and I have no doubt that the writers of this generation and the next will take the pulse of their own times and find monsters to suit.

What we might hope is that in time the crumbling urban sprawl will give rise to its own ghosts (I’ve seen a bit of this in Japanese horror films of the past few years), that a future age of cremators and green-buryers will stumble across our own graves and be mesmerized and horrified by them. We can pray that some hideous new disaster, unforeseen, will teach us to fear puppies or cowboys or the Internet.

We can always hope.

Edit: I forgot to mention the changing attitude toward the immortality of vampires. In the old days, it was about not dying: the vampires were old man, cheating death. For the new vampires, it’s about not getting old. Living forever is just a perk.

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