A Survey of Monsters-Part Sixteen

In Which We Reach the Present Day . . .

The 1950s were a decade of monsters, some supernatural, some science-fictional. Although science fiction boomed in that fabulous decade, supernatural monsters didn't exactly fade from view. After all, during the '50s, horror hosts and creature features came to television, monster magazines went into print by the dozens, and Hammer Films of Great Britain began producing its famous line of horror movies. The popularity of supernatural monsters continued in the 1960s with more movies and magazines, plus bubblegum cards, plastic models, Halloween costumes, glow-in-the-dark posters, and so on. Although monsters were no longer allowed in the comic books, kids of the '60s had to wait only until the early '70s before the Comics Code died and monsters lived yet again.

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I have an issue of American Heritage magazine from 1969 in which the author talked about the then-current taste for things nostalgic. Not nostalgic as in the American Revolution or the Civil War, two subjects seemingly worn out over the years, but for the popular culture of the 1920s through the 1940s. The word nostalgia refers to a kind of homesickness. I imagine that the editors, writers, and readers of American Heritage were then all of an age to look back upon their youth and the things of their youth with exquisite feelings of loss and remembrance.

At the time, The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century (1969) was in all the bookstores. Although it shortly became "the king of remainders," that oversized hardbound reprinting of a comic strip that began in 1929 was a kind of emblem of 1960s nostalgia. By the time Buck Rogers was published, Ace Books had been reprinting for more than a decade the authors of Golden Age of Science Fiction and before. In the mid '60s, Ballantine did the same with J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series, which became wildly popular, especially among youth and the counterculture. Thirty years after their deaths, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft were also reprinted. They, too, became very popular and have remained so to this day. Leo Margulies, owner of the Weird Tales property, got in on the act with four reprint editions, beginning with Weird Tales in 1964. Robert A.W. Lowndes made his own homage to "The Unique Magazine" with a series of titles, including Magazine of Horror (1963-1971) and Startling Mystery Stories (1966-1971). And of course Sam Moskowitz published four new issues to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Weird Tales in 1973-1974.

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My contention is that supernatural monsters are monsters of the past and of nostalgia. Put another way, nostalgia and the supernatural go hand in hand. That was as true with the first Gothic romance, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, as it was two centuries later with the revived Gothicism of the 1960s. I'm not sure when a nostalgia for the Gothic started. Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1939), and "The Birds" (1952), all by Daphne du Maurier, were in the Gothic mode, as were Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), and Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies of the same period. In any case, in 1966, Dark Shadows made its debut and a Gothic revival began in earnest.

The star of Dark Shadows was Jonathan Frid as the vampire Barnabas Collins, but in its five-year run, the show also told stories of ghosts, werewolves, witches, and man-made monsters. The writers of Dark Shadows also dipped into Gothic works of the past, including "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft. Barnabas Collins is from the eighteenth century, a time when Gothicism, which began as a kind of nostalgia, was new. Barnabas was of course nostalgic for his own time, and we, the viewers, joined him in his nostalgia, not only by watching the show, but also by wearing clothing and hairstyles inspired by Dark Shadows and the Regency Era (in the broadest sense of that term). I remember watching television and looking at magazines in the early '70s and noticing women's clothing and hair. I could not have known then that I was seeing something of a Gothic revival in women's fashions.

There were other trends in the 1960s and '70s, including witches, devil worship, and demonic possession. Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Mephisto Waltz (1971), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), and The Sentinel (1977) are among the most well-known movies in that trend. There were also plenty of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other assorted undead, demonic, and evil characters. They continue to today and may be as popular now as they have ever been.

Supernatural monsters are so familiar to us that we need not go into long lists of books or movies, or long explanations about their nature and origins, to know them and understand them. The point is that--despite the advent of science, rationalism, and the science-based monster--the supernatural monster persists. Maybe the supernatural monster has subsumed the science-based monster. In any case, I think the monster of the twenty-first century is a combination of the supernatural monster, with which we are so familiar for having known them for so long; the real-life monster, with its origins in the nineteenth century; and the science-fictional monster, which began with Frankenstein's monster (a Gothic creation), but is as current (no pun intended) as the science of today.

Next: A Return to the Monster of the Twenty-First Century

Copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Phyllis A. Whitney (1903-2008)

Author, Dancer, Editor, Teacher
Born September 9, 1903, Yokohama, Japan
Died February 8, 2008, Faber, Virginia

Phyllis Ayame ("Iris") Whitney was born on September 9, 1903, in Yokohama, Japan. Her father worked in an export house. Her mother, formerly married and a former actress, was the granddaughter of Donald MacLeod, a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo and a member of the Scottish Black Watch. Phyllis Whitney lived in Japan, China, and the Philippines until age fifteen. With the death of her father, she and her mother traveled to the United States. They lived in Berkeley, California, and San Antonio, Texas. When her mother died, Phyllis went to live with an aunt in Chicago. That's where she graduated high school (in 1924) and where she began her career as a writer. She sold stories to newspapers and pulp magazines, including All-Story Love Stories, Thrilling Love, and Weird Tales. During the 1940s, Phyllis Whitney served as a children's book editor at the Chicago Sun and Philadelphia Inquirer and taught writing courses at Northwestern University and New York University. Her first book for young people, A Place for Ann, was published in 1941. Her first adult suspense novel, Red Is for Murder, followed in 1943. Phyllis A. Whitney wrote dozens more books over the next half century. In the process, she won multiple awards, including the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best children's mystery of the year (1961, 1964), and lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America, Malice Domestic, and the Society of Midland Authors. Over the course of her long life, Phyllis lived in places all across the United States. An only child, she was married twice and had an only child. Every photograph I have seen of her shows a happy, smiling woman. "Work and wait and learn, and that train will come by," she advised beginning writers. "If you give up, you’ll never have a chance to climb aboard." When she was seventy-nine, Phyllis Whitney gave an interview in which she said, "I always told myself that when I get old I'll reread all my books, but I never seem to get old." Her last book, Amethyst Dreams, was published in 1997 when she was ninety-four years old. Phyllis A. Whitney died on February 8, 2008, in Faber, Virginia. She was 104 years young.

Phyllis A. Whitney's Story in Weird Tales

"The Silver Bullet" (Feb. 1935)

Further Reading

"Phyllis A. Whitney" at Wikipedia

Phyllis A. Whitney Website

Thunder Heights by Phyllis A. Whitney, originally published in 1960. This is a later edition, probably from the late 1960s or early '70s. One of my readers described Gothic novels as "girl meets house." Phyllis Whitney hated the label "Queen of the American Gothics," but there's the girl and there's the house. The Gothic formula goes back more than two centuries. The television show Dark Shadows, which begins with the girl traveling to her new place of employment in creaky old Collinwood, must have helped popularize the genre for a new generation of readers. We have all known simultaneous excitement and apprehension at traveling to a new place and beginning a new life. I believe that's part of the appeal of Gothic romance.

Phyllis A. Whitney (1903-2008), from The Junior Book of Authors.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Richard Matheson and Hell House

Last week I wrote about Dark Shadows, Star Trek, Richard Matheson's novel Hell House, and how fantasists use the material vs. the non-material in their storylines. In House of Dark Shadows (1970), Dan Curtis used a materialistic explanation for Barnabas Collins' vampirism. That was a neat and acceptable solution to the problem of the supernatural in an age of the merely natural. In Star Wars (1977), George Lucas implied that the Force, which holds the universe together, is non-material, and if not spiritual than at least mystical. We accepted that explanation without a word of reservation. Then, in the second Star Wars trilogy (1999-2005), Lucas reversed himself and explained the Force again as a merely material phenomenon. Lucas is a notorious tinkerer. (I'm not sure any of his tinkering has made an improvement on the original.) But we had already accepted his original explanation for the Force. We didn't need another explanation, especially a materialistic explanation. That's why I used the word disheartening in my comments the other day. I also used the word cynical. What I meant was that Lucas turned off his imagination and swallowed the materialist air of our times. He became a follower instead of a leader, that is, a leader in matters of taste, which is one of the roles of the artist. I suppose he thought he was being clever and scientific. His inspiration was obviously the existence of mitochondrial DNA within our own cells. But when he resorted to a high school biology textbook, he turned his back on the sense of awe and wonder we feel when we ponder the mysteries of the universe.

Material vs. non-material. Are they irreconcilable opposites? In his book Hell House (1970), Richard Matheson attempted an answer and created two characters to represent the material and the non-material approach to hauntings. Dr. Lionel Barrett, a scientist, believes that hauntings are merely physical or biological in nature. Florence Tanner, a spiritualist and medium, believes they are non-material and spiritual. The two become part of a four-person crew investigating the haunting at Hell House, "the Mount Everest of haunted houses." Barrett and Florence are immediately set against each other, mostly because of Barrett's dismissal of the supernatural. If you're planning to read the book, you might not want to read any further, although I won't give very much away. As it turns out, Matheson split the difference: the haunting of Hell House is both a material and a non-material phenomenon. A machine and a medium are both necessary to bring the haunting to an end.

In my research for the entry on Richard Matheson as an author for Weird Tales, I learned that he was a believer in paranormal or parapsychological phenomena. His knowledge of those fields comes through with ringing authenticity in Hell House. His catalogue of "Observed Psychic Phenomena at the Belasco House [Hell House]" runs for nearly a full page of dense type. The list is almost comic in its excess. (It reminds me of Major King Kong reading the contents of his survival kit in Dr. Strangelove.) If you know what half those words mean, you deserve a medal. Knowing that Matheson was a believer made me a little biased in my reading of Hell House. As readers, we willingly suspend our disbelief. Maybe the writer has an equal obligation to suspend his belief. Towards the end of the book, Matheson seems to speak through Dr. Barrett when Barrett calls parapsychology "science" and proceeds on a brief discourse in its defense.

I won't quibble. I enjoyed Hell House, despite its sensationalism and its attempts to shock the reader. (Like The Exorcist, Hell House uses sex as a shocker and sexual perversity or depravity as a representation of evil. Maybe there isn't any quicker way to get there, but I can think of more real and palpable evils. Any history of the twentieth century is full of examples.) Matheson's explanation of hauntings as simultaneously material and non-material phenomena is a perfectly acceptable one. In the end, we have two acceptable explanations--House of Dark Shadows and Hell House--and one unacceptable explanation--George Lucas' latter-day Star Wars.

Text copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Dark Shadows, Star Wars, and Richard Matheson

I have been away and still have much to do. I would like to acknowledge gifts received by email and to say thank you to the senders. It may be awhile yet before I write again.

I watched House of Dark Shadows tonight for the first time I think since I saw it as a child at the movie theater. (I should say since I saw most of it at the theater--part of the time I spent under my seat.) Watching the movie tonight brought back vivid memories of the last time I watched House of Dark Shadows. The scene at the old swimming pool where David Collins sees his dead cousin Carolyn stands out among them. It was and is a chilling scene. (Before moving on, I would just like to say how beautiful are the women of Dark Shadows, especially Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played the Gothic heroine Maggie Evans.)

I watched Dark Shadows the TV series as a child but don't remember it very well. In the movie, Doctor Julia Hoffman discovers that Barnabas Collins is suffering from a biological condition that causes his vampirism. He has some kind of cell infecting his blood. She attempts to cure him of the infection. I don't know if that also occurred in the show. In any case, what started out as a Gothic romance became science fiction of a sort--like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein now that I think about it. In House of Dark Shadows, the existence of the vampire, a creature of supernatural horror, is ultimately explained in material terms. I suppose it would have been an innovation to make the supernatural merely natural (though highly unusual) in Dark Shadows. The screenwriters must have been faced with the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century, namely, how do you present the supernatural monster of centuries past when supposedly sensible people no longer believe in the supernatural? The writers of House of Dark Shadows disposed of the problem pretty neatly.

Seven years after that movie was released, another movie showed up on the big screen, a movie that started out as one thing and more recently ended up as another. Despite attempts to classify it as science fiction, Star Wars (1977) is a fantasy, perhaps even a fairy tale. It may have the trappings of science fiction, or more accurately, space opera, but the story is underlain not by science but by a mystical force called--what else?--the Force. Of course the world and George Lucas were different in 1977 than they were in 1999 when the second trilogy got underway. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Force was no longer mystical. It was in fact material, more specifically, biological, as vampirism was in House of Dark Shadows. There is a big difference between those two developments however. In House of Dark Shadows, vampirism is made material in order to tell a story, a more or less positive development. In the second Star Wars trilogy, a largely dreary affair, the Force is made material, I sense, to reflect the materialist air of the twenty-first century. In other words, we simply can't have a supernatural force that "surrounds us, penetrates us, [and] binds the galaxy together." Believing in such a thing is, after all, unsophisticated--a display of ignorance and backwardness. I think George Lucas betrayed his own beliefs when he abandoned the spiritual and made the Force merely material. Maybe he was only reflecting the beliefs of his age.

Anyway, House of Dark Shadows has led me to Hell House, a novel by Richard Matheson set in the same year that House of Dark Shadows was released. I have had that book on the dresser waiting to be read for awhile. Both stories take place in a house in Maine. Both of course tell of supernatural events. I was moved to write this evening by something the author, Richard Matheson, wrote on the second page of the story: the man who initiates the investigation into Hell House is eighty-seven-year-old Rolf Rudolph Deutsch, "bald . . . skeletal" and on his deathbed. He wants to know if anything survives. I suspect the makers of Dark Shadows would say yes. George Lucas might have a different answer. The reason I took note of Rolf Rudolph Deutsch's age, however, was that Richard Matheson died only a month ago . . . at age eighty-seven.

P.S. (July 27, 2013): As everyone knows, Dan Curtis (1927-2006) was the creator and executive producer of Dark Shadows, which ran on ABC-TV from 1966 to 1971. After Dark Shadows came to an end, Curtis collaborated with Richard Matheson (1926-2013) on the television movies The Night Stalker (1972), The Night Strangler (1973), Scream of the Wolf (1974), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974), Trilogy of Terror (1975), and Dead of Night (1977). Matheson wrote the screenplays for all of those movies, while Curtis served as producer.

Copyright 2013 , 2023 Terence E. Hanley