Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (27 page)

The American tradition of horror began to change in the new decade. By the 1960s alien invaders and mutant monsters departed the film screen and popular consciousness as quickly as they had appeared. Many younger Americans, adolescents, and teens, had already stopped watching the skies during the 1950s. Boomer kids began searching out monsters that came from the tomb (or that lived next door) rather than from Mars, rediscovering the creatures that had frightened their grandparents and finding new horrors in old dark places. America was about to go goth all over again.

Night Falls on the Endless Summer

In 1954 thousands of adolescents in the Los Angeles area sought to cajole their parents into letting them stay up after 11:00 p.m. If dubious parents could be convinced, boomer kids could watch, as if hypnotized, a visitor from another world. This was no alien from another planet or multieyed mutant menace, but rather an emissary from the world of gothic past and the future of horror to come. Amid the flying saucers, the giant bugs, and false optimism of the ’50s, Vampira struck a sexy, discordant note.

Vampira was Maila Nurmi, a former exotic dancer who had been offered the opportunity to host a block of late-night horror films for Los Angeles station KABC-TV. Dressed in a black rayon cocktail dress, with black nails and arched black eyebrows, Vampira dripped scary and inviting sensuality. Horror historian David Skal remembers her as a being with an “impossible waist-line” and “the cartoon bosom of a sex goddess,” who appeared out of the dry-ice mist to the sound of eerie organ music and introduced the children of the atom to a night of 1930s horror.
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Nurmi drew on an underground 1950s subculture little known to most Americans. In all likelihood, parents would have locked the television away if they had known that Nurmi took her inspiration not only from the evil queen of Disney’s
Snow White
but also from an S&M magazine known as
Bizarre
. Campy and knowing, Vampira represented a cultural pastiche of American dreams and nightmares, Disney and bondage, the vampire and the vamp.

Beloved by adolescents, Vampira struck out with parents who found her simply too shocking. Although appearing in a four-page photo shoot in
Life
, Vampira was cancelled after a wild eight-month run. Nevertheless, in that short time, she had created a cultural icon that reanimated periodically as Morticia Addams, Elvira the horror host, and Vampirella the sexy comic book vampire. America in 1954 was just not ready yet.

Nurmi had drawn Vampira from the dark well of late twentieth-century American culture. At a time when it seemed that flying saucers had brought the monsters destined to take over the world, she heralded the return of a gothic sensibility that never entirely disappeared. Throughout the 1950s, some of the same kids that stayed up late watching Vampira enjoyed the horrific thrills of EC comics and their popular “Tales from the Crypt” series. In the final years of the decade, Vincent Price appeared in enormously successful films that featured apparitions, psychological mayhem, and twisted desires. The schizophrenic fifties, with its sunny optimism and paranoid watching of the skies, would soon worry about the things from the crypt.

Vampira

Gothic America revived, spinning in every direction through American culture like a spiderweb. Nurmi created her sex-drenched vampire goddess in an effort to attract the attention of another 1950s gothicist, Charles Addams. Nurmi hoped that Addams, a cartoonist for the
New Yorker
known for his macabre images and bleak sense of humor, might see Vampira and decide that his drawings had television potential.

Addams himself represents the gothic undertow of the postwar era, foreshadowing a host of new American monster obsessions. In 1932 he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to take art classes. Soon after, he held his first media position retouching photographs for the popular men’s magazine known as
True Detective
(his job was to remove the blood in crime scene photographs). The same year he left college, he sold his first cartoon to the
New Yorker
, and by 1936, became a regular staff contributor. In half a century with the influential magazine, his macabre sense of humor created an iconography of American gothic, including the characters that became the basis for the television hit
The Addams Family.
Addams himself became an icon of the gothic style, with rumors circulating that he had periodic bouts of insanity (untrue) and that he collected medieval weapons and had been married in a pet cemetery (true on both counts).
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Many of Addams’ cartoons skewered postwar America’s visions of consumer abundance and domestic bliss. These images walked the line between humor and horror, as in an example from his 1950 collection
Monster Rally
, which shows a wife sitting in a chair, munching on a box of chocolates. Her husband is coming up behind her as she says “Now don’t
come back asking me to forgive you.” What the wife cannot see is that he carries a hatchet in one hand and a bag for her body parts in the other. In another mordant image of postwar married life, a wife looks on as her husband, in an attempt to hang himself, gets his arm caught in the noose. “Can’t you do anything right?” she scolds.
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American consumerism’s relationship to the supposedly ideal family also received a gothic send-up from Addams. In one of his most commented on images, a happy housewife tells police investigators that she has found her own way of escaping Betty Friedan’s “feminine mystique”:

I disconnected the booster from the Electro-Snuggie Blanket and put him in the deep freeze. In the morning, I defrosted him and ran him through the Handi Home Slicer and then the Jiffy Burger Grind and after that I fed him down the Dispose-All. Then I washed my clothes in the Bendix, tidied up the kitchen and went to a movie.
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Addams’ cartoons exuded unease about the central icons of postwar America and challenged any notion of the 1950s as an era of simple consensus. Although powerful corporate, religious, and governmental forces in American life wanted to turn postwar America into a land of consumer bliss and traditional values, dissent appeared everywhere, bubbling to the surface in preparation for the ’60s explosion. Historian Weini Breines captures this mood perfectly when she describes the era as a time of “liberating possibilities masked by restrictive norms.”
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The aliens had not landed, but monsters were everywhere. Even
Freaks
made a comeback. In 1962, the same year as Tod Browning died, the Venice Film Festival screened
Freaks
in hopes of stirring the growing fascination with “camp” cinema. Browning’s masterpiece quickly became a standard attraction on the art house circuit and encouraged numerous writers, theorists, and artists to reconsider the meaning of the freak show. A viewing of the film at the New York Theatre on the Upper West Side inspired the legendary Diane Arbus, whose photographic oeuvre became focused on the marginalized and abnormal. Arbus repeatedly viewed the film and eventually photographed Andrew Ratoucheff, a Russian midget who had starred in Browning’s celebration of abnormality.
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Vampira’s brief and shadowy appearance, the macabre humor of Charles Addams, and the second coming of gothic freakdom signaled sundown for American cultural life, a coming gothicization that would become a part of American culture for the next half century. Serial killers soon became America’s monster du jour, while gothic horrors of all types made a triumphant return from the grave.
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By the 1960s postwar social needs had created discourses about mental illness, fears of violence, and the impersonal nature of modern life. You did not have to go messing about in crypts and dungeons to find something lurking. The monster might live next door, might live in your house, or might even live inside you. Monsters stalked Americans in an age of growing dread. As Norman Bates said in Albert Hitchock’s 1960
Psycho
, “We all go a little mad sometimes.”

T
he story of Marion Crane, a beautiful young woman having an illicit affair, seemed to follow the general outline of Hitchcockian narratives. Crane steals money from her boss in hopes of attaining the postwar American dream of domestic bliss and conspicuous consumption. Then she goes on the lam.

Audiences came to see
Psycho
expecting a suspenseful thriller along the lines of
North By Northwest
or simply a big-screen version of the offbeat espionage and crime tales on Hitchcock’s popular television series. Packing in to theaters all over the country to see
Psycho
, the forty-seventh film by the “Master of suspense,” moviegoers received a shocking, blood-drenched welcome to the 1960s.

Psycho
’s opening scene titillated viewers with Crane (played by Janet Leigh) in white negligee, talking to her lover in a hotel room about their need for money. Audiences, though they would have likely disapproved of her when she steals from her boss, likely identified with her
as she sets out for a new life. Viewers experienced a growing unease as Crane gets lost on a dark and stormy night and stops at a hotel with a frightening, California gothic house leering over it. The young proprietor Norman Bates, though strange, comes across at first as shy and even charming. Moreover, Tony Perkins played the role of the odd young man, and his previous film work had been in light comedy and romance, suggesting that he might become Crane’s ally and maybe even a new romantic interest.

Suddenly, like thrill-seekers on a roller coaster that had slowly bumped its way to the top of the track, audiences felt their stomachs heave as the film took a precipitous and terrifying plunge. As Leigh, alone in her room, begins to take a shower, the curtain suddenly rips open and a shadowy figure with a butcher knife begins plunging the weapon repeatedly into Leigh’s naked flesh. Thirty-four segments, edited together at furious speed into a sequence lasting less than a minute, increased the feeling of the attack’s suddenness and brutality. Leigh’s body crumpled over the edge of the tub with blood swirling down the drain while audiences went from shocked screams to stunned silence.
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Esquire
called
Psycho
“a reflection of the most unpleasant mind, a mean, sly sadistic little mind.” Numerous reviewers exuded distaste and not a little anger at the director himself. The
New York Times
called the film “a blot on an honorable career.” One reviewer, after calling it “the most vile and disgusting film ever made,” added that he found it especially disheartening that a director of Hitchcock’s prominence had been responsible for it.
²

Early critical rejection did not prevent
Psycho
from changing American movies forever. A box-office smash, the film exercised enormous influence over American filmmaking, opening the door for young directors like Sam Peckinpah, who made use of explosive violence to create riveting human dramas.
Psycho
also prepared the way for the mainstreaming of violence in widely distributed horror films that gained a much larger audience than older drive-in, exploitation fare had ever succeeded in garnering.
³

Norman Bates became an early representation of a new American monster. The end of the twentieth century belonged to the murdering maniac, a creature not born from the supernatural shadows or cobbled together in a lab, but coming to deadly life in the midst of American family structures. As a debate simmered over cultural change, the horror film accused the American family of producing monsters.
Psycho
wielded its knife in the middle of a broad American conversation about mental health, crime, gender, family life, sex, and the societal changes of the 1960s.

Tales of Love and Death

The very title of
Psycho
shook Americans in 1960, especially given the amount of attention the nation’s public culture had given to mental health in the fifteen years since World War II. The growth of the psychiatric profession in those years, as well as the frequent prescription of tranquilizers, was a response to a growing number of Americans seeking relief from intense anxiety.