Putting the Monster Away: The Foundations of Classic American Horror

by Andrew Jupin

Before 1968, the majority of American audiences were used to classic horror narrative themes and structures often seen in the films of the Universal monster series. When summing up the thematic structure of these films, Robin Wood simply describes it as, “normality is threatened by the Monster.” While a simple statement, Wood is very much correct. These films start with a quiet village or town (usually European) where everything is happening just as it always does. Wood is careful to note here that when speaking of ‘normality’ he is meaning a society where all members are behaving appropriately and complying with the accepted social norms. In other words, they are a repressed society.

Wood makes it clear that we understand the concept of repression found in the horror film. Wood’s theories on repression are basic Freudian theories developed more thoroughly by Herbert Marcuse. There is a difference between what Wood calls ‘basic’ repression and ‘surplus’ repression. He sums it up by saying, “basic repression makes us distinctively human, capable of directing our own lives and co-existing with others; surplus repression makes us into monogamous heterosexual bourgeois capitalists¾that is, if it works.”

Basic repression is something that is ingrained in all of us as human beings. Wood calls it that which “makes possible our development from an uncoordinated animal capable of little beyond screaming and convulsions into a human being.” In other words, basic repression is what keeps us, for lack of a better word, a ‘civilized’ people. This kind of repression is what keeps us in control of our selves and allows us to accept the ‘postponement of gratification.’

Surplus repression, by contrast is something that is formed on a culture-to-culture basis. Wood says that this kind of repression is ingrained in us from “earliest infancy to take on predetermined roles within that culture.” So for example, we are taught since childhood that hurting people is wrong. The killing of one human being by another is called murder and in our society that is terribly unacceptable and punishable under the law. So we grow up (most of us anyway) knowing that whatever urge we have to do fatal harm to another person is wrong and that we must quell these urges immediately.

Another aspect of our culture that is repressed is sexuality. Wood says that first and foremost, sexual energy as a whole is repressed in our society. The poster-boy or girl for our sexually repressed society is one who is satisfied with their simple heterosexual unity with their one and only partner who they engage in intercourse with simply for means of procreation. The sublimated sexuality of this person, which Wood associates, with the creative side of a person¾stating that sexuality is “the source of creative energy in general”¾is stunted by labor. In other words, any sort of creative urge these people feel through their sexuality is decimated by their compliance to work their daily nine-to-five jobs. But it is not just sexual energy in general that is repressed in our society.

According to Wood, female sexuality has been severely repressed. In addition, the creative potential fueled by sexual energy has also been repressed. This is due to the expectation of women to be the passive counterpart to the heterosexual man. Wood writes that this is, “…the attribution to the female of passivity, and her preparation for her subordinate, dependent role in our culture.” While the men go to work and earn money, women are expected to sit home and wait to get pregnant. Female sexuality plays a key role in the analysis of classic American horror.

Repression is a key thematic component in the horror film. The societies found in these classic horror films need to be repressed in order for them to be affected by the monster when the time comes. In a way, the monster is able to show them things that they would not even dream of doing in their lifetimes. He is that mythological figure that possesses powers greater than anything they have seen before. The monster in horror is almost the personification of that mythological figure. It is the creature that acts on its animalistic instinct. It is not some fairy tale anymore, it exists right before their eyes. The monster in a horror film is capable of exploiting these forms of repression by showing the repressed citizens what it is like to act on urges normally deemed unacceptable by the dominating cultural ideology.

In James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), the monster itself is created from the corpses of those once repressed by dominant ideology. The film opens with Henry Frankenstein and his assistant, Fritz, anxiously waiting for a funeral service to finish so they can dig up the deceased and take it back to his laboratory. They also cut down a body from the gallows that has been left to decompose. In a way this is an emancipation of the man who was hanged for reasons possibly relating to the violation of the social norm. Fritz also steals the brain of a man who was in life a deranged murderer, someone who acted on urges that went against what we are taught through surplus repression.

Henry Frankenstein himself is a character most repressed by society without even knowing it. He hides himself away in his abandoned castle working long into the night on his special project. Frankenstein is also a Romantic character. His own personal ideologies have moved him far beyond that of the Enlightenment way of thinking. To him, science and critical thinking will take him farther than God ever could. He thinks that by succeeding in creating life, he will elevate himself into a new state of success and accomplishment. Through science and technology, Frankenstein can become God. But all he is doing by locking himself away is preventing himself from experiencing life outside of work and repression. He is the prime example of a person possessed by post-romantic fear. Enlightened, faithful thinking can only take our society so far. Frankenstein is the scientist determined to use technology as a gateway to the next level of thinking, a higher echelon of existence.

He has a fiancée, Elizabeth, who he is set to marry. Instead of spending healthy time with her, he ignores her and keeps her at home, preventing her from entering his castle of ignorance and repression. He expects Elizabeth to lay in wait for him until they are to be married, at which point he will most likely leave for the castle again to continue his work away from her.

When the monster comes alive, the repressed lives of first Henry, and then the rest of the village are put into question. Made with the mind of a criminal, the monster is quick to resort to violence when cornered or put in danger. Henry and Fritz wave burning torches in the monster’s face; their torches serve as phallic symbols of repression as well as a tool to repress the monster’s violent tendencies. At first when the monster is exposed to the torches, he immediately backs away and hides from his attackers. With every time this happens however, the monster gets more and more used to them and eventually works up the courage to push right past Henry and Fritz. Henry and his former teacher, Dr. Waldman, decide that the monster must be sedated and eventually destroyed. As they let the monster out of his cell, Henry antagonizes him and distracts him from Dr. Waldman who is wielding a syringe. As the doctor sticks the monster with the debilitating liquid (a reference to female insemination, an act that women are exposed to as their part of heterosexual repression) the monster falls to his knees and succumbs to the repression that the rest of the town lives with. In the eyes of the repressors--society as a whole--his “health” has now been maintained.

While Waldman stays at Frankenstein’s castle to examine the monster and eventually take it apart, Henry returns to the village to rest and be with Elizabeth, as their wedding date grows closer. As if sensing the possibility of a heterosexual union happening, the monster wakes up during Waldman’s examination and murders him, strangling him to death with the hands Henry Frankenstein gave him. As the monster breaks out of Frankenstein castle, the normality of life is put in danger for the villagers as the bumbling, but strong monster makes his way down the mountain and closer to town. The monster, while becoming the personification of these animalistic instincts, is not allied with the villagers in any way. Even though he is showing them how to act on these urges, the villagers are far too repressed to act on their own.

In a tragic scene, the monster demonstrates how the boundaries of right and wrong, what is socially acceptable and what is not, are clearly blurred to him. As he makes his way to town, he accidentally comes across the home of a lumberjack and his wife and child, young Maria. As the father leaves, the monster slowly comes out of the brush and stands next to Maria. The innocent child, filled with the knowledge that violence is wrong and that people don’t hurt other people, thinks nothing of the monster’s grotesque appearance as he sits down next to her by the bank of a lake. Maria is playing a game where she throws the flower tops of daisies into the lake, making them look like little boats. The monster is excited by the game and, not confined to right and wrong, decides to throw Maria into the lake as well. A young child, Maria inevitably drowns in the lake and dies. Not only is this a scene depicting the act of murder, it also hints at the monster acting on another repressed urge, that of pedophilia. Before he throws her into the lake, the monster appears to almost be flirting with her.

Had the monster been ingrained with any sort of surplus repression, he would have realized that his actions would probably wind up taking a life and that that would be morally wrong and socially unacceptable. The monster also lacks much of the basic repression put into the minds of human beings because he is exactly that, a monster and not a human. Had his mind and conscience been filled with any sort of basic repression, he would not have had to rely on surplus repression because the basic would have prevented him from acting out his initial desire in the first place.

The most important aspect of the classic horror structure is the ending. The only way to make these films suitable for the time was to make sure that in the end, all was right with the world. To say it another way, things were put back to normal. As Wood puts it, “… the happy ending (when it exists) typically [signifies] the restoration of repression.” In the case of Frankenstein The villagers trap the monster inside the large structure and begin to light the base on fire. As the structure burns and eventually collapses, so too does any chance the town had at emancipation. Yet ironically, at the same time they are putting the monster back where he belongs, the villagers themselves are in a sense committing an act of murder and thus, are able to participate in an animalistic act just once. The repression is put back into place with the torching of the windmill.

The film concludes with Henry lying in bed, being cared for by his sweet fiancée. Servant girls come to the door to give him a glass of wine, just one little bit of alcohol to relax him. Baron Von Frankenstein takes the glass instead: “Mr. Henry doesn’t need this,” he says. As the door closes behind him, the Baron shuts in Henry, sealing him from the influential outside world. Locked in with his bride-to-be, Henry is toasted to by his father, “Here’s to a son, to the house of Frankenstein!”

With the monster now dead, sent back to wherever he first came, life will go on as usual; men will marry women, women with have children, fathers will become grandfathers and then they all will eventually rest eternal. The normality of life has been returned. Of course, it would be ignorant to pretend like this film--like all the films of the Universal monster series--did not have an endless string of sequels. James Whale himself went on to direct Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. The main difference between these Universal sequels and the sequels of the slasher films, however, is that with the endings of each of these sequels, the monster is always put away; it is always destroyed. The endings to these films never set up the following film. The only time the other films are mentioned is when the sequels start with some sort of recap of what happened in the previous film. But the endings always contain a return to normalcy.

This return to normality in Frankenstein occurs during the final stage of the classic horror structure. Every horror film from this time follows a basic narrative formula; Noel Carroll, in his book The Philosophy of Horror, outlines several variations of horror plot structure. The most common structure that Carroll outlines is what he calls the, “Complex Discovery Plot.” This plot outline is structured in four parts: Onset, Discovery, Confirmation and Confrontation. This structural device can be better examined through a brief deconstruction of Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931).

Onset kicks in at the beginning of the film when the audience is able to acknowledge that something is going wrong. Carroll describes this as the first time “the monster’s presence is established for the audience.” At the beginning of Dracula the audience is introduced to an element of fear in the first few lines of dialogue. A stagecoach carrying several passengers is traveling at a rapid pace through a terrifying mountain range. The Englishman aboard the coach, Renfield, asks the driver to slow down because the road is a bit rough. As soon as he suggests slowing down, a man lashes out at him, citing that this night is the ‘night of evil’ and that they are in the presence of a ‘nosferatu.’ The evil presence and Dracula are connected as being the same; the story of the monster begins.

For the rest of the first act the monster is allowed to wander once his presence has been established, wreaking havoc on whomever he can find. In the case of Dracula, he makes his way to London and sets himself up in a house adjacent to an asylum. As he begins to terrorize the people of the city, there are those who begin to suspect something is wrong. Carroll points out that this is the start of the ‘Discovery’ plot and it begins to occur just as the monster starts terrifying his victims. In the scene following Dracula’s attack on Mina Harker, she describes her experience with Dracula to Jonathan. She thinks that the attack on her was just a dream. As she describes this, Professor Van Helsing, the established vampire expert, overhears her description. After noticing that Dracula casts no shadow, Van Helsing confirms his discovery. What is interesting here is that here we have a slight twist on Carroll’s explanation of the Discovery plot.

Carroll insists that the person making the discovery will not be taken seriously, often times by people of power or “authority figures such as the police, eminent scientists, religious leaders, government officials, or the army.” What we see in Dracula, however is that there is an ‘eminent scientist’ who makes the discovery. This is another nod towards the Romantic way of thinking. Van Helsing uses science over faith. He is indeed a respected man of science; however put in the bourgeois setting of London, England, this Eastern European doctor’s opinion does not hold much weight.

Because of his ethnic background, the other English characters in the film see him as another form of the Other and do not immediately believe what he says. Van Helsing explains to Harker and Seward his case for the Count’s vampirism. Even with evidence such as Dracula’s reaction to the Wolf Bane and his non-existent reflection, Harker does not believe him in the least. “I don’t mean to be rude, but that is something I’d expect one of the patients here to say,” says Harker to the doctor. Now Van Helsing, the sole individual with knowledge of the Count’s dastardly secret, must set out and prove what he knows to the rest of the characters. Carroll refers to this as the ‘Confirmation’ plot.

By now the audience is aware of the monster’s danger, as well as a few of the major characters within the narrative. However it is up to those characters¾or in the case of Dracula a singular character¾to confirm what they know to be true. Carroll explains that, “the confirmation function involves the discoverers of or the believers in the existence of the monster convincing some other group of the existence of the creature and of the proportions of the mortal danger at hand (some of these monsters are often said to spell the end of human life as we know it).” Now, the threat of Dracula is not exactly a global one--that is to say, he is not a threat to humanity in any real way (yet)--however, he is an immediate threat to the Harkers and the other innocent inhabitants of London.

The confirmation of Dracula’s power is actually helped along by the actions of Dracula himself. As he attempts to transform Mina Harker into a vampire, she begins to grow more and more insane; she starts spending lots of time outside in the dark, speaking with animals, certain things that she would not normally do unless she were under control from some outside influence. As her condition worsens, the belief of her father is strengthened. The confirmation is ultimately completed when, after actions taken by Van Helsing, Mina admits that Dracula has attacked her and that he opened a vein in his arm and forced her to drink his blood. This revelation upsets Jonathan and the others and the search for Dracula is on.

With the threat of Dracula confirmed, the final stage of the complex discovery plot is set in motion. Now that there are more people who are willing to believe in the power and threat of Dracula, there is nothing left to do but confront the monster. As Carroll puts it, “…the complex discovery plot culminates in confrontation. Humanity marches out to meet its monster and the confrontation generally takes the form of a debacle.” In the case of Dracula, Van Helsing and Harker chase the Count down to the basement chamber of Carfax Abbey. He pushes Mina aside as he hides inside his coffin. Van Helsing, in a rather unsatisfying victory, rams the stake through Dracula’s heart and break the spell he holds on the young girl.

With the destruction of the monster, the complex discovery plot has completed itself. Things in London return to normal. Again, the structure of these classic horror films always ends with the monster being put away; it is either permanently destroyed or simply laid back to wherever it came from. In the case of these Universal monster chillers like Frankenstein and Dracula and even in The Mummy (1932) or The Wolf Man ten years later in 1941, the monsters are all eradicated.

Structurally and thematically, the horror films of the 1930’s and into the 1940’s all dealt with monsters the same way. They were different looking than humans. This made it easier for audiences to distinguish between the monsters and the innocents. If they held any kind of human form, they were always foreign, or built by foreign influence. They most certainly were not American. Once again, detecting any kind of different accent clued in audiences as to who the monster was. But in the end, no matter how dangerous these monsters were they were always destroyed by the end of the film. The “return to normalcy” was always achieved and the monster was put away. Audiences experienced these same themes and structures for almost twenty years without any sort of change. This is why when Alfred Hitchcock presented his horrific contribution to the world in 1960, Psycho shattered everything about conventional American horror.

Continues with Chapter 2 – Mother Knows Best: The Psychotic Alteration of 1960