"Love God, Stay Awesome."

Wood, Robin. “PSYCHO.” Interview to Mark Ulriksen, 1989, web.tiscali.it/andrebalza/essay.html.

Jaws is an example of fission where there is a clear picture of who is an actual person and who, or what, is a monster. Fission, part of Noel Carroll’s philosophy, is that there is a separation of humans and monsters, whereas fusion crosses paths with those two qualities. There is also a clear picture of who is/are the good person/people, which are the fisherman and who is/are the villain(s), which would be the bloodthirsty shark.

Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th franchise can also tie in Glover’s philosophy on more than one woman being murdered. In this case, Jason also kills men too. Born severely deformed as a child and drowned at a young age, he awakens to avenge his death and goes on a killing spree, with his hit list including the protagonist, Alice Hardy. Jason also ties in with the earlier Robin Wood philosophy on Candyman. It’s the feeling of being repression and having his death forgotten and he wants to make sure everyone remembers him because if you walk into his territory or anywhere near him and you pay no attention to him, Jason will come for you and kill you.

Sometimes a monster can be someone you love the most. Jack Torrance (pictured in this famous broken door scene uttering Ed McMahon’s phrase) from the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining (1980) can arguably be an example of that. Played by Jack Nicholson, he plays the aforementioned father and writer who slowly turns sinister as the movie progresses, even bruising up his own son, and addressing that he has a problem. He already had a issue with drinking in the past and ends going back to the bottle again. With his family trapped in the hotel after a snowstorm, Wendy (Shelley Duvall) is desperate to escape with her kid, while Jack goes on a rampage. Noticeable scenes of red are also present in the film, including the “redrum” scene, the blood-drenched lobby scene and of course red is present in the madman’s jacket. Jack Torrance arguably blurs the lines between monstrous and human qualities. Even if this “monster” doesn’t look ugly or big and tall and even if he doesn’t wear a mask, he does harbor a murderous behavior, aiming to killing his own family. 

Monsters carry real life meaning. The Babadook pictured up top (for lack of a better GIF) is an example that once something is let in, it can never go away unless you acknowledge it. This story revolves around a single mother whose husband died in a car crash before she gave birth to her son. They read Mister Babadook and the mother senses something isn’t right as she’s reading the book. Although she burns the book, the Babadook can never go away unless it is addressed, and the more he is denied, the stronger he gets. (Dempsey 1) She sees the Babadook multiple in different scenarios and in the last one, the mother give a bowl of worms to the Babadook now that he’s calmed down. The feeling that the Babadook represents is that of grief and trauma after a bad event like losing someone you love. Even though the feeling of sadness is gone, you still have to tend to it and you still have to address it. Otherwise, it’s going to eventually take over you again. The Babadook represents the unimaginable feeling knowing that a son will never be able to see his father outside of old pictures.

Monsters often become more than just killers. After all, no monster and no antagonist for that matter, goes after a protagonist without reason. That said, monsters are capable of becoming punishers for sexual behaviors. Carol Glover quoted Schoell in her writing, saying that the only thing more beautiful than a woman being killed is a plethora of women being brutally murdered. (82) And when we see those women being killed, particularly in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) with Freddy Kruger as the antagonist, they’re typically sexually promiscuous prior (this similar theme is also applied to Michael Myers and Halloween [1978]). Sexuality is also repressed in this and other slasher films, and the monster is also ambivalent to reflect cultural ambiguity. We do see sex scenes in this slasher film and it’s not just this film. Slasher films marry horror and gore with pornography, alongside gore and low-brow production values. As a result we get a monster, such as Freddy Kruger, that penetrates with a knife when women get penetrated with the junk.

Not all monsters are of the male species, or at least appear to be such. Some belong with the term Barbara Creed likes to call the “monstrous feminine.” She defines this term as a “biological [freak] whose [body represents] a fearful and threatening form of sexuality. (6) We don’t recognize Angela from Sleepaway Camp (1983) as a killer, but as this innocent young girl who has been bullied and preyed upon for most of the film. We realize toward the end of the film that all along, she was preying upon and taking the lives of the young kids. If you look at Angela as she is being zoomed out to show her body, it doesn’t look like she has the typical female figure, as she looks a little more masculine. Furthermore, there is this scene with Angela and her mother, when the latter talks to her about wanting a girl, because another boy “simply would not do.” It raises the question of transgenderism and it goes back to Creed’s writing because even the monstrous feminine we refer to as may not have been born feminine. It’s a thought to take in and possibly debate or agree particularly with an LGBT filmmaker.

Ultimately, Helen believes the legend is real and surrenders herself to Candyman. She winds up becoming the Candy(wo)man herself and kills her ex-husband. The original monster just wanted her to believe he was real. The whole idea surrounding not only Candyman, but this entire movie was this idea that certain towns and cities were founded on good beliefs and values, when in reality, there were a manifold of adverse issues that loomed over the early past.

Monstrous figures are often contextualized for examples of certain political figures and Coffin Joe from the Brazilian film At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) is a good example of that. At the time this film was released, Brazil went under a dictatorship, resulting in the movie being shown in select theaters across the country. Coffin Joe, the film's main antagonist, is described as arrogant and one who thinks he is above everyone else, which is how a dictator would probably act. Therefore, the director, José Mojica Marins, could’ve talked about the country’s dictator through this character. Glauber Rocha, author of the essay, “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” states that “a film-maker is prepared to film the truth and to oppose the hypocrisy and repression of intellectual censorship [in] Cinema Novo” (13) and Marins does that with this character (also his alter ego). Regardless if the director intended to call out a political figure or not, Marins, now 82 as of this post, created Coffin Joe to exhibit those dictator-like traits arguably well.

Monstrous figures are often viewed as villains trying to disrupt and destroy the very fabric of life. However, when viewed closer and looking into the time of when and where a film was created, they can provide a reflection of values and beliefs, be them positive or negative. The animated image above is of Count Orlok from the German expressionist film Nosferatu (1922), which takes place in a war-ridden Germany three years after World War I ended. According to Morretti’s The Dialectic of Fear, Orlok represents the fear of an uncertain future, (68) which is what many Germans had following the war. Furthermore into this monster, he isn’t bound by human laws and aims to destroy and use victims, similar to the qualities of Dracula. In fact, Noserfatu has the same plot as Dracula, causing the German filmmakers to be slapped with a lawsuit and have some copies of the film destroyed. However, this German expressionist film can be seen as a way of seeing how the country was like after the war and the fear of a questionable future and sometimes succumbing to it.

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