Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds

335 Pages·2016·4.27 MB·English

by  Leo Braudy

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aunted
(cid:3)LSO BY LEO BRAUDY
Trying to Be Cool: Growing Up in the 1950s (2013)
The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon (2011)
On the Waterfront (2005)
From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (2003)
Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (1992, 2008)
The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (1986, 1997)
The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (1976, 1984, 2002)
Jean Renoir: The World of His Films (1972, 1989)
The Plot of Time: Narrative Form in Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon (1970, 2003)
Haunted
o n g h o s t s , w i t c h e s ,
va m p i r e s , z o m b i e s , a n d o t h e r
m o n s t e r s o f t h e n at u r a l a n d
s u p e r n at u r a l w o r l d s
Leo Braudy
New Haven and London
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of
Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright © 2016 by Leo Braudy.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the
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written permission from the publishers.
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Set in Adobe Garamond type by IDS Infotech, Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN 978- 0- 300- 20380- 6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016937700
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1 992 (Permanence of
Paper).
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For Dorothy, eternally
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Contents
Preface ix
1 Shaping Fear 1
2 Between Hope and Fear: Horror and Religion 28
3 Terror, Horror, and the Cult of Nature 75
4 Frankenstein, Robots, and Androids: Horror and
the Manufactured Monster 110
5 The Detective’s Reason 141
6 Jekyll and Hyde: The Monster from Within 179
7 Dracula and the Haunted Present 204
8 Horror in the Age of Visual Reproduction 233
Notes 267
Index 289
Illustrations follow p. 140
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reface
Who doesn’t know the stories? The corpses rising from the grave, the
blood-s ucking vampires that fly by night, the man-m ade creature who turns
against his creator and murderously stalks the land, the gigantic beast bent on
annihilating anything human, the man who has found the magic potion that
turns him into a monster. They’re as familiar as the story of Moses leading the
Israelites out of Egypt, or the Crucifixion, or the Hegira, or the Buddha teach-
ing under the Bodhi tree. But instead of the foundational stories of a religion,
they are stories of horror and terror that have generated more and more mon-
sters as they are told and retold over the centuries. They aren’t just in books or
movies—they are under the bed or they leap out of the closet, they scrape on
the window in the dead of night, and they reside patiently in the attic, in the
basement, in every patch of darkness and shadow, waiting to pounce.
Why have the monsters born or reborn in past centuries continued to have
such a hold on our imaginations? How have they become handy metaphoric
ways of describing the dark side of ourselves as well as epithets to hurl at our
enemies, as heartless automatons or predatory bloodsuckers or mindless ani-
mals, all bent on our destruction? The monsters are before us in both senses:
they seem to come from a dark past, but they stand in front of us every day.
Two linked impulses moved me to write Haunted, both of which have
infused my work since the start. The first is to connect elements in a culture
without recourse to a hierarchy of high and low, the “soft” aesthetic values
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