“WE HAVE ALWAYS HAD monsters in our lives.”
“They have occupied our imaginations and our nightmares for millennia, lurking at the edges of the known world.”
“But something changed in the late 18th century: we began to tell stories of these monsters not simply as cautionary or morality tales, but for the simple pleasure of the terrible feelings they evoked.”
“The gothic novel was born in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s exceedingly strange The Castle of Otranto”
“Walpole’s book was followed by Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), which likewise blended fantasy, realism, and the violation of social taboos, careening between the melodramatic, the picaresque, the terrifying, and the silly.”
“Leo Braudy’s Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds attempts to account for this sea change in our attitude toward the terrible and the terrifying.”
“At the heart of Haunted is this central question: “Do fears always take the same shapes, or do nations and cultures have distinctive fears that may metamorphose through the centuries?””
“Braudy wants to know: “what is universal about fear, and what is culturally specific in its images and stories?” And why do monsters “lie quiescent in some ages and in others crowd the imagination”?”
“Braudy traces the birth of the modern monster to a single major 18th-century event: the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. On the morning of November 1 — All Saints’ Day — a massive earthquake (somewhere in the range of 8.5–9.0 on the Richter Scale, according to modern estimates) destroyed Lisbon, killing somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people. Lasting over three minutes, the quake opened a rift through the city’s center five meters wide; happening as it did on a particularly holy day, in a city known for its religiosity, the earthquake also opened a rift through European theology and philosophy as well.”
“The great earthquake confounded this theology: the people killed did not deserve to die, and they could not be labeled sinners deserving of their fate — Lisbon was no Sodom or Gomorrah.”
“Seemingly without rhyme or reason, the Lisbon earthquake, Braudy explains, “forcefully implied the possibility that perhaps God is not good, or that his power is limited, or that his purposes for the world included death and destruction.””
“The modern monster crawls out of this fault line, this crack in the earth and in ourselves, out of the abyss between faith and reason. A figure that is both terrifying and unknown, it resists easy classification, emerging from a dark netherworld where our usual explanations have no power.”
““A story or a character achieves the status of a myth not because it never changes but because its supernatural essence can respond to the change that occurs around it, as the basic story metamorphoses in reaction to new particulars,” Braudy writes, and this was never more true than for the author of Frankenstein.”
“The same could be said for Stoker’s Dracula.”
““Popular art may be escape for some, but it also does crucial cultural work,” Braudy argues. “Like fairy tales for grownups,” the gothic novel “both expresses and then tries to allay the emotional conflicts and contradictions of modern life, where so much of the world appears open and so much is actually closed.””
“We love a good ghost story, a gruesome horror film, or a baroque gothic novel because it allows us to face these anxieties obliquely, engaging them at a remove.”
“In this new milieu,
the monster and the detective constitute a Janus-headed response to otherwise meagerly articulated problems in the nineteenth-century idea of both civilized society and personal nature. Horror embodies a hidden culture, often rooted in past belief and “superstition,” that has been otherwise repressed by the daylight world of official culture and society, while the detective represents the urge to delve into that darker world and clarify its seemingly intractable mysteries.”
“Rather than focusing on external horrors of nature or technology, these stories reflect the rise of psychology, capturing our inability to understand our own selves.”
““The gothic period,” Braudy reminds us, “embodied a double sense of the past: in gothic horror, it was the monstrous place from which we must escape, as well as the benevolent site of a unified experience of nature and spirituality that has been lost through the rush toward the modern future.””
“In Stoker’s novel, as the media theorist Friedrich Kittler points out, the heroes are only able to combat the vampire through the latest of technological devices: the typewriter, the gramophone, and the telegraph.”
““At a time in the late nineteenth century,” Braudy concludes, “when European and American society seems to be more in motion than ever before, moving forward technologically, politically, and economically, Dracula represents the inexorable pull backward into a terrifying past, ready and eager to take its revenge.””
“Horror, Braudy concludes, “is an unending conversation about irresolvable fears.””