Dark Carnivals, page 7
So emerged the roaring twenties, a state of mind rather than a historical era. Some of the myths of the twenties actually happened. A nation of Gatsbys held parties for the extravagantly wealthy, and bathtub gin, jazz, and short skirts gilded life with glamour even for some of the plebeians. Millionaires became multi-millionaires. Many Americans who bought into the decade’s optimism looked askance at socialists and even organized labor. They believed that captains of industry wrangled their impossible wealth on the frontier of America’s Wild West economy through sheer force of will. Moreover, in this world of new American possibility, they themselves might own at least a small strip of beachfront on Amity Island one day . . . at least a little cottage with oceanfront access so they could go back into the water.
By 1929, the entanglement of American money with the international debtor economy led the country into crisis. The shark had started feeding. America coughing caused the rest of the world to die of pneumonia in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. But in truth what historian Eric Hobsbawm describes as the “house of cards” created by the first (but not the last) American effort to shape the world economy had come crashing down.24
7.Weird Mystery Tales
THE GREAT Depression represented a crisis for American capitalism and also suggested a crisis of confidence. Left-wing organizations, including a public and popular Communist Party of the United States of America, drew one hundred thousand new members and made allies in labor unions and left-leaning organizations. Many Americans wanted change in the thirties, a period that has become known as the country’s Red Decade.
And yet, optimistic images of the American spirit like the unfortunate Viquesney public square monuments and parlor room tchotchkes reveal that much of the nation saw itself as a kind of Amity Island fifty-five years before Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) gave the image to the world. In the minds of many middle-class white Americans, their towns and cities functioned like privately owned resorts, and the country itself could forget that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it had been a battleground of many nations, some European and others native to the continent.
Politicians, who represented the interests of the wealthiest Americans and the class that aspired to be like them, could even speak of “isolationism,” a country able to hide behind its two walls of water after having done its part in a world war. Isolationism has largely been a myth that really means “the United States will make unilateral decisions rather than forming meaningful alliances.” During the era isolationism supposedly shaped American standards of international behavior, the country launched incursions into Mexico, occupied two Caribbean nations, toppled the government of Nicaragua, and seized major islands in the Pacific and dozens of small islands for what was rapidly becoming the American tradition of building multiple military bases in every region of the globe.
The pretense of isolation extended to culture as well. European veterans scripted, produced, directed, and acted in what would become the first silent horror films, but Americans eschewed the emerging genre. When Variety reviewed Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the entertainment magazine tried to interest American audiences by calling it “a mystery story told in the Poe manner,” though it also warned them “it is morbid.” A much stronger, indeed violent, reaction to the film appeared in the streets of Los Angeles when Miller’s Theatre attempted to premier it in May of 1921. A two-thousand-person-strong protest, ginned up by William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, prevented the film from being shown. Moving Picture World, a bubblegum guide for movie fans, wrote Caligari off as more evidence of “degenerate German invention.”25
Lingering anti-German sentiment left over from the Great War explains some of the negative responses to a motion picture that would play an important role in reimagining what a film could do, what it could be about, and how it could call forth new emotions. But something even more pungent, part of the bone and marrow of belief in a particular kind of America, called forth these violent responses. Most Americans did not like horror, or more accurately they thought it had nothing but ill intent. In fact, Americans seldom to never used the word horror as an adjective for films, fiction, stage plays, carnival shows, or other entertainment outlets.
The use of the word weird in describing most any storytelling that departed from formulaic American flicks featuring action, romance, and comedy (often all at once) predated the Great War. Reviewers often described turn-of-the-century magic shows, especially those that encouraged audiences to view their illusions as the supernatural creeping across the boundaries of the rational, as weird. Any film that suggested mystery, supernatural or not, received the label weird. Early film magazines regularly described the weirdness of comedies that featured humorous ghosts, even when they turned out to be dreams or a kind of Scooby-Doo experience of a human pretending to be a visitant from beyond.
The cinema scholar who has written the most about how Americans received and reviewed “weird” films, Kendall R. Phillips, sees a peculiar turn in attitudes toward them. By the time of the Great War, reviewers for magazines like Variety had begun to connect spooky topics on screen with “foreign” productions that are also described as “ghastly” or pretentious. The term weird went, Phillips writes, from being a general term for tales of the fantastic “to connoting films that were decidedly foreign and, ultimately, un-American.”26
Americans wanted their entertainment to let them visit an Amity Island without the shark. Threats to the beautiful heroes of cinema had to be of the criminal, often inept, variety in the 1910s and early ’20s. Americans raised monuments to the happy warriors their doughboys had supposedly been or used the image as peculiar reading lamps or parlor lighting, as the ads for the patriotic saint statues said, “in a world of darkness.” But as they did, large numbers of actual veterans fared poorly in the postwar years, a fact that helps us understand the otherwise inexplicable rage Hearst could stir over the showing of a somewhat challenging German art film that Americans hadn’t exactly clamored to see in the first place.
8.Empire’s Butcher Bill
THE SECOND World War accelerated the options opened to the new world power as the United States took control of military bases all over the world. Bases leased from Britain in exchange for U.S. arms marked a kind of formal changing of the imperial guard, the last wheezing gasp of “Rule, Britannia!” An aggressive American foreign policy created flash points of conflict with the Soviet Union that provided numerous opportunities for the United States to extend its reach. Japan and islands seized from it like Okinawa gave the United States far-flung ports of call. West Germany hosted hundreds of U.S. bases during most of the Cold War.
But this wasn’t enough and so, sometimes, the United States just took what it wanted without apology. In 1953, the United States seized a sizable chunk of Indigenous lands in Greenland, giving its inhabitants only a brief deadline before the U.S. Army bulldozed their communities. This became a forward base for America’s nuclear triad and is the root of one of the Trump administration’s frequent non sequiturs, a briefly touted plan to “buy Greenland.”
The small-footprint empire that the national security state thought it had made had at least as much, perhaps more, destructive effects on the world than earlier powers. The large land and naval empires of the past ruled oppressively but, in cases like Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans, they also held in check and even salved conflicts between the peoples within their borders for hundreds of years. American hegemony had the opposite effect, ginning up older conflicts and even creating new ones.
Since 9/11, the contours of the American empire have become increasingly clear. Ironically, President George W. Bush—until 2016 perhaps the chief executive most ill-informed about American foreign policy and one who surrounded himself with a coterie of operatives with decades of secrets to keep—spoke most openly and forthrightly about American imperial imperatives.
In September of 2002, what became known as the Bush Doctrine called for preemptive strikes against any nation, at any time, in order to make possible “free and open societies.” It also, for the first time in American history, declared that the United States would not allow any nation to challenge its military preeminence as had the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Karl Rove, often referred to as “Bush’s brain,” announced matter-of-factly that “we’re an empire now . . . we’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
An openness about the expansive use of American power continued, transmogrifying under the Trump regime into weaponized tweets that advertised threats, insults, ambitions, and sometimes even explicit initiatives—empire gone viral.
The immense popularity of horror, and the violence horror revels in, restages the horror of empire’s reach for screaming audiences and chilled readers, who can’t take their eyes off the mayhem on screen and page. It’s the nature of living in an empire.
Life in the empire means, above all, experiencing violence as a way of life. The shape this takes depends very much on whether you are a citizen, a citizen with limited constitutional and cultural protections, or a subject with no rights that the unimaginable colossus of American power sees itself bound to protect. But whether you are part of a wedding party slaughtered by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen or a bored middle-class dad in Kansas flipping between news channels featuring stories about school shootings and footage of explosions in places you couldn’t locate on a map, lethal threat and force are the coin of the imperial realm.27
So it has ever been with empires. The Assyrians of the ancient Near East welcomed you to their cities with monuments made of the skulls of their enemies, stele that celebrated the destruction of whole civilizations and their peoples. The Roman Empire brought its captive opponents in chains to parade them through the streets of their capital. Even Victorian Britain featured carnivals and freak shows that displayed the subjects of the empire as primitive, exotic, and defeated. The British Museum became a warehouse of objects ripped from the hands of colonized peoples.
We have horror. It speaks our language of violence and conquest, sometimes to alarm us and sometimes to tell us that daddy vanquished the monster under the bed.
Multiple Hugo Award–winner N. K. Jemisin’s now classic The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms featured a scene where the protagonist confronts the way the imperial power that runs her world legitimizes itself through lies, half-truths, and the general assumption of superiority. “They found so many ways to lie about the things they did,” she thinks. “It mocked the suffering of their victims.”
It’s become very easy for us to lie about the things we do and to mock our victims’ suffering. Since Rove admitted the United States not only built an empire but could rearrange how the public conceives of reality, few Americans have been aware of the drone strikes that have killed civilians at weddings, at funerals, and in civilian refugee convoys.
Living as a citizen of the empire means never having to think about it. Meanwhile, living as a subject, or victim, of the empire means never being able to forget it. Horror films are one of the few places the nature, the violence, and the failure of American power blinks in the unearthly light of the present, a blighted, ugly fog where you can find yourself wandering in a past they didn’t teach you about in school or looking into the abyss of a lost future. In Puerto Rico, you are ignored and disenfranchised with no voice to speak with and no vote to cast after being hit by a catastrophic Category 5 storm like 2017’s Hurricane Maria. In Sudan, your family grocery explodes after a drone strike, killing your brother and his wife because a “person of interest” who may or may not have been associated with Al-Qaeda or ISIS lived a block away. If you are an eighteen-year-old Marine Recon recruit between 2003 and 2021, you hump your way through a desert toward mountains likely hived with caves of Taliban fighters. You are about to become a casualty of a war that started before you were born.
Privileged America doesn’t understand all the ways reality differs from their experience of it. There is a shadow moving at the edge of our consciousness, and the maestros of our dreams remind us it waits there.
9.The Thing on the Stairs
“AS SOON as I looked up, there it was, and it was horrible.” Ray Bradbury, a little kid in the twenties, experienced waking nightmares of a monster balefully watching him from the top of the stairs. He remembered how the shadowed presence waited for him nearly every night. He would scream, sometimes fall backward onto the floor at the ghastly presence. He could recall, nearly ninety years later, his parents sighing and saying, “Oh my God, here we go again.”28
If a monster haunted the stairwell, a peculiar combination of rockets and dinosaurs filled his dreams with wonder. At the age of five, Bradbury thrilled to The Lost World, a 1925 film based on a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle that imagined explorers finding a land of dinosaurs in a remote part of the Amazon basin. He soon devoured Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. In his teens, he befriended the future genius of stop-motion animation Ray Harryhausen when both joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Science Fiction League. The boys had been enchanted by King Kong (1933), a film both friends claimed they saw hundreds of times.
A love and terror of the primal, prehistoric beasts and behemoths from out of time lived in the same heart as an obsession with the future. It was one of the many paradoxes in the life of Bradbury that the man who wrote The Martian Chronicles and predicted everything from earbuds to artificial intelligence hated the internet, refused to type on a computer, did not want any of his work released in electronic format, and never learned to drive. And yet, he has inspired several generations with a dream of the stars. NASA gave the touchdown site of the Mars rover Curiosity the name Bradbury Landing when, on what would have been his ninety-second birthday, it settled into the waterless volcano-born regolith of the red planet.29
As a young teen, Bradbury found relief from his monsters by writing a short story a week in the basement of the UCLA library. Having discovered he could rent a typewriter for ten cents, his fingers began clattering away. Only death chilled them to a halt in 2012.
Science fiction and horror are siblings, twins who have always tried and failed to cut a different figure from one another in the world. Dreams of the stars never really banished the terror of Bradbury’s monsters, and some of his anxieties remained decidedly earthbound. While he watched American society descend into political conformity in the 1950s, he wrote Fahrenheit 451 about a not-so-unbelievable near future where the “firemen” burn books because of the danger they present to the social order.
Bradbury’s first short story collection, Dark Carnival, appeared in 1947 from Arkham House, a press first created for the sole purpose of publishing the short fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. The stories, many of them later republished in his 1955 The October Country, deal with how a skeleton might decide it could get along without its fleshier parts, how death might play the gentleman caller, and the kinds of things that live in the deep places of the earth. They are his monster at the top of the stairs.
He went back to this nightmare land in the 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, a book he originally called (again) Dark Carnival. Probably known to most for the Disney film adaptation, it’s arguably the best novel of Bradbury’s incredibly prolific career. In it, Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show comes to a small town, appearing in the middle of the night. The lights of the carnival draw the townspeople, all dissatisfied with their lives, into halls of mirrors, dark rides, the carnival clown’s uncomfortable laughter, and the call of the barker that offers wonder, mysteries, and something new, something different, if ultimately something as wicked as the title suggests.
The small town as the setting for something dark to emerge has haunted the American imagination over the last century. It’s the little California village of Santa Mira where the pod people descend, a place where everyone knows everyone and there’s just the one local doctor in the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In 1960, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone offered “A Stop at Willoughby,” the story of an anxiety-ridden businessman given the chance at a new life in a little burg. The viewer learns of the true horror of such seemingly anodyne hopes when the dream ends, and we face a more believable bleakness.
Tobe Hooper imagined a lethal carnival coming to a little Florida town in The Funhouse (1981), a place where Mom and Dad tranquilly watch Bride of Frankenstein at home while a maniac dons a rubber mask of Boris Karloff’s monster and slaughters their kids in the ultimate haunted ride. In 1984, the nightmare comes to quiet Elm Street when Freddy Krueger extends his serrated glove in murderous rage, or maybe, the film asks us, it already lived in the hearts of the parents and their very eighties fear of the ill-kempt stranger. Stephen King’s Derry, Maine, was a little hamlet of human-made horrors before terrifying transdimensional clowns began croaking out of storm drains in the novel It, the 1990 TV limited series, and the more recent blockbuster films.
Simple, staid, and very white America. When the sinister carnival comes, all the fairy tales that have poisoned us come alive and show their teeth. But even then, we’d rather believe the monsters are out there, and not in here with us. Even the most paranoid of Americans have found a way to tell themselves horror stories that are ultimately comforting.
10.The Greenbaum Effect
THE WAY of the shark, the story of an innocent America fighting an outside threat, ultimately wants you to believe everything is just fine. Because of the nature of American exceptionalism, and because of the structures of imperial control that hardwire how Americans experience reality, some aspects of horror culture assure the watcher that everything’s okay and, in fact, really, really nice. Horror’s nightmares have not escaped the American dream of consumption and domination. One response to the confrontation with a reality in which “the worst thing is true” has been to amass stockpiles of weapons, suppress Black and Brown Americans, and attempt to exclude, colonize, and even exterminate perceived foreign threats.
