February 2004 Issue - Essay # 10
Hunting
Monsters
By Josh
Gryniewicz
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A
mix of fear and excitement coursed through me as I wrenched myself to
the top of the stone wall that surrounded the cemetery lot. Rows of
wrought iron spears lined in ascending order to form an imposing archaic
structure, the gate itself bound shut with a massive chain and fixed
with a tremendous lock. With the fortitude of a medieval dungeon, it
begged the question, were such precautions really to keep people out…
or to keep something else in? Below
me the remaining members of my crew, had just started their climb.
Statues of mourning angels and macabre cherubs glared at us from marble
epitaphs. A bitter autumn wind carried legends of ghosts. We had no time
for such phantoms; we were in pursuit of something far more terrifying:
we had come to make a horror movie. Clint
and Jason tagged along as die-hard horror fans. Chris, my brother, was
the only one who knew how to use the equipment. And I had come to
research the horror genre first hand by directing a film for a
humanities class. As
the country was in the grips of yet another controversy over media
violence and censorship, I had chosen the most gore-filled genre to
explore the opposite: "Was there a psychologically beneficial
merit to horror films that actually helped audiences cope with serious
personal and social issues?" Renowned psychoanalyst Bruno
Bettelheim, in his "The Uses of Enchantment," explores the
psychotherapeutic aspects of children’s fairytales to the developing
psyche. In his discussion on the suppression of monsters in folk tales,
he argues, “Without such fantasies, the child fails to get to know his
(personal) monsters better, nor is he given suggestions as to how he may
gain mastery over it. As a result, the child remains helpless with his
worst anxieties…” My
own exploration of this quandary would begin on a dark and brutally
stormy night in third grade. The air was tainted with a texture of
wicked foreboding. Well, actually it was mid-morning, slightly overcast
with only a chance of showers and I had eaten an egg-and-sausage
biscuit for breakfast which could account for the sinister feeling--still, something was going to
change. I knew it. My
father, his friend Lance and I were heading to a sci-fi/horror convention downtown.
My father had made me a comic book geek; a steady
diet of super humans and alien invasions that had started when I first
learned how to read. Lance, however, was cool--he had a cool haircut,
he wore a trench coat, he had an earring and, coolest of all, Lance
worked with monsters. He was a special effects artist. And he was
attending the convention to meet his idol, Tom Savini. If
Lance was cool, there were no words to describe Savini, but I guess
"Master of Horror" will suffice. Savini had created the
zombies for the "Dawn & Day of the Living Dead" and directed the
remake of the classic "Night." He had brought life to Jason from
"Friday
the 13th" and he had killed him off and then brought him back to life
and then killed him off. He had worked on "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2"
and the Chuck Norris action movie "Invasion USA." And even though it
challenges my credibility as a judge of "cool," in third
grade, hanging with Chuck Norris was cool. Savini
had been a photographer documenting the atrocities in As
he finished up his lecture, he unveiled one of his nightmare creations: a squat, gnomish looking creature with long grayish hair and an
alligator like snout with rows of razor sharp teeth. This was the beast
in the crate from the film "Creepshow." It was here, in the muted gray
flesh (or foam), and it looked terrifying, and then, like a true
master, Savini gave it a command. At his bidding, the creature drooled
glistening strands of saliva that glimmered along the row of teeth
making them shimmer ever sharper in its savage maw. As
a vampire sires its followers, as a curse is passed by the bite of a
werewolf, as aliens claim you as one of them--I had been changed that
day. I was reborn into darkness as the most diabolical kind of fiend: a horror movie fan. Worse yet, I wanted to be a special effects artist.
The world was never going to be the same. Back
at the cemetery, we set up the equipment and took the opportunity to
explore; morose granite figures with hallowed eyes staring in eternal
lamentation gave it the ambiance of a gothic theater while its near
abandoned quality and disheveled overgrowth provided the feel of a
Romero film. For the preceding couple weeks I had been prepared for this
shoot--from script to storyboard through to scouting locations (actually
that latter bit is too In
the opening scene the camera would pan across the cemetery in broad
establishing shots, then zoom in on a figure in a black cloak raising
from a grave. The script followed the cloaked figure in a simple paper
maché mask as it stalked our central character, a typical teenage girl,
sitting alone in her room, scribbling in her journal. Despite the
simplicity of the creature, not too mention the story, the result was
still as frightening as it was effective. From
the age of myth, horrific monsters have embodied what Jung referred to as
the “shadow” self, a collection of the negative aspects of both the
individual and society; and the horror film genre provides no shortage of
metaphorical examples. The vampire mystique has been applied to
everything from domineering political systems, emotionally abusive
relationships, sexual abuse to sexually transmitted diseases.
Werewolves have metaphorically encapsulated our animalistic instincts
and pubescent changes. Zombies
have symbolized exploitative labor, colonization, manic capitalism,
labor issues, the bureaucratic social machinery and rampant violence.
Alien invasions metaphorically encompassed Cold War fears while
commenting on the dark side of rationalist scientific approaches. It may
have been a Master of Horror, who turned me, but it was the Classic
"Creature Feature" fiends, resurrected for the comedy "Monster
Squad" that issued my higher calling. The night I saw the film it was a
dose of kerosene on the flicker of my youthful delusions. The world was
host of unholy living dead--these creatures were out there, only we
kids could save it. We had work to do, that night I called my friends…
There
is no recollection of what was said to assemble my team of night
stalking demon hunters, but my friends Eric, Randy, Eddie, Dennis, Kevin
and Chris were in. Together we formed the "M Factor," to rid the world of
evil or, at least, the six square blocks in our neighborhood where we
could ride our bikes. We covered the "X-Files" for the "Hardy Boys," and
nothing bonded a group of boys as much as a fascination with monsters
and a devotion to vanquishing the bogeyman. My
parents let us use the back room in our basement as an office to meet
the prospective clients and headquarters for our heroic missions--except they insisted on calling it a clubhouse. We decorated the walls
with posters of our generation of horror classics: "The Lost Boys,"
"Freddy," "Jason," and "Return of the Living Dead." The pride of our
headquarters was its expansive library of ancient works on the occult,
profiling the creatures we hunted (mostly back issues of movie magazines
like "Fangoria" and "Starlog"). However, my father had also amassed and
cross-referenced two massive volumes of paranormal literature in
encyclopedic form, as much for his own amusement as ours--especially
when considering that we presumed research occurred in one-minute
montages. We
were always on the hunt for a nest of vampires, a vicious poltergeist, a
werewolf, or cursed antique; and somehow these situations were in
abundance in our neighborhood. But we spent most of our time talking
about the movies we loved. We talked about Alfred Hitchcock, the twisted
master of suspense behind "Psycho;" about John Carpenter, who directed
"The
Thing" and "Halloween," and Wes Craven, the genius behind
"The Serpent &
the Rainbow" and "Nightmare on Elm Street."
And we saved the most reverence for the artists
who made the monsters: Rick Baker, who perfected werewolf
transformation in "An American Werewolf in London,"
Kevin Yagher, the man who brought Freddy from "Nightmare" to
reality and, of course, my old friend, Savini. To
Kevin, Chris and me, this latter trio was our Houdini. They were
magicians who wielded illusion, wizards who made the impossible
possible, and heroes who mastered the nightmares that terrified us. Our
trio became a nuisance at the local costume shop, peppering the clerks
behind the counter with questions and demands ripped from "Fangoria’s"
pages. Pushing the limits of latex, foam and our allowance to extremes
to make our families (and in my case, especially Kevin’s older sister)
gasp. We created a circus of severe injury, defying stunts and gore
extravaganza. I
wrote the scripts. Chris and I acted. And we all dug into the kit of
special effects. Our magic tricks involved dismemberment and
transformation. Our stage show at family parties was for anyone with the
stomach to watch. At one backyard barbecue I was transformed into a
Kimono wearing, cannibalistic old man, who lived in a cave (a doghouse)
and stalked small village children (my brother). After tearing Chris
apart, his severed arm mechanically crawled across the back porch,
leaving an oozing trail of bloody slime. By
the time I was conducting my humanities project, the script had become
slightly more sophisticated, serving its purpose that horror has
personified our abstract fears through cinema since the technology was
first invented. More so, however, this could be proven by our own
experiences. Over the years, the M Factor’s ghost stories evolved into
late night contemplation of how we would survive a dead world overrun by
zombies, which evolved into how we would survive the unknowns of
graduation, careers and the future. The demons that we had pitted
ourselves against became psychological; members of "M Factor" were claimed
not by creatures of the night, but by a gang shooting, a car accident
and drug addiction. We
all took different avenues influenced by those early connections. Last
we heard, Kevin had applied for an internship at a costume shop. Chris
moved out from behind the camera and is working as an actor. And I now
have an earring, a cool haircut, and a trench coat--and I work with
monsters.
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Author's Biography Josh Gryniewicz is a writer of fiction, creative non-fiction and an explorer of some things in between. Josh is a film reviewer for the web-zine NightsAndWeekends.com, where his monthly column Pop Cultist also appears. He has written on the significance of stories and myth in present day for Nilas, Northland’s Storytelling Network and the Tell-Tale Heartlander. He has also appeared in Illinois Audubon, Glacier and co-wrote and directed the play Waves Under Broken Ice. He currently lives in E-mail
Josh at jgryn5@hotmail.com |
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