2nd Global Conference

Monsters and the Monstrous:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Monday 10th May - Wednesday 12th May 2004
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 7: Monsters Attack
Chair: Michael Breen

The Undead, Psychopomps, and Infanticide: Trickster in The Others
Terrie Waddell
Media Studies Program, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia

The threat of annihilation often takes the form of a terrifying other to whom we are disturbingly vulnerable. In its disrespect for borders and boundaries, the archetypal trickster signifies the mediation between immortal and mortal, life and death, reality and fantasy, consciousness and the unconscious. Terror, repression and illusion are smudged within these liminal spaces where both tricksters and monsters play. Trickster however, can force a confrontation with these 'night' terrors by exposing self-deception. Confronting personal shadows by accepting our own dark places, can dismantle fear and the projections it generates.
Alejandro Amenábar's film The Others, (USA/France/Spain 2001) readily allows for an analysis of trickster as ferryman, arch manipulator of reality, and catalyst for self-awareness. The film follows a collection of ghost-like characters divided into two factions - those who know they are ghosts (the servants) and those who are unable to accept their death (the family of the house). The first group guides the second to the underworld. Unaware of what they are, the phantom family inhabit an eerie 'undead' state, fraught with anxiety and fear of 'the others' (the living) who haunt their lives. The family's refusal to acknowledge their nefarious past, keeps them locked in the kind of psychological limbo that trickster relishes. By examining the wily methods employed by the archetype to activate transformation in each lost soul and so ferry them to the afterlife, it becomes clear that trickster is acting to maintain boundaries. While the motif provokes disorder and psychological chaos, the insight that results from this agitation, often leads to a sense of stability and thus a re-establishment of order.

From Bluebeard and The Robber Bridegroom to "Buffalo Bill" and "Hannibal the Cannibal": A Look at Two Recurring Characters in Art
Verana-Susanna Nungesser
Gießen, Germany

The enormous success of Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1990), the following boom of the serial killer film, the omnipresence of real-life murderers in the media plus the increase of serial killers in recent decades have led to the repeatedly stated opinion that the serial killer phenomenon might serve as a frightening symptom of an increasing development towards extreme individualism, estrangement, and sexual insecurity in Western culture. This may be true to a certain extent but the fact that centuries ago fairy tales already told stories about women and young girls being kidnapped or killed seems to be literary evidence that the serial killer is not a purely modern phenomenon at all. The central hypothesis of this paper is that the various versions of the Bluebeard fairy tale being influenced by real incidents of their time mediate an elementary typology of the serial killer and his psyche: While the Robber Bridegroom 's deeds are motivated by pleasure, Bluebeard kills because of the fear that something about him might be revealed. These patterns of behaviour were transferred into art and kept alive over centuries; first in the oral tradition and later in literature and in the medium of film. It is the aim of this study to show that these - in the Jungian sense - archetypical models are relevant up to now. Even though real criminals such as Ed Geins and Ted Bundy served as patterns for “popular” monsters (for instance Hannibal the Cannibal) a look at post-modern films about serial killers such as The Silence of the Lambs or Gary Fleder's Kiss the Girls (1997) will demonstrate that those notorious murderers have a lot in common with archetypical serial killers described in Bluebeard, The Robber Bridegroom and related fairy tales.

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Creature Conflict:  Man, Monster and the Metaphor of Intractable Social Conflict
Cary Morrison
Manassas, VA, U.S.A.

The study of monsters is a terrifically interdisciplinary dialogue. Psychoanalysis, sociology, politics, history, literature, theology, law, philosophy, medicine, and a multitude of other fields have contributed generously to the study and even to the creation of monsters. The analysis of the monstrous, whether we mean the “otherness” formed by a Freudian-esque projection of our own social identities, or the cryptozoological catalogue, invites contribution from any field that, like monsters themselves, has sprung forth from schools of thought endeavoring to understand the nature of mankind. As a highly interdisciplinary field, Conflict Analysis and Resolution merits a place at the table. This paper joins the ongoing academic discussion on the subject of monsters, addressing contemporaneous topics undergoing impassioned debate among Conflict Resolutionists: narrative discourse, identity theory, social change, free agency, the nature of evil, metaphor, and structural/physical violence.
Popular postulations in the current body of literature regarding the genesis of new and the revival of old monsters within collective awareness offer theories of ordered social patterns and epiphenomenal constructs of corresponding moral signifiers. Examination of these patterns evokes hermeneutical methodologies that mirror scholarly discourse concerning conflict analysis. Those processes by which we make intellectual assumptions about which social systems have been engaged to produce the universal phenomenon of the monster are the same processes through which we understand conflicted societies. The relationship between man and monster, then, is the ultimate metaphor of intractable social conflict. It is not coincidental that the archaeological record shows evidence of simultaneously burgeoning beliefs in monsters and the earliest development of weapons of war. Be it ancient myth, mystical creature, or ordinary human gone criminally insane, the emergence into the social repertoire of that which we call monstrous is brilliantly teleological. Indeed, the beauty of the monster is that it is a product of free will.

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