From the horror films of Wes Craven, to the Cain narrative in contemporary Seventh-Day Adventist literature, to the Cthulu mythos in contemporary Japan, this panel draws together four scholars looking at the intersection of monstercraft and racecraft in creating the religious other. Using diverse methodologies, these four authors examine how the continual constrcution and re-construction of monsters becomes interwoven with religious claims about the origins of race, the exoticism of racial and social others, and our own ideas of the hated "other." This panel also features practical pedagogical suggestions for engaging with these arguments in the classroom to combat the increasing politicization and demonization of educational institutions.
Wes Craven’s distinctly comic storytelling sensibilities can be found throughout his horror filmography, from the humorously quipping Freddy Krueger to the often-comical meta-commentary of the Scream films, but when this comic vision collides with the traditional Gothic monsters of Vampire in Brooklyn and Cursed, what emerges is a curious but insightful pattern into the way laughter destabilizes monstrosity. A cursory overview of Vampire in Brooklyn and Cursed will reveal a nearly identical pattern in which comedy disrupts and detaches the locus of monstrosity from the body of the vampire or werewolf respectively. Instead, we find the locus of monstrosity reforming around the monsters’ stereotypical sidekicks. However, this “migration” of monstrosity from beast to buffoon does not merely reinforce the exoticism of the racial and sexual others in the films. Rather, both Craven’s monsters and stereotypical gag characters serve to expand the “fellowship of laughters” in which these outcasts find themselves.
The Curse of Cain and Ham is an old racist idea that surfaced in July of 2021 in Scientific American and in the April 24th, 2022 lesson of the Seventh-day Adventist Sabbath School Quarterly. The curse’s appearance revealed not only confusion about the biblical text, but also ignorance as to its origin. The curse is connected to early/medieval Christian speculation on monsters. Beginning with Augustine’s speculations on “monster races” in The City of God, this paper isolates the monstrous DNA of the curse and brings it into dialogue with Cohen’s monster theory, including the additional five theses developed by Laycock and Mickles. The Curse of Cain/Ham is a Frankenstein monster that “escapes” to keep the invisible monster of white supremacy alive. The conclusion is that the mark of a monster isn’t skin color, but the willingness to reduce the Imago Dei of other human beings to hold on to power.
H.P Lovecraft’s unique brand of cosmic horror and shared mythopoeia – the “Cthulhu mythos” – has had an indelible impact on the genres of modern horror, science fiction, and fantasy on a global scale. His influence has been especially felt by Japanese writers, manga artists, and in the realm of popular culture. Japan is not only the largest non-English language consumers of Lovecraftian horror but is also one of the largest sites of its production. The success of Lovecraft in Japan is puzzling considering his well-established racism and xenophobia, which is closely tied to fear of the unknown and the genre of cosmic horror. This paper discusses how Japanese writers of Lovecraftian horror confront racism through subversion, empowerment, and historicization. Themes, such as the decline of Western civilization, degeneration, and monstrous reversion, are transformed in the works of these authors who explore the connections between their own purported monstrosity.
Our political discourse is currently full of monsters. The US right has formulated a potent brew of critical race theory, the trans agenda of grooming children, and a cabal of satanic pedophiles at the highest levels of government – a cumulative threat to the very existence of the United States. This paper proposes that the political style that blends anxieties about race, gender/sexuality, schools, and Satan may be usefully named “monsterbating”: a political, cultural, and psychological tactic to make monsters of the marginalized, cultivate pleasure in their demonization, and perpetuate a sense of existential threat. I argue that a primary goal of liberal arts and humanities education must be to teach against monsterbating, and that the religion classroom is particularly well-suited to this endeavor.