.Monsters Among Us

I might lose some punk rock points for this, but as a child one of my core memories was watching the “Thriller” music video. The shuffling zombie corpses rising from graves and the sewers as body parts fell off was the most terrifying thing I had seen in all of my eight years.

I’m pretty sure I screamed. I definitely remember the sleepless nights of terror that followed.

I would later grow up to become fascinated by zombies, vampires, cryptids, demons, monsters and other things that go bump in the night. But I’ll never forget how I felt thinking about the horror of becoming a mindless ghoul.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” exclaims Dr. Michael “Doc” Chemers through the Zoom screen after I share this memory.

“Getting a sense of who you are just by looking at you—with your hair and tattoos—you’re very much an individual and express yourself as one. Becoming a zombie would mean giving up that individuality and becoming one of the horde.”

Chemers would know.

Along with having a Ph.D. in theater history and theory and being a professor of dramatic literature in UC Santa Cruz’s Theater Arts Department, Chemers is a (literal) monster scholar. He’s the author of several books, including The Monster in Theater History: This Thing of Darkness, the co-host of the podcast The Show Where They Talk About Monsters and the founding director of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies.

And this week, Oct. 16–18, the center is resurrecting its annual Festival of Monsters, a three-day intellectual celebration of all things monstrous.

“What I’ve discovered in my research is if you ask people what monster they’re scared of the most, that is really a reflection of what they might be,” Chemers explains.

Held at the UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts Research Center, the festival is free to students. For others, a $185 registration fee includes access to all panels, an afterparty and catered breakfast and lunch.

It all culminates Oct. 18 at the UCSC Haybarn with the Monsters’ Ball, a costumed dance party where boils, ghouls and non-binary alike can all do the mash.

“I’m really excited about the Monsters’ Ball,” exclaims Dr. Renée Fox, Ph.D., co-director of the Center for Monsters and the Dickens Project.

“The Monsters’ Ball is just fun,” she continues. “Especially since all these people are traveling from everywhere and they bring their costumes with them so they can come to the ball fully decked out.”

“We have a great time,” Chemers says. “We’ll have a bar with specialty monster-themed drinks, a DJ, and we just cut loose in a room full of monster scholars dressed as their monsters.”

Unnatural History

So, what exactly is the Center for Monster Studies?

The only program of its kind in the country, the center is a collection of artists and scholars who have dedicated themselves to the study of monsters and how they have been defined and reinterpreted throughout human history across all cultures.

It all began in 2019 when the university’s Humanities Institute held the FrankenCon, a three-day festival of artists, scholars and scientists that explored the legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the novel’s 201st anniversary.

“The UCSC theater department did an adaptation of Frankenstein and they asked me if I would do a scholarly panel to accompany the play,” Chemers remembers. “So I started putting one together and it ballooned with so many people wanting to get involved.”

It resulted in Chemers creating a monster of an event spanning two days that included showings of the original 1931 and 1935 films, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, at the now-defunct DNA’s Comedy Lab. Although it wasn’t advertised under the same name, 2019’s event is considered the first Festival of Monsters.

“It was so popular that everyone wanted to do it again,” he says.

Unfortunately, of course, the Covid-19 global pandemic made sure it didn’t happen in 2020. While the pathogen spread, however, Chemers spawned a new idea. What if there could be a hub for academia to study the monsters that have always lurked behind the human mind?

Chemers—like most, if not all, of the festival panelists and speakers—has had a lifelong interest in horror as a way of reclaiming the power of identity.

“I grew up Jewish in Utah in the ’70s, and that was a hard time and place to be Jewish,” he says. “Other kids would ask me where my horns were, and stuff like that. So I gravitated toward monsters even as a little kid because I thought, ‘If they aren’t going to let me be a part of things, then I’m going to identify with and be that monster instead of being afraid of it.’”

In 2021 he applied to the UCSC Office of Research for funding and a year later the Center for Monsters was established.

“When he looked around on campus to see what classes were being taught, and if there were any interest in monster studies, he discovered I was teaching all of the monster classes,” says co-direcftor Fox. An associate professor of literature at UCSC, Fox’s focus is on 19th-century literature, and last year she published The Necromantics: Reanimation, The Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature.

“I was teaching so many classes that centered on monsters and working on my book [about] reanimated corpses—and there can be nothing more monstrous than that. So he brought me on board,” Fox explains.

“We were friends before and then discovered we were both teaching classes, doing research on and publishing about monsters,” Chemers recalls. “She was so enthusiastic about creating and crafting the center, getting grants for it and coming up with cool ways of approaching different ideas that she became the co-director. We’ve been thick as thieves ever since.”

The Abyss

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

He expressed that profound thought in 1886, and it’s just as true today as it was 138 years ago. No stranger to his own inner monsters—Nietzsche most certainly suffered from depression and some modern psychiatrists believe he was bipolar as well—it was precisely his own ability to gaze into his own abyss that gave him insight that still intrigues us today.

Monsters have always been with human beings, beginning in prehistoric days with drawing creatures on cave walls. The Greeks envisioned Medusa, with her stony gaze and snakes for hair, and the part-man, part-beast centaur. Aboriginal Australians spoke of Yara-ma-yha-who, a small red creature without teeth that swallowed its prey whole. In ancient Egypt the Serpopard—with its leopard body and snakehead—represented chaos beyond its borders. And don’t stay out after 2am in Japan, because the Gashadokuro–-giant, vengeful human skeletons with an endless hunger—feast upon the unsuspecting.

And then there are the ghosts.

“Ghosts are everywhere,” Chemers explains on Episode 2 of The Show Where They Talk About Monsters. “As far as I know, every human culture on Earth has ghost stories.”

In modern times, fictional monsters have become part of a horror industry that makes billions—if not more—worldwide. For instance take the foul-mouthed anti-hero, Freddy Krueger, from horror master Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street series. The entire franchise has made $472 million worldwide across nine films at the box office alone. That’s not including the short-lived Freddy’s Nightmares TV show, trading cards, T-shirts, action figures, bobble-heads, cosplay items, and more that’s come out over the past four decades (in fact, the original film celebrates its 40th anniversary this year).

Of course, Santa Cruz is the perfect setting for the fest, as we are no strangers to monsters, physical and fictional. One can point to atrocities throughout our area’s history such as the enslavement, rape and torture of Native Americans with the influx of colonizers. As the area grew and more people arrived, Asian immigrants were the new focus of racism and hate.

Fast forward to the 1970s, when Santa Cruz had not one but three serial killers: John Linley Frazier, Herbert W. Mullin and—most infamous of all—Edmund Kemper. This earned the city the nickname the “Murder Capital of the World,” a moniker that would be immortalized in pop culture by Joel Schumacher’s 1987 vampiric cult classic, The Lost Boys.

While it might be the most beloved horror movie filmed in Santa Cruz, it’s hardly the only one. One year after Schumacher’s film, Killer Klowns From Outer Space was released with locations filmed in Watsonville and Santa Cruz. More recently David Arquette’s 2006 slasher The Tripper was filmed in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and in 2019 Jordan Peele released Us, which he chose to film in the area based on his love for The Lost Boys.

On Tap for 2024

Each year Fox and Chemers come up with the themes or topics for the panels and invite a variety of academics and creatives from across the country to participate.

Last year’s event, titled “Werewolf Hunters, Jungle Queens and Space Commandos: The Lost World of Women Comic Artists,” centered around just that: comic books drawn by women dating back to the 1930s. The idea came after Jim Gunderson, a philanthropist, Banana Slug alumnus and avid comic collector, donated a large amount of his comics to the university’s Special Collections and Archives.

“We were so excited about his collection we wanted to create a museum exhibit that showed the role monsters played in comic book art drawn by women,” Chemers says, so they partnered with the Museum of Art and History to showcase the art.

While there is no official theme for this year’s festival, the panels are centered around topics like monstrous ecologies, body horror, queerness in horror, zombies, Black monstrosities and more.

Last weekend the festival gave the public a taste of what’s to come with two days of free events. However, the real frightful fun starts Oct. 16 with a welcome reception followed by a staged reading of Monster, a Frankenstein play by John Clancy, performed by UC Santa Cruz students and directed by Marie Stewart.

On Thursday attendees will enjoy an entire day packed with panels ranging in topics from “The Horror of Sex, Bodies and Monsters in Cinema” to dissecting race in horror with “Black Monstrosities.” There will also be a live recording of The Show Where They Talk About Monsters along with keynote speaker mattie brice, who is a video game designer, UC Santa Cruz faculty member and activist.

Chemers describes brice’s games as “astonishingly important in the history of game design,”

Notably, brice’s 2012 game, Mainichi, transports the player into the main character of a Black transwoman. The challenge is to get through a normal day in a society that sees the character as a monstrous threat.

“It’s really eye-opening,” Chemers admits. “It uses the power of games to get you, the player, to embody an experience you’d otherwise never have and to gain a little empathy.”

Monster Mashup

Friday continues the frights with topics like “Reanimating the 19th-Century British Monsters,” “Queer Monsters” and “Everyday Monsters and Monsters of Resistance.” The day’s keynote speaker is Dr. Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, a writer, professor and assistant director of the Institute of African American Studies at the University of Georgia.

“The study of monsters is so important,” says Jenkins, author of The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction and Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction.

“My work looks at humans and the human monster. It’s a construct that we’ve created and monsters represent—in many ways—the things that we don’t like about ourselves. That’s why I think some people have a hard time dealing with horror. It’s a reflection that makes us uncomfortable.”

Jenkins explains that traditionally in Western culture, horror was not seen as a Black genre. However, a new wave of Black horror creators—critically acclaimed authors like Tananarive Due (whom Jenkins calls the “Literary Stephen King”), Nnedi Okorafor, Linda D. Addison, Helen Oyeyemi, Jemiah Jefferson and Kenya Moss-Dyme—are changing that perception.

“There’s been a rising trend of Black women in Black horror,” he states. “Traditionally it’s been a male genre, but within Black horror now, I feel like I can name all of the Black male horror writers on two hands. Whereas with women there’s a list.”

In Anti-Blackness, he analyzes the monsters frequently explored in Black American horror fiction–the hypersexualization of Black women in American culture and how Black men are seen as rapists and thugs. Stereotypes dating back to America’s monstrous Original Sin of slavery. An institution—he points out—that isn’t confined just to race or our country’s history.

“Before there was an Atlantic slave trade, there was the Indian Ocean slave trade,” he explains. “The term slav comes from Slavics. So we should be asking, ‘What the hell is going on with human beings that we want to do this shit to each other?’”

Love for the Monster

Then there are people like Kahlo Smith, who have a different take.

“What brings me to monster studies in particular is an interest in self-identification with the monsters” explains Smith, a University of Nevada, Reno graduate student, Felton local and festival panelist.

“I’m Queer and also Jewish and those are two groups that—throughout history—have been aligned with villainy and monstrosity,” she continues.

“What I’ve seen as I’ve grown up in modern culture is a really interesting way that the queer community self-identifies with monstrosity as a way of reclaiming it and valuing difference. Sort of having love for the monster.”

It’s a topic she will explore in detail for her talk titled “I’m Not Straight But I’ll Make an Exception for Mothman: Transgressive Desire in Queer Cryptid Memes.”

So what is it about monsters that not only has held its gnarled grip upon humanity since the beginning of time, but continues to slash away at our deepest fears?

“There’s a kind of delight and joy in eeriness and especially a kind of catharsis,” Smith. Her love for monsters began as a child in the Santa Cruz Mountains, growing up on Highway 9 just down the road from the Bigfoot Discovery Museum. It’s a subject—and place—she would revisit as an adult.

“I interviewed the proprietor—Mike Rugg—back when I was in college,” she says. “The first big research project I did was during Covid, and I interviewed people who were the curators of cryptid museums [across the country]. That really started because of him.”

Creature Discomforts

For Center for Monster Studies co-director Fox, monsters are ubiquitous vehicles that travel through many aspects of humanity.

“Monster studies is a really capacious field in ways other academic fields aren’t. There’s space for people to come at monstrosities from all different angles: literary studies, engineering, science, media studies, Black studies, queer studies, indigenous studies. All of these fields get to come together in monster studies in a way they don’t in other academic spaces.”

How monsters change throughout time and culture is also worth noting. It’s a topic Fox will moderate on at the “Adapting Old Monsters” panel and one she explores extensively in her book The Necromantics, with a particular focus on Shelley’s Frankenstein. In her book Fox argues that Frankenstein itself has become its own monster over the past 206 years.

Today we think of the mad scientist’s monster as a mindless, destructive corpse reanimated through the resulting power when technology meets electricity.

However, that version has been stitched together of pieces from each time period and culture it passes through. In her masterpiece, Shelley never uses the word “reanimate,” instead opting for “animate”—an important distinction that Fox argues changes the meaning of the creature.

“He’s a newly created being who learns how to be human in a world that doesn’t want to allow him to be,” Fox explains.

“He’s culturally and racially illegible, his gender is illegible, and he doesn’t appear to the world in any of the categories they define as human so he has to figure it out for himself. That’s so much of what the novel is about. The problem with the creature is that he’s entirely new, not something that’s old.”

For Chemers the human obsession with monsters might actually be the only thing to save us from ourselves.

“You can take an actual person, mat the monster onto that person and then you can persecute that person without feeling like you’re a psychopath,” he says. “The monsterization of others leads to atrocities. But if you look at the monster and see yourself, then you are on the threshold of some really powerful self-discovery.”