Sex Monsters!

“It’s all about transgressive behaviour. Being a successful movie monster, that is,” declares top film nerd and amateur critic Herb Nebblinger in the latest episode of his regular podcast Stalk’n’Slash. “Well, a classic movie monster that is – because those films from the forties and fifties, they are just about nothing but sex!” The twenty seven year old Milwaukee resident’s revelations come after a weekend movie marathon of watching classic horror movies for the first time. “I mean, those vampires, in particular, are all about sex – all that blood drinking is clearly a substitute for oral sex. They also spend a lot of time targeting innocent young women, preferably virgins, and violating them with their perverted practices. This is particularly worrying as the vampire has typically been undead for hundreds of years, making him the ultimate in dirty old men!” Nebblinger contends that the vampire’s depredations are a complex business, with the clear implication that his victim has sometimes been ‘asking for it’, in that they are sexually promiscuous and/or a willing participant in the blood drinking/sex. “That said, more often than not, the vampire’s attacks are more akin to rape, with his attentions being forced upon an unwilling victim,” he muses. “Like rape, it isn’t about sex, so much as power: not only is the vampire usually a member of the nobility, but his attentions usually leave the victim helpless in the face of his power.”

Nebblimger’s brush with classic horror has left him disgusted with its obsession with perverted sex. “Before this, I just thought that they were the sort of creaky old innocent stuff that my grandparents watched – completely non-frightening and badly dated old relics,” he says. “But I’ll tell you, from now on I’m sticking to stuff made after 1980 – good honest splatter, dismemberments and serial killers. No unwholesome sexual stuff there. Give me a good slasher movie with a serial killer wearing a leather mask thrusting his knife into women, or some body horror with women being dismembered, over these bloody sex obsessed vampires any day!” But it isn’t just vampires amongst the ranks of classic movie monster which have raised Nebblinger’s ire. “Let’s face it, Dr Jekyll’s transformation into Mr Hyde is clearly sexually motivated. The good doctor’s bestial alter ego allows him to indulge in all sorts of sexual depravities his normal repressed self could only fantasize about,” he opines. “Much the same applies to the werewolf, who also crosses another boundary by eating people as well.”

Nebblinger, who lives in his mother’s basement, concedes that, for a while, he thought that the Frankenstein monster, at least, was pure of any sexual implications. “But the more of the films I watched, the more I realised that he was always carrying off young women in low cut dresses, or even their underwear, with the clear implication of a sexual motive,” he points out. “Even in the 1931 Frankenstein, there’s a scene where Karloff’s monster lumbers into his creator’s bride-to-be bedroom – the way the sequence is cut, with the bride-to-be lying prone on her bed, hair disarrayed and limbs akimbo, clearly implies rape. Mind you, there’s always the question of whether Frankenstein has constructed his monster with the requisite equipment for that sort of activity – maybe that’s his motivation: sexual frustration!” Although, the horror fan notes, the creature’s attempts to get the good Doctor to create him a mate seems to imply that he is equipped. “Then I realised that the Frankenstein monster was, in fact, all about masturbation,” Nebblinger reveals. “He is, obviously, not born of woman. In fact, no woman is involved, at any point, in his creation. He is entirely the product of a man. Put crudely, the Monster is the result of masturbation, a terrible warning of what happens when unnatural (ie solo) sex usurps the normal sex act involving a man and a woman! Frankenstein’s monster is less a masturbatory fantasy than a masturbatory nightmare!”

Some other classic horror creatures left Nebblinger perplexed as to their sexual predilections. “That Creature From the Black Lagoon, what’s that all about?” he asks. “A half man, half fish, (or whatever the Hell he’s meant to be – some kind of prehistoric humanoid amphibian, I think), stalking nubile young women in swimsuits swimming in that lagoon – at the very least, I suppose, it is voyeurism, but it quickly turns into stalking. But at the end of the day, isn’t just about bestiality – I mean, he’s an amphibian lusting after and carrying off to his lair, human women. What else is he going to do with them there? It’s absolutely disgusting! Not to mention illogical – why would a scaly amphibian would find human women attractive? I mean, if the situation were to be reversed, would the audience be expected to believe that a human man might find a scaly green woman with gills sexually alluring?”

Film historian Lionel Bumstadler has been left exasperated by Nebblinger’s podcast. “He’s just typical of the current generation of horror film consumers, who seem to be entirely ignorant of the history of the genre they profess to love,” he told specialist movie magazine Furtive Films. “They think that the genre was invented by John Carpenter and started with Halloween. All they are interested in is the blood and gore, the way the killings are staged and the special effects – the nuances and subtelties of the films are completely lost on them. That’s why cannibals, zombies and serial killers are now the most popular monsters – they are bland, motiveless killing machines, interested only in dismemberment and disembowelment!” Sex, he contends, has always been an integral part of the best horror films, those that stand the test of time. “Sex and horror are inextricably linked,” he says. “There’s a reason why the French refer to the orgasm as ‘the little death’ – the release of pent up fear at the climax of a great horror film is like the ejaculation which climaxes a great sexual experience!”

A lack of a sexual sub-text makes for a bad horror movie, Bumstadler argues. “That’s why mummy movies, for example, are always so lousy – he presents no sexual threat towards all those women he carries off. Sure, his interest in them is usually motivated by the fact they are the reincarnation of his long lost forbidden love, but there’s never any suggestion that he’s going to be do anything physical about it, even if he could,” he says. “Mind you, if he could do something physical with those women, then that would represent some very transgressive sexual behaviour, as four thousand year old embalmed corpse having sex with a living woman would surely count as necrophilia. But without the sex, what’s left for the poor old Mummy other than just shuffling around musty old tombs?”