In the autumnal depths of October, under the spectral glow of a fading sun, dozens gathered at the Museum of Art and History in Downtown Santa Cruz for a dark and sinister purpose: to celebrate monsters!
This year, the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies held its third Festival of Monsters, which brought together about 200 monster-loving academics, creators and fans from across the U.S. — people who think deeply about monsters, and what they reflect about society.
“Like any cultural form, they reflect us back to us,” said Henry Kamerling, a professor of history at Seattle University who attended. “These are all characters on the margins of society."
For Labris Willendorf, who works at the Center for Monster Studies as an administrator, her current love of monsters was an evolution that started after joining the center.
“Before, I thought of monsters only as evil or bad,” Willendorf said. “It doesn’t have to be that way. And actually, being a queer person, we’ve been monsterized. So I think for me it’s like: how monster-y can I be?”
Much of the discussion was rooted in academics. But there was a lot of fandom, too.
“I love monsters,” said Brandon Callender, who specializes in queer and Black horror studies at Brandeis University. “I love evil monsters, I love villains.”
The Center for Monster studies was pieced together and jolted into life by Michael Chemers, a professor of dramatic literature in the UC Santa Cruz Theater Arts department. Renée Fox is co-director of the center, and a professor of literature at UCSC.
The two think about monsters deeply — even when it’s not Halloween. So I asked them why these fantastical, creepy creatures are so fascinating to them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CHEMERS: I think monsters are extremely efficient at showcasing the anxieties, but also hopes of the cultures that create and sustain them. But then, of course, monsters are also a key component in the process of preparing people for identification as deviant or less than human, and then setting them up for persecution or atrocity.
FOX: Monsters are also incredibly popular. So there are monsters in every single culture and people are attracted to them. People are interested in them. They make people want to think they get people's attention. They're also a way to open people's minds, to ideas they might not have had before. To allow you to think about how a culture is functioning from so many different angles.
There's this description of what this festival is all about. And it says: Monsters rise in times of growing prejudice, discrimination and othering. And I guess I wonder if you could describe a current example that you see in the world of this?
CHEMERS: If you map the figure of the monster onto people you don't like as a prelude to getting ready to commit atrocities against them because human beings do not commit atrocities against other human beings. Not if they're sane. But against monsters. Sure, why not? They're not human. They don't have the right to live. They don't have the right to survive.
And so the more effectively you can map that monster onto that person, the more effectively you can sort of create a moral cover for yourself when you do what you really want to do in the first place, which is to commit atrocity against them.
FOX: But the other things monsters do, I mean, one of the things we talk about so often is that monsters always exist at the intersection of fear and desire. Monsters enable you to, to project certain kinds of desires that you might want to cordon off or not admit to or, you know, not allow into the into the world in certain open ways monsters. I mean, monsters are both in the closet and help all sorts of things come out of the closet.
CHEMERS: Absolutely. And so if you are capable of looking at a monster and seeing yourself reflected in the monster, you're on the edge of tremendous personal growth, tremendous psychological development.
Is there an example of that in your backgrounds?
CHEMERS: Yeah, it's deeply personal. The concept of the werewolf was extremely important to me personally, as I was dealing with my own struggles with anxiety. And what I discovered is that having a monster to hang on to, to sort of reflect what I was going through was tremendously therapeutic and helped me tremendously in navigating my way out of that problem.
FOX: So for me, vampires have always been the monster that I have both been most attracted to and that has allowed me to to think through, you know, not only my own kind of world of desire, but also my intellectual desires. Vampires are the monsters that helped me see my intellectual self and also my inner self.
It is Halloween season, and I wonder, as folks who work at the Center for Monster Studies, how do you go about celebrating that?
FOX: We dress up!
CHEMERS: Yeah, we dress up as monsters. We embody the monsters that we study.
