Monsters

In my first year on the speech team I focused on Impromptu and Extemporaneous, because they required the least preparation. With Impromptu you have five minutes to prepare and give a speech on the topic they give you (generally recommended that you use 30 seconds to prepare and speak for four minutes and thirty seconds). With Extemp, you get your topic and have 30 minutes to prepare to speak for 6 or 7 minutes, and it is always on current events.

Anyway, I remember at one tournament I was going through the current events file and reading an article on Haiti. The opening, talked about how wolves were such a scary part of life in Europe, that it made sense that werewolves became a fear—something deadly disguised as someone like you. However in Haiti the worst part of life was the hard labor, and so the fear of being reanimated and needing to continue to work afterwards as a zombie was a logical fear for them.

I don’t think I used it for the speech I was preparing, but it made an impression on me where I would think of scary stories in terms of the psychology behind them. When we toured the Winchester House, and they explained that her husband died of tuberculosis and her baby died of failure to thrive, it totally made sense to me that she became convinced of the supernatural, because to have all of your family waste away, with no visible reason, would make you crazy. The only thing that would have made more sense is if she had become obsessed with vampires instead of ghosts.

So, I have thought about those things in the past, and of course I have been thinking about zombies a lot now, and the new thing that I have been thinking about is the fear of infection. The worst thing for me about zombies (besides the grossness) is the loss of your identity, and that happens both with the traditional Haitian zombies and the Romero flesh-eating zombies. Death is one thing, and un-death but still as yourself is another thing, but not being you anymore is the worst.

Thinking about the infection got me thinking that this is very common with our classic monsters. Vampires turn you into vampires. Lycanthropes turn you into lycanthropes. Sometimes maybe they just kill you, but there is that possibility of conversion, and usually with some loss of control. The werewolf may be fine in man form, but usually in wolf form does not know what he is doing. The vampire may not want to kill others, but the hunger is so strong.

And those are monsters that people actually believed in. Now, at the time, people may have been more concerned about being killed outright than turned into a monster. Maybe the loss of self issues happened as we got more modern, and individualistic. My point is, it is reasonable to worry about your own capacity for evil, and it is reasonable to worry about being corrupted.

Over the next few posts I will be covering religion and politics, and I may call out a few things as evil, but my main concern is going to be with people throwing away good pieces of themselves, and doing it for bad reasons, and not realizing the bargain that they make. People sell their souls way too cheaply.

But for now it is a matter of metaphor, and one that’s good for this time of year. Did you know that Dr. Jeckyll didn’t want to overcome his good? He wanted to free his bad so it wouldn’t bother him anymore. And even when he saw that it was not working the way he intended, and was causing harm, he kept it up until he couldn’t stop.

Happy Halloween.