In this
ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s
archetypal monsters.
Last September, my wife, Elise, and I received the
terrifying news. We were told that in nine months, a creature would be bursting
out of Elise’s body to menace us for the next eighteen years… perhaps more if
it decides not to go away to college. How could this be? Elise hadn’t been
exposed to any alien eggs. She hadn’t been visited by Satan after taking a dose
of drugged chocolate mousse. At least I don’t think she had. We don’t spend
every minute of the day together, you know.
As many, many years of devouring horror movies has taught
me, Elise’s pregnancy could have happened any number of ways. After all, a lot of monstrous babies have crawled
across the screen. Yet the monster baby is a relatively recent phenomenon.
While monstrous children peaked in the early sixties amidst “juvenile
delinquency” hysteria with items such as Village
of the Damned and the “It’s a Good Life” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” it
was not until 1968 that Roman Polanski explicitly monsterized the first stage
of life. I say “explicitly” because one could argue that the monster baby was delivered
during the haunted summer of 1816 when Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein. Though we are privy to the
Monster’s sketchily described birth in the book, he spends most of it in a
state of rebellious and ornery adolescence, pissed off at his inattentive
doctor daddy. And we certainly never witness him as a bald little
diaper-wearing thing.
