Earlier this month Alexander Chee wrote an article for Guernica Magazine about Dracula which proposed that some of the evil of Dracula was the sublimated eroticism that Stoker felt toward Walt Whitman. This article principally focused on the monster as a figure for interrogating evil and, midway through the article Chee recommends that his readers, ” Ask yourself what you might really fear, and why.”

Monstrosity is a threat. When I wrote about the desire to be monstrous in Cabal I said that the Nightbreed dance along the edge of the indescribable because they are everything that we can not bear to be. The monster is tied to the Jungian idea of the shadow – the idea that we, collectively as a culture, have parts of ourselves we can’t bear to look at. Even without the blood and the frenzy of the Nightbreed (who we should remember do, in fact, eat people) the very repression of the Nightbreed is a threat. They reveal what we all wish to conceal by their being.

The monster is not simply the inhuman. A chicken is inhuman. A rock is inhuman but neither chickens nor rocks are threats to humanity. We might sympathize with the chicken, kept caged, surrendering its young or being force-fed into a premature adolescence and slaughtered for food. But there is nothing of the monster about the chicken. Monstrosity is not simply being outcast or othered. While a monster is an othered figure this is a simplification of the monster. In No Future, Lee Edelman introduces his text to say, “Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it.” This negativity he describes is much like the Shadow in that it is grounded in rejection – a rejection of futurity itself.

Certain other critics have engaged with Chee’s work and seem to misunderstand it somewhat by proposing that Chee’s description of the “literary gossip” of a meeting between Stoker, Whitman and Wilde that never happened is the root of the homophobia of Dracula. In fact Chee alludes to the homoeroticism of Dracula by pointing out that, while Stoker and Wilde met Whitman separately, Stoker’s correspondence with Whitman was deeply homoerotic. If we are to treat Dracula as a homophobic text we should situate the monstrosity of the Count in this form of the Jungian shadow – a negation that fears to look at the monstrosity that lurks within the subject, the threat of the self as a self-subversion.

To the extent that Edelman invites the queer subject to embrace the monster it is not to reach out to the liberal majority and seek empathy. It’s to make, of a political body, an explicit threat: we want no future like this. You cannot cow us with the threat to some imagined child.

Sympathy and identification with the monster is complicated when we begin to treat people as being dividual. In Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol Clover is very careful with the idea of identification, saying, of identification with a character that it is fluid: “competing figures resonate with competing parts of the viewer’s psyche.” A person might identify both with the slasher-killer and the final girl. As Chee points out it’s not uncommon to root for the monster and yet we still feel satisfaction when he is dispatched. We enjoy watching Freddy dispatch teens in increasingly absurd ways and we enjoy watching Nancy overcome him in the end. Both the part that delights in Freddy’s sadism and in Nancy’s flagellant heroism are elements of the psyche of the audience.

When examining the figure of the monster and the question of sympathy we might be well-advised to consider Frankenstein. There is that old joke that first you realize that Frankenstein is the doctor and not the monster but then you realize that the doctor is, in fact, the monster of the story, and that’s true. Doctor Frankenstein is a monstrous figure. But his creation, in full awareness of his senses, murders William and blames Justine. He murders Elizabeth, he kills and he glories in his kills. Frankenstein’s creature is the victim of Frankenstein’s promethean hubris, he is a subject with whom we can easily sympathize. He is also a hot-blooded killer who enjoys killing.

We don’t seek out identification with the monster for the purpose of comfort. Another key example is Knife + Heart. There is a scene at a burlesque in which an elderly woman begs a monster to couple with her and the monster warns her that in the throes of passion it will consume her. She pleads the monster to do so and the monster rips her apart. This relationship of monstrous attraction is highly reflective of the bitter, collapsing and abusive relationship between the protagonist Anne and her ex-lover Loïs. Anne, watching the woman circle the monster, beg for her death in ecstasy and passion, sees herself as the monster and Loïs as the victim who cannot separate herself and, in doing so, gives herself a kind of justification for her own abusiveness. But there is another monster in Knife + Heart – the revenant-like killer who stalks the gay porn scene of 1979 Paris. And he, too, is a victim whose story demands sympathy. He was a gay man maimed and possibly murdered by a homophobic father; he watched his lover burned to death in front of him. There is a demand for sympathy just to understand his murders. But in the end we cannot help but also feel sympathy for the patrons of a porno theater who cut him down.

Monsters aren’t nice.

The idea of the identity of the monster, the shadow-self that is rejected by society, is a critical lens for understanding the subaltern. But monsters have claws and fangs. Monsters do terrible things. As both Lee Edelman and Karl Marx remind us, when it is our turn we will make no apologies for the terror. The Nightbreed of Midian want no integration into the human community and they still eat flesh and drink blood. When we want monstrosity we must want to be monsters not because they are subaltern but because they are a threat. There is no need to invoke the monster simply to sympathize with the subaltern. All you need for that is a functioning heart. The monster is a reminder that some forms of minority are subaltern because they threaten to overturn an old order and replace it with nothing that can be recognized.

Happy Halloween.