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Year One Review

November 8, 2016 / Heather McCallum / 0 Comments

When I started this project, I set a few boundaries in place to help limit my discussions. I wouldn’t be talking about zombies, aliens, or man-made abominations so early on. I wouldn’t talk about anything past 1900 to keep these folktales regionally limited, or at least easier to trace than the quickly mutating monster movie media. I wouldn’t explore American, Oceanic, or Asian monsters, to try to keep to a discrete strain with a written record. I would produce academically-worded papers intended to be taken as pure research.

As I continued research, however, I became curious of exactly what I knew versus what I thought I knew, and I enjoyed pleasant diversions down the rabbit hole in researching the Salem Witch Trials, or an impressive attempt at tackling all the monster movies I never got to see in my sheltered youth.

And at the conclusion of the first year of this project, the most neatly polished essays I have to offer are pieces on the Salem Witch Trials, vampire and monster movies, global taboos, and Blood Libel’s connection with vampires through the modern era. I feel like I’ve careened wildly off-track from where I intended to go, and I’m learning to be okay with that. Research is the lifeblood of academia, and I have enjoyed few pleasures as great as being able to dig in and study something that I really love, or something that I don’t know much about yet. (Don’t hold me to reading up on obscure mathematical theorems. I have my limits!) My Salem paper clocked in at 17 single-space pages in part because of my physical experiences which enriched my writing, but also because the combination of on-the-ground experience and the glut of research produced a genuine excitement for the topic. While I scheduled pieces exploring safer topics like ‘vampire anathema’, I found that forcing myself to write on something that I’d researched extensively but had little passion about produced lackluster writing efforts. The thesis experience allowed me to do something fun, and in the process, I could relate that fun to others. I want this kind of drive to fuel the rest of the topics I write about so I can relate my passion to you, and I’m eager to see where the next year will take me.

Werewolves

It should seem easy to define the werewolf, but culturally, our understanding of werewolf has shifted as dramatically as a man’s transformation into an animal figure. In present day, we include any man-to-animal transformation under the banner of the word ‘werewolf’, despite unique cultural descriptors, or the animal in question not even closely matching the genus of ‘wolf’. For those broader examples, it is more accurate to use the word ‘shape-shifter’ or ‘shape-changer’ in general, and apply the specific cultural descriptor when relevant.

A werewolf is an individual who, whether by curse, intention, enacting taboo, or biological relation, is transformed into a half-man-half-wolf shape; a natural wolf shape; or a hulking, beastly wolf shape, typically with the movement of the moon. In the cases of intentional shape-changing, their alteration has no connection to the lunar orbit.

Werewolves are not Man-Animal Hybrids.

A werewolf is not created from a human individual having progenitive sex with a wolf and a human child being birthed as a result of it. A werewolf is not created from a human lab infusing wolvish elements into a human child, or human elements into a wolf pup. There is nothing to suggest genetic interplay in that fashion.

Werewolves are not Feral Humans.

Feral humans are humans who were abandoned by their own kind as babies or very young children and raised by animals. While the typical animal caregivers do tend to be the nurturing wolf-packs, feral humans do not actually gain the characteristics of wolves, ie, they do not compensate for exposure to the environment with growth of body hair or the development of claws and foot-pads. They do show forms of emulation in mimicry of wolf-noises, walking and running on four limbs, and eating habits, but may successfully be reintegrated into society.

Werewolves are not “Animorphs”.

Werewolves do not have the capacity to change into a variety of different animal forms. They do not gain their animal forms from close physical presence to wolves. In the case of intentional shape-changing, the proximity is considered a spiritual connection, and the changer is typically ritualistically imbued or given clothing or artifacts that enhance or produce that connection.

Introduction

March 11, 2016 / Heather McCallum / 0 Comments

My name is Heather McCallum, and I’m a teratologist and researcher. For the past four years, I have studied the way we connect to monsters, and how our monsters connect to us. Monster stories were an important part of my childhood, but as I connected with different groups of people, I realised that these monster narratives influenced a vast body of individuals in different and discrete ways. I became excited to see just how important these monsters were.

Monsters are an important part of our storytelling. They help us conceptualize and relate unspoken evils, discuss the formation, violation, or destruction of taboos, and address certain parts of ourselves that we’d rather not look too far into. We see the discussion of what we consider to be a monster, and what our monsters do for us as early as the child-aimed ‘The Monster at the End of This Book‘, up through ratty copies of ‘Goosebumps‘ passed hand-to-hand in middle schools and public libraries, and into splatterhouse films, the delight of teenagers and young adults who want to prove they’re not afraid of the dark. We make fun of our monsters, like in Ghostbusters, or we take them seriously enough to put our own faces on them, like in Silence of the Lambs. Our monsters can have paranormal powers, or be extensions of our own science, or be the paladin of forceful, merciless nature, or be twisted psychological studies.

Depending on the storyteller, our monsters can act as hilarious examinations of society, the stuff of nightmares, or romantic ideals. Fear can be named and minimized, or heightened as the ‘essence of things unseen’. But at the end of the day, we create monsters, and we use monsters, and we tell stories about monsters, and my purpose is to figure out their purpose in our lives. What makes monsters so appealing? Why do they sell? Why do women want to date them and men want to be them? How do we use our monsters, and how do we incorporate them into our lives? I’ll be exploring these questions and more.

Join me as I journey In the Footsteps of Monsters.