W. Scott Poole > Quotes

“The monster in American history is not simply that which destroys. It is a being that must be destroyed. ...There can be no simple border wars in America's conflicts. Every battle is a mythic battle, a struggle against savagery, whether it be a Native American war, the search for a sea monster, or a war on terror.”
― W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

“The corpses in the wasteland of past and present haunt us. We are still in Eliot's land of the dead, imprisoned in Kafka's penal colony, running from the unexplained rage of the golem, listening to Lovecraft's drumbeat of horror, and shivering in the chilly shadow of Grau and Murnau's Nosferatu. We cannot awaken from history.”
― W. Scott Poole

“American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security. The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle class families to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation.

American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of 'creature features' proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders in flying saucers, radioactive mutations, and giant creatures born of the atomic age wreaked havoc but were soon destroyed by brainy teams of civilian scientists in cooperation with the American military. These films encouraged a certain degree of paranoia but also offered quick and easy relief to this anxiety... Such films did not so much teach Americans to 'stop worrying and love the bomb' as to 'keep worrying and love the state.”
― W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

“All the creatures of folklore and popular culture raise unanswered questions about the bodies we inhabit. The walking corpse horrifies because our bodies will bear a real resemblance to them someday, sans the perambulation. Medical oddities are distburbing because they remind that the boundaries of the human body are inherently instable... Other members of the monstrous fraternity, even the sultry vampire, threaten to puncture, rend, and ultimately destroy our bodies. We fear the monster perhaps because we fear the death and dissolution of our temporal selves.”
― W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

“A number of scholars, many of them seeking to explain the appeal of the monstrous in pop culture, have seen the monster primarily as part of an inner horror show, the personal nightmares of the ego torn between a reptilian id and the moralistic superego. This interpretation understands the monster as a metaphor of human development, the demons that guard the gates of adulthood and emotional maturity. Monsters, according to this view, are primarily inner monsters. Our desire for them emerges from our desire to embrace our own darkness. This approach often makes the self, especially the adolescent self, the locus of understanding the horrific.”
― W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

“Of course it's kitsch, and of course our love for every cult figure gets called kitsch when we want to separate the suffering it requires to create a symbol that lives in the world from the ravages of one's own life.”
― W. Scott Poole, Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror

“The urge to reproduce, once inextricably linked to sex, may have a connection to a neurotic fantasy of cheating death by creating an enduring legacy. You can test the primal strength of this cultural idea by noting how no one questions the rationality of reproduction, even in a world of rapidly dwindling resources. Meanwhile, people who choose not to have children often receive both religious and secular disdain as selfish, the breakers of an unspoken social contract, or simply odd.”
― W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror

“The consequences of the 1918 armistice that became the 1919 Treaty of Versailles slammed into the last century like a hurricane making landfall at high tide, pushing ever more violent waters up the rivers of history, transforming streams into raging cataracts and covering the global landscape with an ever-rising flood. Looking back over the last hundred years and seeing the fervent desire for war and the sadistic means in which armies murdered their way to bitter victory, we have to grimly conclude that the Great War never ended.
The nightmare continued.”
― W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror

“She always paid a high price for her dignity.”
― W. Scott Poole, Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror

“Don’t worry about the thing on the stairs. If you don’t want to be “woke,” it’s terribly cozy to sleep on peacefully while vast tracts of American horror culture allow you to float in Amity’s warm and woozy dream.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“Her scream echoes, and the light of her darkness does not go out. She wants you to join her midnight ramble.”
― W. Scott Poole, Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror

“Monsters of all kinds are far more than malefic explosions of the id, more than a return of the repressed. Monsters occupy a central place in American social and cultural history. They sit like spiders in the center of a web of political identities, economic forces, racial fantasy, and gender dynamics. They are more than the dark side of the human personality or the dark side of popular culture. They are part of the genetic code of the American experience, ciphers that reveal disturbing truths about everything from colonial settlement to the institution of slavery, from anti-immigrant movements to the rise of religious fundamentalism in recent American politics. They are more than fantastical metaphors because they have a history coincident with a national history. The interpretation of the monstrous as the working out of psychic trauma is deeply flawed in its reductive and overdeterminative implications.”
― W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

“Writer and director Aislinn Clarke doesn’t use the phrase elevated horror. But she has suggested that a difference does exist between something being “scary” and true, lingering horror. The creation of horror depends on upending convention and, she suggests, should “punch up” against those in power rather than “merely making monsters of those at the bottom”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“In the weeks following the December Pearl Harbor attack, Bataan and Singapore fell to Japan while German U-boats ravaged American shipping. In one of his famed fireside chats, FDR rather ominously evoked the miserable condition of the Continental Army at Valley Forge and made use of the famed Thomas Paine quote about times that “try men’s souls.” Under the direction of Roosevelt’s government, the National Association of Broadcasters forbade the use of the phrase now for some good news from the radio, as it highlighted the bleak situation.10”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“The Greenbaum effect is the tendency of Americans to choose outlandish and unsupported conspiracy theories while ignoring the conspiratorial actions of political and economic elites that are backed by evidence.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“Rose meant that while horror films proffered suspense, in reality every fan knows the accepted “rules” of the genre. He argued that, in general, horror movies are actually “one of the safest spaces in cinema” since a fan’s knowledge of what to expect provides them with a “flashlight” for the darkest corners a director might lead them to.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“true nature”
― W. Scott Poole, In the Mountains of Madness: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of H.P. Lovecraft

“The Senate declined to pass a bill paying out the bonus, and Hoover sent regular army troops, tanks, and machine guns to clear the tent city. The aggressive move resulted in one hundred injuries and wounds. Some veterans attempted to set up camp again, and this time Washington police fired on them, killing William Hushka and Eric Carlson. Both are buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Much-reduced bonus payments would eventually come in 1936.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“Most American citizens do not think of themselves as living in an empire but instead in a great nation that mostly does good things. The occasional failing, like the toppling of a government in a violent coup or the murder of civilians in an air strike, is “not who we are.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“Colonies like the Carolina settlement included the right to own African people in their charters. Early in colonial America, some poor whites worked without wages as indentured servants. The practice died out, however, and indentured servants eventually earned their freedom. Colonial law regarded African men and women as chattel, literally “movable property” like a cow or a wagon.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“The connection between the changing role of the police in American society and efforts to control culturally subversive groups is illustrated in the backgrounds of some of the most well-known of the “occult cops.” Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedecker’s examination of these usually low-ranking detectives found that many of them “had spied on groups opposing racism or the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.” Before morphing into “occult experts” they traveled the “small town lecture circuit” warning mainly white, middle-class audiences about the danger of “Moonies” and other alternative religious movements. The role of the police in the satanic panic of the 1980s appears to be symptomatic of a much larger problem. Rather than asking its police to prevent and prosecute crimes against person and property, white America asked it to crusade against evil, to slay monsters and demons. In an urban America prostrated by the growing economic inequality of the 1980s and the consequent deadly mix of entrepreneurialism and despair that constituted the crack epidemic, politicians gravitated to the “tough on crime” rhetoric that became such an important part of the successful campaigns of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Meanwhile, the leadership of the evangelical and Charismatic worlds adopted a very similar rhetoric in which their followers were asked to engage in an unrelenting war on the forces of darkness threatening their homes, children, churches, and communities.”
― W. Scott Poole, Satan in America: The Devil We Know

“Americans thus proved themselves ready to remember an idealized version of the men who had fought the war while forgetting the actual people. At least in the minds of the politicians and the general public, the veterans represented a demographic small enough to forget. Such a mind-set has made the costs of the war, perhaps the experience of war itself, difficult for the United States to fully grasp.”
― W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror

“After the beginning of the Great Depression in ’29, President Herbert Hoover effectively rescinded this plan. Unemployed and deeply embittered, twenty-five thousand veterans marched on Washington with over ten thousand men and their families setting up Hooverville in Anacostia Flat, a muddy river bottom of the Potomac.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“Horror lets us know that how we expected the world to act has been indefinitely cancelled.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“What directors, authors, comic artists, and even game designers want is to hit the audience with a cultural roundhouse. There’s no way to do that effectively without pushing political buttons to overstimulate the most delicate nerve endings of personal belief, ideology, patriotism, gender roles, and unexamined hatreds.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“Best-selling novelist Paul Tremblay writes that horror really works only when it “push[es] and prod[s] at moral boundaries” and forces its audience to “confront personal and societal taboos.” In fact, he suggests that horror films need a “progressive” vision to really pull us out to sea on a dark tide.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“Conspiracy theories are, like horror, tales of how the worst thing you imagine is true. “You think things are bad? Well, let me tell you, buddy, you don’t know the half of it.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“The double bill moved east to Salt Lake City, where an incredible line, probably overestimated at five thousand people, waited to see the vampire and the animated pile of corpses that went by his maker’s name. The theater’s manager rushed to rent out extra space.”
― W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

“Robert Boyle, the English scientist largely responsible for the creation of the modern discipline of chemistry, interviewed miners in the 1670s in an attempt to discover whether the men had met with any “subterraneous demons . . . in what shape and manner they appear; what they portend and what they do.”
― W. Scott Poole, Satan in America: The Devil We Know

“The image of the devil in human history has provided the simplest answer to the problem of evil in all its forms. How is it that human beings, capable of acts of self-sacrifice and moral magnificence, are also able to perpetrate the greatest of horrors? One answer has been the power of an evil, dark force that has helped to corrupt us from the beginning of time—a devil that embodies all of our aggression and rage without any of our capacity for moral imagination ... A Tempter, but also a creative sadist, the monotheistic West’s image of the devil has given us an embodiment of violence. Our dark impulses are us, but they are also not us, according to traditional beliefs about Satan. We act on our most vicious impulses, the logic of the diabolical tells us, because a Tempter pulls us into them, makes us live in our darkness, causes us to forget ourselves or even become a new, wretched self.”
― W. Scott Poole, Satan in America: The Devil We Know