The Horror Genre, Frankenstein, and Monsters from the Id
/Jake McAtee is an author at Canon Press who recently wrote an introduction to the Worldview Edition of Frankenstein.
Today, he and Dr. Jones discusses Monsters from the Id, Frankenstein, and how the horror genre is an external manifestation of internal sexual guilt and other social complexes.
Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film
"Monsters from the Id is a tour de force of cultural analysis because of Jones's ability to integrate history, politics and moral philosophy with the interpretation of texts and films. It is also an urgent and a sad book because, as he writes in commenting on Last House on the Left, "children are vulnerable precisely because the authority figures in their lives espouse Enlightenment morals" (266). This was the story of the Godwin-Shelley households, the story of Frankenstein and the story in millions of American homes today. Most of these people would like to do the right thing but are hindered by bad ideas that corrupt their habits (if not their hearts) against their own best impulses. Part of the remedy is education for its essential purpose, to form character that is free to know and govern itself. The hidden history of Modernism, the history of thought control must be exposed, taught and taken to heart. One hopes that the thesis of this text, and its constituent chapters make their way into textbooks, classrooms and souls so that the next generation may get out of the uncanny house of contemporary culture and back into the clear sweet light of simple and disciplined human pleasures."
-Eugene Narrett
