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mode, are productive and representative of meanings granted them by a particular epoch and its historical discourses. I also find useful Halberstam’s argument that the meanings of the monster are connected to “a particular history of sexuality” in which the other, the monster, becomes a sexualized foreigner. According to her reading, this begins in nineteenth-century gothic literature and continues through the modern slasher film. See Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 7–9, 21–27.
    2   In the discussion that follows, it is important for the reader to remember the distinction between horror narratives and their most common subject, the monster. The monster, while most commonly showing up in the context of a horror aesthetic, is a being that moves in and out of these narratives and can find real-world incarnations. Part of this book’s argument is that the monster can become “materialization of ideology” (Slavoj Žižek, “Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach,” in The Žižek Reader , ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright [Oxford: Blackwell, 1999]).
    3   Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 24.
    4   See Žižek, “Fantasy as a Political Category,” 91.
    5   Ironically, Žižek uses the phrase “the truth is out there” to explain Lacan’s notion that “the unconscious is outside.” This book assumes something similar in its interpretation of cultural images of the monster. They assume a “corporeal form” in the events of American history and how that history shapes American culture. In this way, their “external materiality renders visible inherent antagonisms.” They become for American historical consciousness what Žižek labels “the imp of perversity.” See Žižek, “Fantasy as a Political Category,” 89.
    6   The historians among my readers will, I hope, recall the foundational social historian E. P. Thompson’s effort to free his subjects from “the enormous condescension of the past.” See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 12. This is the most basic goal of every historian and every work of history.