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Casting Shadows: Playing in the Realm ofMonsters

By Doug Ronning, MFT, RDT/BCT

From coast to coast, zombies have taken to the streets! In Portland, Maine,
the stumbling undead suddenly appear amidst a crowd. In a flash, the
music of Michael Jacksons Thriller begins, and the undead, made up of
both amateur and professional dancers, recreate the iconic music video
(WMTW, 2013). Across the country in Portland, Oregon, a food bank is the
recipient of a fundraising Zombie Walk with the tagline: We may eat brains,
but we do have hearts! (Oregon Food Bank, Inc., 2009). And its not just
zombies. Every October, more than 2,500 interactive haunted houses
spring up around the world, where local residents dress up to gleefully
terrify visitors on country hayrides, in backyard mazes, on movie studio
backlots, and in abandoned prisons (Olmstead, 2013).
Zombies, vampires, aliens, and other monsters are prevalent on todays
movie screens, televisions, and book shelves. This may hint at current
cultural anxieties, but there is a long history of fascination with these
mysterious forms across cultures. Monsters run rampant through folklore,
religion, fairy tales, and mythology, and clinical practitioners have drawn
inspiration from them since the onset of psychotherapy.
Many dont understand the allure of monster movies, particularly those
pictures designed to horrify and instill dread. Even more bewildering is this
impulse to spend days every autumn putting on makeup and terrifying
people, even when those people are paying for the privilege to be scared.
In an attempt to understand the appeal of horror, film critics, cultural
analysts, psychologists, and psychotherapists have examined the genre
using various psychological orientations, including psychoanalytic,
existential, and postmodern views. For more information, see Horror Film
and Psychoanalysis: Freuds Worst Nightmare, a collection of essays
edited by Steven Jay Schneider (2004) and Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-
Teachings of the Monster Tale by Kirk J. Schneider (1993).
The first half of this piece will explore a variety of these views. The latter
half will explore monster archetypes through more embodied drama
therapy approaches.
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Beginning in the 1970s, the popular essays of film critic Robin Wood
explored classic psychoanalytic interpretations of monster movies, based in
Freuds linked conceptions of repression and the uncanny (Wood, 1986).
Wood states One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is all
that our civilization oppresses and represses (1986, p. 68). Stanley
Kubrick, while discussing his film The Shining with film critic Michel Ciment
(1980), offered, In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud
said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully
experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I
should think this alone would serve as its credentials (para. 66).
Many monster stories speak to questions of existential psychology:
survival, fear of death, life purpose, somatization, and generativity. In Holy
and the Horror: Wisdom-Teachings of the Monster Tale, existential
psychotherapist Kirk Schneider (1993), states that any common physical
sensation or human emotion can become monstrous in the extreme:
unceasing hunger, boundless adoration, and uncontrollable sight all have
given birth to monster characters. These basic fears can be as horrific as
the fear of debilitating illness and painful lingering death; all represent an
imprisonment within the body. Even good health can be excruciating; for
being healthy carries responsibility and freedom, which can even more
painfully remind us of the boundaries of our abilities (Ziegler, 1991) which in
turn invites the fantasy of extreme deviation.
As in narrative therapy, postmodern interpretations of monster stories cast
the monster as the problem; the monster is either a catalyst for change, or
a staunch defender of the status quo that needs to be vanquished. In the
introduction to Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film,
homosexuality is compared to the Wolfman, Frankensteins monster, mad
scientists, and vampires all of whom challenge the very foundations of
society (Benshoff, 1997, p. 1). Film critic and sociologist Andrew Tudor
(1989), identifies the emergence of paranoid horror (widespread confusion
as in Night of the Living Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre) in the 1960s
as the erosion of the foundations of social legitimacy in many western
societies, going on to call it the age of delegitimization (p. 222).
As rich as the view of monster movies is from the (psychoanalysts) couch,
there is one key element that none account for why people so often love
and empathize with the monster. In Killing Monsters: Why Children Need
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Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, journalist Gerard

Jones (2002) shares a story about his son crying when the monster is killed
at the end of Beast From 2000 Fathoms. His son refused to watch another
monster movie until his dad promised him the creature would survive at
the end (p. 90). Jones goes on to point out that the Japanese filmmakers
behind kaiju (giant monster) movies like Godzilla recognized that the
monsters were lovable and sympathetic, and they always allowed the
monster to survive at the end.
This mirrors my own experience; my first transcendent cinematic
recollection is from a revival screening of the original King Kong in the mid
1970s. The death of Kong marked the first time I cried at a movie. The
giant ape was easily the most likable male figure in the picture, and the true
villain was the greedy theatre producer who sealed the monsters doom.
Kong was bigger than life and driven by love, and to a thirteen year old gay
kid who felt out of place in the world, he was every bit the tragic hero.
In the abstract for Horror Films: Tales to Master Terror or Shapers of
Trauma?, the two authors, both medical doctors, state, the horror film can
be seen as a cultural tale that provides a mechanism for attempting
mastery over anxieties involving issues of separation, loss, autonomy, and
identity. An individual will identify with narrative elements that resonate in
personal life experiences and cultural factors embedded within the film,
which carry levels of either stress that will be mastered, or act as a trauma
to the viewer (Ballon & Leszcz, 2007, p. 211).
A number of drama therapists have written about their work employing
monsters. Ann Cattanachs (1996) The Use of Dramatherapy and Play
Therapy to Help De-brief Children After the Trauma of Sexual Abuse, offers
a potent example of empowering a child by having her face and overcome
a dream monster. One of the most noteworthy points in the article was
Cattanachs assertion that the dream monster not be killed for if it is later
resurrected in the childs dreams it then becomes all-powerful.
The all-powerful nature of the monsters in our dreams and childhood
fantasies remains within us into adulthood, feeding our shadows. As Noga
Levine-Keini and Brurit Laub (1999) state in the abstract of Dealing with
Monsters, Monsters are a universal element in our inner life (p. 120).
Their work to find therapeutic ways to deal with monsters in the psyche is
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built on two approaches: Jungs (1960) work emphasizing the development

of the ego, where the inner monsters reside; and the work of White and
Epston (1990), who pioneered externalizing and personifying inner
problems. By integrating the two approaches, Levine-Keini and Laub
(1999) came up with three missions, beginning with creation, moving to
confrontation with the monster, and finally, relief from the monster. Moving
beyond dialogue, the two therapists employ tools from the various creative
arts therapies psychodramatic scenes, drawing, and sculpting to
experientially explore the conflict between the client and their monster.
Over the past decade, Ive employed and adapted Levine-Keini and Laubs
(1999) model to work with clients confronting Obsessive Compulsive
Disorder (OCD), addictions, and eating disorders.
I learned about Levine-Keini and Laubs work while still in graduate school,
while writing a literature review based on their article and developing an
idea for a drama therapy workshop employing monster archetypes. Despite
the enthusiasm of my cohort over the monster exercises Id adapted or
created, the workshop didnt happen for several years.
It was when these zombie flash mobs and extravagant haunted houses
started appearing in the mainstream that I recognized a cultural act hunger,
a desire for enactment, and decided it was time to resurrect my work, and
thus the Monster Movie Salon was born. In the Salon, now in its fourth
year, we explore monster films through psychological, cultural, and
personal lenses. Rather than taking the victims point of view, we focus on
the wisdom in the monsters story. The distancing device of the monster
allows us to explore meaningful material, such as the family shadow,
income inequality, anxious/avoidant attachment, and identity politics, in a
fun and dynamic way. We watch film clips not just from horror movies, but
family films, dramas, comedies, and musicals in which monsters appear,
while alternatively engaging in free writing, group discussion, and dramatic
play.
This juxtaposition of communal film viewing and embodiment can lead to
fresh insights. We transition back and forth between the cinematic realm
and that of the participants subjective experience, to explore a
phenomenology (Blatner & Blatner, 1997) of monsters. For example, one
exercise invites participants to consider human somatic experience by
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manifesting shuffling zombies, floating ghosts, and stomping daikaiju,

inviting an experience of constriction and expansion (Schneider, 1993). A
sampling of other exercises in the workshop series includes an adaptation
of sound and movement transformations called monster transformations,
a monster role analysis, Famous Monster Sculpture Museum, and a three-
part story exercise about an encounter with a monster.
By exploring the monsters story through human experience, we see
beyond the fears they induce, to the wisdom they can impart. The monster
characters of cinema give shape to obsessions, compulsions, insecurities,
unnamed desires, unwanted emotions, and painful memories the very
things that bring people into psychotherapy! Thrust from the human
imagination, monsters are a continuum of us, offering meaningful lessons
on what it means to be human.
Doug Ronning,MFT, RDT/BCT, is a Drama Therapist with a private
practice in San Francisco, CA and an Adjunct Professor at the California
Institute of Integral Studies. He is a lifelong fan of creature features, a
produced screenwriter (HBOs Tales From the Crypt), and creator of the
Monster Movie Salon.
References:
WMTW, Thriller Flash Mob Breaks Out in Downtown Portland, Maine,
(2013, October 24) Retrieved March 20, 2015, from http://on.aol.com/
video/thriller-flash-mob-breaks-out-in-downtown-portland
maine-517985778
BallonB., & LeszczM. (2007). Horror films: tales to master terror or
shapers of trauma?. American Journal of Psychotherapy; 61(2), 211-30.
Benshoff, H. (1997). Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror
Film. New York, NY: Manchester University Press
Blatner, A., & Blatner, A. (1997). The Art of Play: Helping Adults Reclaim
Imagination and Spontaneity. New York, NY: Brunner/Mazel, Inc.
Cattanach, A., (1996). The Use of Dramatherapy and Play Therapy to Help
De-brief Children after the Trauma of Sexual Abuse. In Alida Gersie (Ed.)
Dramatic Approaches to Brief Therapy (pp.177-187).
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Ciment, M. Interview with Stanley Kubrick (1980), Retrieved March 20,

2015, from http://genius.cat-v.org/stanley-kubrick/interviews/ciment/the-
shining
Jones, G. (2002) Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super
Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. New York, NY: Basic Books
Jung, C. G. (1960). The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Vol 14. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Levine-Keini, N., & Laub, B. (1999). Dealing with monsters. Family
Therapy, 26(2), 121-133.
Olmstead, L. 10 Great Halloween Haunted House Attractions Across The
U.S., (2013, September 20) Retrieved March 20, 2015, from http://
www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2013/09/20/10-great-halloween-
haunted-house-attractions-across-the-us/
Oregon Food Bank, Inc. Oregon Food Bank, Inc.s Portland Zombie Walk,
(2009, October 24) Retrieved March 20, 2015, from http://
www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/blanca-garcia-rinder/portlandzombiewalk
Schneider, K. (1993). Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-Teachings of the
Monster Tale. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Schnieder, S. J. (2004). Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freuds Worst
Nightmare. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Tudor, A. (1989). Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the
Horror Movie. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc. (p. 222)
White, J. & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New
York: Norton.
Wood, R. (1986). Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. New York, NY:
Coumbia UP
Ziegler, A. J. (1991). Illness as Descent into the Body. In Jeremiah Abrams,
& Connie Zweig (Eds.), Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the
Dark Side of Human Nature (pp. 29-34). New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/
Putnam
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