The Beginning
The night I first watched The Lighthouse, the rain had polished the streets of San Francisco shiny, reflecting storefront neon lights and rainbow-edged, oily puddles. As I waited for a friend to find parking (his irritation giving way to rage the longer he looped round and round the block), I sat in a tiny independent movie theater lobby. The theater was sandwiched between Korean markets with green awnings, ripe produce displayed out on the street for all to see like jewelry in a storefront window.
The lobby was no bigger than the cramped San Francisco apartment rooms landlords charged ungodly amounts of rent for, its dark red carpet worn from decades of shuffling feet who had come in from the rain, the fog, the (more scarce) sun, eager to watch movies. Behind what could only be deemed a cubicle-sized snack bar, a young worker popped popcorn and waited for whatever crowd would emerge that night.
I sat there, waiting, unaware of the impending obsession the movie we were about to see would trigger in me. Unaware of the trajectory it would shove me headlong towards. Instead, I started the movie without my friend (who, by now, was cursing the very name of San Francisco and all its inhabitants in his desperation to still find parking).
The first bone-shaking blare of the foghorn and the shrill whine of the soundtrack set my body rigid. My muscles would remain in that fixed state for the rest of the film, despite its crass and shocking comedy, its titillation, its horror. When the film ended and the lights came back on, I was released from my trance and my friend and I stumbled back out onto the streets, my stomach uneasy. I had never felt so breathless, so unnerved after a movie, and I would remain so for weeks afterwards, the image of writhing tentacles, hungry mermaids, and mad lighthouse keepers vivid in my mind.
I was still in the (glass) closet at this point in my life, though, I’m certain that the only person who I was fooling was myself, and even that was becoming undeniable, the delusion untenable. It was for this reason that The Lighthouse spoke so viscerally to me. To watch Winslow struggle through his identity as it metamorphosed into something of an unspeakable horror that repelled and magnetized him; and that not only chased him, but devoured him in the end.
So too would my own obsession with monstrosity become a specter that haunted me, a madness that chased me through the pandemic while others dealt with quarantine in more conventional ways like roller skating and bread baking (though I did try—and fail—that as well). I devoured countless books, made sliding scales and graphs, anything to attempt to satiate my burning curiosity to understand the evocative connection between monstrosity and eroticism.
And yet, despite the years it has been since that quiet, rainy evening in San Francisco, I have still not yet found peace. That is just the nature of monstrosity, as monsters are, as Jeffery Andrew Weinstock synopsizes, ‘a kind of language, a way to give symbolic shape to and communicate affect and experience’. This study and book, then, is in large part self-preservation: a way to crack open my skull and spill forth the language of monstrosity, its allure, its perversion, before it tries to devour me whole. This book is for anyone who finds themselves drawn to monsters as well, or even those who, on occasion, found themselves confused by the titillation terrifying creatures had on them.
I welcome all who join me on this journey as I wade through the overwhelming amount of data the survey provided, the countless historical and cultural books I will read, the interviews I will watch and carry out with monstrous authors, and any other epiphanies that strike me through the research portion of this study.
Thank you for your support and enthusiasm. With love–
E