Read Online Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan - Free Book Online Page A

reflexes, a weak immune system that has allowed the person to suffer from considerable disease, past episodes of malnutrition, or bad genes. Thus, the evolutionary argument goes, we view these traits negatively because they hint that a potential partner carries genes that we don’t want to mix with our own. This negative view of asymmetricality is not limited to attraction; it has spilled over into popular culture and become associated with overall “badness.” This is why villains like the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride and the lion Scar in The Lion King are so often associated with these sorts of characteristics. In fact, their names are their deformity, because the negative essence of the trait represents them so completely.
    Looking at Chimera is, in effect, not much different from looking at a human who has two heads, a scar running across one eye, or a missing limb, and this adds to the monster’s fear factor.
    Chimera itself does not feature much in modern books, films, or television, but many of the fears that it embodied are alive and well. When H. G. Wells wrote The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1896, he was looking out upon the dawn of a scientific era when surgery and veterinary science were beginning to suggest that biological tampering might make it possible to merge human and animal features. The scientist, Dr. Moreau, uses his knowledge of physiology to make animals more human, effectively creating creatures that are neither man nor beast. These beast folk strive to throw off their animal instincts and struggle to follow a strict code of laws in their primitive society.They are forbidden from hunting, chasing, walking on all fours, and lapping up water with their tongues, and they continually repeat the mantra “Are we not men?” Yet as the story unfolds, animal instincts prove difficult for the beast folk to control, and the island slowly collapses into dangerous disorder with the question “Are we not men?” resoundingly answered with a no.
    Wells makes a clear argument that tinkering with life by using surgery to try and make animals more human is something dangerous. Prendick, the shipwrecked protagonist, finds the beast folk horrific, and many of his encounters with them in the jungle interior of the island are the stuff of nightmares. If the idea of humanized animals brings to mind ancient monstrous creatures that merged human and animal features like the Sphinx and the spine-tailed Manticore, that should only further drive home the point that mixing human and animal traits creates creatures that have terrified people for millennia.
    Yet in The Island of Dr. Moreau there is an intriguing contrast to the mixed monsters of ancient history. While Chimera, Cerberus, Manticore, Scylla, and others were monsters created by the gods, the beast folk of Dr. Moreau’s island are entirely the result of a single man recklessly wielding science. Indeed, just as King Kong is clearly a monster movie with a monster that is not so easy to vilify because of human cruelty toward the giant ape, The Island of Dr. Moreau is a monster story where the monsters are really rather pitiful victims of the doctor’s scientific work. That Dr. Moreau is a villain is readily apparent. 22 But where exactly the monster in the monster story resides is hard to say, since the two key elements found in monsters—a visage of horror and a willingness to harm others—are somewhat divided.
    Unsurprisingly, The Island of Dr. Moreau has found its way onto the silver screen three times since it was first written, and in the latest(and not particularly good) adaptation, released in 1996, it embraced the rising use of genetics. Shifting from Wells’s original suggestion that the doctor was surgically humanizing beasts, the recent version describes the doctor as using drug therapy and gene manipulation to accomplish the same result. Along the same lines is Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which links the testing