From Freddy Krueger to General Butt Naked:Who Are The Real Monsters?

One day in the 1940s a young boy in Ohio looked out of the window and saw a strange man wearing a fedora. The man clocked that the young boy was looking at him so started trying to scare him. A few years later that boy, now slightly older, was relentlessly bullied at school by a kid called Fred Krueger.

You've probably already worked out that the boy in question was Wes Craven and you will certainly have worked out that Craven combined the image of the strange man with the name of the school bully to come up with one of the most deathless, and annoying, horror characters of all time. Not a particularly scary one - certainly not in the hilariously bad Freddy's Dead:The Final Nightmare with its piss poor 3D sequences - but absolutely one of the most famous.

The story about the young Wes Craven and the invention of Freddy Krueger was just one of many excellent digressions that Dr Brian Sharpless took us on during last night's Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub talk (back at the old venue, now renamed The Star of Greenwich - still less than a fiver a pint) Monsters on the Couch:The real psychological disorders behind your favourite horror movies.

Sharpless (a psychologist, author, and horror movie fan, based in Washington DC) is a good speaker and he spoke for a long time (well over two hours though there was a break so we could charge our glasses and empty our bladders) but the talk never dragged. Delivered with knowledge, passion, and a mischievous sense of humour I got the impression that Sharpless could have carried on until 3am.

He's got a book out with the same name as the talk (I was tempted to buy it but I have a mountain of unread books already) and that covers a lot more territory than this extensive talk which meant last night there was no time for Frankenstein's monster, zombies or scary clowns - and no mention at all of folk horror - but he did devote a lot of time to three very specific archetypes:- vampires, body snatchers, and cannibals.

The talk was so extensive that I'll never remember all of it (buy his book if you want that) but let's start with vampires - as our speaker did. There's quite a wide gulf between how folkloric vampires are described and how movie vampires look. Folkloric vampires tend to be quite ugly, gaunt, and, often, very very smelly. A walking dead person would not smell of roses.

Hollywood vampires are often sexy. Like the ones in The Only Lovers Left Alive, Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Lost Boys, and Blade. That's because the movies, Hollywood more than anywhere else, need to sex things up to sell them. They also need to think up interesting origin stories though Sharpless had his own theory on how real life vampires come to be (and he mentioned a 27 year old prison inmate in Denver, Colorado called Paul (who doesn't look much like a vampire at all)) and it went a little bit like this:-

One day, a young adult was masturbating and cut their finger or thumb. Whilst continuing to pleasure themselves they sucked the blood off their digit and, in their still forming mind, the taste of the blood and the thrill of sexual satisfaction became commingled. Most people who like eating blood (and there are a few around) start by eating their own blood, move on to animals, and then (in a few extreme cases) eventually start sucking other people's blood. Some consensually. Others not.

So what if a vampire comes for you? Who you gonna call? Not Vampirebusters - they don't exist. Of course there's the tried and tested method of putting a stake in the vampire's heart but most of us don't tend to have a stake handy at all times. Daylight, mirrors, and garlic are, of course, also your friends but Sharpless suggested another technique. 

Most vampires, not least Sesame Street's Count von Count, have arithmomania and have a compulsion to count everything. So if a vampire comes for you a good thing to do is to throw a huge bag of rice (or, indeed, beans or peas - just make sure there's lots of small individual pieces) on the floor near them. The vampire will become so obsessed with counting how many bits there are that they will, temporarily, forget their blood lust. This gives you time to make haste. Or, if you're really efficient, they will still be counting when it gets light and have to go home and sleep in a velvet draped coffin or whatever vampires do during the day.

Sharpless was at pains to point out that though there are real vampires that two of the most celebrated supposed real life vampires weren't actually vampires. Our old friends Vlad the Impaler (representing Romania) and Countess Bathory (operating under the Hungarian flag).

Vlad, or Vlad Dracula, was knocking about in the fifteenth century. He was a brutal military dictator who loved to impale people on sharp sticks (earning him his nickname) and then, with a flourish that ISIS would come to admire, display their severed heads to deter any future enemies. But there is no evidence whatsoever that he sucked, or drank, the no doubt large amounts of blood that poured from his vanquished foes dead bodies.

Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614) was said to bathe in the blood of virgins but even if that were to be true, and it's quite unlikely, that doesn't actually make her a vampire. She was, however, one of the worst serial killers of all time and is said to have murdered over three hundred young women. Though, for the sake of balance, some historians claim she was the victim of a witch hunt. Or maybe she was something of a witch. Who knows?

So the reason we are so interested in, and make so many films and television shows about, vampires is that some form of vampire behaviour, and plenty of vampire myths, have been with us for centuries, possibly millennia and it's the same with body snatchers or doppelgangers.

Here, Sharpless did (briefly) mention werewolves and lycanthropy but he also mentioned that far more people have reported being turned into a dog (cynanthropy) than a wolf. There were three dogs in the audience (or at least I think they were dogs, they could have been patients of Sharpless who just thought they were dogs) and they'd already had to hear about vampires sucking the blood of animals and now they were having to put up with an audience of people who may have suspected that they weren't even real dogs.

It's not just dogs and wolves that people think they've been turned into. Lots of other animals too. Quite a few people report that they believe they have turned into a cat and there's even been a case of one person who believed they'd been transmuted into a gerbil. Though when I looked up gerbils on the Internet to find out if there was a word for that I just kept finding stories about Richard Gere. Funny that.

Far more common than believing, despite all the evidence to the contrary, you've been turned into a dog, cat, wolf, or gerbil is believing that someone close to you, often your partner, has been replaced by another human being. An imposter who looks and sounds exactly like your loved one but somehow, in your head, isn't them.

Possibly your loved one has been kidnapped and is being held hostage by this imposter and possibly this imposter has deeply nefarious intentions. People who believe this, in a significant though not staggeringly high number of cases, sometimes resort to violence and sometimes even murder their loved ones thinking they are imposters, that they have evil plans, or that they have already performed wicked acts.

This genuinely terrifying psychological condition is very real (if, thankfully, very rare) but it's been juiced by film makers in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers but it plays on a real human fear that has been around for a very long time. Which brings us to cannibalism. Cannibalism has happened a lot in the past and, more than likely, is happening somewhere right now.

Within the last thirty or so years there was actual cannibalism during the Liberian Civil War and on the island of Borneo. One of the leaders of the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy was a man who operated under the nom de guerre of General Butt Naked because his troops fought without any clothes on. General Butt Naked and his troops often killed and ate their opponents. He's not a warlord, or a cannibal, anymore and has since converted to Christianity and become a pastor. The Christian church, it seems, will take absolutely anyone.

On the island of Borneo, the locals (known as Dayaks) got fed up with settlers from nearby Madura and after Dayak youths were stabbed by Madurese youths at a pop concert, the Dayaks decided to exact a grisly revenge. A large group of them covered themselves in war paint, entered what appeared to be some kind of trance state, and entered Madurese homes before shooting the people in them with shotguns, cutting off their heads, drinking their blood, and then removing their hearts and eating them.

The old Aztec technique. They taste better if they're still beating, apparently. Now there's clearly some link between cannibals and vampires but when it comes to serial killers (which cannibals can't fail to be if they act on their cannibalistic impulses) there's a list of who the worse ones are. Your common or garden serial killer claims bronze, cannibals get the silver medal, but the cannibal necrophile is the ultimate bad boy.

Imagine killing someone, eating them, and fucking them at the same time. I mean, it's not for me but when we look at the language us non-cannibals use (and I'm assuming there are no cannibals reading this) we can see that there is a kind of acceptance of cannibal style chat in civil society. We might describe someone as so desirable we want to eat them (obviously this can have a quite different, and far more pleasant, meaning) and, in the eighties, young men would often describe attractive young women as 'tasty'.

So we end up with Hannibal Lecter, Pluto (The Hills Have Eyes), and Leatherface. Of course most cannibals are not as obviously terrifying (or, in Lecter's case, as erudite) as this lot but it's based on a genuine primal fear of being eaten because, throughout history, people have eaten other people.

Mostly, it's for survival. The 1993 film Alive tells the story of the Uruguyuan rugby team whose plane crashed in the remote, and frozen, Andes in 1972 and how those that survived managed to do so by eating the remains of their dead friends and team mates. Sharpless talked about how this kind of thing works.

If you have animals you normally start with them. First the dead ones, then the livestock, and then the pets (those poor dogs at the talk had really put up with enough already by then). After that you may end up eating leather belts (as happened when the Chinese Communist Army nearly starved to death during 1934/5's Long March) and other edible, if hardly mouth watering, goods. Then it's people.

The young and old are usually the first to die so they go first and then, it would appear, it's every man and woman for themself. Sharpless suggested the best way to not get eaten first is to (a) make yourself useful - be the one who starts fires or collects water and (b) don't be annoying. You may be starving but so is everyone else and if you're the one who keeps moaning about it you'll most likely be served up as the next meal.

There are forms of cannibalistic festish where people don't have to die. There's vorearephilia which is a condition where people fantasise about being eaten alive, eating someone alive, or simply watching somebody eat somebody else alive. Pornography is made to sate these desires and often it involves a normal size person eating a person who has been shrunk down to a few inches. Like Honey, I Shrunk The Kids but for really odd people.

Then there's the case of Armin Meiwes, the "friendly and polite" German cannibal. The former computer repair technician who posted an advert on a now defunct cannibal fetish website, The Cannibal Cafe, asking for someone to offer themselves up to be eaten by him. He received a positive response from one Bernd-Jurgen Brandes who then drove to Meiwes' house in Berlin where Meiwes amputated his penis and put it in the frying pan.

A definitive case of "the wrong sausages". Meiwes and Brandes then tried to eat the cooked penis together but it was too 'chewy'. So they added some salt, pepper, garlic, and wine but now it was too burnt to eat so they fed it to the dog. Meiwes went to bed and read a Star Trek book while Brandes nearly bled to death on his couch.

Eventually, Meiwes decided he had to take action so he stabbed Brandes to death and hung him up on a meat hook (sound familiar, horror fans?) and then, over the next ten months, ate most of his body which he had stored in pizza boxes. A year later Meiwes was arrested and sent to prison where he still lives to this day. Though he has since become a vegetarian.

With horrors like this in the world it's no wonder we tell horror stories and make horror films. But who are the real horrors? While life can, quite clearly, imitate art I still believe that, for the most part, art imitates life. We tell stories about vampires, body snatchers, and cannibals because we fear them and turning them into a fiction almost neutralises those fears. As it turns out, going to a talk about horror films, their inspiration, and the psychological disorders that underpin them serves pretty much the same function.

Thanks to Dewi, Tim, and David for joining me, thanks to Professor Chris French for hosting, thanks to the friendly bar staff at the Star of Greenwich, thanks to Goddards Pie and Mash for delicious food (so much nicer than still beating human hearts or dismembered German cocks), thanks to Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, and thanks to Dr Brian Sharpless for a really great Thursday night out. I didn't even feel scared walking home on my own after midnight.