Big piles of muck and weeds walking around
Thinking about the Golem legend a few days ago made me remember a similar theme in fantasy and horror stories. This is one the rare new additions to the pantheon of vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc... the pile of undead muck and vegetable debris (usually surrounding a corpse or skeleton). The Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, the Heap, Solomon Grundy.. they all derived from a short story by Ted Sturgeon, "It." From the August 1940 issue of UNKNOWN this is thirty pages of pure nightmare. Theodore Sturgeon was only twenty-two when he came up with this vision. Already, his earliest stories showed the flair for word choice and intense visual images that would make his work memorable. I first happened upon "It" when I was about eleven or so, and it darn near electrocuted me. Reading it again all these decades later, I find the story is still genuinely frightening and unnerving. SPOILERS AHEAD, Just so you know.
On the most basic level, this is a tale of a monster that comes wandering out of the woods, kills some animals and then a dog named Kimbo and then Kimbo's owner. In a scene that`s really hard to take, it absolutely terrorizes a ten year old girl named Babe before finally meeting its ironic and well deserved end. The final words have haunted me all these years; even after the monster is destroyed, life doesn't just bounce back to normal. ("So the Drews had a new barn and fine new livestock and they hired four men. But they didn`t have Alton. And they didn't have Kimbo. And Babe screams at night and has grown very thin.")
Aside from the unique loathesomeness of It's physical being, Ted's creation presents us with one of the most convincing examples of a nonhuman consciousness I can remember. The monster has vague curiosity and no memories, so it's starting from scratch. It calmly rips apart a dog to see what`s inside and then (in a surreal bit of logic) when night falls, It concludes that it's dead and passively lies down in the forest. ("Black and liquescent it lay in the blackness, not alive, not understanding death, believing itself dead.")To me, this weird unpredictable behavior is much creepier than a straightforward predatory sort of critter. One meek character escapes unknowingly because the skulking thing swings a heavy arm just as the man bends to pick up his handkerchief, then loses interest in the guy. (This bit of relief is just to let you catch your breath, the worst is coming.And of course, there is the way the thing comes to be. The skeleton of a man long dead, lying under a mass of rotting vegetation, somehow stirs into unlife in a process of slow spontaneous combustion. ("It walked in the woods. It was never born. It existed. Under the pine needles the fires burn, deep and smokeless in the mold. In heat and darkness and decay there is growth. There is life and there is growth. It grew but it was not alive....")
What we are dealing with here is the concept of a rotting mass of stinking matter*, somehow getting up and lumbering around and casually killing things. If you were standing right next to it, you would have no warning that it can suddenly grab out at you. I think I understand now why this idea has such chilling power. When you're concentrating on something, completely alone without even a pet in the house.... and then abruptly, a stack of magazines or a sack of groceries loudly falls over, you jump much more than you would if the dog suddenly started barking or your roommate sneezed. Your mind half expects movements from living things, but when something moves that shouldn't, it triggers an extra strong alarm response. That's what we have with the monster here. (The Uncanny Valley is a useful label for the unnerving phenomenon.)
"Standing there was, not Uncle Alton, but a massive caricature of a man: a huge thing like an irregular mud doll, clumsily made. It quivered and parts of it glistened and parts of it were dried and crumbly. Half the lower left part of its face was gone, giving it a lopsided look. It had no perceptible mouth or nose, and its eyes were crooked, one higher than the other....." Ickk and more ickk. With this charmer, Sturgeon created a new species of monster for horror stories. The dead body clotted with rotting vegetation has been used several times since, resulting in at least four characters who still are stalking the pages of comic books to this day, terrorizing civilians and giving superheroes cold sweats. Alfred Bester created Solomon Grundy as an opponent for the original Green Lantern in ALL-AMERICAN COMICS. Although he shared It's origin and nature, Grundy also had a strong element of Karloff`s Frankenstein Monster. This white zombie is still around, a bit less gruesome, showing up in various incarnations.
At about the same time, the Heap appeared in AIR FIGHTER COMICS (later AIRBOY). He originated when a WW I German ace was shot down in flames over a swamp in Poland, but swore to live on no matter what. Looking sort of like a haystack with legs, the Heap was initially a rampaging blood-drinking brute but he later developed into a sort of Nature's Avenger under the guidance of the goddess Ceres, wandering the world as a Greenpeace enforcer. The Heap was resurrected in the 1970s in a sleazy black and white magazine, then came back in his true winsome glory with a revival of AIRBOY comics. Who knows, he may lurch up out of the undergrowth again. I know I would like to see a trade paperback collecting his 1940s appearances. There was something enigmatic and haunting about the Heap. He had no thought balloons, the captions just guessed at what was going on in his mind. Occasional flashes of the German pilot's memories surfaced, as when the Heap found a model airplane and pathetically carried it around for a while.
And of course. in the 1970s DC came out with Swamp Thing and Marvel dug up Man-Thing. (Marvel also did a one-shot adaptation of Sturgeon's tale. I give Roy Thomas credit for always honoring the sources of comic book themes.) These guys are pretty well known, especially considering Swamp Thing has had two feature films, a TV series and those famous issues written by Alan Moore.Swamp Thing has gotten away from the original concept and been revised into a plant elemental, but the last I saw of Man-Thing, he was still an undead horror. Standing next to Man-Thing would not be like being near an animal or person, but like standing next to a pile of muck that suddenly moves.. it should be an uncanny experience.
Oh, wait. There was also a cheapo horror flick called SLITHIS, about a pile of murderous mud (seriously) which seems to bear a close resemblance to the monsters we're considering here. A film maker looking for something a bit different from the glamorous vampires and serial killers so overused lately would do well to buy the rights to Sturgeon's story. _____________ *Ted Sturgeon's own famous and much quoted law that ninety per cent of everything is crap seems to be literally true with this creature. It actually IS ninety per cent crap.