Cinematic monsters with ethnic identity shape real attitudes toward communities

Evidence

Scholars have also shown how movies, and in particular characters that create fear, have influenced the attitudes toward particular communities. In horror film, a symbiosis exists between the dreams of the filmmaker and the nightmares of the audience-this is the “fusion made by the shared structures of a common ideology.” In some cases, monsters are culturally neutral, failing to express a particular identity. In other cases, however, monsters have a pronounced ethnic, religious, or racial identity. Paul Wegener’s 1920 film, The Golem: How He Came into the World, is an example of the latter, by altering the golem legends situated in Jewish folklore to create a monster that threatens German Christians. This Jewish monster is ultimately destroyed by an Aryan hero. “The beautiful blonde child who vanquishes the Jewish menace becomes an innocent defender of her faith as well as her people.” The Golem film is one of many movies depicting Jews as monsters. Wegener, whose later films included Nazi propaganda pieces, made a film that mattered to Germans, a movie that had “crucial social and political implications,” which we know too well. The Muslim characters examined here also have implications, for they, like the golem, function as powerful celluloid monsters, but they also exist beyond the Most of the Muslim monsters examined here have, in one way or another, been inspired by Orientalism, which is formulated in a “symbolic world of infinite complexity, surprise, color, manifold variety and richness.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 597

Categorization

• SEED: The Golem analogy (a folkloric monster reworked to embody a feared minority) is a powerful framing device for an essay on how the Muslim ‘monster’ template was prepackaged from the Jewish monster tradition—a manufactured continuity of the monster-making project.
• BMF: The idea of a monster legend being altered to target a specific feared community echoes the demonic/alien control structures in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, where manufactured fear maintains social order.