Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (12 page)

Medusa is never alive in any of these paintings—Perseus has only her chopped-off head—but the danger of a deadly gaze is always present. Were these artworks merely portraying a fear of the paralysis generated by extreme terror? Possibly, but there is another aspect of Medusa that could be playing a role. Medusa is distinctly female. From the very beginning she is always described as one of three sisters, and in later works, like Ovid’s
Metamorphosis,
her femininity is accentuated by her description as a woman with beautiful hair who is even capable of attracting the attention of the god Poseidon. One has to wonder if these relatively late presentations of Medusa’s deadly gaze are playing upon fears that men had of being overpowered by the gaze of a dangerous woman. To a certain extent these fears are still very much present in society (more on this later in “The Created”).

Today Medusa is by no means gone. She was featured in both the 1981 and 2009 versions of
The Clash of the Titans
and in the (rather preposterous) 2010 film
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.
This is a remarkable presence for such an ancient monster, but whether she still generates much of a fear factor is not entirely clear.

In Chris Columbus’s
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief,
Uma Thurman portrays Medusa. The iconic writhing snakes for hair have, not very believably, been attached to her head, but she is otherwise shown as attractive. She wields no weapon whatsoever, has no claws or fangs, parades around a greenhouse in sunglasses, and depends upon words of manipulation and an attractive body to get people to open their eyes and look at her.

Like the Sirens of Greek mythology, which are at least partially scary because they make sensible people do life-threatening things (like sailing their ships into rocks), in this film, Medusa is a seductress whose threats are not immediately apparent. Her hideousness is absent and her petrification ability and snakes are so blatantly unrealistic that there is little to frighten anyone over the age of five.

Both Desmond Davis’s 1981
Clash of the Titans
and Louis Leterrier’s 2010 version take a very different approach and reveal Medusa to be much more snake than human. Instead of having legs, she has a long writhing snake’s body that tapers into a rattle at the end. Many
camera shots in the films take close-ups of just the rattle or a small section of her body sliding between stone columns. This is scary in much the same way that seeing a shark fin disappearing beneath the waves near swimmers is scary, as it makes good use of animal dangers that are real. For all the availability of antivenins and medical facilities, the human brain cannot shake off millions of years of evolution. Snakes are still widely perceived with tremendous fear and filmmakers know it. This makes any close-up of slithering snake bodies writhing through rubble or tall grass frightening.

As for Medusa’s ability to petrify in these films, there is something spine-tingling about it. The reasons are elusive. Nobody today should believe that anything could ever turn them to stone. Perhaps the terrifying element of the petrifying gaze is the fact that, subconsciously, there is a fear of physical petrification when faced with horrific circumstances, a deep-rooted and uneasy concern the body might not flee as it is supposed to when being attacked. Is this part of an ongoing awareness that shock induced by fear can literally paralyze and sometimes kill?

Although the fears of her gaze have not changed much, Medusa seems to have evolved, but not due to mutation or selective breeding. She has transformed with the fears of humanity. Once upon a time, she took shape from the frightening uncertainties presented by fossils and the threats posed by venomous snakes. Now, with fossilization well understood, some filmmakers are trying to utilize her femininity to make her a manipulating monster like the Sirens. Others are focusing on the reptilian aspects of the historic Medusa that are still scary and making as much of these traits as they can. Where her evolution will end is tough to tell, but her recent portrayals suggest she will become more and more serpentine.

Snakes have lost none of their fear factor. They played a pivotal role in Steven Spielberg’s
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
crushed the life out of people in Luis Llosa’s
Anaconda,
were the stars of David Ellis’s
Snakes on a Plane,
and have even slithered their way into J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter
books.

Aside from appearing as the basilisk that petrifies the students of
Hogwarts in Chris Columbus’s
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,
the ever-feared snake is consistently present alongside the villain Voldemort in the form of Nagini, his companion. Nagini is dangerous, of seemingly human intelligence, and intriguingly… female. Moreover, in David Yates’s
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1,
Nagini is revealed to be able to take the form of a human woman so she can lure Harry into cramped quarters in an old house where he can be more effectively ambushed. Once Nagini has Harry where she wants him, she transforms, grotesquely, into her snake form and attacks. Harry is petrified with fear and barely survives. The snake’s attack is one of the scariest moments in the film. Medusa in modern form?

25
 When wishes show up in the literature of other civilizations, the people who make them typically wish for riches, visions of the future, or eternal youth. Not the Greeks. No, Minos wished for a bull. Go figure.

26
 Don’t ask.

27
 Continental crust is defined by its chemistry, not by whether it is above or below water. It can have water on top of it; this just doesn’t happen very often.

28
 This is, of course, relative. Aeronautical engineers get excited by planes that can break the sound barrier. In contrast, geologists get all excited when they find crust moving at a rate faster than your fingernails grow. An easier crowd to please.

29
 We’re talking a real wrath-of-God-type event, the sort of thing that would turn even an ancient Richard Dawkins into a believer.

30
 There is the added fact that the bull, which started the entire Minotaur mess, was given to King Minos by Poseidon, the god of both the ocean and earthquakes. Mere coincidence?

31
 In some parts of the world, the mineral pyrite, more commonly known as fool’s gold, can accumulate inside bone and transform it into a glittery replica of its original form. One has to wonder if the discovery of such transformed bones inspired the story of Midas, the mythical king whose touch could transmute objects into gold.

32
 You didn’t think it was just happenstance that the first antagonist in the Bible was the serpent in the Garden of Eden, did you?

33
 Snake venom varies a lot. Some snakes, like most of the vipers that inhabit Europe, deliver a bite that, with prompt first aid and basic medical care, causes only local tissue damage and leaves patients feeling numb and sick for a while. Other snakes, like the tiger snakes that inhabit the island of Tasmania, have venoms that kill within hours if antivenin is not administered quickly. Both would have probably proved lethal in an age when any serious weakness would have left humans vulnerable to predation.

34
 Color blindness is a genetic condition that commonly disrupts the ability to differentiate between the colors red and green. Intriguingly, research led by the primatologist Amanda Melin at the University of Calgary suggests that people who are red-green color-blind are particularly adept at spotting people who are wearing camouflage in forested settings. She and her team argued in the journal
Animal Behaviour
that this “disorder” may have once been beneficial to ancient humans who were hunting prey that was camouflaged. One has to wonder if it might also have played a role in helping them notice cryptically colored snakes on the forest floor.

35
 Who also happened to be Andromeda’s uncle.

36
 Nuptial gift?

4

The Mysterious Fathoms—Charybdis, Leviathan, Giant Squid, Jaws

“You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be monsters.”

—Captain Barbossa,
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

At sea, leaving sight of the land is always unnerving. As the shore slips away and the black waves grow choppy, there is a peaceful solitude that goes hand in hand with a sense of foreboding. Of course, on modern vessels there are often radios, life rafts that automatically pop open if the boats are struck by rogue waves, and emergency beacons that will alert rescue teams if the ship goes down, but even so, these essential bits of safety equipment do little to assuage a primal fear of vulnerability associated with the sea. For ancient mariners, the ocean was a powerful and dangerous force.

It is fair to ask whether fear of the ocean is as irrational as fear
of the dark. The fear of darkness stems from apprehension about nocturnal predators, but the fear often felt when walking through a darkened bedroom is unwarranted today, since not many people have a threat of nocturnal predators lurking by their nightstands. In contrast, there is something real and substantial about fears of open waters.

The main cause of death in people left adrift is hypothermia-induced drowning. In most parts of the world, the ocean is far colder than the toasty 98.6° F (37° C) that the body needs to survive, and there is no way to generate enough heat when submerged to keep treading water for very long. Even in seemingly warm waters, like those off the Greek coast, temperatures are cooler than the core body temperature and sap the body of its heat. After a while in the water, a swimmer’s arms feel like planks of wood, the muscles lock, and he sinks into the dark depths where he drowns.

Life vests change things a bit. Instead of dying by drowning, death tends to occur by actual hypothermia. The body at first burns nutrients to generate heat for itself, but this is a lost cause. If the adrift individual were cooling down in a shallow bath, there might be some hope for the body to heat the surrounding water and fend off the cold, but not in the limitless ocean. Drifting people, even those in wet suits, inevitably lose all their heat. Their temperatures plunge, their respirations and heartbeats come to a halt. With no blood flowing, organs fail and they die.
37
It is a grim way to go.

Few monsters better represent fear of the water and all of its life-quenching properties than the fiendish Charybdis. Literally a living whirlpool that has a taste for human flesh, Charybdis is famously featured in Homer’s
Odyssey.
As the hero Odysseus sails on from his visit to the sorceress Circe, she tells of dangers ahead.

She explains he must pass through a narrow strait with the bizarre
Scylla on one side and Charybdis on the other. “Charybdis sucks the dark water down. Three times a day she belches it forth, three times in hideous fashion she swallows it down again. Pray not to be caught there when she swallows down; Poseidon himself could not save you from destruction then.”

Due to the dangers presented by the living whirlpool, Circe warns that it is better to lose six men than his whole crew and advises Odysseus to sail close to Scylla. In the end, this is exactly what he does: Scylla feeds, and Charybdis gets no further description.

Certainly a basic fear of water and drowning played a role in the creation of Charybdis, but the fact that a whirlpool is specified suggests that the Greeks actually knew what oceanic whirlpools were. That whirlpools are real was made painfully obvious to most people in the modern world shortly after the catastrophic tsunami struck Japan in 2011. As the waters that rushed inland receded, they collided with incoming waters. Like two surging rivers flowing next to one another in opposite directions, these rushing waters started to spin where they met and created a huge vortex, sucking ships into its center. Could the Greeks or their ancestors have seen something similar and been led to imagine there was a monster dwelling in the water?

As mentioned earlier in “It Came from the Earth,” fossils of marine organisms scattered among terrestrial deposits along the coast of Greece make it clear that the Mediterranean was the site of historic tsunamis. Unfortunately, whirlpools created by tsunamis leave no fossil evidence, so it is impossible to know for certain if they actually did occur. However, since we know that tsunamis were striking the ancient Greek coast and since the
Odyssey
specifically describes a whirlpool monster, it does not seem like much of a leap to suggest that the Greeks, or their recent ancestors, saw at least one huge whirlpool that scared them senseless and made its way into their myths.