The Science of Monsters

Police Chief Koivunen: “I think crime scene analysis has evolved greatly over the past few decades with the increase of technology and particularly DNA evidence, fingerprint evidence, etc. Some of the things seen on CSI are simply not reality. We will send in suspect fingerprints that may take three to six months to get a result back. It’s not instantaneous like on television.”

Fingerprints can help determine a suspect.

As Police Chief Koivunen mentioned, another aspect of crime scene investigation is bloodstain pattern analysis, or the interpretation of bloodstains at a crime scene. The purpose of analyzing bloodstains is to recreate the actions that caused the bloodshed. Experts examine the size, shape, distribution, and location of the bloodstains to form opinions about what did or did not happen. What are some of the things that can be determined? Using geometry and the science of how blood behaves, detectives can discover where the blood came from, what caused the wounds, from what direction the victim was wounded, how the victim and perpetrator were positioned, the movements made after the bloodshed, and how many potential perpetrators were present. In theory, a bloodstain pattern analysis expert could see one of Chucky’s crime scenes and determine that the killer was approximately twenty-nine inches in height. They wouldn’t be able to tell how many cheeky one-liners Chucky used before the crime was committed, but maybe science in the future can help with that!

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CHAPTER THREE

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

Year of Release: 1984

Director: Wes Craven

Writer: Wes Craven

Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund

Budget: $1.8 million

Box Office: $25.5 million

Amysterious syndrome is said to have been the inspiration for the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). According to a 2014 interview with Vulture, writer and director Wes Craven said:

I’d read an article in the L.A. Times about a family who had escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia and managed to get to the US. Things were fine, and then suddenly the young son was having very disturbing nightmares. He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of A Nightmare on Elm Street.¹

Is there a medical explanation for what happened to the young man? Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS) is a condition that strikes men of South Asian descent more prevalently than other demographics, as was described in the story Wes Craven read about. Specifically, there were a startling number of cases of SUNDS among Hmong immigrants in the early 1980s:

In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control began tracking a mysterious rash of sudden unexplained nocturnal deaths occurring in apparently healthy, male immigrants from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The problem, unknown in other ethnic groups, has now claimed more than one hundred and four men, averaging thirty-three years of age, and one woman, according to Dr. Gib Parrish, a CDC medical epidemiologist. Ninety-eight percent of the deaths occurred between ten p.m. and eight a.m. In 1981, the peak year of these deaths, twenty-six men, often Hmong refugees from the highlands of northern Laos, died in their sleep. Usually victims were simply found dead, but when medics arrived quickly, the men’s hearts were fibrillating or contracting wildly, a symptom Parrish said may result from numerous possible causes.²

What cultural beliefs could have contributed to this phenomenon? In the Hmong culture, the spiritual realm is highly influential and dictates what happens in the physical world. The spirits of deceased ancestors are thought to influence the welfare and health of the living. The Hmong immigrants may have been experiencing a sense of guilt in fleeing their homeland coupled with extreme stress. In Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection,³ Professor Shelley Adler comes to this conclusion: “In a sense, the Hmong were killed by their beliefs in the spirit world, even if the mechanism of their deaths was likely an obscure genetic cardiac arrhythmia that is prevalent in Southeast Asia.” To understand more about the Hmong culture, we spoke to Mai Vang, creator and chair of The Hmong Museum in St. Paul, Minnesota: