Over at The Atlantic, I took a look at NBC’s reboot of The Munsters, Mockingbird Lane, and beyond that, the question of what monsters are for and whether they can have any actual impact when they’ve become ubiquitous:

So if we aren’t supposed to be frightened of the Munsters, what are they for? Mockingbird Lane has stripped away the working-class symbolism of The Munsters, which at the time was meant as more direct commentary on a kind of family sitcom that doesn’t quite exist anymore, replaced by self-aware, upper-middle-class juggernauts like ABC’s Modern Family. Herman no longer works at a funeral home, or even seems to work at all, and Lily’s so ethereal—she appears in clouds of smoke and wears designer frocks weaved for her by friendly spiders—it’s hard to imagine her starting up even so posh a business as a beauty parlor. Grandpa may disdain the neighbors, but that’s just because they’re human and not for any more-revealing reason. Marilyn, the sole member of the family who doesn’t exhibit any monstrous traits, is presented more as a chipper agent of the Munsters’ interests than, as she was in the original, someone whose values and sense of self turned out very differently than they might have otherwise had she grown up in a fully human family. There’s no real sense of darkness Marilyn is either drawn to or has to conceal from the world at large: Everything happening around her is too brightly lit and flip in tone for the show to communicate any sense of danger.

If every person, every anxiety, every repressive impulse, is monstrous, then it’s awfully hard to distinguish what should actually be frightening, what’s actually momentous, what actually requires a major battle.

I am wildly excited about Dreadline, an upcoming title from indie developer Eerie Canal. The first effort from the studio features a group of rabble rousing, time traveling, monsters. The characters visit the sites of history’s greatest calamities and wreak havoc on the already doomed souls they find. It’s weird, it’s stylish, it’s ridiculous and sort of horrible (in an amazing way) and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it first.

I knew that Eerie Canal was at work on something awesome given that they were founded by some of my exceptionally talented former colleagues. But I had no idea just how perfectly ridiculous their project was until I saw the trailer a few days ago. You can watch it below:

I caught up with Bryn Bennett and Steven Kimura, the studio’s co-founders to talk more about their new project, going indie, and life in general.

What is Dreadline?
Bryn Bennett: It’s a high paced ARPG, where you play the part of monsters who travel through time, killing the people that are going to die anyway. Think of a mix of Diablo, Freedom Force, and Mario Kart, thrown through an indie game filter.

How did you come up with the name Dreadline?
Steven Kimura: It came to me in a terrible dream.

Bryn Bennett: We googled it, and I think there might be a terrible hard rock band from North Carolina named Dreadline. We may have to get our people on that.

You mention the Titanic and Pompeii in the trailer, what other disaster sites might the monsters visit?
BB: There are so many options! Humans are really an unlucky bunch. The Boston Molasses Disaster?

I really hope the Molasses disaster is in there.
SK: Not the World Trade Center. Please stop asking about that people.

Why monsters, why not cuddly bunnies?
SK: Ghost is a cuddly monster. In the tumultuous wake of the global financial meltdown, we all have to find ways to economize wherever we can.

BB: We did have a bug once where the monsters were rendered really small. Little mummy was the cutest thing ever. We started thinking about moving the game to a more “Muppet Babies” theme.

What platforms will Dreadline be available on?
BB: For right now, PC only. The engine does work on Xbox, but it is tougher to get onto consoles. We are going to release on PC first, and then look at our options. We definitely won’t port it to another platform unless we can find a control scheme that would make sense.

How and when did you decide to form your own studio?
BB: I think it happened at the Middle East (a bar) after our 17th shot of whiskey. I also think we planned on running for congress at that point, but I don’t remember. We just both knew that we had a lot of ideas that we probably couldn’t work on at our current positions. Creating an indie game studio was the obvious choice!

What have been the biggest challenges for you all as you went indie?
SK: We’re completely broke.

BB: I like to think of it as being a starving artist… really sacrificing for our love of games. I also can’t blame any other programmers when the game doesn’t work.

What advice do you have for other indie game makers?
BB: I don’t know if we’re in a good position to answer that, since we are really just starting. There are a number of Boston indie companies like Dejobaan who are much more likely to give a useful answer.

SK: I can say that I love the idea of making indie games, and that people should be as creative as possible since that’s not always possible when working for a larger studio/publisher.

When can we get our hands on the demo?
BB: We plan on being done in early 2013, so we’ll probably start asking people to help us test in late 2012.

Does Frankenstein have a cameo anywhere in the story? (Please say yes).
SK: Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus?

BB: (Steve reads a lot.)

I should have clarified, “Frankenstein’s monster.” Sorry Steve.

Anything else we should know?
BB: We’re just crazy excited to get this game out there! Indie development is awesome, and we’re so pumped to be where we are right now. Please check us out at http://www.eerie-canal.com as well as http://www.facebook.com/EerieCanalGames and https://twitter.com/eeriecanalgames

So there you have it. Any other questions for the Eerie Canal crew? Post them in the comments below.

I’m not usually exceptionally fond of either contrarianism or remakes, but I’m going to buck a trend here and say I’m kind of excited about a darkish reboot of The Munsters. We’re certainly seeing a bit of a trend towards the horrifying on television this fall: if American Horror Story can sell people on Connie Britton eating brains, I guess anything is possible. And Grimm is doing something I appreciate, increasingly partnering up straight-man-to-the-point-of-invisibility Nick with a Big Bad Wolf. But both Ryan Murphy’s wannabe-transgressive drama and NBC’s semi-bland procedural essentially use monsters in the same way, to test the extent to which there’s a bit of a wild thing inside all of us normals before reasserting our essential humanity. Instead, I’d like to see a show about what it’s like to be a monster in America, something as proudly but a little less triumphalist than The Addams Family. What does it mean to grow up really, profoundly different, without the promise of a big-city gay community or the rise of hipster glasses as a fashion trend to power you through? What does it mean to find your community — and your family — and what would you do to protect it from outsiders? America’s pretty quick to kill or assimilate the things it sees as monsters. We’re less good at making art that at the things we can’t eliminate easily or decisively.

I just finished W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America, and while I think the book has an unfortunate tendency to wander away from its central thesis (and as a result to not entirely prove it), the premise is interesting enough to merit further consideration. Essentially he argues that “the narrative of American history can be read as a tale of monsters slain and monsters beloved” — and more specifically that in the United States, monsters exist not just as engines of social control and reflections of our anxiety, but as things that we define ourselves by conquering. Poole describes one delightful example, the arrival of what a lot of people thought was a large sea serpent off the coast of Massachusetts:

Numerous New Englanders claimed to have seen it, and everyone tried to invest it with meaning. The Gloucester serpent quickly, in fact almost immediately, mae its way into political discussion. The anxious maritime entrepreneurs of Gloucester gave their sea monster the nickname “Embargo,” a reference to the controversial Embargo of 1807…The 1817 Boston broadside certainly makes it clear that destroying the monster in Gloucester harbor was the community’s first priority. On the first day of the sighting, ‘a number of our sharp-shooters’ were in pursuit, firing muskets at the serpent. There seems to have been no public discussion of this effort. It was assumed that killing the monster was the only possible course. The men of the New England coast killed giant sea creatures for a living, and this particular wonder would receive the same treatment. The monster in American history is not simply that which destroys. It is a being that must be destroyed.

Poole doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining how that American mindset is different from that of other countries, mostly asserting that it’s the case, even though I think he might have built a stronger one. The Puritans’ commitment to destroying monsters didn’t stop at self-control: Cotton Mather and others were all too eager to visit bodily destruction on the people who they believed had become monstrous in the country they’d come to subdue. The transformation of slaves who rebelled against their treatment into monsters in the canon of American mythology certainly had real-world consequences in the militarized mindset of the pre-Civil War mindset, and the treatment of fugitive slaves. But there’s no question that America is very good at mobilizing swiftly to absolutely destroy the kinds of things we’ve decided are monstrous, whether they’re New England sea serpents or al Qaeda.

It would be interesting to consider whether there’s a distinctly American approach to monsters that originate elsewhere. The edit and reframing that produced the American version of Godzilla turns the monster’s death from a tragedy and ominous warning into a triumph. In Europe, we desperately need Van Helsing to corner Dracula. Here, apparently, teenage girls can dispatch them either by slaying or seduction. The mark of real victory over a monster is when you don’t need to be afraid of it any more. America hasn’t defeated all of its monsters, and it never will. But to a certain extent, it can’t. It’s hard to remain exceptional if there’s nothing left to stand against, no way to distinguish yourself by the victories you can achieve that no one else can.