Toward better monsters for England, or, "We're the hooligans...—BLAM!"

or, "No one knows what it's like to be a dustbin..."

Spring-Heeled Jack terrorizes the English with his claws, red eyes, maniacal laughter and his remarkable leaping ability. Legend doesn't confirm whether he's ever killed anyone—but he might have, once!

Does this guy do anything except pussyfoot around and not die? He was benign enough that penny dreadful authorsrewrote him as a hero and it stuck. At least for now he has Jack the Ripper to upstage him.

Bill Hicks would call this "classic England." Hicks said he was once offered a job plugging for "Orange Drink." On his Rant in E-minor album, he told a comedy-club audience:

"I'm goin', what's the name of the product?"
"'Orange Drink!'"

The plain-named, nonlethal Spring-Heeled Jack shows a similar lack of exotic flair. If I'd never seen that Wikipedia article, I would have thought the name was a generic nickname for a lively dancer, or perhaps someone who could put away fifteen pints at the pub and get up the next morning and skip about, good as new. "Good old reliable Spring-heeled jack! Always industrious and perky!" Where's the horror?

England must renew its apocryphal monsters the way it always renews its culture and economy—by importing things from Asia. The English should invade Nepal and snag them some Yetis. British explorers were the first to see Yetis, but the English public never adopted the Yeti to the extent that its novelty could wear off. First there was tea, coffee, sugar, unruly brown people. Those are old now. England's only cultural hope in terms of folk legends is a thriving breed of unspeakable flesh-eating snow-apes.