Here be monsters
Mary Shelley’s fictional offspring turned 200 this year. Maybe giving fear a fictional shape makes us less afraid of real-life horrors … or maybe we’re just weird
Humans have always been bewitched by monsters. There are tales of dragons, gorgons, three-headed dogs, trolls (which made a comeback in the age of social media), minotaurs, furies and chimeras.
In stories from around Africa there are tokoloshes, iimpundulu, biloko, kongamato, and the more recent but no less scary Pinky Pinky, a ghoulish figure said to haunt girls who wear pink underwear.
With the rise of popular fiction and the advent of film, monsters exploded all over the place.
There is a surprising lack of diversity in the monster department, however. It seems that once having seen something hideous, it is hard to imagine it in another form.
Those who create monsters draw on previous monsters for inspiration, as in the case of the main picture on this page. It is one of a series of watercolours by poet and artist William Blake, painted between 1805 and 1810 and depicting the Great Red Dragon, a scary monster from the biblical Book of Revelation.
In 1981, horror writer Thomas Harris created a human monster (played by Ralph Fiennes in Red
Dragon) whose obsession with Blake’s painting caused him to do monstrous things.
Monsters mutate endlessly and are frequently recycled with new names, but one of the most enduring is the creature built by Dr Victor Frankenstein, the fictional scientist who gave his name to Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.
If Shelley had given her freaky beast a name —
Harvey, say, or Magnus or Nigel or Bob — we’d have been spared centuries of confusion. Millions continue to believe that the stitched-together lunk with a bolt in his neck is called Frankenstein.
Perhaps Shelley deliberately created this muddle because the real monster in the book is not the anonymous cabbage-patch doll — it’s the doctor who sewed it together and made it walk.
Beware usurping the work of the gods
The alternative title of Frankenstein gives a clue as to who the real villain is. Prometheus, in Greek mythology, was the man who stole fire from the gods. His punishment was to spend eternity chained to a rock. Each day eagles would eat his liver, which would grow back each night so it could be eaten again the next day.
Some might draw an analogy between alcoholics and vitamin B, but the point of the comparison was that Dr Frankenstein, by giving life to a being of his own making, displayed the same gall as Prometheus. He usurped the work of the gods and his punishment was to watch helplessly as the creature slipped from his control, developed a form of artificial intelligence and programmed itself to do all sorts of bad things.
Shelley’s novel is frequently read as a warning against the dangers of messing with nature, whether through atom splitting, genetic engineering or robotics. That’s one way to look at it, but on a deeper level Frankenstein’s monster does what all scary made-up monsters have always done: they give shape to our terrors, thereby making us a little less terrified.
You’d think there were enough real monsters in the world without our having to invent more. Some think there is nothing more to fantasy monsters than the cheap thrill associated with bungee jumping or eating a whole habanero chilli.
In his book, The Science of Monsters, author Matt Kaplan wrote: “Monsters are creatures we run from and beasts we warn our children about. Yet something about them is enticing, mesmerising and addictive … They terrify, yet we cannot get enough of them.”
Kaplan suggested that this fascination arises out of a sort of masochism. “Just as the brain is able to identify that screaming taste buds [when eating spicy food] are screaming about nothing serious, the brain is capable of realising that a frightening story is not real. Researchers propose that in this realisation there is a sense of mastery of mind over body that is, in itself, enjoyable.”
Casting evil in a mould
But perhaps there is something more to the thrill of a horror movie than a shot of endorphins. Perhaps vampires, zombies, killer clowns and malevolent ghosts do well at the box office because they take the nebulous evil that floats around us and cast it in a mould where it is removed, contained and much more manageable.
Stephen T Asma, philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago and author of On Monsters, said: “Monsters is a term we reserve for people who cannot be negotiated with. It’s almost impossible, if not impossible, to understand their behaviour, their motives, their mind. Our regular theory of mind doesn’t work on these people.”
Because they don’t exist in the real world, fictional monsters make us feel marginally safer. But they also operate on another level. The most appealing monsters have a streak of vulnerability that makes us relate to them as semi-human and therefore potentially redeemable.
Frankenstein’s monster has been portrayed in many film, stage and cartoon spin-offs as a clumsy oaf, but on the page he was an anguished, perceptive creature who felt the pain of rejection and fought to contain his vengeful impulses. He behaved monstrously as a result of the monstrous way he was treated — isolated, abused and tormented.
When we hear of a person who has behaved in horrifically inhumane ways, attempts are often made to understand why this happened, what traumatic incident might have occurred in the person’s past to warp their vision of the world and break their bond with humanity.
If we could understand this and find a point at which we empathise with the monster, we reason, it would become less capable of harming us and therefore far less scary.
We don’t like the thought of humans who are inhuman, which is one of the reasons why we need monsters: they provide a vessel into which we can pour the inconceivable outrage we feel towards people who behave like monsters.
We don’t just create fictional monsters to help manage our fear of real ones; humans are also quite good at transforming real-life monsters into manageable memes or caricatures of themselves.
When the monsters are real — and there are plenty of those to contend with — they exert the same compulsion over our imaginations as do fictional bogeymen.
Helping us understand our fears
It is not necessarily weird and ghoulish to be preoccupied with the gory details of how the latest serial killer dismembered his victims. The same impulse that draws us to fictional monsters is at work here, according to David Castillo, author of Baroque Horrors.
Castillo’s theory is that terrifying tales of real-life perversion perform the same function as outlandish horror movies, in that they help us “to understand our own modern fears and their monstrous offspring”.
There is another side to that coin. Sometimes it is much easier to dismiss a human who has committed atrocious acts as some mutant creature that has nothing in common with real people like us.
Rather than trying to understand what went wrong in the minds and lives of people like Hitler and Stalin, and all the less famous monsters whose ugly deeds air daily on the news, it is less arduous and more comforting to reduce them to the status of aliens who need be neither understood nor pitied, nor even feared, because there is no chance at all that we could become like them.
Our reactions to real (human) monsters are complicated. Monsters of the fictional variety are much simpler. They help us to be less afraid because they give shape to our fears, and when fear has a shape it is not nearly as paralysing as the formless menace lurking beneath your bed on a dark night after too much cheese.
What we fear most is always the unknown, because you can’t fight something if you don’t know what it looks like.
So, happy 200th birthday, misunderstood child of Frankenstein, and thanks for helping us face some of the stuff in this scary world of ours.
Yet something about them is enticing, mesmerising … They terrify, yet we cannot get enough of them