Monsters. What is it that we are so afraid of? And if they frighten us so much, why do we keep coming back for more? I think the last thing that most of us want is to be confronted with a true monster. With horror movies, we get to walk all the way up to the edge of the abyss of death and look over without any real fear of falling in. Our most popular monsters involve two things that frighten us the most. The first one is death. The second involves putting a mirror in front of our faces to confront the hidden horrors that exist inside all of us.
Zombies
Popular culture has transformed zombies from lone mindless slaves of voodoo masters into armies of cannibalistic corpses, shuffling along with no other purpose than to satisfy their hunger with the living. The living undeath spreads like a disease from which no one is immune. The older we get, the faster we approach death. Parts start breaking down. Friends and family pass away. We age and decay before our own eyes. Death becomes like a disease that consumes us. It’s not difficult to see why we fear and relate to stories of death eating life, spreading and spreading, throughout the world, until we focus on a handful of survivors who do everything in their power to keep death from consuming them. This may be the most terrifying monster of them all. Death doesn’t discriminate. It takes the young and the old. The sick and the healthy. The good and the evil. It is mindless, hungry, violent, and it never stops chasing you. There is no cure. If you manage to outrun it for a time, it will still consume all of those around you until you are alone in the world.
Ghosts
Popular tradition tells us that a ghost is the spirit of a deceased person whose soul is still wandering in the physical world. Death scares us all. But what happens when we die? Is that the end? Will we just end? What if I’m not done being alive? There are so many things I still want to do! I want to tell my wife one last time that I love her. I want to see my grandchild’s first birthday. I want to cure cancer. I want to finish my hamburger. It’s likely that we will never be ready for death. So who gets to go to heaven, and who becomes trapped in the world they couldn’t let go of? How does it all work?
Ghosts combine our fear of death with fear of the unknown – the afterlife. When we die, what spirits will come to claim us? The idea of being haunted by an invisible presence that knows all of our secrets unnerves most of us. Humanity is filled with choices that we regret or secrets that we prefer to keep hidden, like skeletons in a closet. The thought of those secrets coming back to torment us is the root of our fear of being haunted.
Quite often, our greatest desire is to keep on living in some form or another after we die, or else what is it all for? From the murderous banshees of The Grudge to the benign spooks of The Sixth Sense, we often think of ghosts as spirits who are unable to let go of the life they left behind. Maybe they can’t let go of their loved ones, or their money. Maybe they are trying to communicate one last message. Maybe they want revenge for their untimely murder. Whatever the reason, they are so singularly obsessed that they are unable to move on. Many of us have dealt with this kind of obsession in our own lives. We dwell on the poor choices that we have made or on the things that have been done to us. We wait for that lover or child or career that we’ve lost to come back to us. We become so lost in the past or a present that “might have been” that we forget to live. Life stops and we become ghosts ourselves. Maybe a resolution will solve this undeath. Maybe if we wait long we will get that apology, or long lost love, and our world will be fixed. But it’s not likely. We are the only ones that can choose to start living regardless of what life sends our way. And so it is the ghosts that we are afraid of becoming, that scare us the most.
Werewolves
Werewolves are portrayed as cursed individuals with a beast inside of them that they are unable to tame. There are violent places in a man’s soul that he’d rather not admit that he has. Even to those of us who haven’t experienced this violence first hand, there’s always the thought of “what if”. What if the animal gets out? What if I can’t control my anger? Or my lust? What if the beast wins? What if I hurt someone close to me? What if I say something so awful that I can’t take it back? What if I allow that haze of fury to blind me to my own actions, and when the dust settles and I wake up, I discover that I am not fit to be a husband or a father? What if that ONE time that I let the beast out, it hurts someone so much, that they feel entitled to just ONE time of letting the beast out? And so the cycle of the werewolf continues.
Vampires
Ever since Bram Stoker gathered up all the vampire myths and published them in his penultimate novel, Dracula, 114 years ago, the world has been fascinated by vampires. And why not? Here you have our first “monster” that is in control. A very human looking figure with supernatural strength, shape-shifting skills, powers of seduction, and immortality. The devil never looked so good. But make no mistake, his primary goal is to consume your life and eventually, your soul. This “devil” can’t enter your world unless you invite him in. Once there, he will come to you when you are sleeping and your defenses are down. Night after night, he will subtly suck your life away. You probably won’t even notice it. Friends may notice you shying away from things of the light that once gave you joy. One day you will wake up and wonder what you ever saw in your friends in the first place. Who understands you now? At this point the vampire will make himself known to you as someone who just wants a friend. After all, this person understands you. They “get” the dark. They aren’t afraid of it like your friends are. Maybe the vampire will even let you in on what has been happening to you and you’ll feel like it’s really no big deal. It’s okay now. He can drink your blood if he wants. But now he wants you to drink HIS blood back. You are repulsed. But you have to make a choice. Embrace the darkness? Or flee from it? Maybe if you just go along and push through this repulsion, everything will be okay. But it’s not. You’ve stepped over the threshold by your own free will and there is no going back. You find yourself hiding in the night. Sticking to the shadows. You’re more at home with the things that happen in the dark and you’d rather others not see what you’ve become. You can’t stand the sight of yourself anyways. You get rid of all mirrors, because you know if you looked into one, the person staring back would be a harsh reminder of how far you’ve fallen. It’s better to get rid of all the mirrors and hide yourself from your own undeath. Crosses and religious symbols used to bring such light to your world. Now you flee before them to escape those reminders that burn you and stab at your heart. A heart that no longer beats for anything. You remain seduced by the dark. And still you are repulsed by yourself for allowing to be seduced by the dark. You have nothing to love and no one left to love you back. It’s just you and the dark. Your heart aches with hunger pangs. You’d do anything to FEEL again, and wake up from this undeath. So you seek someone out. Someone that you can befriend. And seduce. And bring down to your level. Someone to feed off of. And it will ease your pain and satisfy you. For a time. These days, vampires have been watered down. We’ve given them capes, and souls, and glitter. We think that maybe we can rescue them and fall in love so they won’t be so lonely. And in return they can protect us from other things that go bump in the night. But deep down, we walk that dangerous edge with full knowledge that one day they may try to seduce us. And we may like it.
We watch horror movies. We get scared. We laugh. And we tell ourselves that they’re only stories. But in reality, the horrors in these tales that we fear exist in all of us. We are zombies. We are ghosts. We are werewolves. And we are vampires. Say your prayers at night and hope the dawn comes swiftly.
Zombies
Popular culture has transformed zombies from lone mindless slaves of voodoo masters into armies of cannibalistic corpses, shuffling along with no other purpose than to satisfy their hunger with the living. The living undeath spreads like a disease from which no one is immune. The older we get, the faster we approach death. Parts start breaking down. Friends and family pass away. We age and decay before our own eyes. Death becomes like a disease that consumes us. It’s not difficult to see why we fear and relate to stories of death eating life, spreading and spreading, throughout the world, until we focus on a handful of survivors who do everything in their power to keep death from consuming them. This may be the most terrifying monster of them all. Death doesn’t discriminate. It takes the young and the old. The sick and the healthy. The good and the evil. It is mindless, hungry, violent, and it never stops chasing you. There is no cure. If you manage to outrun it for a time, it will still consume all of those around you until you are alone in the world.
Ghosts
Popular tradition tells us that a ghost is the spirit of a deceased person whose soul is still wandering in the physical world. Death scares us all. But what happens when we die? Is that the end? Will we just end? What if I’m not done being alive? There are so many things I still want to do! I want to tell my wife one last time that I love her. I want to see my grandchild’s first birthday. I want to cure cancer. I want to finish my hamburger. It’s likely that we will never be ready for death. So who gets to go to heaven, and who becomes trapped in the world they couldn’t let go of? How does it all work?
Ghosts combine our fear of death with fear of the unknown – the afterlife. When we die, what spirits will come to claim us? The idea of being haunted by an invisible presence that knows all of our secrets unnerves most of us. Humanity is filled with choices that we regret or secrets that we prefer to keep hidden, like skeletons in a closet. The thought of those secrets coming back to torment us is the root of our fear of being haunted.
Quite often, our greatest desire is to keep on living in some form or another after we die, or else what is it all for? From the murderous banshees of The Grudge to the benign spooks of The Sixth Sense, we often think of ghosts as spirits who are unable to let go of the life they left behind. Maybe they can’t let go of their loved ones, or their money. Maybe they are trying to communicate one last message. Maybe they want revenge for their untimely murder. Whatever the reason, they are so singularly obsessed that they are unable to move on. Many of us have dealt with this kind of obsession in our own lives. We dwell on the poor choices that we have made or on the things that have been done to us. We wait for that lover or child or career that we’ve lost to come back to us. We become so lost in the past or a present that “might have been” that we forget to live. Life stops and we become ghosts ourselves. Maybe a resolution will solve this undeath. Maybe if we wait long we will get that apology, or long lost love, and our world will be fixed. But it’s not likely. We are the only ones that can choose to start living regardless of what life sends our way. And so it is the ghosts that we are afraid of becoming, that scare us the most.
Werewolves
Werewolves are portrayed as cursed individuals with a beast inside of them that they are unable to tame. There are violent places in a man’s soul that he’d rather not admit that he has. Even to those of us who haven’t experienced this violence first hand, there’s always the thought of “what if”. What if the animal gets out? What if I can’t control my anger? Or my lust? What if the beast wins? What if I hurt someone close to me? What if I say something so awful that I can’t take it back? What if I allow that haze of fury to blind me to my own actions, and when the dust settles and I wake up, I discover that I am not fit to be a husband or a father? What if that ONE time that I let the beast out, it hurts someone so much, that they feel entitled to just ONE time of letting the beast out? And so the cycle of the werewolf continues.
Vampires
Ever since Bram Stoker gathered up all the vampire myths and published them in his penultimate novel, Dracula, 114 years ago, the world has been fascinated by vampires. And why not? Here you have our first “monster” that is in control. A very human looking figure with supernatural strength, shape-shifting skills, powers of seduction, and immortality. The devil never looked so good. But make no mistake, his primary goal is to consume your life and eventually, your soul. This “devil” can’t enter your world unless you invite him in. Once there, he will come to you when you are sleeping and your defenses are down. Night after night, he will subtly suck your life away. You probably won’t even notice it. Friends may notice you shying away from things of the light that once gave you joy. One day you will wake up and wonder what you ever saw in your friends in the first place. Who understands you now? At this point the vampire will make himself known to you as someone who just wants a friend. After all, this person understands you. They “get” the dark. They aren’t afraid of it like your friends are. Maybe the vampire will even let you in on what has been happening to you and you’ll feel like it’s really no big deal. It’s okay now. He can drink your blood if he wants. But now he wants you to drink HIS blood back. You are repulsed. But you have to make a choice. Embrace the darkness? Or flee from it? Maybe if you just go along and push through this repulsion, everything will be okay. But it’s not. You’ve stepped over the threshold by your own free will and there is no going back. You find yourself hiding in the night. Sticking to the shadows. You’re more at home with the things that happen in the dark and you’d rather others not see what you’ve become. You can’t stand the sight of yourself anyways. You get rid of all mirrors, because you know if you looked into one, the person staring back would be a harsh reminder of how far you’ve fallen. It’s better to get rid of all the mirrors and hide yourself from your own undeath. Crosses and religious symbols used to bring such light to your world. Now you flee before them to escape those reminders that burn you and stab at your heart. A heart that no longer beats for anything. You remain seduced by the dark. And still you are repulsed by yourself for allowing to be seduced by the dark. You have nothing to love and no one left to love you back. It’s just you and the dark. Your heart aches with hunger pangs. You’d do anything to FEEL again, and wake up from this undeath. So you seek someone out. Someone that you can befriend. And seduce. And bring down to your level. Someone to feed off of. And it will ease your pain and satisfy you. For a time. These days, vampires have been watered down. We’ve given them capes, and souls, and glitter. We think that maybe we can rescue them and fall in love so they won’t be so lonely. And in return they can protect us from other things that go bump in the night. But deep down, we walk that dangerous edge with full knowledge that one day they may try to seduce us. And we may like it.
We watch horror movies. We get scared. We laugh. And we tell ourselves that they’re only stories. But in reality, the horrors in these tales that we fear exist in all of us. We are zombies. We are ghosts. We are werewolves. And we are vampires. Say your prayers at night and hope the dawn comes swiftly.
