Why are monsters so fascinating?  Is it because they represent challenges—real and unknown—that we must face and overcome?  Are they a reflection of our bestial nature, our proclivity for sinfulness, even and especially towards the ones we love?

I think these reasons are accurate, but here’s the simplest explanation:  monsters are cool.  Every little kid who gets into monster movies doesn’t do so because the monster is a metaphor for grief, or nuclear war, or our darkest inclinations.  No, it’s because we want to see the monster—and see the good guys defeat it in some intriguing way.

Yes, we can appreciate monsters at a deeper, more sophisticated level as we grow older and experience “monsters” in our lives, but at the bottom of it all—after all of our high-browed interpretation of what are, essentially, B-movie fairy tales—we just love a cool, scary, weird monster.

Female readers may not understand this concept as intuitively as male readers, but anytime there is a big, scary beast in a video game, men’s first instinct is “how do I kill that thing?”  In games that permit early access to monsters way over the player character’s abilities, there is a thrill in surviving—often narrowly!—an encounter with a far stronger foe.  Even failing to defeat him is a lesson learned, and an opportunity for new growth.

I’ll never forget when my younger brother defeated an incredibly challenging enemy in the Nintendo classic Dragon Warrior.  He went into the encounter with a copper sword, one of the weakest swords in the game.  I still don’t know how he did it—he had wandered way off the intended path of his quest—but defeated this evil wizard-knight.  That was over thirty years ago, and I still remember it.

Yes, there are real monsters.  Yes, monsters in fiction are often symbolic of some deeper fear or anxiety.  But monsters—and defeating them—are also just really, really cool.

With that, here is 24 October 2024’s “TBT^16: Monsters“:

It’s an election year here in the States, and the monsters on the Left seem to be more ravenous than usual.  I suspect they are uttering the death bellows before they are vanquished by the paladins of Trumpist Righteousness.

But I don’t want to be too cocky.  Besides, the best monsters are the ones we can enjoy while watching them lurk around on television—or the mysterious ones that may, but probably don’t, live way out in the woods somewhere, safely away from our predictable lives.

What if monsters are real?  What if Bigfoot (who doesn’t exactly seem monstrous, but that could just be good PR) is lurking around out there—and you stumbled upon him while camping?  Would it be an incredible adventure—or a nightmare?

Well, there are plenty of real monsters out there.  They aren’t cool and made from practical effects; they’re wicked people who are willing to do wicked things to unsuspecting people.

With that, here is “TBT^4: Monsters“:

‘Tis the season for monsters and ghoulies!  Having just returned from the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival—and with the annual Spooktacular just two days away!—yours portly is in a monstrous mood.  Indeed, I wrote an entire album about them, which is available on streaming platforms for you cheapskates.

What is it that makes monsters so fascinating?  In old monster movies, the monster was always the last thing the audience saw, because saving the featured creature for last guaranteed you stay hooked (and because most of those old films had shoestring budgets and bad makeup/costumes/props, so they had one or two good shots with the monster before the whole contraption broke down).  Even now, when movies tell us everything that happens—even if we just saw it happen—we still want to see the monster—the more the better.

All I can figure is that we want to see how wild our own imaginations can be—and how well we can scare ourselves with monsters that are both alien and familiar.

With that, here is 27 October 2022’s “TBT^2: Monsters“:

Monsters.  Ghouls.  Ghosts.  Democrats.

They’re all creatures of the night:  bloodsucking, blood-curdling, blood-soaked.

Or they’re adorable, CGI critters that work in a factory, according to Pixar.

Of course, if you’re Stephen King, the real monsters are us—humans.  Have you read ‘Salem’s Lot?  A woman beats her own baby (and that baby becomes an infant vampire—yikes)!

That’s all a very weak, very contrived introduction for this week’s edition of TBT, which looks back at a couple of years’ posts and related commentary on monsters.  Whatever they are, whatever their intentions, monsters are always one thing:  interesting.

With that, here is 21 October 2021’s “TBT: Monsters“:

As the days grow shorter and cooler, with a full moon overhead, that old Halloween spirit has me excited for mischief and fun to come.  Shirts for this year’s Spooktacular have come in, and I’m ready to play more spooky tunes from my front porch!

I’ve already reblogged one of my favorite posts, “On Ghost Stories,” and it’s a bit early to throwback to past Halloween posts, so it seemed like a good time to consider another post pertaining to the so-called “spooky season.”  This post, “Monsters,” is very much in the same vein as “Things That Go Bump in the Night,” but from the angle of cryptids—think “Bigfoot“—rather than strictly supernatural creatures.

I don’t know if I believe in Bigfoot or not—I want to believe in it, at least—but I’m very much open to the possibility that there is far more to God’s Creation than we can even hope to comprehend.  As such, it seems self-limiting to outright deny the existence of certain creatures.  There might be plenty of evidence against the existence of Bigfoot, Mothman, etc., but such was the case—as I point out in this post—with the adorably weird duck-billed platypus.

But I digress.  Whether these monsters exist or not, there are still plenty around us.  With that, here is 21 October 2020’s “Monsters“:

Back in May I stumbled upon an online culture journal, The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for the Advanced Studies of Culture.  I don’t know much about either the publication or the IASC, other than they’re based out of the University of Virginia, so I can’t speak to their degree of implicit Leftist infiltration, but my default position is that any organization in 2020 that isn’t explicitly conservative is probably Left-leaning.

It’s sad that I even have to make that disclaimer, because some part of me still clings to the old ideal of a broad, humanistic approach to knowledge—that we should examine ideas on their own merits, not on the politics of the entities espousing them.  I still believe that ideal is worth pursuing; I just also believe it is currently dead, or at least on life-support.

But I digress.  The then-current issue of The Hedgehog Review was dedicated entirely to the theme of “Monsters.”  It being the Halloween season, the time seemed ripe to revisit those pieces, and the idea of “monsters.”

The two pieces I bookmarked five months ago are now hopelessly lost behind a paywall, and as I’m in the business of selling subscriptions, not paying for them, I’m just going to wing my analysis based on their opening paragraphs.

The first, “Monstering,” starts with a relatively self-indulgent, overwrought introduction all about the author being a criminal defense attorney and an artist.  Sure, I’m self-indulgent, but this is a blog, not a serious academic journal.  Ms. Vanessa Place, the authoress of this piece, does not come across as particularly serious, either, with her needlessly complicated opening paragraph, in which she literally states she has nothing to add to the topic of monsters!

Thank goodness the rest is behind a paywall.  The painting of “The Cyclops” by Odilon Redon drew me in, but Ms. Place repulsed me where the ostensible monster attracted.

The second article, “Desperately Seeking Mothman,” seems more promising.  It’s about cryptids, cryptozoological animals for which anecdotal evidence exists, but formal zoology does not accept as real.  The author, Tara Isabella Burton, makes an interesting point in one of the two paragraphs cheapskates like me can read:

The field of cryptozoology—the occult-tinged study of as yet unbeheld creatures—from the bloodthirsty chupacabra of Mexico to the ponderous Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest—has often been dismissed (fairly) by the academic world as a pseudoscience. But spotters of Mothman (a red-eyed, winged humanoid first glimpsed in West Virginia in the 1960s), the dinosaur-like Mokele-mbembe, or the Loch Ness monster aren’t doing science so much as practicing a kind of acute antiscience: resisting the notion that the world, with all its inchoate wonders, can fit neatly into any one taxonomy. Cryptids, as practitioners in the “field” call them, aren’t just “undiscovered” animals, but category-crossing ones: creatures whose bizarre juxtapositions render them icons of a world more complex than empirical science alone can explain.

That notion that certain things can’t be neatly fit into the traditional categories of science—really, of the Enlightenment—is one worth exploring.  Indeed, I think it’s one worth embracing.  One needn’t believe in Bigfoot (as my good blogger friend Audre Myers of Nebraska Energy Observer 98% does) to understand the vastness of Creation, of our still-limited capacity to understand it.  Even the humble duck-billed platypus defies our attempts at neat classification—and it was considered a fake once, too!

There is so much more to this world than we can understand—or even perceive.  But there are plenty of real monsters out there.