Twisted. Mingled. Ugly. Big. Scary… The history of monsters is not only rich with man’s imagination and intrigue, but it is also filled with fear and…passion?
While the previous entries dealt with Ancient Egypt and Greece, and Norse mythology and Abrahamic religions, this entry focuses on two completely opposite types of monsters: The ones that we are made to understand and even fall for, and the ones that are beyond our human understanding. It is the contradiction of those monsters that makes them too appealing to ignore. In this piece, I will take a dive into the fascinating world of vampires, werewolves, dragons, and some of the most peculiar monsters from the Cthulhu Mythos.
The Romanticization of Dragons
While dragons have been considered a force of evil and a force of good depending on the culture and the tradition, recent tellings of dragon stories have been filled with more fascination than fear. When I was a child, I watched a film called Dragonheart (1996) which was my first ever encounter with dragon stories. Ever since, I have not been able to view the destructive, fire-breathing, scaled force of nature in any way aside from appreciation.
Certainly, films and series like How to Train Your Dragon and Game of Thrones have turned dragons from absolutely murderous creatures into pets—although they retain their great force in those movies and series. Other animated movies like Mulan turned dragons into tiny gimmicky creatures. However, all the same, the romanticization of dragons can be summed up in one line from the critically acclaimed Game of Thrones series by Daenerys Targaryen:
“The brave men didn’t kill dragons. The brave men rode them.”
Vampires
If this list were to be measured in popularity, vampires should be at the very top of monsters. Vampires, blood-sucking immortal beings that do not age. Vampires, as told in various Dracula stories, are terrible beings capable of great harm. Some can transform into bats or other creatures, and of all things, they fear the sunlight and religious symbols like the cross.
To think that that would make for a good romance... It absolutely does! I believe that this tradition comes from fairytales like Beauty and The Beast. The most concrete example of the romanticization of vampires comes from the late Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles in which she reinvented the vampire in a mixture of romance, horror, and erotica. Other stories that romanticize vampires include Twilight and The Vampire Diaries.
Werewolves
Much like dragons, stories of werewolves are quite ancient, first appearing in Greek mythology. Werewolves, as we know them today, are people who are cursed somehow by a curse relating to wolves. They usually turn into werewolves at the time of the full moon and the transformation is often devastating as well as particularly painful for the werewolf who tends to regret their behavior at the time of the full moon.
Films like Wolf and The Wolfman not only romanticize this beast, but they put the viewer in its shoes. There have been many, many adaptations of the werewolf story and they tend to be similar in many ways. Even in stories where the werewolf only presents a secondary character, like the Harry Potter series, they tend to be more remorseful and regretful than many of the other creatures; giving them the part of their humanity that they need to make for a compelling story.
The Cosmic
My main focus on this part will mainly rely on H. P. Lovecraft’s monsters (or gods) from the Cthulhu Mythos. There is one thing to keep in mind in this part: It heavily relates to extraterrestrial horror which will be discussed in the following entry. In this, I quote one of my favorite quotes attributed to Lovecraft himself: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
Cthulhu is an ancient extraterrestrial being (or god). In Lovecraft’s description, Cthulhu is a cosmic being with immense power and is described as unfathomable with the title of the Great Sleeper or the Sleeper of R’lyeh. He is described as having the head of an octopus with a writhing mass of tentacles that hang from where the mouth should be. While vaguely humanoid, he is simultaneously described as grotesque in appearance. He has the wings of a dragon which allow him to fly despite his colossal size. He has long, taloned claws on both his hands and his feet.
The horror of Cthulhu is not solely in the description, but the outcome of what happens to those who see him. Lovecraft describes the encounters as always ending with madness for the viewer. Additionally, as Cthulhu is an ancient god, he cannot be killed. When his vessel is destroyed, he is simply reborn which adds to the horror of that which cannot be destroyed.
The most conceptual of the monsters of Lovecraft is the color from The Color Out of Space, as it is, simply put, a color. However, the color does not correspond to any earthly light due to its alien nature. It is something foreign, outside of the visible spectrum, so much so that it defies description by any known language.
A deeper reading of the color immediately leads me to think of climate change, as the color is a destructive force similar to that of famine. It completely destroys the landscape, but not in an immediate way, instead, rather gradually. Additionally, the color affects humans, leading them to illness both physically and mentally.
In the next entry of The Anatomy of Monsters, I will take a turn into an alien territory… Stay tuned!
Written and illustrated by Amr Abbas.
Cover photo by Jaro Mettinisson.