As frightening as monsters are, they have always captivated us. From chimeras and hydras to bunyips and golems, creatures have emerged from our imaginations throughout history and across cultures. Today, they explode onto our cinema screens with incredible regularity. Given how scary monsters can be, it seems paradoxical that we keep making them. In fact, they are actually very important to us, and are deeply rooted in our evolutionary history and psychology.
Monsters are the fantastical descendants of our co-evolution with predatory animals: they are wired into our neurocircuitry. Snakes, for example, were our ancestors鈥� first deadly predators. This scaly threat caused early primates to evolve specialised snake-responsive neurons in their visual cortices and . You could say that snakes were monsters that helped make us. Just a small patch of scales is enough to suggest 鈥渟nake鈥� to a monkey or a . Human babies who have never seen a snake before uniquely to them.
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This hardware, together with our capacity for symbolic representation, produced the serpentine monsters that abound in almost all traditions: dragons, hydras and more. It is why we get a thrill from watching Snakes on a Plane or the basilisk in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Likewise, the minds of many more recent hominins were shaped by the need to detect bears, lions and other mammalian predators in the tundra landscape of Europe during the last glacial period. As a vulnerable, naked ape in a landscape dominated by megafauna, we evolved to see predators in the merest shapes on the horizon, in the dark between tree trunks or in shadowy corners. With their long teeth and scythe-like claws, these mammals haunted our imaginations, appearing in cave paintings created over millennia. They eventually have become the monsters of mythology.
There are psychological benefits to being frightened by monsters. When we listen to scary stories as kids, or watch films featuring horrific creatures, we experience acute fear. The foreboding, the jump scare, the all-out crisis: these activate the amygdala, the brain鈥檚 fear centre. It revs up the fight-or-flight response, adrenaline coursing through our blood. In a safe context, the end of the story is followed by a drop in adrenaline and endorphin-fuelled . Such controlled bouts of fear might actually help us to manage chronic stress or increase our pain tolerance. It is why some people with anxiety enjoy watching true crime or horror films before bed. Others like to go or bungee jumping.
The monsters we create today for films, video games or books represent the greatest fears of our age: Godzilla threatening civilisation, fungi zombifying the entire human species, genetic experiments gone awry or aliens growing in our viscera. These creatures offer intense experiences of cultural catharsis. A case in point: during the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, horror fans lower levels of stress and fear about what was happening. Perhaps they had faced these monsters before, in films such as 28 Days Later or World War Z. It is probably no coincidence that the series The Last of Us was such a hit after the height of the pandemic.
Monster media allows us to push otherwise-insurmountable anxieties away, externalising them into brutish, supernatural beings or extreme zombie pathogens, making normality appear relatively safer. It helps us exorcise our deepest fears. By understanding our monsters and why we make them, we can learn a great deal about what is going on under the surface of our minds and culture.
Natalie Lawrence is a historian of science and author of
