Many of today’s movies (with a few exceptions) that depict psychopathic killers and pure abominations of human kind by reducing them to their lowest common denominator, portray them as only something to fear and something to triumph over. This aspect of the monsters within a horror film/book will probably always be with us, and it serves a need.

In some respects I think many of the antiheros in comic books and on screen serve the modern purpose of the old view of monsters. The difference is that those characters are already pitched to the reader/viewer as “someone” and someone to show empathy for. With the antihero, too, they are presented as having redeeming qualities up front; the reader/viewer doesn’t have to think about what could be of value…

WRONG!!!

HOW DO YOU DO IT, Tom and Tom’s EXTRAORDINARY staff???!!! Five days a week, I hope for FOREVER!!!! What a FASCINATING and intellectually stimulating this hour wound up to be!!!

I’m getting greedy now: Can your BRILLIANT guest come back again to address ONE of these issues in even greater detail…Beowulf, for instance; or, maybe a bestiary of medieval monsters????

Just when you thought it was safe to read non-politically motivated comments… it attacks like the living dead, zombie like and after the blood of anyone who dares to dissent from their ideology.

Children more understand the need for monsters than adults often do. Although it may be difficult to get a child to articulate nuance, they have an innate sense of how monsters are complex in our psyches.

Monsters from childhood led me to my vocation.

When I was a very small boy, around the age of four, I remember I had had my first memorable nightmare: grotesque monsters appearing in patterns on my bedroom curtains. Around the same time, my uncle would tell the children of the family about Zookie, the monster who lived in the attic, and who couldn’t come out because light would hurt his eyes and blind him. Working along side these monsters was the urban legend my young cousin was spreading around to scare the children about a monster who was half human and who had no arms and legs; this “half-human” monster also ate little children. I consider this monster story to be particularly cruel, as every person I saw for about a year after who was physically disabled I believed to be one of those “half-human,” child-eating monsters.

At age four and a half, we moved to a new house and I got my own room. I remember that room well; it was on the second floor, just at the top of the stairs. My very own window, which faced the back yard, could afford a view into the backyards and homes of other people. Directly across from me, at the back of a neighbor’s house, was a window to a bedroom, a room of a little girl; the little girl was about five years older than I. She was grotesque to me; I had never seen a person with such a distorted face. I remember thinking, “maybe she is a monster?!?”

She had Downs Syndrome which, back then, people called people with Downs Syndrome “Mongoloids.” This sounded pretty scary to me. I never asked my parents about her; I guess it was a combination of shyness and being afraid. Lisa was her name, and she never came out of her house but constantly looked outside from a bay window. The neighborhood kids would point to her strange looking face, her webbed fingers, her dwarf-like body and chant “Lisa’s a monster, Lisa’s a monster…” I didn’t like what they were saying, but I was only five. Lisa’s room faced my room, and I remember she would look at me from her window. I was at once afraid and compelled to look at her, to connect through eye contact. She looked sad and lonely I thought. I never met Lisa but never forgot her.

Later, in early teenage years, I felt a similar empathy in seeing children like Lisa. I no longer felt fear or had the cruel misconception that they were monsters, but I also saw how shunned they were and subject to ridicule. I could not say why I thought that was wrong, but I knew it was.

When I was 16 I decided to volunteer at a summer camp for children with developmental disabilities. I don’t know, maybe it was a way to fully end the controversy and misunderstanding in my mind that I saw foisted on people like Lisa; maybe it was some kind of atonement for feeling I hadn’t done enough to bring forth honor and dignity toward Lisa, I can’t say for sure. I do know that beauty comes in all forms for all sorts of reasons.

I worked in an institution for what was known as “the mentally retarded” back then when I was in college, and I worked for people with autism all through my early-mid twenties.

Maybe at least some monsters are simply those creatures we either don’t know, don’t understand, or don’t see ourselves in…

He was without a doubt one of the first truly frightening characters how seem a bit eccentric or are masking some deep psychological problems.

I am sure the first time anyone has seen Psycho they wont get into a shower for days.

the other monster is Chucky the doll. It’s a real B or even a C movie but as a scary character he is brilliant plays into all of our childhood fears.

Cassius:
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141) – Shakespeare.

I think it’s the sound they make that freaks me out so much.

As a child I had recurring dreams about the Wicked Witch.