What makes a monster a monster? This is probably one of the best questions I have ever been asked and I spent a couple of days mulling over it. “That which questions the binary thinking and introduces a crisis” is a monster, says Marjorie Garber. Personally, I couldn’t agree more. While Jeffery Choen elaborated on 7 topics I noticed it always came back to challenging the common thinking or the common morals of the time that they live in. The changing of the times and the evolution of the way in which the stories are spread. I want to focus on his 5th thesis statement  “The monster polices the borders of the possible”

This makes me think of most of H.P Lovecraft’s work.  Putting aside his racism even in the standards of the late 1800s / early 1900s he was not very bright and was terrified of anything outside of his hometown, especially technological progression since he did not understand it. This fear of the unknown brings a special flair to Lovecraftian mythos. Cool air is one of those stories, the criminally short synapse I can give is a man becomes fast friends with his upstairs neighbor, a reclusive doctor with a cold apartment when the main character has chest pains. One day the doctor’s air conditioner breaks and he freaks out begging the main character to bring him as much ice as possible while he hides in his restroom, the main character asks someone else to get the ice and they get nosey and look inside the bathroom. When the main character returns he sees horrors that he refuses to explain in any detail because it’s that horrid. Turns out the doctor had passed away and was using the modern-day “practices” to keep his body embalmed but he needed the house to be freezing so he could be preserved. Is the doctor the monster for wanting to preserve his life? I don’t think so, in this context the monster is the progression of modern technology. Cohen states “To step outside this official geography is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself”. Stepping off the beaten path physically or in principle can lead to disaster and this chance of becoming monstrous. Cool Air is more of a theoretical way of thinking of things that are monstrous but what about the things that actually go bump in the night?

 Growing up as a kid with the internet slowly becoming more available and being obsessed with reading horror books you end up reading creepy/copypasta. These stories started to get more and more popular and people started to compile them. More of the common ones are like Slenderman who has many video games and is often referenced in pop culture. Well, some people started compiling stories and the SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) universe started to grow. The SCP foundation harbors “files” on new monsters, old monsters, or anything that defies natural law is written about scientifically, classified, and plausibly. 

While there are thousands I could possibly talk about, I want to address SCP 2191. SCP 2191 is a temple found in Romania constructed around 4800 to 3000 BC, inside of this temple are a group of things that are genetically human but by all accounts shouldn’t be able to survive. They do not appear to age, they are missing organs, they cannot see but hunt and communicate like bats, and their skin resembles cracked porcelain. It is too long to truly explain what this entity is and I would highly recommend reading it, but this is a take on Dracula is really interesting to me because it makes them less human

Now all of this leads to the actual historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler. Vlad was the Vpovpde of Wallachia and a hero of Romania. It was said at night that his troops would become bats and fly over the mountains and attack the invading troops, this is why Dracula has been known to turn into a bad. Vlad also has the nickname of an impaler for good reasons, he was said to bathe and drink blood on the regular, and his house was guarded by the cut-off heads of his enemies (this is simply the tamer things it gets worse). It just goes to show that almost every monster in pop culture has its roots in something truly historical, it may just not be human history.