I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all seen a hor­ror movie or two (some more than oth­ers), but I’m a big scaredy-cat and don’t want to be too pre­sump­tu­ous. But where do these mon­sters come from? This thought led me down a rab­bit hole that I’m hop­ing you’ll take a moment to dive down into with me.

Goth­ic hor­ror, as it came to be known, began in the 18th cen­tu­ry, with many peo­ple attribut­ing the first hor­ror nov­el to Horace Walpole’s The Cas­tle of Otran­to. Now if you don’t know this book, not to fear, this is prob­a­bly the only time I’m ever going to talk about it. Goth­ic fic­tion, in brief, shows dark sub­lime scenery and a lot of fog, with roman­tic and super­nat­ur­al ele­ments. I could go into it in a lot more detail, but that just wouldn’t be fair to any­one. The main point I want to make is this: goth­ic is gloomy, and with­in that gloom are the many famous mon­sters that we know and love.

When I was grow­ing up, Drac­u­la was a name that I heard every Halloween—he’s the sta­ple vam­pire in everyone’s mind, aside from maybe Edward. Who hasn’t heard of him, or of Frankenstein’s mon­ster (yes, I said mon­ster, Franken­stein was the doc­tor)? And these mon­sters don’t just show up in books and movies, they’re in everything—there’s even a Franken­stein musi­cal if that’s what you’re look­ing for!

All of this got me to think­ing about why these mon­sters are the famous ones. What makes Goth­ic mon­sters some­thing uni­ver­sal­ly scary, to the point where they are heav­i­ly fea­tured in the hor­ror genre? Mod­ern nov­els and films have end­less ideas for new mon­sters, and def­i­nite­ly ones that are far more scary. So why did these ones stick?

In the end, I think it all comes down to the fact that these mon­sters have some­thing strange­ly human in them. If you’ve read Franken­stein, I’m sure you remem­ber that giant tem­per tantrum the mon­ster had on a moun­tain. These goth­ic mon­sters reflect a lot of the inse­cu­ri­ties we have about our­selves and our lives. Drac­u­la dis­plays how hard it is to cope with loss and death, and Franken­stein shows how des­per­ate­ly we want to fit in, and, in Frankenstein’s monster’s case, just to be human.

One of the best things we can take away from these goth­ic mon­sters is that it’s okay to be human—desirable even! I may be over­an­a­lyz­ing, slight­ly, but hey, I am an Eng­lish major. Now, with that all being said, I hope you all get a chance to watch some clas­sic hor­ror movies this spooky sea­son, and try not to read into too many metaphors for the human con­di­tion!

Hap­py Hal­loween, folks!

Errin Johnston-Watson

This post was pub­lished on the orig­i­nal UVic ESA web­site.