Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Those Wild Monsters

Monsters are not the same as normal humans on the outside, but on the inside, what they carry is strange and scary, same as humans. Although a typical monster is usually feared and shunned, its unknown potential hides behind the fascination of its scariness, because consciously or subconsciously we feel we have something in common with the monsters, for most of us experience, at one time or another, a duality of opposing forces--in other words, good versus evil--within ourselves.

Monsters take different forms, shapes, and sizes, but they are the same with the impact of terror they leave in the people and readers of fiction.

The giant in Jack and the Beanstalk story is feared first for his size and loud voice, reflecting what a frightened child feels like when dealing with an intimidating adult. Godzilla was another monster feared for his size, for the way he destroyed buildings and stepped on everything much smaller than him.

The Hydra, too, was a gigantic monster but with nine heads, the central one being immortal, meaning the negative force or the dark side will always be there, no matter how much it is cut or conquered. The same idea takes form with monsters such as Star Trek's Borg who cannot be battled against successfully.

The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, on the other hand, is a monster not for its size but for its cunning and craftiness.

All this makes me accept the idea that, in our imagination or in our writing, we turn our fears into monsters. Then, we try to destroy and suppress them, and in not succeeding, we feel the conflict inside ourselves, which finds its way to the computer screen or the printed page. Case in point, the Victorian era was when fascination with monsters was rampant due to rigid moral codes, suppression of desires, melodrama, and emotionality.

Accordingly, a monster in a story represents forbidden insights, a modern pact with the devil, and the result of science without ethics. It frightens because man can turn to monster as the scientist and sorcerer who can forge a holy or unholy alliance with some scary, dark knowledge. Take the Story of Frankenstein, for example. Wasn't it written at a time when the Industrial Revolution threatened every comfortable idea and accommodation people had known earlier? Didn't this monster speak through inarticulate sounds and mutterings impossible to understand? Most of the time, don't we, as human beings, fear science, the aliens, or anything alien or unknown, and act cautiously or with prejudice?

Sure enough, we have spaces in our beings where monsters rule from seemingly inaccessible corners. While we steer clear of those spaces during our everyday lives, when external situations strike fear or panic in us, we find our monsters taking the reins and making our reason and even morals lose control. This losing control may happen, in extreme circumstances, by perceiving attacks from inanimate or imagined objects. In its simplest form this occurs in nightmares during sleep, when the consciousness is overtaken by the subconscious.

The most successful strategy to deal with inner monsters is by facing them and trying to gain insight into their origins. Facing the inner monsters is what happens at the end of every story in literature.


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Prompt: Let's take a walk on the wild side...We all have something we'd like to write about, but that doesn't really fit our blog. Write it anyway.

Note—Since I started writing from prompts, some on the outlandish side, everything and anything fits my blog, no matter how much I try to connect the subject at hand with the idea of writing. Since monsters rule from their deserved place in literature and they are on the wild side, they have been what I wanted to write about, even if the prompt might be asking for something else.