Monsters: Horrors and Moral Panics

Abstract

A quick glance at the roster of Hollywood horror films from any decade will reveal that filmmakers have had few problems in envisioning any species of animal as a monster. Insects, fish, birds and all manner of domestic and wild mammals have been marshalled by screenwriters, directors and studios in order that audiences should be terrified, horrified or, in the case of some of the more fantastical or ultra-low-budget horror depictions, amused. Horror films reflect social and cultural anxieties, and the circumstances that give rise to fictional monsters are often rooted in science-fact such that each new era of scientific discovery brings a new generation of monster forms into existence. Irrespective of the degree to which news media might celebrate scientific discoveries, horror films can cut through the abstraction of science and the hyperbole of human advancement to imagine the more sinister outcomes that such innovations might herald. In this sense, on-screen threats can imagine and amplify the offscreen risks to human and animal lives. Often the monstrous animal is not in itself the most terrible aspect of the narrative and is instead the outcome of a much greater hazard that has been wrought by humans interfering in some way in ‘nature’. Risks posed by pollution, nuclear testing, genetic experimentation and so forth are the contexts from which monsters emerge, and many horror films eschew a closed narrative structure leaving the audience to ponder on what will happen next.¹ Thus, whilst it is true that open narrative structures leave the possibility of a franchised sequel on the cards, they also suggest that although the monster of this film may have been stopped the human science that created them still exists. This is one way in which fictional monsters can ‘leak’ into social reality.