Types of Monsters
Monsters are extraordinary characters in an ordinary world.
Monsters are strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way.
They represent the uncanny and the abject. The abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.
Monsters’ categorical incompleteness: disintegrating things, formless, rotting, interstitial, indescribable, inconceivable, “It,” and “Them”
that instill Revulsion and disgust (but not always).
Monster categories:
Monsters are strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way.
They represent the uncanny and the abject. The abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.
Monsters’ categorical incompleteness: disintegrating things, formless, rotting, interstitial, indescribable, inconceivable, “It,” and “Them”
that instill Revulsion and disgust (but not always).
Monster categories:
- Magnification: Hordes! Large numbers of dangerous things like zombies or aliens or creatures.
- Fission (spatial or temporal): based on the incompleteness of the monster. These are entities that change into and back from different forms at different times. Examples: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, werewolves, can you think of others?
- Fusion: these are monsters whose identities and "parts" are fused from disparate entities fused into one being/thing, can also be called chimeras. Examples: The Sid's toys in Toy Story, Frankenstein's Monster, can you think of others?
- Metonymy: something not necessarily revolting on its own but associated with monsters and things that are. Examples: vampires and rats or bats, witches and black cats or spiders, Dorian Grey and the painting. Can you think of others?
- Massification: monsters who are enormous. Examples: Godzilla, the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, the spiders in Eight-Legged Freaks. Can you think of others?