Fi Phillips

I've discussed the idea of monsters previously in my article, Loving the Monster , and the recent Hallowe'en season has got me thinking about it all over again. It seems to me that most of the fictional monsters and villains we meet through books, films and TV these days are generally created in a way that we can understand their crimes or brutal approach. For instance, in the novel, The  Warm Bodies (and subsequent film) by Isaac Marion, we find a zombie who grows tired of his life of noshing human flesh and seeks something more, well, human. He wants to fall in love and have experiences beyond his condition. In Dexter , the character of the title is a serial killer who appears to take delight in his gruesome murders but only slaughters criminals who have escaped justice. Time and again, the actions of fictional monsters and villains can be explained away but what happened to having a baddie who was just bad? I miss that. We need more thoroughly evil characters like...

There used to be a time when the appearance of a monster was a reason to run away screaming or at the very least hide behind the sofa. Daleks trundled around with their half-throttled calls of  'exterminate'. Werewolves ripped off their own skin then the throats of their victims. Vampires just wouldn't take no for an answer. They gave us nightmares and made cellars the worse place to be. The darkness became peopled with demons and graveyards were rife with zombies. But somewhere over the last decade or so, our attitude to monsters has changed. We want to understand them. We want to explain their bad behaviour. Ultimately, we want to love them. Of course this 'relating' to the monster started much earlier than this century in the novel ' Frankenstein ' written by Mary Shelley. If you read this book within a book within a book, you will come to the conclusion that the true monster is Frankenstein himself. His creation simply tries to survive and through ...