monsters we make

Edvard Munch

Joan Didion once said, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Perhaps more accurately, we tell ourselves stories to name the things that scare us. These stories, of beasts and trolls, Baba Yagas, and Slendermen who lurk just out of sight, are never just about the things themselves. They are reflections, shadows cast by the fears we do not name outright. If you follow the stories long enough, if you hold the knife of monstrosity and trace its path through time, you begin to see not just what we feared, but what we longed for, what we worshipped, and what we misunderstood.

The monsters of folklore were born in the dark corners of the world, in the untamed places where human reason faltered. The Bunyip, that spectral creature of Aboriginal lore, was said to lurk in the swamps and billabongs of Australia, its presence a warning against straying too far into the unknown. What lived in the water was beyond our control, beyond the reach of civilisation, and so it had to be named and turned into something recognisable. This is how monsters begin: not in the fangs and claws, but in the act of naming. A myth becomes a precaution, a symbol of the boundary between what is known and what is not. The Bunyip is, in essence, an early warning system. The same could be said of Slenderman, that faceless spectre of the digital age. A bogeyman born not in the depths of ancient culture but in the jungles of an internet forum. His long, stretched limbs and empty face are something more insidious: the fear of surveillance, the fear of the unseen, the fear of being watched and taken. If the Bunyip was a lesson in staying close to home, Slenderman is the whisper in our ear that nowhere is safe anymore—not even in the screen. We created him, and then, chillingly, he began to take shape in reality. Two girls in Wisconsin, convinced of his existence, stabbed their friend to prove their allegiance. This is the power of modern myth. The monsters we make do not always stay in the realm of the imagined.

But monsters are not always terrifying. Some, we find, are seductively dangerous. Dracula, that eternal aristocrat of the night, is frightening, yes, but he is also alluring. The vampire myth is one of our most enduring because it sits at the perfect intersection of fear and desire. The vampire is the stranger who could consume you, yes, but also the one who could liberate you from your mundane existence. It is no accident that so many of our most famous vampire stories play with the language of eroticism, of submission, of intimacy, of surrender. The vampire asks a question buried deep in our anxieties: what would it mean to give in? More insidious, however, is the emotional vampire, the one who drains not blood but spirit. This is the monster we struggle to recognise because it does not come with fangs or capes but with false warmth, with manipulation disguised as affection. If we created Dracula to embody the fear of seduction, then the emotional vampire is the fear of being slowly, incrementally depleted by those we trust. The term has become part of the cultural lexicon because we have all encountered them: the friend who only calls when they need something, the co-worker who is grinding your gears, the family members actively working and plotting against you, and causing discord. These creatures of myth have names, but they also have faces. Often, they are people we know.

The Greeks also knew something about monsters. From the labyrinthine corridors of the Minotaur’s prison to Medusa’s stone-cast victims, the monsters we conjure serve not only as symbols of terror but as projections of our worries, externalisation of that which we refuse to confront within ourselves. The Minotaur, that strange fusion of man and beast, condemned to wander an impossible maze, was not born a villain but was made one. A victim of divine cruelty, his mother, Pasiphae ensnared by Poseidon’s curse, was cast into the dark, a monster fashioned by decree rather than disposition. What terrified the Athenians was not simply the Minotaur’s brute strength or his consumption of human flesh, but the existential crisis he posed: a being neither fully man nor fully beast, existing at the liminal space of identity. The fear of the Minotaur was the fear of the other, of hybridity, of the inability to categorise and contain. Medusa, too, was a woman before she was a monster. Once a mortal of great beauty, she was punished by Athena, who turned her hair into serpents and her gaze transformed into an instrument of death. Yet her curse became her only means of survival, her weapon against the world that rejected her. The horror she inspired was not merely one of physical repulsion but of power, an unsettling assertion that a woman, scorned and forsaken, could wield such deadly autonomy. To look upon Medusa was to be forced into recognition, to see not only her but the truth she embodied. And so she became a warning, a creature to be slain, not because she was evil but because her continued existence disrupted the order of things. What do our monsters say about us? What do they reveal about the hidden fears in the fabric of our culture? The beasts of antiquity were often misfits, casualties of divine or social injustice, punished for circumstances beyond their control. They were locked away, hunted, vilified, but their stories endured precisely because they spoke to something beyond the horror they were meant to invoke. They told of exile, suffering, injustice, isolation, of what happens to those who do not fit within prescribed boundaries.

And so, we must ask, what forms will our future monsters take?

In an era where technology erodes the barriers between humans and machines, the next Minotaur may not lurk in physical labyrinths but in digital ones. We fear the hybrid once again, not the melding of man and beast, but of man and algorithm, the dissolution of individual identity in the face of an intelligence that is neither human nor fully alien. If history tells us anything, it is that monstrosity evolves with our anxieties. The next great bogeyman will not live in the forest or the deep; it will not need to. Our fears have turned inward, toward the erosion of privacy, toward technology. Perhaps the next great monster is the algorithm, the thing that knows us better than we know ourselves, feeds on our preferences, predicts our desires before we even have them. Perhaps the next great monster is not a singular entity but an omnipresent force. This unblinking eye watches, learns, mimics, and completely shapes the very nature of reality itself. Perhaps it will be remnants of our world, the ghostly sounds of a climate altered beyond recognition, a planet that has turned against us as surely as we have turned against it. Horror will no longer be the supernatural and beyond; it will be the consequences of what we deem natural. The monsters will not be mythic beings hiding in caves but the earth itself shifting.

Joan Didion once said, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Perhaps more accurately, we tell ourselves stories to name the things that scare us. Yet, the monsters we make are often misunderstood. We invent them as omens, warnings, and shapes to give our fear, but in doing so, we misread them. They are not threats; mirrors of what we refuse to face directly. To name a monster is not just to define what we fear but to reveal what we fail to understand. We have always needed monsters. They tell us what we fear but also what we value. They tell us where the boundaries are: between self and other, between safe and wild, between real and imagined. They are our mirrors, our warnings, our storytellers. And they are never quite as far away as we think.

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“We create monsters and then we can’t control them.” — Joel Coen