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3 days ago
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Something’s going on with our monsters. They used to feast on humans with abandon, burn our villages, prowl the margins of the map; now they’re seeking therapy. The fangs are still there, but they’re clenched in pain. Killing sprees have become cries for help; horns and scales are mere markers of identity. These creatures aren’t out to destroy the world; they’re just trying to find their place in it.
Consider sea monsters, perhaps the oldest terrors in world literature. Tiamat, the Babylonian chaos goddess, embodied the primordial ocean. She spawned a brood of abominations—snakes, beasts, scorpion-men—before the divine champion Marduk smashed her skull and made the world from her dismembered body. Leviathan, of the Hebrew Bible, spat fire and churned the sea like boiling soup in a cauldron. Even into the twentieth century, the ocean coughed up colossi, none more famous than the king of monsters himself, Godzilla. Yet in the past decade sea demons have gone from menaces to misfits. In Pixar’s “Luca,” they’re cute kids yearning for sunlight. DreamWorks’ Ruby Gillman is a teen-age kraken who just wants to survive high school. The amphibian man of Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is a gentle romantic.
The same domestication has crept ashore. The misunderstood monster, once an occasional changeup, is now the default. Werewolves are heartthrobs (“Teen Wolf,” “Twilight”). Evil witches have tragic backstories (“Wicked,” “Maleficent”). Alien parasites (“Venom,” “Alien: Earth”) and notorious villains (“Cruella,” “Joker”) have their redeeming qualities. Ayana Gray’s new novel, “I, Medusa,” reimagines one of Greek mythology’s most hideous fiends as a victim of bigotry and sexual trauma. Even Frankenstein’s creature—most recently reanimated in del Toro’s “Frankenstein”—has never been so soulful, so desperate to be understood.
Our appetite for relatable monsters—call it the sympathetic turn—is a profound reorientation, if you take the long view. For most of human history, monsters have been embodiments of aberration, breaches in the boundary between the human and everything else. The historian Surekha Davies, in “Humans: A Monstrous History” (California), sees them as falling “across or outside the categories of ‘normal’ people or beings in the world.” The Biblical scholar Esther J. Hamori, in “God’s Monsters” (Broadleaf), locates monstrosity in “juicy category violations”: ooze, grotesquerie, shape-shifting, supernatural strength, reanimation.
Humans tend to see something potently unsettling in such boundary-crossing. The word “monster” comes from the Latin monstrum, meaning “omen.” To the ancients, these beings could be warnings: disruptions of the natural order that foretold disaster or divine wrath. With the rise of monotheism, their existence had to be brought under the power and perfection of a single god. Leviathan, in the Book of Job, is presented as evidence of God’s might: “No one is fierce enough to rouse it. Who then is able to stand against me?” Elsewhere in the Bible, as in Daniel and Revelation, beasts appear as apocalyptic terrors poised to ravage the earth.
In medieval and early modern Europe, demons, werewolves, and more prowled the margins of Christendom, often embodying sin and rebellion. Between 1400 and 1775, an estimated fifty thousand people—four-fifths of them women—were executed for witchcraft in Europe. The charges weren’t limited to spell-casting: they included flying, conspiring with the Devil, even cannibalism. To be monstrous was to offend against both God and nature.
With the Enlightenment, monsters were brought under the lamp of reason. The Hydra, the unicorn, mermaids—careful observers exposed them as hoaxes or misidentified species. The French anatomist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire analyzed certain apparent monstrosities, such as cyclopic and acephalic fetuses, not as moral warnings but as developmental mishaps.
Yet, as Goya warned in 1799, “the sleep of reason produces monsters,” and Enlightenment vigilance regularly lapsed. In the stories we told then, the beasts still attacked, infected, and rampaged until they were vanquished by heroes. The current sympathetic turn unsettles that archetypal pattern. The talons and fangs have been filed down, the hunger for flesh recast as a troublesome compulsion to be managed through self-control. Audiences love these rehabilitations. But can we really do without the monstrous—or are we merely relocating it to places, and people, closer to home?
Even in an age of microscopes and anatomical theatres, horrors seeped in from the edges of empire, where the dead were said to rise and feed. Around 1726, in the Serbian village of Medveđa, a man named Arnaut Pavle fell from a hay wagon and broke his neck. Soon after his burial, the village was gripped by fear. Four people died; others swore that Pavle harassed them in the night. Forty days later, the villagers exhumed his body. Their observations, recorded by the Austrian surgeon Johann Flückinger, helped give rise to one of modern culture’s most enduring monsters.
“They found that he was quite complete and undecayed, and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears,” Flückinger wrote. Blood covered Pavle’s shirt; his nails had peeled off, and new ones had grown in their place. Everything suggested that he was a vampir—the local word for such demons. People recalled that Pavle had once complained of being tormented by a vampir, and, to protect himself, had smeared his body with its blood and eaten earth from its grave—foolproof ways to become bloodthirsty himself.
The villagers drove a stake through Pavle’s heart. The corpse groaned and bled. They burned his body and threw the ashes back into the grave, then disinterred his supposed victims, who, by lore, must have become vampiri themselves. Flückinger, a regimental surgeon in the Habsburg army, led the inquiry. His report, dated January 7, 1732, marked the vampire’s first major appearance in Enlightenment Europe. Soon after, a letter from another physician, Johann Friedrich Glaser, appeared in a Nuremberg journal, recounting the outbreak in greater detail. Translations and commentaries spread across northern and western Europe, provoking both panic and debate. In March, the London Journal published an account of “dead Bodies sucking, as it were, the Blood of the Living; for the latter visibly dry up, while the former are fill’d with Blood.” By the end of 1733, at least a dozen books and several dissertations had been published on vampires.
The vampire evolved quickly once it entered the bloodstream of European culture. Voltaire made it a metaphor for greed and parasitism, the perfect emblem of hypocritical excess. John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) gave the creature aristocratic poise and predatory charm. Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897) completed the metamorphosis, fusing the Serbian corpse-demon with gothic eroticism (fangs, neck-biting), Romanian superstition (garlic), and late-Victorian dread—of contagion, of female sexuality, of imperial contamination.
Stoker’s count was as courtly as he was corrupt. He fed on the living, defiled women, spread disease, and inverted sacred symbols. He offered no tragic backstory, no flicker of remorse, nothing to complicate his evil. He was, in Professor Van Helsing’s words, “devil in callous, and the heart of him is not.”
For decades, his screen descendants stayed true to type. The title characters of F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” (1922) and Tod Browning’s “Dracula” (1931), the villains of “The Return of the Vampire” (1943) and “Horror of Dracula” (1958): all were creatures of pure appetite, pure evil. But by the nineteen-seventies the infection had mutated. A more introspective breed of bloodsucker appeared: the world-weary sensualist of Anne Rice’s novel “Interview with the Vampire” (1976), the mournful aristocrat of Werner Herzog’s film “Nosferatu the Vampyre” (1979). Today, the rehabilitation is complete. The undead are brooding and sensual, the perfect boyfriend material of “Twilight,” “True Blood,” and new-wave romantasy—creatures that would be unrecognizable to the Balkan villagers who first staked Arnaut Pavle in terror.
In a 2013 essay in Gothic Studies, the scholars Angela Tenga and Elizabeth Zimmerman observed that the “reformed vampire needs a counterpart who will look and feed like a monster,” a figure that can “bear the burden of true monstrosity.” They concluded that “the zombie meets this need, voicing anxieties that many contemporary vampire narratives silence.”
It was a plausible diagnosis for its moment. In the late two-thousands and early twenty-tens, the culture was overrun by the undead: “World War Z,” “The Last of Us,” “The Walking Dead,” “Left 4 Dead.” Survivalism was the reigning mood, and the zombie—blank, voracious, beyond reason—seemed to be the last monster standing. But the sympathetic turn has claimed it, too. When “Warm Bodies,” a human-zombie romance, reached theatres, in 2013, the critic Richard Roeper praised it for giving the undead heart and interiority. Since then, the infection has spread. Films like “The Girl with All the Gifts” and series such as “iZombie,” “My Dead Ex,” and “Santa Clarita Diet” have rendered the lurching corpse soulful, even adorable. The zombie-with-feelings trope is already starting to rot.
What of Frankenstein’s monster? When Mary Shelley introduced him, in 1818, she was reimagining monstrosity. The creature was no longer a visitation from the gods or a sport of nature but a human artifact—stitched together from our own parts, endowed with our reason, and condemned to bear the moral weight of our actions. In making the monster a creation rather than an accident, Shelley turned him into a mirror. He learned language, read “Paradise Lost,” and pleaded for compassion. “Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded,” he tells his maker. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
The version most of us picture, though—the one sold as latex masks every October—owes little to Shelley. It descends from James Whale’s 1931 film, itself adapted from Peggy Webling’s stage play. Whale gave the creature the neck bolts, the square head, the dragging gait. He also gave him his creator’s name, sealing the confusion. Mute and lumbering, stripped of intelligence and anguish, he became an icon of horror, cut off from his human source.
As with vampires and zombies, the trajectory of Frankenstein’s monster over the past century runs from terror to pathos. Whale’s sequel, “Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), began the softening: the monster acquired halting speech, longed for a mate, and wept when she recoiled. Robert De Niro’s turn in “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (1994) restored much of the creature’s eloquence and pain, though he remained more brute than philosopher.
“I have a safe room in case I find myself in a French restaurant.” Cartoon by Sam Gross
Del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” out soon on Netflix, carries the sympathetic turn to its logical conclusion. His monster (played by Jacob Elordi) enters with a guttural roar that rips across the Arctic, but in the course of the film a portrait emerges of a creature whose humanity matches, even exceeds, Shelley’s original. Like her creation, this one learns to speak and read, and secretly aids an impoverished family until they drive him away. Del Toro adds what Shelley omitted: the newborn stage, when the monster is gentle and bewildered, desperate for touch. His Dr. Frankenstein, by contrast, is a tyrant—impatient, abusive, demanding more than his creation is ready to provide.
Although del Toro’s monster has violent outbursts, they feel more justified, more defensive, than the unprovoked aggression that drove Shelley’s creature to kill Dr. Frankenstein’s brother, William. And then there’s his appearance. “I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!” says Dr. Frankenstein in the novel—yet it’s the only time he is so described. Thereafter, the creature, with his yellow skin and black lips, is “filthy,” “horrid,” and, Shelley’s favorite adjective, “wretched,” terms that shaped later depictions. Del Toro’s being—lithe, slate-colored, his scars tracing the lines of his musculature—recovers the grace Dr. Frankenstein originally intended.
Shelley’s book presaged the modern humanization of monstrosity. By making the creature a human invention, she advanced a critique of scientific hubris and mechanistic thinking. But her sympathy is not ours. Shelley’s monster is tragic: his eloquence condemns humanity rather than reassuring it. Today’s sympathetic turn completes her project only by altering its meaning. Del Toro’s creature no longer accuses; he invites understanding. He has ascended from Shelley’s indictment of Enlightenment reason to become a fully dignified being, barely distinguishable from those who fear him.
While I was working on this essay, my wife and I spent an evening out with some family friends. As the adults talked, our friends’ ten-year-old daughter, Zara, sat reading a fantasy novel. She’s well-versed in the genre—I rarely see her without a book on dragons or imaginary quests—so I asked what she thought about monsters. What makes a bad one?
She rejected the premise. “I don’t think anyone does bad things and is a bad person for no reason at all. They have to have a reason.”
I asked her to elaborate. Sure, humans have reasons. But monsters—deformed, hideous, wretched?
“If you look up ‘monster’ in a dictionary, it’ll say, like, a creature that is bad,” she said. “But that’s just how we use the word.” Then she asked me to imagine that she “turned into a huge, drooling, purple, polka-dotted tiger. . . . It looks dangerous. It might look at you and be, like, snarling. Our instincts tell us, Be scared of this. This might hurt us. But that doesn’t mean it actually will.”
Zara’s answer is revealing. It captures the intuition that the sympathetic turn has now made second nature: appearance isn’t character. You can limp and groan, or be huge and drooling, and still mean no harm. In her world, there are no monsters, only creatures we haven’t taken the time to understand.
Historically and cross-culturally, this is an astonishing idea. A 2001 comparative study of semi-human monsters from twenty traditions—from the Apache to the ancient Greeks—found remarkable consistency among them. The creatures were always outsiders, and many were cannibals. All bore some visible deviation: one from northwestern South America had eyes on his knees; the Apache ogre was encumbered by testicles so massive he could hardly walk. In every culture, the monsters were defeated, usually slain, by heroes whose courage reaffirmed the moral order. The creatures’ wickedness didn’t arise from trauma or poor life choices. Otherness alone was enough.
For millennia, that reflex—equating difference with danger—defined the moral imagination. The sympathy that Zara takes for granted would once have been unthinkable. It took a slow revolution in how we conceive of the monstrous to make it possible. Romanticism planted the seed, turning wickedness from an external contagion into an inward condition. Freud’s account of the Unheimlich made monstrosity inward in another sense: what terrifies us is not radical otherness but the sudden recognition of what is most our own—the return of the repressed. In his hands, the monster ceased to be a visitation from outside and became the uncanny face of the self.
But empathy hardened into a creed only after the twentieth century’s convulsions. Fascism and racial mythologies of a master race had shown what followed from deciding who was fully human and who was not. In the moral aftershocks of genocide, the very idea of monstrosity started to grow suspect. To demonize, stigmatize, dehumanize—words that once had a theological valence—became secular sins. As nations recoiled from Nazi dogma and colonial hierarchies, ideologies of universal dignity took hold. Civil rights, second-wave feminism, and gay liberation were followed by disability activism and multiculturalism. In the Pixar era, empathy became the hegemonic moral sentiment of liberal modernity—and monstrosity the ultimate test case for inclusion.
Consider two movies from the past year: Isaiah Saxon’s “The Legend of Ochi” and Dean DeBlois’s live-action “How to Train Your Dragon.” Both follow the same moral geometry: villagers hate monsters; a father, who has lost his wife to the creatures, leads a hunt; his child sees the creatures’ humanity; the father resists until the child reveals their goodness. In each case, the villain is not the beast but the bigot—the man who insists on annihilating monsters when he could have chosen understanding instead.
The moral imagination has moved from essence to choice—from evil as something one is to evil as something one does. That reorientation has powered the sympathetic turn. But it has also brought a darker consequence: as monsters grow more human, humans look more monstrous.
There’s good data on this from Lilliana Mason, a political psychologist at Johns Hopkins, and Nathan Kalmoe, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Beginning in 2017, they administered surveys to measure how people perceived members of the opposing political party. The surveys probed whether respondents viewed their political opponents as “a serious threat to the United States and its people,” considered them “downright evil,” or believed they “lack the traits to be considered fully human—they behave like animals.”
I asked Mason what she had expected to find with that last question—how many Americans did she think would literally dehumanize the other side? “Maybe five to ten per cent,” she said. “Because you can get five to ten per cent of people willing to say virtually anything in online surveys.” It turned out to be roughly twenty per cent. “I was surprised by that number,” she said. “I was worried by that number. But that was the lowest it ever was.” By November, 2022, more than thirty per cent of American respondents said that their political opponents were not fully human. In a survey conducted just after the 2024 Presidential election, the figure had climbed to nearly fifty per cent—with almost no difference between the parties.
These findings echo a broader pattern political scientists call affective polarization: the replacement of disagreement with abhorrence. In a 2024 study, when asked what proportion of partisans on the opposing side would condone political violence, both Democrats and Republicans guessed nearly half. (The real numbers, on both sides, were closer to four per cent.) Each camp, in other words, sees the other as monstrously bloodthirsty.
What begins as vigilance curdles into caricature. Another study published last year found that each side wildly overestimates its opponents’ approval of all sorts of moral wrongs. Democrats imagine that nearly thirty per cent of Republicans consider wrongful imprisonment to be acceptable; Republicans believe that fifteen per cent of Democrats approve of child pornography. In both cases, the actual percentage is close to zero. Political opponents become monsterized—transmuted into villains beyond redemption. In teaching us to empathize with the feared and the misunderstood, liberal modernity, in particular, may have merely shifted the coördinates of monstrosity. It teaches us to see the humanity in the monstrous—and to see as monstrous those we think fail to do the same.
Del Toro’s creature may be the gentlest of any “Frankenstein,” gentler even than Mary Shelley’s, but his maker is also the cruellest of Frankensteins, the most recognizably monstrous. Perhaps the next evolution isn’t toward still cuddlier monsters but—as hard as it is to imagine just now—toward a moral universe less eager to see monsters in our opponents. As the creature in del Toro’s film says to his creator, “We can both be human now.” ♦
