Monsters
On the borderland between superstition, occultism, and science are the many monsters, human or animal, reported from many parts of the world throughout human history. The word "monster," from the Latin monstrum, implies a warning or portent. The term is used derogatorily in reference to malformed or misshapen animals and humans, as well as creatures of great size. Because of the awe and horror excited by monstrous births, they were traditionally regarded as an omen or a sign of God's wrath with a wicked world. Many street ballads of the sixteenth century moralized about monstrous animals or malformed human beings. Today, persons born with bodies outside the social norms—giants, dwarfs, and Siamese twins—are studied under the scientific label of "teratology." Deformed and limbless children are now known to be caused by rare genetic factors or by the use of such drugs as thalidomide in pregnancy.
In modern times, much of the superstitious awe surrounding legendary monsters has passed into the world of fiction, and talented novelists have created images of scientific or technological doom like Godzilla and Frankenstein, the evil from the subconscious like the vampire Dracula, or the product of unrestrained animal-like urges, Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde. Such literary monsters have been powerfully represented in horror movies, which have presented increasingly terrifying creatures from the edge of civilization and human experience—swamps, ocean depths, and outer space. Such fictional monsters undoubtedly owe their power to the eternal fascination of the clash between good and evil in human affairs and the old theological themes of judgment and damnation.
Few stories achieved this metaphysical terror so powerfully as Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the possibilities of evil inherent in all human beings are released from the kindly Dr. Jekyll in the shape of the demonic Mr. Hyde. Stevenson also varied this theme in his short story Markheim, where a debauched murderer is confronted by an angelic alter ego.
Mysterious creatures reported from isolated places, having an existence somewhere between myth and natural history, continue to fascinate and attract while playing on subconscious anxieties. The discovery by Western scientists of the gorilla and the colocynth have given substantive hope to the idea that some of the legends of monsters may refer to actual survivors of ancient species. This has generated a new field of research, cryptozoology.