Love Letter to Monster Movies

Image Credit: Yohan LIBOT.

For as long as I’ve loved movies, I’ve loved monster movies. As a kid, I had a recurring nightmare that I was being chased by a T-Rex; but it didn’t keep me from regularly watching what was then my favorite installment of the Jurassic Park franchise: The Lost World: Jurassic Park. At my thirteenth birthday party, the thing I wanted most was to watch Jaws for the first time — and I did. So far, the highlight of my summer 2025 has been watching 28 Years Later and Jurassic World: Rebirth in theaters. When Primitive War hits theaters this August, you can bet your ass I’ll be buying a ticket.

Research suggests a plethora of psychological reasons why some people are compelled to consume horror. Watching horror movies may help some anxious people develop the ability to better cope with stressful, anxiety-inducing situations. Horror films can be a relatively healthy channel for exploring the evil in other humans as well as the evil within ourselves. As books like It Came from The Closet and Men, Women, and Chainsaws demonstrate, horror, due to its tendency to subvert societal norms (think: final girls), is also uniquely capable of validating and inspiring those who live on the margins of society.

Watching horror movies for any of these reasons — or all of them — makes sense to me; but when it comes to monster movies in particular, the reason for watching that resonates most with me is one theorized by Mathias Clasen.

In the introduction of Clasen’s book — Why Horror Seduces — Clasen seems to suggest that horror appeals to humans because it dials into the hyper-vigilance experienced by our ancient human ancestors, but within a safe, make-believe context. Clasen writes: “ … the well-told horror tale, in whatever medium, can evoke very real and very strong emotional and physiological reactions in us, essentially sending us on a backwards evolutionary roller coaster ride, straight back to our deep history as hunted prey. And we love it.”

In the article, “Why Do We Enjoy Horror Movies?” VeryWell Mind frames Clasen’s thoughts on why horror indeed seduces as: “vicarious experiences and threat mastery.”

By engaging our most primal fear — the fear of becoming the prey of a more powerful animal — I believe that monster flicks connect us with our ancestral humanity in a way that no other horror subgenre can. While we may not be under the constant threat of becoming a leopard’s next meal like our bygone relatives were, evolution has left us with a finely tuned threat detection system that — whether we’re aware of it or not — is perpetually on the lookout for predators. Watching monster movies gives this system of ours a chance to stretch its legs without running any real risk to our safety.

Perhaps equally important, in a modern world full of existential threats that early humans likely couldn’t have fathomed, threats that feel insurmountable to the average human of today — climate change, fascism, failing economies — monster movies allow our persistent threat detector to work as it evolved to: they give us a chance to narrow our focus of fear and anxiety to a single, survivable thing. For me, that’s oddly comforting.

The popularity of monster movies — and my personal love for them — undoubtedly also stems from the ancient human tradition of telling terrifying stories about terrifying creatures. For as long as humans have been creating societies, we’ve also been creating monstrous tales to tell each other — whether as entertaining distractions, conceivable explanations for why bad things happen, or warnings that, when heeded, might prevent real harm.

The zombie myth, for example, originated in Haiti, where it was created by enslaved West Africans as an allegory for the horrors of oppression, colonialism, and imperialism — horrors that birthed and nurtured the transatlantic slave trade.

In Scottish folklore, the nuckalevee — a fleshy, grotesque sea monster with the torso of a man and the body of a horse — was blamed for all manner of crop loss and disease. The malignant water horse wasn’t only used to explain misfortune, however; the nuckalevee also acted as a warning against the very real dangers of the sea, from which the Scottish people had witnessed violent storms and even more violent invaders.

One could argue that the movie M3gan — a cautionary tale of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence — is a modern, albeit campy, iteration of the human need to warn through story as well.

E.O. Wilson reportedly said: “We are not afraid of predators, we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters...”

I agree wholeheartedly with Wilson, but I think another, simpler way of saying what he said might be: we love our monsters in order to love ourselves.