Fears and Monsters in Media

 Fears & Monsters

Fears

Psychologist Glen D Walters believes that in order for a film to be scary it must have the following elements:

1) Tension and suspense must be created through the manipulation of film language.

2) The fear must be unreal - the audience must able to enjoy it without fearing for their safety.

3) The fears must relevant and so be based on existing societal and personal fears.

People are scared of a lot of things and most of the scary things are very different. People might be scared of certain things because of past experiences or trauma, and people might be scared of things respective to their age. So its important to know what is scary and how it can be effective at frightening our audience within film and media. And so I thought about what scared me the most, as well as the people around me such as my parents and the majority of society around me. 

Things that scare individual people:

- Animals

- The 'Unknown' 

- Small & Restricted Spaces

- Death

Things that may scare society:

- Terrorism 

- Crime

- War

- Apocalypse

- Death

Monsters

Scary things and people's fears can be translated through monsters within film, representing different aspects and types of fear for a film-maker to scare the audience with, and to leave a more lasting impression on viewers. Many monsters have made a name for themselves, all thanks to the fears that they represent...

Godzilla

Godzilla is the pinnacle of the giant-monster category within film and media, with many different adaptions, he has been making his name present since his debut in 1954's Godzilla which sparked a new style of monsters in movies.

(Godzilla: King Of The Monsters, 2019)

(Godzilla, 1954)

(Tomoyuki Tanaka)

Godzilla is great at creating fear because he is something that challenges human instinct, a monster such as Godzilla would simply knock us down from the top of the food chain, which reflects our fear of anything bigger and greater than us. However, Godzilla represents fear on a much wider and realistic scale, but in order to fully understand we have to go back to Godzilla's origin. He is a Japanese monster created by Tomoyuki Tanaka, and he is a reflection on the atomic bombs dropped of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II. This is implied as Godzilla's key features consist of being an awakened creature empowered by nuclear radiation, proving that he is a metaphor for Nuclear weapons. Therefore, Godzilla's representation of fear is in fact a representation on war, which in itself is related to the fear of death. 

   Count Dracula

Count Dracula is the most well-known vampire, and vampires are some of the most well-known monsters, making the Count the king of monsters. Unlike more modern monsters, Count Dracula made his cinematic debut in the 1931 film, Dracula. However, the character was originally introduced in the 1897 novel Dracula, written by Bram Stoker.

(Dracula, 1931)

(Bram Stoker's Dracula, 1992)

Dracula is a great source of emitting fear as he is a more realistic take on a monster. In some ways, Count Dracula is a very human monster in the sense that he fits within a troupe of male representation as he is a wealthy white male who specifically victimizes poor virgin peasant girls. This archetype that he fits within can be used to create a very patriarchal character which is presented as he uses his power to corrupt and exploit the poor. Whilst the realism to his character certainly poses as an instrument of fear, his terrifying nature comes from his need to suck the blood of his victims. This main monster-like attribute is backed up with the scariness of his age, being hundreds of years old and living within a dark haunted estate. The fear that dwells within the audience comes from the realization that Count Dracula could easily kill as he pleased, relating his monster-ness to the fear of death. 

Zombies

Among monsters such as Vampires and Frankenstein, Zombies are undoubtedly the most infamous. With countless film and television franchises revolving around them, they are the scariest, most world-ending that exist. 

(White Zombie, 1932 - Trailer)

(Zombies from White Zombie, 1932)

(Zombies from The Walking Dead, 2010-2022)

Zombies make their first appearance in the film, White Zombie from 1932, now 90 years ago. The story follows a woman as she is transformed into a zombie by an evil voodoo master. Despite this film sounding funny and slightly ridiculous, it is what drove the zombie-monsters into the main stream line of cinema. However, for the sake of a more accurate response I will only discuss monsters from cinema within the last 20 years. Zombies are a strong way to implement fear into an audience as they are a pure representation of death symbolizing the end of the world. By being virus contaminated humans, they are bordering onto a real world fear, especially within the past few years, adding an additional sense of fear to them. As Zombies travel in slow moving hoards that always manage to catch up, they outnumber their victims, driving them into corners, giving the audience a sense of being claustrophobic, yet another real world fear implemented into Zombies. I previously mentioned that Zombies are a representation of death, whilst this is true, the way that they display death is through the representation of smoking addicts and old age, which are both things that kill you more and more, making you slower and older, just like the Zombies. Therefore, because they are a play on humans, they become all the more terrifying as they have the single minded goal of killing, infecting and devouring live humans, and yet again, this relates these monsters to the fear of death.

The Alien (Xenomorph)

Aliens are notorious as they are the monsters of Sci-Fi, with a wide range of different creatures spanning multiple film franchises the Xenomorph's from The Alien franchise is the most distinguishable. 

(Xenomorph from Alien, 1979)

(Alien, 1979)

The Xenomorph debut's in the classic Sci-Fi horror film, Alien (1979), and displays itself as the opposing force to Ripley and the rest of her crew. The Xenomorph is spectacularly terrifying for all audience's as they are from outer space, the vast and infinite unknowns to humankind. Similarly to Godzilla, the Xenomorph is a superior being to humans, and therefore, it overpowers us and marks itself as the head of the food chain, creating the sense of fear that there could be greater beings in a place we know nothing about. However, I personally think that the frightening nature of the Xenomorph comes from the actual design of it, with an ugly skeleton-like body and an elongated head. The ugliness of it is unsettling and disturbing, but what takes the design further is the inclusion of the second mouth. Having it acts as a somewhat inner voice to show that the Xenomorph is no different to humans, it eats to survive and continue its race. Comparing monsters to humans and finding the similarities is what is truly frightening about them, what we share in common scares us in itself. For the Xenomorph, that similarity is the power to kill, relating monsters back to the fear of death. 

Titans

The hit show Attack on Titan (2013-2022), is what it is today because of the fear Titans instill within the audience whilst captivating them at the same time. They one of the most easily recognizable faces in media and pop-culture within the last ten years. 

(Attack on Titan, 2017)

(Attack on Titan live action, 2015)

(Attack on Titan, 2013)

Titans make their first appearance in the manga series Shingeki No Kyojin (2009-2021), and making a TV Anime debut in 2013, with several live-action films to follow just a few years later. Titans are terrifying because of so many things, their design, nature, mystery and the fact that they are mindless giants with the only goal of eating humans. Their design symbolizes humans, but on a far greater scale, with unsettling body shapes and movements, and because the design is so symbolic of humans, it is a metaphor for true human nature. They are completely unknown to the last surviving humans, nobody knows where they come from or what their goal is, which relates the titans with the fear of the unknown, which is also implemented into the world of Attack on Titan, as the world outside of the walls is a vast land of unknown. This also plays into the fear of apocalypse, as the world the survivors live in is filled with constant running and hiding, which also reflects the fear of restricted spaces as anywhere outside the walls are immediately dangerous. All of this associates the man-eating monsters with the fear of death, making them immediately frightening for audiences.