Given the holiday, I've been mulling over the idea of fear. After all, things that go bump in the dark are the subject of our childhood nightmares, and the cultural landscape in the world of monsters is pretty fascinating, in that almost all of them have to deal more with a body that doesn't look like our own. Society's fascination with weight didn't just start the moment Coco Chanel made the boy shape famous in the 1920's, it was just lurking beneath the bed.

For instance, Frankenstein? Okay, so he's had some limb transplants, but really, how many of us run in terror when we hear a coworker or friend talk about being technically dead on the operating table and then revived through modern science. No, Frankie is terrifying because he's large, has a touch of arthritis, and maybe a tinge of green. I am pretty sure that the green thing is a Hollywood addition, though. Boyfriend is just pissed off because everyone's giving him so much shit for being different. We always portray witches as being green, because otherwise we can't distance ourselves from them visually.

And his best friend, the Count? Dude has a major eating disorder. He craves blood, which is, you know, very ishy, but if you think about it, sushi is disgusting too, and yet I roll my eyes and grunt with pleasure when I have a spectacularly tasty Maki in my mouth. And we feel bad when people get pica and want to eat dirt, yet it's not disgusting (for some people) to eat steak tartare. Zombies have eating disorders too, but they're just not savvy enough to post about it on their MySpace pages.

So many monsters are only scary because they are bigger than they should be. King Kong was an ape, which is scary in its own right, but he's ginormous, so grab your children and run. I don't know what Godzilla would have been if he hadn't been crushing Japanese buildings between his toes, but also another enormo-body. The Invisible Man is pretty normal, other than the fact that you can't see his body. Ghosts don't have bodies, and skeletons are always dodging rumors of anorexia. The Blob undoubtedly has an overeating obsession and also, how can he work off the calories when he can't lift weights? They slip through his, er, not fingers, well, his blobules. The Phantom of the Opera is pissed off about his complexion, and the Wolfman has a little issue with his hirsuteness. 

So does it seem odd that we're freaked out by difference from the societal norm? We're brought up on this shit. It really wasn't until the Hitchcock classic Psycho that our fear started taking the shape of that which looks normal by daylight. In fact, Jason, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface and Michael Meyers all started out looking very normal, but it's really their homicidal insanity that drove their scary nature (although, with Freddy, third degree burns helped a little).

You can learn a lot about a society from their fears, and in the recent movie Slither, impregnation by the alien squid monster thing meant that you ate and ate and ate until you were as big as a house and still wanted to eat anything you could, until you actually explode from the baby squid-slugs inside of your body. Terrifying stuff, but wow, also very telling. Guess who survived the Squid attack? Nathan Fillion and two very beautiful girls.

No wonder we freak out. If you're not drop dead gorgeous, not only will your character die in a horror movie, but you're probably representing the concept of Otherness that bred that initial fear in the first place. And that, my friends, is seriously fucked up, right there. —Weetabix