Popular Monsters: Human anxieties and the figure of the monster in literary, cinematic, and comic contexts

Abstract

Protean and shapeshifting, monsters have always been fascinating, albeit difficult to pin down. In my study of monsters, I argue that beyond its appearance and psychology, a monster is defined by its ability to provoke anxiety in the reader. My study looks at three texts, Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, the Alien films – namely Alien (dir. Ridley Scott), Aliens (dir. James Cameron), and Alien3 (dir. David Fincher) – and Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s serialised comic, Monstress, and focuses on the central monster in these texts: Frankenstein’s Creature (Frankenstein), the Alien (the Alien film series), and the Monstrum in Maika (Monstress). In my analysis of each text, I outline features of the monster’s representation, or how appearance and psychology are constructed as monstrous. I then discuss how those characterisations reflect contemporary anxieties of the time by tracing through the monster’s (re)production: where it originates from, how it reproduces, and how it is destroyed. Beginning with Frankenstein, the prototypical monster of the modern age, I then move on to the Alien films, where the monster is expressed in a cinematic context, and lastly, I end with Monstress, where the monster is represented in comics.