The monsters in fiction
The scary parts of our fiction are diverse because of how many ways we interact with the world. If we were another species, we would have different monsters. Orcas probably wouldn't have any monsters in their stories because there’s nothing that kills orcas whereas whitetail deer or squirrels are afraid of everything so their fiction would have a deep menagerie of monsters to be afraid of.
The way we’ve interacted with the world has changed over time and what we find scary as a species has changed too. Our stories used to focus on the big bad wolf, bridge trolls, or beasts and dragons in the dark forests and caves. Basically, we were afraid of the dark and we were afraid of being eaten by the things in the dark. This seems perfectly on-brand for someone living at a time when civilization had just barely carved a place for itself distinct from nature.
Reflecting on the ‘monsters’ in our current fiction, the things we find frightening, can be a way to look at how we’re interacting with the world now. The number of zombie movies and stories that take place after an apocalyptic fall of civilization show us that a shared fear of ours is that our civilized world may be on shaky ground. A viral outbreak movie, or a novel about what happens to the world after atomic bombs are dropped resonate with a modern audience but would be foreign to a medieval one.
There will always be a place in fiction for actual monsters, but I get the sense that our societal fear of demonic possession, witchcraft, evil spirits, werewolves, hauntings and vampires is ebbing. The ‘big bad wolf’ archetype is now a parable character for children, no longer taken serious by adults as something to fear for real. Even much more recent boogey men have faded from serious concern to half-joking status such as flying saucer abductions and alien invasions from mars. Orson Welles was able to scare the nation with a fictitious invasion from Mars, but I think our society today is more credulous of that specific threat.
Some of the monsters and boogey men that are in our current fiction take the shape of desert landscapes, ravaged by climate change and incapable of supporting life on Earth. Our heroes may gallantly try to vanquish these foes by flying off through interstellar space, jump starting the core of the Earth, or saving the planet from superstorms that freeze whole continents. The Earth itself failing is a modern boogeyman in fiction, it wouldn’t have made any sense to Shakespeare or Virgil or Homer to write about that.
Even when the same fear exists, we may face it in different ways than we have in the past, which creates new and interesting boogeymen. What happens after death has been terrifying people for countless millennia. Odysseus and Dante travel to their respective representations of the afterlife, but modern incarnations of the afterlife in fiction might look like uploading our consciousness to a computer, modifying our aging bodies, or even replacing our bodies all together. The question of what happens after we die is still a scary one, but the boogeyman that we use to symbolize that fear in our fiction looks very different than it has in the past.