A Modern History of Monsters

Michael Egan

Somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, I remember César Aira writing that “monsters manage to escape from the net that brings humans to the surface.” It’s a compelling image, but I don’t think he’s right. I’m not so sure there is a clear distinction between humans and monsters—or that the net is so selective, or that monsters are particularly good at escaping the net’s clutches.

After years of teaching history, I can assert that monsters are good to think with. They are instantly recognizable and one of the great universals across time and place: because monsters are everywhere, their study invites comparative investigation of myth, stories, and beliefs all over the world. Monsters constitute a familiar entry point into tackling a broad array of social and cultural questions, because they hold up a mirror and reflect the fears and anxieties of a people as a means of warning. This prompted me to develop a course on the history of monsters at McMaster University in 2019; I have been teaching variations of that original course since. HIST 2GR3 (the course code may be some of my finest work…) meandered through foundational mythologies from every continent, the medieval and early modern worlds, before turning its attention to modern popular culture and the horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I never pretended toward any kind of comprehensive survey, but rather invited students to follow their own enthusiasm within (or beyond) the content I laid out. I subscribe to the notion that teaching and learning the tenets of historical methodologies is infinitely easier if students are already captivated by historical content that is meaningful to them. My presentation of the course had a clear narrative arc, but the real thrust of the course was around student discovery and helping them to navigate their own wonder and curiosity.

The Latin roots for monster—monstrum and monstrare—mean divine omen and to point out or show. These roots suggest that monsters have always been meant to show us something about the world. Contemporary scholarship takes that charge seriously, asking what lessons these creatures have to offer. Through these warnings, monsters and their stories foster conformity and discourage deviance. And they continue to possess considerable currency in the modern world. But history is full of human monsters too, and it is equally important to recognize the shared space between human and mythical monsters within a singular narrative.

PAZI SNAJPER: watch out: sniper. One of many such markings in Sarajevo. Photo credit: Paalso, July 1996

The tagline for my course was that every society gets the monsters it deserves. It’s a cute way of suggesting that monsters are a product of their time and place. It’s no accident that Bram Stoker’s Dracula captivated a late Victorian period worried about immigration and a loosening of sexual mores. It might be equally easy to recognize how and why Godzilla emerged from post-World War II nuclear fears in Japan. In a more contemporary world, zombies do a lot of heavy lifting. Not unlike Dracula, they offer another xenophobic image of barbarians at the gates, but they also speak to the mindlessness of capitalist labour and the fatuous, all-consuming twitterings of social media and entertainment echo chambers. Recent reports suggest that North Americans check their phone over 100 times a day, which maybe speaks to an undead-like erosion of presence, patience, and attention (but that’s another essay).

Of course, monsters and their place in human societies have changed over time.  In broad brushstrokes, the course identified distinct periods, and I split my survey of the history of monsters across three imperfect and overlapping chapters: 

The Monster as the Unknown. The earliest chapter leaned into monsters in a world shaped by magic, myth, mysticism, and the supernatural, where not everything can be explained and morality tales provide stark warnings about what’s “out there.” This is the bump in the night or the fear of the deep dark woods; those stories were designed to keep communities close to the hearth.

The Monster as Other. Somewhere between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment—I’m deliberately a little loose with my timeline: this is a slow and uneven transition—the bent toward explaining and justifying the cosmos was revolutionary in demystifying the world. The rationalization of the world provoked a doubling down on the othering of monsters from creatures that were unknown to known, demonized miscreants or, simply, non-conforming others. This demonization of difference took on unsavoury forms of racial ideologies and established “rational” racial and gendered hierarchies that continue to underpin contemporary thought.

The Monster as Self. We are all monsters. Alternatively, we are all legacies of the history that made us, and the history of the modern world is replete with catastrophe: war, genocide, violence, exploitation. On the one hand, this third chapter turns the exploration of monsters inward to strike at the imaginative fears that have always concocted and created monsters. On the other, it is a meditation on the “banality of evil.” This is a function of the unspoken, compassionless social complicity that ignores the suffering of others—a lack of imagination—but also the tendency towards conformity and unquestioning order. We are our own monsters, and that’s something with which the contemporary world ought to reckon.

Implying that we are products of the horrors that preceded us—and we are all monstrous—is a difficult (but important) pill to swallow. Where monsters in popular culture spark the imagination and invite some entertainment, play, and wonder, the alchemy of connecting these kinds of safe monsters to the real-world horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in this final chapter can be discombobulating. In the classroom, I found I needed to find a way to walk back some of the darker implications with which the course was wrapping up in order to help students make more thorough connections across the various themes we’d covered. The monster as self was unsettling, and I discovered that many students were depressed by the historical and psychological legacies that came with kinds of compassionless social complicity that recent history suggests might lie at the heart of the human condition.

I landed on a conclusion that submitted the imperative of loving monsters, or understanding them, which maybe amounts to the same kind of thing. This was less advocating forgiveness for past transgressions and more about appreciating, reveling in, difference. I quoted Anne Carson in Autobiography of Red quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “I will never know how you see red, and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.” The belief in an undivided being between us as first movement is, I have come to think, one of the central tenets of understanding the importance of radical dignity through the study of history and a critical step in making connection in an evermore disconnected world. Making space for the idea that we aren’t in constant confrontation with each other (and our perceived monsters)—and that we might insert ourselves into a more complex ecosystem—means that the idea of monsters does not disappear, but it loses its harsh oppositionality. It becomes an acceptance of otherness and an appreciation for variety through practicing a kind of kinetic energy that treats all living things with dignity.

That is how we might all accept our monsterhood and come to love our monsters. Yes, there are monsters; yes, we are all monsters in one way or another; yes, these are dark times. But the mission remains the same: there is hope for a better world and it begins with according love and dignity to ourselves and to each other. And the best way to do that is in cultivating the imagination so that it doesn’t fail us and we are better able to recognize our complicity in the suffering of others or our failure to embrace variety. It’s a punchy ending. It flirts with edginess. It makes a case for the importance of a liberal arts education. But it is also just another iteration of the imposition of conformity omnipresent in morality tales. It’s a jeremiad warning of darkness and danger but offering redemption in the final analysis.

Maybe there’s a little more to it than that. Histories of monstrosity challenge students to reflect on the power of stories and the limits of their empathy. Where every society gets the monsters it deserves, not all monsters deserve the societies that make them. And make no mistake: monsters are very frequently invented. Natalie Haynes’s novel, Stone Blind, reminds us that Medusa is unfairly portrayed as a monster; her story is far more complicated. She was a beautiful priestess to Athena until she was violated by Poseidon. Because Athena couldn’t punish Poseidon, she transformed Medusa into a monster capable of turning all those who looked upon her (men) to stone. Lost in this account, of course, is the reversal of the ubiquitous male gaze which, when turned back on men, petrifies them. In a similar vein, Maria Dahvana Headley has gone to some length in humanizing Grendel’s mother in her streetwise translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf as well as in her contemporary adaptation, The Mere Wife, a novel set in a post-Iraq, suburban United States. In both treatments—Haynes’s and Headley’s—the traditional concept of hero is due a reckoning. Perseus and Beowulf are one-dimensional creatures, intent on restoring a violent and patriarchal order. Both authors ask us (in much the same way that Mary Shelley did in Frankenstein): who is the real monster here? Compare, too, the Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest with the Caliban in Aimé Césaire’s anti-colonial adaptation, and maybe it’s possible to challenge preconceived notions about what, who, and why is a monster. There is a further lesson here: monsters make convenient scapegoats (and excuses) for human cruelty in the name of policing and performing a moral conformity.

But, and this is really what I wanted to say, there are monsters: real monsters so unfathomable that they cannot be reconciled with the hopeful ending advocating greater kindness and empathy. And they live among us, drawn up to the surface by the same net. A growing body of evidence suggests that during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, well-to-do bankers, lawyers, and doctors from Europe and North America (Canadians among them) engaged in weekend “sniper safaris.”^[i] Hunting and weapons enthusiasts paid exorbitant prices for the experience of shooting Sarajevans in the streets. From Trieste, these hunters were flown to Belgrade, where the Bosnian Serb militia provided them passage to and positioning in the 1984 Olympics concrete bobsled track on Mount Trebevi?. Emblem of the Winter Olympics turned fortified sniper’s nest gave rise to a new kind of “weekend warrior” driven by some pornographic Nietzscheian fantasy. What kind of monster is it that can travel into a distant war zone, pay for the privilege to hunt human game, and deny that it is looking at another self through the crosshairs of its rifle? In addition to travel and logistics, fees were assigned for targets. Elderly citizens were free. Children cost extra. Between 6 April 1992 and 29 February 1996, 11,541 Sarajevans were killed by shelling and sniper fire. More than 1,500 were children.

I will abdicate meaning and conclusion to readers as well as the problem of how to square this kind of monster with other historical and mythical horrors. This is not some variation on Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil or some grotesque lack of imagination. Something else is at play here for which psychopathy is insufficient as explanation. I have locked Sarajevo and its international band of hobby shooters deep inside for a long time, but it rattles around in my mind at the most inopportune times. Maybe for obvious reasons, I have not shared it with my family even as its intrusive images haunt me at the dinner table. It is also a story that I was unable to wrap into the last iteration of my history of monsters course, because it seemed to suggest an ineffable category of monstrosity for which I lacked language, category, and imagination (who is the monster now?).

A part of me is sorry to share this story with you, reader—to infect you with such monstrosities—but my own stunned silence is counterbalanced by the kind of compulsion or obligation that drove Coleridge’s ancient mariner” to tell his tale. Maybe this is a selfish act of gaining temporary relief from the “woful agony” of wrestling with  knowledge of the Sarajevo story. But maybe it is in shining a light on the darknesses in the human psyche that a more fulsome reading of the past can be realized. Modern history is a violent and untidy enterprise. If monsters serve as a lens or mirror through which to read a particular historical moment, and we are all the legacy of those past moments: What is the nature of the undivided being that connects us with such monsters? And what can history offer as pathways toward redemption?

^[i] Inspired by the Slovenian director Miran Zupanic’s 2022 documentary, “Sarajevo Safari,” and research conducted by the Italian writer Ezio Gavazzeni, just published in I Cecchini del Weekend: L’Inchiesta Sui Safari Umani a Sarajevo (Rome: PaperFIRST, 2026), a formal inquiry was initiated in Milan in late 2025 to investigate these sniper safaris and to bring to light who was involved. The first suspect was called to testify in February 2026. Should more perpetrators be identified, this could become one of the great trials of the century, and a critical confrontation with a monstrous evil that should rattle the cage of what it means to be human.

Michael Egan is an historian and academic director of the INSPIRE Office of Flexible Learning at McMaster University. In addition to writing a history of monsters, he is at work on a book about the abduction and murder of the Moroccan anticolonial activist Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965. Toxic Fear: Pollution Anxieties in the American 1980s is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press later in 2026.