The monsters are ourselves on the other side of the screen.

Beings that love as we do, but they are afraid of not being matched, because they know in advance that they will not be accepted and that true happiness is sudden and therefore a rare thing.

Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of beautiful days

Goethe

Facing monsters is overcome fears. It’s to face the Sphinx and let her muted. According to Lutz Müller the “frightening figures of human fantasy” (demons, devils, witches, evil deities, figures and hideous monsters) cause fears and feelings of danger to the human personality.

Fears represented in all times and in all cultures are archetypal, “are basic universal experiences that determine the experience and behavior of the individual, both now and in the future.”

Andree Guittcis as Nosferatus

The horror film works as “scheduled catharsis” safely purging our fears. To Luiz Nazario, in an interview to the Superinteressante magazine, “the monster was trivialized by the culture industry and isn’t anymore a reference of transgression, a spokesman of the different. The monster used to be  a metaphor for the outsider and today it’s an object of consumption. ”

The disgust and wonder that monsters exert have been going on across the centuries. They are the very representation of the fears and dangers present in the human experience, in our evolutionary process. We all purge our fears, and sometimes, they are embodied on an iconographic form.

Text reprinted from Revista Universitária do Audiovisual – O monstro, o cinema e o medo ao estranho de 15 de maio de 2012 (in portuguese).