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Fear suffocates us, blinds us, obscures and paralyzes our minds. At first glance, our appetite for horror stories is inexplicable. It arises from a contradictory desire: on the threshold of a feared and exciting revelation, we shudder with curiosity and confusion. When a movie scares us, we cover our eyes but open the slits between our fingers to watch the scary thing. We want to know the secret and at the same time feel the danger. The shadow of the monster beats in the trembling of the stories.
Two women were pioneers of the modern horror novel: the Spanish María de Zayas and the Englishwoman Mary Shelley, who combined dark gothic stories from the past with emerging science fiction. In a startling way, the uncanny broke into the tame everyday reality, familiar territory for writers excluded from public life for centuries, guardians of home, its routines and ruins. Maybe that’s why for decades it was a genre that was considered childish and underestimated. By the time Mary invented her most famous creation in 1816, she was already breaking the codes of her time by living with the poet Percy B. Shelley and having children without marrying. Social prejudices affected the book’s sales and the author was ostracized. As her biographer Charlotte Gordon notes, “At the beginning of the 19th century, women artists were by definition monstrous.”
Mary Shelley’s view of her protagonist is always compassionate. Although we popularly call him Frankenstein, in the novel he has no real name other than demon, wretched, or unfortunate. Rejected by its creator Victor Frankenstein, it depicts orphanhood and the longing for companionship and is an echo of the author’s own lonely childhood. While escaping from the Ingolstadt laboratory where he came to life, he finds shelter in a shed on a farm. By secretly observing the residents of the house, he learns to speak, read and write. Although he knows about meat, he decides to become a vegetarian. As an avid reader, he devours books by Plutarch and Goethe. He becomes cultured, sharp and sensitive, but also becomes aware of the terror that his appearance inspires. The most moving part of the novel tells how society abandons the monster. When they see him, everyone is horrified and knocks him down. Even when he saves a girl’s life, the father shoots him. Their attempts to get closer to people end in violent and cruel ways.
In the film Frankenstein, a classic directed by James Whale, an angry mob with torches and fears tortures the unfortunate man in the forest. The overwhelming scene is deliberately reminiscent of the lynchings of black people in the United States. Whale, who was openly gay in the 1930s, identified not with the horde of angry citizens but with the victim, unfairly attacked because of his strangeness and unusualness. In “The Spirit of the Hive” by Maestro Víctor Erice, another girl discovers that the real danger comes from the adults with their merciless gaze and not from the cornered monster.
The word “monster” shares a root with the Latin monstrare, “to point with the finger,” that pointing finger pointing to the other, to that which penetrates our deeply rooted maps of reality. Therefore, it is the finger that points and rejects that creates the monster. On the other hand, “normal” comes from “norma,” the Latin name for the square, a carpenter’s instrument intended to produce objects in series. The creature imagined by Mary Shelley embodies the opposite: stitched skins and interwoven organs, a multiple body born into a new life.
Horror literature alludes to a very primitive, ancient human instinct that is common to all humans: fear of others. In the words of HP Lovecraft: “The oldest and most intense feeling of humanity is fear, and the oldest and most intense of all fears is the fear of the unknown.” We still find it difficult to live happily with the difference and its beauty and strength to recognize its fabulous and festive diversity. The supposed monsters invite you to invent different rules of the game: It is no coincidence that fun comes from diversity.
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