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Whether you’re working in the lab late one night or going to your favorite repertory theater after hours, now’s the time to do the Midnight Movie Monster Mash. This October, we’re honoring the Halloween season with a carousel of killers so unusual their beastly mugs would make Lon Chaney quake — and he’s been dead for 100 years. Ancient beasts predate humans, and monsters have always stalked our campfire stories.
But in cinema, the monster movie has mutated into an uncontainable genre behemoth all its own. From B-movie creature features to chilling portraits of serial killers, the terrors of the big screen we choose to call “monsters” are as colorful and varied as the doors a certain Pixar flick would have them walk through. A multi-headed archetype that encompasses a sprawling taxonomy of characters, monsters can be just as hard for audiences to classify as they are for victims to escape.
Any human antagonist — but particularly those in horror — can be labeled a metaphoric monster if they’re evil enough. Hannibal Lecter? Monster. Annie Wilkes? Monster.
Ryan Murphy’s true crime Netflix anthology? That’s “Monster,” but same idea. With Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, Wolf-Man, and more staple characters in its menacing men.