The Hiearchy of Monsters

This is an unscientific ranking of ghouls, from best to worst:

1) Zombies - For everyone in and around my general demographic, this is the universal favorite. In whatever form it takes, either the serious (Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead), the satirical (Shaun of the Dead, The Zombie Survival Guide), or somewhere inbetween, (Dead Alive, Re-Animator), people have a strong fondness for the rotting, flesh-eating Undead. I suppose there might be some deep-rooted, psychological reason for this (it wouldn't be Freudian though, because he believed we would actually be terrified to see a return of the dead; so maybe it'd be Jungian), perhaps due to some painful longing to see lost loved ones again...but I'm not positive about that. What I do know, however, is that Zombies look really cool. And that's probably the biggest and simplest reason why we like them so much. They're all rad-looking, with sunken eyes, gangrenous skin, and tattered clothing (it's funny how Zombies are hardly ever naked; they always still have like 1/2 of a shirt left, or 1/3 of a pair of pants). As far as physical appearances go, they're hard to beat. And that's probably why it's the perennial last-second, default Halloween costume. It's incredibly easy -- a small-sized, long-sleeved cowboy shirt; frayed, 29-waist cut-off jeans; a little bit of make-up; a vacant stare and, there you have it, Zombie Indie Kid.

2) Werewolf (aka the Wolfman) -- We all love a good martyr, and Werewolves are the reigning marytyr kings of the Monster World. They don't transform into unholy half-wolf/half-human creatures because they want to; it's because they're cursed to. It's not like they disembowel people of their own volition (that would make them cold-blooded murders, and generally unlikable), it's just that pesky full moon's fault. Their condition, their Werewolfdom, was thrust upon them -- assuming of course that you subscribe to the gypsy, Eastern European folklore popularized by Hollywood: victim is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting bit by a pre-existing Werewolf -- a burden that they're forced to live with, the pall of it all hanging heavy on their conscience and their heart. For real, we eat that maudlin shit up for breakfast. We love our tragic figures. We love anyone who shoulders the load of an unfair destiny. We sympathize and empathize (as much as you can empathize with someone turning into a mythical wolf-like creature, at least) with their supernatural plight. And this is because it represents the grievances we have with the physical maladies and deformities we have in our own lives. We can relate with everything that plagues us -- the big, fat nose; the gaping underbite; the multiple sclerosis; the searing foot pain caused by fallen arches; the cleft palate; the speech impediement; the hunched curviture of the spine...we have so much in common. Life has dealt us all some unfair hands, but don't despair -- the Wolfman understands us.

3) Ghosts -- I don't even know if I believe in an afterlife. And for the sake of argument, supposing that there is, I'm probably just as likely to be reincarnated as a tree or an elephant or a dental hygienist as I am to become a floating, wailing, transparent specter (and for the record, if I ever did become a spirit, I wouldn't want to be a lame, nondescript-looking Casper kind of ghost; I would want to be like the ghost of Jacob Marley in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, carrying around all of those noisy, heavy chains as an eternal punishment for being such a misanthrope...it's very Sisyphean). But my cynicism and disbelief notwithstanding, I love a good ghost story. The eerier and creepier, the better. Like the lady who haunts room 219 at the local hotel because she hung herself from the shower head; or the little girl (wearing a typical Victorian-era Sunday dress, naturally) that died of tuberculosis and can be regularly seen playing hopscotch in the backyard garden of her childhood home; or the wandering hitchhiker who still appears on the shoulder of a lonely highway, accidentally struck and killed by a wayward driver on a particularly dark and rainy and slippery night. It's all bullshit. The people who insist on seeing these kind of things also happen to be the same kind of people who believe in it. Of course there are always the ones who try qualifying their stories with "Oh man, I was never the type to believe in ghosts, but there was this one time..." But if you asked them, honestly, if they believed in an afterlife or God or Christianity as a whole before their supposed sighting, they will almost always sheepishly answer, yes. In other words, they're predisposed to see ghosts. If I jump into the middle of the ocean expecting to see sharks, I'm probably gonna see something that kind of, sort of, looks like a shark. That's just how your mind is hard-wired to work. But despite my status as a relative non-believer (and I say "relative" to hedge my bets; hopefully if I remain noncommittal enough, Jesus will cut me a break and still let me into Heaven should I be wrong haha), I still find ghost stories completely fascinating. It speaks to my curious, macabre side. A really good ghost story will always make me hesitant to go the bathroom at night by myself.

4) Vampires - Kids who read copious amounts of Anne Rice novels (I'll give them Interview with the Vampire, but that's about it) are weird and ugly, but for the most part, vampires are still generally cool. But lets make a distinction here; frankly, the Hollywood version of Count Dracula -- the thin, pasty effeminate man, mincing and prancing around in a satin cape, sucking people off -- is actually kind of gay. But Vlad the Impaler, the real-life, historical figure that likely inspired Bram Stoker's novel? He was one of the baddest men ever. I stop and drop everything I'm doing whenever a documentary of his airs on the History Channel. Vlad was no joke, his favorite form of torture being impalement. Anyone who crossed his authority was sentenced to having a wooden stake driven through their body, starting at the anus and then slowly tearing its way through the their mouth. Being the kind soul that he was, Vlad was sure not too sharpen the stake too much, as to not give his victim the benefit of a quick, merciful death. He was known to watch these impalings while eating dinner, feasting on their spilled blood in a golden chalice. He probably thought it gave him supernatural power, bestowing him the strength of his fallen victim or something out-there like that. What a crazy, vampiric, maginificent psychopath that Vlad was.

5) Wendigo - This is underrated, under-appreciated darkhorse rounds out my Top 5. According to Native American mythology, anyone who consumes human flesh can suffer the mystical transformation into a Wendigo. For the Algonguin tribe of the Canadian wilderness, this myth was mostly a cautionary tale to deter people from murder and breaking taboos (the taboo in this case being canabalism). But much like the Werewolf, the Wendigo can also become a very sympathetic, tragic figure. There have also been stories of men getting lost in the woods, usually becoming incapacitated somehow, perhaps by badly spraining an ankle, falling down a deep ravine, or getting a foot caught in a bear trap. Either way, the man is completely immobilized and is unable to return to the confines of civilization. Days will pass by; soon, it'll be a week. He sustains himself on nearby berries and bugs, collecting rain water the best he can with overturned leaves. But the air is getting colder and his body is growing weaker. Someone will eventually find him, but he realizes that if he doesn't act in the mean time, he will die. So with his pocket knife in hand, he decides his only hope is eating some of his own flesh...and then, Wendigo. You feel for him because he's being punished for the natural human emotion of survival. You're horrified by the idea, but you can also identify with him because if placed in the same situation, you might actually do the same (not me though, as I'd probably just give up and die).

And these are the other monsters that didn't make the cut:

Mummies - They're like the dumber, lamer version of our standard non-Egyptian Zombie, all those stupid strips of bandages hanging everywhere. No one's afraid of being chased by King Tut. If anything, I'd be more scared of the curse that comes along with disturbing a Mummy's tomb than the actual Mummy itself. And no, I haven't seen a single one of those Brendan Fraser movies.



Dr. Frankenstein's Monster -- The ramifications of playing God, of creating life out of which there previously was no life, and then shunning that creation when it doesn't turn out to be exactly what you expected makes for a phenomenal psychological thriller (thank you Mary Shelley), but it really doesn't scare me. That scene when the Monster, desperate for human contact, finally decides to reveal himself to the family he had been watching from afar and that he had fallen in love with, only to have them recoil in horror when they see how hideous he is...that breaks my heart, but it doesn't exactly chill my bones. Oh, and if you want to sound like a pretentious bigshot know-it-all, be sure to correct anyone (smugly, of course) whenever they refer to the Monster as "Frankenstein" -- that is incorrect. The doctor who created it was named Victor Frankenstein, but the Monster itself had no name.

Bigfoot/Yetti/Abominable Snowman; Loch Ness Monster -- These fit under the same category; they're "monsters" in the same sense that Leprechauns, or the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny are "monsters." So yeah, they aren't monsters at all. There are people who actually hunt these make-believe, figments of imagination...and they all need real jobs.