What is Monster Theory?

What are monsters — and why study them?

Demons and dragons, werewolves, and wendigos — monsters take all sorts of shapes, from fantastic beasts to incorporeal spirits. We find monsters in ancient religions and contemporary roleplay games, on medieval scrolls and the silver screen, created by mad scientists and political speechmakers. 

Every culture has its monsters — whimsical, awe-inspiring, horrifying. While some monsters appear again and again across periods and places, each monster speaks from and to a specific cultural moment. Monsters are at once resurrected and reincarnated, constructed from used parts while posing a particular threat to the culture that creates it. 

So what exactly is a monster? We might think we know one when we see one, but coming up with a concise definition is less than intuitive when we look at the wide and weird assortment of creatures included in this category. In the later section, “Monster culture: Cohen’s seven theses,” this guide turns to one of the most important essays on understanding monsters, but let’s begin with the word’s origins.  

In Religion and Its Monsters (2002), Timothy Beal reminds us of the etymology of “monster.” The word derives from the Latin monstrum, related to the verbs monstrare (“show” or “reveal”) and monere (“warn” or “portend”). Monsters are portents, omens. They simultaneously warn us about what is to come and reveal what is already present; they point beyond and within us. So is the monster an “envoy of the scared” (Beal, 2002) — capturing a sublime mystery beyond our knowing, an “Other” entirely beyond us? Or is the monster, following Freud’s theories, a revelation of what we repress within ourselves, the Other inside us? Whether the monster is either of these, or both, it is trying to tell us something. Scholars engaged in monster theory and monster studies try to listen.

Monsters often combine incongruous elements or appear in excess; they are too much, too little; they are hybrid. The Sphinx merges the head of a human with the body of a lion. The Cyclops is gigantic in size but boasts only one eye. The monster transgresses boundaries, not only of physical categories but also of culturally acceptable behaviors. The vampire is both alive and dead; with its bite, it breaks the skin, that boundary between outside and inside the body, and it taps into unspeakable sexual desires.

In his entry on “monstrosity” in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, Jerrold E. Hogle describes the Gothic monster as,

Standing as incongruous “others” to supposedly coherent humans, monsters “threaten to engulf people in the contradictions that can most destroy their desired ‘natures’ unless they believe they have found ways to annihilate it completely or to bury it from view” (Hogle, 2015). These contradictions, of course, already exist within us, but we ignore them. We destroy the monster or else it will destroy us — physically and epistemologically. 

The hybrid, excessive nature of monsters and the genres that spawn them provide rich fodder for monster theorists. Monsters embrace not only physical excess — too many limbs, insatiable appetites — but also an excess of meaning. As Jack Halberstam argues in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters:

Monsters take on an excess of identifiers and serve as figures of “negative identity”: “Monsters have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of the human, [...] make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual” (Halberstam, 1995). 

Monsters reveal what a culture thinks of itself and of others; they define the human as much as they define the inhuman. In exploring what monsters are and where they come from, monster theory aims to understand what monsters mean and what cultural work they do. 

Where do monsters come from?

One way to begin defining and theorizing monsters is to categorize them by origin. Here are the most common origins of monsters, starting far beyond us and moving closer and closer to home. Monsters come from: 

• Beyond this world. Aliens, creatures of cosmic or eldritch horror like Cthulhu, demons that crawl out of hell — all of these monsters come from beyond our known world, playing on our fear of the ultimate unknown.
  
• Nature. Historically, many monsters were imagined to come from nature, as our own world contained many realms of the unknown populated by sea monsters lurking at the margins of maps, werewolves hunting in the woods after dark. Modern monsters from nature often show the earth fighting back against human efforts to destroy it or the power of natural forces.
  
• The past. Often immortal or raised from the dead, monsters like Dracula and The Mummy come from another time, threatening the present with the past.
  
• Our own making. The combination of science and hubris can produce horrors. Frankenstein’s creature is the exemplary monster of our own making, a creature designed by humanity that turns on us (often because of our own mistakes). 
  
• Within us. From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the contemporary obsession with criminal monstrosity, especially serial killers, modern monsters grow in our own bodies and minds.
  

Some monsters combine several of these origins: for example, Godzilla is a prehistoric creature awakened by nuclear experimentation, a monster arising simultaneously from nature, the past, and human action. Thinking through these categories can help us consider the different fears, and desires, monsters prey upon. 

A (brief) history of monsters and monster theory

Monster theory stretches across cultures and disciplines. Monsters arise in so many different times and places, so theorists must be cautious about making broad generalizations; scholars of literature, art, medicine, religion, sociology, anthropology, and even computer science have aimed to consider what monstrosity is and how it functions. 

Monster theory was properly named in 1996, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s edited collection, Monster Theory: Reading Culture. But monsters and those who study them have existed for much longer; when there were humans, there were monsters. The Epic of Gilgamesh — the world’s oldest extant epic, written in Sumerian around 2000 BCE — is filled with themes of monstrosity. Timothy Beal interprets chaos gods of ancient Near Eastern religions as monsters and points out the monstrosity required of their adversaries to fight them (2002). The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous provides an extensive history of monsters from ancient China to Mayan art of the Classic (ca. 250–900 CE) and Post-classic (ca. 450–1500 CE) periods, from the Islamic visual tradition of the tenth through the sixteenth centuries to the Caribbean from 1492 to the present. The advent of Gothic literature, and particularly the Gothic monster in the early nineteenth century, spawned a whole new collection of creatures which have only continued to proliferate since the invention of film.

Along with monsters themselves came the desire to understand them. The theorization of monstrosity, as summarized by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in The Monster Theory Reader (2020), has largely developed along three tracks: teratology, the study of “monstrous” births; mythology, the consideration of fantastical creatures; and psychology, the exploration of how human beings come to act in monstrous or inhuman ways. Some monster theorists, like Patricia McCormack, have revived the term teratology to mean the study of monsters more broadly.

Ambroise Paré’s 1593 work, On Monsters and Marvels, is one of the best known attempts from the early modern period to theorize “monstrous” births, or the birth of children which did not conform to “standard” human appearance. These births range from what we would now recognize as birth defects or genetic anomalies to part-human, part-animal children, or even entirely animal infants, that are more difficult to retroactively diagnose. Paré lists the causes of monstrous births, combining scientific explanations such as “the narrowness or smallness of the womb” and “hereditary or accidental illness” with religious/supernatural explanations, like “the glory of God,” “his wrath,” and “the artifice of wandering beggars” (1982).

In contrast with the study of real congenital abnormalities, mythology provides a study of more mythical monsters, yet its theorists are no less rigorous. Writing in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder details various “monstrous races” of the ancient world in his Natural History, and the practice of theorizing far-away wonders continued in the Middle Ages: texts like The Marvels of the East combined tales of fantastic creatures with accounts of monstrous races and wonders throughout the world, and maps of the world depicted monsters in unknown regions of the sea. In Japan, the oldest catalog of yōkai — a term for a range of forces beyond this world, monsters and spirits, wonders and shape-shifters — is the Gazu hyakkiyagyō, an 18th-century series of four illustrated bestiaries by Toriyama Sekien (recently published in English for the first time as Japandemonium Illustrated). In The Book of Yōkai, Michael Dylan Foster acknowledges the difficulty in theorizing these creatures, beyond categorizing them:

Bestiaries like Sekien’s Gazu hyakkiyagyō straddle the line between fact and fiction, reality and mythology. Although the creatures they examine may not be as “real” as the “monstrous births” Paré describes, the impact on their cultures is no less palpable, as shown by the dedication to tracking, categorizing, and theorizing these creatures.

While teratology and mythology have long histories, psychology may seem like the most recent way to theorize monsters. However, theories of Paré and his contemporaries about how the mother’s mental state could impact the child prefigure psychoanalysis, and connections can be drawn between older systems of understanding abnormal human behavior, like the humoral system, and modern psychology. Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis have had a lasting impact on monster theory. The monster can be read through the concept of the “return of the repressed,” our stifled desires and impulses come back to haunt us. Freud’s unheimlich — translated usually as “the uncanny” — is also useful for analyses of monsters that make the familiar strange or, like doppelgängers and automata, look at us with faces eerily similar to our own. Other important twentieth-century theorists who laid the groundwork for monster theory include Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-François Lyotard.

As Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel write in the introduction to Classic Readings on Monster Theory, one could argue that contemporary monster theory would be impossible without postmodernism. In the twentieth century, scholars, activists, and thinkers questioned the universality of Enlightenment ideas; postmodernism challenges the notion that the world could be quantified, organized, and understood through human logic and that white Anglophone men were the best arbiters of those distinctions. As postmodernism rejected and reevaluated traditional centers of culture and philosophy, theories attending to or speaking from historically marginalized experiences could develop — feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and more. It was out of the impulses to unpack how identity is culturally constructed and to flip hierarchies on their heads that monster theory was born.

While most specific and sustained work on monsters has been written after 1980 and postmodernism’s flourishing, there are precursors of monster theory scattered throughout the earlier twentieth century. J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (available in Classical Readings on Monster Theory) served as the “opening salvo in monster theory, with the eminent medievalist and author arguing that monsters were not something to be embarrassed about” (Mittman and Hensel, 2018). Rudolf Wittkower’s “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters” (1942) tackled a massive range of monsters from Classical Greece to seventeenth century Germany and England, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1947, [1971]) interpreted monsters in a positive, comic light when presented in the realm of the carnivalesque. In 1975, Foucault gave a series of lectures on the “abnormal,” following the monster’s transformation in European judicial and medical systems into a creature that must be either punished or treated. John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (1981, [2000]), excerpted in Classical Readings on Monster Theory, analyzes how markers of racial and ethnic identities were used to otherize monstrous peoples from ancient Greece into the early modern period. This approach, exploring how monsters are constructed as inhuman through reference to human identities, has become a dominant thread in monster theory. 

Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror (1990) significantly “shifts the focus from the markers on the bodies and in the actions of monsters to the interactions of normative humans with them. Carroll defines the monster not by what it is but by how it is perceived by the characters and audiences reading them (Mittman and Hensel, 2018). 

In 1996, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen named monster theory, and since then, what was once a marginal field of study, dismissed as not properly academic, has grown significantly. Like the monsters it studies, monster theory continues to mutate, infiltrating new areas of study and responding to new cultural developments.

Monster culture: Cohen’s seven theses

In “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” reprinted in Classic Readings on Monster Theory, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen proposes “seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear” (1996, [2018]). These “breakable postulates” are at once adaptable to specific cultures, histories, and texts while providing overarching guidance to our understanding of monsters, from whenever and wherever they originate.

THESIS I: The monster’s body is a cultural body. 

The monster emerges at a specific cultural moment, embodying a certain time, feeling, and place. The monster signifies something other than itself. It is made of meaning: “The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read” (Cohen, 1996, [2018]). Every monster is “a double narrative, two living stories: one that describes how the monster came to be and another, its testimony, detailing what cultural use the monster serves” (Cohen, 1996, [2018]). 

Compare, for example, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and the film The Hunger (Scott, 1983). Both texts stage lesbian seduction between a vampire and a human. However, in Le Fanu’s text, the vampire Carmilla is horrific because of her “deviant” desires and her potential racial and ethnic otherness. The Hunger inherits from Carmilla imagery from ancient Egypt, the vampire’s association with “abnormal” sexual practices, and an (at least initial) treatment of vampirism as an illness. But The Hunger pushes this last element further in order to respond to its specific cultural moment: the film fully explores the implications of vampirism as a disease spread through infected blood, placing itself in conversation with the burgeoning AIDS epidemic and offering a new cultural use of vampires.

THESIS II: The monster always escapes.

The monster is an escape artist, never truly vanquished, ever reincarnated in sequel after sequel. Though monsters leave material damage, they vanish, reappear, and adapt. Cohen writes, “the monster’s body is both corporal and incorporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift” (1996, [2018]). The monster’s meaning changes as it is reimagined in different contexts: “even if vampiric figures are found almost worldwide, from ancient Egypt to modern Hollywood, each reapprance and its analysis is still bound in a double act of construction and reconstitution. ‘Monster theory’ must therefore concern itself with strings of cultural moments, connected by a logic that always threatens to shift” (Cohen, 1996, [2018]).

Take Halloween (Carpenter, 1978). The movie’s serial killer, Michael Myers, escapes from a mental hospital to kill again. Over a franchise spanning thirteen films, Myers/The Shape is reincarnated, rebooted, and rewritten to return again and again.

THESIS III: The monster is the harbinger of category crisis.

The monster refuses to ascribe to clear categories or participate in the traditional order of things. It embraces hybridity, existing between and beyond classifications, dangerous because it is “a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (Cohen, 1996, [2018]). The monster appears at moments of crisis, when hierarchies and binaries are called into question, gesturing toward multiple and unexplored possibilities of knowledge, meaning, and experience. 

The vampire epitomizes this liminality. Is the vampire alive or dead? With its ability to turn into an animal or a gaseous form (in some mythologies), it unsettles distinctions between human and nonhuman, solid and gas. In Let the Right One In (2004, [2022]), John Ajvide Lindqvist’s young vampire doesn’t just hover between categories; Eli exists beyond them, saying: “I’m nothing. Not a child. Not old. Not a boy. Not a girl. Nothing” (2004, [2022]).

THESIS IV: The monster dwells at the gates of difference. 

The monster serves as the embodied Other, a conglomerate representation of cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual, and bodily alterity. Differences are exaggerated into monstrous aberration, a rhetorical strategy we are familiar with from histories of identity-based persecution. The monster combines different forms of alterity and deviance. 

For example, Dracula is a composite monster of everything the middle class, English protestant protagonists are not: he symbolizes the parasitic aristocrat, the foreigner (Eastern European, Asian, or Irish), the sexual predator and deviant, the religious other (Catholic or Jewish), the mystical past haunting the secular present, the nightmarish future of an empire extending its reach. These identities overlap, combine, and even substitute for each other: while on the surface, the blood exchange in Dracula stages sexual deviance and gender transgression, it speaks to deeper fears of racial mixing. 

This monster making has real consequences, producing and justifying the dehumanization of marginalized groups. But the monster also reveals its own constructed nature. As Cohen writes, “By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed” (1996, [2018]).

THESIS V: The monster polices the borders of the possible.

The monster steps beyond what is knowable or imaginable, especially within certain cultural conditions. While some monsters serve as calls to action, usually the destruction of political enemies or threats to the nation, others prohibit some behaviors while valuing others. Monsters demarcate the boundaries that must not be crossed in order to uphold a culture’s systems — controlling women, preventing threats to heterosexuality, separating racial groups. 

Across the boundary of what is culturally permissible lies monstrosity. The first werewolf, Lycaon, was once a human king, so the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses goes. When the king of the gods, Jupiter, came to visit, Lycaon tried to slay Jupiter in his sleep and fed him the body of a slaughtered servant. Transgressing cultural mandates on the guest–host relationship, and attempting to kill a god himself, Lycaon was turned into a wolf as punishment. Stay in line, or monstrosity awaits. 

THESIS VI: Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire.

The monsters that terrify are also the monsters that attract, offering escapist fantasies and forbidden indulgences. As Cohen writes, the “linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint. [...] We distrust and loathe the monster at the same time we envy its freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair” (1996, [2018]). The monster permits a contained exploration of otherwise taboo actions, eliciting a thrill of fear and pleasure that is not dangerous because we know it will end. The destruction of the monster can serve to satisfy the desire to ritually purge our own personal and cultural sins.

Jennifer’s Body (Kusama, 2009) plays with fear and desire in its titular character. Both demon and sex symbol, Jennifer seduces her victims; the scene of pleasure transforms into one of horror when she consumes them. As a rape-revenge film, Jennifer’s Body also represents through monstrosity the desire to lash out against specific abusive men and the patriarchy in general. In Jennifer, viewers may find a monster they can root for, enacting a fantasy of justice.

THESIS VII: The monster stands at the threshold…of becoming

Even as they’re pushed to the margins, monsters creep back. They bring, Cohen writes, “not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge — and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside” (1996, [2018]). The monster challenges us to reconsider how we perceive the world, what cultural assumptions we make, and how we create monsters in the image of others — and ourselves.

Monster theory’s critical allies

Monster theory is fed by many other critical frameworks. Because monsters can “represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in one body” (Halberstam, 1995), scholars can read monsters using any method of analyzing these identity markers, from Marxism to postfeminism.

Feminism and Julia Kristeva’s writings on abjection (excerpted in Classic Readings on Monster Theory) support readings of the monstrous feminine (our study guide on abjection theory can be found here). Queer theory and trans theory lead to new interpretations of monsters defined by sexual and gender deviance. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick analyzes homoerotics in the Gothic’s monstrous men in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, while Ardel Haefele-Thomas reads the Gothic as a safe space for exploring sexuality, gender, class and race in the guise of monstrosity in Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. 

Postcolonial theories like Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (excerpted in Classic Readings on Monster Theory) inform monster theory’s efforts to understand the monster as a constructed “other” and to expand our reading of monsters beyond “Western” traditions. Disability theory reads the “abnormal” and “imperfect” bodies of monsters as reflective of the way disabled bodies are dehumanized and discarded (see Angela Smith’s Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema). Although many monsters present “otherness” as horrifying, unacceptable, and threatening, many monsters, and monster makers, also flip the script and reconceptualize monstrosity as a place of possibility and resistance. 

Attending to the monster’s status as an omen, ecocriticism imagines monsters as warnings against continued depletion of the earth’s resources or as agents of the natural world fighting back. Posthumanism further unsettles anthropocentric tendencies, reading monsters as promises of what we could be — what we already are. As Patricia MacCormick writes, “we are all, and must be monsters because nothing is ever like another thing, nor like itself from one moment to the next” (“Posthuman Teratology,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, 2018).

The stakes of monster theory

In his introduction to The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, Asa Simon Mittman argues that the monster is known not through observation but through its effect, its impact. From this perspective, all monsters are real because they produce palpable impacts on the cultures that spawned them, on neighboring cultures, on future generations. We live with the monsters of the past. As Mittman writes,

Though the monsters we dream up may be “fiction,” the effects they have are real — the depiction of indigenous people as “savage” or cannibalistic, the demonization of Jewish peoples from the Middle Ages to Nazi Germany, the stereotype of the violent Black man or the “superpredator.” Much of monster theory aims to unpack the way monsters carry and shape cultural fears, stoked by real hatred.

But monsters aren’t all bad. Reimagining the monster, even identifying as one, can open up new possibilities. In November 2019, writer Paul B. Preciado was invited to speak at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference focusing on “women in psychoanalysis.” Facing 3,500 psychoanalysts representing a discipline that considers Preciado mentally ill because he is a trans man, Preciado delivered a searing polemic in which he declared:

Prevented from finishing his speech in person, Preciado has since published Can The Monster Speak?, a potent example of the stakes of monster theory — how monsters continue to be made, their effects felt, and their voices reclaimed. Through the figure of the monster, Preciado and other wielders of monster theory can turn the focus back on the monster makers, the so-called humans. As Cohen concludes his seven theses,

Since Cohen first published his seven theses, monster theory and monster studies have grown, gaining a level of academic legitimacy while retaining their attention to voices that are marginal or strange. In a world where the language of monstrosity is all around us — describing politicians, terrorists, and COVID-19 — monster theory may prove to be one of our greatest tools for interpreting the real life horrors, and possibilities, we face.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M. (1971) Rabelais and His World. Translated by Iswolsky, H. MIT Press.

Beal, T. (2002) Religion and Its Monsters. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1607706/religion-and-its-monsters-pdf. 

Carrol, N. (2003)The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1614571/the-philosophy-of-horror-or-paradoxes-of-the-heart-pdf 

Cohen, J.J. (1996) Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press.

Cohen, J. J. (2018) “Monster Culture: Seven Theses,” in Mittman, A.S. & Hensel, M. (ed.), Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume One. Arc Humanities Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1459197/classic-readings-on-monster-theory-demonstrare-volume-one-pdf. 

Foster, M.D. (2015) The Book of Yōkai. University of California. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/552350/the-book-of-yokai-pdf. 

Foucault, M. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975. Edited by Marchetti, V. & Salomoni, A. (2003). Verse Books. 

Friedman, J.B. (2000) The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Syracuse University Press. 

Halberstam, J. (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1466017/skin-shows-gothic-horror-and-the-technology-of-monsters-pdf. 

Haefele-Thomas, A. (2012) Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. University of Wales Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/573054/queer-others-in-victorian-gothic-transgressing-monstrosity-pdf. 

Halloween (1978) Directed by John Carpenter. Available at: Amazon Prime.

Hogle, J.E. (2015) “Monstrosity,” in Hughes, W., Punter, D., & Smith A. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, Wiley-Blackwell. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/993336/the-encyclopedia-of-the-gothic-pdf. 

Jennifer’s Body (2009) Directed by Karyn Kusama. Available at: HBO Max.

Le Fanu, J.S. (2013) Carmilla. Edited by Costello-Sullivan, K. Syracuse University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/537881/carmilla-a-critical-edition-pdf. 

Lindqvist, J.A. (2022) Let the RIght One In. Macmillan.

MacCormick, P. (2016) “Posthuman Teratology,” in Mittman, A.S. & Dendle, P.J. (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1495624/the-ashgate-research-companion-to-monsters-and-the-monstrous-pdf. 

Mittman, A.S. & Dendle, P.J. (2016) The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1495624/the-ashgate-research-companion-to-monsters-and-the-monstrous-pdf. 

Mittman, A.S. & Hensel, M. (2018) Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume One. Arc Humanities Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1459197/classic-readings-on-monster-theory-demonstrare-volume-one-pdf. 

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Humphries, R. and annotated by Reed, J.D. (2018) Indiana University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/668214/metamorphoses-the-new-annotated-edition-pdf. 

Paré, A. (1982) On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Pallister, J.L. University of Chicago Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1975036/on-monsters-and-marvels-pdf. 

Pliny the Elder. Pliny the Elder: The Natural History Book VII (with Book VIII 1-34). Edited by Travillian, T.T. (2015). Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/394921/pliny-the-elder-the-natural-history-book-vii-with-book-viii-134-pdf. 

Preciado, P. (2021) Can the Monster Speak?, trans. Wynne, F. Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Saïd, E. (1979) Orientalism. Vintage.

Sekien, T. Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien. Translated and annotated by Yoda, H. & Alt, M. (2017). Dover. 

Sedgwick, E.K. (1985) Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1359514/between-men-english-literature-and-male-homosocial-desire-pdf.

Smith, A. (2012) Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. Columbia University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/774886/hideous-progeny-disability-eugenics-and-classic-horror-cinema-pdf. 

Stoker, B. (2012) Dracula. William Collins. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/670643/dracula-pdf. 

The Hunger (1983) Directed by Tony Scott. Available at: HBO Max.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (2018) “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in Mittman, A.S. & Hensel, M. (ed.) Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume One. Arc Humanities Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1459197/classic-readings-on-monster-theory-demonstrare-volume-one-pdf. 

Weinstock, J.A. (2020) The Monster Theory Reader. University of Minnesota Press.

Further reading on Perlego

Gilmore, David. D. (2012) Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. University of Pennsylvania Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/732862/monsters-evil-beings-mythical-beasts-and-all-manner-of-imaginary-terrors-pdf 

Mittman, A. S., and M. Hensel. (2018) Primary Sources on Monsters: Demonstrare, Volume Two. Arch Humanities Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1459245/primary-sources-on-monsters-demonstrare-volume-two-pdf 

Schotanus, M. S. (2022) Interdisciplinary Essays on Monsters and the Monstrous: Imagining Monsters to Understand our Socio-Political and Psycho-Emotional Realities, Emerald Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3471905/interdisciplinary-essays-on-monsters-and-the-monstrous-imagining-monsters-to-understand-our-sociopolitical-and-psychoemotional-realities-pdf