#werewolf imagery | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

artist-issues · 2 months ago

Note

I would like a steaming hot dish of the importance of monster stories and how it reflects the Gospel please

okay

I think if I dig real deep and look real hard at how I came to this conclusion, it would just be that in some sense God allows scary things to happen in reality.

That’s the bottom line.

I feel like nobody realizes that if the whole world were a movie, and God was the writer/director, He would have frightening monsters in His movie.

Not that He created them—don’t take the analogy too far—but

He didn’t have to preserve, in His Word, for all of human history, the account of a man losing his mind and growing fingernails and shaggy hair and living like a beast. He didn’t have to describe the whole encounter with Legion, the fact that a Thing called Legion consisting of corrupt elohim that can puppet a human around like a meat sack on strings, and give that meat sack self-mutilating super strength, exists and is a Thing that is possible to have in our world. He didn’t have to remind all Christians and historians for all of history that He can and did crack open the Earth and entomb people alive in a mysterious place called “Sheol.”

He didn’t have to allow the enemy to exist any longer than it would take to fall from heaven.

But He did. He chose to let that dark and terrifying stuff be in His story, for all time, and even allows us to perceive those things as being present for a long time. He kept it in His story, and in that way, reminds us of the dark and terrifying stuff.

Why?

I’m not going to pretend I understand all the myriad of reasons or know the mind of God in its entirety, obviously. But from what I can observe, it sure looks like he left those things in History because they serve His Main Point.

His Main Point is Who He, Himself, Is. And to show the ultimate good and glorious, the ultimate nasty and frightening makes a really good contrast. If you turn a spotlight on in a brilliantly lit town square, nobody is going to be able to see what the spotlight is highlighting. But turn a spotlight on in the dark, and that’s all you’re looking at, because everything else is so dark.

It’s like a living, breathing, compare-and-contrast essay. Those are the best essays. You understand one thing because you used something else as a measuring-stick.

Real-life monsters, the demons, the humans, their dark deeds— are the measuring stick.

Plus, what hero seems heroic with nothing to stand up against, nothing to fight, no vile thing to save everyone from? What bad action is actually accepted as bad by the reader of any story that doesn’t have terrible consequences written in?

Demons are only demons because they were first angels, and corrupted. Human corruption is only seen as horrifying because it’s a twisting-up of what we were supposed to be.

Have you ever seen or read Lord of the Rings? Tell me how the story would be without Gollum.

Not The Ringwraiths or Sauron or the Orcs or Saruman. Gollum. Gollum, specifically. If you wrote him out, how would the story be? How would the main point be?

But if we treated Gollum the way we (real-conservative Christians) do werewolves and vampires and zombies, we’d write him out. He’s a gnarly, nasty, creepy, bottomless pit of a character. The glimmers of ‘humanity’ left in him only add to the horror of what he totally is, instead of detracting from it. But that’s the point of him. That’s what he is, to the story.

Anyway. I think you have a really solid foundation for “Why Monster Stories?” right there. Because the Ultimate Storyteller allows monsters in His stories, because they’re the Cautionary Tale, & they’re the Thing to Be Saved From, & they’re the Visible-Tangible Manifestation of Invisible-Intangible Harsh Realities.

But when it comes to the Gospel

Monsters Are Evil Through & Through

The thing about monsters, whether we’re talking about real-life demons or serial killers, or the “fictional” stories, or the myths of ancient cultures, is that they’re evil through-and-through. None of this “they’re just misunderstood, they’re just unaccepted, they’re somebody else’s fault.”

You have that mentality with other types of “harm-causing” characters. With villains that mentality implies that if society just accepted them, treated them better, understood them more, gave them something, that a villain would cease to be a villain—without ever actually having anything About Themselves change. That it’s the outside world that needs to change, not anything about the monster. That’s how you get your anti-heroes, or “sympathetic villains.”

But monsters are not like that. Real, true monster stories are all about a Thing which Should Not Be, which has a very nature that is monstrous. And no amount of “understanding/accepting/being nice to it” can fix it.

It is the same with human beings that are fallen. We’re just as doomed and dangerous as demons, in our lone state. There is nothing good in us. Anything that seems good is just the spasmodic twitching of a corpse that used to contain life. Nothing truly alive.

Just like anything that seems “human” in a werewolf is just the last sad traces of something that is absolutely, certainly not human anymore. And the fact that you can see that it used to look human is, in and of itself, a cruel twist that only makes it more scary and horrible.

That’s the thing. Part 1 of the Gospel is “I am not what I’m supposed to be—I am evil, deserving of death.”

Monsters Must Be Stopped

There’s a sense in which other types of things or characters or beings in a story can just go on existing as they are. But a monster can’t. Not in a true monster story. It either eats everybody and ends the story that way, or it’s killed. Or it’s cured.

But the point is, it can’t go on being a monster. Because it is a broken bone in the skeleton of reality. As long as it exists, it does damage and spreads corruption. It can’t belong. Not in like, a tragic, romantic sense. In a “cancer doesn’t belong among healthy cells” sense.

And what’s more horrible is that usually a monster is always seeking life. What it does to try and “possess” life is horrifying. Vampires can’t produce blood of their own; they have to drain it out of the living to go on being animated, but they never stop being corpses, themselves. Werewolves try to swallow up any life they come across, but they themselves are death. Zombies can’t think, can’t reason, can’t heal, can’t grow—all they can do is try to consume the brains and life they don’t possess.

but because that’s the point—monsters can’t have life. Just like we can’t have eternal life, or spiritual life. But all our futile efforts to get it, for ourselves, hurt us and hurt others and only UNDERLINE the whole flaw we embody. Which we can’t fix on our own.

So, in most real monster stories, the monsters are killed. But even that is all Gospel-coded.

How to Stop the Monster

I’ve said this before, but in my favorite monster stories, the monster can only be defeated by two elements: “purity” and “sacrifice.”

In Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf, the monster is not slain by the main character’s frantic swinging of an axe. It’s slain because it gave him a mortal wound, but his blood was pure and shed to protect a traitor from the monster. Pure blood sacrificed kills the monster. That’s how that book ends.

I could list other examples (that one is my favorite) but just think about the symbolism behind all these myths the peoples of the world have come up with over the years. Vampires can’t see their reflection, not just because they’re the ultimate Non-Person, but because mirrors used to be lined with silver. The same thing that kills werewolves; silver. Silver is noted for its symbolic purity.

Just like fire is a sure way to kill a vampire, werewolf, or reanimated corpse—it’s pure.

But usually, in a monster movie (even the ones I don’t like, like Nosferatu) sacrifice of someone who’s thought of as “pure” or “innocent” is what winds up foiling the monster. In Frankenstein, it’s a little muddier, but certainly the monster finally gives up on living after he sees the pure sacrificial way his creator, his hunter, dies.

Anyway, my point here is that Christ’s pure sacrifice—and quite literally, His blood—is what kills the monster. In us. The old us is dead, slain on the cross. What comes forth is a new creation, Alive. But, dual-meaning—His blood also killed the monsters. The monsters that are Death, and also, the ultimate defeat for the Dragon, and the Enemy in general.

What We Get When We Don’t Have Monsters in the Story At All

This part I think is important, even though it’s not an answer to your question.

I think it’s fine not to have monsters in a story because you think they’re associated too much with demon-celebration in our culture. That’s fair. That would maybe be like trying to tell a story about a man who’s trying to come up with the perfect dog-meat recipe. In America you’d have way too much uphill work to do, because in our culture, dogs are pets and beloved. But in another culture, like in the Philippines, they wouldn’t bat an eye, they’d just accept that this character needs a good recipe and be like “tell me his journey, go on.”

That is a fine reason not to use them. Because everything can be sacrificed, including monsters, if the monsters aren’t useful for communicating the main point of the story.

But if the reason is because you think monsters are impossible to use because “they’re bad, and bad stuff can’t be in good stories,” well, that’s silly. Tadashi Hamada dying in a fire is “bad.” You want to cut fires and tragedy out of stories?

Anyway. That’s how I feel about monsters and the Gospel. Monsters are total evil. Nothing less than the strong and powerful sacrifice of someone pure could stop them. We are monsters. Apart from Christ. And then the monsters die. And then the sun comes up.

#Monsters #Halloween #werewolf #vampires #vampire #Nebuchadnezzar #Babylon #biblical bible #biblical imagery #Bible #biblical #writing #storytelling

43 notes · View notes