By Sarah Jack
You know the game, right? Stand in front of a mirror in the dark, say the name three times, and wait for something terrifying to appear. Bloody Mary, Candyman—these urban legends tap into primal fears. But what if the monster you’re expecting isn’t the one you’re going to see? What if understanding monsters isn’t about what’s lurking in the dark, but about why we put it there? It’s time for The Thing About Witch Hunts podcast to go deep into the hushed shadows to speak up about monsters, folklore, and the psychology of fear because witches are monsters, and we need answers.
What makes someone monstrous?
Why do we keep these terrifying figures alive in our stories, our myths, our collective imagination?
And most unsettling of all:
Why do we treat humans as monsters?
Fear and Monsters
We fear ourselves and our capacity for cruelty, our potential for transformation into something monstrous. We fear that monsters exist and that they will come for us. Monsters are designed to trigger our fight-or-flight response, and they intersect with our deepest anxieties, cherished values, repressed desires, and greatest hopes. A good monster knows exactly where we’re vulnerable.
What Is a Monster?
A monster is whoever crosses the line. It violates our sense of natural order, breaks the rules for how bodies should look, how creatures should behave, how people should act. Monsters embody transgression. They are too big, too hungry, too powerful, too different, or too much like us in uncomfortable ways. They can be supernatural, like vampires, werewolves, demons, and ghosts or physically aberrant like fairytale giants, futuristic hybrids, and the unstoppable undead. But monsters can also be entirely human. And we do monsterize humans. When we strip away someone’s humanity in our minds, when we decide they’re beyond redemption or understanding, we create a monster.
The Classic Monsters: Vampires, Werewolves, Ghosts, and Demons
Before we talk about the monsters we make of each other, let’s look at traditional creatures of myth, folklore, and horror. Understanding what makes them frightening reveals what we fear most.
Classic monsters from scary stories and legends are designed to terrify on multiple levels. They appear scary with distorted faces, unnatural proportions, and bodies that shouldn’t exist. They act scary, moving in ways that violate nature’s laws, appearing where they shouldn’t be. They speak scarily, in riddles, with threats, or seductive lies. Monsters are fundamentally untrustworthy. The vampire offers immortality but delivers endless hunger. The fairy promises wishes but twists your words into curses. The demon makes deals that always have a catch. They traffic in trickery and scams, offering what we desperately want, while hiding the terrible price. What makes monsters truly powerful is how they intersect with our deepest anxieties, cherished values, repressed desires, and greatest hopes. The vampire in folklore and horror stories embodies our fear of being drained both emotionally, spiritually. It’s parasitic intimacy, immortality at the cost of humanity. The werewolf legend is our terror of losing control, the beast within breaking free. The ghost can’t let go of the natural world because of unfinished business, the past that won’t stay buried, or the fun of haunting the living. Demons in mythology and paranormal tales corrupt and possess, taking away your agency and self. Traditional monsters understand us better than we understand ourselves. They know exactly where we’re vulnerable, and they go straight for it.
Who and What Do We Find Monstrous?
We’re built to identify what feels dangerous, what disrupts our sense of order and safety. That’s why we find monstrosity in humanity. The person who violates our spoken and unspoken rules about how people should look, love, worship, or live becomes a social monster. Danger exists in every category, including our own. Throughout history, we’ve projected fears onto marginalized groups, turning real people into monsters through prejudice, propaganda, and persecution. The physically different, the culturally foreign, the socially divergent have always been deemed monstrous by those who wanted to diminish their power. An important distinction: actual dangerous people exist. This discussion distinguishes between them and the monsters we create from innocent people like alleged witches, past and present, innocent of harm but guilty of being vulnerable.
The Witch as Monster
Fictional Witches occupy a special place in our monstrous pantheon. They’re the ultimate transgressive figure. Women with power in societies that denied them agency, practitioners of forbidden knowledge who traffic with the supernatural. This witch is dangerous because she refuses to be controlled, lives outside set structures, knows things she shouldn’t know and is willing to harm.
Alleged human witches occupy our actual living world taking the brunt of our violence and fear. Alleged witches are family and friends, as well as strangers. They may be health practitioners, independent women, or property owners. They may have dementia, a disability, or albinism. The same human called beloved in one context becomes a witch in another. The difference isn’t in what they do, it’s in who’s afraid of their agency.
The Monster as Mirror
Monsters don’t just represent what we fear outside ourselves. In fact they reflect what we fear within. Every monster embodies some quality we recognize and revile in human nature: the vampire’s parasitic hunger, the werewolf’s savage impulses, the ghost’s inability to let go, the serial killer’s capacity for cruelty, the witch’s intention to harm. When we create monsters, we can externalize our own repressed desires, darkest impulses, and most shameful traits. We can take everything we don’t want to acknowledge about humanity and give it form through art while pretending we can defeat it “out there” instead of confronting it “in here”.
Why are Monsters Useful?
Monsters serve vital psychological and social functions. They give form to formless anxieties, let us rehearse fears in controlled environments, and create boundaries that help us define ourselves. We need monsters to:
- Process collective trauma and cultural anxieties
- Explore taboo desires and forbidden territories
- Establish and test moral boundaries
- Create social cohesion through shared enemies
- Experience catharsis through symbolic confrontation
- Entertain ourselves with delicious fear in safe contexts
- Test faith and belief
But we also need monsters because they give us something to overcome. Monster stories can ultimately give us triumph over fear, find our courage, make us clever, or help us prevail against impossible odds.
Winning Against Monsters
When we face down the creatures of our nightmares, we have an arsenal: we hunt them with persistence, outwit them with strategy, fight them with courage, find their weakness:silver bullets, wooden stakes, sunlight, true names. We deploy protective magic, use special powers, form teams, refuse to believe, solve riddles, or uncover conspiracies. Sometimes we can redeem them, sometimes only punish them, and sometimes we expose them to authorities who will end their reign of terror.
Why We Kill the Monsters We Create
Once we’ve fully monsterized someone, a terrible logic takes hold: if they’re truly monstrous and not human, then killing them isn’t murder. It’s pest control. Complete dehumanization justifies elimination in ways that partial othering cannot.
When communities face real crises, like sickness, loss of resources, or social upheaval, they need to deflect blame through scapegoats. The witch must be permanently removed to “cleanse” the community. Fear of contamination drives the violence: the perceived witch’s evil can infect others, so elimination becomes necessary.
Public execution creates social cohesion through shared violence. The community bonds over destroying the monster together, reinforcing who’s “in” and who might be next. The killing becomes its own justification: we killed them, therefore they must have been guilty.
When the Monster Wins
Monsters have their own playbook: they scare, trick, and lie. They infiltrate, poison, possess, bully, oppress, lure, and cause doubt. They change forms, become invisible, impersonate those we trust, target our vulnerabilities, invade our dreams. Monsters and human monsters converge when they turn us against each other through triangulation, scapegoating, spreading misinformation, dehumanization, stoking fear, and exploiting divisions. Do you recognize these tactics? They’re the same strategies used by abusers, tyrants, and hate groups. The danger isn’t just in the shadows, rather it comes from positions of power and from within.
The Future of Monsters
Monsters evolve with us. Each era creates the monsters it needs, embodying its particular anxieties. Have you viewed our recent podcast episode, Ain’t Slender Man Scary? with Sean and Carrie? You should hit play when you finish this read to learn about new monsters in the digital age. No matter how much our monsters change, they’re always performing the same function in showing us ourselves, challenging us to be brave, reminding us of our boundaries, and occasionally inspiring us to redraw those boundaries with more compassion and less fear.
Fear and vigilance take their toll. Who do you need to better understand? Relief comes in releasing fear—people aren’t dangerous because they’re different. Real danger lies in actions that harm, not in difference itself. We defeat monsters by acknowledging the ones within ourselves and refusing to become them, even when we’re terrified or hurt. Every persecution began with someone deciding another human was monstrous. The monster teaches us what we’re capable of becoming.
See Also
Why We Need Monsters in Our Lives, episode 165 of The Thing About Witch Hunts
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