Dr. Monster Fudger

Im just wondering what the community thinks

My gut says no, dinosaurs aren’t monsters but what’s interesting (as you point out) is that the movies operate like monster movies. You even have articles like this which make a distinction between dinosaurs and Movie Dinosaurs ™️ So despite dinosaurs not being monsters, the movies could technically still fall in the monster movie genre 🤔 does this mean that Jaws falls into the monster movie genre as well? At what point do animals (of which dinosaurs are) become monstrous in movies and not categorically animals?

opening up the floor for discussion like we’re in Ancient Greece debating various scholars and philosophers.

Given that "monster" is a social category, and social categories are often about role performance (or the failure to do so), I don't see why not. What is a "sea monster" in ancient times if not just a large, terrifying, unknown sea animal? And they often were just animals: manatees, dolphins, whales, sharks, squid. I'd totally believe the people of Byzantium saw Porphyrios as a sea monster, even though he was just a whale. They certainly hated him personally in a way you'd rarely hate an animal. And the way wolves, the enemies of livestock, are portrayed in folktales is highly monstrous, even absent lycanthropy.

I suspect our urge to create monsters comes from our primal fear of large predators, projected onto other things we fear, like non-normative humans, combined with our revulsion toward disease. Werewolves and vampires are both predators and traitors, ones that spread like disease. It's very akin to how some cultures think/thought of witchcraft.

The shark in jaws is an animal, but it's not acting the way we normally expect animals to act. It seems to have a personal vendetta against humans, an urge to kill us, like a serial killer. It has transitioned from being part of nature--a background element, to be understood, channeled, or avoided--into something outside of nature and part of our society (category transgression). As an unwanted guest to our social world, preying upon us, we fear and hate it the same way we fear and hate members of our own society who pose a threat.

Movie dinosaurs don't belong. They're terrifying anachronisms, and they're unlike any land animals we know. They transgress our experiences of what an "animal" is or acts like. The most monstrous dinosaur in Jurassic Park isn't the T-Rex, it's the velociraptors. It's their humanlike behavior and their determination to hunt us specifically that makes them less animalistic and more vampiric.

This is a great breakdown on monstrosity!! The way that monsters elude neat categorization means that even things that we do recognize and understand (animals) can fall outside of that categorization in a way that strikes fear into our hearts. That’s such a FANTASTIC point about the velociraptors!! The movie makes a point to emphasize just how clever and smart they are, even to the point of outwitting humans.

Hollywood is really jumping on that monsterfucker train 🚂 so ALL ABOOAARRDD!

“After her life falls apart, soft-spoken actress Laura Franco finds her voice again when she meets a terrifying, yet weirdly charming Monster living in her closet. A romantic-comedy-horror film about falling in love with your inner rage.”

What do we think, lads? 🤔

One of my favorite things about dracula daily is that we, tumblrina that we are, known lovers of sexy vampires just looked at Count Dracula, the most famous and sexualized vampire of our time,and we were all collectively: "Nah, he is awful."

And to be fair, that's how you are supposed to feel after reading the books, but I just think it's funny that Count Dracula is the only vampire we all just refuse to find sexy.

It’s funny because our love for Dracula, at least erotically, derives imo from the movies predominately! (Although the screenwriter for Coppola’s Dracula says that the book is “wet and oral” so you know, the book does have its influences, hairy palms or no…)

Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula was marketed as “the strangest passion the world has ever known!” And women drove to the movie in FLOCKS and even wrote love letters to Legosi.

From there the erotic and romantic subtext was made more and more prominent, next best in Hammer’s Dracula featuring Christopher Lee (1958), where Lee was chosen specifically for being a hottie that would draw in women dreamin and fiendin for some tall mysterious man to bite their necks.

Director Terence Fisher even instructed actress Melissa Stribling during scenes in which Dracula bit Mina to “imagine [she was having] one whale of a sexual night, the one of [her] whole sexual experience” and that she needed to “Give [him] that in [her] face!”

After the Hays Code ended in 1968, 70s horror film boomed with vampires, especially sexy ones, so you got lots of sexualized Dracula movies as well as straight up pornos featuring Dracula lmao

But most memorable yet is Coppola’s romantic, tragic and overwhelmingly horny Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)! Coppola himself describes the movie as “an erotic dream”, which like, yeah lmao Jonathan almost gets snagged into a man-eating, orgy amongst the vampire wives; the werewolf/Lucy scene; and the Mina/Dracula embrace really come to mind.

This doesn’t even touch the queer erotic readings of the Dracula novel, and thus the queer subtext present in the movies as well between Jonathan and Dracula! 🧛‍♂️ 🦇🩸

You can read more on my blog 👉: https://monstrousdesirestudy.com/hypnotism-through-the-decades-dracula/