Link Between Fictional Monster Creation and Human Vulnerability

As humans, our imagination runs wild and we often look for outlets to express them rather it be through creating literature, films or even inventing some of the world’s wonders like the pyramids in Egypt. If you look back through the monsters that have been imagined some of the most popular ones in my opinion are vampires, Godzilla by Toho Studios producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and the creature created in Frankenstein by Marry Shelley. Stephen T. Asma stated, 'The monster concept is still extremely useful, and it's a permanent player in the moral imagination because human vulnerability is permanent' (65).

I am sure that everyone has an argument on rather or not the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a necessary evil or not, but that is not what I am going to be discussing. If it was not for the United States Atomic Age, however, we would not have Godzilla today. You may be wondering how Godzilla plays into moral imagination and human vulnerability? The director of Godzilla, Ishiro Honda stated, “I wanted to make radiation visible” (52). Granted, not everyone that was involved wanted to use Godzilla as an outlet to express their emotions following the tragic events that happened in Japan, but nobody can argue that it was an outlet for them to express their emotions.

People are vulnerable irrational creature as times that may make haste decisions without weighing out the pros and cons of the outlets, we use to express our emotions. As long as we are on this planet, there are going to be tragedies that occur in our lives and people that choose to make horrible choices that harm others. Since we have ill-intentioned people in the world, we will never stop being vulnerable. Asma stated, “Part of our fascination with serial-killer monsters is that we (and our loved ones) are potentially vulnerable to sadistic violence.” (62). I am almost certain that there is not a single person that wakes up in the morning thinking that something terrible is going to happen to them.

Throughout history we have had people that prey on innocent lives for any number of reasons. If you look at Adolf Hitler, for example, he attempted to genocide European Jews between 1941 and 1945 without any good reason whatsoever. Even in today’s day and age we have fascist leaders such as North Koreas Kim Jong un and terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State that torments and terrorizes innocent people for either personal gain or illogical beliefs that have been passed through to them by brainwashing or other means. I believe that as long as we have evil the world, we will always use monsters as a way to ease our pain and suffering.

While reading this you may think that I have the perception that all monsters are created because bad things happen and that is not necessarily the case. Some people may believe that vampires are just blood sucking ruthless creatures and I would have to disagree with them. In my opinion vampires are no different than people, there are both good and bad ones. As humans we are always searching for someone to spend the rest of our lives with. Unfortunately, if we do find that one person at some point death will eventually take them away from us and leave us in sorrow for the rest of our life and sometimes we may never find another person to fill the void that our spouse left us with.

What if we could eliminate death though and spend eternity with our spouse? For this very reason I believe that humans have always longed for a certain level of immortality and vampires like Dracula are misunderstood hopeless romantics searching for their eternal soul mate. If I am ever able to find the person that I want to spend the rest of my mortal life with and they were able to make it an eternity with a simple bite to the neck that is a risk that I would be willing to take for a reward that would last forever.

I know that not everyone is going to have the perception of monsters and people that I do but I would have to highly agree with Asma’s beliefs on monsters. In this paper I have only covered two out of all of the monsters that exist, and I have shown how they are an outlet to not only human vulnerabilities but also human desires. Rather it be the two bombs that devastated the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ruthless people in the world or the search for true love, I believe that monsters will always be an important way for us mere mortals to explore our imagination and cope with the vulnerabilities we have in the world today.