Our Old Monsters
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The witch, the vampire and the werewolf endure as popular characters in modern horror. These “old monsters” have their origins in the writings of Aristotle as studied in the universities of medieval Europe, where 13th-century scholars reconciled works of natural philosophy and medicine with theological precepts.
They codified divine perfection as warm, light, male and associated with the ethereal world beyond the moon, while evil imperfection was cold, dark, female and bound to the corrupt world below the moon. All who did not conform to divine goodness--including un-holy women and Jews--were considered evil and ascribed a melancholic, blood hungry and demonic physiology.
This construct was the basis for anti-woman and anti-Jewish discourse through the early modern period and would persist through modern Western culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in horror films, where the transgressive bodies of the witch, the vampire and the werewolf represent our fear of the inverted other.
They codified divine perfection as warm, light, male and associated with the ethereal world beyond the moon, while evil imperfection was cold, dark, female and bound to the corrupt world below the moon. All who did not conform to divine goodness--including un-holy women and Jews--were considered evil and ascribed a melancholic, blood hungry and demonic physiology.
This construct was the basis for anti-woman and anti-Jewish discourse through the early modern period and would persist through modern Western culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in horror films, where the transgressive bodies of the witch, the vampire and the werewolf represent our fear of the inverted other.
Brenda S. Gardenour Walter is associate professor of history at the Saint Louis College of Pharmacy, USA. Her research examines the role of Aristotelian discourse, learned medicine, and scholastic theology in the construction of alterity and the continued influence of medieval otherness on the horror genre. She lives in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA.