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- Jan 22, 2008
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In Dance Macabre, Stephen King identifies what he calls three tarot cards of horror: archetypes to which, he claims, almost all monsters can be traced. They are:
The Werewolf – not just literally, but the concept of chaos and evil hiding inside or behind an ordered, kindly exterior. Jeckyll and Hyde is a good example.
The Vampire – this also would include zombies and anything else that feeds (literally or not) on another person. Essentially, parasites.
The Thing – a rampaging alien monster. Obviously, the creature from The Thing, Tolkien’s orcs, many of Lovecraft’s monsters and possibly heraldic things like dragons, whose horror derives from how unlike humanity they are and their capacity for destruction.
So, the Alien is obviously a Thing, but it also includes elements of the vampire and the werewolf, in a way. King also proposes The Ghost and The Bad Place as possible other tarot cards. Certainly ghosts appeal to something very basic in the human mind – almost every culture seems to have them. The Bad Place is interesting, because some of the best haunted houses are really just reflections of the characters who find them: The Shining and The Haunting of Hill House both use this concept. I wonder also if the hunting ground of a monster (a Thing) might count as a Bad Place: take the sea in which a monster or a shark is hiding, which can almost take on a sense of its own. But that might just be a matter of setting.
To this list, I would add The Impostor, as specifically something evil making a flawed job of passing itself off as human (this could be extended to be The Object Possessed by Evil, to include cars, machines and – yawn – porcelain dolls). This might just be a hybrid of the Werewolf and Thing, but I think it deserves a mention of its own. Obviously this would cover robots, but also perhaps certain ghosts and non-vampiric undead, and even really deranged humans (the villain from Gone Girl, say). Essentially, anything that lives in the Uncanny Valley (which I think would exclude Dracula and actual Werewolves – they’re not nice, but not in that specific way).
This is something I’ve become quite aware of recently: I realised that in writing fantasy, I was using a lot of ideas from science fiction and crime when I wanted to add a new element (as to whether this works, I don’t know). Has anyone else run across this, and are there any other archetypal monsters out there?
The Werewolf – not just literally, but the concept of chaos and evil hiding inside or behind an ordered, kindly exterior. Jeckyll and Hyde is a good example.
The Vampire – this also would include zombies and anything else that feeds (literally or not) on another person. Essentially, parasites.
The Thing – a rampaging alien monster. Obviously, the creature from The Thing, Tolkien’s orcs, many of Lovecraft’s monsters and possibly heraldic things like dragons, whose horror derives from how unlike humanity they are and their capacity for destruction.
So, the Alien is obviously a Thing, but it also includes elements of the vampire and the werewolf, in a way. King also proposes The Ghost and The Bad Place as possible other tarot cards. Certainly ghosts appeal to something very basic in the human mind – almost every culture seems to have them. The Bad Place is interesting, because some of the best haunted houses are really just reflections of the characters who find them: The Shining and The Haunting of Hill House both use this concept. I wonder also if the hunting ground of a monster (a Thing) might count as a Bad Place: take the sea in which a monster or a shark is hiding, which can almost take on a sense of its own. But that might just be a matter of setting.
To this list, I would add The Impostor, as specifically something evil making a flawed job of passing itself off as human (this could be extended to be The Object Possessed by Evil, to include cars, machines and – yawn – porcelain dolls). This might just be a hybrid of the Werewolf and Thing, but I think it deserves a mention of its own. Obviously this would cover robots, but also perhaps certain ghosts and non-vampiric undead, and even really deranged humans (the villain from Gone Girl, say). Essentially, anything that lives in the Uncanny Valley (which I think would exclude Dracula and actual Werewolves – they’re not nice, but not in that specific way).
This is something I’ve become quite aware of recently: I realised that in writing fantasy, I was using a lot of ideas from science fiction and crime when I wanted to add a new element (as to whether this works, I don’t know). Has anyone else run across this, and are there any other archetypal monsters out there?
In fact, for many authors "science" in "science fiction" is another synonym for "black magic". Such "science fiction" is actually a variety of fantasy or simply a fairy tale. So borrowing elements from pseudo-SF is normal.
