Monster Scholar

Happy Turkey Day from Monster Land! I'll leave you today with some musings on the The Hunger Game s whose horrific re-interpretation of the cornucopia puts new twist on our ages-old horn of plenty. The Hunger Games is a film adaptation of the wildly popular teen novel of the same name. Set in a futuristic version of the U.S., the country is divided into 12 districts ruled by the Panem. The Panem created the Hunger Games after a revolution that resulted in the destruction of the 13th district. A male and female tribute from each district are sent to compete in the Hunger Games, but only one will make it out alive. The winner's district will receive gifts of food and fuel for a single year while the other districts struggle to eke out a meager living. The plot is a cross between Lord of the Flies and Battle Royale as the tributes are trained to kill one another in the ultimate televised sporting event. The cornucopia of The Hunger Games is a golden horn that contains food

I am head over heels for these art prints by Dan Hillier . They are the perfect mix of Victorian style etchings showing polite scenes of fashionable men and women and the grotesque.I love how the seemingly ordinary people sprout tentacles and snake transforming them into Cthulhu and lamia-like creatures. Great fun. If you act by December 10th Dan will send you a print of one of his beautiful grotesqueries in time for Christmas. Tis the season.

I was thinking on my favorite subject—monsters—when I realized that these creatures mostly rise out of folklore, find their way into literature then blossom onto both the big and small screen. This shouldn’t surprise us considering that monsters have been around or ages and only the way in which we tell their stories has changed with time. In this three part series, I will explore the origins of three classic monsters—vampires, werewolves and zombies—that have endured the past and continue to haunt our present. Zombies have been around since the earliest forms of writing. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh the vengeful goddess Ishtar vows: I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! The revolt of the dead against the living has been a popular image of horror and zombies can trace their folkloric lineage back to West African Voudon and Haitian voodoo. In both relig