Our fascination with monsters tells us a lot about ourselves

As frightening as monsters are, they have always captivated us. From chimeras and hydras to bunyips and golems, creatures have emerged from our imaginations throughout history and across cultures. Today, they explode onto our cinema screens with incredible regularity. Given how scary monsters can be, it seems paradoxical that we keep making them. In fact, they are actually very important to us, and are deeply rooted in our evolutionary history and psychology.

Monsters are the fantastical descendants of our co-evolution with predatory animals: they are wired into our neurocircuitry. Snakes, for example, were some of our ancestors’ first deadly…