Monsters, Ontological and Moral

I’ve found myself returning again and again to this problem in my writing and speaking. I’m working through the idea that there are two types of monsters: ontological and moral. These two categories are overlapping, but also distinct. Often, the rhetoric of the monstrous can be put to dangerous uses when these two categories are blurred.

In this post, I’m going to first talk about how I’m thinking about these two categories; next up will be a deeper dive into how the blurring of categories can be deeply harmful.

The easiest way to think of a monster is as a creature that can’t exist in nature. This is Noël Carroll’s classic definition, a creature that is hybrid in ways that combine impossible categories. (His classic text A Philosophy of Horror breaks down all of the different kinds of combinations that create monstrous bodies.) This is an ontological monster – the monster is monstrous because of its body.

 So far, so good. But Carroll argues further that the foundational definition of horror is the presence of a monster – and a monster that’s recognized as such. (Monsters in fantasy works aren’t often treated as monstrous, because they’re not impossible according to the rules of the fantasy world.) So for Carroll, Dracula is a horror movie, but Psycho or Silence of the Lambs are not – they’re more something like suspense.

Intuitively, that doesn’t seem right to most of us. For me, Psycho is the easiest single film to point to as the launching pad for modern horror, so it doesn’t make sense to say it’s not really a horror film after all. Many scholars since Carroll have agreed – and the most common move is to say that, well, Norman Bates is actually a monster. He may have the physical characteristics of a normal human, but his abnormal psychology and extreme lack of empathy makes him monstrous. (Let’s note the problematics of associating monstrosity with mental illness, and move on. At least for now.)

So, the problem is solved, right? Movies can be horror because their human protagonist is, in some way, monstrous. We’ve expanded the definition of monstrosity enough to encompass Hannibal Lecter.

What we’ve really done is drawn a distinction between an ontological monster (one that is monstrous because of its body) and a moral monster (one that is monstrous because of its behavior). Often, these categories overlap. Dracula is both monstrous in body (he’s living and dead, he’s a human-like-being who can transform into mist or a bat), but also in his violent behavior. But then there are monsters like Frankenstein, monstrous in body but with a deeply empathetic character. (At least in the classic Universal horror film incarnation – his character in the Shelley novel is rather different.)

 What the 1931 version of Frankenstein understands – as do many more contemporary horror films – is that our natural inclination is to assume that ontological monstrosity is the same as moral monstrosity. If a creature is monstrous in body, he must be a bad dude.

There are some important implications for this – implications which will be the subject of the next post..