My Favorite Monster
The No Contact team, on their favorite monsters.
Jinn
It is said that angels were created on Wednesday, jinn on Thursday, and humans on Friday. So next time you're looking for a ghoulish activity to satiate your spooky senses, make it a Thursday, and instead of chanting Bloody Mary opposite a mirror, visit your local abandoned warehouse, go for a hike close to sunset, or fall asleep under a tree on the edge of a desert (preferably the Sahara). For optimal chances of things going bump in the night or getting tipsy with a slight possession, bring some bones and rotten flesh for jinn to snatch as dinner. Whether appearing from underground, as a black hound or fox, serpent or a scorpion, from within the rings of a redwood, an errant shadow on your wall in the dead of night, a mist on your morning run, or maybe a duplicate of your best friend, a jinni will first invoke their invisibility. Sometimes weeks before they make themselves known to you, collecting morsels of your life to use as knowledge against you in the art of persuasion. They revel in mischief and do not mind if their idea of play becomes your undoing. On the other hand, they can be quite nice, offer you favors, operate in a guise of altruism. That's the scary part. Made from fire and air, they can vanish at a moment's notice, whirling into sand, leaving you in a dust of loneliness. Three wishes? You're going to wish you never rubbed that lamp. — S.S. Mandani
Carmilla
Carmilla is the best vampire out there, bar none. The eponymous character in Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 vampire novella, Carmilla is moody, possessive, supernaturally powerful and enchanting. Carmilla came highly recommended; my friend Bri had read it in her Irish Story class and was so into it. This nineteenth century novella about a vampire in a coded lesbian relationship delivers. Laura, a young woman, and her family take in this enigmatic woman, Carmilla, after finding her in a carriage crash. The two women develop this intense, codependent relationship that paves the way for so many other stories of queer friendship. Years before reading, I’d devoured The Talented Mr. Ripley, and this too hit on a deep level. The queer coding is not so subtle, either. Carmilla wants Laura completely: “if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine.” Whoa, now that’s some real yearning.Le Fanu packs so many horror devices into his slim novel: there’s the sense that they’ve known each other before, Carmilla is the dark to Laura’s light, even some hand of the author anagrams cast a Tom Riddle “surprise.” The text beautifully conjures a number of queer experiences — obsession with a best friend, nighttime tete-a-tetes reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Obscure Object — and Carmilla herself is an ancient vampire. Stoker’s Dracula may provide a metaphorical read on anxiety surrounding homosexuality, but Carmilla fully embraces its underlying queer desire. — Michael Colbert
Jaws
Jaws* is a natural favorite monster for a boy who spent every summer in New England, a region of this country full of people who seem like they’d be better off on the business end of Jaws. I watched Jaws a lot in New Hampshire at my dad’s place—and there’s a hacky lot that could be said about how Jaws represents COVID, and the mayor in Jaws is every politician in America. Obviously the mayor in Jaws is the real monster—he should know better but he keeps sending wave after human wave of delirious New Englander into the jaws of Jaws. Actually, maybe Quint is the real monster because he smashes the radio and almost gets everybody killed, and he delivered the Hiroshima bomb on the USS Indianapolis and is therefore certainly responsible for more deaths than Jaws. Brody, as a cop, is obviously the real monster too—retiring to Amity after too many use-of-force inquiries and Dick Dryfus is also a monster because he’s rich and doesn’t let them use his fancy boat with the fishfinder to fish-find Jaws when the chips are down. Jaws is my favorite monster because he is God’s scourge for the wretched and decadent New Englander, and as cool as it is when Robert Shaw puts his nails on the chalkboard and says “You all know me, you all know how I make my living…” Quint got what he deserved. — Nathaniel Berry
*Jaws is the name of the shark in Jaws.
Werewolves
Werewolves were always my favorite monsters—the man-wolf hybrid, lycanthrope, or loup-garou, whatever you want to call it, a person who found themselves in a liminal state between human and beast. People who lost control. People who could not contain the violence inside them. People who were good-hearted but who feared their true, deep power because it hurt others—a supernatural power that made them unlike others and that made them dangerous. Today, the idea of the monster within (or monster among us) continues to resonate. Usually in pop culture, werewolves are infected by a bite like zombies, or they’re cursed to turn into mindless bloodthirsty creatures, but their defining characteristic is they are a hidden threat to the community that must be found out and destroyed. I’m not as interested in that particular plot, or in the so-called realistic mechanics of a werewolf, like how you spot them, or how you kill them: I want to know who they are as characters in the stories I read—what they think, feel, and believe—and why we feel the need to keep hunting them. — Benjamin Pfeiffer
Roz from Monsters Inc.
Do you remember seeing Monsters Inc. as a young child and being terrified not by the creatures intended to give you a scare in bed at night but instead by the grouchy administrator for Scare Floor F, or are you a bit more well adjusted than myself? Regardless, Roz's grumbling attitude toward all of her colleagues and saturating severe sarcasm set me up (somewhat ironically) for what I could expect in my own adult, office culture many moons later. On my worst days, I find myself identifying with Roz: v-neck sweater, oversized spectacles, and green complexion to compliment a gravelly, somewhat masculine voice (fun fact: Roz is the only female monster in the film franchise to be voiced by a man). Also, still to this day, almost nothing scares me more than judgmental older women, or the vague idea that I have forgotten to file some kind of paperwork. — Rachel A.G. Gilman
Red Guitar/Green Slime
In the late 1960s my parents bought me a shiny red Harmony Rocket guitar. It was nerdy and uncool but, as a hollowbody electric, it was useful for playing the feedback intro to “Foxey Lady”. My friend and local guitar wizard Joey Ianuzzelli could play the rest of the chords on his very sexy, very rock & roll sunburst solidbody. We were ten-year-olds doing Hendrix—fuck yeah.
When we weren’t jamming down somebody’s basement we’d go to movies like The Green Slime. When Commander Jack Rankin travels to space station Gamma 3 to destroy an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, strange goo gets all over everything … and it multiplies. Monsters arise. Not even frickin’ lasers can kill them.
The Green Slime is the worst movie I ever paid money to see but it has my favorite kind of monster. It’s the monster you cannot kill, that gets stronger with your every laughable attempt. Just when you think it might have gone away, it oozes under the bedroom door in the middle of the night. It’s the silent, slithering, shapeshifting presence that never truly dies.
Why settle for one-offs like Godzilla and Hannibal Lecter when you can have a monster that lasts a lifetime.
After the movie they gave everyone a bumper sticker that said THE GREEN SLIME ARE COMING!, which I immediately stuck onto my guitar to upcool it. My mom was pissed when she found out but Joey Ianuzzelli said it looked kinda neat. — Paul Ruta
Death Angels
I attended an outdoor viewing of A Quiet Place a couple of years ago, which scared me silly, an experience made far more nerve-wracking by every passing car honk or motorcycle rev (seriously, THIS movie for an outdoor screening? Really??). Also, I love to talk, so I would absolutely die in a silence-based universe like the one in A Quiet Place — these monsters seem tailor-made to my weaknesses. But, my favorite, absolute favorite iteration of the A Quiet Place monster is the rendition released by Funko Pop in 2019 December. How absolutely adorable! What a miniature terror! That's my kind of monster alright, and I'll be chattering away at it, long into the night. — Jemimah Wei
