Figure 1. Digital collage for Self as Monster assignment, by S. Stahoski. Reproduced with permission.
This essay introduces an undergraduate honors course that approaches monsters as products of monstrification, a discursive act of interpellation. Students move from analyzing to creating and inhabiting monsters, and the monsters they produce reveal concerns about identity, embodiment, and technological encroachment that echo themes from internet folklore and creepypasta traditions. By examining monsters as constructs of participatory meaning-making activities, students grasp that monstrification can affect themselves as well as others.
Monsters, whether drawn from traditional myths and legends or more contemporary digitally mediated cultural narratives, function as “meaning-making machines” (Halberstam 1995, 21). As is often noted in the field of monster studies (e.g., Beal 2022, 1; Scott 2007, 1; Weinstock 2020, 2), monsters (monstrum) have historically served as signs intended to show or reveal (monstrare), or remind, admonish, advise, warn, or teach (monere) anyone capable of correctly interpreting them. In other words, “[m]onsters are, at their base nature, by their essential ontology, pedagogic tools” (Mittman 2017, 19) or, more simply, “[t]he monster’s body is a pedagogical body” (Cohen 2017, 228)
However, teaching monsters in the classroom poses ethical and pedagogical challenges. The language of monstrosity has, especially in Western culture, been used to justify exclusion, violence, and oppression by casting certain bodies, identities, and behaviors as less than human, even actively dangerous. Moreover, Western monster-theory narratives that treat monsters only as symbolic figures—as expressions of psychological anxieties, social fears, or evolutionary responses— may privilege analytical explanation over lived cultural understanding.
Note to Educators: Assignments that include student self-reflection alongside topics that may be triggering or traumatic require additional care and scaffolding in the classroom. Please ensure that you and your students know what resources are available as support if you include a personal monster-creation component to the assignment.
Douglas E. Cowan notes that approaches that merely “explain away” monsters risk not only dismissing the possibility of the monster itself but also the cultural and religious frameworks within which such beings are meaningful (2025, 25). Avoiding epistemological ethnocentrism might require regarding monsters as, ultimately, relational and rhetorical constructs—the products of a process of “monstrification.” That is, to label something or someone a “monster” is to perform an act of interpellation, a discursive maneuver that positions its subject within cultural systems of meaning and power: Monsters are spoken into existence. This perspective shifts the focus from “explaining away” monsters to examining how they are bestowed an identity as monsters. Analysis of the purposes and consequences of such monstrification may then follow.
This essay focuses on two assignments in the undergraduate honors course We Are All Monsters Here that approach monsters as the consequence of monstrification; it also discusses trends that have emerged in students’ monster-creation presentations that seem to situate their practices adjacent to the tradition of participatory storytelling, especially as practiced within the genre of internet horror.
In We Are All Monsters Here, students are asked to analyze monsters as cultural texts and engage with the processes by which monstrosity is assigned, resisted, and, sometimes, embraced. In doing so, they discursively transform shared anxieties into culturally recognizable narrative and symbolic forms. These assignments help students differentiate between two related actions: interpellating the monster, bringing it into being through various discursive practices, and interpreting the monster, explaining what it means within its cultural and historical context. Students move between these tasks throughout the semester, first analyzing examples of monstrification, then monstrifying contemporary social anxieties, and finally confronting the “monstrous self” by monstrifying themselves or reflecting on how they have been monstrified by others. It is, after all, a disquieting truth that we can be, and probably have been, interpellated as monsters by somebody else at one time or another. Understanding that monstrosity is not only something we impose on others, but that others may impose on us, helps students interrogate the ways in which social identities are constructed, contested, and transformed. Two texts anchor this progression: Cohen’s (1996) essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” provides the foundational analytical framework to which students return throughout the semester, while Valente’s (2010) poem “A Monstrous Manifesto” reminds students that identifying as a monster can help establish solidarity with others who have been marginalized and monstrified.
Class assignments were designed according to principles of student engagement (James and Brookfield 2014, Chap. 1) that emphasize personal relevance, multimodal learning, and unfamiliar or unexpected tasks. For instance, weekly assignments might ask students to photograph “uncanny” campus spaces or map a hypothetical zombie outbreak onto the campus and local community. These tasks encourage students to reinterpret the familiar environment in which they live through monstrous perspectives and situate themselves as both analytical outsiders and potentially threatened insiders.
In addition to engaging students with monster narratives and theory, the assignments also seek to familiarize them with processes of monstrification, gradually moving them from critique to creation to self-recognition. To avoid inadvertently promoting monstrification, We Are All Monsters Here focuses discussion on nonhuman monsters, although that may include monsters that appear human or were at one time human, such as zombies. Students are discouraged from describing regular humans as “monsters,” a conversation that begins on the first day of class when, inevitably, someone answers the questions of “what’s your favorite monster?” or “what monster scares you the most?” by referring to an ordinary human such as the fictional serial killer Dexter or the real serial killer Ed Gein. This begins what will become a semester-long discussion of monstrification. Although these ordinary humans might be described as inhuman, they are not nonhuman; their actions may be monstrous, but to describe them as a monster, students are reminded, is to exercise a rhetorical strategy often employed to encourage racist, religious, and political prejudice and excuse oppressive actions, laws, and policies.
To better illustrate the point, on the second day of class, students break into groups to view and discuss examples of human monstrification in the media: the 1800s media coverage of Jack the Ripper, which includes speculations about the Ripper’s social class and background; contemporary political news coverage in which politicians label opponents as monsters; wartime propaganda depicting nations/religious groups as monsters; and political cartoons from the late 1800s and early 1900s that depict different racial/ethnic groups as monsters. These examples expose them to different ways in which monstrification has been used as a strategy of dehumanization and provides real-world context for some of the analyses they will read later in the semester. Because of the offensive nature of the imagery involved, however, instructors should clearly explain the purpose of the exercise beforehand and provide examples that avoid turning the activity into an experience of individual exposure or vulnerability for any students whose identities might be implicated by a monstrifying image.
Monster Creation
The Monster Creation project, assigned about halfway through the semester, marks a key pedagogical turning point in which students shift their focus from interpretation to interpellation. Working in small groups, students must design original monsters that embody some current, socially relevant anxiety, framing their work with Cohen’s seven theses and other concepts drawn from monster theory. To encourage a creative approach and draw attention to the larger social context of monstrification, students are asked to present their monster within a fictive framework; for example, teams have chosen to be scientists at a national research conference, activists trying to protect a monster during a congressional hearing, podcasters investigating mysterious deaths, and a public relations team trying to rebrand a monster, among other scenarios. They must also create and present appropriate artifacts related to the monster, its creation, and/or its reception.
In a sense, this is a monstrous assignment. Monsters transgress, collapse, and challenge our ontological categories, as Cohen’s third thesis asserts, and this assignment violates what are often taken to be natural boundaries between “play” and “scholarship,” “truth” and “fiction.” Presenting academic material in a playfully fictive format is an unfamiliar exercise to many students. However, allowing students freedom in how they create and present their monster makes the project personally meaningful, and adding a role-play component requires them to work in a variety of modalities. Team members are encouraged to apply skills and concepts from their majors and minors to the project, resulting in presentations that have included detailed descriptions of parasitic lifecycles or how alien prosthetic brain and spinal cord implants might work, debates over rebranding techniques for a maligned algorithmic monster, and lists of warning signs that may indicate monstrous infection. Student artifacts have included poetry, paintings, sculptures, sounds, newspaper articles, videos, and documents such as a congressional bill proposing a law to protect supernatural entities. About half the teams have chosen to present in costume. During the post-presentation question-and-answer period, the audience probes the mythology and assumptions behind the monster and soon begins asking questions that refer to the previous teams’ monsters; this inspired in-character responses from both teams that unintentionally began weaving together a new monster mythos specific to each semester.
Although race, gender, and sexuality have been historically significant sites of monstrification, and remain subjects of controversy in public discourse, the overwhelming majority of monsters that students have created for this assignment focus on anxieties surrounding the self, such as loss of identity and cognitive control or bodily instability and malleability. This may indicate that students are internalizing the course’s caution about the monstrification of marginalized groups, but it also suggests that students associate the task of co-creating a monster, its backstory, and its artifacts with their previous experiences, often in middle and high school, consuming participative internet folklore—particularly creepypasta’s typically apolitical themes of anxiety and unstable subjectivity. Students’ collaborative work creating a monster and its accompanying narrative for classroom consumption might be considered analogous to contemporary folklore production, with the teams drawing on the established techniques, traditions, and tropes of online horror, even though the dissemination of their newly created horror is primarily limited to the classroom and any websites or media accounts that they set up for their presentation.
Student-created monsters that point toward the loss of self and/or of the consciousness of self have usually taken the form of social media memes or viral algorithms, echoing contemporary concerns over the psychological effects of social media and too much “screen time” in general, as well as fears about the effects of generative AI on creativity and original thought. Students admitted that they struggle with their own social media habits or are concerned by the ways friends and family members have been affected by biased or incorrect online information. Their self-aware memes and algorithmic monsters encroaching on body and mind draw on familiar creepypasta territory inhabited by monsters such as Smile Dog or Ben Drowned, collapsing what Cooley and Milligan describe as “the comfortable dichotomy of subjects acting upon objects by creating narrative spaces in which haunted objects encroach upon the lives of their victimized subjects” (2018, 194). Along similar lines, new monsters representing anxieties about bodily permeability and transformation, often resulting from biotechnological experiments gone awry, point to body-horror themes of violation, mutation, or destabilization of the flesh as a site of identity (Halberstam 1995; Creed 2020, 216) and may share company with creepypasta monsters such as Jeff the Killer or the victims of The Russian Sleep Experiment. Students have mentioned being inspired by contemporary anxieties around assigned versus self-identified sex and gender and the constellation of issues surrounding cultures of body-shaming and lookism.
Additionally, corporate manipulation and cover-ups have been central to many of the new monsters’ backstories. In addition to being common tropes in science fiction and horror, students noted that their choices reflected media coverage of corporate malfeasance and concerns over the unethical behaviors of some billionaire CEOs and their corporations. However, a majority of the students’ scenarios depicted small-scale investigators, such as podcasters, successfully uncovering unethical experimentation and confronting the corporate perpetrators of monstrosity. In three cases, the scenarios included scientific or corporate representatives inadvertently revealing themselves by the end of the presentation: taken over by the monsters they had created or exposed as a result of competitive in-fighting. These narratives may help assuage students’ sense of social powerlessness by allowing them to roleplay scenarios in which individuals call shady corporate behavior to account. Yet, while most presentations acknowledged Cohen’s second thesis—that the monster always escapes—by pointing out that the monsters or techniques leading to their creation haven’t been stopped, few directly engaged with the classic horror-genre question their scenarios seemed to pose: is the creation or the creator more dangerous? Nevertheless, by roleplaying scenarios that called corporate creators to account, students wrote themselves a victory over which it seems they considered to be the more dangerous of the two.
The Monstrous Self
The final class project, The Monstrous Self, returns students to the monstrification of ordinary humans that was discussed at the beginning of class. By this time, however, they have been armed with a semester’s worth of reading, discussion, and reflection. Referring to Valente’s poem, “A Monstrous Manifesto,” and Cohen’s seventh thesis, “the monster stands at the threshold … of becoming,” the assignment asks students to represent themselves as a monster that could, for example, represent some stigmatized or secret aspect of themselves or some deep fear or concern they harbor that arises to transform them. Students are invited to draw, paint, photograph, or record themselves as the monster, or write a personal essay or story narrated by their monstrous self. In addition to this creative work, they must write a short reflective essay that applies monster theory to explain why they chose to monstrify themselves in such a way.
Although the rest of the assignments are either posted openly in class discussion boards or presented in front of class, this assignment is individually completed and available only to the professor. Instructors adopting the assignment should review institutional policies regarding their federally or institutionally mandated reporting responsibilities should a student disclose certain types of information—including sexual harassment, sexual violence, or abusive conduct—in the context of the assignment and advise students, in class and in the assignment’s written instructions, about the types of content that could trigger a reporting requirement. It’s important that students understand that any promise of confidentiality has limits so they can make an informed decision regarding what they want to share with their instructor.
In this assignment, students engage with processes of monstrification not solely as an interpreter or interpellator, but also as the interpellated. They are asked to inhabit the body of the monster and consider the lived experience of being monstrified. Their creative submissions have included sketches, digitally manipulated photographs, a sculpture, acrylic paintings, short stories, and monstrous dialogs. Two students gave permission to reproduce their “Self as Monster” images for this article as credited (Figures 1-3); their images represent manifestations of the personal anxieties or fears, or social expectations or stereotypes, that they felt made them “monstrous” in their own or others’ eyes. Their reflective essays remain confidential.
Figure 2.
Figure 3. Sculpture for Self as Monster assignment, by C.A.T. Second image shows detail. Reproduced with permission.
Some students choose to engage with externally applied dehumanizing rhetoric by reflecting on ways in which they have been the subject of monstrification by others because of ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, disabilities, medical conditions, or past actions. Others take a more psychological perspective, monstrifying themselves by exaggerating their inner drives, anxieties, or fears and depicting the ways in which this exaggeration might reveal itself in a monstrously embodied sense. Student work, which can range from painfully frank and vulnerable to somewhat distant and objective, requires them to examine themselves as both a subject called out by the rhetoric of monstrification and an agent who may adopt, reshape, or resist that rhetoric. Many students sought to resist monstrification, but some identified strengths in being a “monster,” including styling themselves as fierce defenders of others who share their backgrounds or as destructive monsters intent on shattering others’ prejudices and biases.
The monsters that students create and inhabit over the course of the semester reflect not only their individual anxieties but also their participation in evolving systems of storytelling—particularly those of internet horror, wherein processes of monstrification shape the ways in which fear, identity, and power are understood and negotiated. Framing monsters as discursive constructs—products of an interpellative process of monstrification—avoids dismissing the reality of monsters within cultural and religious belief systems while emphasizing that monstrosity emerges through acts of perception and description that are always entangled with power. In this way, We Are All Monsters Here strives to leave students prepared to recognize, navigate, and negotiate monstrifying rhetoric, whether applied to others or to themselves, long after they leave the university.
Dru Pagliassotti is a professor in the Communication Department of California Lutheran University. Their work largely focuses on representations of diversity in popular media such as comics, film, and fiction.
Works Cited
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Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Culture (Seven Theses). In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 3-25
—. 2017. Afterword: Monster Classroom (Seven Theses). In Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us, eds. Adam Golub and Heather Richardson Hayton. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 228-35. Kindle.
Cooley, Kevin and Caleb Andrew Milligan. 2018. Haunted Objects, Networked Subjects: The Nightmarish Nostalgia of Creepypasta. Horror Studies. 9.2:193-211.
Cowan, Douglas E. 2025. The Metanarrative Problem of Monsters … in Theory. In The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters, eds. Brandon R. Grafius and John W. Morehead. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 15-31.
Creed, Barbara. 2020. Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection. In The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey A. Weinstock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 211–25
Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
James, Al and Stephen D. Brookfield. 2014. Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers. Newark, NJ: Wiley. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Mittman, Asa Simon. 2017. Teaching Monsters from Medieval to Modern: Embracing the Abnormal. In Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us, eds. Adam Golub and Heather Richardson Hayton. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 19-34. Kindle.
Scott, Niall. 2007. Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. New York: Rodopi.
Valente, Catherynne M. 2010. A Monstrous Manifesto. October 10. http://catvalente.livejournal.com/610889.html
Weinstock, Jeffrey A. 2020. The Monster Theory Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
URL
A Monstrous Manifesto http://catvalente.livejournal.com/610889.html