UCSD - University of California - San Diego

07/23/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 07/23/2026 09:09

Why Are We So Fascinated by Monsters

Published Date

July 23, 2026

Article Content

Frankenstein's creature is more than 200 years old. Dracula has been haunting the public imagination since the Victorian era. Godzilla first stomped onto movie screens in 1954. And somehow, we're still not done with them.

That enduring fascination will be on full display as San Diego Comic-Con returns this week, with programming that includes a behind-the-scenes look at Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein," celebrations of the original Universal monsters and an early look at Na Hong-jin's sci-fi monster epic "Hope." Beyond the convention, monsters are also having a moment on screen, with a wave of new takes on figures like Dracula and the Bride of Frankenstein.

So why have monsters endured for generations? And what can they reveal about the way we understand ourselves?

Bradley Voytek

UC San Diego neuroscientist Bradley Voytek brings a fitting perspective to those questions. A professor and chair of the Department of Cognitive Science in the School of Social Sciences, with affiliations in the School of Medicine's Neurosciences Graduate Program and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute in the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, Voytek is also co-author of "Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?," which uses the behavior of the fictional undead to explore how the human brain works.

Ahead of Comic-Con, we asked Voytek why monsters have endured for generations - and what our brains have to do with it.

Why are we so fascinated by monsters? What is it about these stories that continues to captivate us?

When Tim Verstynen and I wrote "Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?," we spent a lot of time thinking about what makes zombies such compelling fictional monsters. One of my favorite ways to think about this comes from Max Brooks, who wrote "World War Z": Zombies are a blank slate on which we can write our cultural theories.

You can see that in how zombie stories have evolved. George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" reflected racial tensions in America in the 1960s, while "Dawn of the Dead," set in a shopping mall, offered commentary on rampant consumerism. Later stories tapped into fears about environmental damage, nuclear fallout and genetic engineering.

It's the same monster, but we use it to reflect the cultural concerns and fears of the time. And now we're in another period with a lot of fear and uncertainty about things like jobs and artificial intelligence. I think we're going to see a boom in stories about robots and AI taking over because that's a big fear of ours right now.

Why are monsters such an effective way to process our fears?

Monster stories give us a safe way to engage with fears we can't always put into words. Sometimes you read the news and think, "Something feels off. The world seems scarier right now than it used to." You can't always explain where that feeling comes from, but it's easy to project those anxieties onto monsters in the dark.

I don't want to overprescribe a neuroscience explanation for why we love monsters. We all have anxieties - both cultural and individual - and many of those are evolutionarily mediated, meaning humans evolved to detect possible threats, even when we're not sure they're there.

Monster stories give those fears form and shape. We know we're anxious. We know we're scared. We just don't always know why. These stories let us engage with those feelings in a way that feels tangible.

What is happening in our brains that makes us so drawn to monsters and other things that frighten us?

Evolutionarily, it was to our advantage to hallucinate things in the dark at night. We were better off being on high alert and wondering, "What was that noise? What's that thing in the dark? Is there something out there?" than assuming everything was safe.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were a little anxious and jumpy than if they were overly confident and got eaten by whatever was lurking nearby.

Today, we've built a world that is incomprehensibly safer than anything our ancestors experienced. But we still have those primitive survival instincts. Monster stories tap into that tendency to stay alert for potential threats.

Read more news about: School of Medicine, School of Social Sciences

"We know we're anxious. We know we're scared. We just don't always know why. These stories let us engage with those feelings in a way that feels tangible." Bradley Voytek
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