6 Popular Monsters Myths (That Prove Humanity Is Doomed)

If you don't believe in monsters, you're part of a tiny minority of humans. Pretty much all of the cultures on Earth have believed in monsters for most of their history and, even stranger, they all believed in the same monsters. We recently pointed out that every culture has some variation of the vampire legend and that's true of all the standard monsters--zombies, werewolves, etc.

Mexico's werewolves leave much to be desired.

But why? Well, it has to do with the wiring of the human brain, the evolution of cultures and, most importantly, the fact that people are dicks. All of which may spell bad news for the human race...

Zombies were inadvertently invented by a nameless stray dog, thousands of years ago.

I'm not kidding.

Been Around Since...

"I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living... I shall make the dead outnumber the living."

Where do you think the above line comes from? George Romero? That one movie about the army of Nazi Zombies?

It's from an ancient Babylonian epic that was written five thousand years ago. It's one of the oldest written works we know about. So forget about Night of the Living Dead or even the old Haitian Voodoo zombie priests. Zombies go way back. There's even a zombie army in the freaking Old Testament.

Which brings us to that random stray dog.

Experts think that back before we even had such a thing as stories or even language, the whole idea of resurrected undead came when some dog sniffed some rotting meat a few inches under loose soil: a recently-buried body. The dog digs up a hand, chews on it a bit, then runs off when he hears people coming. The people show up, see a single hand jutting up from the dirt and run like hell. "He's coming back! SHIT!"

Thousands and thousands of years later, you'll see that exact same image on the covers of zombie novels and movie posters: the rotting hand, clawing up from the ground. It's stamped into our consciousness.

For the Love of God, Why?

People back then already suspected the dead were a bunch of douchebags because anyone who hung around rotting, oozing corpses tended to get sick. Not knowing what microbes were, they declared the dead (and areas where the dead hung out) to be "cursed" or "haunted." So already people knew corpses were something to be afraid of.

But people who study things like zombies say there is a psychological element; that seeing humans turned inhuman raises some really awful doubts about human nature. What if all of the things we think make us human--our thoughts, our feelings for our loved ones--is all pointless bullshit? After all, even insects live, eat, have sex and build things, and they do it all without "minds" or "souls" or even a simple high-five to celebrate a job well done. So all that stuff we think makes us special... what does it matter?

So, when confronted by a human who's been transformed into a mindless, shambling predator, the terror is in the sneaking suspicion that we're looking into a mirror.

Jesus. Let's pause for a boob break.

But then you have to take into account...

The "People are Dicks" Factor:

Of course, when we fear that humans are, at bottom, nothing more than mindless animals, what we really mean is other people are mindless animals.

So what happens is zombies now get used as symbols for every group we fear and hate. It's no secret that Romero used zombies to symbolize the communist hordes in his first movie, and mindless consumers in his second. Today, Resident Evil makes zombies the foot soldiers of an evil corporation and mad scientists. All of it plays to the "us vs. them" theme, "us" as the "real," thinking and feeling humans; zombies in the role of "them," ie whatever group of immoral rabble is destroying the world this week.

Also, as we've pointed out before, zombies are the last enemies that are considered politically correct to slaughter. In an era when we're even supposed to feel guilty about killing robots (I, Robot) and aliens (The Day the Earth Stood Still), we'll give up our right to splatter zombie brains when you pry it from our cold, dead fingers.

Not only does every culture have some variation of the vampire, they're so freaking popular right now that you could start a damned religion around them. Hell, somebody probably already has.

Been Around Since...

Let's put it this way: There are shards of ancient Persian pottery depicting blood-sucking creatures. That pre-dates all written records, folks.

But the more specific "dead guy rising from the grave to suck blood" vampire (and in fact, the word "vampire") comes from Eastern Europe folklore, where they combined fear of blood suckers with the always-present fear of the reanimated dead (yes, the vampire also probably owes its invention to that same fucking dog).

He is currently owed $40-billion in royalties.

For the Love of God, Why?

Vampires were considered a separate species from the zombie thanks to the fact that no two corpses rot in exactly the same way. Sometimes the skin flakes off in such a way as to leave the remaining skin looking smooth and undamaged and gases from decomposition can cause the body to inflate, giving the appearance of being fat or healthier than they were at death. Also, skin tightens around fingernails and hair, so it looks like it has grown. Dig one up and you'd get the impression it had just spent the night roaming the countryside.

Cracked.com Legal reminds you that this site does not officially
encourage readers to fact-check this article by unearthing a corpse.

But why would they dig it up in the first place?

Diseases like tuberculosis and bubonic plague were rampant. They would rip apart the lungs and make the corpse bleed at the mouth. So you have a village where suddenly everyone is dying of the same symptoms, seemingly "drained" of their life or energy, and here's this bastard in his coffin, obviously faking death, with goddamned blood around his mouth! Put a stake through his heart already!

But then, in an awesome twist that no one could have predicted, the idea of the vampire kind of gave people a boner. Sexy stories emerged of handsome, powerful vampires exchanging body fluids by sucking on the necks of hot women. There's another few centuries of popularity for you. Today you can watch an episode of True Blood right until the screen is obscured by your erection.

A True Blood vampire "attack."

The "People are Dicks" Factor:

Hey, remember how they tended to blame diseases on vampires? It turns out many of our superstitions stem from the first rule of human dickery: Everything bad has to be someone's fault. Thus you have the 18th Century vampire panics--the vampire version of the witch hunts when a whole lot of accused vampires were hunted and killed (though the body count was not as high as the witch hunts, thanks to the somewhat hilarious fact that many of the accused were corpses).

Of course they have the same "humans as predators" appeal as zombies, but with the added twist that it makes being a vampire seem kind of awesome. The message of the vampire is that in order to achieve absolute power, we must treat our fellow humans as prey. And as others have brilliantly pointed out, most of us only hate the idea if we think we're on the "prey" side of that equation.

Wait... what does it say about us that the vampire is now pretty much our main pop culture hero?

I think it says we're dicks.

We're not talking about modern day Wiccans here. We're talking about this:

Warts, green skin, riding on a broom, owns a cauldron. Honestly, who the fuck came up with that combination? A broom? Why a broom?

The answer is far weirder than you think.

Been Around Since...

Talk of black magic spells that can cause sickness or death, and people who cast them, goes back to ancient Babylonia which again means it goes back as far as the written words. So we're talking thousands of years before the Witch Hunts that happened in Europe.

For the Love of God, Why?

None of it would likely have happened if anyone had a microscope.

Remember how we said vampires wound up the target of a "blame game" when disease outbreaks struck? No one got it worse than witches.

The way sickness had the ability to hop invisibly from household to household--even when the members avoided direct contact--was once considered absolute proof that dark magic existed. And as we have already established, someone had to be blamed, since blame is the only thing that makes us feel better in anxious times. But why did they take it out on (usually female) witches instead of, say, fat guys? Well...

Etching of a witch trial about to be interrupted by a motorcycle.

The "People are Dicks" Factor:

First, we wound up with the warty, green-skinned Halloween decoration-slash-Wizard of Oz villain we call a witch today because at some point we combined the "witch" with the "hag" or "crone"; ugly, old, cackling women who have turned up in scary stories going back millennia. In societies where women were considered worthless if they weren't bearing children, old women (and especially widows) were basically hated. So, they got cast as villains.

And why do they ride broomsticks? Well, one (awesome) theory is that women used to use broomsticks to take hallucinogenic drugs through their vaginas.

No, really. Some historians say the practitioners of witchcraft were using hallucinogenic plants like mandrake and belladonna to perform their "magic," and even believe they were flying. Such drugs work best when applied to the thin skin of mucus membranes... like the labia. So the story goes the "witches" would apply their "magic potion" to their broom sticks and "fly."

Kid! No!!

If you think all of this points to a really low opinion of women, you've basically figured out where witches come from. It really all comes down to good old-fashioned misogyny: men demanding utter dominance in the society, and hating--hating--the mysterious power that women (ie, boobs) have over them.

Thus a famous 15th Century witch-hunting manual warns that women are more susceptible to the dark arts because they're naturally weaker. They're also fond of tempting men into sin and naturally, witchcraft gives them the power to magically steal men's penises (it doesn't take Freud to puzzle that one out).

Another writer back in the day claimed that women performed witchcraft by strategically withholding sex. And by "back then" I of course mean a famous televangelist said that last month.

If that's not up-to-the-minute enough for you, on the day this article was written five accused witches were stripped, beaten and forced to eat human feces in India. Uh, yeah. Not so easy to make a Halloween decoration out of that.