To the Romans, a monster was a warning sent by the gods
Monster comes from the Latin monstrum, rooted in moneo, to warn or foretell. For Greeks and Romans an unnatural birth or strange creature was a message of divine displeasure. The historian Suetonius even called a legless snake and a flying bird monstrous, simply because both seemed to defy nature.
Over time the word darkened. By the era of the philosopher and playwright Seneca it had taken on a philosophical sense, a horrifying visible disclosure of truth. Myth complicated the category further, because creatures such as the Hydra and Medusa were divine beings rather than natural animals, probably an inheritance from older Proto-Indo-European belief in which spirits, gods and monsters blurred together. Monsters are older than writing, and the study of what they reveal about a culture is called monstrophy.
Many monsters trace back to a human wrong. The Minotaur existed only because Minos kept a bull he had promised to Poseidon. Others are human figures who were never quite human, like the Gorgons, or who lost their humanity through something unnatural, like werewolves and Frankenstein's creature. Grendel in Beowulf set the pattern of the brutal, misshapen raider, while Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula laid the foundations of the modern literary monster.
Cinema reshaped them repeatedly. Silent-era monsters were mostly human-sized, and RKO's King Kong became the first giant monster picture of the sound age. Universal Studios built a franchise around Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, until the cycle went comic with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948. After the Second World War, giant creatures returned in a wave often linked to fears about nuclear weapons, beginning with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and followed by Japan's Godzilla, Britain's Gorgo and Denmark's Reptilicus. Hammer Film Productions brought colour to the genre in the late 1950s.
Not every monster is a villain. King Kong and Frankenstein's creature are often cast as misunderstood, the Hulk plays the monster as hero, and Shrek, Elmo and Chewbacca are plainly lovable. Pixar's Monsters, Inc. has its creatures harvest children's screams, and later laughter, as power. Japan leans especially towards gentle monsters, with My Neighbor Totoro and Pokémon among the most famous, while role-playing games use the word as a catch-all for any hostile creature a player must fight.
Source: Monster
