10/29/2025
Let’s Talk About the Monsters of Gothic Literature
Humanity creates monsters, and in them, it pours what it despises, fears, or secretly desires.
As humanity changes, so do its monsters.
The ghost that haunts us today—say, in The Shining (the film, not the novel)—may preserve the idea of a ghost, but not its original essence. The ghost of The Canterville Ghost, written at the close of the Gothic tradition, belongs to another time and another imagination.
Even their form and aesthetic evolve with each era. What doesn’t change is their presence: monsters keep returning. Humanity never stops recreating the same beings that threaten to destroy it.
There are three monsters we’ve been battling and reinventing since the Gothic began: the vampire, the creature, and the ghost.
Each carries symbolic tones that have endured since 1764, when The Castle of Otranto first gave shape to our collective fears.
🩸 The Vampire: Carmilla, Dracula, Lestat and Louis, Edward Cullen… all vampires, and yet as different from each other as any human is from another.
In their figure live the ideas of contagion, seduction, and pleasure that ends in death. The vampire forces us to confront our desire for the forbidden — our fear of death intertwined with our longing for it.
⚡ The Creature: Frankenstein’s monster.
A creation born outside divinity, entirely human and therefore flawed, reminds us of the sense of abandonment that comes from losing our higher origin.
The creature is a modern being: intelligent, rational, and yet lost. In its very existence lies an excess of reason that leads not to progress, but to the downfall of the human spirit.
👻 The Ghost: the return of what we thought was gone.
It embodies our inability to live fully in the present. The ghost shows us what remains unresolved, what we owe to ourselves, to others, to history.
There’s something essential that all these monsters share: an inner contradiction, the ability to exist between extremes.
The vampire is the living dead.
The creature is artificial nature.
The ghost is present absence.
Perhaps our deepest fear is this: that boundaries are illusions, and we fear what we cannot define.
So next time you read or write about monsters, think about their symbolic meaning.
What do our fears say about us?
Tell us: what’s your favorite Gothic story?
