![]() ![]() Most monsters function as disgusting threats that heroes and gods vanquish, repudiate, and cleanse from the community. To give our brains credit, however, our pre-scientific ancestors didn’t need a more nuanced understanding of whales, and we had as much knowledge about them as was probably necessary for survival. Our folk taxonomy concerning whales reveals the unsophisticated quality of our natural classifications if it swims in the water and looks like a fish, it’s a fish. Not only do kids tend to see whales as “fish,” but early natural history made this error too. Even as small children, we seem capable of grouping people, birds, bugs, trees, and fish together into kinds-similar within their category but dissimilar across categories. We have a way of organizing the world into predictable categories for easy understanding, cognition, and manipulation. So why all the taxonomic mashing and mixing? Humans have an innate or an early developmental folk taxonomy of the world, according to psychologist Dan Sperber and anthropologist Pascal Boyer. More recently we have regular hybridizing of humans and computers. Literature over the last two millennia, from Beowulf to Tolkien to Rowling, has added countless composite creatures and shape-shifters. The many Greek hybrid creatures-centaurs, satyrs, mermaids, Pegasus, Hydra, griffins, chimeras-are constantly resurrected in Hollywood. Ganesha, son of Shiva, is humanoid with an elephant head. Vishnu, in India, manifests as a fierce lion-man monster, Narasimha, in several Hindu texts. In the Epic of Gilgamesh (2100 B.C.), heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu battle a hybrid monster named Humbaba, described as having a lion’s head and hands, but a scaly body. The sphinx in Giza, half-human and half-lion, is at least 4,500 years old. Composite creatures appear in our earliest literature and turn up in Upper Paleolithic cave paintings. Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty ImagesĮvery culture, it seems, has monstrous mash-ups in their folklore and religion. MONSTER MASH: The face-hugger in Alien taps into fears and terrors symbolized in folklore and religions throughout human history. ![]() But the hybrid nature of the Alien monster takes us deeper into ourselves and history. My paralyzing dread of the face-hugger in Alien may be a vestige of ancestral primate experiences with snakes and spiders. We are wired for emotional jolts and these feelings have adaptive benefits. But they also reveal important truths about human cognition and cultural evolution. ![]() It’s easy to interpret our fears of alien predators as nothing more than superficial horror ginned up by the Hollywood fright machine. Not only did it penetrate the human host’s throat, planting the chest-burster in the gut, but it was intrinsically grotesque, an odious, zoological mash-up of scurrying spider and slithering snake. While the full-grown xenomorph alien was chilling, the larval stage face-hugger was terrifying. The hair on the back of my neck was perpetually up and I had the jittery demeanor of a combat veteran. It scared me into a month-long spell of anxiety. I was 13 years old when the movie Alien was released. ![]()
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