A Monster Is What You Create

The monster I chose to discuss previously was the Boogeyman. To me, he exemplifies multiple of Cohen’s theses he wrote about in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”.  Cohen shares that monsters are creatures that stand as a cultural body and is something unknown by humans, adding to their terrifying identity.

 The Boogeyman doesn’t necessarily stand for a cultural belief or historical crisis in modern times, however it is cultural that its story is shared with children by parents all across America and even other countries. Also, the fact that the Boogeyman has been around for hundreds of years shows us how important monsters and story-telling in general are to everyone’s culture. I have not ever realized before reading this article that many of our monsters today and from the past were created because of cultural problems. I think that all monsters are created to teach a lesson or share a story about something that a group of people can never turn back from, as the movie Cloverfield shows us. In the case of the Boogeyman, he is was created to teach child to stay in their beds at night after the lights were shut up, a cruel trick but a smart way to eventually get a child into a sleeping pattern. In Cohen’s article, he also wrote about how all monsters come from an unknown or is “an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond.” As a child, the Boogeyman was exactly that, something from a different world, a world that lived under my bed or in the closet. Only hearing about the Boogeyman from stories also allowed me to imagine the scariest, most grotesque creature.  In the article, Cohen writes “Monsters are our children,” they allow us to grow them or to change them, they are what we make of them. And I think that this is exactly what I learned as I grew older, that a monster is only as big of threat as you make it out to be; that the Boogeyman is only a creature hiding in your room, when you want it to be there.