The Universal Monsters & Universal Fears

Let’s talk about writing villains today.

One idea a writer can use to create compelling villains is to tap into some of the the universal fears.

In some ways, those universal fears are embodied by the classical Universal monster movies.

I mentioned before that in Halloween 2025, I saw that a bunch of the old black and white Universal monster movies were on Prime Video, so I watched them for the first time since I was a kid.

They held up pretty well for movies that are nearly a century old. Especially considering that these were some of the very first movies ever made with sound, and the filmmakers were kind of figuring it out as they went along. DRACULA is a bit uneven because they tried to cram the play version of the book into a seventy minute movie, though Bela Lugosi’s performance as Dracula and Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing really carried the movie and helped define the characters in the public eye. But the others are all good, and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is legitimately a great movie.

But why have these particular movies lasted so long in the public consciousness? For that matter, why do people keep coming back to new stories of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Creature and the others? Part of it is because the characters are in the public domain, true, but there’s a lot of stuff in the public domain that doesn’t see the light of day nearly as often as the classic monsters.

I think it’s because the classic monsters tap into universal (small u) fears, or classic archetypes of the things that people fear in real life. It’s interesting to note that most of the classic Universal monsters were either originally humans who became monstrous, or creations by humans that turned monstrous. Essentially, the monsters tap into archetypal fears, and are exaggerated versions of villains and monsters we might actually encounter on a day-to-day basis.

What do I mean? Let’s expound!

DRACULA

Count Dracula is in some ways the easiest metaphor to explain. He’s an aristocratic vampire that feeds upon people and gives them nothing but evil in return. Perhaps he will pass on his own immortality to some of his victims, but its a cursed and hellish form of immortality, and any vampires that he raises are essentially his slaves, sometimes his mindless slaves.

Dracula is the fear of the Evil Elite. This of course takes many different forms in the modern era, but it is very much alive and well. The various conspiracy theories that the elite of a society might be devil worshippers or engaged in sinister cults are definitely Dracula-adjacent, and indeed it appears at least some of those conspiracy theories turned out to be entirely accurate. More prosaically, “rent-seeking” behavior is often characterized as vampirism. Rent-seeking behavior is defined as finding ways to extract profit without adding value by manipulating the legal or regulatory environment. The landlord who raises rent by $500 a month for no reason, a software developer who reduces features while raising the subscription price, or a financier who manipulates the regulations for an industry while investing in it are good examples of rent-seeking behavior that is metaphorically vampiric.

For that matter, it can be downright mundane. The middle manager who bullies his employees and then takes all the credit for their work is a very boring and unpleasant but nonetheless all too common example of the “vampire” metaphor in real life.

FRANKENSTEIN’S CREATURE

Frankenstein’s Monster is much easier metaphor to explain how that it would have been before ChatGPT went mainstream.

There is always a fear that we will be destroyed by the works of our own hands, especially in the last hundred years since the creation of nuclear technology and gene-editing. Probably the most famous examples of that are THE TERMINATOR and THE MATRIX science fiction movies.

However, these days the metaphor is almost ridiculously easy. We have generative AI to fulfill the metaphor of Frankenstein’s monster for us. Karl Marx famously said that history repeats twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Nuclear weapons as a metaphor for Frankenstein’s Monster was a tragedy, but generative AI is a farce. The tech bros sold it as this omniscient mind that could solve all problems and eliminate all jobs.

What we’ve gotten is an imbecilic chat bot that makes lots of mistakes, can’t remember anything, can’t actually do anything right, inflicts widespread damage to the economy, and drives up electric costs and make existing products like Windows 11 and Google Search much worse. It’s like if Frankenstein’s Monster was really, really stupid and wanted you to add glue to your pizza to keep the cheese from sliding off.

THE WOLF MAN

The Wolf Man, of course, is a metaphor for the potentially bestial nature of man. We all know, of course, or are eventually forced to learn, that human beings have a dark side that can come out in times of anger and stress. Civilization is sometimes a thin veneer over the animalistic side of humans. Sometimes the veneer seems to grow even thinner and the dark side comes raging out in riots and wars and mass slaughter.

For Larry Talbot, the original Wolf Man in the movie, his situation is even more terrifying. He’s a rational man who believes in science and psychology and doesn’t believe in things like werewolves. Yet when he is bitten, he nonetheless loses control and transforms into the Wolf Man. He doesn’t want to transform and attack people, but he has lost control of himself to the werewolf curse, and so he does.

In a sense, all humans are werewolves in that we have a monstrous side that can come out. The worst of us embrace that fact, just as in medieval legend sometimes people would make pacts with the devil to become werewolves.

THE INVISIBLE MAN

The Invisible Man was originally a science fiction story, which means that the Invisible Man represents a new fear created by science.

“Transhumanism” is an idea that eventually humans will merge with machines and evolve to become something new. Naturally, many people think this is a bad idea, and so a new idea has emerged – “posthumans” or humans that have been so modified by science that they are no longer recognizably human. So far this has remained mostly science fiction, but you can see the glimmers of it beginning in biology and medical science. There is a reason performance-enhancing drugs are banned in most sports. Genetic engineering opens up the possibility that corporations could create their own custom humans – essentially their own posthumans. The possibilities for abuse in such a situation are sadly endless.

So the Invisible Man, like Frankenstein’s Creature, taps in to the fear of science, or more accurately the fear of what horrors science might create.

THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

On the surface, The Creature From The Black Lagoon is a monster story about a creature that carries off a pretty girl.

I think it taps into a deeper fear, however. Namely that the world is older and stranger and more alien and incomprehensible than we can possibly know.

Like, hardcore creationists say that Earth is 6,000 years old or so, and other people say that the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years or so. Both groups have neat, detailed charts explaining their theories and why they’re correct.

But what if they’re both wrong? Oceanographers often say we don’t fully understand the oceans, and a common theory among UFO people is that UFOs rise out of hidden bases at the bottom of the ocean inaccessible by any human. There are other theories that there have been entire civilizations such as Atlantis that have vanished without a trace and were more advanced than our own, or that human civilization is a cycle that constantly destroys itself and restarts without memory of its previous failures. Or that aliens have influenced and controlled human history.

Of course, all those theories are likely bunk. Probably.

I think it is true to say that not only is the world stranger than we know, it is stranger than the human mind is actually capable of comprehending. And depending on how far that goes, that could be a terrifying thought.

So the Creature From The Black Lagoon, the idea that some race of fish-men lurks beneath the waves that we don’t know about, taps into that fear.

THE MUMMY

Like the Creature From The Black Lagoon, the Mummy on the surface is another story about the monster who wants the girl, since Imhotep waits three thousand years for his love to be reincarnated.

But I think this taps into a deeper fear.

Namely, that we can’t escape history. That no matter what we do or how hard we try, history will catch up to us, whether our own personal history or national history.

Political philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously wrote a book called THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN in 1992, arguing that with the collapse of Communism, liberal democracy was the final form of government achieved by mankind, and that it would have no serious competitors in the future.

This is a nice dream, but I think it is fair to say that the last thirty-four years have proven that thesis profoundly wrong. History is definitely not over, and in every domestic or international political crisis of the last thirty-four years, you can trace its roots back for decades or even centuries.

It took three thousand years for the dead hand of Imhotep to affect the present, but it usually doesn’t take nearly that long for history to have negative effects in the present world.

BONUS: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

The Phantom of the Opera is considered one of the Universal monsters, but I don’t think he really taps into a deeper fear. Maybe to be wary of a creepy guy who lives in a theatre basement and is unhealthily obsessed with the leading actress? Honestly, that just seems like good common sense. Maybe poor Christine Daae just needs some pepper spray or a good solid shotgun. 🙂

CONCLUSION

I think each of these Universal monsters remains popular because they tap into a deeper, more profound fear. So if you’re a writer looking to create a memorable villain, you could do worse than to follow those universal fears. You don’t even have to explicitly write horror to do it. In a mystery novel, you could have a “Dracula” villain in the form of a slumlord who traps his tenants with restrictive lease agreements to bleed them dry financially, of an “Invisible Man”  villain in the form of a scientist who is illegally injecting college athletes with an experimental drug without their knowledge. The “Wolf Man” appears quite often in detective and thriller fiction as a serial killer or another kind of violent criminal. And, naturally, we cannot escape history, so “The Mummy” can appear as a conflict that has its roots in events that happened decades ago.

Of course, the range for “universal fear” villains in science fiction and fantasy is much greater. Then you don’t have to be nearly so metaphorical. 🙂

-JM