We're afraid of spiders, wasps, scorpions and snakes because we don't like being stung or bitten, especially by things that might be venomous. This fear is occasionally reflected in some Hollywood movie or other, and sometimes these critters are stand-ins for other things we're even more afraid of but don't really like thinking about. The '50's and '60's were a great time if you hated communism, didn't really know anything about radiation and just didn't want to think about madmen pushing buttons, for example.
We're not usually irrational about that fear, though, because we've got fly swatters and baseball bats and cans of Raid. If it's a monster movie that comes out of Hollywood, odds are it's about something that's at least vaguely man-shaped. You can't always see right away that a man-shaped thing
isn't a man, and this seems to be the worst kind of monster because you'll often discover it doesn't honour human values only after it's done something evil to you or to someone you love.
This is bad, but most of the time, the man-shaped things you run into on your screen isn't somebody you ever knew or particularly trusted. What greater horror can there be than to wake up next to somebody you'd known, loved and trusted implicitly for many years and find that he or she has somehow suddenly become something Other somewhere under the stars? You realise in that moment that you can't trust as much as you used to because you don't know what he or she is going to do, or say... or eat.
In fiction, it's quick and it's easy. One bite - one
scratch - and then you become one of them after just a few minutes or a few days of being horrifically sick. In vampire fiction, there's even usually a death phase to mark the point of no return.
In real life, it's often not quite so simple. Human monsters aren't born nearly as often as you'd think. Yes, some people are born with shriveled up frontal lobes or something, but many people who don't end up as pillars of the community had had bricks dropped on their heads or had ingested something that turned their brains into blood pudding. Many more had had to endure many years of dehumanising treatment before finalising their divorce from general humanity.
Consider the plight of the young girl who'd run away from a toxic home environment at an early age and fetched up in the Big City to find that its megafauna really only have one use for her. This is vampirism of a sort, but in much slower motion and on a much larger scale. It's not
one bite, it's thousands or millions of them, each sucking away another quantum of her self-worth. Such a girl will often come away from this experience -
if she comes away at all - utterly convinced that the whole concept of "community" is a massive outright lie. She won't necessarily be any major kind of monster, but she will almost certainly always find herself on the outside looking in, and not understanding what she's seeing.
This is a process of transmogrification, and it doesn't just happen to little girls who run away. It can happen to little boys, too, and it can happen to good little boys and girls who stay at home and go to school every day. Bad parents, funny brothers or uncles, bullies at school... the list of people who can continually suck away little quanta of a young person's life is endless.
Towards the end of this process, there's a point when we suddenly realise that Jacqueline or Olivier just isn't the same sweet, loving, care-free little toddler with the quick, easy smile and the infectious laughter he or she'd once been, that this kid who's nearly a fully grown adult is now sullen, shiftless and sometimes easily moved to violence, and we ask ourselves "what the heck happened!?"
This particular image is one of identical twin sisters, one of whom fell under my image manipulation program as I idly pondered just how much is the man a product of acculturation and how much is he just a deterministic finite state machine whose behaviour is dictated by nucleic acids. It seems obvious that this question might best be asked by separating large numbers of identical twins at birth, stationing one in a nurturing, wholesome environment and the other in a hardscrabble urban slum with wholly undesirable guardians. There's a "child protection agency" of an unnamed
but very real western first world country that would probably be very happy to keep exhaustive notes of these sets of twins under a strict injunction against interfering in any way. After a mere twenty years, records could be tabulated, correlated, categorised and subject to statistical analysis to arrive at some numbers to report to those who debate "nature vs. nurture".
Such numbers wouldn't affect the girl on the left at all; her soul is already cauterised and hermetically sealed away in a porcelain body that knows only hunger and fear. Such knowledge wouldn't comfort the girl to the right at all, either, knowing that said numbers would be probabilistic at best,
not knowing or understanding what processes of corrosion left her sister in this state, and very likely being certain that the only way to be sure of not bringing more monsters into the world involves bilateral tubal ligation for her sister
and herself.