There’s a particular kind of unease that creeps in when you realise the monster (or antagonist, the terms are often interchangeable) isn’t lying, and everyone else is. Not because the monster is gentle or fair or deserving of sympathy, but because it never pretends to be anything other than what it is. The fear doesn’t come from uncertainty, but from certainty. From the solid, immovable sense that this thing understands itself completely, while the people around it are scrambling to maintain a version of themselves that feels acceptable.
In many stories, especially horror, the monster is framed as the great deceiver. It lurks in shadows, slips between shapes, wears borrowed faces. It whispers, manipulates, tempts. Think of the shifting, performative horror of something like It, or the seductive duplicity of the vampire myth; creatures defined by disguise and false intimacy. The monster is positioned as an external corrupting force, something that intrudes and distorts.
The humans, by contrast (or antagonists) are framed as the emotional anchor of the story. They are flawed and frightened, sometimes selfish or cruel, but still recognisably real. We’re encouraged to trust them more, to believe they are closer to the truth simply by virtue of being human. Even when they do terrible things, the narrative often cushions those actions with context, trauma, or good intentions.
But when I think about the stories that actually linger — the ones that leave a residue rather than a clean ending — that assumption rarely holds.
Over and over again, it’s the humans who are evasive. They omit details. They rationalise violence. They frame their worst instincts as necessity, love, duty, or survival. In Frankenstein (1818), it’s not the Creature who hides his nature — he is painfully upfront about his loneliness, his rage, his need to be seen. It’s Victor who constantly reframes his actions, who insists on his own righteousness while abandoning responsibility again and again. The so-called monster tells the truth about what he feels. The human protagonist tells the truth selectively.
More often than not, the monster is the only character not pretending to be something else.
It doesn’t try to soften its edges to be palatable. It doesn’t disguise hunger as righteousness or cruelty as protection. It doesn’t apologise in advance or retroactively cleanse its actions with explanation. In The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal Lecter never claims to be good. He doesn’t excuse himself with childhood trauma or moral language. He is precise, self-aware, and horrifyingly honest about who he is and what he enjoys. The discomfort comes not from his deception, but from his clarity, especially when set against institutions and individuals who insist they are acting ethically while committing their own violations.
The monster simply is. Its presence functions less like a character and more like a declaration: this exists, whether you’re comfortable with it or not.
That kind of blunt clarity is deeply unsettling. Not because it’s loud or aggressive, but because it removes all the usual hiding places. When the monster refuses to lie, it exposes how much work the human characters are doing to maintain their own illusions. Their goodness becomes fragile. Their morality conditional. Their honesty selective. In The Wicker Man (1978), for example, the villagers are open about their beliefs and practices, it’s Sergeant Howie who clings desperately to a moral certainty that can’t survive contact with reality.
The discomfort comes from recognising that the monster isn’t breaking the rules of the world; it’s ignoring the social contract that demands we disguise our worst impulses. And in doing so, it reveals just how much of human behaviour depends on pretending we’re not capable of the same things, given the right pressure and the right excuse.
The monster doesn’t corrupt the story.
It reveals what was already there.
Monsters Don’t Need Justifications
Human characters are obsessed with justification. They constantly narrate their own behaviour, even when no one else is listening. Every choice is wrapped in explanation, softened by context, arranged so it feels inevitable rather than chosen. Violence becomes necessary. Cruelty becomes unavoidable. Betrayal becomes for the greater good.
I had no choice.
Anyone would have done the same.
This isn’t who I really am.
These aren’t just lines spoken aloud. They’re internal scripts, repeated until they feel true. They exist to smooth over the exact moment a character crosses a line and wants to believe it doesn’t count. In horror especially, this self-narration is constant. Characters talk themselves into actions they would once have found unthinkable, clinging to the idea that circumstances, not character, are to blame. Justification becomes a form of self-preservation. A way of holding onto the belief that there is still a solid, coherent moral self underneath the blood, the bodies, the choices already made. Without these explanations, the character would have to face something far more unsettling: that they chose this, and that the choice says something real about them.
The monster doesn’t do this.
It doesn’t pause to contextualise its behaviour or search for a version of the story where it comes out looking better. It kills because it kills. It feeds because it feeds. It harms because harm is bound up in its existence or survival. In films like Halloween (1978), Michael Myers doesn’t justify his violence, doesn’t explain it, doesn’t frame it as reaction or revenge. He simply acts. The lack of motivation becomes the point; a void where explanation should be.
There’s no appeal to necessity framed as tragedy. No insistence that this is a temporary deviation from a fundamentally good nature. Compare that to Jack Torrance in The Shining (1977), who spends the entire story narrating his own descent — blaming stress, isolation, alcoholism, the hotel itself; desperately constructing reasons that allow him to avoid the truth until it’s too late.
The monster doesn’t need to convince itself it’s still good, or even that goodness is relevant.
That doesn’t make the monster admirable. It doesn’t absolve it. But it does make it clean in a way that human behaviour rarely is. There’s no moral residue clinging to its actions, no awkward gap between who it claims to be and what it actually does. What you see is what you get. In Alien (1979), the creature doesn’t pretend to be misunderstood or tragic; its behaviour is brutally consistent, and that consistency is what makes it terrifying.
And that clarity can be more disturbing than outright cruelty.
When a character refuses to justify itself, it strips away one of the most comforting ideas we cling to: that evil always arrives with reasons attached. That it needs a tragic backstory, a corrupted ideal, a noble intention gone wrong. Horror repeatedly undercuts this comfort. Sometimes there is no explanation waiting to be uncovered, no psychology that will make everything add up.
Sometimes harm doesn’t come wrapped in apology or rationale. Sometimes it simply happens.
That realisation forces the reader to look harder at the human characters — the ones who do justify, who insist they’re different while causing comparable damage. In The Mist (1980), the most horrifying acts aren’t committed by the creatures outside, but by people inside the supermarket, each convinced their actions are necessary, righteous, even holy. The monster’s honesty throws those human explanations into sharp relief, exposing how often “necessity” and “good intentions” are just carefully chosen disguises.
In that light, the monster’s lack of justification isn’t a failure of morality. It’s a refusal to lie. And that refusal makes everyone else’s excuses feel thinner, louder, and far less convincing.
The Monster as a Mirror
One of the most effective uses of a monster is as a mirror; not a subtle one, but a warped, exaggerated reflection held up so close it’s impossible to look away from. It doesn’t offer a gentle comparison or an abstract metaphor. It takes familiar human impulses and stretches them until they become unmistakable, undeniable. The monster doesn’t ask what if? so much as it says this is already here.
Monsters rarely introduce something entirely new into a story. They don’t arrive carrying alien emotions or incomprehensible desires. Even the most otherworldly creatures are rooted in recognisable human drives. Instead of inventing new impulses, they take what already exists in the human characters and remove the limits placed on it.
Greed becomes consumption without restraint — not wanting more, but wanting everything. In The Fly (both he 1958 and 1986 versions), ambition and curiosity are stripped of ethical limits until self-improvement curdles into self-annihilation.
Control becomes domination — not influence, but ownership. Think of Candyman (1992), where obsession and entitlement are given mythic weight and allowed to operate unchecked.
Loneliness becomes fixation — not connection, but possession. Vampires across the genre embody this, turning desire for intimacy into eternal captivity.
Rage becomes indiscriminate destruction — not anger with a target, but violence as a default response, as seen in the unstoppable brutality of slashers like Friday the 13th (1980).
The monster doesn’t invent these traits. It strips them of their social camouflage. It removes the language that makes them sound reasonable, justified, or temporary. Words like stress, love, duty, pressure fall away. What’s left is the impulse itself, raw and unfiltered.
This is why monsters so often feel personal. When a human character recoils from the creature, it’s rarely only fear of physical harm. It’s the shock of recognition. Something in the monster’s behaviour feels uncomfortably familiar — not because the character wants to admit it, but because they can’t quite deny it either. In Black Swan (2010), the horror works precisely because the “monster” is inseparable from Nina’s own ambition and self-loathing. There is no external threat to destroy without destroying part of herself.
That recognition doesn’t always rise to the surface of the narrative. Sometimes it manifests as disproportionate anger, an obsessive need to destroy the monster at all costs, or an insistence that it is nothing like us. The louder the denial, the closer the reflection usually is. The villagers in Jaws (1974) aren’t just afraid of the shark; they’re confronted with their own greed and denial, magnified into something with teeth.
And the monster doesn’t deny the comparison. It doesn’t rush to differentiate itself or argue that it’s fundamentally other. It simply exists alongside the humans, moving through the same world, operating on the same basic impulses — just without restraint or apology.
In many stories, the monster doesn’t even need to speak for the parallel to land. Its actions are enough. The doppelgängers in Us (2019) don’t require lengthy explanation; their presence alone forces an uncomfortable confrontation with buried selves and suppressed lives. But when the monster does speak , calmly, plainly, without malice, the effect can feel cruel, as though it’s deliberately pressing on a bruise.
Yet it’s rarely incorrect.
The monster isn’t saying, I’m better than you. It isn’t claiming moral superiority or demanding understanding. It’s saying, I’m what happens when you stop pretending. And that’s the moment the reflection becomes impossible to ignore.
Fear of the Unmasked Self
There’s a reason monsters who speak plainly are often more unsettling than those that remain silent. Silence allows space. It keeps the monster at a distance, safely abstract; something that can be feared, projected onto, or mythologised without resistance. A silent monster can be anything. Plain speech collapses that distance. It pulls the monster into the same conversational space as the humans and, by extension, the reader. Once it speaks, it stops being a shape in the dark and becomes a presence with intent.
A monster that explains its rules, its hunger, its boundaries is frightening precisely because it sounds rational. Not emotional. Not chaotic. Rational. Its behaviour follows a logic that can be understood, even if it can’t be accepted. Think of the Xenomorph in Alien compared to Ash the android, or the clinical clarity with which Pinhead lays out the terms of suffering in Hellraiser (1987). There is a system at work, and systems are far more disturbing than madness.
That logic suggests intention, a way of seeing the world that is structured, consistent, and disturbingly coherent. The monster isn’t lashing out. It’s operating according to principles. It knows what it wants, what it will do to get it, and where the limits are, if there are any at all.
Chaos can be dismissed as random. It can be explained away as a fluke, a breakdown, a force of nature. A storm doesn’t need to be reasoned with. A disease doesn’t have a plan. Intention can’t be dismissed so easily. Intention implies choice, awareness, and continuity. It implies that the monster knows exactly what it’s doing and will continue to do it, regardless of how anyone feels about it.
When the monster states what it wants the human characters lose their favourite escape routes. There’s no misunderstanding to clear up, no assumption that if the right words are found the situation will improve. There’s no comforting fantasy that reason, empathy, or shared values will suddenly bridge the gap. In The Witch (2015), Black Phillip doesn’t rage or threaten; he offers clarity. And that clarity is far more dangerous than noise.
The monster has already made itself understood.
And this is often where the humans begin to lie harder.
They promise restraint they won’t keep, because saying it makes them feel in control. They insist on their moral superiority while crossing the same lines they claim to oppose. They swear they are nothing like the monster, even as they adopt its methods in the name of survival or necessity.
In The Descent (2005), the real fracture doesn’t come from the creatures in the dark, but from the moment survival demands brutality, and the characters begin to justify actions they would once have condemned. The line between human and monster blurs not because of influence, but because of pressure.
These lies aren’t always conscious. Often they’re reflexive — the mind scrambling to preserve a sense of difference, of distance, of safety. If the monster is truly other, then the actions taken against it don’t need to be examined too closely. Violence becomes acceptable as long as it’s aimed in the “right” direction.
The monster watches this unfold without surprise. It recognises the pattern because it’s seen it before, in different forms, in different people. It doesn’t need to accuse or explain. It doesn’t need to name hypocrisy. Like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979)— horror-adjacent but relevant — the power lies in observation, not condemnation.
The behaviour speaks loudly enough on its own.
What’s truly frightening isn’t that the monster understands itself so well. It’s that it understands us — our thresholds, our justifications, the precise moment we stop telling the truth about who we are.
Why This Works So Well in Horror
Horror is at its most effective when it dismantles comforting stories; the quiet assumptions we rely on to feel safe in the world. One of the most deeply held of those comforts is the belief that we are the good ones. That, whatever else happens, there is a clear moral centre and we naturally belong to it.
An honest monster doesn’t argue against that belief. It doesn’t challenge it with speeches or counter-logic. It simply exists outside it.
By refusing to participate in human moral frameworks, the monster destabilises the entire hierarchy of the story. It doesn’t ask to be judged, redeemed, or understood. It doesn’t care where it sits on the scale of good and evil. When the monster is open about what it is, the narrative focus quietly shifts. The central question is no longer just can we stop this thing? but what does our response to it say about us?
That shift is crucial. Stopping the monster becomes a technical problem. Confronting what it exposes is a moral one.
And moral questions linger far longer than fear alone.
Long after the immediate danger has passed, the reader is left sitting with the uncomfortable parallels. The human characters may have survived, but they’ve crossed lines, justified actions, and rewritten their own behaviour in ways that can’t be neatly undone. The monster didn’t force those choices — it merely removed the illusions that kept them hidden.
When the story ends, the monster may be destroyed, banished, or sealed away. Order may even appear to be restored. But the unease remains, because the most unsettling realisation isn’t that something inhuman existed in the world of the story.
It’s that it never lied.
It told the truth about what it was from the beginning. It never promised anything else. Never pretended to be better. Never softened itself to be acceptable.
And the real horror is recognising how much effort the humans, and by extension, the reader or viewer, put into doing the opposite.
Gareth Ellis - Author 