Nine Monsters
Rated: Which is Scariest?
By Tamim Ansary
Every year the community center down
the block from my house sets up a "haunted
house" at Halloween. For a couple bucks, you can
stick your hand into a bucket of warm fettuccini and
pretend they're entrails.
If you try you might even feel a twitch of fear. Why
some people want to feel frightened, I don't know, but
we do. Lots of us do.
It isn't real-life menace we crave, of
course; it's fictional horror. Alas, in my opinion, our
scariest creatures have been overexposed. When I see
"ghost" I think Ghostbusters. Goblins?
Casper's uncles. Witches? Sabrina. Vampires? Buffy the
Vampire Slayer.
The chill is gone.
So what's a member of Fright Club to
do? I've been thinking that we might need to look beyond
the tired, traditional, mainstream scary creatures to
less familiar monsters. I looked into it, and I found a
number of worthwhile candidates from cultures around the
globe. How many of these monsters do you know?
I've rated each creature from 1 to 10
on my own private scare-o-meter, on which 10 means total
terror. See what you think.
Hai-uru
African folklore is rife with legends
of a frightening fellow who hunts human prey. He'll kill
you if he can, but he'll give you magic powers if you
beat him. He's Hai-uru to the Khoikhoi
of southern and western Africa, Tikdoshe to the Zulu
of southern Africa, and Adroa in Democratic
Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).
Details differ, but all these
creatures share one feature: They have only half a
body--one eye, one arm, one leg, etc. What's up with
that? I think this thing may be aimed at some nerve that
I don't have.
Scare-o-meter rating: 3
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list]
Kali
Topping India's terror charts is Kali.
In sculptures, she looks horrible: She's got four arms,
she's swinging a bloody sword, and she's dancing on her
dead husband. She wears a necklace of severed heads and
a belt of dismembered arms. In the West she'd be an
image of unmitigated
evil.
But it's not quite that simple. Kali
destroys, yes, but she destroys ignorance; that's good,
right? She kills, but she maintains the cosmic balance.
So Kali isn't just the goddess of "You die";
she's also the goddess of "get over it."
Scare-o-meter rating: 5 (However, Kali
gets a lot scarier if you include the Thugs
in her story. According to Encarta Encyclopedia, this
secret cult of killers worshiped Kali by strangling
people.)
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Chindis
According to Navajo
beliefs, when people die, the evil in them lingers on.
These spirits, known as chindis, account for the
Navajos' particular dread of corpses. When someone dies
among the Navajo, tradition calls for the house to be
burned to the ground and the person's name never to be
spoken again.
Here's the thing about chindis: If you
do evil, a chindi can attach itself to you and no one
can detach it except the person you have wronged. So
yes, be afraid of chindis if you're evil--be very
afraid. If you're good, relax.
Me, I'm not worried. whistle whistle.
Scare-o-meter rating: 6
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list]
Chupacabra
We think of vampires as suave fellows
in black tuxedos and silk capes. But that's only our
common Transylvanian vampire, Dracula, invented by
19th-century novelist Bram
Stoker. (Dracula, incidentally, has some historical
basis in a 15th-century count known as Vlad the
Impaler. His name says it all.)
But the vampire myth is both older and
younger than Vlad. The Chinese were telling stories
about a vampire called giang shi as early as 600 BC. And
in Puerto
Rico right now, there are stories of a new vampire
called the chupacabra.
The chupacabra kills goats and cattle
by sucking the blood out of them. Nothing else is known
about it--that's what makes it scary. You can imagine
anything. So ... for all I know the chupacabra might be
a two-legged tree-stump with a beak and a cape. Come to
think of it, the scare-o-meter reading just dropped.
Final score: 1 1/2 (10 if you're a
goat)
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list]
Jinn
In Afghanistan,
where I grew up, we didn't have witches or ghosts. The
fearsome spooks of my own childhood were jinn.
These creatures are mentioned in the Qur'an,
the scriptures of Islam; if you're a good Muslim, you
have to believe in them. The Qur'an says jinn are made
of smokeless fire, so you can't see them, but they're
everywhere, everywhere, especially in old, abandoned
buildings ... rural cemeteries ... dank
basements--places like that.
When the back of your neck prickles
for no reason, jinn are near. Sometimes they get inside
you. To me, the Blair Witch Project was about jinn.
Scare-o-meter rating: 8
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list]
Golem
Frankenstein's
monster was scary till he got a gig as Fred Munster
and later moved to Nick at Night.
The underlying story, however, tapped
our modern anxiety about technology: know-it-all builds
artificial servant out of lifeless matter but loses
control of it. That idea still scares us, especially
when we think about how nanotechnology is about to meet
genetic engineering... Yet the archetypal story isn't
new at all.
The granddaddy of the type might be
the Jewish legend of the golem.
Sometime around 1500, it seems, a certain Rabbi Löw of
Prague decided to build a tireless servant. He shaped a
heap of clay into a crude humanoid, muttered a spell
and--say hello to the golem, a powerful pile of mindless
matter that follows its master's orders relentlessly.
Needless to say, it didn't work out as
hoped.
Scare-o-meter rating: 4
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list]
Ghouls
We come now to ghouls, creatures out
of ancient Islamic folklore. The word ghoul
comes from an Arabic term meaning "the
grabber"--as in a hand bursting out of the earth
and grabbing your ankle!
Seems that in ancient days, Arabian
nomads would upon occasion run across a plundered grave.
Sometimes the corpse was missing. Sometimes, they'd find
half-eaten remains nearby. How to make sense of this?
Two possibilities spring to mind. One:
wild dogs. Two--equally plausible: some corpses come
back to life after burial and feed on their fellow dead.
Islamic folklore did not choose "wild dogs."
Scare-o-meter rating: 8 (The grossness
factor may be distorting this reading.)
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Banshees
There's only one thing most of us know
about banshees: They scream. But what are they?
I'll tell you. Banshees ("women
of the hills" in Gaelic) come out of Irish
folklore. They're women who died in childbirth and are
doomed to spend the remaining years of their allotted
span near deserted streams, washing blood from the grave
garments of those who are about to die.
The banshee's scream is more of a
wail. If you hear it, someone in your family is about to
die.
Sad-scary.
Scare-o-meter rating: 7
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Windigo
The windigo is a Native American
nightmare, invented in the subarctic by the Cree
and Ojibwa
peoples.
Let's set the scene: The subarctic is
about 5 million sq km (2 million sq mi) of forest and
tundra inhabited by fewer than 60,000 people. We're
talking lonely. Winters last forever up there, and
winter nights are long, cold, and dark.
In times past, the people who lived in
this region spent winters holed up in their shelters,
rationing out their dwindling food supplies, and telling
tales. The most dreadful of these stories featured the
windigo, a friendless creature that lives alone in the
forest. It's 6 to 9 m (20 to 30 ft) tall and has a
lipless mouth and jagged teeth. Its footprints in the
snow are full of blood and you can hear its hissing
breath for miles.
It eats people. And that's the good
news.
The bad news is, if a windigo catches
you alone in the forest, it can possess you. Then you
turn into a windigo yourself--a mindless cannibal.
I think I see the underlying fear that
glimmers through this story. Survival in the subarctic
was a desperate struggle. Every now and then food ran
out before winter did. Sometimes, well ... cannibalism
happens.
There you have the real horror of the
windigo legend. Ask not what some monster might do to
you; ask what you might do to someone should you become
a monster.
Scare-o-meter rating: 11
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list]
Related Links:
Looking for a mother lode of
folktales from many cultures? Check out the Encyclopedia
Mythica, a collection of information about myths
from around the world.
Encarta
Encyclopedia
Encarta
World English Dictionary
Encyclopedia
Mythica
The
history of Dracula
The
Chupacabra homepage
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