On a screen, a snarling, feral face materializes out of the darkness. “Whoever is bitten by a werewolf becomes a werewolf himself,” a voice intones. The scene then flickers through clips of classic monster movies as a manic voice cries, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”
The trailer for National Geographic’s upcoming series, “Monsters: The Truth Behind the Myths,” teases some of the most enduring archetypes of horror: the beast, the blood sucker, the animated corpse. While these bogeymen are undoubtably nightmare fuel, they are also fascinating. The question the trailer seems to suggest is, “why?”
MSU’s Kinitra Brooks, a scholar of Black horror, unpacks this and other contradictions as one of the featured experts in the new series. Its Oct. 24 Disney+ premiere is timed for the week leading up to Halloween.
“Monsters are never only monsters,” Brooks says. “They reflect our cultural anxieties. And many times, those anxieties deal with race, gender and class.”