Quick Take
The Festival of Monsters returns to Santa Cruz from Wednesday to Sunday to discuss monsters in history and media, organized by UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Monster Studies. The festival includes an academic conference and multiple public events such as a film screening, author panels and a game day.
For five years, UC Santa Cruz’s Festival of Monsters has brought together scholars, artists, students and “all kinds of monster-loving people” for a week of ghastly panels, games and discussion.
“Most of us probably don’t always feel like we fit in. We feel a little alternative, like we’re on the margins of society,” said Renée Fox, co-director of UCSC’s Center for Monster Studies. “Monsters give us a way to feel like an integral part of the community. Monsters offer an alternative way of being in the world. They imagine difference as something magical.”
The festival, which runs Wednesday through Sunday, has typically been celebrated in Santa Cruz. But last year, it attracted attention from multiple conservative news outlets, whose commenters described it as “depraved” and “demonic.”
Michael Chemers, director of the Center for Monster Studies, said the articles were “actually pretty factual.”
“It was the comments that were like, ‘What are these left-wing professors teaching our students?’” Chemers said. “It’s a funny thing because there’s nothing inherently left-wing about monster studies. There is a strong emphasis on empathy and compassion and rationalism.”
Chemers said the festival looks at how marginalized groups are dehumanized or made into monsters throughout history.
“For me, growing up in Salt Lake City as a Jewish person in the ’70s, people used to ask me where my horns were,” Chemers said. “A monster gives us a very convenient way of wrapping up all those feelings. You can say, ‘Well, it’s not as if I’m targeting another human, right? That’s a monster.’”
The festival pairs that academic inquiry with a lineup of public events. Attendees can catch a screening of the sci-fi classic “The Quatermass Xperiment” on Wednesday at The 418 Project in downtown Santa Cruz. The nearby Museum of Art & History will host a panel on devilish fiction with authors Kiersten White and Clay McLeod Chapman on Saturday, and Chapman will also later join writer Iván Brandon to talk about comics at Atlantis Fantasyworld.
Chapman said many of his ideas for his horror books and graphic novels are “ripped from the headlines.”
“The world’s a really scary place right now,” Chapman said. “One of the values of horror is that you can use it to process or articulate the fears of what’s happening outside your window. Having a safely contained environment, whether that’s a 300-page book or a two-hour movie, you’re able to tap into those fears and release them.”
Chapman said he’s looking forward to hearing the scholarship that comes out of the festival and “honored and intimidated” to speak on the panels.
“It shows that there is an academic bent to genre, to horror, speculative fiction and sci-fi. It’s not just for teens on a Friday night,” Chapman said. “You can see the intellectual pursuit behind fearmongering.”
Wes Pannell, the owner of Game Santa Cruz, looks forward to hosting a public game day Saturday, featuring horror-themed games that Pannell has vetted himself, including Blood on the Clocktower and This Game Is Killer.
“I get to showcase that games are more than just things like Monopoly, that they can tell a cool story, even if it’s just a party game,” Pannell said. “One of the things about horror is that it scares us and reminds us that it’s fun to be alive, and I think that’s what gameplay does as well.”
Keynote speaker and bioethics scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson emphasized that monsters have taken many forms across centuries of literature and popular culture.
“We’ve seen the return of monsters over and over again in the literary and cultural archive from the cyclops in the Iliad, to Frankenstein’s creature in the early 19th century,” said Garland-Thomson, a professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University. “We can look at figures from the Japanese tradition called chibi, like Hello Kitty, who is not a scary monster, but a cute monster designed to again elicit a feeling from the witnesses.”
While monster studies might seem niche, Chemers said their research is gaining traction. The second Center for Monster Studies will open in Germany on Halloween, and more international researchers have reached out to connect. Chemers will also be in an upcoming National Geographic series “Monsters: Truth Behind the Myths,” which comes out Oct. 24.
“We need monsters because they remind us what it is to be human. They delineate the boundaries of humanity and human behavior,” Chemers said. “We need them. They are us.”
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