Each era’s monsters embody that era’s specific anxieties.

Evidence

The monster is a protean character. “The body that scares and appalls changes over time, as do the individual characteristics that add up to monstrosity, as do the preferred interpretations of monstrosity.” The Muslim monsters of the Middle Ages are not the same creatures featured in post-apocalyptic zombie films, even those that exhibit post-9/11 imagery. For this reason, monsters need to be seen as symbols of particular fears or anxieties. These creatures emerge from a particular milieu: “Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) which generate them. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 63

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the protean monster as a symbol of era-specific fear, a definitional backbone for the whole inquiry.
• XREF: Ties to the prototypical ‘phantasm’ figures in Western imagination mentioned earlier in the book and to Cohen’s monster-theory literature.