From the headless 'Blemmae' to a flesh-eating wolf: a 500-year history of monsters

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At different points through history, individual monsters – both ancient and new – have had their moments in the limelight. They’ve becoming the emblems for specific events, conflicts and concerns that were troubling society at particular times.

The many topical monsters that have emerged over the past half-millenium can offer windows into an ever-shifting cultural psyche. What do they reveal about the zeitgeists of different periods?

Blemmyae – 15th century

The Blemmyae were a race of humanoid monsters who had faces in their chests – no need for heads or necks. Some had eyes in the centre of their chests, others had one eye on either shoulder, like car headlights.

They were fabled to live in different regions of Africa, such as Ethiopia or Lybia, or further east in India.

Blemmyae appeared on ornate maps and in scholarly texts throughout the Middle Ages, drawn from the writings of the first-century Roman scholar, Pliny the Elder. He discussed a whole range of monstrous races thought to exist in distant places by Classical authors: from the dog-headed Cynocephali to the one-legged monopods.

In the Renaissance, the Blemmyae and the other monstrous races became especially topical. Europeans had been exploring new regions of the globe from the 15th century. They encountered new peoples – who appeared and behaved in unfamiliar ways – at an unprecedented rate.

Some explorers and scholars, whether guilelessly or not, turned to the traditional Blemmyae and other monstrous races to represent these newfound people for many decades into the 16h century, at least. In addition, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440 meant that more people had access to printed materials than ever before. As you might guess from modern social media, they loved to see new, surprising things – like monstrous beings believed to live far, far away.

The Papal Ass – 16th century

In 1496, a chimerical creature washed up on the banks of the Tiber River. Artists’ impressions – based perhaps more on hearsay than observation – showed it as having the head of a donkey, the torso of a woman, one elephant arm, one hoof and one bird claw for feet. Not to forget the tail with a dragon's head and devil’s face for a rump.

News of this beast spread quickly. By the 1520s, it became known as ‘The Papal Ass’, and it was used as a virtual weapon in the most bitter rivalry of the time, the Reformation.

The revolutionary Gutenberg printing press, invented in 1440, allowed more to people to access printed materials than ever before. This unleashed a new cultural phenomenon: propaganda wars. Along with the ‘Monk’s Calf’, another monstrous apparition from Saxony, the Papal Ass was used as a symbol of the corruption of the Pope and Catholic Church in a satirical broadsheet published in 1523 by Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon.

Deformed births and monstrous apparitions were seen as omens from God at this time, so these strange creatures were presented as signs of the evil of the papacy in a slew of Protestant pamphlets and books. Ironically, however, often the very same monsters were used for precisely the same slanderous purpose by the opposing side.

Beast of Gevaudan – 18th century

In the 1760s, people in the Gevaudan region in Southern France lived in fear of a terrible predator that was unlike anything they had ever known before. It first appeared in the summer of 1764, when a young woman was tending her herds. A strange, wolf-like creature charged at her, but was chased off by her bulls.

Soon after that, a series of vicious attacks began, leaving a string of victims – men, women, children – often with their throats torn out, or decapitated. Between 1764-67 the ‘Beast of the Gevaudan’ claimed over 100 lives.

The savage deaths attracted so much attention that the crown got involved, offering a hefty bounty and deploying royal hunters. Anyone who faced the creature and lived was hero-worshipped.

What was the beast? Eyewitness accounts described it as wolf-like but striped and russet, impenetrable by bullets, able to leap impossible distances and walking on its hindlegs.

Historians still speculate whether the Beast was an escaped lion or hyena, a wolfdog, or even a human serial killer. There may have been no beast at all: just hysteria around wolf kills.

Why did the beast take hold in the Gevaudan? These attacks began when France was at a low point after the Seven Years’ War. Life was especially tough for ordinary people, and monsters are borne from trauma. The 17th-century werewolf trials might have had something to do with it, too.

We tend to think of the 18th century as the burgeoning of the Enlightenment, when scientific rationalism overshadowed magical thinking. Things, of course, are never that simple….

Frankenstein’s Monster – 19th century

It could be argued that the advent of scientific rationalism generated a whole new generation of monsters. One of the very first was to be found in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Gothic classic, Frankenstein (1818).

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The novel’s nameless creature was sewn together from pieces of corpses robbed from graveyards and animated in a feat of quasi-magical electrification by the deranged Dr Frankenstein.

Horrified at the unsightly nature of what he has made, the Doctor then abandoned his creature. The monster was forced to go in search of love and connection, only to become bitter and vengeful as he realised the bleak nature of his existence. He tracked down the Doctor and they spent the rest of their days in a cat-and-mouse chase, all the way to the wastelands of the Arctic.

Whether the reanimated patchwork of human body parts or the power-crazed Dr Frankenstein are the monster of the book is a moot point. Together, they reflect early nineteenth-century anxieties about the development of science, industrialisation and its effects on society.

Frankenstein’s desire to create life, to play God – and the terrible, isolating and deadly consequences of his ambition – is a warning about humanity's hubris in seeking to control nature.

This theme continues to resonate today, keeping Frankenstein and his monster alive in our imaginations.

Count Orlok – early 20th century

Vampires have inhabited folklore for a thousand years or more. A few individual vampires have even become more than just the hungry undead: they have become monstrous superstars.

Count Dracula, the eponymous villain of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) was one. The very first cinematic vampire, Count Orlok, who terrorised a small German town in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), is another.

The long-fingered, etiolated Orlok was played by Max Schreck in the silent film directed by F W Murnau. Though the plot of Nosferatu was based on Stoker’s Dracula (the film came into legal trouble for ripping off Stoker’s novel, in fact), Orlok was quite a different creature to Dracula: repulsive rather than seductive, bat-like and ghoulish rather than pale, aristocratic and magnetic. The vignettes of Orlok’s hunched silhouette climbing up a staircase or spindly fingers casting a heart-gripping shadow are now iconic images of gothic cinema.

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Like all the best vampires, Murnau’s Orlok embodied pressing issues in the cultural imagination. Orlok’s corrupting power echoed the pestilence of the Spanish Influenza epidemic, which had just swept disastrously through Europe, his rats evoking the earlier Bubonic plague.

He embodied the horrors of the First World War: the rat-infested trenches, fear of totalitarian power – even presaging the fascism that would take hold in Germany shortly after the film was made. Robert Eggers’s recent Nosferatu (2025), though a remake, transforms Orlok once again to be a monster for the modern day.

Godzilla – mid-20th century

Godzilla first lumbered across a cinema screen in the 1954 film Gojira directed by Ishiro Honda. Disturbed by nuclear tests, the 400-ft dinosaur-monster emerged from the ocean supercharged and ready to flatten Tokyo in his irritation. He was so vast, so powerful, so radioactive that he wreaked devastation and very little could be done to stop him.

Godzilla was based on earlier Japanese myths of dragon-like monsters. His name is a combination of gorira, meaning ‘gorilla’, and kujira meaning ‘whale’. He’s one of a number of other vast monsters that are collectively called kaiju (kai – ‘mysterious’; ju – ‘beast’ in Japanese) – who together have starred in the longest-running film franchise ever.

Conceived in the aftermath of the Second World War, Honda’s Godzilla is a physical manifestation of the anxieties of a nation’s very real fear of obliteration: the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the firebombing of Tokyo during Operation Meetinghouse in 1945 and the tyranny of the post-war US occupation of Japan. As well as, of course, natural disasters such as tsunamis, which Japan suffers frequently.

Only a creature with the sheer bulk of Godzilla could represent the sense of powerlessness in the face of such destructive force unleashed on Japan.

The Godzillas of recent cinema are fleshed out with different anxieties, often of anthropogenic apocalypse as a result of ecological collapse. He’s become nature’s rough-skinned Valkyrie and even the saviour of mankind, defending us from the consequences of our own hubris.

Natalie Lawrence is the author of Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and Their Meanings (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024)