damselfish | These Monsters Are Not Very Scary

I finally got around to reading The Hunger Games* and was in the middle of it when I saw io9's spoilertastic post on movie concept art for the muttations. "So cool!" said I, getting excited, and teleidoplex told me that I would be sorely disappointed when I reached that point in the books.

I blew through the last 40% of the book or so yesterday, and I have to say: yes, yes I was. Ignoring, for the moment, what the things about the tribute muttations says about society,** the frisson of horror their appearance inspires is quickly dulled because they're just monsters. It doesn't matter if they're actually the tributes brought back or if they're just monsters made to look like the fallen tributes, they're just animals trying to kill the protagonists. Their viciousness is a little different from the usual trope-- torturing Cato instead of killing and eating him-- and they problem solve, which is a rarity for people-turned-monster stories, but it was a wasted opportunity. They were, quite simply, not that scary.

Which sucks, because that's clearly what Collins was going for: these brutish monsters that may or may not be the other tributes. But they lack any of the personality of their former selves, and even if they were turned into hateful monsters bent on killing the protagonists, they lacked any of the advantages the previous person may have had. Like... there's a Thresh monster! Great. Not nearly as scary as Thresh himself. Thresh-monster wants to rend Katniss and Peeta with his teeth. Okay. Thresh-the-person was an unknown quantity, and that scene was more tense than the muttation scene. It even overshadowed the horror of Cato being mutilated all through the night because I was so busy wondering what the muttations were and being disappointed that they lacked any of the coolness that the tributes brought to the table. There was no horror that they'd been turned into monsters, because it wasn't them.

That's my real problem with this specific subgenre of horror, be it zombies or werewolves or what have you. The person is turned into a monster OH NOES HOW HORRIFYING. No... not really. Zombies aren't that scary. I had a talk with a friend about how zombie stories scared her, and I felt meh about them. "But... if you die you'll become a zombie!" she said, aghast. "So? I'll be dead, wtf do I care? It's not like I'm there to be aware of it. My zombie is someone else's problem." This reasoning gave her pause, because she never thought of it that way. Aside from worrying about friends, I don't really care about my corpse after death-- zombie, in a hole in the ground, it's all the same, isn't it? You're not there to think about it. Zombies are scary for the survivors, but as a monster and potential end? I don't feel much horror. They don't come back to haunt the survivors, not even in a twisted sense-- a monster that's still someone turned against the survivors, with all their intelligence and personality but wrong. That would be so much scarier, because it leaves a possibility of awareness, of moral questions, of whether the survivor's friend is still in there. God. I love those stories. And they so rarely come up. It's always "my friend came back as a dumb husk that wants to kill me!" It's not your friend, put a bullet in their head already.

I feel similarly about werewolves, except the horror felt is slightly different. The werewolf is still a dumb animal, lacking any of the benefits that come from being human, but at least there's the horror that comes the morning after. Still. I feel a distinct apathy about the traditional werewolf. Yawn, dumb aggressive monster. Whatever.

I want to see smarter monsters! Monsters with dubious morality! Monsters that maybe could be your friend again if only you said the right thing! (But of course, you can't, because they're totally twisted against you and they're monsters, c'mon. Though "converting the monster" is another trope I love.)

This monster trope always feels so... hollow, to me. That spark of dread I'm supposed to feel just isn't there.

*I haven't read much at all because I've lost a good reading groove. Law school totally threw me off, and as soon as I had time to start reading again during 2L year, I'd moved and set up new routines and couldn't really find a way to fit books into it. I guess I never technically stopped reading because I still read a fair amount of literature online, but I don't feel like a "real" reader if it's not something physical. I guess. But I started taking my Kindle to the gym and it was the magic bullet to get me both reading and working out.

**It doesn't matter whether the muttations are the tributes or not, because there are two options:

1) This is a society capable of turning corpses into living, breathing monsters in a short time (Foxface died, what, the day before the final confrontation?)
2) This is a society capable of creating full-grown and intelligent creatures within the span of a month-- since that's the amount of time they have to know what the tributes look like to engineer the muttations. Also brings up the question of whether there's Katniss or Peeta muttations in storage somewhere, which is a question I will never answer because I won't read the next two books, as per everyone's advice.

So we have a society that can make intelligent (we see the muttations problem-solve) entities out of whole cloth.

And yet they need coal. They need indentured servants to get them food. Instead of making an obedient muttation force to do all their work for them and blowing up all the districts to ensure the starving and impoverished people don't rise up against them, the Capitol... only uses their incredible science for tormenting kids on a game show. Okay? The technology in Panem is mindblowing, and yet they don't use it! WHAT THE HELL.