Dragons

One of the first monster we are confronted to as kids is the dragon. It is present in many cartoons such as Sleeping Beauty. Its features are that it is very big, can fly and spit fire. It is a mix between a snake and an eagle.

Sleeping Beauty

Nowadays, dragons are still very important, they can be considered as nice and friendly such as in the animated film How to train your dragon. At the beginning they are considered as evil and mean by the humans but at the end humans discover that dragons are helpful and nice and only one of them was mean. The population decides to train them in order to use them as soldiers in their wars and help them defend their territory.

How to train your dragon

Dragons also represent power just as in Game of Thrones. There are three dragons terrifying the population and helping the queen to get back on the throne. The major problem is to know how to control them and use them just when necessary.

Game of Thrones

I am going to talk about an interesting dragon from a manga Haku. What changes is that the person is both a dragon and a human and can change at will. The character has lost all of his memories. The only thing he knows is the transformation into the dragon form. This monster is depicted as a beautiful, silver dragon. It has a long serpentine body, deer-like anthers, flowing whiskers and a lupine face. The interesting thing is that as a human he is unemotional and cold whereas as a dragon it is kind, protector of the innocent, has more emotions. Here, we have the contrast between human and monster but in fact, it is the reverse. The human is meaner than the dragon. It changes from the usual dragon stories.

Haku

The dark side of the fairies

In the fairy tales we read and cartoons we watch we are used to face nice fairies helping out the humans. Some examples would be the fairy godmother of Cinderella or Tinker Dell in Peter Pan.

Fairy godmother of Cinderella

But there are not only good fairies some are bad and want to kill humans. The first thing to know about them is the spelling which changes but no one pays attention to it : faeries are the evil ones. The origin of evil fairies comes from a belief that they were once angels. But when Lucifer and some of the angels revolted against God and were cast out, there were some that got « caught in the doorway » so to speak. It is thought that they were strongly persecuted by demons, as they lacked the strength to stand up and take one side or the other in their war against God. So they went from being helpful spirits that were welcomed to evil demons out to destroy souls.

I will now give two examples of famous faeries. In Ireland we have the Leprechaun. If you catch him he will grant you three wishes but you need to be careful with the way of saying them. For instance, if you say  »I want my mum to leave me alone », he will kill her.

Leprechaun

In Brittany, there are the korrigans. They give challenges to humans, if they succeed they are granted one wish otherwise it is a trap to go to hell or a jail underground, with no hope of escaping.

Korrigan

But faeries are not only myths in different cultures, they are also present in books. For instance in Sleeping Beauty, a fairy who wasn’t invited, wanted her dead but another fairy changed the curse to a long sleep. A last example is Rumpelstiltskin. He completes wishes in exchange of something. In the story he helps a princess spin straws into gold. In exchange she has first to give him a ring and next to give him her first born child. But since she is desperate he offers that if she guesses his name she can keep the child. Eventually because of a song he was singing she guesses his name.

Rumpelstiltskin

So be careful you may encounter a faery one day…

 

Zombies

In the past few years, zombies have become more and more important in movies and TV series. It usually starts with a biological virus that contaminates one person and eventually the whole world. The particularity is that these people are walking dead. The only way to kill them is to smash their brains. In some stories they are said to be blind and only know where you are because of the sound you make when you move. Their bodies are in decomposition and they only groan.

A zombie

I will talk about two examples. The first one is a South Korean movie called Train to Busan. It takes place in a train as a zombie apocalypse suddenly breaks in the country and endangers the passengers. Most of them get transformed into zombies and want to transform everyone. It is a movie about survival when you are surrounded by deadly zombies and how humans react to this situation. Some of them are ready to kill other humans if it can save them. The transformation takes several minutes and only three of them succeeds in escaping. The thing is at the end we don’t know if the government is going to succeed in killing every zombie so that life can get back to what it was.

Train to Busan

The second example is the famous TV show The Walking Dead. A sheriff wakes up in an apocalyptic world in which zombies are ruling over fear. He joins a group of survivors and together they try to escape from the zombies and also from other groups of survivors. Because indeed in a world in which you need to fight for survival you also fight to get your food and your weapons. So who are the most dangerous, zombies or humans?

The Walking Dead

These types of movies show how humans react in such conditions and sometimes they even turn themselves into monsters to survive. Scientist have studied zombies and how it propagates to make some research on flu. Indeed, flu is a disease that can propagate very fast. Thanks to the movies it has helped them stop and prevent propagation of diseases. In this case we could be thinking, what if one day they don’t prevent it and we all become zombies?

Psychopaths

Psychopaths can be considered as human monsters. We are scared of them but at the same time they intrigue us. Indeed, many studies were realized to understand how they can become like this, what happens in their brain. Usually it is related to their past such as a difficult childhood with abusing parents. We can actually see an example of that in the TV show Criminal Minds. Here, every criminal is a serial killer who has psychological problem due to something that happened to him in the past. Sometimes the episodes can be scary because they target lambda people so relating to the present it could be you.

Criminal Minds

But psychopaths are not only present in fictions. Throughout History, there have been numerous cases involving psychopaths. My example would be Vlad the Impaler. It is the person on which Dracula is based. Vlad the Impaler was called this way because he liked to torture people and eventually impale them. I have a few examples of what he did. One day, two Turkish diplomats came to see him. Due to their traditions they were wearing turbans. Vlad asked them to take them off but they refused. So he nailed it to their head to make sure they would never take their turban off again. Another story is when he ordered women to be impaled together with their suckling babies on the same stake. The babies fought for their lives at their mother’s breasts until they died. Then he had the women’s breasts cut off and put the babies inside headfirst. He had them impaled together. A last example would be that he loved to eat with dead bodies around him. With time psychologists said that he became such a psychopath because of his childhood. He was kept hostage with his brother far from his father in a castle in order to assure his father’s loyalty. But this is not a good environment to raise a child. Moreover his father and his brother died when he was young.

Vlad the Impaler

Psychopaths are intriguing and scary at the same time. By watching this type of movies aren’t we also psychopaths because we enjoy it?

 

Robots and artificial intelligence

Robots are a big part of science fiction movies. They can take different forms, human or metallic. They represent the new technologies realized by humans. The problem is they can become good or evil. The first example I will take is R2-D2 in Star Wars. It is a metallic robot that speaks its own language, which is a kind of whistling. Its particularity is that it is a very clever robot eager to help humans and go in adventures even if they don’t understand what it says. It is part of the good robots. Its character is very important for the audience, everyone is attached to this little astromech droid.

R2-D2

The other example I will talk of is a more complex type of robot: Ava from the movie Ex Machina. It has a metallic shape even though some of its part are covered with human flesh. In the movie, a young programmer wins a contest and can go in the house of his boss. He has to test an android to see if it is capable of thought and consciousness. During their numerous talks he gets closer to her and we can even wonder if he is not falling in love with Ava. At this point we can wonder if in real life with the new robots coming out humans will eventually fall in love with them. It is something that already happens. In Japan some wedding ceremonies were performed between a human and a robot with artificial intelligence. In the movie at the end, we discover that Ava has been manipulating the programmer since the beginning in order to be able to escape alone and discover the real world. In order to do so it means that she has demonstrated true intelligence.

Ava

This means that one day maybe humans will be able to create robots that think and react like humans. This is why so many movies are related to robots. We love new technologies and one day robots may take our place. For the moment we are intrigued but watching this movie make us think, is it a good thing to create more and more powerful robots?