In this modern era, when large predators like tigers, grizzly bears and even sharks are being driven to extinction, our apprehensions remain insistently primal. Whether the manifestation comes from outer space, the abyssal depths, or the lab of a mad scientist, the fate we prefer to fear is consistent: we are afraid of being eaten alive.
As with T. Rex, the fiercest will hunt us down in our nightmares long after they have vanished from Earth.
The danger of becoming a meal is no longer instilled in us by the fables we are told as children. The persistence of this visceral fear despite the absence of everyday cultural reinforcement suggests it is hard wired into our being, a genetic trait that once served us well because it kept us alert.
Other movie monsters exploit a considerable fear we each possess: the fear of our own kind. Vampires and zombies and faceless serial killers are but stand-ins for the mindless masses and malevolent loners living in our midst, who could turn on us without provocation. The primal fear in this case stems from a human predisposition toward paranoia. Instinctive xenophobia is particularly rampant in an anonymous society where anybody, even a family member, can become a malevolent stranger who was only pretending to be a friend.
Of course, we have tamed vampires and zombies with soap opera characterization, because we are not truly afraid of the mindless masses and malevolent loners, we just resent having to accommodate them during commute hour.
Despite the pacification of the planet, there are yet things roving the real world that wrap around our spines with an icy grip. The one true mortal threat that we fear most is so scary that it has never, to my knowledge, been portrayed as a movie monster. This is the horror of our own cells commandeered to kill us, the inscrutable threat of Cancer.
I thought about what Cancer might look like as a movie villain. The claw and fang cliches are boring. I am not professionally skilled at creature creation with 3D modeling programs, so I offer a sketch combining description with a conceptual image.
Imagine the Cancer Sisters, Maligna and Metasta. Maligna is a faceless, amorphous medusa head extending long tendrils outward in all directions. Metasta is a volumetric Mandelbrot beetle swarm hovering to Maligna's side. They are both glossy black, reflecting everything around them, showing no color of their own save a malevolent aura. When they move in for the kill, the victim is unaware, but soon the victim suffers the full range of cancer symptoms either compressed into the span of moments, or drawn out over months, at the Sisters' cruel discretion.
If you don't get a chill imagining this, if you don't fear superstitiously that even thinking about such things runs the risk of making them true, then you are made of stronger stuff than most of the human race.
Maligna and Metasta are not likely to appear at the multiplex. They are so scary no one would want to face them as phantoms on the screen. It is frightful enough that we face them when loved ones die, or the doctor brings us bad news.
We reserve our tame cinema fears for beasts with the predator characteristics we are vanquishing from the planet, as a kind of justification for our ignorant, thoughtless, relentless, selfish behavior: extermination as self defense.
The truly frightening threats in real life, all of our own creation now, are too scary for entertainment.
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