Description: For this first short assignment, you should write a brief history of your own experience with monsters. I’m not talking about actual monsters–hopefully you’ve never encountered one of those. I’m talking instead about the monsters from television, movies, stories that you remember as playing a significant role in your own life’s history. This short assignment should provide a brief overview of the way you were introduced to these fictional monsters, and an exploration of how they affected your thinking and your life. As you can probably tell, I included the Louise Zhang Ted Talk on how monsters have affected and shaped her life in order to give you an opportunity to “see” how someone might approach this kind of assignment firsthand. If you want to, you can refer to or quote from Zhang’s talk directly. It might give you inspiration. If not, that’s fine too. 

Tips and Suggestions to get going:  Be creative. You can start with a framing device, an anecdote or really any way to catch the reader’s attention. Don’t worry about that old boring introduction that says something like, “There have been monsters throughout the history of the world.” The reader already knows that–you don’t need to remind the reader of what they already know. Start with your OWN life, and with your own experience of monsters. Put that experience front and center–and see where it leads. 

Requirements: MLA style, 350-500 words, at least three paragraphs. I’m looking for creativity here, and thoughtful arrangement of ideas and that’s what I’m going to pay the MOST attention to when I grade. But I’ll also be looking for your ability to follow the basic rules of MLA style. If you are not familiar with them, be SURE to read over the overview I’ve provided on the content page in this week’s module. You will be expected to write using MLA style capably throughout the semester. I prefer that you submit your work as a Microsoft Word document, but if you do not have Word available, you may manually enter it using the text entry tool provided. 

EXPERIENCE WITH MONSTERS

My perspective about monsters in movies is that as much as we don’t see their monstrous times and those scary moments when we reflect about those movies outwards, we find that they have great relevance in our own lives. In 2016 I picked a movie one night to watch as I was home alone about a demon popping out of a book that was meant to be read by children. The movie’s name was the Babadook, and I had picked it to watch for just fun, and I thought that it would not be as scary as other monster movies I had watched. The truth is it was scarier than most of the movies that I had watched, and surprisingly it taught me more about my self and other people that I knew than I had thought.

 Watching this movie made me realize that I was living my life full of anxiety and fear, which was unimaginable and unfounded. This movie captures the reality of a life that is filled with grief. It showed me how the anxiety in my life and the lives of many people that I know causes us to run away from reality and fear things that do not exist. Samuel’s character and how he struggles to fight the monster reflect on how we live in a constant struggle with demons and monsters in our imaginations and haunt our lives. It also shows us how the struggles and challenges that we face or go through in our lives affect those closest to us and how they are intertwined, like in the case of Amelia and Sam. The relationship between the characters is affected by false visions and imaginations which makes them to imagine scary things that keeps them out of touch with reality.

My interpretation is Babadook, who appears as a man wearing a hat and a big coat in the night is not there. This represents grief and depression that most people are going through. It represents barriers that appear in our lives many times and stop us from doing what we are supposed to be doing. They are mostly imaginable, and they affect our eating, sleeping, and even our getting up to perform our daily tasks. This movie tries to show us how depression, which has affected most people in society, affects and disrupts the life of people and those that are close to them. The most intriguing thing about this horror movie creeped me out and made me jump at the same time. In this movie, depression is portrayed as an ambiguous monster, and that lurks in every corner that we turn to. It shows how the monster ruins relationships and turns them into horrors not visible to others who do not understand what is happening in the lives of the victims. I love how the monster character Babadook has been used in this movie to represent mental health and depression and show how our fear to face and accept reality could have a detrimental effect on our mental health.

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