Monsters In The Blade Runner

This assignment starts with notes to give you a general sense of the evolution of monsters, and some info to help you generate ideas.

The monster through time: pre-WWII, movie monsters tended to be human-sized, and human-like. A werewolf is a man transformed by a curse into a beast and back. In his beast state, he has no human inhibitions, but in his human state he feels remorse. The invisible man is transformed by science, a potion, but is still himself (though the potion begins to eat away at his sanity). He is himself but can act outside of social boundaries because he isn’t seen. The vampire is a human who has been transformed by a bite. His food is the blood of the living, and his misery is that his existence is eternal: no rest and no

We went without new “monsters” for some time, before they began to be recycled, with twists. Instead monsters were humans without affect, without boundaries, without human feelings, psychopaths and sociopaths, killers without remorse, brutal murderers who fit in and appeared to be “normal”: the monster within (Think Hannibal Lector, the boy-next-door character in American Psycho, the female murderer in the 2003 film Monster, which is in part an ironic title. Charlize Theron won the best actress Oscar for her

Binge on monster movies/TV shows of a certain kind.

You’ll devise your own project, your own theme. BUT this cannot do so until you’ve done some research. You can pick the monster, but not the theme until you’ve read what other, serious, scholarly writers have written on the subject. You won’t know what direction to go in unless you do, and your final project will be vague and uninteresting. It will read like a general essay with some specific sources thrown in. Don’t do that.

So, it’s your choice. Are you a sci-fi fan? Focus on a type of sci-fi monster, an alien, or a cyborg, or a period of sci-fi. Do you like more romantic fiction and movies? Maybe you loved the Twilight series, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Fine. But to talk about one of those (or both), you might first want to watch one of the old original Dracula movies.

Instead of starting with the monster itself, you might want to start with a general idea or time period (not the present) to explore: maybe you’re interested in the 50s radiation monsters. Okay. Go watch and read about them. Then choose one or