George Daniel Lea’s Thirteen for Halloween tour reaches Medusa and the Gorgons, the monsters he met first in a childhood Ladybird book. He reads the Medusa myth through Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Ray Harryhausen’s Clash of the Titans, and asks how a creature built to terrify became a feminist icon.
Why do horror monsters outlast the heroes sent to slay them? George Daniel Lea introduces his Thirteen for Halloween series with a personal look back at Ladybird myths, Knightmare, Jim Henson and Stephen King. He also explores why queer and neurodivergent readers so often side with the monsters in horror fiction.
Forget the hunched brute of the films. In this Thirteen for Halloween essay, George Daniel Lea goes back to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and finds a plain, short man rather than a beast. His Jekyll and Hyde analysis lays the blame for the monster on Victorian repression, shame and class.
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