Humans are the Real Monsters

At first I just wanted to talk about how as the seasons progress on the Walking Dead the zombies become less and less a threat and the real danger are the surviving humans. Then it occured to me that this is actually a theme found all over popculture. All popculture is, of course, produced by humans (as far as we know... *cue X-Files music*). This is an interesting observation to make as it suggests that no small part of humanity actually has views bordering on misanthropy and can identify with those views in media.

Back to the topic: this theme is so prevalent that it has an extensive TV Tropes page. For the sake of a comprehensive discussion I will only choose a few examples of media I personally have dealt with, but go on and check out their list and description, it's worthwhile. As described on the page this theme comes in different varieties. For my analysis I divide the chosen examples in two categories:

a) A human protagonist in conflict with the alien or supernatural realizes either that they have been in the wrong or that there is something worse than what they thought they were fighting against.
b) A non-human character provides an outsider's perspective on the actions of humans and makes the audience question what they took for granted.

Let's start with a) because this has been my starting point for this post, too. In Walking Dead a ragtag bunch of human survivors fight against a horde of zombies that threaten to overpower them from time to time. At least in the earlier seasons. Now the most conflict stems from their interactions with other survivors. Zombies are usually only an annoyance and only really dangerous when utilized by other humans. They have however come into contact with vicious cannibals that treat others like meat and now a group of cruel sadists whose actions promise to be more gruesome than anything we've seen before (I haven't seen season 6 yet, so I don't know for sure). Because they are corpses, the zombies rot. It costs them their already dubious strength, speed and endurance. Nowadays the zombies splatter apart if they trip and fall (which they frequently do). But any human that's still alive has either had the fortune of being protected or is a more or less deranged survivor accostumed to violence. If you heard a rustling in the bushes in earlier seasons you wished for a human, now you wish for a zombie.

Another show in which human protagonists fight against non-human enemies is Supernatural. Usually the perpetrators are mystic beings of varying degrees of evil. That humans, however, also have the potential to cause absolute horror is also evident. This is taken up by Lucifer himself who uses it to partly justify his hatred of humanity. But even the main characters experience this. I can think of two episodes that have no supernatural element in them at all and are simply examples of humans being senselessly cruel. One of them features a quote by Dean: "Demons I get, people are crazy!" He says this, because while demons are awful, they are somewhat justified in that seeing as they are demons, humans however have no excuses, no apparent destructive nature to hide behind.

An intersting case to look at is District 9.  In this movie an alien ship got stranded on earth. The surviving extraterrestrials are subsequently locked up in a horrible ghetto and treated on all accounts as subhuman. The human protagonist works for a company intimately linked with the organization of the ghetto. In the course of the filiming he gets infected and slowly but surely turns alien himself. His change of perspective is thus forced, because he experiences the same oppression and terror that the aliens have been forced to endure for a while now. The effect is nevertheless the same and in no way diminished. While we might at first see the aliens as scary it becomes obvious over the course of the movie that the humans are effectively the villains.

Now we turn to b) and the first thing that comes to my mind is X-Men as a metaphor for struggle against oppression in general. The mutants are notably not human. They have potentially disatrous abilites and quite a few of them look more or less drastically different (Kurt Wagner aka Nightcrawler only an example). It is clear from the beginning who we should symapathize with. X-Men asks us to switch perspectives and has us clearly identifying humans as the villains. Even the movies that present Magneto as the primary antagonist feature humans being just as horrible if not more so, since Magneto generally is given a more or less convincing justification.  

The Doctor in Doctor Who usually loves humans. He travels with them and spends a lot of time and effort saving them or their planets. He has a great deal of positive things to say about them, too. Sometimes, however, humans screw up as they do. Not everyone is a fundamentally good person and sometimes humans do everything they can to prove the Doctor's enthusiastic belief in the human race wrong. His sympathy for all living creatures is not always shared by the humans. He gets angry then and calls them out on their hipocrisy or cruelty.  "I should have told them to run, as fast as they can, run and hide, because the monsters are coming: the human race!", he says after humans blast a spaceship in retreat into oblivion. They prove themselves to be no better than the alien invaders.

Tying in with my Science Fiction university course this theme is especially popular in the genre of Science Fiction or Dystopia as those are often used to reflect on worrying developments in modern society.