Last year I was talking with a friend about what monster categories we and our friends/relatives/significant others would fit into. We ended up talking less about who was a vampire, who was a werewolf, etc., than we did about what the categories should be in the first place. Vampire, Ghost, Werewolf, Zombie, and Mummy seemed like the big five, but is there some overlap between Zombie and Mummy? Are they the same idea/metaphor/creature, just in different places in the world and times in history? What about Witches/Warlocks–should they constitute their own phylum among the monsters, or be nested in some sort of other domain?

Then we remembered Aliens, which were both different enough, humanoid enough, and prevalent enough culturally to fit into our concept map of major monsters. But Frankenstein’s monster, in part due to being singular, would be shuttled off to some small branch under the heading Trolls or Ogres; Sirens might be some subform of Witch; Poltergeists surely fit into the greater Ghost category, et cetera. Do we consider fairies? No, we’ll keep it to “evil” monsters, or at least those that are generally cast as evil though sometimes good (Witches/Warlocks, Ghosts) rather than those who are generally cast as good though sometimes evil (Sprites and so forth).

I think dragons were ruled out by virtue of being animals, whereas Vampires and Werewolves retain human form part-time. Animal-esque monsters, perhaps, are the other Kingdom. And since we had started by trying to fit everyone we know into the supernatural creature of best fit, we stuck to the Humanoid Kingdom.

For a second it amazed me that everyone seemed to fit so neatly into one of the categories we’d settled on. Then I remembered that humans love categorization, and that you can find cause to cleave the population into groups as sensical as “Which Ninja Turtle are you?” or as random as “Everyone is a bird, horse, or muffin.”

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