Why Monsters Are Scary

This story does not seem to fit many of Carroll’s conditions for the horror genre. The monster, who can only be General Zaroff has few supernatural qualities. The only larger-than-life qualities he possesses are extremely talented hunting skills. Rainsford sees him as having “uncanny powers” (177). Yet there is not really any proof of this. Mostly Zaroff is just really good at tracking. This is the horror of the story—he is only human. This story is terrifying because it tells us that the most dangerous monster is a person. That underneath any one of our polished, “civilized,” exteriors, a bloodthirsty monster could be lurking. General Zaroff is well read and well educated (he reads “all books on hunting published in English, French and Russian” (171)) and has sophisticated tastes (he drinks port and smokes perfumed cigarettes and hums Madame Butterfly and reads Marcus Aurelius).
I think that this story points out something important about all horror stories: the monsters are only scary because there is something about them that is believable. They are only scary because we know that people can be monsters. There is something logical and horrible about General Zaroff’s reasoning. He points out all the quirks in humanity that seem to echo Agent Smith’s views on humanity in the Matrix. He says that there is “no greater bore than perfection” (172), which is just like how Agent Smith tells Neo that the first version of the Matrix didn’t work because people cannot accept a perfect world. This seems to be an inherent flaw in humans: we need imperfections. We are bored without challenges, without struggles, without wars. General Zaroff dismisses Rainsford’s moral qualms by saying that it’s just the same as war. But Rainsford never wavers; he tells Zaroff that hunting humans is nothing but murder.
What I love about this story is that there’s no point where the author has to “out” the monster and therefore make it less scary. There’s usually that moment in horror movies where you actually see the monster in daylight and its mystery and most frightening aspects disappear. I’ve heard that this is one of the reasons Jaws works—they couldn’t get their Jaws shark machine working so you don’t actually see the shark for a long time. In “The Most Dangerous Game,” the monster is the primitive, animalistic, survival of the fittest, violent nature hidden in all humans. General Zaroff has let this nature come out in a way that most people don’t. To me, what is really unsettling about this story is that in order to win, in order to survive, Rainsford has to allow his monster to come to light. Rainsford turns from the hunted to the hunter when he goes into Zaroff’s bedroom, recognizing that he must kill Zaroff in order to survive. And at least for me, I cannot help but be glad that Rainsford wins. I’m on his side while I’m reading; I don’t feel bad when he kills Zaroff. And so, when we support Raisnford’s murder, doesn’t Connell prove in the end that the monster is in us as well? Perhaps all horror reflects this basic fear that there is a monster somewhere in humanity. Why would we be afraid of silly monsters that obviously are not real? Perhaps because they are a way of separating the evil we see from the people who participate in it. This is why, to me, this story is much more haunting than a story about a bunch of ants.