Monsters, Ghosts & Exclusion

Monsters, Ghosts & Exclusion

What do we do with what we cannot integrate?

What happens to experiences, memories and people that disturb a community’s understanding of itself? What returns when something has been silenced, cast out or declared finished?

This catacomb explores monsters and ghosts as figures through which literature and horror give presence to what remains difficult to recognise or accommodate.

Inside This Catacomb

Monsters can unsettle the boundaries through which a family, community or culture defines belonging. We ask how a figure becomes an “Other”: who names it monstrous, what makes it threatening, and what its exclusion allows the surrounding structure to preserve.

Ghosts invite a different set of questions. They may bring the past into the present, trouble an accepted account of events, or give presence to a loss that has found no place among the living.

One distinction I explore is between the monster cast out when it no longer conforms and the ghost of what once belonged but can no longer be acknowledged. This is a proposed reading to examine in each work, allowing for figures that overlap or resist it.

Disenfranchised grief runs through this investigation: losses whose significance receives little social or cultural recognition. Gothic stories can offer a language for approaching those experiences and questioning the conditions under which a loss is permitted to matter.

The figures we encounter also turn our attention towards the structures around them. What do those structures contain and protect? What do they exclude? And what might the monster reveal about whether they remain places of safety?

Questions We Explore

Who decides what belongs and what must be cast out?
What happens to people whose losses are not recognised by their community?
How do monsters and ghosts disturb the stories a culture tells about itself?
When does an encounter with the excluded invite recognition, and when does it reinforce fear?

An Emerging Question

The Ghost Inside Me

What remains within us when an experience has not yet found words or a place in our lives?

This emerging exploration begins with the images that accompany us: remembered dreams, losses and parts of our experience that remain difficult to express.

I am interested in how the ghost might offer a language for approaching these presences: what continues to speak within us, how we listen, and what happens when we give it form through writing or imagery.