Humanity has always been scared of the dark. Perhaps this is an evolutionary adaptation. Perhaps it is something else. However, the fact of the matter is that everyone at some time or another has heard a bump in the night and sat up wide awake terrified of the world around them. In and of itself, the dark is not particularly scary or threatening. However, it is the creatures that we know operate in the nighttime hours that scare us. We are less afraid of the dark itself and more of the unknown possibility of the threats that could lurk in the darkness. 

Perhaps, then, it is better to simply say that one of humanity's greatest and most universal fears is the unknown. The monstrosity of the unknown is the monstrosity of opportunity. It is a sort of anti-world, where anything could happen. In other words, "This anti-world, when it is seen from the perspective of those who first create it and then haunt it, believing everything to be exceptionally possible in it -- forgetting for their part that only laws create exceptions -- this anti-world is the imaginary, indistinct, and [dizzying] world of the monstrous" (Canguilhelm, 42). Our fears of the unknown are projected onto the world around us, and onto the darkness as well. For example, if we consider the early cartography from a few months ago in this course, monsters always lurked on the outskirts and the edges of the known world. Explorers and thinkers simply didn't know what was out there, and that scared them. However, as with all monstrosity, it provided a spark of curiosity for the daring and the intrepid. 

In the modern digital age, the world is getting smaller by the day. Almost all of the reaches of the surface world have been explored. The only two places where unknown monsters still potentially lurk are at the bottom of the sea and in the vast reaches of outer space. These are the uncharted areas left to us, and our fears of the unknown are projected out into them. We fear the sea monsters that lurk in the darkness of the deep, and we fear the unknown aliens that could potentially exist in the vast dark of the universe. 

Furthermore, our fear of the unknown extends to the future. We project our fears of the potential negative consequences of our actions onto the future, as we do not know what it will hold for us. In today's world, there are growing concerns about climate change and its potential effects on our world. This has spawned a whole new genre of films and conceptions of monstrosity with respect to the monstrosity of nature. Nature may not be monstrous in and of itself, but irresponsible actions on the part of humanity today and yesterday may very well cause monstrous consequences for humanity in the future. These potential consequences, however, are yet unknown. We know they are coming, yet we do not know the details of how, when, or to what extent. This lack of knowledge and lack of ability to see the monsters in front of us causes us immense fear and worry. The monstrosity of the future, similarly to the monstrosity of the dark, is simply a projection of our fear of the monstrosity of the unknown.