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Doctor Christopher Moreman sees dead people.

Not in a “stairwell closet” sense. More in the “they keep showing up in our movies” sense. The dead, it turns out, are bad at staying gone.

Moreman, chair of the Philosophy & Religious Studies Department, has spent a career thinking about monsters—with an unusual amount of enthusiasm for someone whose day job involves resuscitating the words of dead philosophers.

On second thought, that tracks.

His fixation eventually turned into Religion, Monsters and Horror, a popular upper-division course he’s taught for more than a decade. Students rush to enroll the way horror characters rush into cornfields—ignoring every warning sign.

Monsters, he argues, are cultural tells—the figures societies invent to give their fears a face.

“You can learn a lot about a society from its monsters,” he said.

The word monster comes from the Latin monēre: to warn, to advise. In ancient cultures, monsters weren’t random horrors. They were corrective forces. When communities drifted, the gods sent something to pull them back—because sometimes it takes a monster to raise a village.

“Monsters also reveal our fears,” Moreman said. “Personal and societal ones.”

They outline what a society calls normal—bursting in to test its limits.

Normal, of course, is famously unreliable.

Consider witches. Once shorthand for spiteful, unbridled women, they’ve been reimagined as misunderstood figures. Wicked reframes the Wicked Witch as a scapegoat and exposes the “good guys” as something closer to smug tyrants.

Eighty years ago, that might have been unthinkable. Today, we sing along.

Moreman is especially fluent in zombies.

Modern zombies represent graceless death, if not the in-laws: decaying, clumsy, impossible to escape.

“Here’s a corpse coming after you that you can’t escape,” he said.

But zombies raise an awkward question. If the thing trying to eat your face looks like your brother, do you still love it—or do you lock and load?

In Haiti, zombies were once pitied—dead slaves forced to labor after death. With Night of the Living Dead (1968), they became something else entirely: a consuming force turned outward at a defiant generation.

Zombies stopped being us and became them.

Moreman often points to Freaks (1932), a film that scandalized audiences by making physically different characters sympathetic—and “normal” people cruel.

The film was banned.

Monsters aren’t warnings about creatures in the dark so much as reminders that sometimes society names the monster—and sometimes the monster does the naming.

There’s an old grifting rule: if you don’t know the mark, it’s you.

Moreman thinks monster stories run on the same logic.