The Monster You See and the Monster You Don't

Something that I found in common between “Nightmares” and “Living Conditions” (and this will probably be true for many other episodes as well) is that, as we discussed, ordinary, explainable problems manifest themselves as supernatural. Even though the roommate Kathy did turn out to be evil, Billy and Buffy both sought out to make their problems bigger and scarier than they needed to be. In Buffy’s case, as we discussed in class, she tried to cast her roommate as a demon because she knew how to solve that kind of problem. But why did Billy?

Billy’s mind turned his crazy little league coach into “The Ugly Man,” a hulking monster that could always find him when he was hiding. On some level, this is worse than the human coach, because The Ugly Man is a frightening, unbeatable monster that chases people for no apparent reason, other than that he is a monster. But at the same time, it’s better than the coach: how could a little league coach be so sick as to beat a child into a coma, and then “check-in” on him in the hospital to see if (or rather, to make sure that) Billy was still unconscious? At least the Ugly Man had the excuse of being evil. The Ugly Man is the monster you see, and the little-league coach is the monster you don’t. Which do you find scarier?

I feel like a lot of Gothic literature probably gives a supernatural facelift to pretty normal problems. Is this done to make a good, scary story? Or instead to explain away something that seems too horrible to exist in the natural world?

<3

P.S. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAnuhQ55O1E