Quiz: Can You Match the Monster to Its Wikipedia Description?

Monsters have haunted the human imagination since time immemorial. But how well do you actually know your creepers, crawlers, and midnight maulers? Test your knowledge of monsters by seeing if you can match the Wikipedia description to the malevolent bogeyman it corresponds to!

How did you do? Are you prepared to set up your own monster-hunting business, or is it time for a refresher on the monstrous subtypes that haunt so many folktales, features, and films? Either way, read on to learn a bit more about monsters across human history.

Famous monsters across time

Humans have told stories about terrifying creatures for many thousands of years. It makes sense; after all, our most ancient ancestors were haunted by tigers, lions, and other dangerous creatures.

Ever since we developed the ability to tell stories, we’ve used them as a means to make sense of a sometimes inexplicably terrifying world, so it’s no wonder that monsters have fascinated us for so long. Watching the forests of the night for glittering eyes and long teeth is one of our oldest and most powerful instincts, so of course, monsters were always going to make for gripping narratives. 

Some of the oldest monsters on record come from the earliest stories we know of. Most mythologies, from Hindu to Greek, describe various evil monsters. One of the earliest recorded monsters is Humbaba and the Scorpion-Monsters, who first appeared in the Epic of Gilgamesh some 2000 years BCE. Humbaba is a forest guardian with a face made of entrails—an image that sounds scary enough to haunt a modern blockbuster for sure. 

It’s easy enough to think that ancient monsters were all pure evil, and only in recent centuries have we begun to humanize monsters in stories like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. Yet monsters have always been complex. The aforementioned Humbaba, for example, was a forest guardian merely wanting to protect his home, and his death quickly leads to the hero’s own annihilation. 

Modern monsters, myriad meanings

Monsters have often reflected human fears of the other and the unknown. Many of these fears have historically been rooted in racial prejudices and other stereotypes. In modern years, monsters have been portrayed in increasingly complex and humanized ways across various media. Most monsters still symbolize various human fears, from zombies that serve as metaphors for the destructiveness of capitalism to killer robots that embody worries about technology’s increasing encroachment on human life.

From Dracula to mummies, Godzilla to zombies, and Bigfoot to krakens, monsters haunt our dreams, our literature and films, and the shadowiest parts of our psyches. Given their longevity, it’s unlikely that they’ll go away anytime soon. But at least by learning more about them, we can be better prepared for the day a zombie apocalypse comes…or more likely, the day that digital robots turn against humanity. Fortunately, every famous monster has its kryptonite, from vampires that can be killed with stakes to bogeymen who can be neutralized by a few kind words.