Matthew Hare asked Alan Moore:

What do you think makes a person or monster truly scary?

Alan Moore I think the most frightening quality in a monster – real or fictional, human or otherwise – is its distance from our world of common human understanding; the sense that we are confronted by some sort of awareness that is absolutely nothing like our own, with interior processes and perceptions and agendas that are utterly foreign to our own and which are therefore unreadable to us. In this sense, things like werewolves, vampires or H.R. Giger’s franchised aliens aren’t really any more disturbing than a runaway car that’s heading in your direction. If there’s something with fangs or teeth like a typewriter carriage that’s making its way towards you, then you probably don’t have that many questions about its motivations, or your own: it’s evidently trying to kill you, and you , just as evidently, would rather not be killed. Being killed, whether it be by a tumour, a drunk and masturbating truck driver or a reanimated mummy enacting a vengeful curse, is something that, as humans, we should probably be used to by now. Something wanting to kill us...often a really ugly and monstrous something...has been our constant companion since the Palaeolithic. Much more alarming, in my estimation, is the entity of which we haven’t the faintest idea what it wants; the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks as opposed to the shuffling and brain-seeking cadavers of our zombie movies. This posited unknowable entity doesn’t even have to mean you any harm or be aware of your existence in order to terrify. The very fact of its irresolvable and unfathomable nature is enough to haunt and obsess us forever after, to the point where we might end up wishing that we’d encountered a nice, down-to-earth, uncomplicated rampaging sasquatch instead.

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