When you think of spooky or scary creatures, monkeys are probably not the first animal that crosses your mind. Cats, rats, and bats. Even corvids and canines. These creatures more obviously fit the aesthetic of the Gothic, and you’ll commonly see them crawling through castles, darkening the skies, or lurking in graveyards in Gothic texts. But there were also many who found monkeys to be deeply unsettling—especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is both the strangeness and the familiarity of these creatures that makes them excellent vessels for horror. On the one hand, primates bear a significant resemblance to humans in both their physical features and the actions they are capable of—a similarity which would ultimately lead Darwin to his paradigm-shattering theory of evolution in the mid-nineteenth century. On the other hand, these creatures are still distinctly inhuman. And for many Western writers whose only encounters with other primates came from colonial excursions, monkeys were inevitably associated with the Evil, Exotic East. You’ll see all of these elements brought out in the examples listed below of some of my favorite monkeys in Gothic literature:
