What is the scariest movie monster ever created? We might first think of the xenomorph from the alien franchise, or pale man from Guillermo del Toro's Pens Labyrinth, or perhaps even the T-Rex from Jurassic Park. It's a way in which Hollywood is extremely prolific and quite underrated for over 120 years it's created nightmare-inducing creatures. But none of these creations even remotely compared to the terror I felt. The first time I heard this sound. This is the mutated bear from Alex Garland's Annihilation, and it haunted my waking dreams for what seemed like weeks after I saw the film. Annihilation takes place in the alien-induced shimmer, a shroud of mutations on time, biology, and mental clarity. All emanating from a lighthouse, the location of the aliens' arrival. The shimmer is a prison, but it refracts everything. The bear also takes cues from this cancerous environment. It is emaciated. Its skin and fur peel off of its frame. It sokes through the environment through labor breaths. But the most disturbing cue of this out-of-control mutation is the human skull embedded inside the bear's own head. But the animal is not without an emotional presence. Garland and visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst collaborated closely to create a creature that would strike fear, but also empathy. The behavior of the monster has something odd about it, because it s primarily in a state of despair and pain rather than anger. But Whitehurst to create a monster that engenders connection, I think the best way to explore this is to develop a deeper understanding of what horror films happen to, psychologically. Our unconscious personality, we have hints, we have certain ideas, but we don t know it really. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung thought that the most powerful stories were filled with metaphors for what he called the collective unconscious. He called these symbolic representations of incestually shared human behavior archetypes. There is still good in him. He s more machined than man, twisted than evil. And our stories are still filled with these exaggerated characters, like the magician, the sage, and of course, the hero. I will take the ring to Moldo. Jung believed we have an impulse to live these archetypes within our individual lives, whether we're conscious of it or not. We believe horror films deal specifically within the Persona Shadow archetype duality, and that this makes them particularly powerful. The Persona archetype is what we choose to share with the world, but there exists a deeper unconscious shadow, which often represented by a monster, drives us toward evil. Annihilation presents us with characters who have medical degrees, prestigious academic appointments, but also struggled deeply with self-destructive tendencies. She's tried to kill herself. Oh, I think the opposite trying to feel alive. So if the bear is a metaphor for the shadow, what is it telling us about ourselves, and which part of our repressed unconscious does it hint? It was so strange hearing. Shepherds' voice in the mouth of that creature last night. I think as she was dying part of her mind became part of the creature that was killing her. Imagine dying frightened and in pain and having that as the only part of you which survives. I wouldn't like that at all. I think it's the fear we've lived with our entire lives. The greatest unknown. What happens when we die? Ventress wants to face it. You want to fight it, but I don't think I want either of those things. The bear seizes the moment its victim realizes death will soon occur and suspends the sphere forever in its cry. Now I think there's an important distinction to make here. It isn't death itself which causes this fear. It's our collective story of death. We fear the story of a cold, isolating, entropy-oriented end to our existence. You know, it's a pull-it-surprise-winning book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker writes, The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation. But it is life itself which awakens it and so we must shrink from being fully alive. I think we're so often caught in this purgatory-like existence, caught between being afraid of death and being afraid to be fully alive. We slowly and quietly destroy our lives, but we never get too close to death. Almost none of us commit suicide and almost all of us self-destruct in some way and some part of our lives. Young's answer to break this cycle is to fully integrate the monster into consciousness, to fully integrate the story of death into life. So I went looking for answers and stumbled upon an interview with a triple-bored certified physician named Zack Busch. But let me tell you about what my experience has been in those last moments with patients who are dying. The most poignant examples of this are people that actually die biologically and we spend 15 or 30 minutes in an ICU resuscitating them with drugs and shocking their chest like you see on TV shows and everything else. They all told such a similar story on the other side of biologic life. And I had to do with a little bit of a typical story that you might see in a movie or something where they saw white light and there was a sense of expansion and all this. But there was one sentence that came back again and again and I had one ICU shift that was very weird. I had one ICU shift where I worked for 36 hours shift and during that night and middle of my 36 hours shift, I see three people die and I bring them all back. And the variety was huge. One of these was an African American pastor had over 200 visitors in his ICU room in the days before he passed away. And the other one was very isolated kind of ostracized gentlemen in his communities. He was dying of complications of AIDS. And then I had this kid who had genetic defects and all this stuff and he was dying of complications and pneumonia because he couldn't breathe anymore because his skeleton had collapsed. He just couldn't pick three different medical cases or three different human beings. And to the last one of those three, every single one of them, their first sentence had was always, why did you bring me back? And then as they start to get oriented and in the hours that follow, they are telling their loved ones, I went into this space and it was bright white light everywhere and I in that moment felt completely accepted for the first time in my life. And that was an unexpected sentence to hear out of multiple accounts. I felt completely accepted for the first time in my life. So what do you make of that? I think we're all walking around lonely as hell. And our opportunity to rebirth because death is not an endpoint. It's an transformation moment. It's an expansion beyond the limits of this frail, biologic shell that we carry around. And the instant that we step out of that, we find out that the universe embraces us. And every single second of our existence and complete acceptance of who we are, we are enough, in and of our own identity of I am, at every second of every point of our existence. I think it's so often true that the scariest things in our lives are the stories we tell ourselves about reality. Our purpose or lack thereof are impending fate. In Annihilation's creature, Alex Garland gives us an opportunity to grapple with these stories, to integrate the darkest parts of ourselves into conscious life. Or maybe it's just a bear that's really fucking scary.