Remember when it was taboo to fantasize about having sex with monsters? It wasn’t so long ago that getting off to tentacles, fur, and gills was done behind closed doors or on private browsers. Now, with the release of Wicker, a romantic satire about a woman and an anthropomorphized basket, questions about whether Alexander Skarsgård’s “wicker dick is cut or uncut” are tweeted from public accounts. 4DX’s corporate profile is advertising its Wicker run in TikToks of rocking seats under the headline, “Feel every creak in 4DX.” Inter-species sex fantasies onscreen are downright… mainstream.
This new breed of beast isn’t Robert Pattinson’s brooding, fully humanoid vampire in Twilight. This is Bill Skarsgård starring as a vamp literally rotting off the bone with goo oozing from every orifice in 2024’s Nosferatu. (And actor Rachel Sennott professing “being drawn to an ugly evil guy” in the film’s Letterboxd reviews.) So what happened? The shift certainly can’t be attributed to loosening attitudes toward sexual permissiveness. Gen Z—the generation most likely to head to the theaters—has earned themselves the nickname “puriteens” online for their perceived prudishness. Amongst the so-called “sexless generation,” a whopping 19 percent of 18–29 year olds are virgins.
The youth, researchers make sure to clarify, are no less horny. And they’re not saving themselves for marriage like the virgins of yore (only 5 percent of Americans are making that commitment). Instead they’re consuming porn, fanfiction smut, and audio erotica in the privacy of their own bedrooms. They’re swiping endlessly on dating apps as heteropessimism permeates the culture and online interaction becomes the easier alternative to a living, breathing human standing in front of you. But even as Gen Zers extoll the virtues of the digital to the Kinsey Institute, broader studies reveal the perils of this way of living. Six in 10 Americans cite social divisions as a major stressor. We’re lonely; we just won’t turn to each other to solve the problem.
This is where the monster finds us: alone in our room, the subtle light of a cell phone screen barely illuminating the space. But instead of tearing us limb by limb, he ravishes. “[It’s] an empowerment fantasy,” says health and sexuality educator Robyn Manning-Samuels. For a long time, monster-human romances onscreen, predominantly heterosexual ones, fell into two camps: the woman tamed the beast, as in Beauty and the Beast. Or, the beast corrupted the woman, as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, wherein a werewolf comes to seduce poor Lucy in the night. She becomes monstrous herself and is righteously murdered for her indiscretions. Now—as in the paragon of modern “monsterfucker” films, The Shape of Water, which sees an amphibious creature rescue a woman from tedious, menial labor as they escape into the Baltimore canals together—the monster neither transforms into a human man nor is the woman punished for her attraction to him. Rather, he sees something unbridled in her, and she sees something worth tending to in him.
“Instead of having the power that I’ve been told is monstrous, and needs to be tamed, taken away, it’s treasured and honored,” says Manning-Samuels of these heroines. “This more powerful being is like, ‘I see you, I want you, I find you attractive, let’s bone.’ There’s an attractiveness to that. There’s obviously a neuroticism to it as well, because it’s usually a heterosexual dynamic [and] he’s no longer a threat either.”
In Wicker, the latest monster romance to launch a thousand raunchy tweets, Olivia Colman is a lonely Fisherwoman who is ostracized for her foul odor and slovenly appearance in her quaint village. She heads to the Basket Weaver’s cottage and asks that he fashion her a wicker lover. Imagine the townspeople’s surprise when Wicker Husband is not only pliable in all the right places, but more considerate and helpful around the cottage than any of the menfolk loitering around the bar. “He would have had me coughing up splinters every morning,” reads one enthusiastic Letterboxd review.
“At first it was funny,” says Alex Huston Fischer, one half of the husband-and-wife director duo behind Wicker, alongside Eleanor Wilson. “People were responding to [the film] and it kind of felt like they were playing your song on the radio. Oh my God, they’re playing my song! Then it was like, They’re doing some weird stuff with our song…” When I speak to the pair about the rabid response to Wicker Husband, they explain that they’ve learned quite a bit about the internet since Wicker’s release. The film’s reception can’t have come as too much of a surprise, though. Wilson notes that their request to the design team was “Mr. Darcy, plus basket.” “Yes he’s gorgeous,” she elaborates, “but he’s also willing to lend a hand and not need a pat on the back for it, which is maybe the sexiest thing about him.”
Wicker explores themes that plague many modern day relationships: conformity versus liberation, the balance of labor between partners, emotional maturity versus volatility, the expectations of a marriage. “When you have a character who’s seeing everything through fresh eyes, it magnifies all of the inadequacies or strange traditions,” says Fischer. “All of our normal patterns get highlighted. He shows there’s another way to be.” In speaking about the freedom of working in the fantasy genre, Wilson touches on something that could be behind this whole monster obsession: “It’s almost a safer way to explore those themes because there’s a distance between you and the characters.”
In a time when the manosphere proliferates, the monster romance provides a safe alternative to a relationship with a real human. He’s a protector, chiefly from other men, in both the fantasy and the real world. The fact that the monster paramour has made it all the way from guarded fanfiction sites to the multi-billion-dollar film industry shows just how atomized and detached we are as a society.
“The thing about fantasies is that they’re in your head,” says Manning. “The werewolf boyfriend doesn’t exist, and I think that helps a lot. One of the issues with, let’s say Twilight: The vampires looked like people the entire time. You’re like, Well, it just looks like my ex, and then he’s just acting like my ex. But there is a sort of ‘otherness’ to these monsters. It’s not anything in our normal lives, and it allows the fantasy to rarely bleed into real life in a way that would break the fantasy entirely … They can imagine that danger, and then while knowing they’re safe, they can close the book or finish the movie or finish themselves, and then go off to their everyday life and never seek that out.”
The monster romance as we see it today is primarily a female or queer fantasy, entering a market where erotic content targeted toward these demographics is historically underrepresented—Manning describes the research as unequivocally “bad.” But the power reversal is not without its reliance on old, unhelpful tropes: a taboo longing for “otherness,” a desire to objectify or dominate a partner. The monster’s unreality, in liberating one’s own sexual fantasy, does so in part by alleviating the discomfort of inflicting it on another real person—as traditional porn might, and has long been criticized for.
“That helps it stay self-contained, and also keeps it firmly in the role of fantasy, which is good for whatever purpose it serves, and allows it to be the metaphor [for the] erotic fetishized object,” explains Manning. “You can objectify it to your heart’s content. I don’t feel bad; he’s made of wicker. I can do whatever I want with him. That’s the ambidextrous gaze of being able to objectify, which women can be unpracticed at in a way, and so get a giddy satisfaction in being able to just be like, I can just think the werewolf is hot and leave it at that.”
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