I’ve always lived with monsters.
Not the kind that hide under your bed and watch you while you sleep, or the cute fuzzy kind in Pixar movies.
These monsters will not hurt me; instead, they line the walls, shelves and crevices in my home, like statues in a museum.
My dad is an avid collector of monster figurines and statues. Whether it be our movie room, butler pantry, my bedroom or my dad’s office, wherever you look, chances are you will find a statue of some sort staring right back at you. My dad has been building his collection since he was a teenager, and now our house is full of models both new and old, finished and incomplete, displayed like tokens of a lifelong dedication.
It is not weird for me to wake up staring down the mouth of an engineer, or to make coffee with a xenomorph on the counter next to me with five more statues above the microwave behind me.
In my first home, we had a movie room which was really just a small TV, a couch and a menagerie of teeth captured in plastic and resin. This changed when we moved in with my grandmother after our house flooded in Hurricane Harvey.
These monsters came with us to my grandmother’s house when we moved, though they mostly migrated to the third-floor movie room. While we lived there, my family and I would watch a movie every night.
Just us and the monsters.
I would ask my father what they were and what movies they were from, and he would answer with a carefully censored description. He couldn’t exactly say, “Oh yeah, the alien popped out of his chest and murdered everyone,” but his lack of a clear-cut answer only fueled my imagination and increased my desire to watch more films, despite my young age. From what my dad has told me, I became hooked and vowed to become a collector myself to be like my father.
Some of these models have been here since before I was born. One is the life-size Yoda outside of my grandmother’s room, which I used to decorate with flower crowns and glow sticks. It wasn’t mine, but I wanted it to be.
When my family moved into our new house, the first thing I wanted in my room wasn’t stuffed animals or books, but monsters. I asked my dad if I could take a Ben Grimm statue to my room because I had just watched the “Fantastic Four” for the first time, and when I was 13, I got my first xenomorph.
The movie “Alien” has always been special to me because I share my love for it with my dad. Though my dad loves the xenomorph itself, my favorite characters were always Ash, who I would call the milk man because he was made of milky synthetic fluid, and Jonesy, aka the reason EVERYONE DIED. Some of my first models were three doll-like statues of Dallas, Kane and Lambert in their spacesuits when they visited LV-426.
Lambert’s head would always pop off and bobble around aimlessly in her helmet. Wanting to repair my own models to be like my dad, I hot glued her head back on. It was sloppy and wrong, and I damaged the model significantly, but it was the first time a model truly became mine, despite being deformed and partially melted.
Over time, the monsters became so normal to me that I hardly even noticed them.
Throughout this, my dad had gotten me hooked on shopping for models. He taught me the art of identifying which sculptures were high quality and which ones used cheap paint. I would look online and analyze their faces, the shadows and the detail, and I would always complain to my dad when I knew we could have done the paint job better ourselves.
However, I absolutely fell in love with a sixth-scale model of Nebula from the “Guardians of the Galaxy.” I had been absolutely infatuated with the franchise for years, having watched it dozens of times.
When my dad bought me the model for Hanukkah, I tore into it the way a little kid tears into a new Barbie doll. For two years, I carried one of the model’s fake batons with me for good luck, and I still display the model alongside my Godzilla CD collection.
I tend to think of my models as an extension of my connection with my dad. Whether it be the 10-foot-tall xenomorph in the movie room or the Predator on top of the microwave, each model and each collection reminds me of a conversation or moment I have shared with my dad. It’s like the models spark neurons in my brain that bring me back to the moment I learned about them.
The number of movies I’ve watched and the sheer quantity of models I collect hasn’t decreased with time. Though both my dad and I are busier now, we still find the time to debate whether a movie scene is pure genius or not, and though I have gotten older, I still haven’t moved the models or posters that line my room, and I do not think I ever will.
To most kids, monsters seem daunting and scary with their sharp teeth, razor-like claws and cat-like agility, but to me, they are my safe space. I would always feel more at home watching a bad horror film with my dad with a massive alien statue towering over us than out at a restaurant or movie theater.
I never believed in the monster under the bed or the creature in the closet.
I never had to.
The monsters in my house never hid, and we never tried to conceal them.
