Monsters are real; in fiction, fantasy and film is how we deal | MARK HUGHES COBB

Picture a monster.

If that isn't at the heart of a basic psych eval, I'm burning my Ph.D. in Phonus Balonus studies.

How can you kick what's bothering you, if you don't know what you're running from?

More: The return from beneath the planet of the Monster Makeover | MARK HUGHES COBB

I'll bet a few pictured an ex, or family member, with foundation. Recently spinning the social-media ramble, a woman comic shared her painful past with an abuser, but was met with skepticism, because "He never did anything like that to me!"

The woman: "Do you think everything that happens, happens around you?"

That's an object permanence issue, the kind of thing a healthy toddler learns at about eight months tumbling through the game of life. It's why you can peekaboo! a six-monther into rapturous giggles for hours, assuming your peek-hands can support your boo-face that long.

Knowing things (people, Frisbees, very small rocks) exist outside our perception is part of being a stable adult.

Narcissists struggle to believe in the lives of others, and can flip any query about bad behaviors on the questioner. "Do you think my feelings aren't real?" is one puzzler a person with narcissistic personality disorder might toss up, apropos of nothing, even if the preceding was "Do you want sausage or green peppers on the pizza?"

It's an "I'm rubber, you're glue"-ish retort, classic psychological projection from a mad-house mirror.

The Joker avers to the Batman that they're the same: They both dress outlandishly, deal in violence, and prefer to remain anonymous, at least to officers of law.

Yet one flat-out murders for laughs, so it's no brain-twister to picture the monster in that scenario.

The object permanence's hideously in-bred second cousin, object constancy, can cause an emotionally or mentally unhealthy person, perhaps one with narcissistic personality disorder, to veer wildly between impressions of others. If you please the toxic, they may bestow favor. If you irritate, on purpose or accidentally, you tip into the fire swamp. The NPDs tend to view folks as either/or, one or zero, all good or pure bad. Those moods can swap by day or hour. But once they've lined someone up with their negative feelings, the victim will most likely fail to clamber out of the pit of despair.

Basically Two-Face and Batman, only the coin toss is ordinary behaviors that might get you monster-mashed.

I'll bet others pictured a Hannibal Lecter, a Michael Myers (the tall one with melted William Shatner face ... though if the gossip is true, the tiny one's kinda frightening too), or Darth Vader. Picturing is easy when you've actually seen the picture, the motion picture, and dark-house ridden along.

Though hit monsters sometimes, in sequels or prequels, unearth a crypt-kicking backstory, we rarely get answers for the nature of raw evil, possibly excepting Anakin Skywalker, assuming you could not blot those George Lucas-directed hellspawn from your mind.

Patton Oswalt, a bigger "Star Wars" nerd than even DragonConners could imagine, did a riff on the prequels, featuring unprintable words, so I'll go for the gist. He starts with an imaginary conversation.

Lucas: "So, do you like Darth Vader?"

Oswalt: "Do I like Darth Vader? Oh god I LOVE Darth Vader! With the cape and the mask and the lightsaber? He's a bad (donkey)."

Lucas: "Well, in the first movie you get to see him as a little kid."

Oswalt: "I … what? Wait, you mean he's like Damien in 'The Omen,' right? He's going around killing people with his mind and stuff, right?"

Lucas: "Well no, he's just a little kid, and he gets taken away from his mommy, and he's very sad."

Go luxuriate in the rest, as Lucas shreds Oswalt's childhood by reducing awesome things to their origins.

Oswalt: "I DON'T GIVE A (FLIP) WHERE THE STUFF I LOVE COMES FROM! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE!"

Origin tales aren't necessary for monsters. In this physical world we stroll around, flesh-covered bone machines, knowing we all will one day walk no more. We take for granted horror exists. Whether evil thrives as adversary, to pit ourselves against and grow stronger from; or similarly as inner challenge, to test our mettle, resolve and decency; or as raw, implacable force — like gravity, electromagnetism, or Dolly Parton — that must be dealt with in order to ring 'round life's cycles, we feel tremors from the Big Bad down to our skeletons.

We've seen it. Evil kills children.

You don't have to go further to underline the four-letter abomination that, ironically, in our language, spelled backward means its opposite: Live.

Evil can show up wearing the mask of pediatric cancer, amassed terrorists, loners with grudges and guns .... All things we must face, and each so searingly, seemingly impossible, to face. To picture.

Since 2010, The Tuscaloosa News and its partners in the Monster Makeover have asked little kids to picture a monster, and then depict it. For fun, of course, shiny with the ghoulish delights of Halloween. The Monster Makeover arose from near-dead for 2023, after a pandammit-enforced hiatus. Come see the art exhibit, adults' and kids' works for sale by silent auction, at its closing party, 5:30 p.m. Friday at Harrison Galleries, Inc. All free; all welcome.

Worred about some of the things kids said, I spoke with Joy J. Burnham, a professor in counselor education at the University of Alabama, who has researched childhood fears. With maturation, kids learn real from make-believe. So by first grade, they're not recounting nightmares, but just wanna have fun with the spooky-kooky rollercoaster ride of Halloween.

“My view is that Halloween is play, compared to some of the very real things that we deal with,” Burnham said.

We're all at play on ground we will someday, hopefully far in the future, no longer be able to dance upon, so:

Live now.

Mark Hughes Cobb is the editor of Tusk. Reach him at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Making the monsters over, for our own satisfaction | MARK HUGHES COBB