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| Dean Hardscrabble in the door lab in "Monsters University." Image source. |
[content note: spoilers for the 2013 Pixar movie "Monsters University"]
"Monsters University" is a prequel to "Monsters, Inc." It follows Mike Wazowski's time as a student at Monsters University, studying to be a scarer. He has big dreams and confidence, but other monsters are always telling him he can never really be a scarer, because he's not that scary.
In the universe of these movies, doors in the human world can be accessed from the monster world- in the monster world, a replica of the door is built, and it is attached to a docking station that powers it. Once it is powered, opening the door- from either the human side or the monster side- will allow you to walk right through from one world into the other. Typically these doors are closet doors in children's bedrooms. Monsters go into kids' rooms to scare them and harvest their screams, which create electricity for the monster world.
The scene I want to talk about is the big climax of the movie, when Mike gets discouraged and runs away, going through a door into the human world in order to prove that he *is* scary enough. But this door leads to a cabin at a camp, and Mike is in a room full of children- which he was not expecting. They laugh at him because he is not scary.
Another monster, Sully, comes through this door later, to find Mike. But then, the monsters on the monster world side of the door turn off the power from the docking station- this way, the door will no longer allow anyone to cross between the human and monster worlds. Mike and Sully are stranded in the human world. And what's worse, now a group of human police officers are coming to investigate what is going on in the cabin.
Mike and Sully come up with a plan to do spooky things in the dark cabin when the group of police is in there- making strange sounds, scratching the walls, etc- building up the tension but not letting the people see them yet, until finally Sully jumps up and roars at them, and they all scream and this powers the door, and Mike and Sully are able to get back to the monster world.
And so I can't stop thinking about this.
Wait, stop the presses, so "Monsters University" shows us that it's possible to power a door between the human and monster worlds, from the human side???? !!!!!! This is huge! This means it's theoretically possible for terrified humans to open doors into the monster world, without any monsters even being involved or aware of it at all.
Imagine human who's terrified because they're in life-threatening danger. They're being chased by a murderer, they're on a sinking ship with no way to escape, etc etc. And then- okay I guess they have to scream for this to work- so they scream and open a door and run through it, and suddenly they're in the monster world. Oh my goodness, that would be so fascinating! Suddenly the thing they were scared of is far away, they're not in danger any more, but they're lost in this really weird place.
Maybe they're thinking, wait, did I die and this is heaven? (Or hell?????)
How long would it take for them to discover the existence of monsters? How would they get back to the human world? And what would it be like to cope with the trauma of the terrifying experience they just escaped, while also trying to navigate this bizarre new world?
Has anyone written a fanfic about this? I need it!
This is such a huge, significant change to the "Monsters, Inc" worldbuilding. The opening of the doors is *not* entirely controlled on the monster side. !!! I feel like this has incredibly significant implications, which the monsters really should be concerned about, seeing as how they're actually terrified of people, and they believe that being touched by a human child is deadly for a monster. Isn't it, like, a problem that there could be any number of terrified humans accidentally bumbling their way into the monster world?
Now let's address some possible objections against what I'm saying here:
Objection 1: It's not like *any* human door can open into the monster world. There has to be a duplicate door created by the monsters, in the monster world, along with the technology which connects them. Most doors in the human world are *not* connected in this way. So no, you're not going to get situations where humans are opening a monster-connected door without realizing it.
Okay, yeah, it's not just *any* door that would work. But, apparently most closet doors in children's bedrooms are connected to the monster world in this way. It's extremely plausible to imagine a situation in the human world where someone runs to hide in a bedroom closet- home break-in, domestic violence, tornado warning, or any number of other terrifying situations.
So yeah, if you say "this wouldn't happen because most human-world doors aren't set up to connect to the monster world"- well, still, some of them are, and it could totally happen with those ones.
Objection 2: It's not that fear *in general* or screams *in general* power the doors. It has to be, specifically, fear in a situation which involves a monster. It has to be a scream of a person who sees a monster. So no, you couldn't have people scared of something completely unrelated to monsters, and accidentally opening doors into the monster world as a result.
Hmm, maybe there's something to this objection. In "Monsters, Inc" and "Monsters University", we see plenty of scenes of people screaming and this energy being collected and used by monsters- but the people are not really in any actual danger. Monsters never ever touch people, because monsters genuinely believe that it is deadly for a monster to do so.
The whole "monster in the closet" thing is not so much about actual danger but a normal phase that children go through, trying to make sense of their emotions about what they don't know and can't control about the world. And there is a scene in "Monsters, Inc" where a monster says that a child is no longer scared of him- children naturally grow out of this phase- and therefore that child's door is no longer useful for the monsters.
So maybe it's not exactly *fear* that is useful for power in the monster world. Maybe it's that specific kind of feeling, it's not fear exactly, it's the sort of thing where you can look back at it later and laugh at yourself because it's obvious there was no actual danger. The feeling that makes people enjoy horror movies and roller coasters. The tension that builds and then releases.
Maybe a door into the monster world *can't* help a human escape an actual life-threatening situation, because it isn't powered by that kind of fear.
But also, in the "Monsters University" scene with the police in the cabin, they genuinely were scared, right? They weren't just having fun and/or working through normal childhood emotions. So maybe this distinction between different kinds of fear (?) doesn't actually matter for powering the doors.
Hmm.
To what extent is the "life-threatening situation" fear the same feeling as the "watching a horror movie" fear though? Hmm. That's a question. Is it the same feeling? It's like... when we watch movies, we *want* that kind of feeling, it's exciting, even though we definitely would NOT want to be in the dangerous situations the movie characters are in. Watching it is fun, but if it was happening in the real world, it would be terrible. Is that the feeling that powers the monster world?
Hmm, then maybe people consensually being scared in a haunted house could accidentally enter the monster world. Rather than people running from actual life-threatening danger.
Hmm.
Or does it only work if there are literal monsters there?
Hmm.
I still need a fanfic about this though.
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