When Cachét was three years old, she was terrified of a glow-in-the-dark rubber skeleton her parents used as a Halloween decoration. So much so that it became a “point of contention” between her and her parents. Then, for reasons she can’t fully explain, Cachét became obsessed with the skeleton. She asked her parents if she could keep it long after the other Halloween stuff came down, sleeping with it like a teddy bear until it fell apart. “ I think that might be where my attraction to weird, scary monster things came in,” says Cachét, now 34. (Cachét asked to use only her first name for privacy.)
Thus began a series of monster crushes. At five, she had eyes for the Crypt Keeper, the decomposing skeleton man from Stephen King’s Creepshow. Then she caught feelings for The Iron Giant and Imhotep from The Mummy (in his zombie form). But her strongest affection was reserved for insects in the yard. “I found grasshoppers very attractive,” she says.
Today, Cachét works as an illustrator. She makes a living doing commissions for personal use, which can cost anywhere from $50 for a sketch to $700 for a full color drawing. Her art often depicts her own fantasies: a woman making love to a cockroach in a seedy motel, a skeleton licking a woman’s neck, a grasshopper performing cunnilingus.
Growing up, Cachét didn’t have a word for her fetish. Now, she understands herself to be a teratophiliac, or more colloquially, a “monster fucker.” And Cachét is one of many. While she likes bugs and skeletons, others prefer demons, elves, ogres, orcs, Na’vi, gnomes, Sasquatch, slime blobs, or Minotaurs.
Since the dawn of the internet, monster fuckers have found each other in forums, bonding over homemade porn and smutty fan fiction. They’ve tended to skew young and geeky, with overlapping interests in videogames, sci-fi, anime, and RPGs. But today, teratophilia—sexual attraction to monsters —is everywhere. Business is booming, driving sales not just for freelance illustrators like Cachét, but in romantasy e-books and Stranger Things dildos. Now, genderqueer furries and BookTok moms have something in common. Is this what endless, personalized internet porn does to us? Are we all going to be monster fuckers soon?
“It is more prevalent than we consider, and I think a lot of people have a little bit of it,” says Phoebe Santillan, a researcher who studied monster attraction through the lens of evolutionary anthropology at California State University, Fullerton.
Our collective human canon is riddled with stories of monster-on-human lovemaking. In Greek mythology, Zeus seduced Leda in the form of a swan. Lamia, a half-snake, half-woman demon seduced young men before devouring them. Yokai, Japanese folkloric creatures, offer many examples: the half-spider temptress Jorōgumo, or the shapeshifting Takaonna who haunts brothels. The Moche culture, active in northern Peru from 100 to 800 AD, made pottery depicting skeleton sex. The 19th-century Japanese printmaker Hokusai is best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, that picture which adorns so many dorm room walls and tote bags. His second most famous work, another woodcut, called The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, depicts a pearl diver being ravaged by two octopi.
“I think human sexuality is very weird in that it is so cerebral and conceptual, which is just not a thing in the rest of the animal kingdom,” says Lindsay Ellis, bestselling author of Axiom’s End, a science fiction novel featuring human-on-alien sex. Several monster fuckers I spoke to cited Ellis’s 2017 video essay “My Monster Boyfriend,” a critique of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water, as a good articulation of how they feel. In short, Ellis found that the protagonist gave in to the Amphibian Man too readily, with the film underanalyzing how challenging that would actually be while addressing its themes of disability and immigration justice.
In Ellis’s view, monster fucking speaks to how age, wealth, status, and physical strength structure human relationships. “When there is a really extreme disparity of power, is an abuse dynamic somewhat inevitable?” she says. “Is that just part of our nature? Or can the more powerful being be trusted?”
A through line exists within all erotic literature, according to Ellis, that plays with these questions. Beauty and the Beast, published anonymously in France in 1740, is quite literally the love story of a woman and a monster. Bodice rippers from the 1970s like The Flame and the Flower exploded because “you could have the male hero act in ways that were completely socially unacceptable for the 1970s…but you could pretend like they were normal in the 19th century,” she says.
In the 2010s, young adult fiction with these themes became hugely popular. With 160 million books sold and almost $4 billion in film box office sales, the Twilight franchises—the story of a love triangle between a girl, a vampire, and a werewolf—might be the most successful work of teratophilia of all time. “Narratives where some virginal beauty archetype falls in love with some monstrously othered [character], be it socially othered, or he did something bad, or he’s an outlaw, or is physically othered—those appeal to mainstream audiences.” (But Ellis does not consider hunky humanoid vampires to be true monsters. “If it has a mushroom tip, it doesn’t count,” she says.)
Meanwhile, the internet was fostering a community of teratophiliacs. In 2003, a webcomic coined Rule 34, which says that if something exists, there is porn involving it on the internet. FurAffinity, launched in 2005, is the preferred destination for furries and “yiff”—porn with anthropomorphic animals. Archive of Our Own, created in 2008 by LiveJournal bloggers, is the most popular site for text-based fan fiction, which often includes sex with monsters and creatures. Like many sexual subcultures, teratophiliacs also find each other on Reddit, in subs like r/MonsterFucker (53,000 members) and r/teratophiliacs (43,000 members). Posts are a steady stream of porn comics, anime art, complex 3D animations, and Audubon-esque sketches of hypothetical monster genitalia. On the internet, monster erotica is often stripped of the narratives and subtleties of folklore and literature. In other words: It’s porn.
Alex Callahan, 25, has had a lifelong attraction to vampires. Not the Twilight kind, which he finds “ easy, because they look very human,” but the Bill Skarsgård-in-Nosferatu kind. “He’s this putrid, decomposing thing,” Callahan says. “He’s somebody who does exude this sexual energy.”
“ The ones that I like are usually the ones that are like a little off, to say the least,” Callahan says. “There’s definitely something inhuman and monstrous about them.”
Many lovers of monster porn that I spoke to drew a connection between the monsters and their own feelings of otherness. Callahan often felt ostracized as a child, growing up as an American in France and coming out at a young age. “I t was something that spoke to me, because a lot of the times, monsters were written as outsiders,” he says. “They’re something that might be seen as dangerous or bizarre.”
Cachét agrees that most teratophiliacs feel marginalized in some way. “I’ve always been on the outside,” she says. “There’s this commonality with an alien or monster deemed as ugly or unlikeable.”
For others, the fantasy is best expressed as a terrifying monster inexplicably showing kindness to you. “One of the main draws for me is the representation of humanity in a nonhuman figure,” says William, 20, a student in Appalachia who identifies as asexual and a romantic teratophiliac. (William also asked to use only his first name for privacy.)
William fantasizes about large creatures with the exoskeleton of an insect and an odd number of legs. He also imagines being swallowed by the monster and feeling warm and safe in its belly. This, he says, would be the ultimate expression of the monster’s ability to kill him but choosing not to. He stresses that this fantasy is not sexual, but romantic. “ What I find rather interesting is how something completely inhuman isn’t quite so inhuman when you take a closer look,” William says. “And how that reflects upon the people interacting with it.”
William connects his fantasies with his frustration with society. He struggles to trust strangers and often fears he will be mistreated by others. He believes that today’s politics are not kind and do not care about regular people. So he turns to teratophilia as “wish fulfillment”—if monsters are capable of humanity, maybe we are too. “People disappointed me, so monsters became interesting,” he says. “Seeing something not human exhibit non-awful qualities reassures me that humans are capable of those same qualities.”
For some monster fuckers, the appeal is driven by the thrill of the threat. “ There is a weird connection between the way fear and arousal manifest,” says Cachét, the illustrator who once feared her Halloween skeleton. “It’s very similar. Rising heartbeat, dilated pupils, things like that. And I do think those wires can get crossed.”
“We could look at it as just some misfiring of already predetermined things for how we are attracted to others in general,” says Phoebe Santillan, the teratophilia researcher. “It could just be character design, or maybe someone’s really interested in personality and physicality doesn’t matter to them. It could be that they felt like outcasts, and like monsters more closely represent how they themselves feel or see themselves in society. It’s all very different, and I have never heard the same story twice.”
Even in the realm of fantasy, the monster fucker community, much like furries, takes issues of consent seriously. Bestiality and zoophilia are strongly condemned by almost all teratophiliacs and banned from most spaces. The Harkness Test, named after a character from Doctor Who, is used to determine the appropriateness of having sex with a fictional creature. You can only proceed if the creature meets three criteria: human level intelligence or above, the ability to communicate clearly, and sexual maturity for its species.
As I reported this story, I began to wonder: Does it ever get frustrating to have such vivid fantasies that can obviously never be acted upon? To my surprise, the answer was largely no. Cachét, the illustrator, said drawing her desires allows her to express them sufficiently. William is happy to have them play out only in his mind. “The entire thing is very much unrealistic,” he says. “Could never happen. Should never happen. But it’s just something fun to think about for me anyway.”
Alex Callahan finds comfort in knowing these thoughts will always remain just thoughts. “In a way, it’s easier because I’ll never have to worry about the consequences of what that would entail,” he says. “Because I don’t have to worry like, Oh shit, could you get an STD from a werewolf?”
Being a teratophiliac doesn’t inherently mean you’re uninterested in human intimacy. Callahan has a partner, who jokes that with his black hair and pale skin, Alex could be one of the vampires he loves so much. “ Man, I know tons of people who are into monster-fucker-type stories, and not a single one of them has ever had a problem with relationships,” says Ellis, the novelist.
Today, monster fucker fantasies have found their apotheosis within pockets of BookTok, in which countless female TikTokkers discuss pulpy, smutty romantasy novels. BookTok propelled Sarah J. Maas’s fantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses to 13 million sales and a Hulu adaptation. It features explicit sex between faeries and humans, with one GoodReads forum noting that the “spiciness” level rises to 4.5 out of 5 chili peppers as the series progresses.
BookTok’s biggest hits remix the classic taboos of teratophilia for modern audiences. CM Nascosta’s Morning Glory Milking Farm, the most popular science fiction erotica book on Amazon, follows a young woman who can’t get a job or afford her city apartment despite having a graduate degree. Rather than move back in with her parents, she takes a job “milking” Minotaurs at a Minotaur milking factory. She spends the money buying home decor online and visiting the monster town’s farmers market, before falling in love with a surprisingly gentle (and rich) Minotaur.
Monster fantasies sometimes even spill into memes. Consider the trend of asking your partner if they would still love you if you turned into a worm. Perhaps we’re really asking each other: “Would you fuck a worm?”
Many hard-core teratophiliacs scoff at BookTok, deriding them as mere “monster lovers” compared to real monster fuckers like themselves. But both Reddit porn and BookTok ebooks are facets of a broader trend: The internet’s democratizing access to increasingly niche erotica, down to any media franchise and its nonhuman stars. Rule 34 means you can find hypersexualized illustrations of any animated character you can think of. If you like a book enough, you can almost certainly find fan fiction on Archive of Our Own in which the characters have sex. Kindle self-publishing allows writers to find audiences for smut novels that publishers rarely take a chance on.
Helping people bring these fantasies to life can be big business. The company Bad Dragon is one of the largest producers of fantasy adult toys in the world, according to CFO Mike Sullivan, shipping 1,000 to 2,000 packages a day from its warehouse in Phoenix. “Our motto is making fantasies real,” Sullivan says. “The people that flock to our toys are not necessarily sold on just the design. It’s also for the characters behind them. They look at building their own story.”
Bad Dragon’s most popular models are a suction-cup-studded tentacle, a Godzilla-esque phallus, and a silicone unicorn horn. Sales often spike alongside big media franchises: Dragon dildos were popular when Game of Thrones aired, and a toy modeled on the Demogorgon from Stranger Things has sold very well, Sullivan says.
Sometimes, in their obsession with monsters, humans end up finding other humans. In 2019, Cachét developed a crush on Salad Fingers, the main character in a British cult web cartoon. She drew porn of Salad Fingers and sent it to David Firth, the show’s creator. Firth loved it and followed her back. “He thought I was a guy because no girl would draw porn of Salad Fingers,” Cachét says.
They started messaging. Cachét complimented his drawing of a human-bug threesome and asked for a print. Three years later, Cachét and David got married. The human-bug threesome drawing hangs on the wall of their home.