Arts & Culture
The Festival of Monsters returns to Santa Cruz
As Halloween draws near, the monsters are about to descend on Santa Cruz. From Wednesday, October 14, through Sunday, October 18, the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies will bring together more than 80 scholars, artists, writers and makers for the fifth annual Festival of Monsters, the center’s largest conference yet.
Festival of Monsters banner and logo
graphics and text
As Halloween draws near, the monsters are about to descend on Santa Cruz.
From Wednesday, October 14, through Sunday, October 18, the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies will bring together more than 80 scholars, artists, writers and makers for the fifth annual Festival of Monsters, the center’s largest conference yet.
Despite its spooky subject matter, this year’s Festival of Monsters is anything but sinister. The event blends pop culture fun with rigorous scholarship.
“The Monster Studies community is collegial, fun, and intellectually rich,” said Center for Monster Studies Director Michael Chemers, a professor in the Performance, Play, and Design Department.
The five-day gathering will explore the many ways monsters have shaped human culture—and what they can teach us about identity, language, empathy and belonging.
In previous years, much of the festival has taken place on the UC Santa Cruz campus, but the newest edition will unfold at the Courtyard by Marriott Santa Cruz near the Beach Boardwalk, with academic panels running throughout the week alongside public events, role-playing games, film, literary readings, comics, tours and a costumed Monster’s Ball on Saturday night, October 17.
The Monster’s Ball, held at the Courtyard, is open to the entire UC Santa Cruz community. This year’s celebration will include a drag show, as well as the costumes, dancing, and festivities that have become a signature of the event.
The focus, once again, will be on transgressive beings of all textures, shapes and sizes.
“Monsters have always been essential to the fabric of western and non-western cultures, demarcating even as they transgress the boundaries of identity, community, and self-knowledge,” said Associate Professor of Literature Renee Fox, co-director of the Center for Monster Studies. Fox is also the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies.
“The center aims to discover new ways of understanding the junctures between tropes of monstrosity and cultural discourses of dehumanization, particularly focusing on the creative capacity of monsters to undermine these discourses and embody expansive imaginaries of belonging,” Fox said.
That tension—between exclusion and belonging, fear and empathy, the human and the nonhuman—is at the heart of the center’s work. Scholars associated with the center examine monstrosity not simply as a category of things that frighten us, but as a way of thinking about how cultures define who belongs and who gets cast out.
The festival, with its combination of academic and open-to-the-public programming, moves well beyond the traditional academic conference.
Each year, the Festival continues to expand its reach and popularity both within and beyond the Santa Cruz community.
“This year, for instance, we ran an undergraduate art competition to find a monster for our Festival poster design,” Chemers said. “The monster slug we’re using in all our publicity was created by an undergrad named Lyna Hwang. We are expanding our network of writers who cycle through the festival to read and discuss their work, as well as the network of scholars and artists from all over the world associated with the Center for Monster Studies.”
This year’s festival now has an international dimension. Chemers and Fox sit on the board of the brand-new European Centre for Monster Studies, which will launch on Halloween in Heilbronn, Germany, and which will in the future run exchange programming between the annual Festival of Monsters and the annual festival they plan to host.
The Center also now runs exchange programming with the Society for the Study of the American Gothic, with Fox and Chemers organizing panels at its annual conferences in Salem, Massachusetts, and members of the society organizing panels for the Festival of Monsters.
On the evening of October 14, attendees can gather at the 418 Project for a screening of The Quatermass Xperiment, preceded by a talk from Marsh Leicester.
The evening of October 15 brings a haunted Boardwalk tour.
On Saturday, October 17, horror writers Kiersten White and Clay McLeod Chapman will appear at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History for a reading and discussion, followed later in the afternoon by a comic-book conversation and signing with Chapman and Iván Brandon at Atlantis.
More information about the 2026 Festival of Monsters and the Center for Monster Studies is available at monsterstudies.ucsc.edu.