For every vampire and werewolf and demon, the monster-hunter genre asks a beautifully practical question: who shows up to deal with it, and what does that job do to a person? This is horror flipped on its head, told from the perspective of the professional with the crossbow rather than the victim in the dark. The pleasure is competence against the impossible, the lore and the silver and the well-worn coat, and the cost is loneliness, because a life spent hunting monsters tends to make you into something the daylight world cannot quite look at.
From a witcher on the path to two brothers in a black muscle car, the hunter is a working-class hero of the supernatural, and the beast is just Tuesday.
Essential Monster Hunters
The cross-media canon of professionals who hunt vampires, werewolves, demons and beasts for a living.
The hunter is always a little bit the monster
The richest monster-hunter stories know the job marks you. Blade is half the thing he kills, the Witcher is a mutant the villagers fear as much as the beasts, and Buffy is denied any normal life by her calling. To stand between humanity and the dark is to live a little outside humanity yourself.
Slayers on the big screen
Crossbows, silver bullets and holy water: the hunters who take the fight to the dark on film.
Hunt the beast: the games
Contracts, big swords and bigger monsters. The games that put the hunt in your hands.
Gaming might love this genre most of all, because the hunt is pure mechanics: study the beast, prepare the right tools, land the perfect strike. From the contract-driven Witcher to the great-sword spectacle of Monster Hunter, the hunt is the game.
Hunters on TV
Week after week, blade in hand: the series built around the people who keep the monsters in check.
The hunter's handbook on the page
Wizards-for-hire, vampire executioners and bounty hunters: the novels that wrote the rulebook.
And it is a thriving shelf on the page, the urban-fantasy hunters and wizards-for-hire and vampire executioners who turned monster-slaying into a recurring day job.
More of the dark, and the people who hunt it
Werewolves & Lycanthropy
Explore the Werewolves & Lycanthropy guide →To hunt monsters for a living, you have to become a little monstrous yourself. That is the genre's quiet tragedy: the hunters keep us safe from the dark by living halfway inside it.