Introduction: Folk Monsters and Monstrous Media: The Im/materialities, Modalities, and Regionalities of Being(s) Monstrous

The introduction outlines this collection's focus on the affordances of the media environments in which monsters are made and how they are generated by media-specific creative practices as much as the epistemologies or cultures in which they originate. In examining monstrous beings across a diverse range of contexts, this collection illustrates how monsters travel and lurk between vernacular – or what we polemically term "folk" – and formal media cultures. As this chapter and the collection as a whole elucidate, monsters travel through time as well as space, yet their composition and the anxieties that they project are materially inflected by specific cultural, historical, regional, and geographic conditions