There’s a pretty good chance that you already know what a wendigo is, at least to some extent. These things have been showing up everywhere lately, and not just as a strange, hairy, North American ice monster that people like Stephen King didn’t really understand. Today, chances are you have a rough idea of what a wendigo is; a cannibalistic monster that used to be human, but ate another person and turned into a monster as a form of punishment. And that is one form of the myth; you might even know about wendigo-psychosis, a condition that a person can develop from eating human flesh that causes a person to develop characteristics similar to a wendigo. But there’s a lot more to this monster than that.
To start with, let’s lay down the basics of what a wendigo is. First, the “guy with a skull for a head and dear antlers” version is new – it didn’t exist before the 2001 film Wendigo. In fact, they were more likely to be associated with owls instead of deer before modern Americans figured out what a wendigo actually is. More often, they were more like zombies with horrifying features like blood dripping from the eyes and mouth. They are almost always humans turned into monsters through cannibalism, usually shown as being mostly skin and bones, often associated with winter and sometimes have ice powers, and has an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Everything else you’ve heard about a wendigo is probably dependent on the myth, and even some of the things in this list are not guaranteed.
The first thing to know about the wendigo is that there isn’t really a “true” wendigo myth. Like with vampires, werewolves, and other monsters, different tribes in North America had different interpretations of this monster. In some versions, the wendigo was effectively a mindless monster, barely possessing any of its prior human intelligence and having become little more than an animal. Pretty fitting, considering that this version of the monster is usually someone who resorted to cannibalism purely as an act of survival, dropping down to an animal-like level just to stay alive, and giving up their humanity in the process.
Another kind, popular among the Algonquian tribe, was essentially a sociopath, similar to a vampire, and could shapeshift in and out of human form. Sometimes the human form of a wendigo would have a telltale sign of their true nature, but other times, they were indistinguishable from a normal human. Sometimes, the eating of other humans wasn’t even literal; just a metaphor for people who feed on others in one form or another.
One of the stranger and perhaps scariest kinds of wendigos were actually demons that took possession of a person during a moment of vulnerability. What counts as a moment of vulnerability differs from story to story, but some tribes believe that talking about or even thinking about the wendigo can make you ripe for possession, and this is why many tribes refuse to discuss this myth entirely. It’s also why people have gotten the myths so wrong for so many decades before starting to get the right basic idea in recent years; the tribes that the myth originated from refused to correct anyone out of fear that they might be possessed.
So as you can see, the wendigo is a bit like a vampire in that there are a lot of different versions, with very little that actually stays consistent from myth to myth, but somehow, each version is still classified as “wendigo.” Why is that? What do they all have in common? And why have they become so popular in recent years?
Well, like the vampire, the wendigo speaks to something very real to us on a psychological level. Sure, the wendigo’s physical traits are probably derived from the very real symptoms a person can develop as a result of committing cannibalism. But the wendigo means so much more to us than that, to the point that people who don’t even live in North America have become fascinated with the monster and have made stories and films about it.
Obviously, one reason we enjoy stories about this monster is because it’s absolutely terrifying. You can make a vampire puppet who teaches kids how to count, you can make a show about a friendly ghost, you can turn witches into cute (or sexy) anime waifus, but there seems to be no way to make a wendigo anything other than pure nightmare fuel. It’s almost as if any portrayal of a wendigo that isn’t scary stops being a wendigo, or that it can’t be a wendigo to begin with if it isn’t a horrifying monster. And that’s a little weird, isn’t it? Vampires, werewolves, and wendigos are all formerly human monsters who feed on humans in some way or another, and if you survive one you might turn into one. There is a lot of common ground here, and yet the wendigo seems to be in a distinct category of its own, labeled “do not parody.”
Part of it might be that this monster originates exclusively from North America. We don’t have myths in the United States or Canada about draugr haunting our ancestral gravesites, since there are no five-hundred-year-old gravesites on this continent of which the public is aware and have assigned monster myths. There are no stories in the U.S. about the fair folk, or evil fairies, and we’ve mostly forgotten many of the old monsters that were tied to specific lands. But the wendigo is purely American, and it predates the age of colonization.
An important clue might be what the various tribes of North America associated with the wendigo, and how these differences are reflected in the monster itself. The Algonquians were so scared of wendigos that cannibalism was seen as a major taboo, to the point where even cases of desperation and starvation where a person had already died of unrelated causes was not a good excuse to break the rule. But in a lot of myths, they aren’t just associated with desperation; they’re seen as an embodiment of things like greed and cruelty. That’s a particularly odd combination with a creature that’s often associated with starvation. If it was just a normal person who ate someone out of desperation, why would we call them cruel? What if they killed their victim painlessly? What if the victim of their cannibalism was already dead when the wendigo found them? And greed? It’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that eating someone out of necessity is an act of greed. Selfish, sure. But greed? You’d be hard pressed to convince someone that desperate cannibalism is an act of gluttony, let alone greed. So, what gives?
The secret here might be the practice of cannibalism for reasons other than hunger. This gets into the versions of the wendigo who are not associated with winter and ice-themed powers. Remember when I said some wendigos were basically just mundane sociopaths, and some could shapeshift between human and monster form? Well, the Algonquian tribe, which seems to be the primary source of the myth, was a migrating tribe that traveled far and wide across modern day Canada and the U.S., and they encountered a wide range of other tribes in their travels. Among them were the Mohawks, whose name literally means “man-eater,” and reports strongly suggest the name wasn’t hyperbole.
The Mohawks were one of many tribes that used cannibalism as a symbol of their supremacy. It was a way of saying “I’m higher up on the food chain than you. I can take whatever I want from you, even your flesh, because you are no more than pigs to be slaughtered to me.” This practice was fairly common in varying parts of North America, even more so than cannibalism for religious or starvation purposes. And here we see the pieces sliding into place. A tribe sees another tribe as weaker. As an act of greed, they attack that tribe and take their lands, women, and resources. Then, as a way of showing how low they think of the conquered people, they eat some of their dead in front of their living relatives, as a perverse, cruel joke. I think this, more than anything else, is the source of the cruel and greedy incarnations of the wendigo.
So why does the wendigo fascinate so many people? It’s partly because the monster is pure horror, and unlike most horror monsters, there’s no part of us that thinks we can tame this beast, make it sparkle, or (heaven forbid) add it to young adult romance fiction. It’s partly because the monster is unique to America, and potentially fills a hole left by displaced peoples who can’t connect with their ancestors’ monster myths. But I think the biggest reason is because, whether we know it or not, this monster speaks to us about the nature of evil on a level we may have forgotten in our sheltered modern world.
