Not All Monsters Are Magical: The Real-World Horror of Incels on Screen

We’re used to monsters having glowing eyes, big claws or at least a dramatic entrance through mist and moonlight. But in Adolescence and The Pitt, the monster is something far more terrifying: a teenage boy with a quiet rage, unchecked isolation and nowhere to put it in an increasingly polarised world.

Netflix’s Adolescence isn’t horror in the supernatural sense, it’s much worse. The four-part drama follows 13-year-old Jamie Miller, who’s arrested for the murder of a girl at his school. What unfolds is a claustrophobic and devastating portrait of a family in crisis and a community trying to understand why—and how—a boy could do something like this. It’s not stylised. It’s not sensational. It’s real-time horror told in single, continuous takes. From a technical standpoint, incredible.

Jamie isn’t a monster in the traditional sense. But he’s also not an innocent child. Adolescence refuses easy answers—it asks us to sit in the tension of empathy and unease. It’s not about proving guilt or innocence. It’s about the ecosystem of silence and shame that lets violence incubate in the first place. Jamie’s detachment, his inability to explain himself, and the way adults orbit his interior world without ever entering it? That’s the horror. Not evil. Absence.

This emotional ambivalence—the refusal to draw clean lines between victim and perpetrator—is what makes Adolescence so terrifying. The violence doesn’t erupt from nowhere. It builds slowly, inside a kid no one really knows.

And standing firm at the heart of the psychological reckoning is Erin Doherty’s Briony Ariston. A forensic psychologist, Briony doesn’t try to console Jamie or excuse his actions. Her strength is in her stillness—clinical, composed, but never cold. In an increasingly tense interview, she unpacks the layers of entitlement, self-pity, and denial that underpin Jamie’s version of the truth. She’s not there to pass judgment; she’s there to expose what’s been festering beneath the surface. And she does—quietly, devastatingly. In the absence of clarity from those closest to him, Briony is the one who finally names what Jamie has become.

That same grounded fire runs through HBO Max’s The Pitt, where the incel storyline is brought into terrifying clarity through the character of David. He’s a bullied high school student, emotionally withdrawn, and increasingly isolated. But the horror sharpens when his mother, Teresa, who has made herself sick to get David to the hospital, discovers a list of girls he plans to "eliminate."

The doctors involved, Robby and McKay, debate the ethics and urgency of intervention. Robby initially hesitates—worried about the consequences of involving police if it turns out to be a misunderstanding. But Fiona Dourif’s Dr. McKay sees through the fog. Her confrontation is quiet but searing. She doesn’t plead—she demands. As someone who’s survived male violence, she understands exactly what David’s list means. She knows that hesitating doesn’t protect David’s future—it endangers the girls whose names he wrote down.

These women aren’t written as saints. They’re not perfect. They’re exhausted, principled, and sometimes brutal in their honesty. But they are the ones who name the danger out loud. They’re the ones who say, clearly and without apology: this boy is not just sad. He’s a threat. And pretending otherwise doesn’t make anyone safer.

The storylines aren’t subtle. Both are emotional and ethical gut punches. The Pitt and Adolescence don’t sensationalise male fragility — they interrogate it. These aren’t just stories about individual boys; they’re about the environments that shape them. About how easily toxic beliefs take root in silence — in bedrooms, in grief, in rejection.

David and Jamie aren’t monsters when we meet them. That’s what makes their descent so chilling. They’re withdrawn, angry, searching — the boys we assume will “grow out of it.” But now, they’re not just growing — they’re being groomed. Quietly. Algorithmically.

This is the era of the manosphere: digital pipelines that repackage rage as reason, entitlement as masculinity, victimhood as power. Where a bad day becomes identity, and loneliness becomes ideology. Their delusions don’t feel fictional — they feel familiar. Their entitlement isn’t shocking because it’s rare. It’s shocking because it’s everywhere. And it’s getting younger. Smarter. Louder.

But The Pitt and Adolescence refuse to centre these boys as the only story. There are women watching. Recognising. Challenging. Friends, mothers, teachers — the ones who try to break the cycle before it breaks someone else.

Because the truth is, not all monsters are magical. Some grow in the dark, unnoticed, until they explode. And there’s nothing more terrifying than a monster that thinks it’s the victim—and nothing more urgent than the women who refuse to let that narrative go unchallenged.