Where evil's in the air-school,
A place without compare-school, that fills us with disgust!
Oh others may like their school,
But come here they won't dare-school,
This really raise your hair-school, beloved by all of us!
In some works, the Monster Mash settles down and raises a family. And where do they send their children of the night? Why, to a monster school of course! While there may not be anything special about the school itself, all of its students are certainly special. When the teens literally are monsters, and Wolf Man junior and Cute Monster Girl need to learn what it is to be a proper nightmare, this is where they go. There's often a Reluctant Monster or Friendly Neighborhood Vampire in the cast as the odd monster out, and sometimes it's the new monster on the block. Other times, it's a normal kid sent there by mistake. It may be all monsters and supernatural creatures, and sometimes it's an exclusive boarding school for one species (almost invariably vampires).
It may also extend to witches, but only if the witches in question are a separate species like Hags. Any fantastical creatures, such as Bigfoot, Demons, Goblins, mermaids and fairies, as well as made-up monsters, may also be present, so it does not always follow the Monster Mash casting exactly. Preferably some form of Undead should be the main focus, it's mainly anything you'd imagine living in Halloweentown. Oftentimes the school lessons are on being scary, while other schools may focus on staying off of the Van Helsing hit list by maintaining the Masquerade. When it's in a world where monsters are commonplace, it's just a normal public school. If not, it's almost invariably a Boarding School, or a quite literal Boarding School of Horrors. Often an Academy of Adventure in this case. Conversely, it could be an Academy of Evil. A must if the setting is in Monster Town.
Requirements are that the school is actually for (or at least appropriated by night by) monsters, ghouls, ghosts or other supernatural/fantasy non-human creatures. The lone monster enrolled at a normal human school is a Fish out of Water and therefore does not count as an example, even if it is a magic school.
Usually this institute has a suitably spooky name. If it is a generic school with no name mentioned, as long as it's a work involving a specialized school for the sort of students previously mentioned, it counts.
Subtrope of Extranormal Institute. Related to Wizarding School, only it's for monsters. Not related to One-Gender School despite the similarity in name.
For the IDW graphic novel (which is an example of this trope), see here.
Examples:
- Choujin Gakuen: The premise behind it is that the heroes are trying to start one so those of supernatural nature have a place to belong.
- Fairy Tail has the Monster Academy in Edolas, though it's not an actual monster school - it is an attraction in an amusement park with what appears to be robot monsters.
- Hell's Angels is set in Hell and features Destiny Land, a huge academy for monsters of all sorts.
- Hell Teacher Nube also has a Youkai High school in it, which Yukime attends in the late manga. Populated and staffed by,what else, youkai...
- Marugoto Anju Gakuen is also a series featuring an all-girls and all-Youkai boarding school. The main human protagonist gets sent there by his family (long story there, it involved getting shipped in a box against his will), with mixed goals between making it to the top of class and simply surviving against all the monsters around him.
- Svetlana Chmakova's Nightschool is a regular public school during the day and open to vampires, werewolves and Weirns at night.
- Rosario + Vampire has Youkai Academy. The main character is a perfect example of the above-mentioned "normal kid sent there by mistake". At first. And it turns out he wasn't the first human to have this happen. Nor was his being sent there actually a mistake.
- Tokimeki ★ Mononoke Jogakkou, a Yuri Genre manga about an all-girls' school for various kinds of Youkai.
- Vampire Knight: At Cross Academy, both Day Class and Night Class are held for certain reasons. At twilight, the two classes cross paths. Two Guardians of the school, Yuki Cross and Zero Kiryu, are standing guard so the two classes do not interact. The reason for all of this is because the people of the Night Class are vampires.
- Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun has a school in hell where the students are all demons, except the human Suzuki Iruma who was sent there by a demon who bought him from his abusive parents, he has to keep his identity as a human a secret from everyone else and he gets along quite well with his colleagues.
- Youkai Gakuenki is about a human girl attending what turns out to be a Monster Elementary school.
- IDW's aptly titled All-Ghouls School features Darkmoor Academy, a One-Gender School for female monsters (and the new Token Human student).
- In the Beetlejuice comic series, there's a story which includes a location that's literally called the "All-Ghouls School."
- Charm School: Magical Witch Girl Bunny has a love triangle among a witch, a vampire and a fairy at a school whose students are magical creatures.
- British children's comics The Dandy had some strips with this premise, "Eddie Potter at Strange Hill School".
- Magic Trixie: The titular character and her friends attend Monstersorri School, which is a small schoolhouse that can be reached via Spectral Park.
- The Spanish comic Minimonsters has Villa Susto's local school, apart that the entire town are monsters.
- Whizzer and Chips had a "Strange Hill" with a similar concept, but the teacher is a normal man with grotesque students. Another IPC comic, Monster Fun, had an inversion of that in the strip "Creature Teacher," with a monster as a teacher and with normal (for British Comics) students.
- The Far Side had one strip looking across a schoolroom at whose desks are seated all sorts of mutated freaks and grotesque creatures. The teacher's Thought Bubble: "Miserable little monsters."
- Played with in Metamatronic's Danganronpa Monster AU
(or Cryptid AU
as she sometimes calls it). Hope's Peak is depicted here as a Rosario + Vampire-esque school that teaches cryptids and monsters to blend in with human society... but they do admit regular humans as well, usually transferring them from the Reserve Course and planting them into the "monster" classes without telling the other students as part of the lesson to help them blend in. Makoto and Nagito are the Token Humans for Classes-78 and 77 respectivelynote , though most of Class-77 assumes Hajime is the token human, since he transferred in from the reserve course (he used to be human, but ended up possessed by a Fallen Angel named Izuru Kamukura after an experiment gone wrong). Natsumi Kuzuryu (who was Spared by the Adaptation here) is also in the Reserve Course wanting to prove a point to her brother Fuyuhiko — which causes him some panic since Natsumi doesn't know that he's a zombie now.
- Monsters University. And its main rival, Fear Tech.
- Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School is about Shaggy, Scooby and Scrappy getting jobs as gym teachers at an all-girls boarding school for female monsters—the only known students consist of a vampire, a werewolf, a mummy, a ghost and a Frankenstein Monster.
- 100 Monsters in My School by Bonnie Bader has Frank N. Stein Elementary School and follows Jane Brain, the only human girl at a monster school.
- Bad Day At Monster Elementary by Mike Thaler. On Friday the 13th at Monster Elementary, things are off to a gruesome start as Little Kong climbs the flagpole with the cafeteria lady and the Creature from the Black Lagoon flushes himself down the toilet.
- In Evernight, Evernight Academy is a school for vampires to find sanctuary and learn how to fit into modern society (the students look like teenagers or can pass as teenagers, while the teachers are vampires who have managed to keep up with societal changes and can pass on what they know). In the second book, it gets haunted by ghosts as well, though this is a cause for alarm as wraiths and vampires usually avoid each other. Evernight also lets in some human students, though they aren't supposed to find out about the Academy's true nature. Why exactly the headmistress Mrs Bethany has chosen to let humans enter the school after all this time is one of the driving mysteries of the series.
- The Falcon Quinn series, complete with a rival school for monster hunters.
- Frankie Stein Starts School by Lola M. Schaefer has Miss Wart's Academy for Ghouls and Goblins.
- Goosebumps has the fittingly titled Ghoul School, and Why I Quit Zombie School, the former of which involves weird monster and the latter has zombies.
- Tom B. Stone's Graveyard School series has a book called Little School of Horrors, where a new boy realizes his classmates aren't human and neither is he exactly.
- Dutch children's book writer Tais Teng wrote a series of books (De Griezelklas, aka "Class of Horrors") about a witch girl who attends a special monster class within an otherwise normal elementary school. It has vampires, a mummy, a plant creature and a werewolf, just to name a few of the students. The teacher of said class however is an ordinary human. More hilariously, the rest of the school is suffering from a massive Weirdness Censor and think they're just special needs kids. Their teacher goes along with the pretense while going through truly herculean efforts to keep them under control.
- Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins has Hex Hall, a school for witches, vampires, fairies, and the like.
- The House of Night teaches its "vampyres" how to behave in society.
- Jeepers Creepers A Monstrous ABC by Laura Leuck. Educational alphabet book that takes place at a monster school.
- Kanokon: A novel about a boarding school for monsters having trouble keeping up Masquerade.
- Lovecraft Middle School is about a seventh grader who lives with monsters under the guise of humans and a ghost of a young girl named Karina Ortiz.
- Monster School, a book about a normal kid sent to a school for monsters by accident.
- Mostly Monsterly by Paula Wiseman and Tammi Sauer is about a nice monster named Bernadette who gets teased for her niceness at a monster school.
- The Perfect Monster by Sally Grindley features another friendly monster, being tutored by the most gruesome monster in class.
- Duircean in Stranger And Stranger is a school for humans who have recently been snatched and turned into changeling fae.
- Three Star Billy by Pat Hutchins features a monster nursery school and a bad-tempered monster boy who gets gold stars for acting up, which makes him start to behave instead.
- Vampire Academy is about an academy especially for vampires of all sorts.
- Vampire High: Vlad Dracul Magnet School is a school comprised almost entirely of vampires, save for the water polo team the members of which are the only humans at the school.
- Vampire School by Peter Bentley has two: St. Orlok's (for vampires) and Chaney Street Elementary (for werewolves).
- A.N.T. Farm: In MutANT Farm, the older kids were humans while the ANTs are monsters.
- The Satanic academy in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
- Legacies: The Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted is full of supernatural kids.
- Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide had a Halloween Episode in which Ned imagined himself and all the other characters as monsters going to an all monster school.
- Wednesday is set at Nevermore Academy, a gothic school for “outcasts” such as vampires, gorgons, sirens… and Addamses.
- The song "Amphibious Trigonometry"
by the Gothsicles is about one of these.
- Social Mediasochist
is set to a music video depicting a teenaged Jason Voorhees attending a Slasher-themed High School and his romance with Carrie.
- Followed up by a sequel, Social Mediasochist II
that follows Jason and Carrie in their marriage.
- Followed up by a sequel, Social Mediasochist II
- The setting for the Australian kids' TV puppet show Li'l Horrors.
- Wandering Monsters High School is all about this Played for Laughs and/or for parody of well-known games such as Dungeons & Dragons. As you can see in the author's article
, a good example of characters in this game is an iron golem cheerleader.
- The Witch Girls Adventures universe has several schools for young witches, which overlap with this, due to both the application of Mage Species, and the occasional staff that are other creatures, or witches that are witch/Otherkin hybrids.
- In Avenue Q, Kate Monster's dream is to start the Monsterssori School, a special school for monster children only. Monsters in this universe are furry humanoids (similar to Cookie Monster, Grover or Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street).
- Mattel's aptly titled Monster High.
- Except for Monster High's one "normie"...
- Brawl Stars did this with the Brawl Academy set of skins, which is a high school that has monsters such as snakes attending it.
- The Academy of Evil from Crash Twinsanity: Although it accepted human students according to the game's story, only two humans are at the academy when the player visits, and both are cyborgs.
- Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice is set at the Evil Academy, where the students include succubi, cat girls, dragons, zombies, and ghosts, among many other things. They do accept human transfer students, assuming they're able to live through the screening process.
- Little Monster At School was an educational CD-i story of the Mercer Mayer character.
- Monster Prom is a dating sim with a multiplayer element, where the player(s) choose one of four characters and try to help them find a date to the prom at a high school for monsters.
- RuneScape used to have a random event where the player would be teleported into a classroom full of monsters and would have to answer questions given by the teacher Mr. Mordaut, who is an intelligent red dragon, in order to return to what they were doing. After the event was removed from the game, Mr. Mordaut got a new job working in a museum, and helps the player in several quests.
- Campus Creeps has "Nevergreen Hollow University", a college for monsters.
- Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures has SAIA, short for Succubus and Incubus Academy, which is exactly what it says on the tin. (Though the cubi race in that setting goes for the work-safe alternative of feeding on emotions in general, the specific class of emotions depending on the individual clan and the individual cubi.)
- Devil's Candy primarily follows a group of students at Hemlock Heart Academy, a general-admittance high school in a world populated exclusively by monsters, and its student base is accordingly diverse. This is in contrast to its rival, the posh, private Scarlet Crown Academy, which only allows daemons to enroll.
- Eerie Cuties: While it may appear to be a normal school, on the outside, Charybdis Heights is actually a school for cryptids. And to ensure their safety, it must remain a secret
from the general public. Which is why Jeffry the groundskeeper tries to keep humans from snooping around.
Though the more persistent ones, like Tiffany, present a problem....
- Fairview High
which isn't so much an All Ghouls School as just monsters going to regular high school with the humans blissfully unaware of their existence.
- Frightmoore University
: Its students are vampires, werewolves and other monsters.
- Monsterful has Addams High and features zombies, mummies, werewolves and vampires, and also some mythological creatures like a gorgon and an anthropomorphic female Loch Ness monster as professors.
- The currently-on-indefinite-hiatus Night School
had Kojo Academy, where creatures of the night went to learn how NOT to be monsters in a modernizing fantasy world.
- Slime Times High
,the name of the monster school in this shojo inspired comic about a slug monster girl.
- Parodied in the Something*Positive storyline "Homecoming of Elemental Awful", in which Vanessa decides the scariest possible setting for her Halloween RPG is high school
.
Vanessa: Come with me, mortals, to a place where magic and monsters reign, and the law of the land is that might makes right unless that's not cool this week. - Delcastle High from Tapsal-Teerie
is a school for children of the world's monsters, which teaches them to be the next generation of legends.
- A number of OC Role Playing groups/clubs exist based around the concept of an all-monster/supernatural school on DeviantArt:
- Halloween Academy
One of the larger groups focusing on this.
- Elysian Academy
A long-runner and quite a popular one.
- R.I.P Academy
- Academy of War and Magic
Despite the title, the race descriptions are of werewolves and vampires and other sorts.
- Heaven-Hell Academy
Demons and angels attend this one.
- Night Owl Academy
- Hollows Monstro
- Full Moon Bites
- The Upcoming Grave Academy, not yet ready, but fully announced, is a Forum-Based one. http://graveacademy.forumeiros.com/
- Mr-DNA
's underburb.
- Halloween Academy
- SCP Foundation, SCP-2507 ("A Web Of Cliques")
. The conversations of the spider-like members of SCP-2507 refer to events at "Brachypelma Elementary School", which they apparently used to attend. Presumably this is a school whose student body is made up entirely of SCP-2507 (note: Brachypelma is a genus containing several species of tarantula).
- Heretical Edge: Crossroads Academy falls somewhere between this trope and a Hero Academy (for a given definition of 'hero'), as while its student body are completely mundane humans when they join, they don't stay that way for very long. And some of them were only mostly human to start with, official policy notwithstanding.
- Aaahh!!! Real Monsters has different monsters attending school. All the monsters are invented for the show and not of the classic variety.
- The "Mini-Monsters" cartoons from The Comic Strip took place at a summer camp for monsters.
- French-Swedish series Creep School, Europe's answer to Gravedale High; four normal human kids have to go to a school of ghouls and monsters lead by a vampire headmaster.
- Casper's Scare School features all kinds of monsters from mythological to folklorist and to movie types.
- Gravedale High is about a high school for all types of monsters. The main cast includes among others a vampire, a werewolf, a Frankenstein Monster, a mummy, a Gorgon, a Zombie girl, a Creature from the Black Lagoon, among others.
- Monster High is a Mattel Cash-Cow Franchise with Flash webisodes
and CGI movies based around the toyline.
- Monstro City High is an unaired animated series created by Todd Kauffman and Mark Thornton and directed by Ted Collyer. It is set in a fictional high school inhabited by both humans and classic monsters.
- The Owl House: Hexside, as well as various similar schools throughout the Boiling Isles, has in addition to the more human looking witches a plethora of demonic entities enrolled. It's been pointed out that bipedal-type demons are actually quite capable of casting magic as well, so it would make sense they would need a curriculum to work from as well.
- School for Vampires follows Oskar von Horrificus and his vampire friends who repeatedly cause mischief in school and try to protect the vampire secret from Paulus Polidori, a vampire hunter.
- In Scream Street, Luke and his friends attend a monster version of the Good Old British Comp.
- The Smurfs (1981): In the time traveling ninth season, the Smurfs reached Transylvania and meet a ghoul school run by a Mad Scientist.
- In The Simpsons, Homer, Bart and a few other characters create a kids book titled "The Troll Twins of Underbridge Academy" with the cover featuring various magical creatures in school uniform. Publishers later edited the book to "The Vampire Twins of Transylvania Prep" since trolls were much less marketable.
- Super Monsters is a Netflix original series about a group of preschoolers who are the children of famous monsters.
- Supernatural Academy is attended by Shifters, Magic-Users, Faeries, Trolls, Harpies, Vampires and Mermaids.