Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

So this is Christmas Apes, and what have you done? Well, I’ve started watching another batch of ape-themed films to write about on this site. I hope you, the reader, have fun.

With a title as sensationalistic as Bride of the Gorilla, you’d probably expect something pretty bombastic—but things are not what they appear. That title was not the first choice for writer-director Curt Siodmak, screenwriter of The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (and author of the oft-imitated Sci-Fi story Donovan’s Brain), who began the project under the name “The Face in the Water”, something a bit more mysterious that maybe better reflects the film he was trying to make, something closer to a psychological thriller than a monster movie (also, technically, there is no gorilla in this movie.) Looking past the surface ridiculousness, one can detect traces of not only Siodmak’s previous work on The Wolf Man, with its cursed and agonized protagonist, but Jacques Tourner and Val Lewton’s acclaimed 1942 thriller Cat People (Siodmak had worked with both on the film I Walked With a Zombie), which kept the audience unsure of the movie’s reality. Well, this is trying for that level of ambiguity, at least, regardless of it it achieves it.

The Thing From Another World (1951)

Let’s go back to the beginning…or one of the beginnings, at least.

This movie has been brought up several times before—in reference to the general tone of the Sci-Fi monster movies of the 1950s, and in all the times it’s been ripped-off directly in the ensuing decades. In truth, most monster movies made after The Thing From Another World are ripping it off in some way: this type of movie, with this kind of structure and these themes, didn’t really exist before 1951—The Man From Planet X, an alien-based movie that released at almost the same time, still has a foot in the days of the Universal Monster movies, and while The Thing also does in certain ways we’ll get into, it also loudly asserts its time and place, the early fifties of it all. This is the movie that made paranoia the central feature of so many creature features of the era, literalizing the fears of all that is unknown and inscrutable in a wider universe humanity was gradually discovering—but what became increasingly generalized and irrational as the decade wore on still has a shocking clarity and specificity here at the point of origin.

Creature Classic Companion: The Day of the Triffids

English author John Wyndham wrote numerous highly influential Science Fiction novels in the fifties, including the likes of The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, and The Midwich Cuckoos (source of the multiple Village of the Damned films)—but The Day of the Triffids, originally published in 1951, remains singular. Yes, it’s foundational to the post-apocalypse subgenre, providing some early and potent imagery of decaying social cohesion and a major city turned into a hollowed-out wasteland, but what really struck me was how the background of the story combines many contemporary-at-the-time fears: the dangers posed by arms race secrecy, unchecked scientific experimentation (for mostly economic purposes), and ecological distortion, all becoming a volatile chemical combination that eventually blows up in the face of the entire civilization. Unique among killer plants, the triffids are far more frightening for the way they become the ultimate invasive species, and how they’re not even the most immediate threat the surviving humans have to deal with—but they’re always there, spreading, and it’s only deep into the novel (and in the successful adaptations of it) that the survivors realize just what they’ve wrought upon themselves.

The Man From Planet X (1951)

1951 was the year the extraterrestrial film really established itself, with the release of both The Thing From Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still cementing many of the aesthetic trends for Science Fiction boom that encompassed the rest of the decade—which is definitely interesting when you consider how utterly different their depictions of alien life are. Intentionally and unintentionally, they approach the tension of the Cold War from opposing angles, a call for peace and understanding contrasted with fighting off an implacable, shadowy enemy, and while the latter probably became more common in subsequent movies, the concept of a sympathetic alien visitor was seeded very early on. The Man From Planet X was a smaller affair in 1951 compared to the high prestige of the other two, shot in six days on a relatively small budget (and yet Roger Corman was not involved), but it also showcases the pre-formula possibilities of alien-based movies, somewhat bridging the gap between the two opposing approaches. It’s also a bridge between the Gothic horror movies of the thirties and forties and the Sci-Fi thrillers of the fifties, using the environments and moodiness of the former and the ideas of the latter—this is likely due to the influence of director Edgar G. Ulmer, who is mostly known for the Lugosi/Karloff thriller The Black Cat and the noir Detour (he also claims to have worked on German expressionist classics like Metropolis and The Golem, but apparently there’s no evidence of that, so nice try, Eddy!) There’s a lot of history to be found within this thing.