Stumbling into something new while seeking out material for this site is always an exciting experience—and nothing demands my attention like the phrase “weird Yugoslav-Czechoslovak Science Fiction movie from the early eighties.” Visitors From the Arkana Galaxy (sometimes referred to by the more nondescript title Visitors from the Galaxy) is definitely a weird one, and has only found wide distribution in English-speaking countries in the last year thanks to Deaf Crocodile Films—its combination of unvarnished eighties European settings and borderline surrealist storytelling makes for the kind of cult-ready object that modern boutique film distributors regularly gift to us. Shifting between exaggerated reality and extreme fantasy, Visitors has something of a satirical edge, and combined with its bizarre visuals, you can really tell that director Dušan Vukotić comes from an animation background (the movie was partially produced by prominent Croatian animation studio Zagreb Film.) To further invite attention—my attention in particular—there is a prominent monster element that was designed and partially animated by stop motion animation master Jan Svankmajer before he gave us such classics as Alice and Little Otik.
After a few weeks of classical monsters, it’s now time for something very different.
If I really wanted to justify watching and writing about Polish art film director Andrzej Żuławski’s cult classic in October, I could say that the heavily, heavily truncated original North American release was released on Halloween in 1983—that version cut out over forty minutes from the movie, in an attempt to make it something resembling a “normal” horror film. But it is not a normal horror film, even though any one scene in this might be among the most upsetting you’ll ever—and despite being featured in histories of “monster movies”, it isn’t quite a monster movie, either, although it does have a memorably disturbing monster in it. Possession is, first and foremost, a story about a married couple whose lives together and their hold on reality completely disintegrates, a game of mutual destruction where they remain circling the whirlpool and dragging each other down further—and like many of the most interesting monster stories, the bizarre creature becomes a manifestation of all that has gone wrong and all that they secretly want.
As I learned from Mark McCray’s book The Best Saturdays of Our Lives, 1966-1968 was the short-lived reign of superhero action cartoons on Saturday morning TV, building off the success of Filmation’s The New Adventures of Superman—over a dozen series in this genre from all the major cartoon producers premiered in the fall of 1967. This trend was short-lived because those shows became the target of parental groups and publications that criticized the violence (McCray contextualizes this by noting the atmosphere of the US in the midst of the Vietnam War, making some people much more sensitive to what their kids were being exposed to), and by the end of the decade they were replaced by musical comedies, while the “action” shows that came down the pike in the seventies were severely defanged. Anyone born in the last few decades would probably watch any of those sixties action shows and be flabbergasted that anyone would consider them too much of anything—that’s just a sign of how things change.
During that brief two-year superhero cartoon buzz, one of the big pushers of the genre was Hanna-Barbera, who seemingly had a hit with their series Space Ghost & Dino Boy in 1966, and so in 1967 managed to produce a half-dozen new shows in a similar vein (it makes more sense when you consider that they were making cartoons for all three of the big networks at the time, but it’s still a lot.) Almost none of them lasted for more than twenty episodes, although it’s hard to tell if it was because of that anti-violence backlash or just Hanna-Barbera’s typical cut-and-run style of production. As surprising as it may sound for a company not known for originality, H-B did try to find ways to differentiate all these shows from each other, leading to a decent variety of settings and concepts— from that we got our present subject, The Herculoids, whose distinguishing element was that the titular heroes were a team of monsters (with a human family guiding them) protecting their extraterrestrial home from various generic sci-fi threats. This series aired eighteen episodes (thirty-six ten-minute segments) and then halted, but it had enough of an impact that it was briefly revived in the early eighties, alongside Space Ghost, as part of the package series Space Stars. The characters of Herculoids have made cameos or been referenced in later Hanna-Barbera-related series, especially Adult Swim stuff like Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law (coincidentally, the original Birdman series premiered at the same time as Herculoids), so I had some knowledge of the series through cultural osmosis, and its concept would obviously intrigue me—its combination of a “primitive” setting with science fiction, and its clear appeal to kids who were in the midst of a kaiju renaissance in the mid-sixties, is both completely of its time and also still fairly unique.
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.
Is it possible that I made this for the post title alone? Maybe.
I first read John Gardner’s Grendel after Ursula K. Le Guin referenced it briefly in one of her many story introductions—apparently the description “Beowulf as seen by the monster” was enough to intrigue me (I still haven’t read Beowulf, but really, we all have the gist of it through cultural osmosis [he says, justifying his own laziness.]) Grendel is one of those foundational pieces of postmodern literature, rejecting the premises at the base of western prose, and taking a rather bitter position on the entire history of human civilization and even art (isn’t it wonderful when a piece of art questions the ethics of creating art?) Being literary fiction (and particularly idea-focused at that, with long conversations and monologues about the nature of reality and thought), it probably hasn’t had as much of an impact on monster stories as you’d want, despite the large number of “from the monster’s perspective” things that existed after it (countless stories about vampires alone), but it still feels like it should be the forerunner of all subsequent modern reinterpretations of myth.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 