Monsters (2010)

It didn’t take long for the new wave of indie and lower budget creature features to get noticed by the big studios—after the 2000s and very early 2010s saw accomplishments and milestones in genre filmmaking like previous Creature Classic subject The Descent, many of the directors of those projects were being recruited to helm big budget blockbusters. The ostensible purpose of plucking upstarts from the film festival and fan circuits was to lend artistic credibility to what have mostly been franchise revivals, suggesting that the studios were looking for new takes on classic concepts that would speak to the modern audiences just as the smaller films had. In practice, it was simply appropriating any credibility those filmmakers had while taking advantage of their lack of Hollywood clout to force them into the studio assembly line. You might be able to detect something of their previous creativity once they had their names on a major movie, but it was a gamble whether or not these directors ever got a real opportunity to live up to their earlier promise.

Digital effects artist-turned-director Gareth Edwards is one example of that phenomenon: his debut film Monsters is a modern reconfiguration of the giant monster movie that earned much acclaim and almost immediately got him the job of shepherding the second American Godzilla film that released in 2014. That is a mighty quick and impressive turnaround, going from a modest kaiju project to the actual King of the Monsters in almost no time at all—but that’s how the indie-director-to-pipeline was accelerated back then, and you can see it even in the American Godzilla films that followed Edwards’, most of them directed by other directors who started out in the world of small scale cult genre films. Edwards has never really left the Hollywood system since making the leap, helming a Star Wars movie and currently directing yet another Jurassic Park sequel (taking over from another indie-genre-recruit from the early 2010s, Colin Trevorrow.) He also directed the completely original Sci-Fi movie The Creator last year, which attempts to bridge the gap between his smaller-scale starting point and all his franchise work.

So, based on the fact that this movie ultimately had a direct impact on the Godzilla series, Monsters is worth examining closer. What likely got Edwards’ work noticed in 2010 were the kind of small-scale innovations that give a worn out genre a new sense of life, many of them adaptive concessions to budgetary limitations, alongside a story and atmosphere that no big budget spectacle would likely ever attempt. In Monsters, you see larger-than-life creatures in ways that emphasize their mysterious and unknowable qualities while grounding everything else in a recognizable reality, making the disaster elements feel less like the building-smashing excess we’ve come to expect. Despite going from a movie that cost $500,000 to one that cost around $160,000,000, many of those innovations were still readily evident in Godzilla 2014—to a potentially annoying and ill-fitting degree, as some may argue, but it was going for something, at least.

Geharha: The Dark and Long-Haired Monster (2009) & Death Kappa (2010)

Japan is another country where giant monster movies are produced. Did any of you know this?

In the gaps between major kaiju films, you can always expect to see alternative sources pick up the slack, including fans. The late aughts and the early 2010s were one of those gaps, and while neither of the two subjects I’m covering here, one a short film that aired on television and the other a feature-length film that comes off as multiple short films cobbled together, are technically fan-produced, they certainly feel like they are. They carry with them the same loving attempts to recreate classic tokusatsu effects (utilizing veterans of the field), and the same desire to fill as much of the cast with recognizable faces from other tokusatsu productions—all things we saw in previous site subject The Great Buddha Arrival, which is an actual fan-made film. In this case, both are also affectionate parodies of the genre, capturing the technical craft while making light of their cliches—with that in mind, another one of their major similarities to each other might be their oddly uneven approach to spoofing the form.

Trollhunter (2010)

Now that we’ve checked out Denmark’s only giant monster movie, it’s only a short trip across the North Sea to see what Norway has on offer—and it’s something that looks to more local, and far older, inspirations than the original Godzilla. Released during the height of the found footage cinema boom, André Øvredal’s Trollhunter uses the format to bring some of Scandinavian folklore’s most well known monsters to life in a way that’s unexpectedly grounded, focusing less on horror and more on the day-to-day issues of living in a world where civilization and the fantastical cross paths. More impressively, it manages to not sacrifice either realism or fantasy in the process of bringing them together.

“The Things”

Illustration by Olli Hihnala. All images in this post were collected on Peter Watts personal website.

There are certainly Sci-Fi/creature feature/horror movies made throughout the ages where it may not be unjustified to question why an alien that is apparently intelligent enough to build a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel would land on Earth and immediately start acting like a violent, mindless animal. It’s a recurring logic hole generally papered over, thinly, in order to justify traditional genre entertainment. Even The Thing From Another World, the starting point for many of these extraterrestrial thrillers, only provides a vague sort of justification for its monster’s behaviour, and it actually does more plot logic legwork than many of the films that followed it. In general, the alien’s perspective is not always given a lot of thought in these things, although it’s an area where even an otherwise rote story can really distinguish itself…when there’s the motivation to do so.

Speaking of The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is another one of those movies where the question applies, probably even more than the original. It features one of the most inventively-portrayed alien creatures in film history, but its true form is so incomprehensible that it seems almost impossible to imagine it piloting a spaceship—but it not only does that, it also has the knowledge to build another one from scrap parts. I’ve always thought of the titular Thing as being like an intelligent communicable disease, seeking only to propagate itself and absorbing whatever knowledge and technical skill it needs to do so. Other people have their own theories about this, but only Sci-Fi writer/marine biologist Peter Watts, author of the evocative first contact novel Blindsight, managed to get his version published in Clarkesworld, one of the leading English language SF publications. “The Things”, his re-interpretation of the dynamics of John Carpenter’s version of the story, focuses entirely on the alien’s perspective, giving us a surprisingly benevolent take on the shapeshifting flesh beast that infects everything around it—as it turns out, such a thing is possible.

Rubber (2010)

I planned which movies on Tubi I was going to watch a while back, but by the time you read this, this one will no longer be available on the service. That’s always a possibility whenever you’re talking about streaming movies—there’s a non-zero chance that some or most of the movies I’ve written about in this subseries will be removed some day. Oh well! Here it is anyway!

Rubber is one of those movies I read about back in my cult movie website reader days, the kind of high concept film festival debut that got talked about a lot, even if it was only about the trailer (this is a similar context to how I first heard about Incident at Loch Ness.) It’s the exact kind of intentionally ridiculous premise that put daily news recaps and early social media in a tizzy: a killer tire! How droll! The sheer amount of slight guffaws at the basic idea of Rubber easily overwhelmed the contingent asking “How does this sustain a feature-length running time?” If there was one thing I remember from that era of film discussion, it’s that it sometimes felt like something that existed primarily as an elevator pitch was all some genre fans really wanted (see: Snakes on a Plane, Hobo With a Shotgun), and not many actually ended up really talking about the movie itself.

Monster Multimedia: Needle/7 Billion Needles

At some point, Science Fiction writers probably got tired of the standard assortment of Bug Eyed Monsters that had populated the pages of the pulps since back when they called the genre “scientifiction”, and wanted to get at something a bit more conceptual, like the aliens dreamt up by H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and First Men in the Moon. This was especially the case during much of the “Golden Age” in the forties and fifties, where scientific rigour was emphasized over expediency-for-the-purposes-of-plot (and sometimes over plot itself), so writers began looking at biology to inspire new kinds of extraterrestrial life forms and make more interesting and “accurate” stories (and also so we could get some intelligent aliens with character, rather than just slavering beasts to be raygunned.) Among the more notable examples can be found in Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle, which probably introduced a lot of SF-reading kids to the idea of symbiosis.