Arachnophobia (1990)

Last year, I delved into the strain of big studio monster movies that popped up throughout the nineties—an era emboldened by advances in special effects and a sense that creature features could be made even more palatable to a mainstream audience through genre mixing and nominally self-aware writing. The first movie of era, Tremors, demonstrated those latter points by taking a mostly traditional monster movie premise and imbuing it with a goofy, blue collar sensibility—one must remember, though, that Tremors was not particularly successful in theatres, and only gained its notoriety from home video and television airings afterwards. Arachnophobia, which premiered six months later, carries the same basic tenor, but attracted a bigger initial audience—so it could be argued that this is the true starting point for the dark comedy sensibility that permeated so many of the subsequent creature features.

Arachnophobia did have one major advantage: whereas something like Tremors can only borrow Steven Spielberg vibes, this movie is a true Amblin production—working with Disney’s slightly-less-than-reputable Hollywood Pictures label—with Spielberg on board to produce a movie directed by longtime collaborator Frank Marshall (later to direct previous subject Congo.) This pretty openly formalizes the way these movies attempted to recapture the most successful elements of Jaws, particularly the more grounded approach for both the characters and the thrills. Maybe even more than Jaws, this movie plays into existing, everyday fears—I mean, the title alone tells you that—by exaggerating them just enough, and by filling the scenes in between the horror with a colourful supporting cast that have a particular small town quality, creating a movie approximation of a recognizable world. Just beneath the surface of that, you can find what would become a consistent thread in the next few years of monster horror: the way these elements reveal themselves to be something of a facade, a way to grab people into seeing something as ludicrous as the older monster movies and as mean-spirited as less mainstream films, a prototype form of pulpy excess that would eventually be refined into the spectacle of Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park.

Grabbers (2012)

I’ve written about some wildly varying monster comedies, and one of the potential points of variation in them is just how seriously they take their monster—it is still possible for a movie to be a comedy while still presenting us with a monster that is threatening or even scary in a relatively straightforward manner. Alligator is a good example of that, as is Tremors—and the latter is the one that is the most apparent inspiration for the Irishcreature comedy Grabbers, where even the title seems to be a sly reference. The similarities run deep: both are rooted in a certain working class milieu, focusing on a group of small town personalities forced to do battle with a extraordinary menace, with the more ridiculous elements of their generally uneventful lives playing a part, good or bad, in the ensuing chaos; moreover, both are also indebted to classic monster movie traditions, and present those things without intentional subversion (but with inventive creature designs.) It’s an entertaining kind of light horror that doesn’t come around that often—with less overt cynicism or gruesomeness than most horror-comedies—and this one utilizes its setting and its ensemble to very good effect while getting an equal amount of juice out of its monsters.

“The Curse of Fenric” (S26E8-11)

It is 1989, and Doctor Who is on its last legs. You may have noticed that I skipped over all of the serials featuring Colin Baker in the lead role—this is not simply because of the poor reputation most of the stories have even among fans of the series, but because none of them offer a particularly compelling monster-centric story to write about. Things started looking up at least a little bit in 1987, when the show went through a small-scale creative overhaul, with a new batch of writers behind the scenes and a new lead in Sylvester McCoy, but none of the active attempts to make the series more ambitious and relevant saved it from going on an indefinite hiatus just as the eighties ended, leaving it at a still-impressive twenty-six consecutive years on television.

The three years with McCoy and lead writer Andrew Cartmel carry a very distinctive atmosphere, one that attempts to mine the best parts of the series’ past, especially its sense of imagination and its capacity for moments of child-friendly horror, and infuse a puckish kind of whimsy and more focus on the characterization of the Doctor and his companion. “The Curse of Fenric”, the classic series’ penultimate story, carries with it the DNA of previous serials we’ve talked about: there’s a the moody atmosphere and marching army of monsters of “The Web of Fear”, a somewhat Quatermass-esque combination of mythology and Sci-Fi similar to “The Awakening”, and even the winking social commentary of “Carnival of Monsters.” Another similarity to “Web of Fear” is its attempt to provide a new interpretation of a well-established monster—but this goes much further in taking its inspirations and playing around with the iconography.

The Monsters of Unsolved Mysteries

Years ago, I wrote about my initiation into the…fandom?…of Cryptozoology and other stories of unexplained phenomenon through books and TV programs like Animal X, which focused entirely on cryptids and other weird animal anecdotes. In the grand scheme of things, a show like Animal X was niche, a foreign import that found its way into circulation during the strange expansion days of cable TV—even a broader-minded program in a similar vein like the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search Of… (a recurring topic on my other website) was mostly a minor staple of syndication. These series have snuck their way into the nostalgic memories of lifelong channel surfers, and likely introduced more people to the many mystery monsters of the world…but I imagine that even more people were introduced to Cryptozoology through the most mainstream mysterious phenomenon TV show, Unsolved Mysteries.

Its credentials as an actual hit are pretty evident: the initial run, which like In Search Of… started out as a series of specials, ran for fourteen straight years on three channels, including two of the big networks (NBC from 1987 to 1997, and CBS from 1997 to 1999) and one cable network (Lifetime, from 2000-2002); it almost certainly became another staple of syndication in that timeframe as well, and was recently revived in a revised form on Netflix. A series like that doesn’t go on for that long and end up with hundreds of episodes without being seen by a few people, and the trick to getting this type of show in front of so many eyeballs is ingenious: it’s a Trojan Horse, of sorts. From its inception, Unsolved Mysteries was a true crime docu-series, focusing on murders, robberies, disappearances, separated families and other down-to-earth cases—it’s a good example of what the genre was like before the more recent trends in True Crime “entertainment.” This makes it cheap to produce for networks, and it even includes an audience participation angle, with a telephone line open to hear from people who may have information that will crack those cold cases, with subsequent episodes providing updates on previous stories that showed that this hotline actually worked.

When it became a full weekly series in 1988, the show expanded its range of topics to include different sorts of mysteries, including supposed supernatural phenomena: UFOs, hauntings, and starting in a first season episode from 1989, monster legends. One could question the taste of putting stories with genuine pleas to help reunite families and solve violent crimes to give people closure next to sensationalism about crop circles and Bigfoot, but it’s the exact sort of gleefully tone-ignorant juxtaposition you expect to see on television. These things are all “mysteries”, and so they are jumbled together regardless of their actual content (I do wonder how many phone calls they got with “information” about the weirdo stuff.) In any case, this means that the sorts of people who would initially watch a series about real crimes were, more often than not, also exposed to some of the most well-known cryptids, and maybe even came away convinced that they’re real—and believer or not, other people came away from the show with the memories of these creatures burned into their memory thanks to the dark and menacing atmosphere the show imbued in their portrayal.

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Consider this: an early sixties Roger Corman monster movie spoof made in three days is regularly recreated in high schools across North America. This is but one result of the unexpected cultural nexus point that is Little Shop of Horrors, a previous site subject transformed into an off-Broadway musical in 1982 and then adapted into a new film in 1986. These roots are long and deep: both versions were produced by David Geffen, and written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, whose work here would get them the job of reinventing Disney’s animated musicals starting with The Little Mermaid; meanwhile, the film attracted the directing talent of Jim Henson’s (sometimes literal) right hand man Frank Oz, who brought a team of Muppets-trained effects team (including the design work of Lyle Conway, a veteran of films like The Dark Crystal) to give new cinematic life to the stage musical’s central charismatic flora. It really does feel like a decade’s worth of legendary figures in the entertainment industry came out to produce this—which, again, is based on a low budget monster movie.

Hellraiser (1987)

Maybe not surprisingly, I often determine Creature Classics subjects by asking the question “How often does this get ripped off?” Sometimes it’s not even in terms of ideas, but visuals—and you know you’ve struck some kind of nerve if disparate bits of culture liberally borrow your visual style for years afterwards. I think that’s more of the case with the original 1987 Hellraiser: not many people are doing their own take on the movie’s sadomasochistic themes, but they sure love all those chains and the stylishly leather-clad & mutilated demons that serve as the movie’s monster mascots (yes, even kids cartoons have taken a cue from them.) But, really, the visuals of those monster mascots in their first appearance—let’s just ignore the rest of the disjointed franchise, it’ll save us all a lot of time and a lot of headaches—are tied directly into that theme, creating a sui generis horror aesthetic based in the discomforting interweaving of extreme physical sensations, blending sex and pain in a way few other horror movies do, even when they are otherwise filled with both.

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.

The Blood Beast Terror (1968)

It just wouldn’t be Halloween without at least one British horror movie starring Peter Cushing in a lead role. Apparently Cushing considered The Blood Beast Terror (US title The Vampire Beast Craves Blood, and we can only hope that whoever came up with these titles lived a happy, contented life knowing that they made the world a brighter place) the worst movie he ever worked on in his long and storied career—of course I can’t definitively state whether that’s true or not, as I haven’t seen every one of his movies. Among the ones I have seen, there have been excellent ones (The Abominable Snowman, Horror Express), solid ones (Island of Terror), and interesting but flawed ones (The Creeping Flesh)—Blood Beast is probably the least interesting of these, the one that feels the most like a procedural monster movie, but that’s not to say it isn’t interesting at all. As has been the case many times before, while it proceeds in a predictable manner, all the little details (or, in some cases, the lack of details) build up a pleasingly melodramatic mix of Victorian moralism and Gothic ghoulishness.

Blood Freak (1972)

This is a movie about a man who becomes a mutant, blood-drinking man-turkey due to a combination of bad weed and unethical experimentation on poultry. Not to spoil too much too early, but it’s also a movie where the solution to the problem is embracing Christianity. Could this seemingly incompatible combination of ideas come together at any other time in history but 1972*? To be honest, they barely come together even then.

Hidden beneath Blood Freak‘s home video production values, sub-amateurish acting, and plot so ludicrous that you’d need to come up with some pretty strong arguments just to convince people that it’s not parody, are a number of fascinatingly contradictory messages that mark it as unique even among the lowest of the seventies exploitation schlock. It’s a movie built to be served to the bored young people who were going to see horror in the early seventies, but ungracefully tries to pull a bait-and-switch and pushes a Come to Jesus message even while pouring on the fake blood. It’s not even a case of it not being smart enough to be subtle—it tells you, straight to your face, what its message is. It tries its damndest to show the horrifying consequences of what it sees as an age of self-destructive debauchery, and does it in the form of something that only those partaking in said debauchery would ever think to watch: a violent monster movie that makes no sense. In some ways, this is kind of genius, although a genius that is readily disproved by the actual execution.

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968)

The only real difference between the Japanese yōkai, the multitude of spirits that inhabit the country’s traditional stories, and the mythological creatures of other nations is that there has been more of historical trend towards treating yōkai as a collective group of popular characters rather than just creatures in various stories. Although they originate in tales that are often meant to be scary (or at least creepy), most yōkai have ended up becoming more like weird but lovable mascots than figures of terror, and despite often coming from different contexts, they’ve also been treated as one big group for even longer. Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (called The Great Yōkai War in Japan) is an example of how they’ve come to be used in culture—the second in a loose trilogy produced by Gamera/Daimajin studio Daiei (just to further solidify the connection between this and Daimajin, this movie is directed by that movie’s cinematographer), the only thing that seems to connect the three movies are the yōkai themselves, a whole host of them brought to life with sixties tokusatsu ingenuity. Considering that most kaiju films, and Japanese media about monsters in general (even later when you get to stuff like Pokémon) are heavily indebted to depictions of yōkai, it seems rather obvious that they’d get some movies made about them in this style. It’s an homage to where much of the monster movie tradition in the country originated.