All told, 2002 seems like the appropriate point where the strain of big studio Creature Features should come to an evolutionary dead end—Reign of Fire continued the trends of genre mixing and the infatuation with all the things CGI would let filmmakers put on screen, but scaled up to a world-demolishing scope that was in keeping with the increasingly bombastic blockbusters of the turn of the millennium. I’m sure the studio and screenwriters Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka, and Matt Greenberg (the latter having done uncredited rewrites on Mimic) thought that renewed interest in high fantasy thanks to movies like The Lord of the Rings would directly benefit their high concept of portraying fantasy-style dragons with a Sci-Fi approach to “realism”—instead, this turned out to be box office disappointment (although its $60 Million dollar budget was relatively modest in that era), and big studios stopped being so keen about putting that much money into monster movies. That leaves us with a mildly novel take on giant monsters and post-apocalyptic world building that oozes 2002 from every pore.
If you were dismayed by the non-appearance of Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee in the Halloween season movies this year—don’t worry, I have you all covered.
The Gorgon has an unusual backstory: fearing that they were potentially stuck in a rut, Hammer Productions decided to take an idea sent to them by a Canadian fan named J. Llewyn Divine and assigned some of their lead writers, John Gilling and Anthony Nelson Keyes, to polish it into a full feature directed by Hammer’s go-to man, Terence Fisher. I think I can understand why a fan of Hammer’s movies would pitch this concept, and why Hammer themselves would be intrigued by it: after reviving most of the “classic” literary monster—a Dracula, a Frankenstein, a mummy, a werewolf, even things like the Phantom of the Opera and Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde—moving in the direction of classical mythology is the next best source of recognizably scary faces, such as the snake-haired, petrifying Gorgons of Greek legend. It seems quite obvious, in fact. A less obvious approach is taking a recognizable monster from Greek mythology and somehow transplanting it to a turn-of-the-century European setting with a ready supply of Gothic manors and spooky forests—to, in essence, make this bold new concept into a Hammer movie, complete with Peter Cushing and Christoper Lee in major roles. I guess they just couldn’t resist the pull of what had worked before, even when they were trying to! Much as in the Lovecraft adaptations that AIP gussied up to resemble Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, it makes for an unusual aesthetic contortion.
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.
When most people think of the Universal Monster movies, they think of them collectively, not as individual horror films that just happened to be put out by the same company and featuring many of the same actors. When you think of Dracula, chances are Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy are lurking around as well. This was something that Universal themselves leaned into, as their second era of monster movies in the 1940s eventually started just throwing in all the monsters, giving you the most bang for your buck. By the fifties, most kids experiencing these movies for the first time were either seeing them revived in theatres as double bills, aired on TV under the Shock Theatre banner, or featured prominently in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland—so, in the minds of generation after generation, the monsters were always hanging out in the same dusty castles and spooky moors, making them into a group not unlike how the yokai spirits of Japan are portrayed. The continuing existence of “The Monster Mash” makes that abundantly clear.
Speaking of Japan: despite coming from another continent, Konami’s Castlevania series is very much following the tradition of those monster mash-ups, reintroducing the classic creatures to a new generation of kids through a new medium (I’ve written about that before.) The original 1987 entry could basically be described as “Conan the Barbarian with a whip fights the Universal Monsters”, and as the series progressed, it developed more of its own style, as well as its own nonsense mythology and timeline (which somehow is able to include Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, even though the book is bereft of mummies and skeletons and fish-men), but never strayed that far from that original pitch. No matter who was fighting through the dark corridors and at what point in history, Castlevania has still been about Dracula and his castle housing an accumulation of monsters from all sorts of sources, and reappearing every century or so for another Monster Shindig. The atmosphere the games perfected was a fun celebration of every Gothic horror trope they could cram into one setting, pulling from not just the movies, but also literature, folklore, and demonology, making it seem sensible that all these disparate evil beings hang out together in this one big house. No other game franchise really has this very Halloween-y spirit.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 