Bonoho-ho-ho! With December comes the jolliest time of year—Christmas Apes season!
While researching what movies to watch, I try to find details that make them stand out, or possibly resonate with what I’ve written about before, allowing me to compare and contrast. When I decided upon the obscure forties B-movie The Monster and the Girl, it was at least partially because it’s another example of a movie which revolves around a brain transplant, a once ubiquitous plot device that we previously saw in The Colossus of New York. It also has “monster” in the title, which makes it seem like a pretty obvious subject for this series. However, what actually drew me to track this movie down are some quotes from a contemporaneous review from Variety, which described it as “a chiller-diller that will send fans of goose-pimply melodrama from the theaters amply satisfied” and “red meat of the bugaboo ticket buyers.” How could you not want to see whatever it is this apparent human being is describing? You know how much I, a bugaboo ticket buyer, love chiller-dillers.
I write about monster apes as a crucial part of the monster enterprise, but the contradiction at the heart of that is that apes are not monsters—they are us. Once upon a time, pointing out the striking similarities between humans and the great apes was a shocking but intriguing idea, a source of merriment and thought experiments…and then it simply became incontrovertible that humans aren’t just similar to the great apes. To some people, this realization has been a source of enlightenment, a recognition of the interconnected nature of all living things on this planet. To others, however, from the earliest days of evolutionary theory to now, it only creates this grotesque mirror, a backwards mockery of human exceptionalism and civilization in animal form. Those two approaches is where the central complication of “apes-as-monster” comes together: we see ourselves in these animals, and sometimes that makes us want to sympathize with them (maybe that’s why ape movies have their own distinct following), and other times, it makes us fear them. In both cases, it’s because of what their very existence says about us.
Carl Linnaeus was the first to suggest that humans were directly related to other primates in the eighteenth century, and as great apes like chimpanzees and orangutans became more well-known in the western world in the subsequent years, the connection was increasingly a central fascination among fantasists. While many early depictions of apes in fiction were meant to play their relationship with humanity for satire, among the most famous early stories about an ape was Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The story is probably more well-known as the first true detective story, portraying a genius private citizen using deductive reasoning (Poe called it “ratiocination”) to solve a seemingly impossible crime, much to the astonishment of the bumbling local police—but it is also a likely inspiration for the apes-as-monster stories that would follow, the one that showed how an ape could be a figure of fear. Sure, it’s “only” an orangutan—normal-sized, no kung-fu skills—but to the people reading it in 1841, an orangutan was something unusual, something they’d probably never seen before (even if they read about it), something that didn’t sound real. In the twentieth century, ape fiction was still trying to maintain that mysterious and unsettling air, but since we knew more about them then, they started exaggerating them in different ways. In any case, Poe used the limited public exposure of apes like orangutans to make something memorably gruesome.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 