Gargoyles (1972)

Monster movies were in a bit of a slump in the seventies, but began to pick up steam starting in the eighties. This, I think, can primarily be attributed to the rise of increasingly complicated special effects, and the dedicated studios producing those effects that started pushing the limits on the imagination and believability of monsters in film. Once monsters stopped looking so much like guys in rubber suits, a number of possibilities began to open up, and movie studios noticed. Stan Winston and his studio were among the pioneers in that space, providing award-winning effects for some of the biggest movies of the eighties and nineties.

But before he could be the director of Pumpkinhead, Winston had to start somewhere, and that somewhere was the 1972 TV movie Gargoyles, his first credited work as a make-up artist (a credit that he apparently had to fight for), which won the 1973 Emmy in the make-up category alongside effects overseers Ellis Burman Jr. (“prop manufacturer” for Prophecy) and Del Armstrong. You can tell that they really wanted to emphasize the make-up effects in this thing because they include several publicity shots and scenes of the titular gargoyles in the opening narration as it slips from quoting Paradise Lost to giving an entire history of gargoyles before we’ve had a chance to catch our breath. Seeing the monsters before the movie even begins would seemingly spoil the surprise, but I guess the question is…what surprise? This is a TV movie made in 1972.

Tremors (1990)

Big Hollywood studios have a hot-and-cold relationship with monster movies—they’ll cede that territory to B-movie productions for years, or decades, at a time, and then start investing some bigger budgets into a select few before dropping the whole thing again. The nineties was one of those periods with a minor streak of classic-style creature features—”classic-style” in the sense that they’re more or less following the structures that were laid down in the fifties. Their special effects may be more sophisticated, the dialogue less stiff and expository, and the violence more explicit, but in the end it’s still a movie where a group of people have to deal with the sudden appearance of a monster or monsters, and the expected plot beats are barely changed, even after forty years.

Tremors, which could be considered the first in that wave, wasn’t a significant success in its original release, and likely accrued its cult following through home video and TV airings, leading it to become a direct-to-video franchise with a surprising amount of longevity (as in, it’s most recent sequel came out in 2020)—it even had a short-lived TV show, and a more recent series attempt that wasn’t picked up. Technically, it’s also an end-of-the-eighties movie that was delayed into the dead early months of 1990, just like Nightbreed, making it something of a liminal artifact. Looking at it now, you can see how it heralds some of the ways the subsequent decade of monster movies attempted to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, some minor tweaks in presentation likely meant to pull in new audiences—while Tremors and what followed tended to resemble the old school entries in basic plotting, they change just enough of the surface details to make themselves feel contemporary, with a particular emphasis on comedy.

“The Zanti Misfits” (S1E14)

The three Outer Limits episodes I wrote about previously did not employ twist endings—that was always more of a Twilight Zone thing. But that changes with “The Zanti Misfits” (another Joseph Stefano script, originally aired on December 30^th, 1963), which has a classic zinger conclusion of the sort that Golden Age Sci-Fi and Rod Serling preferred. I have feeling that this is one of the key reasons why this episode in particular is well-remembered, sitting near the top of most lists of the series’ best episodes, and even finding its way onto lists of the best episodes of any television show—while the sustained drama of the other stories set them apart from most genre fare on TV, this has that AND a sledgehammer ending for the audience to ponder over, as well as one of the most unsettling-looking monsters anyone would have likely seen on their screens in the early sixties.

Nope (2022)

Writer-director Jordan Peele’s Nope follows the critical and commercial success of his horror films Get Out and Us, and using all the cultural clout he has accumulated over the last five years, he has produced one of the most high profile creature features in recent memory. It’s a true blue classic-style monster movie, too, one that readily engages in some of the genre’s oldest themes (in a story engages with the history of the American entertainment industry in general) in ways that are smart and modern. Seeing this combination of expensive-looking action, B-movie enthusiasm for the weird, and interesting characters in a mainstream film is impressive, and is even more so because of the way it respectfully contributes to the history of its genre.

Creature Classic Companion: Them! (1954)

The atomic monster category that was so profuse in the 1950s did not appear fully-formed, despite the timeliness of its inspiration: in the first major monster movie to use that device, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the nuclear bomb test that unleashes its titular dinosaur feels almost incidental, possibly even flippant when considered alongside the military triumphalism it ends on. That film was so successful that Warner Bros. was quick to follow it up the next year with more radiation-spawned giant monsters, this time going from stop motion dinosaurs to giant ant puppets (and in the process begot yet another category of monster movie that spanned the entire decade, the giant insect movie), but by comparison, Them! is a much more sober and startling take on the idea, despite what the excitable title and the promise of giant radioactive ants. While not coming off as some sort of didactic warning of what could happen now that Pandora’s box of atomic energy has been opened, it is much more serious-minded and engaged with the long-term effects of these things, and coming within a few months of Godzilla‘s premier in Japan in the same year, captures a period of more intelligent consideration of that new age than the wacky radioactive free-for-all that subsequently became the movie norm.

Creature Classic Companion: The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

What makes Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion work stand out is his attention to lifelike detail. Following on the techniques of his mentor, King Kong animator Willis O’Brien, the animated creatures in his movies have tics and behaviours that mimic those of real animals, no matter how outlandish or fantastical the creature is. They make the kinds of seemingly pointless movements that living things have, and they react dynamically to situations—all the kinds of things that lesser animation and guy-in-suit movies generally lack (although they sometimes make up for it with unique performances), but with the same “physical object” gravity that all practical effects possess. Yes, these days his animation no longer has the “realism” that they once touted, especially when seen in a level of fidelity they were never intended for, but there’s a sense of empathy that comes through Harryhausen’s work, a sense that these things have a vitality and a presence, and aren’t just there for schlocky thrills, which is why in interviews he never liked his creations to be called “monsters.” Remember, too, that for most of his career, he did all that painstaking frame-by-frame animation by himself—it’s a true labour of love.

Of course, the history of monster movies really begins with the desire to bring dinosaurs back to life—that’s what built O’Brien’s career, and Harryhausen followed dutifully. As I’ve said elsewhere, dinosaurs are like every imaginary monster humanity has ever concocted, except they were real animals that roamed this planet in a time so long ago, it was more or less an alien world. Artists have been trying to resurrect them visually ever since Richard Owen coined the term in the nineteenth century, and when film came around, suddenly we had the opportunity to see these long-dead organisms move around (based on our current knowledge of how they moved around) for the first time. O’Brien was the master of the movie dinosaur, and nothing could match the marvel of his work on King Kong, but he never really got a chance to work on that subject again during his unfortunately turbulent career—it was appropriate, then, that Harryhausen would see one of his unrealized dinosaur-based ideas come to fruition years after his death. That would be The Valley of Gwangi, which probably felt like a bit of a throwback when it was released in 1969, and was under-seen at that time (because the new management at the studio gave it paltry advertising, at least according to Harryhausen himself), but did prove to be a bit of a benchmark when it came to portraying dinosaurs on-screen.

Phase IV (1974)

Most people who know Phase IV know it for two reasons: (1) it’s the only movie directed by influential movie graphic designer Saul Bass, and (2) it’s weird as hell. It also has a direct connection to the very first movie I wrote about for this series, The Hellstrom Chronicle, as the insect footage in both was shot by Ken Middleham—and like Hellstrom, Phase IV recontextualizes nature documentary moments to make common insects, in this case ants, utterly alien. But it’s something else entirely in this movie, which depicts not regular ants, but ants granted an amalgamated hyper-intelligence through cosmic means, and humanity’s various attempts to understand and communicate with an organism whose mind works on a completely different level. Despite the lurid promises of the (decidedly not Saul Bass-designed) poster, this is not a thriller, but a borderline experimental Sci-Fi movie working with some heady ideas, and is maybe one of the oddest things I’ve watched for this series, which is really saying something given some of the bizarre subjects I’ve already covered.

Screamers (1995)

Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “Second Variety” is maybe the exact opposite of Gog, despite coming from the same Cold War context—it is absolutely an existentialist nightmare about our technology becoming self-replicating and ultimately superseding humanity, to the point where the armed conflict between humans that led to their creation is completely invalidated. It is quintessential killer robot fiction, and it is also classic Dick, concerned with identity and human behaviour, containing imagery that is sometimes both ridiculous and highly disturbing, and a final line with implications I still think about all the time.

It also has plenty of interesting visuals to work with, so a movie adaptation was certainly on the table after the success of Total Recall created a potential mini-industry of PKD-based films—and what do you know, the adaptation of “Second Variety”, called Screamers because it was the nineties, was co-written by Total Recall co-writer (and also Alien co-writer/Return of the Living Dead director) Dan O’Bannon (alongside Miguel Tejada-Flores, whose other best known work is…Revenge of the Nerds and The Lion King? Okay, whatever you say.) The movie manages to recontextualize the story for the post-Cold War age while keeping the desolate and paranoid tone, for the most part, and also gives it plenty of that cynical nineties dinginess that was so omnipresent in both horror and sci-movies of the time (the director, Christian Duguay, got his start directing straight-to-video sequels to Scanners, so it’s about what you’d expect.) While it’s clear that part of the impetus for this was its potential for violence and weird special effects, there are enough ideas here to make it a little bit more than that.

Creature Classic Companion: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

I didn’t plan on watching Shin Godzilla and the 1984 movie version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on the same day, and it was probably only about halfway through the latter when I realized what an appropriate double feature it was. The direct connection is obvious to everyone who knows about those movies’ histories: Shin Godzilla co-director Hideaki Anno (known mainly as the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion) got his start in the animation industry working on Nausicaä, being specifically tasked with animating the sequence featuring the giant God Warrior, a melting, corpse-like entity that would prove to be one of the (many) iconic elements of the film. Three decades later, Anno produced a live action short film depicting the God Warrior attacking Tokyo for a museum exhibit on tokusatsu that used a combination of classical and digital effects (I’d link to it, but no complete version of the original exists online), which likely had a large influence on the making of Shin Godzilla a few years after that.

But it’s also clear that his work on Nausicaä had a much deeper influence on the movie: in Shin, Godzilla is as much like Miyazakis’ God Warriors as he is like previous incarnations of Godzilla, both in his visual depiction—less like a giant animal and more like a sickly aberration, scabbed, gelatinous flesh in his earlier “unfinished” stages, and something like a molten tumour with ungainly proportions in his final form—and in his behaviour, which seems borderline mindless, the destruction he causes often coming off as just a mechanical reaction to what happens around him. Even his trademark radiation breath looks very similar to the hyper-destructive beams fired by the God Warriors. Both are meant to represent the worst abuses of the natural world by human hands, but the simpler allegory of the older Godzilla films (which took inspiration mainly from movies like King Kong) has been usurped by the coarser and angrier one pioneered by Miyazaki in his story, which feels increasingly appropriate as we’ve had further decades of thoughtless environmental abuse. It wasn’t enough for us to accidentally create a giant monster in these stories: the giant monster has to look like Death Itself to get the point across.

That unexpected thematic two-fer only reinforced a notion I’ve held for a while: while both the manga and animated versions of Nausicaä are rightly regarded as seminal, and are highly influential to the entirety of Japanese pop culture (you wouldn’t have the world design of many video games without it), they are also innovators specifically in the realm of monster stories, providing some of the most memorable creatures of all time, and making them a central part of the narrative’s thematic core. Not since the original Godzilla had giant creatures, and how they relate to mankind, been taken that seriously—and very rarely have they ever been made to feel a wholly organic part of their universe.

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.