The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

But if I’m going to be writing about the history of Godzilla, I should go back to where it really started.

In the development of the monster movie as we know it, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was the second impact, following previous Creature Classic subject The Thing From Another World, and the two of them set the tone for the rest of the 1950s. As was the case in writing about The Thing, I feel like it’s difficult to convey to readers how this type of movie, which most people probably assume has always been one of the primordial ideas of cinema, was simply not a thing before this—okay, it had had been a thing once before, almost twenty years prior, but there was nothing in between. For myriad reasons inside and outside of the film itself, King Kong (which had been re-released the year before this and saw a surprising amount of success) casts a long shadow over this film, possibly even more than all the subsequent movies about giant monsters stomping through a city, and while both share a dedication to realistic-as-possible depictions of prehistoric animals (even if they are fictionalized ones) and showcasing excessive property damage in New York City, Beast 20K (as I like to call it) offers a significant and timely innovation: attributing the appearance of the monster to atomic bomb testing. With this single narrative detail, one of the primary fascinations and terrors of the monster movie was unleashed upon thousands of theatre screens—it is not the only thing from this movie that subsequent ones would utilized, but it is among the most significant, providing a recurring theme for decades of movies about the perils of the post-war age of scientific advancement. With that in mind, it’s even more interesting to look at how this story’s use of that concept feels so removed from its imitators.

The Colossus of New York (1958)

Previous techno-wary monster movies I’ve written about like The Invisible Boy and The Lift are about humanity losing control of their increasingly complicated machines—The Colossus of New York takes a different angle, asking if our increasing integration with that technology will cause us to lose our humanity. The idea of human enhancement with mechanical parts had existed in Sci-Fi literature prior to this, but in terms of film, Colossus is taking on what was likely fairly new ground even while using some of the ideas (sometimes pretty directly) from those earlier examples, and in doing so it anticipates decades of cyborg movies (as well as decades of movies with New York in the title that were definitely not filmed in New York) and debates about transhumanism, two years before the term “cyborg” was coined (but only a year after the term “transhumanism” was.) It is a classical sort of monstrous tragedy in many ways, too, but what struck me was how surprisingly dark it is.