Congo (1995)

Before the year’s out, I’d be remiss not to take one last dive into the short-lived but intriguing Hollywood dalliance with the creature feature in the nineties, a trend that was unarguably spurred on by Jurassic Park. None of the subsequent follow-up movies is more directly connected to JP than Congo, another genre blockbuster based on a Michael Crichton novel that not only features special effects by Stan Winston and Co., but Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Frank Marshall in the director’s chair (one of Marshall’s previous directorial efforts was Arachnophobia, a missing piece of nineties creature feature history that will gets its due on this site eventually.) While its ambitions are certainly on a smaller scale than its predecessor—bringing to life a bunch of mutant gorillas is not quite as impressive as animating dinosaurs—through its rollicking adventure structure and jungle setting, I have no doubts it was trying to bring in at least some of the vast audience that the previous Critchton adaptation got. However, even if many of the surface elements remain similar, the explicitly throwback nature of this story makes for a different beast,

Of Unknown Origin (1983)

Compared to Leviathan, the second George P. Cosmatos-directed movie with Peter Weller in the lead role, Of Unknown Origin is a more grounded (and slightly less damp) creature feature, one of those edge cases where the “monster” is a regular, everyday animal that just happens to behave in a way that no real animal ever has. But there are other ways to paint a common vermin, in this case a rat, as monstrous other than exploiting common phobias or pure schlocky exaggeration—this is an urban version of man-against-nature, with the central conflict specifically played to Weller’s character, escalating what should have been a normal pest control problem into an obsessive battle to protect his symbols of upward mobility and masculine success. Given that the movie includes its lead character pulling out a copy of Moby-Dick AND watching a film version of “The Old Man and the Sea”, it’s not exactly subtle about the kind of narrative it’s trying to weave.

Alligator (1980)

One of the major inflection points in the evolution of the monster movie was when well-informed fans started working behind the scenes, aware of all the tropes and knowing just where to push them to take something from cliche to slyly self-aware examination. The ur-example of this was the Joe Dante-directed Piranha, which took what could have easily been a movie simply following the trend of ripping off Jaws and turned it into something else entirely—someone was clearly paying attention, because when director Lewis Teague (later of movies like Cujo) was given the job of making a Jaws rip-off about a giant alligator, he threw out the original script and called in Piranha screenwriter John Sayles (later of several award-winning films) to help him craft something more interesting. Together, they produced a movie in the middle ground between traditional drive-in schlock, the intelligently eccentric B-movies typified by Larry Cohen’s entries in the genre, and the cartoonish and loving parodies that Dante continued to refine in the eighties—and it does it in a way casual and subtle enough that many critics of the time didn’t even catch the dark comedy at the heart of Alligator.

Slugs (1988)

Moving from household pests to garden pests, Slugs faces one potential hurdle to its status as horror: slugs are not particularly scary. Some people might find them creepy or gross, but probably not scary. I’m sure that was probably part of the appeal of making a horror story about them, though—they are so common, and so seemingly innocuous, that to turn them into bloodthirsty monsters creates a mildly subversive “horror of the everyday” scenario (they’re also weird enough as animals that actively ignoring their real biology won’t be noticed by most.) That’s all well and good, but you’re still going to need to put in some effort to make slugs come off as menacing, and this movie does try various things to do that—it doesn’t succeed, but it is sort of funny to see it try.

Razorback (1984)

For people on every other continent, Australia is some unknowable alien world, with its strange, seemingly inhospitable environments and unique (and sometimes uniquely dangerous) organisms, developed through eons of island isolation. The common outsider image of Australia being this vision of untamed nature is probably why pop cultural depictions of the people who live there often focus on equally untamed, knife-wielding outdoorsmen (who, it should be noted, are never members of the indigenous groups who have lived there for thousands of years.) Those sort of reductionist portrayals could be expected of people who don’t live there, but Australia’s own native filmmakers seem equally apt at portraying their home as a blasted hellscape, even when it’s not supposed to take place in George Miller’s Mad Max future—take Razorback, brought to us by fellow Australian director Russell Mulcahy two years before he helmed Highlander (and based on a novel by the guy who created Judge Judy—no joke!), which depicts the outback as a vast nightmare land bathed in dust browns or the ominous orange of a murderous dusk. Would it surprise you to learn that this movie brought in the Director of Photography of The Road Warrior? Much of the film, set in the modern day of 1984, has some very Mad Max design work to go along with its vicious conception of nature, embodied in a massive, carnivorous pig. It is all very pointedly ugly.

Creature Classic Companion: Piranha (1978)

The career of director Joe Dante represents the ascent of the Monster Kid from fan to filmmaker—people who grew up during the creature feature boom of the fifties and sixties were suddenly given reign of the genre, which they knew inside and out. Having that kind of understanding of the formulas made it all the more easy to subvert and reinvent them, making a smarter and more self-aware range of monster movies in the late seventies and eighties, which Dante heavily contributed to with The Howling and Gremlins. Before those, though, he worked his way up in the B-movie system, cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (and co-directing a movie made mostly of stock footage) before being assigned to direct Piranha, New World’s blatant attempt to cash in on Jaws‘ success. Following the general Corman ethos, however, meant that as long as you check off all the exploitation movie requirements—low budget, surface similarity to something popular, blood, and female nudity—you are free to do whatever you want (although that didn’t go quite so well for the director of Piranha II, some guy named James Cameron.) So, Dante got together with writer John Sayles to build a Jaws knock-off full of comedic touches and creature feature homages, something that wasn’t just another killer fish movie. As the story goes, Universal was fully prepared to sue this movie out of existence before it reached theatres…until it received the full approval of Steven Spielberg, who considered it by far the best imitation of his movie.

The Bay (2012)

So, how exactly did we get a found footage monster movie from the director of Rain Man? According to the backstory, Barry Levinson was tasked with directing a documentary about the ecological problems of Chesapeake Bay, but not unlike the creatures at the heart of The Bay, the project mutated into something else entirely. It was 2012, right in the middle of the much-groused-about-at-the-time trend of found footage horror movies mostly instigated by Paranormal Activity (the producer of those movies, Jason Blum, is also a producer on this one), as well as what still felt like the early days of the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones—a perfect confluence of trends that inspired the idea of watching a disaster unfold from personal and media video footage, a collage of reactions and non-reactions from normal citizens, experts, and people in places of authority. The verisimilitude offered by this style of film might even bolster the real environmental issues that inspired the far more gory events in the movie! One could hope!

Of course, the other obvious inspiration for this movie comes from a place I’m sure we’ve all been to: finding out some random (maybe true?) fact on the Internet, especially about weird nature stuff. I imagine that most people only recently learned about Cymothoa Exigua, also known as the tongue-eating louse, probably from some listicle containing the same few photos of that oceanic isopod and its peculiar form of parasitism, where it sucks the blood from the tongues of fish until they shrivel up and fall off, and then replaces the tongue in the fish’s mouth. It’s hard to blame some writer for seeing those images and thinking “now, there’s a movie!”

Monster Multimedia: Hook Jaw

Someone could argue that Jaws shouldn’t be considered a monster movie because a slightly larger than average great white shark is not a real monster—I think the structure and tone of it is more important in classifying it as a monster movie than how fantastical the creature is, but whatever. In any case, Jaws has had a major influence on how monster stories are told, probably because the supposed plausibility of the “monster” (abetted by mainstream ignorance of nature) and the contemporary setting and characters made it a more gripping type of thriller for people at the time, especially compared to the increasingly stodgy Gothic and atomic horrors of the previous decades. After all, lots of people spend time on the ocean, and we know there are sharks there. Sharks are real, but to many people who don’t know anything about them, they pretty much are monsters. This led to a whole decade of animal attack stories that were more often than not complete rip-offs of Jaws in every single way, and that includes plenty that were also about sharks.

Among those was the infamous UK comic strip Hook Jaw, which ran in 1976 in the magazine Action. Action was a comic that attempted to push the format of boys adventure comics in an intentionally abrasive and brutal direction, and was so shockingly violent for its time that it was denounced by tabloids, truncating its run as newsstands refused to sell it. This eventually led to the main architects of Action, including editor Pat Mills and writer John Wagner, to take the anarchic and subversive philosophy that was buried underneath the gore and turn it into 2000 AD, an institution in British comics for over forty years. Before that, though, we got Hook Jaw, a killer shark tale that I think people would have less of a problem calling a full-on monster story, because the titular killer shark behaves in a way so far removed from real sharks that it might as well be a made-up animal. It’s definitely capitalizing on Jaws, but Hook Jaw feels less inspired by the movie and more by its iconic poster.

The White Buffalo (1977)

The western and the monster movie go together pretty well, don’t they? The former idolizes a time of frontiers, unexplored wilderness, a constant need to push outwards into the unknown out a personal desire for glory and riches, with a penchant for lawless violence—so this would be a perfect place for a mysterious creature to show up and wreck the place, especially since those old settlements weren’t exactly sturdy. We didn’t know the North American landscape back then—not fully—and it was primarily a world of stark environments, thick untamed forests and canyons, no gigantic all-encompassing European-style civilization to be found. This is a world that seemed teeming with unexpected terrors (and the indigenous mythologies, no matter the region, have plenty) that hadn’t been crowded out.

I’m sure there must be others that find a way to combine the two, even outside the anything-goes madness of the weird west subgenre, but the only semi-notable I’ve found is this one, a strange film from a strange time in American cinema. It was well past the western’s prime, and is also a generally modest special effects movie from just before the era of special effects blockbusters; as far as I can tell it is largely forgotten, save probably for completists of the Charles Bronson filmography (or for any of the largely overqualified cast of this.) But really, a western Moby-Dick starring Charles Bronson? I knew I had to see this one eventually.