Geharha: The Dark and Long-Haired Monster (2009) & Death Kappa (2010)

Japan is another country where giant monster movies are produced. Did any of you know this?

In the gaps between major kaiju films, you can always expect to see alternative sources pick up the slack, including fans. The late aughts and the early 2010s were one of those gaps, and while neither of the two subjects I’m covering here, one a short film that aired on television and the other a feature-length film that comes off as multiple short films cobbled together, are technically fan-produced, they certainly feel like they are. They carry with them the same loving attempts to recreate classic tokusatsu effects (utilizing veterans of the field), and the same desire to fill as much of the cast with recognizable faces from other tokusatsu productions—all things we saw in previous site subject The Great Buddha Arrival, which is an actual fan-made film. In this case, both are also affectionate parodies of the genre, capturing the technical craft while making light of their cliches—with that in mind, another one of their major similarities to each other might be their oddly uneven approach to spoofing the form.

Trollhunter (2010)

Now that we’ve checked out Denmark’s only giant monster movie, it’s only a short trip across the North Sea to see what Norway has on offer—and it’s something that looks to more local, and far older, inspirations than the original Godzilla. Released during the height of the found footage cinema boom, André Øvredal’s Trollhunter uses the format to bring some of Scandinavian folklore’s most well known monsters to life in a way that’s unexpectedly grounded, focusing less on horror and more on the day-to-day issues of living in a world where civilization and the fantastical cross paths. More impressively, it manages to not sacrifice either realism or fantasy in the process of bringing them together.

Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

So this is Christmas Apes, and what have you done? Well, I’ve started watching another batch of ape-themed films to write about on this site. I hope you, the reader, have fun.

With a title as sensationalistic as Bride of the Gorilla, you’d probably expect something pretty bombastic—but things are not what they appear. That title was not the first choice for writer-director Curt Siodmak, screenwriter of The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (and author of the oft-imitated Sci-Fi story Donovan’s Brain), who began the project under the name “The Face in the Water”, something a bit more mysterious that maybe better reflects the film he was trying to make, something closer to a psychological thriller than a monster movie (also, technically, there is no gorilla in this movie.) Looking past the surface ridiculousness, one can detect traces of not only Siodmak’s previous work on The Wolf Man, with its cursed and agonized protagonist, but Jacques Tourner and Val Lewton’s acclaimed 1942 thriller Cat People (Siodmak had worked with both on the film I Walked With a Zombie), which kept the audience unsure of the movie’s reality. Well, this is trying for that level of ambiguity, at least, regardless of it it achieves it.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation sought to continue and improve upon the naturalism seen in the work of his mentor Willis O’Brien, transforming fantastical ideas into living, breathing things, and demonstrating the new dimension film can bring to the collective imagination. There did come a point, though, where it no longer seemed like a creatively fulfilling challenge to animate colossal, city-wrecking creatures in movies that were, in truth, slight variations of each other (he had worked on at least four of them by 1957, if you include Mighty Joe Young)—and to really move into a new phase, Harryhausen and his producer partner Charles H. Schneer pivoted to fantasy films starting with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in 1958, leaving behind the concerns of the age for a realm of pure story. No longer would Harryhausen be stuck contrasting his giant beasts with the concrete canyons of the modern world, but working in a wider variety of classical settings—and more than that, he was given the opportunity to apply his animation talent not just to the lumbering mutant animals and extraterrestrials that populated the fifties creature feature boom, but to the magical, implausible monsters found across legends and mythologies. Here, finally, was a new and rewarding challenge: bringing naturalism to the unnatural.

It was likely inevitable that Harryhausen would work on a story from Greek mythology, a setting in dire need of some technical craft after years of cheap Italian sword-and-sandal films. For fans of monsters of all shapes and sizes, those tales are among the inescapable urtexts, a boundless fount of unearthly creatures diverse in appearance and abilities, inexorably attached to the stories of great heroes that have influenced adventure stories across history. If any monsters could be said to be eternally iconic, the ones from these myth are at the top of the list, and to bring them to life on film would be a defining achievement for any monster maker. Jason and the Argonauts, the first (but not last) of Harryhausen’s Greek myth movies, ranks highly in his filmography both for its sense of wonder and its authenticity, conjuring the world as described in those stories on screen and populating it with larger-than-life figures.

Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (2013)

Journey to the West is one of the great works of literature in Chinese culture, a story so ubiquitous that its characters are instantly recognizable, which in turn allows them to be placed into new contexts and new interpretations while maintaining the mythical qualities that made them so captivating in the first place. Hong Kong director Stephen Chow, who gained international acclaim for slapstick martial arts classics like Kung-Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, aims for reinterpretation with his own take on the story, producing a genre-hopping epic full of the brilliantly-staged action and comedy that are his trademarks, and essentially acts as a completely original prologue to Journey to the West. That doesn’t mean that it feels like a film inaccessible to those who haven’t read the novel, nor does it lead to a plot whose conclusion feels necessarily preordained—instead, Chow, co-director Derek Kwok, and their crew of co-writers provide new depths to the book’s central characters, giving them full, humanistic arcs that demonstrate the spiritual and moral power of perseverance, forgiveness, and humanity, and how even monsters deserve a second chance. For a film that contains all the spectacle one expects from a big film—and the combination of Chow’s style and a recognizable story made it the highest-grossing film in China’s history at the time—it’s also very intelligent and emotionally engaging.

The Gorgon (1964)

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.

Little Otik (2000)

Little Otik (Czech title Otesánek, sometimes referred to as Greedy Guts) is about bringing the punitive moral logic of old European folk tales into the modern world. In those stories, no macabre retaliation is too over-the-top for a perceived slight against universal propriety, any deviation from tradition or against common sense justifying a horrendous course correction inflicted on people guilty and non-guilty—to most people hearing those tales today, they come across as horrors whose purpose is hidden under layers of sadism. There is some darkly humorous joy to be derived from these things, with their distinct lack of proportion, and Little Otik even amplifies the surrealistic and disturbing aspects by couching its story squarely in one of the most vulnerable aspects of humanity: birth and parenting. As with most of the work of Czech stop motion animator and director Jan Švankmajer, who made this movie with design work from his wife and fellow surrealist artist Eva Švankmajerová, what we experience is an artistically impeccable nightmare.

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.

The Great Yokai War (2005)

Being so inundated with Hollywood blockbusters for so long, it’s nice to see how other movie industries go about it—what you find is often eminently familiar in their storytelling and reliance on special effects, but in a way that makes their idiosyncratic approaches and cultural differences all the more noticeable. The Great Yokai War is ostensibly a big budget remake of previous subject Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, but in effect the films are barely connected—instead, it takes Japan’s beloved spirits and monsters and puts them in a big special effects extravaganza and a children’s adventure story with your standard “learning to be brave” character arc for the pre-adolescent hero. An even more important difference is that unlike Daiei’s Yokai trilogy, this is set in the modern day and actually grapples with some of the spiritual underpinnings of yokai myths as they apply to a current consumerist culture—all in the name of broad action and comedy, mind you, but it’s still an angle on yokai that I haven’t seen in a movie.

Cryptozoo (2021)

Now it’s time to highlight some of the new monster-based entertainment released over the prior year, because they still make those things, you know. Sometimes, those new ones are really quite different from what we’ve seen before. Case in point:

Indie comics artist Dash Shaw released his first animated film, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, a few years ago, and last year’s Cryptozoo was his follow-up. While very different in subject matter, it maintains the experimental, hand-crafted style evident in both that first movie and his own comics work. Every moment in this film is a multimedia burst of painterly colour, with lush backdrops, collage elements, and characters who look like they walked right out of a sketchbook, all mingling in visually innovative ways (many of the backgrounds were painted by Shaw’s comics contemporaries like Benjamin Marra, Frank Santoro, and former Adventure Time showrunner Jesse Moynihan.) As for that subject matter, well, it’s pretty much tailor-made for me: what if all the creatures of mythology and folklore were real things hiding out in the world, and how would modern civilization deal with that? This is a story that takes a fantastical premise and uses it as a springboard to explore the concept of social progress, of wanting to protect the strange and wonderful things from a world of prejudice and exploitation, and whether the strange and wonderful want to be protected at all. For as quirky and painterly as the world of this movie is, it also pulls no punches and offers no simple conclusions.