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.

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.

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.

Monster Multimedia: Monster in My Pocket

In my last post, I briefly touched on my childhood interest in folklore and mythology and how seeing the things I was learning about reflected in the wider culture was a unique thrill—it was an ever-expanding world of fantastical stories and bizarre monsters that felt endlessly rewarding. I’m not entirely sure what put me on that path to begin with, whether it was seeing references to mythology in video games like Final Fantasy or even Pokémon or finding books solely about mythological creatures in the school library (my parents even bought me a massive encyclopedia of Greek, Norse, and Celtic myths at that time), since those things overlapped and fed into each other, and when the Internet came into the picture, that put the whole thing into overdrive. Whatever the real originator of my fascination was, it is still very clear that that stuff can really hook a kid, especially when presented in a way that emphasizes the adventurous and strange nature of those stories and avoids the stuffy academic version of it that may make the youths think Beowulf is just a musty old poem and not the tale of a guy who rips a giant monster’s arm off.

Kids’ innate interest in the creepy creatures of legend has been exploited in pop culture off and on for decades (most of the books I read on the subject were clearly aimed at that demographic), but an interesting example of it from the early nineties were the Monster in My Pocket toys produced by Matchbox and Morrison Entertainment Group, if only because of how direct it was in marketing hordes of mythological monsters as something cool. Clearly taking inspiration from mono-colour collectible mini toys like M.U.S.C.L.E(which were imported Kinnikuman figures, a subject that, because I’m me, I’ve broached elsewhere) that had been popular in the eighties, MiMP came out in 1990, burned brightly for a year or two, and then disappeared off the face of the earth (except, apparently, in some parts of Europe, Central, and South America, and likely thousands of yard sales and flea markets), a veritable micro-phenomenon. Its business strategy was based on tried-and-true methods that still work to this day, cajoling kids into wanting to get as many possible (an early practitioner of “Gotta catch ’em all”), not just by offering a wide selection of different toys in blind or semi-blind packages and then making multiple colour variations of each one, but also by assigning them a “value” (here, a point system printed on the figures themselves) that serves no purpose but to make certain figures seem rarer or better than others based on nothing. It did everything you need to do to drive undiscerning young completists into a tizzy, yes, but I can also imagine that the subject matter also helped propel its early success: collectible monster toys were neat, but these ones were based on “real things”, which gave them an especially enticing angle. It was like one of those bestiaries I read, except in plastic form, which I guess some prefer.

Monster Multimedia: The Monsters of Castlevania

When most people think of the Universal Monster movies, they think of them collectively, not as individual horror films that just happened to be put out by the same company and featuring many of the same actors. When you think of Dracula, chances are Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy are lurking around as well. This was something that Universal themselves leaned into, as their second era of monster movies in the 1940s eventually started just throwing in all the monsters, giving you the most bang for your buck. By the fifties, most kids experiencing these movies for the first time were either seeing them revived in theatres as double bills, aired on TV under the Shock Theatre banner, or featured prominently in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland—so, in the minds of generation after generation, the monsters were always hanging out in the same dusty castles and spooky moors, making them into a group not unlike how the yokai spirits of Japan are portrayed. The continuing existence of “The Monster Mash” makes that abundantly clear.

Speaking of Japan: despite coming from another continent, Konami’s Castlevania series is very much following the tradition of those monster mash-ups, reintroducing the classic creatures to a new generation of kids through a new medium (I’ve written about that before.) The original 1987 entry could basically be described as “Conan the Barbarian with a whip fights the Universal Monsters”, and as the series progressed, it developed more of its own style, as well as its own nonsense mythology and timeline (which somehow is able to include Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, even though the book is bereft of mummies and skeletons and fish-men), but never strayed that far from that original pitch. No matter who was fighting through the dark corridors and at what point in history, Castlevania has still been about Dracula and his castle housing an accumulation of monsters from all sorts of sources, and reappearing every century or so for another Monster Shindig. The atmosphere the games perfected was a fun celebration of every Gothic horror trope they could cram into one setting, pulling from not just the movies, but also literature, folklore, and demonology, making it seem sensible that all these disparate evil beings hang out together in this one big house. No other game franchise really has this very Halloween-y spirit.