There have been films about the Loch Ness Monster pretty much from the beginning—the first movie about the monster released in 1934 (a film edited by future Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean), only a year after the first noteworthy sightings took place. Needless to say, very few of them are particularly noteworthy, so The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep can take the crown as both the most well-known Loch Ness Monster movie and the best one almost by default (I’ve already written about the only other contender.) Based on a novel by Dick King-Smith (whose book The Sheep Pig was adapted in the movie Babe), Water Horse is pitched as a traditional sort of whimsical family movie, with a cast of respected British thespians and the structure of a “child befriends an animal” story enlivened with fantastical elements ala ET. It burnishes this well-worn plot by taking advantage of the historical context of the Loch Ness Monster story, arguing why a legend like this may have resonated in an era of strife.
See, this is a real indie kaiju movie—it’s such an indie kaiju movie that it isn’t even really a kaiju movie! But that’s okay—one of the reasons I started this whole thing was to see just how far from the norm of creature feature something can fall while still dealing with monsters in some way, and Demeking, The Sea Monster is an example of a monster being used as an element in an otherwise non-fantastical story. I’m sure that many viewers who were going by the title were shocked when they found a movie with little giant monster content in it (although not zero giant monster content), but a lot of low-key slice-of-life storytelling.
One of my goals in the coming months is to cover more movies made in the past twenty-four years. After the nineties, a decade where most monster movies were either unambitious direct-to-video schlock or unambitious Hollywood blockbuster schlock, the new millennium seemed to usher a slew of lower budget indie creature features made by enthusiasts with fresh ideas, given a wider audience thanks to the thriving genre film festival circuit. These ready-made cult films could vary in tone and quality, but you could still sense the verve and imagination returning to the genre after that decade-long hibernation.
In that spirit of experimentation, The Burrowers combines the monster movie with a western, an established but infrequent combination. I’ve said this the last few times I’ve covered a western/monster movie mash-up, but the two styles work well together, with the western’s untamed setting and sense of isolation providing the kinds of spaces where the unknown can creep in, giving new ways to mythologize lands that are now completely familiar to us. That comes into play even more here, as we’re dealing with something of a revisionist western, casting a caustic eye on the colonialist myths of the American frontier—a place of human horror that also has room for some of the inhuman kind as well.
How long has it been since I wrote about a yōkai movie? Clearly, far too long.
I’ve already written quite a bit about the long history of tokusatsu depictions of Japanese spirits and monsters, which bridge the traditional stories and the modern kaiju and kaijin material that take inspiration from them. Considering that deeply-rooted connection, you can understand why some tokusatsu production lifers would eventually choose to make something yōkai-related—and Sakuya: Slayer of Demons (Japanese subtitle Yōkaiden) is a prime example of just that. Director Tomoo Haraguchi’s “tokusatsu lifer” status is inarguable: he started out working on models and make-up as far back as Ultraman 80 in the early eighties, eventually working on to previous site subject Ultra Q The Movie and the the nineties Gamera trilogy (more recently, he has some credited design work on Shin Ultraman.) The movie he produced is a smaller scale project that showcases some of what classical effects could do in the new millennium, one set of traditions nestled within a story based on a much older set of traditions.
This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the original Godzilla–my, how time flies! I’ve written my fair share about the King of the Monsters, but I’ve generally avoided going over most of the actual films, which is territory that I thought was well-trodden, quite unlike, say, Godzilla’s appearances on Zone Fighter. Still, for an anniversary this special, I think it might be time to finally go all-out in the name of the G-Man, so expect a lot more Godzilla-related posts throughout the year, including the return of the capsule review format that I used to write about several of the moviesa decade ago, which will give me even more opportunities to fill in the series gaps on this site.
Before we go back to the beginning (actually a couple of months after the beginning) though, let us travel to just a little over a month ago…
It is 1989, and Doctor Who is on its last legs. You may have noticed that I skipped over all of the serials featuring Colin Baker in the lead role—this is not simply because of the poor reputation most of the stories have even among fans of the series, but because none of them offer a particularly compelling monster-centric story to write about. Things started looking up at least a little bit in 1987, when the show went through a small-scale creative overhaul, with a new batch of writers behind the scenes and a new lead in Sylvester McCoy, but none of the active attempts to make the series more ambitious and relevant saved it from going on an indefinite hiatus just as the eighties ended, leaving it at a still-impressive twenty-six consecutive years on television.
The three years with McCoy and lead writer Andrew Cartmel carry a very distinctive atmosphere, one that attempts to mine the best parts of the series’ past, especially its sense of imagination and its capacity for moments of child-friendly horror, and infuse a puckish kind of whimsy and more focus on the characterization of the Doctor and his companion. “The Curse of Fenric”, the classic series’ penultimate story, carries with it the DNA of previous serials we’ve talked about: there’s a the moody atmosphere and marching army of monsters of “The Web of Fear”, a somewhat Quatermass-esque combination of mythology and Sci-Fi similar to “The Awakening”, and even the winking social commentary of “Carnival of Monsters.” Another similarity to “Web of Fear” is its attempt to provide a new interpretation of a well-established monster—but this goes much further in taking its inspirations and playing around with the iconography.
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.
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.
I don’t think I’ve ever written about Mike Mignola on here—rather unfortunate, as he’s a figure of some significance in the wider monster culture space, and one of the most unique artists in the mainstream/mainstream adjacent comics sphere of the last thirty-plus years. His major work is, of course, Hellboy and its various comics and multimedia offshoots, an entire universe likely worth exploring in depth at some point. In Hellboy, a milieu with some moderate superhero influence also becomes one big repository for every occult, paranormal, or folkloric concept Mignola and his collaborators see fit to include, everything from werewolves and vampires and black magic to man-made abominations, space aliens, and other-dimensional eldritch entities. It’s a classic Monster Mash series—maybe one of the classic Monster Mash series—a form pioneered by lifelong horror/monster fiction fans to encompass all their favourite creepy things (for other examples of this, there’s Castlevania, or if you want a more kid-friendly version, maybe even Hilda.) Even with all the obvious influences going into the work, though, Mignola manages to put his own stamp on it, especially with his stylized, shadow-lined artwork, which finds the appealing middle point between German Expressionism and Jack Kirby.
For someone looking for a bit of Mignola’s style in a form more succinct than the sprawling Hellboy and BPRD universe, there’s The Amazing Screw-On Head, a singular take on very similar material whose primary difference from Mignola’s main series is its more overt focus on comedy. Originally published as a one-off comic from Mignola’s regular collaborators at Dark Horse Comics (and since included in a book with several other short comics), it gained additional notoriety when it was adapted into a single pilot episode for a potential animated series on Sci-Fi Channel in 2006, a few years before the channel rebranded itself as the ever-perplexing SyFy. The pilot was one of those early forays into Internet focus testing, with Sci-Fi uploading the full thing on their website and using the feedback to determine if they should greenlight more episodes—which they did not, in fact, do. Watching it again after seventeen years, it feels like something very specific to its era of pop culture, and probably the single most faithful attempt to bring Mike Mignola’s art to a non-comics medium.
Here’s another film from 1966, and similar to The Vulture‘s adherence to fifties B-movie stylistic tics, this feels like something from another era, with Hammer’s horror aesthetic potentially being long in the tooth (that’s a Dracula joke, kids) at that point in time. While Hammer’s mainstays like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are not present in this one, the Victorian Gothic setting and narrative tropes remain intact, which was one of the ways you knew it was a Hammer film even when they went outside the Dracula/Frankenstein/Mummy milieus that made them famous. Even more removed from the concerns of the mid-sixties, The Reptile hearkens back to a time of vague supernatural mysteries imported from the Darkest Reaches of the Far East, a different variety of colonialist narrative where the problem is not in barging in on other cultures, but bringing something of those cultures back home. It’s dusty stuff, elevated by Hammer’s honed sense of atmosphere, as well as some periodic ventures into a more personal sense of familial tragedy and regret, a sense of a curse not being some abstract magical thing, but a reality one must live with.
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