Splice (2009)

The movies that get the tag “Science Gone Wrong” on here are part of one of the longest lineages in the history of creature features—and probably one of that history’s most reactionary undercurrents, demonstrating a ceaseless anxiety about scientific discovery and experimentation. The deeper we dive into the mechanics of nature, the closer we get to inevitably crossing lines we were never meant to cross, with terrible consequences the equally inevitable result—or, that’s the way they see it, and it’s a structure and theme that has never really gone away, and manages to adapt itself to whatever the latest technological and scientific advances (although by “adapt to”, I don’t necessarily mean “understand.”) Splice is a film that very intentionally hearkens back to some of the more hysteria-prone versions of that Sci-Fi narrative, and even places it in the consistently hackle-raising field of genetic engineering, which has been the topic of more than a few monster movies over the decades. The innovation here is that the lines being crossed in this story are not necessarily being done in the name of science, but something far more personal—and so the ensuing terrible consequences have some different and sometimes more disturbing dimensions.

“It Crawled Out of the Woodwork” (S1E11)

Unlike “Corpus Earthling”, this episode has a proper cold opening, rather than just a preview of a scene from the episode itself—and it’s a real humdinger of a cold opening, jolting viewers with a bizarre sequence that makes them ask just what this thing is going to be about. It starts out mundane enough, with a cleaning lady vacuuming in a lab and coming across a particularly large and stubborn dust bunny in the corner, and eventually leads to an abstract splotch exploding out of the vacuum. Needless to say, we are dealing with another strange “bear”, and it’s a particularly ingenious idea to just have it appear in full as early as possible, while making the audience wait to learn just what the heck they’re dealing with. As it turns out, the inexplicable nature of the monster is maybe part of the point.

The Invisible Boy (1957)

An example of how context matters: Robby the robot in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, one of the most beautiful of all the fifties Sci-Fi classics, was a prominent supporting character and very clearly not a monster (that movie already has a pretty great monster anyway); he proved popular enough that the studio heads at MGM decided to put him in another movie a year later, and suddenly he’s “The Science-Monster Who Would Destroy The World!”, as proclaimed on the poster of The Invisible Boy. This is not just a case of them reusing the character or the suit, either, although he is credited in the opening credits as an actor (voiced, uncredited, by Marvin Miller), but by all accounts this is the same Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet, who in the backstory of this moviehas been taken from twenty-third century back to the 1950s by a time travel experiment. If a fantastical character goes from one setting or story to a different one, even if technically in the same genre, are they suddenly so out of place that they become a monster? It’s the kind of meta thought you get while watching this movie, which at times feels like a lighthearted parody of Science Fiction made for the kinds of kids who probably already loved Robby, before it suddenly turns into a serious thriller that is surprisingly well-constructed, and then back into a comedy again. It’s an unusual, interesting time capsule of a movie.

Gog (1954)

We’re in the middle of February, so it’s about time we start looking at killer robots here in Creature Land. Why is February the month for killer robots? Well, some month has to be.

The best way to understand the killer robot phenomenon, and the underlying anxiety about technology that fuels it, is to go back to its early days—Gog was released right in the middle of the great Sci-Fi movie boom of the fifties, as the third in a loose trilogy of films about the Office of Scientific Investigation, all produced by Ivan Tors (later known for producing such animal-themed entertainment as Flipper and Gentle Ben) and directed, sometimes uncredited, by Herbert L. Strock (whose continued career in monster movies included I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Blood of Dracula, and the meta How To Make a Monster.) Gog is truly vintage fifties SF, as it is mostly poindexters in lab coats explaining scientific concepts to the protagonists/the audience, and is also in pure Cold War mode, centring on a technology-heavy project being manipulated by “enemy agents”—from where, we are never told, but I’m sure they expected the audience to jump to conclusions. Interestingly, what that leads to is a movie with strangely contrasting views on our technological future: both something to be concerned about for its possibility of being turned against us and for its inhumanity, but also the solution to our problems, with the killer robots being the clanking embodiment of the former.