It Lives Again/It’s Alive II (1978)

This month, I’ll be focusing on sequels to movies I’ve written about previously—and while there’s a really tendency in horror movies especially to push out a series of cheap follow-ups made by workman creatives to capitalize on even mild amounts of brand recognition (which was accelerated during the heyday of the VHS market), sometimes you’ll find sequels that have more going for them. Larry Cohen’s 1974 killer baby classic It’s Alive is the kind of simple shock concept that an exploitative producer may want to turn into cheap grindhouse fodder, but both sequels were written and directed by Cohen himself, which indicates to me that the B-movie auteur still had ideas worth exploring. Larry hasn’t led me astray yet!

Even so, the surprisingly human-focused and emotional story of the original It’s Alive seems like a trick that you can only pull once—and I can say that It Lives Again/It’s Alive II does not equal its predecessor on that front. Despite that, Cohen is doggedly intent on actually following up on the implications of the original’s ending, where we learn that murderous mutant babies are being born across America. As one would expect from Cohen, this new story goes in some weird directions, sometimes logically considered and sometimes pure nightmarish grotesque, and the ways it parallels the beats of the first one continue many of its themes while presenting them in a slightly different light. Although escalation is certainly at play here, it’s not as simple as just multiplying the number of monster babies and car chases.

“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.

Nope (2022)

Writer-director Jordan Peele’s Nope follows the critical and commercial success of his horror films Get Out and Us, and using all the cultural clout he has accumulated over the last five years, he has produced one of the most high profile creature features in recent memory. It’s a true blue classic-style monster movie, too, one that readily engages in some of the genre’s oldest themes (in a story engages with the history of the American entertainment industry in general) in ways that are smart and modern. Seeing this combination of expensive-looking action, B-movie enthusiasm for the weird, and interesting characters in a mainstream film is impressive, and is even more so because of the way it respectfully contributes to the history of its genre.

Creature Classic Companion: The Terminator (1984)

Before the name The Terminator defined what a blockbuster film would be for the ensuing thirty years, and before it became synonymous with a lurching franchise constantly finding new ways to not justify its own existence, The Terminator was, simply, a monster movie made by former Roger Corman employees (and with Joe Dante’s Gremlins released a few months before, 1984 was a pretty good year for monster movies made by former Roger Corman employees.) But what could have been a small and economical film with the simple hook of “someone being chased by an unkillable monster” instead feels large in scope, something that does not want to be contained by the Corman ethos. Largeness would come to define pretty much every movie by James Cameron, who started out as a special effects technician, had the frustrating experience of being micromanaged on Piranha II (a sequel to a Corman-produced monster movie directed by, guess what, Joe Dante), and then came up with this and guaranteed the rest of his career. His technical ambitions logically flows from his time in the effects and art departments, but there’s a vision here that isn’t just tailored to fit an effects vehicle—an approach to how to make a thriller, an atmosphere, a sense of what makes for particularly potent “cool” imagery, all stuff that has been normalized in genre movies now but definitely feels distinct when compared to the movies I’ve been watching from this period recently. Everything here comes together in such an explosive way, and casts such a long shadow over film as a whole, you often forget that, at its heart, it is a horror movie, following and innovating on a long line of horror movies.

Creature Classic Companion: Them! (1954)

The atomic monster category that was so profuse in the 1950s did not appear fully-formed, despite the timeliness of its inspiration: in the first major monster movie to use that device, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the nuclear bomb test that unleashes its titular dinosaur feels almost incidental, possibly even flippant when considered alongside the military triumphalism it ends on. That film was so successful that Warner Bros. was quick to follow it up the next year with more radiation-spawned giant monsters, this time going from stop motion dinosaurs to giant ant puppets (and in the process begot yet another category of monster movie that spanned the entire decade, the giant insect movie), but by comparison, Them! is a much more sober and startling take on the idea, despite what the excitable title and the promise of giant radioactive ants. While not coming off as some sort of didactic warning of what could happen now that Pandora’s box of atomic energy has been opened, it is much more serious-minded and engaged with the long-term effects of these things, and coming within a few months of Godzilla‘s premier in Japan in the same year, captures a period of more intelligent consideration of that new age than the wacky radioactive free-for-all that subsequently became the movie norm.

Creature Classic Companion: It’s Alive (1974)

The late Larry Cohen may be the perfect B-movie director: someone who has no problem utilizing the absurdity found in the more disreputable genre films, with wacky premises and bizarre special effects and actors putting in heightened performances, in order to make something both memorable and meaningful. His films look dumb on the surface, but are full of inspired creative choices, comedic touches, and a devotion to pursuing ideas no matter how weird they get, producing movies that I don’t think anyone else could. This is the freedom one is allowed in those disreputable genre films, if you know how to work within certain limits.

While working in many genres, Cohen’s monster movies stand out for their particularly dogged combination of schlock and big ideas—Q and The Stuff are some of the most unique entries in the entire genre, hilarious and anchored by actors going all out to portray the kinds of characters you never really see in these types of movies. The heights of Cohen’s career are very much apparent in It’s Alive, his first foray into the realm of creature features, beginning with its simple, silly, and imaginatively fertile high concept: what if you had a baby, and your baby was a monster? The idea of a killer baby would probably be enough for people who just want to see some violence, and enough for it to be dismissed out of hand by people with good taste, but what’s amazing about this movie is how much it actually focuses on the social and emotional fallout of the situation, and especially the effects it has on the parents of the terrible infant. There’s an appreciable human centre to this off-the-wall pitch, and that’s the Larry Cohen difference.