Dagon (2001)

If we’re talking about Lovecraft adaptations, we’re eventually going to circle back to Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, who were the first ones to really make effective cinematic use of ol’ Howard’s stories in Re-Animator and From Beyond, capturing the eldritch universe while infusing it with horror-comedy sensibilities and carnal undertones—they get the original work, and they also make it their own, what a novel concept! The two of them would periodically venture back into Lovecraftian territory in the nineties, and at the turn of the millennium produced an adaption of one the major works in the Cthulhu Mythos, 1931 novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth (while borrowing the name from the related short story “Dagon.”) As a story of unspeakable Elder Gods and the mutating effect they have on humans that come into contact with them, it contains many of the recurring motifs of the Mythos (including some of the Really Questionable ones that we’ll get into), and like the previous adaptations directed by Gordon and written by frequent collaborator Dennis Paoli, those themes are filtered their own parallel preoccupations.

Gorgo (1961)

While the giant monster movie genre originated in America, it was the productions by Japanese studios like Toho that really gave the genre its own topoi. When studios outside of Toho tackled the subject from the late fifties and into the sixties, it was always in the shadow of Godzilla and its successors, and it’s interesting to see how they responded. Surprisingly few of them really attempted to utilize the tokusatsu kaiju style, instead attempting to keep the stop motion tradition of King Kong alive—Gorgo is one of the few examples of a non-Japanese studio tackling suitmation.

You could call Gorgo a British homage to Godzilla, with “homage” being quite generous—on the other hand, Godzilla itself was a “homage” to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, so you know, turnabout is fair play. Who is the director of this? Why, it’s Eugène Lourié, director of (the non-Ray Harryhausen parts) of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, “homaging” the “homage” to his own movie! It was also the third time he directed a light variation of “giant marine reptile attacks a city”, with the other two being The Beast and1959’s The Giant Behemoth, the latter featuring stop motion by King Kong‘s Willis O’Brien ( Lourié also directed previous site subject The Colossus of New York between those two.) Two years after Behemoth and yet another lizard from millions of years ago is battering London—but despite the clear attempt to ape from Godzilla (and despite it featuring no apes), one of the ways it differentiates itself is by eschewing the nuclear radiation fears that animated both Toho’s and Lourié’s own movies and going back to ape the plot, and sympathetic monster(s), of King Kong (which does feature apes.) Coming out in the same year as Toho’s Mothra, which also has a Kong-esque plot, there seemed to have been a convergent sense of nostalgia in the giant monster genre at the time.

Creature Classic Companion: Piranha (1978)

The career of director Joe Dante represents the ascent of the Monster Kid from fan to filmmaker—people who grew up during the creature feature boom of the fifties and sixties were suddenly given reign of the genre, which they knew inside and out. Having that kind of understanding of the formulas made it all the more easy to subvert and reinvent them, making a smarter and more self-aware range of monster movies in the late seventies and eighties, which Dante heavily contributed to with The Howling and Gremlins. Before those, though, he worked his way up in the B-movie system, cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (and co-directing a movie made mostly of stock footage) before being assigned to direct Piranha, New World’s blatant attempt to cash in on Jaws‘ success. Following the general Corman ethos, however, meant that as long as you check off all the exploitation movie requirements—low budget, surface similarity to something popular, blood, and female nudity—you are free to do whatever you want (although that didn’t go quite so well for the director of Piranha II, some guy named James Cameron.) So, Dante got together with writer John Sayles to build a Jaws knock-off full of comedic touches and creature feature homages, something that wasn’t just another killer fish movie. As the story goes, Universal was fully prepared to sue this movie out of existence before it reached theatres…until it received the full approval of Steven Spielberg, who considered it by far the best imitation of his movie.

The Bay (2012)

So, how exactly did we get a found footage monster movie from the director of Rain Man? According to the backstory, Barry Levinson was tasked with directing a documentary about the ecological problems of Chesapeake Bay, but not unlike the creatures at the heart of The Bay, the project mutated into something else entirely. It was 2012, right in the middle of the much-groused-about-at-the-time trend of found footage horror movies mostly instigated by Paranormal Activity (the producer of those movies, Jason Blum, is also a producer on this one), as well as what still felt like the early days of the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones—a perfect confluence of trends that inspired the idea of watching a disaster unfold from personal and media video footage, a collage of reactions and non-reactions from normal citizens, experts, and people in places of authority. The verisimilitude offered by this style of film might even bolster the real environmental issues that inspired the far more gory events in the movie! One could hope!

Of course, the other obvious inspiration for this movie comes from a place I’m sure we’ve all been to: finding out some random (maybe true?) fact on the Internet, especially about weird nature stuff. I imagine that most people only recently learned about Cymothoa Exigua, also known as the tongue-eating louse, probably from some listicle containing the same few photos of that oceanic isopod and its peculiar form of parasitism, where it sucks the blood from the tongues of fish until they shrivel up and fall off, and then replaces the tongue in the fish’s mouth. It’s hard to blame some writer for seeing those images and thinking “now, there’s a movie!”

Orca (1977)

Three years ago this month, we had an environmentally-themed slate of monster posts. Since it doesn’t seem like we’ve figured out all of our ecological problems in that time (not for lack of trying, I assume!), I think it’s time to pull up another bunch for what you can call Eco-Horror II: The Revenge.

There were of course, a number of movies coincidentally similar to Jaws in the mid-to-late seventies, many of them produced by prolific Italian film companies/exploitation houses—the animal attack movie business was bustling. Not one to avoid capitalizing on a trend, producer Dino De Laurentiis joined in on the good times in the year following the box office success of his King Kong remake (ol’ Dino D went really hard into creature features in 1977, with previous series subject The White Buffalo releasing two months before the one I’m writing about here), and along with screenwriters Luciano Vincenzoni and Segio Donati (both who contributed to the scripts of classic spaghetti westerns like For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,, among many others) and director Michael Anderson (previously of Logan’s Run) gave us the next logical step after a movie about a shark: a movie about an orca. But unlike certain later orca movies (that had cartoons spin-offs where the whale fights an evil cyborg), Orca—sometimes subtitled The Killer Whale for all the dummies who don’t know what an orca is—is not some family-friendly story about human and animals learning to respect each other, but a violent revenge thriller. The gimmick here is that the one seeking revenge is the whale—so this is less Jaws with a whale than it is Death Wish with a whale (and who was the producer on Death Wish? Why, Dino De Lautentiis!) In a sea of killer marine life movies, that immediately makes this one stand out.

Blood Tide (1982)

I’ve already seen a few monster movies based around the eternal, extremely generalized struggle of good vs. evil—see The Creeping Flesh—and also a few that do the same thing while also contrasting Christianity with pre-Christian beliefs—see Viy—so I was prepared for what Blood Tide had on offer. There is obviously something very Wicker Man about the set-up here: outsiders intruding into an isolated place where the old beliefs still hold sway, maybe inviting a terror upon themselves with their unwariness, maybe being pulled in by destiny—certainly they both have a village full of people who are maybe outside the mainstream and are thus entirely suspicious. Substitute the British Isles with the Greek Isles and have the human sacrifice come with a monster, and you’ve got a pretty good idea. Those themes and the choice of location provides an atmosphere for this movie, one that helps it straddle the line between early eighties horror schlock and maybe a more serious kind of horror schlock.

Sweetheart (2019)

Continuing on a minor “modern monster movie” kick, here’s a movie that’s maybe not trying to be funny like Psycho Goreman, but also has a practical effects creature at its core. Sweetheart is one of those recent co-productions between Blumhouse, the house that Paranormal Activity built, and Universal, which in some ways means that this is a modern Universal Monster movie—and proper horror, too, and not some bloated spectacle like that Dark Universe nonsense. It’s an efficiently-made thriller with a fairly simple concept—a lone person marooned on an island with a monster—and is at its best when director J.D. Dillard (whose only other directorial effort is Sleight from 2016) lets the idea, the actor(s), and the atmosphere speak for themselves. With a very lean cast, this is one of those movies where there is very little to no dialogue for the first forty minutes (of eighty-two), which I feel like is so praised by online film critics whenever it happens that the whole thing has really lost any outré cache, but at least it’s appropriately used here and lends a feeling of simmering loneliness to those scenes. This is a story about rolling with the punches whether you want to or not, and it just so happens that many of those punches are being thrown by a seven-foot-tall shark-man.

Creature Classic Companion: The War of the Gargantuas (1966) (+ Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965))

Of all the non-Godzilla kaiju movies from the Toho’s Showa era run, The War of the Gargantuas (called Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira in Japan) is one that really stuck with certain members of the audience on both sides of the world—it was used as a reference point by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill Vol. 2,is a favourite of directors like Guillermo Del Toro, and, no joke, inspired Brad Pitt to become an actor. Part of what makes it unique among the Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya collaborations of the sixties stems from the unusual circumstances of its development: it’s a bizarre pseudo-sequel to Frankenstein Conquers The World (Japanese title Frankenstein vs. Baragon), a film produced a year earlier that had its origins in the same international deal that led to King Kong vs. Godzilla. Originally, King Kong animator Willis O’Brien had been pitching a King Kong vs. Frankenstein concept around Hollywood before a producer unscrupulously sold it Toho without O’Brien’s involvement, with the idea morphing into separate King Kong vs. Godzilla and Frankenstein vs. Godzilla scripts, the latter being rewritten to remove the Big G (the whole thing would remain a Japan/US co-production, with producer Henry G. Saperstein from UPA heavily involved in both Frankenstein and Gargantuas.) Frankenstein Conquers the World feels like a sort of prototype, giving Honda and Tsuburaya a chance to test out something new for their giant monster movies: a monster played by an actor without a full suit, giving him a wider range of emotion and more opportunity for the audience to sympathize. That, alongside the smaller scale of the monster action, was something that appealed to both directors, and would continue in its follow-up to an even greater effect, creating a conflict between monster brothers with diametrically opposed natures, a traditional narrative that nonetheless is highly engaging when presented in the form of a kaiju rumble.

Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961)

By the early sixties, much of the movie industry had moved on from creature features, and Roger Corman was no different—he had already started the Poe cycle (with The Pit and the Pendulum premiering just two months after this post’s subject), which are the more highly-regarded among his directorial efforts. Still, while in this transition period, Corman was experimenting with his horror movies, and starting with 1959’s A Bucket of Blood, we started to see them become out and out comedies with a ghoulish or monstrous twist. Creature From the Haunted Sea is the last of these horror-comedies, and the one that is the most like a parody of his own low budget B-movies from the fifties, which could probably be chalked up to the fact that it more or less reuses the story from the 1959 movie Beast From Haunted Cave, which he produced (and itself was more or less recycled from a non-monster movie Naked Paradise—all three variations written by Attack of the Crab Monsters‘ Charles B. Griffith), with a different setting, monster, and with added comedy. Also, like most of Corman’s movies, it had a low budget, was filmed extremely quickly (five days!), and was made basically because they had extra time during their Puerto Rico location shoots for two other movies. Although mostly an underground phenomenon since its release, you may recognize this movie and the titular googly-eyed monster from its cameo appearance in the opening of Malcolm in the Middle. But as goofy-looking as the monster is, the movie is pretty consistently funny even when it’s not around, showcasing a dialogue-based absurdity that overcomes the obvious budgetary limitations.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

Where the previous Roger Corman movie I wrote about benefited from a more character-based approach that made up for a fitful distribution of monster scenes, its follow-up goes in the complete opposite direction, intentionally paring the script down to primarily scenes about the monster at its centre and simplifying characters so they are defined only by their jobs, genders, or accents (hilariously, screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, a frequent Corman collaborator who will be showing up in future posts, explained that “[Corman] said it was an experiment. ‘I want suspense or action in every scene. No kind of scene without suspense or action.’ His trick was saying it was an experiment, which it wasn’t. He just didn’t want to bother cutting out the other scenes, which he would do.”) At around 63 minutes, Attack of the Crab Monsters barely makes feature length (but is even more perfect as part of a double feature), and while maintaining much of the feel of a fifties creature feature, its maniacal pace and devotion to “suspense and action” makes itself felt off the hop—we get a decapitation within the first five minutes, after all. Even aside from that, what would seemingly be a typical example of one of the fundamental types of narrative conflict—man against man, man against self, man against giant radioactive crab—is complicated by said giant radioactive crabs acquiring some truly bizarre characteristics, giving them an unexpected presence throughout the movie. This is a case of something appearing routine on the surface but having a truly peculiar imagination when you peer into the tidal pool.