The Twilight Zone – “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”

While a TV anthology series like The Outer Limits gives me enough classic monster-based material to be featured in an entire series of posts, its more famous contemporaneous counterpart, The Twilight Zone, did not dip into that well frequently enough to justify a similar treatment. However, among the few times Rod Serling’s influential fantasy vehicle did feature a monster story, it ended up being one of the most famous monster stories of recent memory, remade, parodied, and referenced endlessly for decades. That seems like a fair trade-off.

Originally airing on October 11^th, 1963 (less than two weeks after The Outer Limits’ “The Architects of Fear”) as part of the series’ fifth and final season, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is one of those stories that ingeniously finds a way to make a monster attuned to the terrors of modern life—not just in its choice of setting, but in the anxieties that the setting provokes in people. That’s not as easy as it sounds, and one of the reasons you know that this one succeeded, tapping into something truly universal, is that its story is still completely understandable, if not relatable, sixty years later. While lots of little things about the miraculous and terrifying reality of commercial air travel have changed significantly over the years, in the end there’s still the stark reality that we’re stuck in a claustrophobic tube with no exits, and there is only a few layers of glass and metal that separates you from an unfathomable height. It doesn’t take much for a traveller to remember all the things that can go wrong there, realizing that technology can be as fragile as the frayed psyches entrusting their lives to it.

Creature Classic Companion: The Brood (1979)

David Cronenberg’s name is synonymous with body horror—he spent the first three decades of his career defining it (and recently came back to it after a long absence), pushing the envelope when it came to fleshy protuberances and disturbing hybridization. But as repulsive as the effects could be in his movies, they’ve never really felt like puerile shock for its own sake, as there has always been a sense of fascination about the way bodies could be warped, and an equal amount of fascination with how physical changes affect people. They are visceral both physically and psychologically, and that’s why Cronenberg’s filmography is a thing unto itself, an idiosyncratic fusion of horror and science fiction.

It all started in low-budget exploitation films of the seventies, beginning with Rabid and Shivers, all shot in his home town of Toronto (where all, or at least most, of his movies have been filmed), which overcame moral outcry from local sources who took umbrage at their combination of sex and violence to be reasonably profitable, allowing him to continue making increasingly larger-scale movies. All of his obsessions were there from the beginning, from bizarre body modifications and infections to, yes, a combination of sex and violence (and music brought to us by regular collaborator and future Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore)—and his seventies run culminated in The Brood, distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, which was the big leagues, comparatively speaking. Here, Cronenberg went beyond just the parasitic terror of his first two movies and turned to both parenthood and psychotherapy, and with those themes created some of those notably Cronenbergian images that would define his aesthetic. But this is a movie that is also deeply personal in a way that his other movies aren’t, which makes it all the more disturbing.

Creature Classic Companion: From Beyond (1986)

With the cult success of their film Re-Animator, director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna (alongside co-writer Dennis Paoli) cemented their status as the top cinematic translators of HP Lovecraft’s influential horror stories—which was really not that hard to do, considering that there was only a handful of Lovecraft-based films before them (such as Die, Monster, Die!), and none of them were particularly notable. Maybe the atmosphere of boundary-pushing and the increasing sophistication of special effects found in eighties horror films is what made adapting Lovecraft’s existential abominations seem more attainable, and the Gordon/Yuzna line of movies do capture the sense of strangeness and dread that defined those stories that the ones made in the shadow of Hammer-style Gothic horror did not. At the same time, the other things that define Stuart and Yuzna’s movies are a comedy streak and a perverted parody of sexuality that are very much not found within the more repressed words of Lovecraft’s pulp fiction—they get the spirit of the thing, but bring plenty of their own spirit as well.

The team’s immediate follow-up to Re-Animator, once again distributed by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures (it’s funny to consider that Gordon’s style of film, while vastly superior, is not entirely dissimilar from Band’s usual effects-based schlock, stuff like Ghoulies and the roughly 400,000 Puppet Master and Evil Bong movies) and starring Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, adapted a lesser-known early story by Lovecraft, one whose simple story proved rife with possibility. From Beyond leans less in the overt comedy direction of it predecessor—although it certainly indulges in some ridiculousness, which is always part of the appeal of these movies—but goes more towards the mind-bending otherworldly implications. Just beneath the surface of our rational reality are inexplicable things, and if we were to get a glimpse of what is lurking just outside our senses, then sanity goes right out the window—that’s the recurring theme of Lovecraftian fiction, and this movie uses it as a vehicle not just for very eighties gory and gooey practical effects, but to really get into some of its creators’ other pet themes as well, producing a rather joyously disgusting deep dive into madness.

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

Continuing the trend of returning to old favourites, we’ve got another Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee joint, one that premiered a year after they appeared together in Horror Express. The Creeping Flesh is a proper British Gothic horror, a period piece full of parlours and lacy clothes and laboratories and grotty asylums, directed by a longtime hand at the genre, Freddie Francis (who apparently replaced Don Sharp, another British horror director), an Academy Award-winning cinematographer who also made several thrillers for rival studios Hammer and Amicus (this one is by the other other UK horror studio, Tigon) and apparently wasn’t that big a fan of the genre. In any case, here he is with Cushing and Lee, reversing the roles they had in Horror Express—Cushing is the one with more scruples this time!—in this weird combination of evolutionary science, psychiatry, and timeless supernatural evil. Whatever point Flesh is trying to make is embedded in layers of pseudo-scientific theorizing and even Victorian gender politics, and some of those ideas are implemented so subtly that it’s hard to tell if I’m just projecting them in there myself. This is a truly perplexing object.

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.