Son of Kong (1933)

Released a mere nine months after the original King Kong in 1933 (this will post just two days shy of its eightieth anniversary), Son of Kong’s rapid turnaround leaves it in a bizarre place, a sequel that feels supplementary to what is probably the most important monster movie ever made. It has never been a particularly beloved movie, and despite the involvement of all the key people behind the scenes of the original—producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest Schoedsack, screenwriter Ruth Rose, and stop motion artist Willis O’Brien and his crew—one can detect how the rapidity of its creation rendered it a half-formed footnote (only sixty-nine minutes in length) even when it was new. King Kong inspired multiple generations of monster fans and left an entire form of storytelling in its wake—Son of Kong, not so much.

That hasn’t stopped me from being fascinated by this movie, because for all the ways it will forever toil under the shadow of its predecessor, it is historically important in several low-key ways, representing a major shift in the evolution of both King Kong and of monster movies as an idea: it is the point where the underlying sympathy for the monster comes to the surface. Now, this is a legacy that I’ve technically started writing about backwards, after I covered Mighty Joe Young last Christmas Apes season—that was the second movie by Cooper, Schoedsack, Rose, and O’Brien to take the sympathy they had built for Kong and rewrite it into a lighter story. As I argued there, this could come off as a commercial decision, but it also feels like a product of some phantom sense of guilt, and a desire to show that no matter how King Kong turned out, it is possible for humans and amazing creatures like Kong to co-exist peacefully, if they just got to know each other. What they would do with Mighty Joe Young begins in Son of Kong, but what’s particularly intriguing is, in the latter’s close proximity to the original Kong, it shows just how soon the original crew began to reconsider how a monster movie could operate.

Half Human (1955)

Half Human (original Japanese title The Beastman Snowman) exists as a curious footnote in the history of Toho’s monster movies—it is Ishiro Honda’s direct follow-up to Godzilla (which prevented him from directing the actual Godzilla sequel also released in 1955), with much of that film’s cast and crew carrying over, including effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, story originator Shigeru Kayama, and screenwriter Takeo Murata (also the writer of Godzilla Raids Again and Rodan), which subsequently became an obscurity whose original Japanese release has never officially appeared on home video (although that doesn’t prevent people from finding it if they look a little.) Like Godzilla, this movie’s American incarnation was a heavy edit job, lopping off over over thirty minutes of run time, radically altering the story and tone, and inserting scenes of American actors like John Carradine (who probably wouldn’t turn down a movie role even if you paid him to) to make it seem less foreign, and that version has been the only one easily available all this time. There’s a reason for that pattern of unavailability that we’ll get to, but it has in some ways rendered this movie as much of a phantom as the Abominable Snowman at its centre, a missing link between Godzilla and the Honda-directed monster movies to follow.

The Gorgon (1964)

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.

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)

This October will mark five years since I started writing monster media reviews on a regular basis—and almost two hundred movies (and dozens of other things) later, I know that there’s still plenty left out there. For this year’s Halloween season, most of my subjects will be themed around sneakily breaking my own personal rules when it comes to subject matter—since this project began, I steadfastly avoided covering movies based on the “traditional” monsters of horror, things like vampires, werewolves, and the undead. For me, those represent their own little corners of culture, with their own histories and tropes and meanings that have already been examined in great detail, offering less for me to dig into than the vast “miscellaneous” monster category.

However, if one were to find movies that are ostensibly about those most famous of monsters, but with some kind of twist…

In that spirit, we’re starting this Halloween month off with a film that name checks one of most well-known monsters in history…that’s right, the Space Monster (or Spacemonster, depending on how seriously you take the stark-looking opening titles of the movie.) But anyone coming to this looking for a traditional Space Monster story are going to be in for a shock, because this is really an in-name-only Space Monster movie—it is actually an odd duck mash-up of retro Sci-Fi movie concepts and early sixties cultural trends, a drive-in chimera if there ever was one. If you squint real hard you might be able to make out the Space Monster spirit hidden somewhere in this bricolage, but that is only one minor ingredient among many.

The Reptile (1966)

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.

Nightbreed (1990)

By the late eighties, Clive Barker had enough clout in the movie world that he could pursue bigger and grander projects, including writing and directing an adaptation of his dark fantasy novel Cabal, which constructed a mythology tailor-made to appeal to the horror and monster-loving outsiders of the world. “Humans are the real monsters” is a common enough theme (that’s why I have an entire tag for it), but Cabal and its film counterpart Nightbreed might be the most blatant examples, presenting a story that explores the allure of the monstrous and the macabre, especially to the disenfranchised, and pitting it against the violent prejudice of the close-minded mass of mainstream society. In interviews, Barker explains this story in terms of obvious fantasies that monsters let us live out—of possessing immortality and other amazing abilities—but it also clearly draws a connection between monsters and underground subcultures, often similarly persecuted, which I’m sure was a very meaningful thing for an openly gay writer like Barker to explore, especially at the very end of the AIDS-haunted eighties. So the subversion in having the monsters be the “good guys” in the scenario carries a lot of weight.

Before I get into the bulk of the post, I should clarify which version of Nightbreed I watched—because this was famously one of those movies that the studio mishandled completely, leading to some crucial changes to the final product that in turn led to multiple cuts of the movie existing. The original 1990 theatrical version was 102 minutes; altered and removed footage was rediscovered in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which were re-inserted into what is called the Cabal Cut and has been re-released with lengths from 145 minutes to 159 minutes. The version I went with was the 2014 Director’s Cut put out by Shout! Factory, which is just over two hours long and utilizes footage from the Cabal Cut. None of us want to be here all day, so I won’t go over the differences between the versions.

The Monster and the Girl (1941)

Bonoho-ho-ho! With December comes the jolliest time of year—Christmas Apes season!

While researching what movies to watch, I try to find details that make them stand out, or possibly resonate with what I’ve written about before, allowing me to compare and contrast. When I decided upon the obscure forties B-movie The Monster and the Girl, it was at least partially because it’s another example of a movie which revolves around a brain transplant, a once ubiquitous plot device that we previously saw in The Colossus of New York. It also has “monster” in the title, which makes it seem like a pretty obvious subject for this series. However, what actually drew me to track this movie down are some quotes from a contemporaneous review from Variety, which described it as “a chiller-diller that will send fans of goose-pimply melodrama from the theaters amply satisfied” and “red meat of the bugaboo ticket buyers.” How could you not want to see whatever it is this apparent human being is describing? You know how much I, a bugaboo ticket buyer, love chiller-dillers.

The Iron Giant (1999)

Despite the neglect of the studio heads initially hindering its box office performance, animator Brad Bird’s directorial debut The Iron Giant became a cult hit whose acclaim and influence only grew over time. Very very loosely based on the book The Iron Man by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (which, it should be noted, ends with the titular character matching wits with a continent-sized space dragon in order to create world peace), it is a classic story of a kid befriending an otherworldly being and finding both outside acceptance and self-acceptance, themes that will likely always resonate. It’s also a unique piece of American animation, made as the boom of traditionally animated movies was on the downswing, but nonetheless doing many things very differently than the animation norm of the nineties. Most importantly for us on this site, though, it’s also a homage to, and critical analysis, of the Science Fiction and monster movies of the 1950s, using decades of hindsight to craft a portrayal that captures all the complexities of that time. Despite feeling very modern—well, modern for 1999 I guess—it still very accurately reflects many of the ideological components of those older movies, something I’ve only really come to appreciate after becoming more immersed in the source material.

The Colossus of New York (1958)

Previous techno-wary monster movies I’ve written about like The Invisible Boy and The Lift are about humanity losing control of their increasingly complicated machines—The Colossus of New York takes a different angle, asking if our increasing integration with that technology will cause us to lose our humanity. The idea of human enhancement with mechanical parts had existed in Sci-Fi literature prior to this, but in terms of film, Colossus is taking on what was likely fairly new ground even while using some of the ideas (sometimes pretty directly) from those earlier examples, and in doing so it anticipates decades of cyborg movies (as well as decades of movies with New York in the title that were definitely not filmed in New York) and debates about transhumanism, two years before the term “cyborg” was coined (but only a year after the term “transhumanism” was.) It is a classical sort of monstrous tragedy in many ways, too, but what struck me was how surprisingly dark it is.

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

It is 1953—the space race hasn’t even started yet, and no one has ever been sent into orbit. In Britain, you turn on the telly and see the first humans ever to visit space, put there by an independent science group. That group loses contact with their astronauts, and then learns that they will crash down in the middle of the country. Three men were in that rocket when it launched; only one is there when it returns to earth, and he has been irrevocably changed.

I’ve written about the work of Nigel Kneale before, sometimes directly and sometimes only in regards to other things, and while he is known primarily as a UK television writer, he was also one that had a profound impact on science fiction—and horror fiction—in the fifties and beyond. This began with his 1953 BBC serial teleplay The Quatermass Experiment, which introduced his self-possessed, problem-solving scientist hero Bernard Quatermass. Considered singularly thought-provoking and terrifying when it originally aired, it gave Kneale the clout to continue to produce more more well-regarded Quatermass serials, as well as other relevant-to-me subjects like The Creature (aka The Abominable Snowman), among a plethora of television projects. It also got the attention of a little-known movie studio called Hammer Films, who bought the rights to make a film adaptation of the story in 1955, and in the process changed its name to The Quatermass Xperiment (except in North America, where it was called The Creeping Unknown), a nod to the fact that its horror content would certainly lead to an X rating from British content regulators (they would repeat that joke a year later for X the Unknown, a movie that they initially hoped would feature Quatermass, before Kneale refused the rights.) The film was also a success, and it gave Hammer the idea that maybe science fiction and horror movies were a business they’d like to get into.

Famously, Kneale hated the fact that Hammer recast his very British vision of Bernard Quatermass, played by veteran actor Reginald Tate in the TV serial, as a gruff American scientist, played by film noir regular Brian Donlevy. He had other issues with the way they changed the script, but mostly he was bitter about the BBC owning the rights to the original serial and not paying him for the adaptation. As it turned out, the only real consequences of those disagreements was that Kneale would write or co-write all the other adaptations himself—including the two Quatermass sequels and The Abominable Snowman—which led to consistently good films. Unfortunately for Kneale, despite viewing his own version of Experiment as the definitive one, the BBC’s decision not to keep recordings of four of the six episodes of the serial (this was back in the days when teleplays were broadcast live, and the original airing even suffered from some technical issues) means that the only complete filmed version of the story is Hammer’s Xperiment.