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.

Creature Classic Companion: The Day of the Triffids

English author John Wyndham wrote numerous highly influential Science Fiction novels in the fifties, including the likes of The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, and The Midwich Cuckoos (source of the multiple Village of the Damned films)—but The Day of the Triffids, originally published in 1951, remains singular. Yes, it’s foundational to the post-apocalypse subgenre, providing some early and potent imagery of decaying social cohesion and a major city turned into a hollowed-out wasteland, but what really struck me was how the background of the story combines many contemporary-at-the-time fears: the dangers posed by arms race secrecy, unchecked scientific experimentation (for mostly economic purposes), and ecological distortion, all becoming a volatile chemical combination that eventually blows up in the face of the entire civilization. Unique among killer plants, the triffids are far more frightening for the way they become the ultimate invasive species, and how they’re not even the most immediate threat the surviving humans have to deal with—but they’re always there, spreading, and it’s only deep into the novel (and in the successful adaptations of it) that the survivors realize just what they’ve wrought upon themselves.

Monster Multimedia: “Moxon’s Master”/The Invincible

Even though I’ve already written about a robot-based film for this series (which, to be fair, was explicitly a horror movie), I still often ask the question: do people other than me consider robots to be monsters (I mean, there’s a movie called Robot Monster) and/or fantasy creatures, or does their approximate existence in real life preclude them from that distinction? Mechanical beings existed in stories long before we had any capacity to create actual artificial intelligence, and for the most part their characteristics were purely in the realm of fantasy, allegory, or thought experiment—the fact that we have them buzzing around now, constantly being developed into more refined and capable forms, is more of a case of life imitating art (although, who says something in real life couldn’t also be an allegory or thought experiment?) Besides, to some people, AI will always be a little bit monstrous—an unnatural imitation of life, thinking and acting in ways outside the biological norm, completely aberrational and threatening. Much like in The Golem, these things are our creations, but we don’t really know how they will react to the world around them, or if we can maintain our power over them.

Recently, I’ve read two pieces of literature from the past—one of them predating the term “robot” and many of our notions about them, and one fully in the thick of science fiction’s historical development— that exemplify many of the ideas that make robots so fascinating and also frightening, but also present interesting ideas about their relationship with life as we know it. Essentially, we have a proto-robot story that brings its own notions into them, and an innovation on the established view on robots, both providing a conception of them as, in a way, more part of the natural world than most people seem to consider, and in many ways, making them more like traditional monsters.

Monster Multimedia: War With the Newts (1936)

The most famous creation of Czech writer Karel Čapek is, of course, R.U.R., the 1928 play that introduced the term “robot” into the world vernacular—and also embodied a recurring theme in his work, where the industrial world’s insatiable need for growth and production leads to the use of “lesser” beings as cheap labour. Not far removed from the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution, Čapek used science fiction to demonstrate just how the heads of business were willing to dehumanize in order to bolster their wealth, and how this inevitably leads to the workers fighting back. A few years after R.U.R., he followed it up with a spiritual successor in the novel War with the Newts, a darkly comedic story exploring many of the same themes. The main difference between the two is that while R.U.R. used artificially-created beings (though they were biological rather than the mechanical ones that became more strongly associated with the word robot), Newts instead begins with the discovery of a new species of semi-intelligent amphibians on an island in the Pacific. In both cases, though, humanity’s attempt to exploit these non-humans in their midst only leads to bad things, and our entire civilization reaps the whirlwind.

Grendel/Grendel Grendel Grendel (1971/1981)

Is it possible that I made this for the post title alone? Maybe.

I first read John Gardner’s Grendel after Ursula K. Le Guin referenced it briefly in one of her many story introductions—apparently the description “Beowulf as seen by the monster” was enough to intrigue me (I still haven’t read Beowulf, but really, we all have the gist of it through cultural osmosis [he says, justifying his own laziness.]) Grendel is one of those foundational pieces of postmodern literature, rejecting the premises at the base of western prose, and taking a rather bitter position on the entire history of human civilization and even art (isn’t it wonderful when a piece of art questions the ethics of creating art?) Being literary fiction (and particularly idea-focused at that, with long conversations and monologues about the nature of reality and thought), it probably hasn’t had as much of an impact on monster stories as you’d want, despite the large number of “from the monster’s perspective” things that existed after it (countless stories about vampires alone), but it still feels like it should be the forerunner of all subsequent modern reinterpretations of myth.