Jurassic Park (1993)

The greatest trick a monster movie can pull is convincing everyone it’s not actually a monster movie, and that’s a trick that Steven Spielberg has managed to pull off twice in his career. I’m not saying that Spielberg’s contention that they treated the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park like real animals and not generic movie monsters is untrue, I just think that it is almost impossible to portray dinosaurs in film without being pulled by the gravity of the monster movie. As I have argued before, the history of dinosaurs in movies and the history of monster movies are irrevocably intertwined, the latter still spiritually aligned with the timeless desire to see these seemingly impossible creatures alive in some fashion, a dream that only the medium of film was able to materialize—from Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen onward, every advance in the portrayal of fictional creatures was applied to dinosaurs, and vice-versa. I also think anyone who loves dinosaurs—and Jurassic Park alone created another new generation of miniature paleontology freaks—loves them because they are both real animals and also monstrous, wonderful to imagine and terrifying to behold. By acknowledging that complicated appreciation of the subject, Jurassic Park introduced something bold and resonant to movies beyond just the ballyhooed technological breakthroughs and changes to the very concept of Hollywood blockbusters that it ushered in.

Mad God (2021)

Visuals effects artist Phil Tippett has been at the game of producing amazing on-screen creatures since the seventies, including the ones seen in the original Star Wars trilogy, Piranha, RoboCop, and Starship Troopers. In the very early nineties (around the time his studio was creating effects for RoboCop 2), he began work on the independent stop motion-animated project, but shelved it—partly because his studio was too busy, and partly because while working on Jurassic Park (famously given the credit of “Dinosaur Supervisor”) he was shown early footage of the CGI that would eventually be used in the movie and became convinced that his innovative puppet-based effects had been made completely irrelevant (something I learned from the documentary Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters.) Over twenty years later, the people in his orbit convinced him to finish the film, and with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and support from his employees and numerous volunteers, he created three shorts that were then combined and expanded to become the film Mad God (which can now be watched on our old pal Shudder.) One does get a sense from the movie itself that multiple decades of pent-up creativity in the realm of classic-style physical effects and stop motion has been unloaded into it…and many other pent-up emotions as well. It is both celebration of the imagination that Tippett brought to cinema and also an unrelenting nightmare burned onto film, and that’s what makes it particularly special.

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.