Splice (2009)

The movies that get the tag “Science Gone Wrong” on here are part of one of the longest lineages in the history of creature features—and probably one of that history’s most reactionary undercurrents, demonstrating a ceaseless anxiety about scientific discovery and experimentation. The deeper we dive into the mechanics of nature, the closer we get to inevitably crossing lines we were never meant to cross, with terrible consequences the equally inevitable result—or, that’s the way they see it, and it’s a structure and theme that has never really gone away, and manages to adapt itself to whatever the latest technological and scientific advances (although by “adapt to”, I don’t necessarily mean “understand.”) Splice is a film that very intentionally hearkens back to some of the more hysteria-prone versions of that Sci-Fi narrative, and even places it in the consistently hackle-raising field of genetic engineering, which has been the topic of more than a few monster movies over the decades. The innovation here is that the lines being crossed in this story are not necessarily being done in the name of science, but something far more personal—and so the ensuing terrible consequences have some different and sometimes more disturbing dimensions.

Tremors (1990)

Big Hollywood studios have a hot-and-cold relationship with monster movies—they’ll cede that territory to B-movie productions for years, or decades, at a time, and then start investing some bigger budgets into a select few before dropping the whole thing again. The nineties was one of those periods with a minor streak of classic-style creature features—”classic-style” in the sense that they’re more or less following the structures that were laid down in the fifties. Their special effects may be more sophisticated, the dialogue less stiff and expository, and the violence more explicit, but in the end it’s still a movie where a group of people have to deal with the sudden appearance of a monster or monsters, and the expected plot beats are barely changed, even after forty years.

Tremors, which could be considered the first in that wave, wasn’t a significant success in its original release, and likely accrued its cult following through home video and TV airings, leading it to become a direct-to-video franchise with a surprising amount of longevity (as in, it’s most recent sequel came out in 2020)—it even had a short-lived TV show, and a more recent series attempt that wasn’t picked up. Technically, it’s also an end-of-the-eighties movie that was delayed into the dead early months of 1990, just like Nightbreed, making it something of a liminal artifact. Looking at it now, you can see how it heralds some of the ways the subsequent decade of monster movies attempted to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, some minor tweaks in presentation likely meant to pull in new audiences—while Tremors and what followed tended to resemble the old school entries in basic plotting, they change just enough of the surface details to make themselves feel contemporary, with a particular emphasis on comedy.

Pumpkinhead (1988)

To think, I haven’t written about a single Stan Winston movie yet, despite his prominence and importance to movie special effects and to movie monsters in particular. Winston and his team are responsible for the effects of some of the biggest movies of the eighties and nineties, but Winston himself only directed a few himself (which includes both A Gnome Named Gnorm and the Michael Jackson “Ghosts” video, and it’s hard to tell which is a more ignoble mark on his record), with Pumpkinhead being his first. Of course, you’d expect a movie directed by a guy who is a specialist in animatronics and detailed monster costumes to mostly be a straightforward vehicle for both (not unlike what Equinox was doing for creature effects in the late sixties/early seventies), but it actually manages to mash together a lot of different ideas, producing something that is never really just one thing. It’s a backwoods supernatural horror story, a melancholy morality play, a killer-chasing-young-people flick—I thought Equinox was a movie that was just looking for the most efficient path to justifying having a bunch of monsters on screen, but Pumpkinhead puts in a surprising amount of work into feeling like some legitimate modern folklore.

Color Out of Space (2020)

Back in January, I wrote about the film Hardware, which in 1990 had become enough of a cult hit to make Hollywood interested in working with director Richard Stanley. This ultimately led to the debacle that was 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (featuring Marlon Brando in white makeup wearing an ice bucket on his head), an experience so unpleasant for Stanley (before he was replaced as director by John Frankenheimer) that he ended up abandoning the mainstream film industry for decades. That story, and whole lot more, was told in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul, which you should definitely watch, and may possibly still be on Tubi as you read this. This past year saw his return to directing a non-short/documentary film, and it just so happens to be a very Creature Compatible® one at that, so for the first time in a while we’re going to be taking a look at contemporary material (and the next visit to modern times may be sooner than you think!), as well as our first foray into the career of a master of weird, mind-bending fiction that makes you question the nature of reality: Nicolas Cage. Also Lovecraft, I guess.

Wendigo (2001)

Continuing our examination of Shudder’s selection of films, we’re jumping ahead a good 81 years from our last subject to the uneventful year of 2001, and to a very different sort of movie. Wendigo, written and directed by indie horror auteur Larry Fessenden (who had previously directed the acclaimed vampire flick Habit in 1997, and more recently co-wrote the PS4 horror game Until Dawn, which seems to have some thematic connections with this movie) skews more on the psychological thriller side of things, and while there is a titular monster to actually qualify this for the Creature Canon, it’s not something you’ll be seeing a lot of in the movie itself. It’s really more of a vague presence than a physical force (at least, until it suddenly is physical force), a darkness skirting along the edges of much more down-to-earth story—which, if you know anything about the legends the movie is ostensibly pulling from, is actually rather appropriate. As well, if you have any less-than-favourable preconceptions about indie films, this may be one that fully lives up to most of them…but we’ll get to that.