Attack the Block (2011)

Attack the Block was another one of those destined-for-cult-status movies that was championed by the genre-focused movie websites I read back in the late aughts and early 2010s, and it’s not difficult to understand why. At its heart, this is a throwback movie to older creature features and to the youth-centric films of the 1980s, with a fannish tint to its writing that is reflected in the references in the dialogue and the love of Big, Cool Moments. Writer-director Joe Cornish already had a following from his radio and television comedy work, and was able to parlay his association with Edgar Wright’s comedy-pastiche crew (Wright is an Executive Producer on this with his frequent collaborators Nira Park as Producer and Nick Frost in the cast) to get his film off the ground, and to some extent the exuberant aficionado tone of Wright’s work is evident here even if it’s not as much of a direct homage as his films often are. While this movie didn’t necessarily make a huge splash back in 2011, its favour among an influential crowd almost certainly led its two leads, John Boyega and Jodie Whitaker, to be cast as the new faces of two different long-running franchises, something that both might feel a tinge of regret about.

So, yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that Sci-Fi and horror nerds flock toward, an attempt to capture a bit of nostalgic spirit in its kids-vs-monsters set-up, but it’s also an intelligent and novel twist on that idea that goes places those older movies did not. The straightforward kind of monster action utilized by Cornish becomes a frame in which to place a cast of well-defined, lower class youths, the kind whose lives are not simply left out of fantasy films, but are regularly dehumanized into faceless, hoodie-wearing creatures themselves by people far removed from their poverty-stricken living conditions. Like many of the best monster movies, this is one about taking something very specific and very real and letting the fictional aberrations draw out the reality of it.

Zillatinum: Part 3 (All Monsters Attack & Godzilla vs. Gigan)

Let’s return to the Showa era, and examine how the Godzilla series looked towards the youth in two different ways.

Quatermass II

Finally, we are rounding out Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy, three alien-heavy Sci-Fi films whose impact on the genre in the UK and beyond cannot be understated (maybe don’t expect to see coverage of the much-belated Quatermass/Quatermass Conclusion, which was made when Kneale was in full “Old Man Yells At Cloud” phase.) As with The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass II was originally written by Kneale as a six-part BBC television serial, which aired 1955 (commissioned partly to give the BBC a high profile answer to their first privately-owned competitor, ITV), and then adapted into film form by Hammer in 1957 under the slightly altered title Quatermass 2 (or Enemy From Space in other countries.) With Kneale demanding new terms following his displeasure with Hammer’s adaptation of the first Quatermass serial (that argument led to the creation of X the Unknown as a substitute for a second Quatermass in film in 1956), he was given a chance to write the first draft of Quatermass 2 himself, which was then revised by director Val Guest, who had directed both Xperiment and the other 1957 Nigel Kneale adaptation, The Abominable Snowman. Kneale was so pleased with the resulting movie that, when he gained controlling rights to it, he proceeded to remove it from circulation.

Watching both versions of this, it’s difficult to really agree with Kneale’s position—Hammer’s version of Quatermass II is a thoughtfully condensed version of the serial, and even Brian Donlevy returning to play Quatermass (which one of the things that Kneale disagreed with most vociferously) fits better here than he did in The Quatermass Xperiment. While the movie version of Quatermass and the Pit made over a decade later is a generally good adaptation where you can still feel the missing depth and detail of the extended TV serial, the Quatermass II film captures all the atmosphere and deliberate storytelling without much compromise, and in some ways the story is even enhanced thanks to the upped budget. Importantly, the themes that Kneale imbued in that story are fully maintained, and with Guest’s direction, often intensified.

All of the Quatermass stories deal with a loss of human agency due to the machinations of cosmic horrors—the first one featured a near-mindless extraterrestrial organism that altered a man inside and out, and Quatermass and the Pit showed human evolution manipulated by a self-destructive alien civilization in the distant past. By comparison, Quatermass II feels almost normal, as a variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers paranoia; the TV serial came after Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers but preceded the film version, a case of parallel thought reflecting the fears in the air in the mid-1950s of secret subversive plots and the battle between free will and conformity. What this version of that story emphasizes is the terrifying speed in which the outside influence seeds itself into positions of power, and how the machinations of our higher offices seem almost tailor-made to shield this invasion from the public eye. There is a specific set of very British observations and ironies animating Kneale’s writing, leading to something that is relatively more grounded than the other two Quatermass stories and their broader existential anxieties, while still suggesting that a malignant, inhuman universe can suddenly assert control over us.

Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008)

Yes, this is indeed a much belated follow-up to The X From Outer Space, the second tier kaiju film from Japan’s sixties Monster Boom period that I covered over four years ago, and from the subtitle alone you are probably left with many questions. A nominal parody of both the original film and the state of geopolitics circa the late aughts, this one-off reboot is brought to us by director Minoru Kawasaki, who specializes in comedy tokusatsu projects with names like The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala, and writer Masakazu Migita, an Ultraman TV series writer who has worked with Kawasaki on multiple projects. Migita was also the writer of previous subject Death Kappa, and while this certainly shares comedy stylings with that movie, it benefits from having a direction to its humour beyond just slightly off-kilter recreations of older kaiju films.

It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987)

Some nine years after It Lives Again, Larry Cohen returned to his monster movie debut for one final bow—but this was Cohen returning after expanding his repertoire and innovating in the genre in the eighties, first with Q – The Winged Serpent and then The Stuff, both classics in their own right. The increasingly over-the-top and comedy-infused styles of those movie do in fact continue in It’s Alive III—sometimes in very direct ways, considering the actors involved—keeping it in line with Cohen’s eighties filmography; at the same time, it develops many of the themes and emotional beats that made the original It’s Alive and its supplementary first sequel into something genuinely special. Yes, these movies about murderous mutant babies carry all the marks of schlock genius, but as weird as it sounds, they also have a heart, and that makes something like Island of the Alive stand out just as much as…well, everything else in it.

The Burrowers (2008)

One of my goals in the coming months is to cover more movies made in the past twenty-four years. After the nineties, a decade where most monster movies were either unambitious direct-to-video schlock or unambitious Hollywood blockbuster schlock, the new millennium seemed to usher a slew of lower budget indie creature features made by enthusiasts with fresh ideas, given a wider audience thanks to the thriving genre film festival circuit. These ready-made cult films could vary in tone and quality, but you could still sense the verve and imagination returning to the genre after that decade-long hibernation.

In that spirit of experimentation, The Burrowers combines the monster movie with a western, an established but infrequent combination. I’ve said this the last few times I’ve covered a western/monster movie mash-up, but the two styles work well together, with the western’s untamed setting and sense of isolation providing the kinds of spaces where the unknown can creep in, giving new ways to mythologize lands that are now completely familiar to us. That comes into play even more here, as we’re dealing with something of a revisionist western, casting a caustic eye on the colonialist myths of the American frontier—a place of human horror that also has room for some of the inhuman kind as well.

“The Curse of Fenric” (S26E8-11)

It is 1989, and Doctor Who is on its last legs. You may have noticed that I skipped over all of the serials featuring Colin Baker in the lead role—this is not simply because of the poor reputation most of the stories have even among fans of the series, but because none of them offer a particularly compelling monster-centric story to write about. Things started looking up at least a little bit in 1987, when the show went through a small-scale creative overhaul, with a new batch of writers behind the scenes and a new lead in Sylvester McCoy, but none of the active attempts to make the series more ambitious and relevant saved it from going on an indefinite hiatus just as the eighties ended, leaving it at a still-impressive twenty-six consecutive years on television.

The three years with McCoy and lead writer Andrew Cartmel carry a very distinctive atmosphere, one that attempts to mine the best parts of the series’ past, especially its sense of imagination and its capacity for moments of child-friendly horror, and infuse a puckish kind of whimsy and more focus on the characterization of the Doctor and his companion. “The Curse of Fenric”, the classic series’ penultimate story, carries with it the DNA of previous serials we’ve talked about: there’s a the moody atmosphere and marching army of monsters of “The Web of Fear”, a somewhat Quatermass-esque combination of mythology and Sci-Fi similar to “The Awakening”, and even the winking social commentary of “Carnival of Monsters.” Another similarity to “Web of Fear” is its attempt to provide a new interpretation of a well-established monster—but this goes much further in taking its inspirations and playing around with the iconography.

BTTM FDRS

The 2019 graphic novel BTTM FDRS finds its monster in the legacy of gentrification and exploitation, with beautiful ideas twisted and then abandoned, and the people on the lower rungs of society left to deal with the resulting mess. Writer Ezra Claytan Daniels (author of 2018’s Upgrade Soul) and artist Ben Passmore (creator of numerous comics across mediums including the completely unsparing Sports Is Hell) make no bones about the racial make-up of both sides of that equation, showing its black protagonists putting up with the indifference and hostility of white people in positions of relative power, something used as both a source of horror and of comedy. This is a story that reflects a wider recognition of social stratification, a heady mix of self-consciousness, guilt and anger, and that complexity puts it well beyond just a simple vehicle for social critique and a side of the grotesque—although it is also both of those things, rather pointedly.

“The Awakening” (S21E5-6)

Having already written about a Tom Baker-led serial, we’re taking a big leap out of seventies Doctor Who and into the early-to-mid eighties, where the lead role was taken over by Peter Davison. The eighties ended up being a fairly tumultuous period for the series, following up on the tonal shifts that occurred after complaints of the show’s violent content led to pressure from producers, and where it seemed to gradually slide increasingly into irrelevance, with production problems, creative indecision, and hostility from the top brass at the BBC eventually leading to the show’s fifteen-year hiatus at the end of the decade. The biggest problems of the original run’s final years was still in the future while Davison was there, but you can definitely sense in these early eighties seasons that the show was a little more uneasy, experimenting with different ideas and tones to see what actually worked.

“The Awakening” hails from Davison’s final year, which in turn was following the series’ twentieth anniversary (an anniversary special where Davison teamed up with many, but not all, the previous Doctor actors aired two months before.) After spending an entire year spotlighting the series and its history, a story like this feels like a return to the “classic” mode—it is another plot about an alien presence invading modern England (in this case, specifically said to be 1984), and a plot with more than a hint of Quatermass and the Pit in it, in which our history turns out to be the product of said alien presence. That’s not a surprising direction to go, considering that Doctor Who had been pulling from Quatermass and the Pit (and the other Quatermass serials) pretty much from the beginning, and this one actually puts that story in a new and interesting context, which scales down the scope of its implications while keeping them equally grave.

“Carnival of Monsters” (S10E5-8)

As the seventies dawned, Doctor Who went through several major changes: it was broadcast in colour, Jon Pertwee took over the lead role, and for a few years they changed the format of the show, locking it to a contemporary Earth setting without the Doctor’s time and planet-hopping shenanigans. In effect, this meant that most of the stories were made in the image of ones like “The Web of Fear”, with the Doctor working with a special military organization, which placed the “monsters in your backyard” concept at the forefront more often than not. Even with a more traditional adventure story structure in place, the series honed its horror credentials, and the early years of colour Doctor Who scarred generations with serials like “Spearhead From Space” (the first story of the era) and “Terror of the Autons”, which showed everyday plastic objects (including department store mannequins) transformed into deadly menaces—this is the era when the show really started living up to its legacy of making kids to “hide behind the couch.” Meanwhile, other stories, like the early serial “The Silurians” (where the monsters are allowed to be even a little sympathetic) showcased different and interesting ambitions in the monster space. Even when the plots became more limited in some ways, the creative minds at the helm adapted around those limitations and continued to develop the show’s distinguishing features.

Considering that I’ve written about two stories set on our planet, for the sake of variety I’ve chosen to skip to the fourth year in Pertwee’s tenure, when the series returned to journeys across time and space. The second story of the series’ tenth season has many intriguing qualities, including its wonderfully simple yet evocative title*, but most importantly is another serial written by Robert Holmes, who would go on to write previous site subject “The Ark in Space” (Holmes also wrote the aforementioned “Spearhead From Space” and “Terror of the Autons”, so he was making a name for himself on this series early), and with several more beloved stories to his name, he remains one of the more celebrated creative figures in the show’s history. As in his later stories, “Carnival of Monsters” demonstrates Holmes’ knack for infusing even standard-sounding Sci-Fi scenarios with his sardonic sense of humour, and in this case even carries a slyly meta take on the series itself.