“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.

The Faculty (1998)

Consider this a back-to-school special.

The potential pitfall of all those self-aware, meta-referencing pieces of genre entertainment—a particular specialty of the nineties—is a sense of having your cake and eating it: they point out all the tropes and cliches while actively using them, without necessarily demonstrating any original or truly subversive ideas of their own. The Faculty aims for that style of storytelling, but has at least one new-ish angle up its sleeve: it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in a high school, leading to all sorts of new metaphorical possibilities for a well-worn concept. Of course, because of the style of writing, it’s a version of that concept where characters directly talk about Jack Finney’s original Body Snatchers story as well as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, signposting all of those metaphorical possibilities before you even get a chance to really take them in. That part of the movie was, not surprisingly, the contribution of Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who was assigned by the supervillains at Miramax to revamp a script by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the directorial role given to Robert Rodriguez, coming off of From Dusk Till Dawn and his support work on Mimic. As aggressively 1998 as any movie could be, this does make some honest attempts to straddle the snarky hipness of the meta dialogue with a nominally serious Sci-Fi horror take on teenage alienation.

Bad Milo! (2013)

This really brings me back to when I voraciously read movie websites ten or so years ago—I distinctly remember reading about Bad Milo! when it was new, as it’s the exact sort of high concept, mid-tier film that those websites loved to give attention to, with a real “ha ha can you believe this?” vibe. That felt like the beginning of a time when bigger names in Hollywood were trying to half-jokingly reach for the schlock heights usually left to disreputable, low-budget movies—and it usually begins with a premise that, on paper, is meant to sound incredibly stupid. Most reviews from relatively mainstream sources would begin with that premise, either to say “it certainly lives up to it!” or “it turns out to be more than that!”, and in either case the rest comes off as a slightly bewildered spiral around the gravity of the premise. It’s not hard to see why: just saying “a monster comes out of man’s butt” will automatically make you think it’s a gross-out parody, and the cast of comedy veterans would lend to that view. But, in fact, Bad Milo! is not a parody, and turns out to be rather sincere in many places—which is something that works for and against it.

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.

The Bay (2012)

So, how exactly did we get a found footage monster movie from the director of Rain Man? According to the backstory, Barry Levinson was tasked with directing a documentary about the ecological problems of Chesapeake Bay, but not unlike the creatures at the heart of The Bay, the project mutated into something else entirely. It was 2012, right in the middle of the much-groused-about-at-the-time trend of found footage horror movies mostly instigated by Paranormal Activity (the producer of those movies, Jason Blum, is also a producer on this one), as well as what still felt like the early days of the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones—a perfect confluence of trends that inspired the idea of watching a disaster unfold from personal and media video footage, a collage of reactions and non-reactions from normal citizens, experts, and people in places of authority. The verisimilitude offered by this style of film might even bolster the real environmental issues that inspired the far more gory events in the movie! One could hope!

Of course, the other obvious inspiration for this movie comes from a place I’m sure we’ve all been to: finding out some random (maybe true?) fact on the Internet, especially about weird nature stuff. I imagine that most people only recently learned about Cymothoa Exigua, also known as the tongue-eating louse, probably from some listicle containing the same few photos of that oceanic isopod and its peculiar form of parasitism, where it sucks the blood from the tongues of fish until they shrivel up and fall off, and then replaces the tongue in the fish’s mouth. It’s hard to blame some writer for seeing those images and thinking “now, there’s a movie!”

The Milpitas Monster (1976)

As King Kung Fu was to Wichita, The Milpitas Monster is to the city of Milpitas, California (once a rural hub, now essentially a Silicon Valley suburb): a micro-budget, locally-made monster movie that acts as both an affectionate parody and time capsule, which is probably why it seems to still get played in theatres there on a yearly basis. It’s also a production that sometimes makes King Kung Fu look lavish by comparison—not surprising given that this was a project initiated by students and a photography teacher at Samuel Ayer High School (leading to the “Samuel Golden Ayer Productions” gag at the beginning of the movie), although the fact that it received some kind of national distribution is maybe a bit more surprising (it was even blessed with one of those VHS-only title changes, sometimes being called “The Mutant Beast.”) Needless to say, one does not watch a movie like The Milpitas Monster expecting a professionally-made object, but an odd piece of local colour—employing almost every civil servant and local business in the city if the credits are anything to go by—that is anchored by a fantasy plot based on local waste management issues. In eco-horror terms, it’s a broad issue placed in a very specific context.

Orca (1977)

Three years ago this month, we had an environmentally-themed slate of monster posts. Since it doesn’t seem like we’ve figured out all of our ecological problems in that time (not for lack of trying, I assume!), I think it’s time to pull up another bunch for what you can call Eco-Horror II: The Revenge.

There were of course, a number of movies coincidentally similar to Jaws in the mid-to-late seventies, many of them produced by prolific Italian film companies/exploitation houses—the animal attack movie business was bustling. Not one to avoid capitalizing on a trend, producer Dino De Laurentiis joined in on the good times in the year following the box office success of his King Kong remake (ol’ Dino D went really hard into creature features in 1977, with previous series subject The White Buffalo releasing two months before the one I’m writing about here), and along with screenwriters Luciano Vincenzoni and Segio Donati (both who contributed to the scripts of classic spaghetti westerns like For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,, among many others) and director Michael Anderson (previously of Logan’s Run) gave us the next logical step after a movie about a shark: a movie about an orca. But unlike certain later orca movies (that had cartoons spin-offs where the whale fights an evil cyborg), Orca—sometimes subtitled The Killer Whale for all the dummies who don’t know what an orca is—is not some family-friendly story about human and animals learning to respect each other, but a violent revenge thriller. The gimmick here is that the one seeking revenge is the whale—so this is less Jaws with a whale than it is Death Wish with a whale (and who was the producer on Death Wish? Why, Dino De Lautentiis!) In a sea of killer marine life movies, that immediately makes this one stand out.

The Great Yokai War (2005)

Being so inundated with Hollywood blockbusters for so long, it’s nice to see how other movie industries go about it—what you find is often eminently familiar in their storytelling and reliance on special effects, but in a way that makes their idiosyncratic approaches and cultural differences all the more noticeable. The Great Yokai War is ostensibly a big budget remake of previous subject Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, but in effect the films are barely connected—instead, it takes Japan’s beloved spirits and monsters and puts them in a big special effects extravaganza and a children’s adventure story with your standard “learning to be brave” character arc for the pre-adolescent hero. An even more important difference is that unlike Daiei’s Yokai trilogy, this is set in the modern day and actually grapples with some of the spiritual underpinnings of yokai myths as they apply to a current consumerist culture—all in the name of broad action and comedy, mind you, but it’s still an angle on yokai that I haven’t seen in a movie.

Cryptozoo (2021)

Now it’s time to highlight some of the new monster-based entertainment released over the prior year, because they still make those things, you know. Sometimes, those new ones are really quite different from what we’ve seen before. Case in point:

Indie comics artist Dash Shaw released his first animated film, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, a few years ago, and last year’s Cryptozoo was his follow-up. While very different in subject matter, it maintains the experimental, hand-crafted style evident in both that first movie and his own comics work. Every moment in this film is a multimedia burst of painterly colour, with lush backdrops, collage elements, and characters who look like they walked right out of a sketchbook, all mingling in visually innovative ways (many of the backgrounds were painted by Shaw’s comics contemporaries like Benjamin Marra, Frank Santoro, and former Adventure Time showrunner Jesse Moynihan.) As for that subject matter, well, it’s pretty much tailor-made for me: what if all the creatures of mythology and folklore were real things hiding out in the world, and how would modern civilization deal with that? This is a story that takes a fantastical premise and uses it as a springboard to explore the concept of social progress, of wanting to protect the strange and wonderful things from a world of prejudice and exploitation, and whether the strange and wonderful want to be protected at all. For as quirky and painterly as the world of this movie is, it also pulls no punches and offers no simple conclusions.

Isolation (2005)

Last year, I said that hospitals were effective and underutilized settings for monster stories—and for reasons both similar and different, I think the same about farms. Like hospitals, farms are a place where the most biological aspects of life are no longer hidden, all the gross internals and externals of the animal (human or other) made part of everyday existence—the difference is that while the gleaming, artificial walls and stainless steel implements of the hospital contrast the blood and sickness in between those walls, a farm by its nature (even the most systematized, industrial version) has to wallow in the mud and dust-encrusted world. You’re never far away from dripping fluids, disease, injury, and death. The Irish horror film Isolation plays up the grotty visuals of the farm in many ways—a desolate blue-gray blankets the world, the surrounding land seems vast and shadowy, living spaces are modest and unkempt, animals exist in either lonely spaces or crowd together anxiously in their pens, and the camera peers at human activity from down below or through slats, showcasing every dark corner of the barns and sheds. If one were to choose any place to make a new variation on The Thing—which Isolation very much is—a farm is certainly a good place to go.