Grabbers (2012)

I’ve written about some wildly varying monster comedies, and one of the potential points of variation in them is just how seriously they take their monster—it is still possible for a movie to be a comedy while still presenting us with a monster that is threatening or even scary in a relatively straightforward manner. Alligator is a good example of that, as is Tremors—and the latter is the one that is the most apparent inspiration for the Irishcreature comedy Grabbers, where even the title seems to be a sly reference. The similarities run deep: both are rooted in a certain working class milieu, focusing on a group of small town personalities forced to do battle with a extraordinary menace, with the more ridiculous elements of their generally uneventful lives playing a part, good or bad, in the ensuing chaos; moreover, both are also indebted to classic monster movie traditions, and present those things without intentional subversion (but with inventive creature designs.) It’s an entertaining kind of light horror that doesn’t come around that often—with less overt cynicism or gruesomeness than most horror-comedies—and this one utilizes its setting and its ensemble to very good effect while getting an equal amount of juice out of its monsters.

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.

Creature Classic Companion: It Follows (2014)

It Follows managed to crack a certain critical barrier among horror movies when it was released, garnering the kind of widespread praise that these things only rarely get. Not being a horror fan, but reading a lot of movie websites at the time, I heard a lot about it, and saw it held up as a new sort of innovative, self-aware (but not self-parodying) fright flick, one of the select few from the middle of the previous decade being touted. I can imagine this was at least partially due to it straying away from the found footage-focused paradigm that proliferated back then. I also imagine that it has to do with its efficient pitch, one with a primal meaning at the centre of it that still allowed for a depth of symbolism: a sexually-transmitted curse that puts you in the sights of a methodically murderous shape-changing entity, one that only the cursed people can see and that will not stop until you are dead or you pass it on to someone else…but with the possibility of it going back to you once its current target has been dealt with. It’s a gimmick for sure, one that comes with its set of rules—and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s a subset of horror fans who love rules—but it also intelligently plays with the fears of its adolescent target audience, and director David Robert Mitchell uses the camera to show all the the ways that the gimmick can sow paranoia.