In the spirit of fellow 1965 release Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, which didn’t have Frankenstein in it but DID have a Space Monster, Planet of the Vampires features no vampires but does include at least one planet—its Italian title, Terrore nel Spazio, aka “Terror in Space”, is more non-specific but probably more accurate. It also features a great meeting of some of the minds discussed in previous posts: an international production headed by American International Pictures (who put its North American debut on a double bill with previous subject Die, Monster, Die!), directed and co-written by influential Italian horror auteur Mario Bava (several years after his work on Caltiki – The Immortal Monster), with an English language script written by Ib Melchior of Angry Red Planet and Journey to the Seventh Planet(alongside Louis M. Heyward, who was a producer of many other horror productions of the era like the Vincent Price classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes.) On a conceptual level, it feels very close to Melchior’s previous tales of astronauts terrorized by mysterious alien life forms on other planets, but with Bava’s visual sense, it goes from a mere suggestion of interplanetary Gothic horror to a pure representation of it—its alien planet feels truly menacing and not just inhuman, but anti-human. It’s likely for this reason that this movie became as unexpectedly influential as it has, very likely serving as another one of the inspirations for the Alien, which offered an updated conception of a space exploration haunted by inexplicable monstrosity over a decade later.
In their early days, it was a proud tradition for video games to aspire to be “the game version of X”, where X was some other piece of popular culture—one could argue that it still is a tradition, it’s just that they’re better at hiding it (or are legally obligated to.) Back in the eighties, it was a copyright-skirting free-for-all, and developers were looking to take something else and put their video game spin on it—that’s the mindset that gave us Konami series like Castlevania, Contra, and Metal Gear, which were very blatant mash-ups of multiple movies, and it’s the same mindset at play in Nintendo’s long-running Metroid series, which began as a pastiche of Alien. This is not speculation on my part—as longtime series developer Yoshio Sakamoto (who started out as a designer and has since moved on to director and producer roles on most of the later games in the series) said in an interview: “I think the film Alien had a huge influence on the production of the first Metroid game. All of the team members were affected by HR Giger’s design work, and I think they were aware that such designs would be a good match for the Metroid world we had already put in place.” There are many games that look to Alien for inspiration (and maybe even more that look to its sequel—but Metroid actually released in Japan a little over a month after Aliens, and likely didn’t have to chance to be inspired by it), but it still feels like the entire Metroid series is the one that can claim the title of being “the game version of Alien.”. It’s not because the games have consistently been exactly like the movies—although there are certainly some parallels one could make—but because, more than any other video games, they are the ones that absorbed aspects of the 1979 movie’s core tension, the sense of strangeness and otherworldly menace, and iterated on them, maybe even more than that movie’s sequels.
Three years after The Angry Red Planet, Sid W. Pink and Ib Melchior’s film productions had been shipped off to Denmark, where they collaborated again to produce another interplanetary horror show in Journey to the Seventh Planet—the difference here is not only which planet we visit, but also that it’s Pink in the director’s chair this time. While one could accuse the two of lightly reusing their own ideas for this movie, many other scholarly viewers have accused it of stealing ideas from other, more famous Science Fiction works: the first is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, which saw its first publication in 1961—although it seems unlikely that either Pink or Melchior read it in its original Polish early enough to crib the idea of planet bringing men’s secret desires to life; the far more likely inspiration is Ray Bradbury’s short story “Mars is Heaven!”, which was integrated into The Martian Chronicles in 1950. Regardless of where the story came from, the appeal of it is quite apparent—extraterrestrial life attacking human interlopers with things pulled right from their subconscious, playing on human emotions in ways far more sinister than just employing space monsters as in Angry Red Planet. Obviously, this is done in a significantly…significantly…less thoughtful manner than in Solaris, and to be honest, it might even be less thoughtful than Angry Red Planet.
Let’s do some retroactive projection: The Angry Red Planet was released in November 1959, making it the very last Sci-Fi monster movie of the fifties, the decade where the form flourished. There would be more films approximating that style made in the sixties, but the space age obsessions that animated them, both the exaggerated optimism and the equally exaggerated fears, would be gradually replaced with new ones as the genre film business moved on. Completely unintentionally, this movie serves as a sort of denouement for the decade’s monster movies—so, now that we’ve put The Angry Red Planet in the hot seat, what does it have to say about the whole mess? As it turns out, it’s a lot of the same things these movies had been saying since the beginning of the decade.
There are innumerable places out there recounting the long and complicated history of Doctor Who (which will be celebrating its sixtieth anniversary next year), its place within the history of Science Fiction television, its importance to the BBC and UK TV in general, and its dedicated fandom. All of that has already been thoroughly interrogated, and by people far more knowledgeable than me.
So, instead, let’s talk about monsters.
As the old story goes, when the series was being developed in the early sixties, the top brass at the BBC explicitly told the writers to avoid stories about “bug-eyed monsters.” However, the second serial ready to be produced completely ignored this edict, and due to a lack of other suitable scripts, it went ahead—and unfortunately for the anti-bug-eyed-monster producers, the monsters introduced in that second serial were the Daleks, who became immediate pop culture icons in the UK, complete with novelty Christmas records. The show’s time and space-traversing format allowed the stories to theoretically go anyway and do anything, but from that point forward that anywhere often involved some kind of alien monster.
Unlike the other influential creature TV series I’ve written about from around the same time period, like The Outer Limitsand Ultraman, there was never a requirement for a Doctor Who story to include a monster, and there are many that don’t—but the monsters in that series have become such a tradition (almost certainly because of the popularity of the Daleks, due as much to the distinctive visuals invented by production designer David Cusick as it was to the scripts by Terry Nation, although it was the latter who got the copyright) that the series, from the original 1963-1989 run or the current one that began in 2005, has never veered away from them. With a basic concept that gives them a near endless choice of settings and storylines, the possibilities for just what kind of monsters can show up are equally as endless, which has led to a panoply of highly imaginative monsters, some of them becoming recurring presences on the show like the Daleks did, while others only appeared once, but may still have left an impression. As in many classic monster movies, the creativity on display in the stories and monsters is crucial because the limited budget of a BBC production means that the special effects, back then and today, are never going to be impressive or believable, so they have to find other ways to engage, or terrify, the audience.
The original series reached its peak popularity in the mid-seventies, after the starring role of the Doctor was given to Tom Baker (whose pre-Doctor career we briefly touched on in the post about The Mutations—although the performance that got him the job was his turn as the villain in the Ray Harryhausen effects vehicle The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, another monster connection), the fourth actor to take the part, who brought a particular laid-back quirkiness to a role that had been defined from the beginning by eccentricity. Due to the length of his tenure (seven years, the longest any actor has played the Doctor) and the fact that his were the first episodes to air on US TV, Baker ended up becoming the most well-known lead for many years (it sounds like he was aware of this at the time, too, leading to some notoriously diva-ish behaviour on set.) His second ever storyline, the four-episode “The Ark in Space”, aired from January to February 1975, and is a fan favourite—it’s also an important one for the history of the show and its approach to monsters, signalling a new direction that has cast a long shadow over the entire series.
This movie has persisted for decades because it’s one of your favourite Sci-Fi/horror directors’ favourites—it gets championed by people like John Carpenter and, more importantly, is often cited as the direct inspiration for the second half of Alien (with the first half being taken from Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, as we all know.) We’ve already looked at one movie that was a direct antecedent to Alien, one that was written by (and starring) one of the movie’s co-writers, but its roots clearly go much further back into the fifties B-movie tradition, and its nods to It! The Terror From Beyond Space’s claustrophobic sets and invincible alien menace are evident. There’s a lean efficiency to this modestly-budgeted movie, with its sixty-eight minute running time meaning that is has to get things going very quickly (it was shown on a double bill with The Curse of The Faceless Man, also directed by Edward L. Cahn and written by “It’s A Good Life” author Jerome Bixby, which appears to be about a Pompeii gladiator coming back as a papier-mache mummy), and soon becomes almost entirely centred on the crew of surviving astronauts trying, and often failing, to deal with the threat that they all know is there. If nothing else, it really gets across the feeling of being stuck in a tin can with a rabid animal, and it’s easy to see why this set-up was such an inspiration for the subsequent generation.
As I’ve mentioned countless (countless!) times before, the early-to-mid seventies was definitely the weirdest period for Sci-Fi films, with the two biggest successes—and influences—on the genre being the heady 2001: A Space Odyssey and the grim Planet of the Apes. I think I can safely argue that this was the only point in time when a movie like Phase IVwould be made at all. These bizarre and downbeat visions of the future would more or less be put out to pasture when Star Wars debuted, but the subsequent era of Sci-Fi movies still bore the mark of what had come before, sometimes in very direct ways.
Like previous subject Equinox, Dark Star was a short film picked up and expanded to feature length by The Blob producer Jack H. Harris, but this one was probably a much harder sell, and was only distributed briefly and in a small number of locations. Also like Equinox, Dark Star is the career beginnings for some of the most important people in creature feature history: director John Carpenter and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (with a special shout out to the late concept artist/designer Ron Cobb, who designed the titular spaceship), who a few years after their first project came and went would go on to separately redefine the horror movie. That’s all fairly well-known stuff at this point (as is the story of their tense working relationship and subsequent falling out, as told in Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value), and while Dark Star developed a cult following based on its initial showings, it would gain a bigger one after Halloween and Alien made the minds behind it famous—and it’s also fairly well-trod territory to suggest that Dark Star would become an antecedent to some of their more famous movies, Alien especially. It’s still an interesting thing to look at, though, and while it’s only partly a monster movie, the ways it reflects on (and parodies) present and past Science Fiction trends makes it one of the missing links that illuminates the through-lines of multiple genres’ histories.
Even though I’ve already written about a robot-based film for this series (which, to be fair, was explicitly a horror movie), I still often ask the question: do people other than me consider robots to be monsters (I mean, there’s a movie called Robot Monster) and/or fantasy creatures, or does their approximate existence in real life preclude them from that distinction? Mechanical beings existed in stories long before we had any capacity to create actual artificial intelligence, and for the most part their characteristics were purely in the realm of fantasy, allegory, or thought experiment—the fact that we have them buzzing around now, constantly being developed into more refined and capable forms, is more of a case of life imitating art (although, who says something in real life couldn’t also be an allegory or thought experiment?) Besides, to some people, AI will always be a little bit monstrous—an unnatural imitation of life, thinking and acting in ways outside the biological norm, completely aberrational and threatening. Much like in The Golem, these things are our creations, but we don’t really know how they will react to the world around them, or if we can maintain our power over them.
Recently, I’ve read two pieces of literature from the past—one of them predating the term “robot” and many of our notions about them, and one fully in the thick of science fiction’s historical development— that exemplify many of the ideas that make robots so fascinating and also frightening, but also present interesting ideas about their relationship with life as we know it. Essentially, we have a proto-robot story that brings its own notions into them, and an innovation on the established view on robots, both providing a conception of them as, in a way, more part of the natural world than most people seem to consider, and in many ways, making them more like traditional monsters.
There are so many streaming services available now, so much content awaiting to become someone’s treadmill background noise, and I hear you asking, “Yes, but what kind of monster movies are on these things?” I’m glad you brought it up, entirely hypothetical person, because I plan to find out on this here website! I’ll be using some of my posts to explore the kind of monster-based content that is available to stream on all the less-than-major streaming services (because I already know how barren Netflix’s selection is), seeing who brings the most creature feature value. I think of this as a public service, but not necessarily the kind that is mandated by the courts.
First up, we’ll be checking out the Criterion Channel—home of film history, world cinema, mind-expanding arthouse classics, and a surprisingly robust collection of monster movies, including most of the Showa Godzilla films. They also have The X From Outer Space (AKA Giant Space Monster Guilala), the only kaiju outing from one of Japan’s oldest major film studios, Shochiku, and the missing final piece of the sixties Monster Boom that I began writing about last year. 1966/1967 were the years all the big players in Japanese cinema and television were trying to cash in on the love of rubber suit monsters—which also overlapped with the period where Shochiku was going hard into Science Fiction/Horror films, of which this was the first (the rest are also available on Criterion Channel.) As we saw in the other Monster Boom subjects, there was often an attempt for the non-Toho studios to find some way to distinguish their monsters from all the others, and it seems like the Sci-Fi angle is about as close to a trademark as X really gets…aside from its kooky monster.
Many mainstream movies now are made up of references to a vast network of interrelated movies and TV shows and whatever else—having these big universes to prop up stories with signifiers seems to be part of the appeal. That was true when I first saw the subject of this post a few years ago, and is even truer now—but as close as Hollywood genre movies (especially superhero ones) have gotten to matching the overwhelmingly reference-heavy sugar rush of Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie (that title!), there’s a purity to its nonsense that I don’t think they’ve reached. Being a spin-off of a spin-off of the Ultraman series, there are points where it seems like it doesn’t care at all about slowing down for anyone not deeply entrenched in the forty year history of the franchise, breathlessly introducing ideas and characters that could be callbacks or completely brand new, but it can be hard to tell for even someone like me, who has done some deep diving into that history. When I think about something made for fans first and everyone else maybe sixth or seventh, I still think of this—the difference here being that while a modern superhero movie will reference movies that came out within the last ten years, this is bringing in things from TV shows going back decades, including the original actors themselves. That, and it’s also clearly trying to take the franchise in new directions, complicating matters further. What I’m saying is that this movie is very busy.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 