Arachnophobia (1990)

Last year, I delved into the strain of big studio monster movies that popped up throughout the nineties—an era emboldened by advances in special effects and a sense that creature features could be made even more palatable to a mainstream audience through genre mixing and nominally self-aware writing. The first movie of era, Tremors, demonstrated those latter points by taking a mostly traditional monster movie premise and imbuing it with a goofy, blue collar sensibility—one must remember, though, that Tremors was not particularly successful in theatres, and only gained its notoriety from home video and television airings afterwards. Arachnophobia, which premiered six months later, carries the same basic tenor, but attracted a bigger initial audience—so it could be argued that this is the true starting point for the dark comedy sensibility that permeated so many of the subsequent creature features.

Arachnophobia did have one major advantage: whereas something like Tremors can only borrow Steven Spielberg vibes, this movie is a true Amblin production—working with Disney’s slightly-less-than-reputable Hollywood Pictures label—with Spielberg on board to produce a movie directed by longtime collaborator Frank Marshall (later to direct previous subject Congo.) This pretty openly formalizes the way these movies attempted to recapture the most successful elements of Jaws, particularly the more grounded approach for both the characters and the thrills. Maybe even more than Jaws, this movie plays into existing, everyday fears—I mean, the title alone tells you that—by exaggerating them just enough, and by filling the scenes in between the horror with a colourful supporting cast that have a particular small town quality, creating a movie approximation of a recognizable world. Just beneath the surface of that, you can find what would become a consistent thread in the next few years of monster horror: the way these elements reveal themselves to be something of a facade, a way to grab people into seeing something as ludicrous as the older monster movies and as mean-spirited as less mainstream films, a prototype form of pulpy excess that would eventually be refined into the spectacle of Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park.

Sakuya: Slayer of Demons (2000)

How long has it been since I wrote about a yōkai movie? Clearly, far too long.

I’ve already written quite a bit about the long history of tokusatsu depictions of Japanese spirits and monsters, which bridge the traditional stories and the modern kaiju and kaijin material that take inspiration from them. Considering that deeply-rooted connection, you can understand why some tokusatsu production lifers would eventually choose to make something yōkai-related—and Sakuya: Slayer of Demons (Japanese subtitle Yōkaiden) is a prime example of just that. Director Tomoo Haraguchi’s “tokusatsu lifer” status is inarguable: he started out working on models and make-up as far back as Ultraman 80 in the early eighties, eventually working on to previous site subject Ultra Q The Movie and the the nineties Gamera trilogy (more recently, he has some credited design work on Shin Ultraman.) The movie he produced is a smaller scale project that showcases some of what classical effects could do in the new millennium, one set of traditions nestled within a story based on a much older set of traditions.

The Movie Monster Game

The Movie Monster Game, well, it’s a game about movie monsters. Released in 1986 (the same year as the even more famous giant monster game Rampage) for the Apple II and Commodore 64 and developed by Epyx, a company that gained a name for itself in the eighties PC game space with titles like Impossible Mission and California Games, it comes from a very different epoch than the previous giant monster-based game I’ve written about, a strange and experimental time when game design didn’t always have clear rules, and where a degree of abstraction was still present as a game could only convey so much visual information (Epyx’s earlier giant monster title, Crush, Crumble and Chomp!, a strategy game released in 1981, provides an even primitive-looking example.) Despite that, The Movie Monster Game actually shares a lot in common with later entries in this category, especially in the presentation–decades before War of the Monsters surrounded itself with a nostalgic metafiction wrapper, Epyx went even further, not just basing its menus around a movie theatre motif (complete with “trailers” for other Epyx games that appear before you begin playing), but structuring their game as essentially a movie you construct from various component parts pulled from numerous giant monster movies across the subgenre’s history. Even this far back, you can see that the artifice of these stomp-em-ups, and the context of the audience itself, was considered an indelible part of the experience.

That’s all well and good, but there’s a major advantage that The Movie Monster Game has that even later creature feature games could not pull off: alongside a group of “original” monsters that directly homage specific movies and tropes, they managed to officially licence Godzilla from Toho, putting the King of the Monsters prominently on the package for all to see, and making it the first video game released outside of Japan to feature him. Epyx was not an unknown company in 1986, but even so, getting the sometimes fickle Toho to lend out their star monster to an American game developer at that point still seems like a feat (it is equally surprising that they agreed to let Godzilla and Pals appear in the recent indie brawler GigaBash, a game that I still intend to play.) This was not long after the release of The Return of Godzilla (and its English release Godzilla 1985), which at least put it outside the lowest periods for the franchise, and leads me to believe that this collaboration was not an act of desperation–maybe they were just feeling generous. In any case, Godzilla’s fully approved presence in something with as definitive a title as The Movie Monster Game certainly gives it an air of legitimacy.

Shin Kamen Rider (2023)

The third of the Shin series, this one written and directed by Hideaki Anno solo, follows the general trends of the previous two by returning to the first incarnation of a massive tokusatsu institution and sussing out the meaning inherent within it. As in the Anno-written Shin Ultraman, the type of examination at heart of this update of Shotaro Ishinomori’s insect-themed, monster-battling superhero is entirely compatible with an equal amount of superfan-pleasing callbacks and repurposed imagery–even though I’m not as familiar with Kamen Rider as I am with Ultraman, I can see still see that this is all coming from a place of respect for the originators of the series, even if it’s not always as direct as the previous movie (less outright use of the original soundtrack, for example, although older tracks are remixed for key moments.)  Even more than in Shin Ultraman, I think Shin Kamen Rider’s delirious narrative momentum comes from its own visual and conceptual idiosyncrasies.

(A reminder: Shin Kamen Rider is not the follow-up to previous subject Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue. That two completely unrelated movies called Shin Kamen Rider could be released decades apart is one way to know just how long running and arcane this franchise is–another way you know is because Shin Kamen Rider isn’t even the first time Toei has put out a cinematic reboot of the 1971 Kamen Rider.)

Quiet, Please – “The Thing on the Fourble Board”

About ten years ago, I was seeing radio horror programs, usually from the forties, passed around on my usual online haunts. It’s always interesting to me when something that old unexpectedly finds new life on the Internet. Remember when people were suddenly obsessed with Dracula when it was retold through Tumblr? I’ve observed that kind of thing happening on occasion, and while it’s sometimes difficult to tell if all the people suddenly buzzing about a viral golden oldie aren’t coming from a place of weird kitschy irony, I think it’s safe to say that the starting point is usually someone with a genuine interest in these historical pieces of entertainment, sharing their finds not just out of a semi-detached academic curiosity, but because they like the style of this old thing, even if it’s “dated.”

Radio shows have been one example of the outmodded finding strange new life in current times—you can find quite a few them uploaded to sites like Youtube, as bizarre as that sounds. Radio used to be the broadcast medium of choice once upon a time, the source for mainstream thrills—it was, to say something dumb and obvious, the television of its day. When a person unfamiliar with radio plays encounters these shows, they may recognize all the ways TV takes after this style, while also having a hard time adjusting to all the idiosyncrasies the medium developed. It’s familiar, and yet so different…on the other hand, we’ve also been seeing more than a few podcasts start telling stories in a similar manner. A revival of that style may indeed have led to some seeking out its historical antecedents.

Among those old horror programs uploaded to Youtube (the video part usually just a single image of a haunted-looking radio sitting in a foreboding void), the one I really saw get talked up was the anthology series Quiet, Please, and what was one of its most famous episodes, “The Thing on the Fourble Board.” Being interested in Things, it immediately drew my attention, and what I found was an interesting monster story in a style I had little familiarity with at the time. One would probably not expect to be creeped out by a radio program from 1948, but at least on first listening, the way this particular story utilizes the radio medium is clever, intentionally ridiculous, and, at times, unnerving.

The Ship of Monsters (1960)

There’s very few things as enjoyable as discovering another good vintage B-movie—the quaintness that can be found in the best low budget flicks from the fifties and sixties has a special feeling all its own, which is why I’m always on the lookout for ones I’ve never heard of. As a Mexican Sci-Fi comedy musical creature feature, because it is indeed all those things, The Ship of Monsters (Le nave de los monstruos) is another great find, a film that revels in the silliness of its genre and the limitations of its own budget in a way that’s difficult not to admire. I usually wait until the second paragraph to outline the plot, but I feel it’s necessary to get that out early in order to really get you on board: after atomic radiation kills off all the men on the planet Venus, two bikini-clad saviours are sent to scour the galaxy for male specimens of different species to help repopulate the planet with the best combination of genes, and after picking up several monsters and putting them on a ship (they are certainly open-minded) as well as a lone robot, they have to make an emergency landing on Earth for repairs, and then meet up with a singing cowboy. Are things like this not the reason we have cinema?

Monster Multimedia: The Trap Door

Kids are an audience that is especially open to the appeal to the creepy and macabre, maybe because the idea of normalcy has yet to be hammered into them by the wider culture and they can see the fun in being so inherently repulsive, even if they aren’t one of the outsider kids to whom monsters and weird things are something they identify with—not that I would know anything about that. What that means is that there is a whole history of creepy entertainment aimed at the youth audience, and the more monstrous and unseemly, the more they latch onto it. The Trap Door, which aired forty episodes over two series in 1986 and 1990 (such is the inconsistent airing whims of British television) on two of the UK’s independent broadcasters, ITV and Channel 4, is as good an example of that aesthetic as any, following a group of clay animated (I won’t say “claymation” because I don’t want Will Vinton’s ghost to haunt me with spectral legal trouble) monsters in a spooky castle as they go about their strange days. Everything about the show, created by animators Charlie Mills and Terry Brain (the latter of whom would later go on to work at Aardman, makers of Wallace & Gromit), seems tailor-made for the anti-social child who gets a kick out of seeing bugs, worms, and bizarre creatures running around a chaotically protean plasticine world, full of raucous physical comedy (the kind of carefree love of nonsense that had been mostly stamped out in most contemporary cartoons in North America, as we have regularly seen on this website), but also a working class edge that adds even more colour to a series full of all-in-good-fun nastiness.

Blood Tea And Red String (2006)

Here’s something a little different: Blood Tea and Red String is an independently-made stop-motion animated film created by Christiane Cegavske over thirteen years (because making stop-motion by yourself is a long, laborious process), which by itself is an impressive feat. The film, hand-crafted over a period where professional-level filmmaking tools were not available to most, carries many of the purely tactile elements that give stop-motion a unique appeal: even if the things on screen don’t move like real things, they are, in fact, real objects, with a texture that is difficult to replicate digitally. The uncanny realm between the reality of the components and the unreality of its movement plays right into the surreal, dream-like fantasy of Blood Tea (which was clearly inspired by the stop-motion work of Jan Svankmajer), which presents a humanity-free world of inscrutable creatures, with no dialogue, but plenty of symbolism.

The Super Inframan (1975)

Though I try to be nuanced, my opinions on entertainment can sometimes reflect a duality of extremes: either you produce art that is genuinely thought-provoking, human, and finely-crafted, or you make pure style-over-substance spectacle, where the pursuit of excitement is more important than plot consistency and logic. If you’re not making high art, you might as well be making high schlock, without any pretensions—you’re more likely to create indelible images if you completely loosen yourself from the strictures of narrative and taste, and the best of it can create something engagingly surreal, where it’s not even possible to know what’s coming next. It actually takes a lot of creative ingenuity to do something like that! In my mind, the prime example of perfect high schlock is The Super Inframan, the 1975 martial arts/monster/superhero flick that was one of the genre experiments by the Shaw Brothers Studios, well-known for their long and influential history in the martial arts film business. To boil it down to its raw essence, Inframan is Shaw Brothers’ rip-off of Japanese tokusatsu shows, especially Kamen Rider and Ultraman (which were popular all over Asia at the time), with a movie budget and their own highly-skilled fight choreography—but that only begins to describe the craziness of it. Structured almost like a series of television episodes strung together, Inframan moves at a breakneck pace, rarely letting things up for a moment before barrelling into another fight scene with one of several bizarre rubber suit monster villains. This is a movie where nutty things are constantly happening, and it never stops being fun to watch.

Famously, this is also a movie that Roger Ebert reviewed mostly positively when it came out, and then changed his star rating over twenty years later because his opinion of it only improved over time (“I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film.”) He ended his original review by writing “When they stop making movies like Infra Man, a little light will go out of the world.” Having now watched it multiple times, I agree wholeheartedly.

The Magic Serpent (1966)

Here’s another Japanese period piece/fantasy film from 1966, but whereas Daimajin was only styled to resemble an old legend, The Magic Serpent (Kairyu Daikessen in Japan) is actually based on a famous Japanese fairy tale—specifically, the story of the ninja master Jiraiya, whose ability to shape-shift into a giant toad is likely the basis for every piece of Japanese pop culture that connects ninjas with amphibians. Considering the story is already about large animals duking it out, translating it into a full-on kaiju flick was probably a no-brainer, as well as a symbol of how the old stories of Japan had continuity with the new ones of the Monster Boom. Produced by powerhouse studio Toei—which would become the dominant force in tokusatsu television with their endless Kamen Rider and Super Sentai shows—it is definitely a much lighter piece of filmmaking than something like Daimajin, stagier and focusing a lot more on silly action set pieces, but at least it didn’t feel like I was watching the same movie again.