Congo (1995)

Before the year’s out, I’d be remiss not to take one last dive into the short-lived but intriguing Hollywood dalliance with the creature feature in the nineties, a trend that was unarguably spurred on by Jurassic Park. None of the subsequent follow-up movies is more directly connected to JP than Congo, another genre blockbuster based on a Michael Crichton novel that not only features special effects by Stan Winston and Co., but Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Frank Marshall in the director’s chair (one of Marshall’s previous directorial efforts was Arachnophobia, a missing piece of nineties creature feature history that will gets its due on this site eventually.) While its ambitions are certainly on a smaller scale than its predecessor—bringing to life a bunch of mutant gorillas is not quite as impressive as animating dinosaurs—through its rollicking adventure structure and jungle setting, I have no doubts it was trying to bring in at least some of the vast audience that the previous Critchton adaptation got. However, even if many of the surface elements remain similar, the explicitly throwback nature of this story makes for a different beast,

Jurassic Park (1993)

The greatest trick a monster movie can pull is convincing everyone it’s not actually a monster movie, and that’s a trick that Steven Spielberg has managed to pull off twice in his career. I’m not saying that Spielberg’s contention that they treated the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park like real animals and not generic movie monsters is untrue, I just think that it is almost impossible to portray dinosaurs in film without being pulled by the gravity of the monster movie. As I have argued before, the history of dinosaurs in movies and the history of monster movies are irrevocably intertwined, the latter still spiritually aligned with the timeless desire to see these seemingly impossible creatures alive in some fashion, a dream that only the medium of film was able to materialize—from Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen onward, every advance in the portrayal of fictional creatures was applied to dinosaurs, and vice-versa. I also think anyone who loves dinosaurs—and Jurassic Park alone created another new generation of miniature paleontology freaks—loves them because they are both real animals and also monstrous, wonderful to imagine and terrifying to behold. By acknowledging that complicated appreciation of the subject, Jurassic Park introduced something bold and resonant to movies beyond just the ballyhooed technological breakthroughs and changes to the very concept of Hollywood blockbusters that it ushered in.

The Relic (1997)

Once again, I watch a monster movie made in what would seem to be a more modern time (albeit, over twenty-five years ago), and what strikes me is how much it still adheres to the half-century-old structures and ideas. Opening with a white researcher experiencing something strange among a mysterious indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest, and then sending something equally mysterious back home in marked crates, is one of the hoariest old cliches in the book—you could easily see a version of this story made in 1957, the details changed but the spirit intact. The details, ultimately, are the things that make something like The Relic feel like a 1997 movie, planting this classical B-movie plot into the violent, flippant world of an R-rated nineties thriller, with a monster that can be portrayed more “realistically” by Stan Winston Studio’s advanced animatronic puppets and a smattering of nineties CGI rather than a guy in a suit.

Leviathan (1989)

Released at the tail end of the eighties, Leviathan followed a string of major projects for Stan Winston—he had worked with Rob Bottin on The Thing, and after opening Stan Winston Studio, crafted the effects for The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator (as well as Invaders From Mars and Pumpkinhead), establishing that team to be the top studio for creature effects in Hollywood. Winston himself was well past his Gargoyles mask-masking days, acting as Producer of Creature Effects alongside his crew, including Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. (the latter once again tasked with wearing the monster suit), who would move on to Tremors immediately after this. With those in mind, one can’t help but look at Leviathan as a victory lap, the kind of movie that these people could make in their sleep. It doesn’t change the game like Stan Winston Studios prior projects, but it allows them another chance to show why they got those earlier movies in the first place.

Gargoyles (1972)

Monster movies were in a bit of a slump in the seventies, but began to pick up steam starting in the eighties. This, I think, can primarily be attributed to the rise of increasingly complicated special effects, and the dedicated studios producing those effects that started pushing the limits on the imagination and believability of monsters in film. Once monsters stopped looking so much like guys in rubber suits, a number of possibilities began to open up, and movie studios noticed. Stan Winston and his studio were among the pioneers in that space, providing award-winning effects for some of the biggest movies of the eighties and nineties.

But before he could be the director of Pumpkinhead, Winston had to start somewhere, and that somewhere was the 1972 TV movie Gargoyles, his first credited work as a make-up artist (a credit that he apparently had to fight for), which won the 1973 Emmy in the make-up category alongside effects overseers Ellis Burman Jr. (“prop manufacturer” for Prophecy) and Del Armstrong. You can tell that they really wanted to emphasize the make-up effects in this thing because they include several publicity shots and scenes of the titular gargoyles in the opening narration as it slips from quoting Paradise Lost to giving an entire history of gargoyles before we’ve had a chance to catch our breath. Seeing the monsters before the movie even begins would seemingly spoil the surprise, but I guess the question is…what surprise? This is a TV movie made in 1972.

Invaders From Mars (1953 & 1986)

The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch has had me thinking about horror stories for children on and off for the last few months—that was a movie that completely homed in on a very specific kind of dread aimed squarely at kids, the sense of a family in collapse, the people you love suddenly turning against you, or authority figures simply not listening. An older and influential movie in that vein is Invaders From Mars, an early entry in the 1950s Science Fiction film boom that was apparently made in a rush in order to beat the George Pal-produced War of the Worlds to theatres (giving it the distinction as the first colour alien movie in American theatres)—it’s a smaller film, very clearly, but trades the spectacle of the bigger alien invasion movies with a nightmare scenario that aims squarely at the kids in the audience, utilizing many of the same triggers that Snake Girl eventually would. Although it might come off as hokey to modern audiences at times, its sometimes very inventive concepts scarred/inspired a generation of genre film fans—and to prove that, we need only look at the fact that one of the most influential horror directors of all time remade it in the mid-eighties, attempting to retain its atmosphere while updating its visuals to appeal to a modern audience.

Pumpkinhead (1988)

To think, I haven’t written about a single Stan Winston movie yet, despite his prominence and importance to movie special effects and to movie monsters in particular. Winston and his team are responsible for the effects of some of the biggest movies of the eighties and nineties, but Winston himself only directed a few himself (which includes both A Gnome Named Gnorm and the Michael Jackson “Ghosts” video, and it’s hard to tell which is a more ignoble mark on his record), with Pumpkinhead being his first. Of course, you’d expect a movie directed by a guy who is a specialist in animatronics and detailed monster costumes to mostly be a straightforward vehicle for both (not unlike what Equinox was doing for creature effects in the late sixties/early seventies), but it actually manages to mash together a lot of different ideas, producing something that is never really just one thing. It’s a backwoods supernatural horror story, a melancholy morality play, a killer-chasing-young-people flick—I thought Equinox was a movie that was just looking for the most efficient path to justifying having a bunch of monsters on screen, but Pumpkinhead puts in a surprising amount of work into feeling like some legitimate modern folklore.