Monsters (2010)

It didn’t take long for the new wave of indie and lower budget creature features to get noticed by the big studios—after the 2000s and very early 2010s saw accomplishments and milestones in genre filmmaking like previous Creature Classic subject The Descent, many of the directors of those projects were being recruited to helm big budget blockbusters. The ostensible purpose of plucking upstarts from the film festival and fan circuits was to lend artistic credibility to what have mostly been franchise revivals, suggesting that the studios were looking for new takes on classic concepts that would speak to the modern audiences just as the smaller films had. In practice, it was simply appropriating any credibility those filmmakers had while taking advantage of their lack of Hollywood clout to force them into the studio assembly line. You might be able to detect something of their previous creativity once they had their names on a major movie, but it was a gamble whether or not these directors ever got a real opportunity to live up to their earlier promise.

Digital effects artist-turned-director Gareth Edwards is one example of that phenomenon: his debut film Monsters is a modern reconfiguration of the giant monster movie that earned much acclaim and almost immediately got him the job of shepherding the second American Godzilla film that released in 2014. That is a mighty quick and impressive turnaround, going from a modest kaiju project to the actual King of the Monsters in almost no time at all—but that’s how the indie-director-to-pipeline was accelerated back then, and you can see it even in the American Godzilla films that followed Edwards’, most of them directed by other directors who started out in the world of small scale cult genre films. Edwards has never really left the Hollywood system since making the leap, helming a Star Wars movie and currently directing yet another Jurassic Park sequel (taking over from another indie-genre-recruit from the early 2010s, Colin Trevorrow.) He also directed the completely original Sci-Fi movie The Creator last year, which attempts to bridge the gap between his smaller-scale starting point and all his franchise work.

So, based on the fact that this movie ultimately had a direct impact on the Godzilla series, Monsters is worth examining closer. What likely got Edwards’ work noticed in 2010 were the kind of small-scale innovations that give a worn out genre a new sense of life, many of them adaptive concessions to budgetary limitations, alongside a story and atmosphere that no big budget spectacle would likely ever attempt. In Monsters, you see larger-than-life creatures in ways that emphasize their mysterious and unknowable qualities while grounding everything else in a recognizable reality, making the disaster elements feel less like the building-smashing excess we’ve come to expect. Despite going from a movie that cost $500,000 to one that cost around $160,000,000, many of those innovations were still readily evident in Godzilla 2014—to a potentially annoying and ill-fitting degree, as some may argue, but it was going for something, at least.

It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987)

Some nine years after It Lives Again, Larry Cohen returned to his monster movie debut for one final bow—but this was Cohen returning after expanding his repertoire and innovating in the genre in the eighties, first with Q – The Winged Serpent and then The Stuff, both classics in their own right. The increasingly over-the-top and comedy-infused styles of those movie do in fact continue in It’s Alive III—sometimes in very direct ways, considering the actors involved—keeping it in line with Cohen’s eighties filmography; at the same time, it develops many of the themes and emotional beats that made the original It’s Alive and its supplementary first sequel into something genuinely special. Yes, these movies about murderous mutant babies carry all the marks of schlock genius, but as weird as it sounds, they also have a heart, and that makes something like Island of the Alive stand out just as much as…well, everything else in it.

Half Human (1955)

Half Human (original Japanese title The Beastman Snowman) exists as a curious footnote in the history of Toho’s monster movies—it is Ishiro Honda’s direct follow-up to Godzilla (which prevented him from directing the actual Godzilla sequel also released in 1955), with much of that film’s cast and crew carrying over, including effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, story originator Shigeru Kayama, and screenwriter Takeo Murata (also the writer of Godzilla Raids Again and Rodan), which subsequently became an obscurity whose original Japanese release has never officially appeared on home video (although that doesn’t prevent people from finding it if they look a little.) Like Godzilla, this movie’s American incarnation was a heavy edit job, lopping off over over thirty minutes of run time, radically altering the story and tone, and inserting scenes of American actors like John Carradine (who probably wouldn’t turn down a movie role even if you paid him to) to make it seem less foreign, and that version has been the only one easily available all this time. There’s a reason for that pattern of unavailability that we’ll get to, but it has in some ways rendered this movie as much of a phantom as the Abominable Snowman at its centre, a missing link between Godzilla and the Honda-directed monster movies to follow.

“The Curse of Fenric” (S26E8-11)

It is 1989, and Doctor Who is on its last legs. You may have noticed that I skipped over all of the serials featuring Colin Baker in the lead role—this is not simply because of the poor reputation most of the stories have even among fans of the series, but because none of them offer a particularly compelling monster-centric story to write about. Things started looking up at least a little bit in 1987, when the show went through a small-scale creative overhaul, with a new batch of writers behind the scenes and a new lead in Sylvester McCoy, but none of the active attempts to make the series more ambitious and relevant saved it from going on an indefinite hiatus just as the eighties ended, leaving it at a still-impressive twenty-six consecutive years on television.

The three years with McCoy and lead writer Andrew Cartmel carry a very distinctive atmosphere, one that attempts to mine the best parts of the series’ past, especially its sense of imagination and its capacity for moments of child-friendly horror, and infuse a puckish kind of whimsy and more focus on the characterization of the Doctor and his companion. “The Curse of Fenric”, the classic series’ penultimate story, carries with it the DNA of previous serials we’ve talked about: there’s a the moody atmosphere and marching army of monsters of “The Web of Fear”, a somewhat Quatermass-esque combination of mythology and Sci-Fi similar to “The Awakening”, and even the winking social commentary of “Carnival of Monsters.” Another similarity to “Web of Fear” is its attempt to provide a new interpretation of a well-established monster—but this goes much further in taking its inspirations and playing around with the iconography.

Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (2013)

Journey to the West is one of the great works of literature in Chinese culture, a story so ubiquitous that its characters are instantly recognizable, which in turn allows them to be placed into new contexts and new interpretations while maintaining the mythical qualities that made them so captivating in the first place. Hong Kong director Stephen Chow, who gained international acclaim for slapstick martial arts classics like Kung-Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, aims for reinterpretation with his own take on the story, producing a genre-hopping epic full of the brilliantly-staged action and comedy that are his trademarks, and essentially acts as a completely original prologue to Journey to the West. That doesn’t mean that it feels like a film inaccessible to those who haven’t read the novel, nor does it lead to a plot whose conclusion feels necessarily preordained—instead, Chow, co-director Derek Kwok, and their crew of co-writers provide new depths to the book’s central characters, giving them full, humanistic arcs that demonstrate the spiritual and moral power of perseverance, forgiveness, and humanity, and how even monsters deserve a second chance. For a film that contains all the spectacle one expects from a big film—and the combination of Chow’s style and a recognizable story made it the highest-grossing film in China’s history at the time—it’s also very intelligent and emotionally engaging.

BTTM FDRS

The 2019 graphic novel BTTM FDRS finds its monster in the legacy of gentrification and exploitation, with beautiful ideas twisted and then abandoned, and the people on the lower rungs of society left to deal with the resulting mess. Writer Ezra Claytan Daniels (author of 2018’s Upgrade Soul) and artist Ben Passmore (creator of numerous comics across mediums including the completely unsparing Sports Is Hell) make no bones about the racial make-up of both sides of that equation, showing its black protagonists putting up with the indifference and hostility of white people in positions of relative power, something used as both a source of horror and of comedy. This is a story that reflects a wider recognition of social stratification, a heady mix of self-consciousness, guilt and anger, and that complexity puts it well beyond just a simple vehicle for social critique and a side of the grotesque—although it is also both of those things, rather pointedly.

“The Things”

Illustration by Olli Hihnala. All images in this post were collected on Peter Watts personal website.

There are certainly Sci-Fi/creature feature/horror movies made throughout the ages where it may not be unjustified to question why an alien that is apparently intelligent enough to build a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel would land on Earth and immediately start acting like a violent, mindless animal. It’s a recurring logic hole generally papered over, thinly, in order to justify traditional genre entertainment. Even The Thing From Another World, the starting point for many of these extraterrestrial thrillers, only provides a vague sort of justification for its monster’s behaviour, and it actually does more plot logic legwork than many of the films that followed it. In general, the alien’s perspective is not always given a lot of thought in these things, although it’s an area where even an otherwise rote story can really distinguish itself…when there’s the motivation to do so.

Speaking of The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is another one of those movies where the question applies, probably even more than the original. It features one of the most inventively-portrayed alien creatures in film history, but its true form is so incomprehensible that it seems almost impossible to imagine it piloting a spaceship—but it not only does that, it also has the knowledge to build another one from scrap parts. I’ve always thought of the titular Thing as being like an intelligent communicable disease, seeking only to propagate itself and absorbing whatever knowledge and technical skill it needs to do so. Other people have their own theories about this, but only Sci-Fi writer/marine biologist Peter Watts, author of the evocative first contact novel Blindsight, managed to get his version published in Clarkesworld, one of the leading English language SF publications. “The Things”, his re-interpretation of the dynamics of John Carpenter’s version of the story, focuses entirely on the alien’s perspective, giving us a surprisingly benevolent take on the shapeshifting flesh beast that infects everything around it—as it turns out, such a thing is possible.

Spring (2014)

Always on the lookout for monster movies that venture outside the norm, writer-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s Spring caught my eye—it even received plaudits from Guillermo del Toro, who referred to it as a “Lovecraftian film.” I personally think you’d have to have a pretty broad definition of “Lovecraftian” for this to fit the label, but I guess I can also see where he’s coming from—this is dealing with things strange and ancient that span across human history, things with a certain inexplicable nature, and things that really blur the line between Science Fiction and Fantasy (which is sort of theme in the movie itself.) Despite what some websites will tell you, though, this is definitely not a horror movie, even with some of the grotesque imagery and violent moments (this is the same sort of dispute with online resource genre tags I got into with Lamb—why must these massive websites be so very wrong all the time!), but a fantastical romantic drama, which is certainly unique, and is totally up del Toro’s alley given his own monster filmography.

Gorgo (1961)

While the giant monster movie genre originated in America, it was the productions by Japanese studios like Toho that really gave the genre its own topoi. When studios outside of Toho tackled the subject from the late fifties and into the sixties, it was always in the shadow of Godzilla and its successors, and it’s interesting to see how they responded. Surprisingly few of them really attempted to utilize the tokusatsu kaiju style, instead attempting to keep the stop motion tradition of King Kong alive—Gorgo is one of the few examples of a non-Japanese studio tackling suitmation.

You could call Gorgo a British homage to Godzilla, with “homage” being quite generous—on the other hand, Godzilla itself was a “homage” to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, so you know, turnabout is fair play. Who is the director of this? Why, it’s Eugène Lourié, director of (the non-Ray Harryhausen parts) of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, “homaging” the “homage” to his own movie! It was also the third time he directed a light variation of “giant marine reptile attacks a city”, with the other two being The Beast and1959’s The Giant Behemoth, the latter featuring stop motion by King Kong‘s Willis O’Brien ( Lourié also directed previous site subject The Colossus of New York between those two.) Two years after Behemoth and yet another lizard from millions of years ago is battering London—but despite the clear attempt to ape from Godzilla (and despite it featuring no apes), one of the ways it differentiates itself is by eschewing the nuclear radiation fears that animated both Toho’s and Lourié’s own movies and going back to ape the plot, and sympathetic monster(s), of King Kong (which does feature apes.) Coming out in the same year as Toho’s Mothra, which also has a Kong-esque plot, there seemed to have been a convergent sense of nostalgia in the giant monster genre at the time.

I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958)

I’m happy to have finally written something about The Thing From Another World, in part because it contextualizes many of the other Sci-Fi creature features of the fifties I have and will continue to write about, showing how each of them is a variation on a theme established at the beginning of the decade. The histrionically-titled I Married a Monster From Outer Space is another one of those variations, and much like The Thing, you can very easily read a lot of specifically Cold War paranoia into its story of unfeeling foreign agents taking over the lives of average Americans to further some secret agenda (it was shown on a double bill with The Blob, another one of those anxiety-drenched thrillers.) In that way it more specifically borrows from another fifties Sci-Fi mainstay, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, showing that you can’t even trust the people closest to you.

With all that said, this movie is not as straightforward as you might think, a light but fascinating deviation from the formula. For one, it has a specific vision of paranoia that goes beyond just looking for Communist subversives in the community. Most importantly, it makes a narrative choice that alters its tone compared to The Thing or Body Snatchers: it allows us to understand the motivation of the titular monster, and maybe even feel bad for it.