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.
In another time, on another website, I wrote parallel analyses of a Godzilla cartoon and a King Kong cartoon, two series with no real relationship to each other that nonetheless called for comparison due to the title monsters’ interlocking history. Decades later, television was briefly rocked by the arrival of another Godzilla cartoon and another King Kong cartoon (and not the other otherKing Kong cartoon that I already wrote about), but this time their proximity was far closer and their parallel existence seemed far more intentional. Wikipedia and the fan sites that steal from Wikipedia claim that Kong: The Animated Series, a product of the Bohbot/BKN cartoon factory alongside French animation studios Ellipsanime and M6, was created to “rival” the FOX-airing Godzilla: The Series, starting its two-season, forty-episode run just as the other series was ending, airing briefly on FOX and in syndication from 2000 to 2001. As one would expect from anything said about a piece of pop culture ephemera on the Internet, there is no source for that claim, and most of the surviving press releases and industry pieces from the time I browsed made no mention of Godzilla—but I can at least understand where the assumption came from. In the year 2000, with nothing going on in the series movie-wise, what other reason would someone have to make a King Kong cartoon but to pit it against the ape’s scaly counterpart?
Of course, the caveat there is that, despite all appearances, Kong: The Animated Series is probably not an official King Kong cartoon (I also think it stole its logo from the movie Congo, which definitely won’t be featured on this site soon very soon.) Rather than a revival, even if an odd one, this is actually a clever theft that likely fooled every child in its audience with its quasi-authenticity. But, as it turns out, that is only one of the many strange things I discovered by digging up this copyright-eliding incarnation of the world’s premier giant primate.
I don’t think I’ve ever written about Mike Mignola on here—rather unfortunate, as he’s a figure of some significance in the wider monster culture space, and one of the most unique artists in the mainstream/mainstream adjacent comics sphere of the last thirty-plus years. His major work is, of course, Hellboy and its various comics and multimedia offshoots, an entire universe likely worth exploring in depth at some point. In Hellboy, a milieu with some moderate superhero influence also becomes one big repository for every occult, paranormal, or folkloric concept Mignola and his collaborators see fit to include, everything from werewolves and vampires and black magic to man-made abominations, space aliens, and other-dimensional eldritch entities. It’s a classic Monster Mash series—maybe one of the classic Monster Mash series—a form pioneered by lifelong horror/monster fiction fans to encompass all their favourite creepy things (for other examples of this, there’s Castlevania, or if you want a more kid-friendly version, maybe even Hilda.) Even with all the obvious influences going into the work, though, Mignola manages to put his own stamp on it, especially with his stylized, shadow-lined artwork, which finds the appealing middle point between German Expressionism and Jack Kirby.
For someone looking for a bit of Mignola’s style in a form more succinct than the sprawling Hellboy and BPRD universe, there’s The Amazing Screw-On Head, a singular take on very similar material whose primary difference from Mignola’s main series is its more overt focus on comedy. Originally published as a one-off comic from Mignola’s regular collaborators at Dark Horse Comics (and since included in a book with several other short comics), it gained additional notoriety when it was adapted into a single pilot episode for a potential animated series on Sci-Fi Channel in 2006, a few years before the channel rebranded itself as the ever-perplexing SyFy. The pilot was one of those early forays into Internet focus testing, with Sci-Fi uploading the full thing on their website and using the feedback to determine if they should greenlight more episodes—which they did not, in fact, do. Watching it again after seventeen years, it feels like something very specific to its era of pop culture, and probably the single most faithful attempt to bring Mike Mignola’s art to a non-comics medium.
Little Otik (Czech title Otesánek, sometimes referred to as Greedy Guts) is about bringing the punitive moral logic of old European folk tales into the modern world. In those stories, no macabre retaliation is too over-the-top for a perceived slight against universal propriety, any deviation from tradition or against common sense justifying a horrendous course correction inflicted on people guilty and non-guilty—to most people hearing those tales today, they come across as horrors whose purpose is hidden under layers of sadism. There is some darkly humorous joy to be derived from these things, with their distinct lack of proportion, and Little Otik even amplifies the surrealistic and disturbing aspects by couching its story squarely in one of the most vulnerable aspects of humanity: birth and parenting. As with most of the work of Czech stop motion animator and director Jan Švankmajer, who made this movie with design work from his wife and fellow surrealist artist Eva Švankmajerová, what we experience is an artistically impeccable nightmare.
All the way back in my post about King of the Monsters, I briefly mentioned the 2003 Playstation 2 title War of the Monsters, a game stomping the same grounds as SNK’s monster wrestling dust-up, but separated by an ocean and a decade’s worth of technological development in video games. I’ve stressed it over and over again that giant monsters are a topic that has been woefully underrepresented in the video game sphere—a situation that annoyingly does not right itself in the time between posts where I talk about it (although that GigaBash game from last year might be worth looking at)—and for the longest time, War of the Monsters was probably the highest profile entry, or at the least the highest profile one that didn’t have Godzilla’s name plastered on the box. It had the pedigree of being a first-party Playstation game released during the PS2’s unstoppable reign as the top console, and was developed by Incog Inc. (formerly the much more sensibly-named Incognito Studios), a company formed by the lead developers of Sony’s popular Twisted Metal series, alongside Sony’s stalwart Santa Monica Studio—the “original concept” was provided by Twisted Metal and God of War lead David Jaffe, back when he made video games instead of embarrassing Youtube videos.
There is an obvious logic to getting some the leading minds behind the car combat genre to tackle a giant monster game—they are both, after all, concepts that revolve around massive property damage, and in terms of raw tech, Incog could probably carry over the physics engine that powered the PS2 Twisted Metal entry that released a year-and-a-half earlier. You can feel the car combat roots in the basic feel of War of the Monsters, the way it moves and the way it’s structured, although it also attempts to go back to Twisted Metal‘s origins in the fighting game genre in a more direct manner, with hand-to-hand combat rather than a back-and-forth bombardment of projectiles (although there’s plenty of projectiles in this as well). It’s easy to see that this game is making a genuine attempt to be both a appealing competitive smash-em-up and a loving homage to the giant monster movie genre—in some ways, it represents the last hurrah for a specific view of creature features, and a last ditch effort to take what King of the Monsters was trying to do and get it “right.”
If we’re talking about Lovecraft adaptations, we’re eventually going to circle back to Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, who were the first ones to really make effective cinematic use of ol’ Howard’s stories in Re-Animator and From Beyond, capturing the eldritch universe while infusing it with horror-comedy sensibilities and carnal undertones—they get the original work, and they also make it their own, what a novel concept! The two of them would periodically venture back into Lovecraftian territory in the nineties, and at the turn of the millennium produced an adaption of one the major works in the Cthulhu Mythos, 1931 novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth (while borrowing the name from the related short story “Dagon.”) As a story of unspeakable Elder Gods and the mutating effect they have on humans that come into contact with them, it contains many of the recurring motifs of the Mythos (including some of the Really Questionable ones that we’ll get into), and like the previous adaptations directed by Gordon and written by frequent collaborator Dennis Paoli, those themes are filtered their own parallel preoccupations.
Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, which aired six episodes on the UK’s Channel 4 in early 2004,came out of the same British alternative comedy scene that fostered previous subject The Mighty Boosh, and both not only share many of the same actors, but a similar outlook that combines wry dialogue and a love of the utterly ridiculous. Matthew Holness’ Garth Marenghi, “author, dreamweaver, visionary, plus actor”, is the image of a pompous hack whose astronomical self-importance never allows him to notice his own clear lack of talent, and the show itself becomes a parade of cliches and ineptitude taken to the extreme. But the brilliance of Darkplace is not that it’s full of things that are blatantly wrong, but that all those things are wrong and yet the mastermind behind them still thinks he is somehow making great art—what Holness is parodying is not simply wilfully mediocre storytellers, who are content just churning out trash without a care (although Marenghi also admits to being “one of the few writers who has written more books than they’ve read”), but the kind of superstar writers who let any amount of success get to their heads.
As a prolific author of horror novels in the eighties, the first possible inspiration for Marenghi people mention is Stephen King at his most popular (and most cocaine-fuelled), but he seems just as much inspired by local UK purveyors of over-the-top schlock like James Herbert, author of The Rats (I would think the quality of Merenghi’s writing is based more on the latter than the former.) Even though Darkplace was short-lived and little-viewed when it originally aired, it has gained a cult following in the years since, and Holness has used that to not only periodically revisit the characters from the series, but to move into directing legitimate horror movies with his 2018 film Possum, and will soon publish a short story collection written in-character as Marenghi.
Sometimes, a movie is just a vehicle for a cool monster idea you had—it’s a time-honoured tradition, really, maybe as old as the genre itself, and it became even more noticeable when superstar effects and make-up people started getting the clout to direct their own movies (is it not what Zeiramor Pumpkinhead was, ultimately?) For as highbrow as I like to position myself on this, a site about monsters, I also enjoy just seeing a neat monster concept in action, even it doesn’t without go for any deep commentary on the world from which the monster emerged (not that it won’t stop me from trying to mine for it.) In the end, we are all fans of monster movies because we like the monsters themselves, with everything else just adding some additional spice to the proceedings. The risk in that proposal is that, with everything else in the story primarily serving as a conduit for the monster ideas, the execution of that monster better be there, and that monster better be something truly out there and original, because you have nothing else to latch on to. The independently-made Splinter is an example of that sort of movie, and thankfully, it succeeds in both the originality and execution of its monster, making for a swift, raw horror experience.
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.
Reading the Cryptozoology literature, you will inevitably come across the story of the Beast of Gévaudan, an animal that purportedly slaughtered up to a hundred people (or maybe even hundreds, the record isn’t entirely clear) over three years in 1760s France. After numerous hunts and false victories, the killings finally ended after a particularly large wolf was shot, stuffed, and mounted in King Louis XV’s court. The larger-than-life descriptions of the beast given by surviving victims and hunters and fuzzy historical records has led to endless speculation about just what kind of animal the beast really was (it’s even become a common reference for werewolf stories)—and while the consensus, for the most part, is that the deaths were the work of a wolf, or more likely several wolves, the French production The Brotherhood of the Wolf asks the provocative question “what if it wasn’t a wolf, what if it was, like…a different animal?” It also asks another equally provocative question, which is whether this piece of French history could not be made into an epic-length martial arts action movie.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 