Mothra vs. Godzilla & Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)

1964 was the turning point for the Godzilla films—after ten years and four movies, the series not only solidified into what it would be for the rest of the Showa era, but what it would be in all the years beyond that. After hitting on the kaiju battle premise in Godzilla Raids Again, King Kong vs. Godzilla, demonstrated that having multiple monster headliners duking it out brought in audiences like nothing else. As we have seen in the sixty years since then, it’s a pitch that finds its way back into public favour even after a period of downtime—watching two or more big monsters fighting hits a primal nerve.

These shifts in focus inevitably changed how the stories were written—for one, humanity was no longer living in a world where monsters were a freakish and tragic aberration, but one where they are woven into the fabric of existence. More importantly, though, was how all of this altered the depiction of Godzilla, which spoke of changing attitudes in Toho and possibly in the populace. Although the tone of the movies had significantly softened after the stark nuclear terror of Ishiro Honda’s original, one thing that stuck around even with the relative optimism of Raids Again or the lighthearted spectacle of KKvG was the idea of Godzilla as the ultimate threat, a walking disaster that humanity must contend with again and again as a constant reminder of what they had brought upon themselves. In 1954, Godzilla’s atomic origins made it feel like a new existential problem for life itself—but what happens when that becomes normalized? If Godzilla is eventually part of everyday life, how are we supposed to see him? Could he even become something more than a menace?

Circumstances at Toho led to the regular monster movie crew producing two movies in the Godzilla series in 1964 (with Dogora released between them), and you can see the drastic shift in the tone of this series happen in real time as you watch them. Godzilla gets one more round as the antagonist that brings humans (and more benevolent monsters) together—but within a few months, the tables turn completely, and it is Godzilla himself that humanity turns to for help from an even greater threat. There is something of a logical through line in this—Godzilla’s subsequent change into monster hero did not come from nothing—but it still rather dramatically realigned how these movies would be made from then on.

Reptilicus (1962)

Early 1961 saw an unusual uptick in European-made giant monster movies: over two months, Gorgo and Konga premiered in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, while the Danish-made Reptilicus debuted in its home country. This represented a rather singular mad rush to cash in on the success of Godzilla and other Japanese-made monster movies, but it sputtered out as soon as it began, leaving us with only a few very odd attempts to recreate the kaiju film with different sensibilities. The rest of the world got their chance to partake in Denmark’s only giant monster movie after a year-long delay, as instead of simply dubbing the existing movie, our old pals Sidney W. Pink (acting as director and producer) and Danish expat Ib Melchior (as co-writer) essentially remade the movie, originally directed by Poul Bang, with most of the cast returning. The final product became rather infamous, ending up a modern Mystery Science Theatre 3000 punching bag and finding its way onto “Worst Movies of All Time” lists—by my estimation, it’s not even the worst Sid Pink & Ib Melchior movie I’ve watched, but there are definitely some issues that may be worth formally addressing.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation sought to continue and improve upon the naturalism seen in the work of his mentor Willis O’Brien, transforming fantastical ideas into living, breathing things, and demonstrating the new dimension film can bring to the collective imagination. There did come a point, though, where it no longer seemed like a creatively fulfilling challenge to animate colossal, city-wrecking creatures in movies that were, in truth, slight variations of each other (he had worked on at least four of them by 1957, if you include Mighty Joe Young)—and to really move into a new phase, Harryhausen and his producer partner Charles H. Schneer pivoted to fantasy films starting with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in 1958, leaving behind the concerns of the age for a realm of pure story. No longer would Harryhausen be stuck contrasting his giant beasts with the concrete canyons of the modern world, but working in a wider variety of classical settings—and more than that, he was given the opportunity to apply his animation talent not just to the lumbering mutant animals and extraterrestrials that populated the fifties creature feature boom, but to the magical, implausible monsters found across legends and mythologies. Here, finally, was a new and rewarding challenge: bringing naturalism to the unnatural.

It was likely inevitable that Harryhausen would work on a story from Greek mythology, a setting in dire need of some technical craft after years of cheap Italian sword-and-sandal films. For fans of monsters of all shapes and sizes, those tales are among the inescapable urtexts, a boundless fount of unearthly creatures diverse in appearance and abilities, inexorably attached to the stories of great heroes that have influenced adventure stories across history. If any monsters could be said to be eternally iconic, the ones from these myth are at the top of the list, and to bring them to life on film would be a defining achievement for any monster maker. Jason and the Argonauts, the first (but not last) of Harryhausen’s Greek myth movies, ranks highly in his filmography both for its sense of wonder and its authenticity, conjuring the world as described in those stories on screen and populating it with larger-than-life figures.

The Gorgon (1964)

If you were dismayed by the non-appearance of Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee in the Halloween season movies this year—don’t worry, I have you all covered.

The Gorgon has an unusual backstory: fearing that they were potentially stuck in a rut, Hammer Productions decided to take an idea sent to them by a Canadian fan named J. Llewyn Divine and assigned some of their lead writers, John Gilling and Anthony Nelson Keyes, to polish it into a full feature directed by Hammer’s go-to man, Terence Fisher. I think I can understand why a fan of Hammer’s movies would pitch this concept, and why Hammer themselves would be intrigued by it: after reviving most of the “classic” literary monster—a Dracula, a Frankenstein, a mummy, a werewolf, even things like the Phantom of the Opera and Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde—moving in the direction of classical mythology is the next best source of recognizably scary faces, such as the snake-haired, petrifying Gorgons of Greek legend. It seems quite obvious, in fact. A less obvious approach is taking a recognizable monster from Greek mythology and somehow transplanting it to a turn-of-the-century European setting with a ready supply of Gothic manors and spooky forests—to, in essence, make this bold new concept into a Hammer movie, complete with Peter Cushing and Christoper Lee in major roles. I guess they just couldn’t resist the pull of what had worked before, even when they were trying to! Much as in the Lovecraft adaptations that AIP gussied up to resemble Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, it makes for an unusual aesthetic contortion.

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

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.

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)

This October will mark five years since I started writing monster media reviews on a regular basis—and almost two hundred movies (and dozens of other things) later, I know that there’s still plenty left out there. For this year’s Halloween season, most of my subjects will be themed around sneakily breaking my own personal rules when it comes to subject matter—since this project began, I steadfastly avoided covering movies based on the “traditional” monsters of horror, things like vampires, werewolves, and the undead. For me, those represent their own little corners of culture, with their own histories and tropes and meanings that have already been examined in great detail, offering less for me to dig into than the vast “miscellaneous” monster category.

However, if one were to find movies that are ostensibly about those most famous of monsters, but with some kind of twist…

In that spirit, we’re starting this Halloween month off with a film that name checks one of most well-known monsters in history…that’s right, the Space Monster (or Spacemonster, depending on how seriously you take the stark-looking opening titles of the movie.) But anyone coming to this looking for a traditional Space Monster story are going to be in for a shock, because this is really an in-name-only Space Monster movie—it is actually an odd duck mash-up of retro Sci-Fi movie concepts and early sixties cultural trends, a drive-in chimera if there ever was one. If you squint real hard you might be able to make out the Space Monster spirit hidden somewhere in this bricolage, but that is only one minor ingredient among many.

The Twilight Zone – “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”

While a TV anthology series like The Outer Limits gives me enough classic monster-based material to be featured in an entire series of posts, its more famous contemporaneous counterpart, The Twilight Zone, did not dip into that well frequently enough to justify a similar treatment. However, among the few times Rod Serling’s influential fantasy vehicle did feature a monster story, it ended up being one of the most famous monster stories of recent memory, remade, parodied, and referenced endlessly for decades. That seems like a fair trade-off.

Originally airing on October 11^th, 1963 (less than two weeks after The Outer Limits’ “The Architects of Fear”) as part of the series’ fifth and final season, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is one of those stories that ingeniously finds a way to make a monster attuned to the terrors of modern life—not just in its choice of setting, but in the anxieties that the setting provokes in people. That’s not as easy as it sounds, and one of the reasons you know that this one succeeded, tapping into something truly universal, is that its story is still completely understandable, if not relatable, sixty years later. While lots of little things about the miraculous and terrifying reality of commercial air travel have changed significantly over the years, in the end there’s still the stark reality that we’re stuck in a claustrophobic tube with no exits, and there is only a few layers of glass and metal that separates you from an unfathomable height. It doesn’t take much for a traveller to remember all the things that can go wrong there, realizing that technology can be as fragile as the frayed psyches entrusting their lives to it.

“The Web of Fear” (S5E23-28)

Almost four years after “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, Doctor Who returned to the concept of aliens overtaking London—but at that point, the show was in a slightly different place than where it began. The role of the Doctor had been handed off to Patrick Troughton, establishing the tradition that has allowed this series to continue to exist for sixty years by making its lead a character who can change their appearance when necessary. The show also really started to take the form in which it would be known for those sixty years, putting its full emphasis on Science Fiction-based plots, which often meant focusing more specifically on creating new, memorable monsters to give those plots an additional horror bent. The Troughton years were especially rife with monster-centric thrillers, with “The Web of Fear” being a fairly well-known example—and by sharing a milieu with the previous serial I wrote about, it makes for some interesting comparisons in approach.

The Reptile (1966)

Here’s another film from 1966, and similar to The Vulture‘s adherence to fifties B-movie stylistic tics, this feels like something from another era, with Hammer’s horror aesthetic potentially being long in the tooth (that’s a Dracula joke, kids) at that point in time. While Hammer’s mainstays like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are not present in this one, the Victorian Gothic setting and narrative tropes remain intact, which was one of the ways you knew it was a Hammer film even when they went outside the Dracula/Frankenstein/Mummy milieus that made them famous. Even more removed from the concerns of the mid-sixties, The Reptile hearkens back to a time of vague supernatural mysteries imported from the Darkest Reaches of the Far East, a different variety of colonialist narrative where the problem is not in barging in on other cultures, but bringing something of those cultures back home. It’s dusty stuff, elevated by Hammer’s honed sense of atmosphere, as well as some periodic ventures into a more personal sense of familial tragedy and regret, a sense of a curse not being some abstract magical thing, but a reality one must live with.

The Vulture (1966)

From what I’ve seen, the western-produced monster movies from the second half of the sixties very rarely show any real evolution from what was being produced a decade earlier—a movie like The Vulture could have been in theatres at any point from mid-fifties to the early sixties and would have been exactly the same, and yet it was produced well into a decade of major societal change. You wouldn’t know it from watching it, as it simply doesn’t reflect then-modern culture at all, staying in its B-movie bubble and acting as if its rather puzzling tale of science gone wrong has any bearing on anything. Based on what I’ve seen, it took years for drive-in filler like this to really start getting with the times, both thematically and visually.

Which is not to say that there is nothing novel about The Vulture—although its novelty is more in its particular choice of nonsense than in the movie itself. It was the final project of Lawrence Huntington, a British workman director with over thirty movies to his name stretching back to the thirties, and the fact that he both wrote and directed it (getting financial backing from American and Canadian studios and also an English football club?) leads one to believe that this was something of a passion project. It’s difficult to discern from the film itself what that passion was, but maybe it was in the aforementioned choice of nonsense, which represents not so much a development of the nuclear and scientific themes of the fifties creature features as it as a weird, borderline incoherent offshoot of it.