The Faculty (1998)

Consider this a back-to-school special.

The potential pitfall of all those self-aware, meta-referencing pieces of genre entertainment—a particular specialty of the nineties—is a sense of having your cake and eating it: they point out all the tropes and cliches while actively using them, without necessarily demonstrating any original or truly subversive ideas of their own. The Faculty aims for that style of storytelling, but has at least one new-ish angle up its sleeve: it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in a high school, leading to all sorts of new metaphorical possibilities for a well-worn concept. Of course, because of the style of writing, it’s a version of that concept where characters directly talk about Jack Finney’s original Body Snatchers story as well as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, signposting all of those metaphorical possibilities before you even get a chance to really take them in. That part of the movie was, not surprisingly, the contribution of Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who was assigned by the supervillains at Miramax to revamp a script by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the directorial role given to Robert Rodriguez, coming off of From Dusk Till Dawn and his support work on Mimic. As aggressively 1998 as any movie could be, this does make some honest attempts to straddle the snarky hipness of the meta dialogue with a nominally serious Sci-Fi horror take on teenage alienation.

“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.

The Thing From Another World (1951)

Let’s go back to the beginning…or one of the beginnings, at least.

This movie has been brought up several times before—in reference to the general tone of the Sci-Fi monster movies of the 1950s, and in all the times it’s been ripped-off directly in the ensuing decades. In truth, most monster movies made after The Thing From Another World are ripping it off in some way: this type of movie, with this kind of structure and these themes, didn’t really exist before 1951—The Man From Planet X, an alien-based movie that released at almost the same time, still has a foot in the days of the Universal Monster movies, and while The Thing also does in certain ways we’ll get into, it also loudly asserts its time and place, the early fifties of it all. This is the movie that made paranoia the central feature of so many creature features of the era, literalizing the fears of all that is unknown and inscrutable in a wider universe humanity was gradually discovering—but what became increasingly generalized and irrational as the decade wore on still has a shocking clarity and specificity here at the point of origin.

Monster Multimedia: Godzilla: The Series

The 1998 American disaster movie re-imagining of Godzilla, brought to us by director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin in the wake of their smash hit Independence Day, was defined as much by its massive pre-release hype and merchandising as it was by the movie itself—and when the movie premiered and failed to meet the expectations of pretty much anyone, the companies producing said merchandise were left with a lot of unsold, or unsalable, stock. Among the inevitable tie-ins greenlit for that misbegotten project was a Saturday morning cartoon that aired on Fox Kids from Fall 1998 to early 2000, and even hardcore Godzilla fans who despised the movie have been known to vouch for the animated series. Considering that it was following up not only on the Emmerich movie, but also the previous animated Godzilla series from the seventies, there would have needed to be a concerted effort by the producers to create something that compared unfavourably to either.

At a conceptual level, Godzilla: The Series moves away from the pared down giant-monster-on-a-rampage model used in the movie and back towards the wacky kaiju battles of the Toho sequels, with each episode introducing a new monstrous foe for our titular lizard to battle. Nothing could be simpler, or better suited for a kids cartoon. Its premise is almost exactly the same as the Hanna-Barbera show, with a team of scientists going around the world investigating monster events with a heroic Godzilla in tow (who has a tendency to conveniently and illogically appear when needed), but benefits from more interesting designs, being able to actually depict monster-on-monster violence, and also giving Godzilla his official roar, which goes a long way towards making it feel authentic. By all means, this was about as close as a North Americans in the late nineties got to a regular dose of kaiju action (unless you count Power Rangers, I guess), which is probably what endeared it to both the target audiences and G-Fans bitter about the movie, although it is not necessarily as different from the movie as you may have heard—a thick undercurrent of 1998 runs through both.

Isolation (2005)

Last year, I said that hospitals were effective and underutilized settings for monster stories—and for reasons both similar and different, I think the same about farms. Like hospitals, farms are a place where the most biological aspects of life are no longer hidden, all the gross internals and externals of the animal (human or other) made part of everyday existence—the difference is that while the gleaming, artificial walls and stainless steel implements of the hospital contrast the blood and sickness in between those walls, a farm by its nature (even the most systematized, industrial version) has to wallow in the mud and dust-encrusted world. You’re never far away from dripping fluids, disease, injury, and death. The Irish horror film Isolation plays up the grotty visuals of the farm in many ways—a desolate blue-gray blankets the world, the surrounding land seems vast and shadowy, living spaces are modest and unkempt, animals exist in either lonely spaces or crowd together anxiously in their pens, and the camera peers at human activity from down below or through slats, showcasing every dark corner of the barns and sheds. If one were to choose any place to make a new variation on The Thing—which Isolation very much is—a farm is certainly a good place to go.

Monster Multimedia: Carrion

One of the things that make video games a unique medium is that the audience-character relationship is far closer—no matter who or what the character is, the player identifies with them immediately and often emphatically solely because you are in control of their actions. You are them, and they are you. It can be difficult to make people empathize with, say, less overtly human characters in non-interactive visual mediums (unless it’s a cute animal), but in games its possible to get people to empathize with complete abstractions because of that inherent association. For that reason, games are one of the few mediums that could make something like the recently-released Carrion, a so-called “reverse horror” game developed by Warsaw-based Phobia Game Studio and published by Devolver Digital, to work: something told entirely from the POV of a monster, with humans as the antagonists. That’s not even the half of it, though, as Carrion’s monster is absolutely alien in every way, a feral, viscous tidal wave of red meat slime constantly lashing out with tentacles, spikes, and gnashing fanged mouths, climbing walls and ceilings at unholy speeds and ripping humans to shreds—and while the humans are sometimes armed and ready to attack you at the drop of the hat, many others are unarmed office workers who flee and cower in terror. Doesn’t matter—the monster will track them down and eat them all the same. This is not a game about a misunderstood monster or a monster lashing out at blatantly evil humans—this is a wild abomination that is a danger to everyone and everything if it is not contained. Of course, that’s what makes playing as it enjoyable.

Horror Express (1972)

This really does feel like one last hurrah of a particular kind of horror movie, the quaintly lurid and darkly humorous sort that typified the genre in the fifties and sixties. Horror Express has many of the stylistic hallmarks of those films, not the least of which being that it’s a period piece that stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing—it even has a science fiction conceit that also feels of the previous era (it was produced by Bernard Gordon, who had a major hand in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Day of the Triffids). The early seventies was basically the transition point from these sorts of movies (which had mostly been dominated by Hammer Productions, and mostly starred Lee and Cushing) to more contemporary and hard-edged ones—this came out the same year as Last House on the Left (…and also Frogs), and a year before The Exorcist. It’s pretty clear that something like this wasn’t the kind of terror people were looking for in the theatre. Still, you probably couldn’t have asked for a better send-off than this, which is entertaining and stylish, all the more impressive because Spanish director Eugenio Martin had no previous experience in horror.