Attack the Block (2011)

Attack the Block was another one of those destined-for-cult-status movies that was championed by the genre-focused movie websites I read back in the late aughts and early 2010s, and it’s not difficult to understand why. At its heart, this is a throwback movie to older creature features and to the youth-centric films of the 1980s, with a fannish tint to its writing that is reflected in the references in the dialogue and the love of Big, Cool Moments. Writer-director Joe Cornish already had a following from his radio and television comedy work, and was able to parlay his association with Edgar Wright’s comedy-pastiche crew (Wright is an Executive Producer on this with his frequent collaborators Nira Park as Producer and Nick Frost in the cast) to get his film off the ground, and to some extent the exuberant aficionado tone of Wright’s work is evident here even if it’s not as much of a direct homage as his films often are. While this movie didn’t necessarily make a huge splash back in 2011, its favour among an influential crowd almost certainly led its two leads, John Boyega and Jodie Whitaker, to be cast as the new faces of two different long-running franchises, something that both might feel a tinge of regret about.

So, yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that Sci-Fi and horror nerds flock toward, an attempt to capture a bit of nostalgic spirit in its kids-vs-monsters set-up, but it’s also an intelligent and novel twist on that idea that goes places those older movies did not. The straightforward kind of monster action utilized by Cornish becomes a frame in which to place a cast of well-defined, lower class youths, the kind whose lives are not simply left out of fantasy films, but are regularly dehumanized into faceless, hoodie-wearing creatures themselves by people far removed from their poverty-stricken living conditions. Like many of the best monster movies, this is one about taking something very specific and very real and letting the fictional aberrations draw out the reality of it.

Reign of Fire (2002)

All told, 2002 seems like the appropriate point where the strain of big studio Creature Features should come to an evolutionary dead end—Reign of Fire continued the trends of genre mixing and the infatuation with all the things CGI would let filmmakers put on screen, but scaled up to a world-demolishing scope that was in keeping with the increasingly bombastic blockbusters of the turn of the millennium. I’m sure the studio and screenwriters Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka, and Matt Greenberg (the latter having done uncredited rewrites on Mimic) thought that renewed interest in high fantasy thanks to movies like The Lord of the Rings would directly benefit their high concept of portraying fantasy-style dragons with a Sci-Fi approach to “realism”—instead, this turned out to be box office disappointment (although its $60 Million dollar budget was relatively modest in that era), and big studios stopped being so keen about putting that much money into monster movies. That leaves us with a mildly novel take on giant monsters and post-apocalyptic world building that oozes 2002 from every pore.

Quatermass II

Finally, we are rounding out Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy, three alien-heavy Sci-Fi films whose impact on the genre in the UK and beyond cannot be understated (maybe don’t expect to see coverage of the much-belated Quatermass/Quatermass Conclusion, which was made when Kneale was in full “Old Man Yells At Cloud” phase.) As with The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass II was originally written by Kneale as a six-part BBC television serial, which aired 1955 (commissioned partly to give the BBC a high profile answer to their first privately-owned competitor, ITV), and then adapted into film form by Hammer in 1957 under the slightly altered title Quatermass 2 (or Enemy From Space in other countries.) With Kneale demanding new terms following his displeasure with Hammer’s adaptation of the first Quatermass serial (that argument led to the creation of X the Unknown as a substitute for a second Quatermass in film in 1956), he was given a chance to write the first draft of Quatermass 2 himself, which was then revised by director Val Guest, who had directed both Xperiment and the other 1957 Nigel Kneale adaptation, The Abominable Snowman. Kneale was so pleased with the resulting movie that, when he gained controlling rights to it, he proceeded to remove it from circulation.

Watching both versions of this, it’s difficult to really agree with Kneale’s position—Hammer’s version of Quatermass II is a thoughtfully condensed version of the serial, and even Brian Donlevy returning to play Quatermass (which one of the things that Kneale disagreed with most vociferously) fits better here than he did in The Quatermass Xperiment. While the movie version of Quatermass and the Pit made over a decade later is a generally good adaptation where you can still feel the missing depth and detail of the extended TV serial, the Quatermass II film captures all the atmosphere and deliberate storytelling without much compromise, and in some ways the story is even enhanced thanks to the upped budget. Importantly, the themes that Kneale imbued in that story are fully maintained, and with Guest’s direction, often intensified.

All of the Quatermass stories deal with a loss of human agency due to the machinations of cosmic horrors—the first one featured a near-mindless extraterrestrial organism that altered a man inside and out, and Quatermass and the Pit showed human evolution manipulated by a self-destructive alien civilization in the distant past. By comparison, Quatermass II feels almost normal, as a variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers paranoia; the TV serial came after Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers but preceded the film version, a case of parallel thought reflecting the fears in the air in the mid-1950s of secret subversive plots and the battle between free will and conformity. What this version of that story emphasizes is the terrifying speed in which the outside influence seeds itself into positions of power, and how the machinations of our higher offices seem almost tailor-made to shield this invasion from the public eye. There is a specific set of very British observations and ironies animating Kneale’s writing, leading to something that is relatively more grounded than the other two Quatermass stories and their broader existential anxieties, while still suggesting that a malignant, inhuman universe can suddenly assert control over us.

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.

“The Awakening” (S21E5-6)

Having already written about a Tom Baker-led serial, we’re taking a big leap out of seventies Doctor Who and into the early-to-mid eighties, where the lead role was taken over by Peter Davison. The eighties ended up being a fairly tumultuous period for the series, following up on the tonal shifts that occurred after complaints of the show’s violent content led to pressure from producers, and where it seemed to gradually slide increasingly into irrelevance, with production problems, creative indecision, and hostility from the top brass at the BBC eventually leading to the show’s fifteen-year hiatus at the end of the decade. The biggest problems of the original run’s final years was still in the future while Davison was there, but you can definitely sense in these early eighties seasons that the show was a little more uneasy, experimenting with different ideas and tones to see what actually worked.

“The Awakening” hails from Davison’s final year, which in turn was following the series’ twentieth anniversary (an anniversary special where Davison teamed up with many, but not all, the previous Doctor actors aired two months before.) After spending an entire year spotlighting the series and its history, a story like this feels like a return to the “classic” mode—it is another plot about an alien presence invading modern England (in this case, specifically said to be 1984), and a plot with more than a hint of Quatermass and the Pit in it, in which our history turns out to be the product of said alien presence. That’s not a surprising direction to go, considering that Doctor Who had been pulling from Quatermass and the Pit (and the other Quatermass serials) pretty much from the beginning, and this one actually puts that story in a new and interesting context, which scales down the scope of its implications while keeping them equally grave.

“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.

“The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (S2E4-9)

So, The Outer Limits is not the only monster-heavy Science Fiction series to be celebrating a sixtieth anniversary this year—in fact, only a month or two separates the debut of that series and the debut of the BBC’s own Doctor Who, which I have written about before as a Creature Classic. That means another series of posts about classic television for the next few months, with each entry analyzing a monster-focused storyline from multiple eras of the show. Considering that its original run lasted for twenty-six years, from 1963 to 1989, and its current one has been airing for eighteen, there are a lot of different eras to choose from.

Even so, I think it’s best to go back to the beginning (or close to the beginning, at least), not only to the original cast, but to the very first, and ultimately most famous, monsters to appear on the show. As I laid out in the “Ark in Space” Creature Classic, the original direction for Doctor Who was for it to avoid Science Fiction cliches in its tales of alien time travellers, which included the deployment of “bug-eyed monsters”—but writer Terry Nation had already penned a storyline, submitted under the title “The Mutants” (although back then, each episode had its own title), involving a battle against an alien foe on a distant planet, and a lack of other suitable scripts meant that his serial was not only given the greenlight, but ended up the second aired story in the series’ history. That in turn meant that, almost as soon as Doctor Who started, it was already moving away from its own internal edicts, and would only move further away when audiences got a glimpse of the first alien menace to appear on the show.

That serial introduced the Daleks, which Nation had specified in the script would be “legless”—it was up to series production designer Raymond Cusick to come up with a final design, a job that was originally assigned to another BBC employee who became unavailable…Ridley Scott (seriously.) It was Cusick who gave the Daleks their distinct pepper pot shape, an inhuman, mechanical appearance that immediately set them apart from the men-in-suits aliens of so much of the 1950s creature features—combined with their staccato, electronically-modified voices, they became mass culture figures almost instantly, recognizable to the large swathe of public in the UK. They became so popular that not only were they figures of reference and parody, and not only was their debut story the basis for the Amicus-produced film version starring Peter Cushing, but Terry Nation, who maintained a controlling stake in them, even attempted to create separate Dalek media projects outside the BBC, sometimes leading to periods where they did not appear on Doctor Who itself. As I said in the older post, the reason why Doctor Who has continued to make imaginative monsters such a core part of its identity is almost certainly because of the perfect notes that Cusick and Nation manage to hit at the beginning of the series.

A follow-up to the original story—now generally referred as “The Daleks”—was essentially guaranteed, and so in the second season, Nation was back again to apply a novel twist to the Daleks: bringing them to our planet. This is the central conceit of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, which aired in six parts from November 21^st to December 26^th 1964, once again the second storyline in the line-up. As the original Daleks story inadvertently set the tone of the series by introducing iconic monsters, this story evolved the series’ approach to monsters by introducing the conceit of monsters appearing in familiar English locations, contrasting the everyday with the extraordinary, which would prove to be one of the series’ frequently recurring motifs.

Quatermass and the Pit

The original Quatermass Experiment TV serial in 1953 was followed up by two sequels that aired on the BBC throughout the 1950s, all of them written by series creator Nigel Kneale, and all of them eventually adapted into film by Hammer Film Productions (unlike the original, though, both sequel TV serials have been fully preserved, meaning I can actually provide a proper examination of them.) Quatermass and the Pit was the third serial (I’m sure we will eventually return to the second one, the aptly titled Quatermass II), originally airing in six parts from December 1958 to January 1959, near the tail end of the fifties Sci-Fi boom; studio disagreements kept the movie version, also written by Kneale and eventually directed by Roy Ward Baker, in limbo until 1967, when it was released in North America under the title Five Million Years to Earth. There was a different atmosphere for this kind of genre work in the late sixties (2001 would be released a year after this)—but while the time difference led to this being the only Quatermass movie in colour, the story remained intact.

As he did in the original Quatermass serial, Kneale uses the fantastical elements to posit some deeply unnerving questions about the universe we inhabit and the relationship we have with it—what makes us what we are, and can it be altered by forces beyond our control. The extraterrestrial body horror of Experiment is rendered less physical but all the more existential in The Pit, where our understanding of human history, both in cultural and evolutionary terms, is essentially unravelled. Rather than the encroaching aliens seen in the other Quatermass stories, the aliens here have already encroached—an invasion that took place in the distant past, its presence secretly looming over all mankind, until the day when it isn’t secret any more, and we are forced to confront what seems to be a monstrous part of our own nature.