“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.

The Amazing Screw-On Head

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.

Giant Robo/Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot

We haven’t ventured back to the original Japanese Monster Boom in a while, but there is still material there left to pore over. Giant Robo hails from the latter half of that brief period of monster ascension, debuting within weeks of Ultraseven and Monster Prince, and feeling a bit like a halfway point between those two series: espionage antics involving an international peacekeeping organization as well a child hero with his own giant, monster-fighting companion. It ended with the same 26-episode run as Monster Prince, a truncated existence easily overshadowed by the much longer and more influential Ultra series, but unlike Monster Prince, Giant Robo was dubbed and aired on North American television thanks to the efforts of our old pals at American International Pictures, its title changed to Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. Johnny Sokko became something of a staple of syndicated TV in the seventies, gaining a cult following among English-speakers who went on to start punk and ska bands referencing it—so despite being “lesser” tokusatsu, it has had a surprising amount of staying power in both the west and in Japan, where it has received irregular reboots (all of them animated) in the decades since.

The Blood Beast Terror (1968)

It just wouldn’t be Halloween without at least one British horror movie starring Peter Cushing in a lead role. Apparently Cushing considered The Blood Beast Terror (US title The Vampire Beast Craves Blood, and we can only hope that whoever came up with these titles lived a happy, contented life knowing that they made the world a brighter place) the worst movie he ever worked on in his long and storied career—of course I can’t definitively state whether that’s true or not, as I haven’t seen every one of his movies. Among the ones I have seen, there have been excellent ones (The Abominable Snowman, Horror Express), solid ones (Island of Terror), and interesting but flawed ones (The Creeping Flesh)—Blood Beast is probably the least interesting of these, the one that feels the most like a procedural monster movie, but that’s not to say it isn’t interesting at all. As has been the case many times before, while it proceeds in a predictable manner, all the little details (or, in some cases, the lack of details) build up a pleasingly melodramatic mix of Victorian moralism and Gothic ghoulishness.

The Ship of Monsters (1960)

There’s very few things as enjoyable as discovering another good vintage B-movie—the quaintness that can be found in the best low budget flicks from the fifties and sixties has a special feeling all its own, which is why I’m always on the lookout for ones I’ve never heard of. As a Mexican Sci-Fi comedy musical creature feature, because it is indeed all those things, The Ship of Monsters (Le nave de los monstruos) is another great find, a film that revels in the silliness of its genre and the limitations of its own budget in a way that’s difficult not to admire. I usually wait until the second paragraph to outline the plot, but I feel it’s necessary to get that out early in order to really get you on board: after atomic radiation kills off all the men on the planet Venus, two bikini-clad saviours are sent to scour the galaxy for male specimens of different species to help repopulate the planet with the best combination of genes, and after picking up several monsters and putting them on a ship (they are certainly open-minded) as well as a lone robot, they have to make an emergency landing on Earth for repairs, and then meet up with a singing cowboy. Are things like this not the reason we have cinema?

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968)

The Japanese studio Shochiku, one of the oldest of all of the country’s major movie makers, went on a bit of a Sci-Fi/horror streak in the late sixties—last year, I wrote about their giant monster movie The X From Outer Space, which was the first in that loosely related group of films. Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell followed the next year, and while The X is a clear attempt to emulate Toho’s Godzilla movies (with its own idiosyncrasies, to be fair), part me wonders if this movie is taking some cues from another Toho creature feature: Matango. Much like that movie, Goke focuses on a group of stranded survivors, pulled from all over modern Japanese (and international) society, whose cooperation frays at the seams while a supernatural threat looms in the background—it’s also filled with psychedelic imagery and an overwhelming sense of bleakness and despair, reflected in the unnatural colour choices used for the environments. Unfortunately for Goke, very little in it is as visually interesting as Matango’s lushly unnerving sets—but, thankfully, it makes up for it in the sheer brazen energy of its themes and its extremely harsh condemnation of the State of Things in the late sixties. Subtlety of any kind has no place here, and what is created is a uniquely feverish fusion of alien vampire terror and utter cynicism.

Monster Multimedia: Monster in My Pocket

In my last post, I briefly touched on my childhood interest in folklore and mythology and how seeing the things I was learning about reflected in the wider culture was a unique thrill—it was an ever-expanding world of fantastical stories and bizarre monsters that felt endlessly rewarding. I’m not entirely sure what put me on that path to begin with, whether it was seeing references to mythology in video games like Final Fantasy or even Pokémon or finding books solely about mythological creatures in the school library (my parents even bought me a massive encyclopedia of Greek, Norse, and Celtic myths at that time), since those things overlapped and fed into each other, and when the Internet came into the picture, that put the whole thing into overdrive. Whatever the real originator of my fascination was, it is still very clear that that stuff can really hook a kid, especially when presented in a way that emphasizes the adventurous and strange nature of those stories and avoids the stuffy academic version of it that may make the youths think Beowulf is just a musty old poem and not the tale of a guy who rips a giant monster’s arm off.

Kids’ innate interest in the creepy creatures of legend has been exploited in pop culture off and on for decades (most of the books I read on the subject were clearly aimed at that demographic), but an interesting example of it from the early nineties were the Monster in My Pocket toys produced by Matchbox and Morrison Entertainment Group, if only because of how direct it was in marketing hordes of mythological monsters as something cool. Clearly taking inspiration from mono-colour collectible mini toys like M.U.S.C.L.E(which were imported Kinnikuman figures, a subject that, because I’m me, I’ve broached elsewhere) that had been popular in the eighties, MiMP came out in 1990, burned brightly for a year or two, and then disappeared off the face of the earth (except, apparently, in some parts of Europe, Central, and South America, and likely thousands of yard sales and flea markets), a veritable micro-phenomenon. Its business strategy was based on tried-and-true methods that still work to this day, cajoling kids into wanting to get as many possible (an early practitioner of “Gotta catch ’em all”), not just by offering a wide selection of different toys in blind or semi-blind packages and then making multiple colour variations of each one, but also by assigning them a “value” (here, a point system printed on the figures themselves) that serves no purpose but to make certain figures seem rarer or better than others based on nothing. It did everything you need to do to drive undiscerning young completists into a tizzy, yes, but I can also imagine that the subject matter also helped propel its early success: collectible monster toys were neat, but these ones were based on “real things”, which gave them an especially enticing angle. It was like one of those bestiaries I read, except in plastic form, which I guess some prefer.

Monster Multimedia: The Monsters of Castlevania

When most people think of the Universal Monster movies, they think of them collectively, not as individual horror films that just happened to be put out by the same company and featuring many of the same actors. When you think of Dracula, chances are Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy are lurking around as well. This was something that Universal themselves leaned into, as their second era of monster movies in the 1940s eventually started just throwing in all the monsters, giving you the most bang for your buck. By the fifties, most kids experiencing these movies for the first time were either seeing them revived in theatres as double bills, aired on TV under the Shock Theatre banner, or featured prominently in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland—so, in the minds of generation after generation, the monsters were always hanging out in the same dusty castles and spooky moors, making them into a group not unlike how the yokai spirits of Japan are portrayed. The continuing existence of “The Monster Mash” makes that abundantly clear.

Speaking of Japan: despite coming from another continent, Konami’s Castlevania series is very much following the tradition of those monster mash-ups, reintroducing the classic creatures to a new generation of kids through a new medium (I’ve written about that before.) The original 1987 entry could basically be described as “Conan the Barbarian with a whip fights the Universal Monsters”, and as the series progressed, it developed more of its own style, as well as its own nonsense mythology and timeline (which somehow is able to include Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, even though the book is bereft of mummies and skeletons and fish-men), but never strayed that far from that original pitch. No matter who was fighting through the dark corridors and at what point in history, Castlevania has still been about Dracula and his castle housing an accumulation of monsters from all sorts of sources, and reappearing every century or so for another Monster Shindig. The atmosphere the games perfected was a fun celebration of every Gothic horror trope they could cram into one setting, pulling from not just the movies, but also literature, folklore, and demonology, making it seem sensible that all these disparate evil beings hang out together in this one big house. No other game franchise really has this very Halloween-y spirit.

Monster Multimedia: When I Arrived At The Castle (2019)

Welcome to October. I usually use this series to examine older things, but as a change of pace, here’s something from this year that fits…

When I began writing these posts, I made the decision to leave out certain kinds of monster stories from the material I’d be analyzing, and it was mostly the most well-known ones: vampires, werewolves, the undead. I wanted to focus mostly on the nebulous “miscellaneous” category, because that is usually what falls into my wheelhouse, and I thought that was where I’d find ground that was not nearly as well-trodden. There’s only so much you can write about the potent symbolism of vampires and werewolves that hasn’t been written thousands of times before—that comes with the territory when you’re that ubiquitous in the culture. Even so, sometimes I make exceptions.

Emily Carroll’s comic When I Arrived At The Castle has a vampire in it, but also a cat-person, although for a few reasons I’d say that the cat-person is sort of analogous to a werewolf (at least it provides the same animalisic contrast that a werewolf would.) While utilizing some of the most well-worn horror tropes on the surface—beginning with a dark castle on a stormy night—the book has a distinct take on them, one that combines fairy tale storytelling, body horror, and interpersonal violence to tell a story about guilt, abuse, and the terrors that lurk deep within ourselves. Both the characters here are split between their surface humanity, rendered in monochrome, and red-drenched monstrosity that’s simmering beneath—this is all about the dual nature that lies at the heart of these things, rendered in all its gruesomeness.