“Carnival of Monsters” (S10E5-8)

As the seventies dawned, Doctor Who went through several major changes: it was broadcast in colour, Jon Pertwee took over the lead role, and for a few years they changed the format of the show, locking it to a contemporary Earth setting without the Doctor’s time and planet-hopping shenanigans. In effect, this meant that most of the stories were made in the image of ones like “The Web of Fear”, with the Doctor working with a special military organization, which placed the “monsters in your backyard” concept at the forefront more often than not. Even with a more traditional adventure story structure in place, the series honed its horror credentials, and the early years of colour Doctor Who scarred generations with serials like “Spearhead From Space” (the first story of the era) and “Terror of the Autons”, which showed everyday plastic objects (including department store mannequins) transformed into deadly menaces—this is the era when the show really started living up to its legacy of making kids to “hide behind the couch.” Meanwhile, other stories, like the early serial “The Silurians” (where the monsters are allowed to be even a little sympathetic) showcased different and interesting ambitions in the monster space. Even when the plots became more limited in some ways, the creative minds at the helm adapted around those limitations and continued to develop the show’s distinguishing features.

Considering that I’ve written about two stories set on our planet, for the sake of variety I’ve chosen to skip to the fourth year in Pertwee’s tenure, when the series returned to journeys across time and space. The second story of the series’ tenth season has many intriguing qualities, including its wonderfully simple yet evocative title*, but most importantly is another serial written by Robert Holmes, who would go on to write previous site subject “The Ark in Space” (Holmes also wrote the aforementioned “Spearhead From Space” and “Terror of the Autons”, so he was making a name for himself on this series early), and with several more beloved stories to his name, he remains one of the more celebrated creative figures in the show’s history. As in his later stories, “Carnival of Monsters” demonstrates Holmes’ knack for infusing even standard-sounding Sci-Fi scenarios with his sardonic sense of humour, and in this case even carries a slyly meta take on the series itself.

Deep Rising (1998)

What the creature feature supposedly gained in the post-Jurassic Park world was a new sense of freedom: with the advances in CGI, no longer would their monster designs and action be constrained by what was possible with anything physical. Any monster you can imagine, with all manner of inhuman body shapes and abilities and sizes, can appear on-screen and move in an ostensibly naturalistic way—the dream of the monster movie maniac who had lived through multiple decades of men in rubber suits, stop motion, and more realistic but time-intensive and complicated animatronics that still had to follow the laws of physics.

Deep Rising is the first movie I’ve written about from this period that has gone full-bore into CGI, without even the balance of practical and digital effects seen in films like The Relic and Mimic, released the year before. More than just how it changes the portrayal of the central monster, though, this movie shows that, in practice, what the CGI revolution often did was allow filmmakers with a fondness for mass scale to indulge in those impulses with impunity. Writer-director Stephen Sommers made a career of frenetic, CGI-heavy action, and Deep Rising carries all those hallmarks—it is a film that has no time for limitations or compromises, and in some cases no time for much of anything other than constant movement.

Tremors (1990)

Big Hollywood studios have a hot-and-cold relationship with monster movies—they’ll cede that territory to B-movie productions for years, or decades, at a time, and then start investing some bigger budgets into a select few before dropping the whole thing again. The nineties was one of those periods with a minor streak of classic-style creature features—”classic-style” in the sense that they’re more or less following the structures that were laid down in the fifties. Their special effects may be more sophisticated, the dialogue less stiff and expository, and the violence more explicit, but in the end it’s still a movie where a group of people have to deal with the sudden appearance of a monster or monsters, and the expected plot beats are barely changed, even after forty years.

Tremors, which could be considered the first in that wave, wasn’t a significant success in its original release, and likely accrued its cult following through home video and TV airings, leading it to become a direct-to-video franchise with a surprising amount of longevity (as in, it’s most recent sequel came out in 2020)—it even had a short-lived TV show, and a more recent series attempt that wasn’t picked up. Technically, it’s also an end-of-the-eighties movie that was delayed into the dead early months of 1990, just like Nightbreed, making it something of a liminal artifact. Looking at it now, you can see how it heralds some of the ways the subsequent decade of monster movies attempted to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, some minor tweaks in presentation likely meant to pull in new audiences—while Tremors and what followed tended to resemble the old school entries in basic plotting, they change just enough of the surface details to make themselves feel contemporary, with a particular emphasis on comedy.

Creature Classic Companion: From Beyond (1986)

With the cult success of their film Re-Animator, director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna (alongside co-writer Dennis Paoli) cemented their status as the top cinematic translators of HP Lovecraft’s influential horror stories—which was really not that hard to do, considering that there was only a handful of Lovecraft-based films before them (such as Die, Monster, Die!), and none of them were particularly notable. Maybe the atmosphere of boundary-pushing and the increasing sophistication of special effects found in eighties horror films is what made adapting Lovecraft’s existential abominations seem more attainable, and the Gordon/Yuzna line of movies do capture the sense of strangeness and dread that defined those stories that the ones made in the shadow of Hammer-style Gothic horror did not. At the same time, the other things that define Stuart and Yuzna’s movies are a comedy streak and a perverted parody of sexuality that are very much not found within the more repressed words of Lovecraft’s pulp fiction—they get the spirit of the thing, but bring plenty of their own spirit as well.

The team’s immediate follow-up to Re-Animator, once again distributed by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures (it’s funny to consider that Gordon’s style of film, while vastly superior, is not entirely dissimilar from Band’s usual effects-based schlock, stuff like Ghoulies and the roughly 400,000 Puppet Master and Evil Bong movies) and starring Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, adapted a lesser-known early story by Lovecraft, one whose simple story proved rife with possibility. From Beyond leans less in the overt comedy direction of it predecessor—although it certainly indulges in some ridiculousness, which is always part of the appeal of these movies—but goes more towards the mind-bending otherworldly implications. Just beneath the surface of our rational reality are inexplicable things, and if we were to get a glimpse of what is lurking just outside our senses, then sanity goes right out the window—that’s the recurring theme of Lovecraftian fiction, and this movie uses it as a vehicle not just for very eighties gory and gooey practical effects, but to really get into some of its creators’ other pet themes as well, producing a rather joyously disgusting deep dive into madness.

Rebirth of Mothra (1996)

Last year around this time, I was writing about eco-horror monster movies, where humanity screws with nature and then nature messes us up (which is kind of what’s happening in real life right now)—this time, though, I thought it would be interesting to look at a more positive depiction of an environmentally-minded monster. So, now we’re paying a visit to Mothra, Toho’s brightly-colourful guardian of nature and regular cohort of Godzilla—the original film from 1961, directed by the stalwart Ishiro Honda, is one of the classics of the giant monster genre, but Mothra never starred in another solo film until 1996, despite repeated attempts to make one. Mothra has always been a more lighthearted and fantastical creature compared to Godzilla, and allowed them to make a monster movie with a different tone, but the inability to give her another starring role could possibly be chalked up to the much more limited capabilities of the suits and puppets compared to the bipedal kaiju in Toho’s stable. This was no longer an issue by the mid-nineties apparently, so it was full-steam ahead on Mothra films, which despite being contiguous with the Heisei Godzillas, have a very different feeling to them.