Brute Force

Animal Horror Movies

Dominic Lennard

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438476605, 9781438476612
• eBook ISBN: 9781438476629
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Considers how dangerous beasts in horror films illuminate the human-animal relationship.

It's always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include King Kong, Jaws, The Grey, Them!, Arachnophobia, Jurassic Park, Snakes on a Plane, An American Werewolf in London, and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration-and appreciation-of cinema's many bad beasts.

1

Going Ape

King Kong

KING KONG TOWERS IN CINEMATIC and cultural influence, an inspiration for numerous films in which self-determining and often semi-sympathetic nonhumans smash through a metropolis, from Godzilla to Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). Although we perhaps tend to think of Kong as a work of unprecedented originality, the fearsome monarch of Skull Island had plenty of forerunners, albeit few with the same seismic impact. The jungle quest was a popular genre in the era of Kong,1 and directors Schoedsack and Cooper’s opus was preceded by the now-lost films Man Hunt (1926), as well as Ingagi (1930), the latter a faux-documentary in which gorillas lay claim to local women. In the crime melodrama The Unholy Three (1925, remade in 1930), a crook who runs a pet store uses a gorilla as a weapon against his traitorous accomplice. Further back, French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet’s Gorille enlevant une femme (Fig. 1.1 on page 22), had won its creator the 1887 Medal of Honor at the Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In Frémiet’s vivid carving, a cantankerously open-mouthed ape clutches a struggling bare-breasted beauty with ease under one arm. The poet Charles Baudelaire declared the work’s sexual subtext in his contemporary review: “this is not about eating,” he wrote, “but rape!”2

Figure 1.1. Gorille enlevant une femme by Emmanuel Frémiet (Musée des Beaux Arts de Nantes).

Perhaps the first Western narrative tale of ape-terror (as well as the first modern detective story), Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), reveals its killer to be an escaped “Ourang-Outang” (orangutan). From a tuft of hair in evidence, detective Dupin guesses the assailant to be no man, despite the attack initially suggesting the sophistication of a human attacker. The tale was very loosely adapted for the screen by Robert Florey in 1932, with the ape’s sexual appetite amplified. Ted Gott and Kathryn Weir credit Poe’s tale with fostering the link between gorillas and crime, also evident in The Gorilla (1930, remade in 1939); a series of brutal murders during the late-1920s were referred to in the press as the work of “Gorilla Men,”3 presumably influenced by Poe’s evocative imagery. More directly influential on Kong was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s adventure sensation Tarzan of the Apes (1912), the eponymous hero of which clashes with a number of cranky primates. As a teen, Tarzan battles gorilla Bolgani, bests his long-term ape enemy Tublat, and deposes ornery tribe-leader Kerchak. After the tyrannical ape Terkoz abducts marooned Englishwoman Jane Porter (prefiguring the abduction at the center of King Kong), the jungle hero slays his rival, paving the way for his and Jane’s famous romance. As in Frémiet’s figure, the abduction suggests the brute’s violation of sexual boundaries between species: “Then [Jane] was dragged toward those awful fangs which yawned at her throat. But ere they touched that fair skin another mood claimed the anthropoid.”4

The sexual threat again emerged in Cecil B. DeMille’s precode epic The Sign of the Cross (1932), in which prisoners are flung into the Colosseum arena with all manner of creatures to be mauled and mangled for the perverse excitement of Ancient Roman onlookers. At one point, a gorilla darkly appraises a naked and trussed-up blonde beauty (Fig. 1.2), although whatever happens next is thankfully outside our view. Our biggest concern in these moments is the virtuous Christian girl Mercia (Elissa Landi), who waits in a dungeon for her turn to die. The subjection of the girl ahead of her to this bestial terror is sadistically erotic: what awaits poor Mercia is not merely death but also horrifying sexual degradation.

Figure 1.2. A gorilla ominously approaches a bound beauty in The Sign of the Cross (Cecil B. DeMille, Paramount, 1932). Digital frame enlargement.

After the stomping success of King Kong, of course, the killer gorilla theme hardly abated: a poorly received sequel, Son of Kong (1933), was rushed out the same year; later, The Ape (1940) featured Bela Lugosi and a savage primate pet; and a gorilla guards a white woman in the jungle in Nabonga (1944), the poster of which repeated the Frémiet motif of a damsel clutched under a powerful primate arm. In general, erotic themes have been especially well represented. After a plantation manager murders his boss for love in Bride of the Gorilla (1951), he’s cursed by a local witch to transform into a gorilla, the beast that apparently exemplifies his wild desire. In the exploitation film Kong Island (1968), the villain threatens to lock his two female prisoners in a cage with two hyper-aggressive gorillas who are, he sadistically chuckles, “getting excited.” The possibility of interspecies arousal is even used to poke fun at male narcissism in the zoo-centered comedy Fierce Creatures (1997): arrogant investment heir Vince McCain (Kevin Kline) knows his crush (Jamie Lee Curtis) is smitten with another, and mistakes her devotion to a gorilla as evidence that this must be the man, launching immediately into a mocking derogation of his “rival.” “But let me ask you,” Vince raves competitively, “how much does he earn—how much does Mr. Gorilla take home at the end of the week?”

Consistently in cinema the ape presents an ambiguous human analogue: a creature comparable in appearance and perhaps interiority, including (especially in horror) a human-oriented sexuality that challenges the border between human and animal. Kong is of course king among these representations, the angry ape virtually unrivaled among cinema icons more broadly, suggestive of his enduring archetypal resonance. Yet what of our sympathy for Kong? What of Kong the protector, who shields his would-be mate from Skull Island’s meat-eating megafauna?—the Kong whom even contemporary audiences couldn’t help but pity? As John C. Wright puts it, Kong “roars a challenge to tormentors to do their worst,” and when they do “pour machine-gun fire, efficiently and mercilessly, into the great ape’s breast” and he finally falls, “The audience does not cheer.”5 There’s obviously something in this strange creature that stymies our pleasure in his defeat; this chapter explores the four central versions of the epic tale of the angry ape (from 1933, 1976, 2005, and 2017) as powerful evocations of the shared evolutionary impulses of human and animal.

Beauty and the Beast: King Kong (1933)

Few movie plots are as famous, but we’ll summarize the events of Kong for the forgetful or uninitiated. An audacious movie director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) spots blonde waif Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) on the streets of Depression-era Manhattan and offers her a part in his next film, before he and his crew embark on a voyage to Skull Island in search of the fabled “Kong.” They disturb a scene of sacrifice by the indigenous islanders, dedicated to the mysterious monster, in which a local girl is to become the “bride of Kong.” The natives offer to trade Ann for several native women (picking the white girl as a rarer specimen for sacrifice) and after their offer is unsurprisingly declined, they abduct Ann from the boat anyway. After the supersized gorilla (the ingenious stop-motion work of Willis O’Brien) strides through the jungle to retrieve the offering, by which he is immediately enthralled, the crew mounts a rescue mission, which Kong jealously attempts to thwart. Thankfully, he also defends his unwilling bride against Skull Island’s other hair-raising residents, including a Tyrannosaurus and a giant serpent. To the rescue is Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), Ann’s hardboiled human admirer, who snatches her away but with Kong in hot pursuit. Under the instruction of the enterprising Denham, a trap has been laid: Kong is gas-bombed into submission and transported to New York for exhibition (Fig. 1.3). Degradingly chained up for the awe of New York theater-goers, Kong flexes his muscles and snaps his manacles before laying a path of destruction through Gotham to regain his bride. With Ann in his hairy hand, Kong scales to the top of the newly erected Empire State Building (1931). Yet the jungle monarch is no match for humans’ high technology of violence, and he’s gradually picked off by a swarm of biplanes, plummeting from his iconic pedestal to his death. The director Carl Denham tells us, standing by Kong’s body below, that “It was Beauty killed the Beast,” repeating the epigraph with which the film began (a so-called “Arabian proverb” actually fabricated for the film).

Figure 1.3. The captured king: the mighty Kong manacled for public amusement in King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, RKO, 1933). Digital frame enlargement.

The ambitious ape isn’t successful, but the movie was. Accordingly, King Kong has generated a wealth of scholarship. The giant gorilla has been seen as a fearsome representative of a barbarous racial Other, in line with his remote home and dark-skinned worshippers,6 but as Noël Carroll points out, we’ve also heard about “Kong as Commodity, Kong as rapist, Kong enraptured by L’amour fou, Kong as Third World, Kong as dream, Kong as myth, Kong according to Freud, according to Jung, and even according to Lacan.”7 Carroll’s own essay “Ape and Essence” works to highlight a “survival of the fittest” theme that reflects a strain of Social Darwinism embedded in laissez-faire economic attitudes during the period. Carroll first points out a series of symmetries between Kong’s jungle home and his new urban environment: for example, Kong battles a serpent on the island, and later smashes a serpentine monorail in New York. Such echoes equate the city with the jungle in a “literalization of a banal but persuasive American belief about the nature of society.”8 The jungle world of Kong, Carroll contends, echoes the brutal world of capitalism specifically: “the Darwinian jungle,” he writes, “was a readily accepted figure for the market in the culture in which Kong was made,” and this Darwinist metanarrative reflects an American economy depressed at the time of the film’s production. Degrading though Kong’s exploitation may be, that his captor Carl Denham receives no moral reprimand within the film suggests a culture open to “celebrating unselfconscious opportunism.”9 Yet for Carroll, Kong nevertheless attracts our sympathy as a naïve victim of this system “because he is exploited as a commodity, displaced for the sake of business, befuddled, and smashed to a pulp in the modern jungle. … Kong is not only the biggest country bumpkin ever to be crushed by the city; he is also a metaphor for the Depression Everyman, lowered in the course of Denham’s promotional bid for the showbiz pot of gold.”10

This is a persuasive reading. However, Carroll’s perspective can be valuably complemented through reference to Darwinism as more than a symbol or stand-in for the machinations of capitalism, allowing further interpretation of ape (and human) “essence” as the film presents them. As indicated in this book’s introduction, while still relatively little-noticed by the humanities and social sciences, many researchers in the cognitive sciences have busily applied the implications of Darwinian theory to human personal and social behavior. This research has given rise to fields variously titled sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, and Darwinian psychology.11 Supported by voluminous experimental and anthropological data that show innate and cross-cultural aspects of humanity,12 evolutionary psychology demonstrates that personality, behavior, and social organization cannot be explained solely in terms of arbitrary “social constructs.”13 Consequently, it’s becoming increasingly appreciated that any thoroughgoing explanation of human motivations and behavior simply cannot exclude evolutionary thinking, thereby beginning, as Jerome Barkow puts it, “the mighty labor of shifting humankind from our privileged position in the land of the non-animals to the natural world.”14 A film like King Kong, which centralizes archaic animal forms and primal desires, can be usefully considered with reference to the aims of those desires, and the way they evoke the animal in the human and, necessarily, the human in the animal.

At the center of evolutionary psychology is the encoded “selfish” goal of advantageous gene replication,15 the premise that organisms tend to seek for themselves situations that maximize opportunities for successful reproduction. It’s an appreciation that Darwinian goals are not only the business of the past: human behavior is still dependent on brains that, like those of other animals, prioritize gene replication, and brains that evolved to their current form by responding to the pressures of ancestral environments. This means that the “jungle” of Depression-era New York City in King Kong isn’t just an economic metaphor; those who live there are still in the “jungle” psychologically as well. This is not to simply equate capitalism and Darwinism, or suggest that capitalism is the “desirable” product of evolved human nature; it is to say that capitalist New York is inevitably a domain of behavior for human creatures molded and motivated by evolutionary imperatives.16 When director Carl Denham finds his soon-to-be star homeless, thieving an apple from a cart, he immediately references her value in the most brutal biological terms. While there may be many homeless women around, he tells her, there’s “not many who look like you.” Crude as his observation may be, what he means is that Ann is possessed of a primitive sexual currency that ought to preclude her homelessness—she’s a genetically “valuable” female. The status-obsessed Denham isn’t actually interested in Ann sexually, but he’s very clear that his motives are not altruistic: “I’m not bothering with you out of kindness,” he says, before pitching her the part in his film. Denham only wants a woman in his film to appease female viewers, and sees Ann as a pathway to a greater return on his investment and social...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Welcome (Back) to the Jungle
• 1 Going Ape: King Kong
• 2 Out of Our Depth: Surviving Marine Monsters
• 3 Man versus Wild: Bears, Wolves, and the Men Who Fight Them
• 4 Creepy Crawlies: Intelligent Ants, Sickening Spiders, and Other Ill-intentioned Invertebrates
• 5 Mad Science Makes for Cranky Creatures
• 6 In Their Sights: The Gaze of the Predator
• 7 Snakes Alive
• 8 Bad Dog! The Rogue Hounds of Horror
• 9 Beast Mode: Becoming the Wolf Man
• Aftermath
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover