Monster Cinema

Barry Keith Grant

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813597652
• eBook ISBN: 9780813588810
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Monster Cinema introduces readers to a vast menagerie of movie monsters. Some are gigantic, like King Kong or the kaiju in Pacific Rim, while others are microscopic. Some monsters appear uncannily human, from serial killers like Norman Bates to the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And of course, other movie monsters like demons, ghosts, vampires, and witches emerge from long folklore traditions. Film expert Barry Keith Grant considers what each type of movie monster reveals about what it means to be human and how we regard the world.  Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, Grant presents us with an eclectic array of monster movies, from Nosferatu to Get Out. As he discovers, although monster movies might claim to be about Them!, they are really about the capacity for horror that lurks within each of us.

1

Meeting Movie Monsters

In the 1956 science fiction film Them!, when the avuncular entomologist Dr. Medford (Edmund Gwenn) sees the footprint of a giant mutated ant and realizes for the first time the insects’ possible size, and the consequent threat they pose to humanity, he cries, “This is monstrous!” His words are especially apposite, for monsters, despite their seemingly unending variety, are always marked as different and, consequently, as a threat to the natural or ideological order. Movie monsters may be animal (King Kong [1933], Jaws [1975]), vegetable (Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956], Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! [1978]), or mineral (The Magnetic Monster [1953], The Monolith Monsters [1957]). They may be human (Psycho [1960], American Psycho [2000]), inhuman (Alien [1979], Life [2017]), or technological (Demon Seed [1977], The Terminator [1984]). They may be uncomfortably small, like the turd-shaped parasites of David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), or giant, like the rampaging Amazing Colossal Man (1957).

Indeed, the variety of movie monsters is as staggering as their appearance often is (or at least intended to be). Some of these monsters themselves have multiple forms. The creatures of Alien and its sequels and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) are capable of metamorphosis, while the vengeful wraith of It Follows (2014) has the ability to take any human form. The Blob (1958), the yogurt-like menace of Wes Craven’s The Stuff (1985), and the viscous green evil liquid of Prince of Darkness (1987) are amorphous, lacking any consistent shape. But whatever they look like, their typically repellent and hideous physicality serves as an outward index of the social threat they represent. Typically, their monstrosity is marked as physically different in some way—aberrant, freakish, repulsive—although they may be monstrous in their very physical ordinariness, as are the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Norman Bates in Psycho, or the elite white plotters and their mind-altered victims in Get Out (2017).

Betokening the importance of the monster’s physical difference, monster movies are often structured around the gradual reveal of the creature or creatures, building suspense and expectation in viewers until the inevitable “money shot,” a dramatic peak when the monster in all its intended hideousness is fully shown. In It: The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), for example, we first see the creature—a Martian beast with scaly skin, ridges of teeth, and hands with three claws that sucks humans dry of all bodily fluids—as a shadow when it stows away on the ship and then in close-ups showing its horny feet or hands, and only later is its face finally revealed at a suitable dramatic moment; similarly, we see only the scaly arm and clawed hand of the eponymous gill man of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) reaching from the water’s edge several times before we finally see his full body swimming underwater.

Monsters existed long before the movies, of course, rampaging through folk tales, myth, literature, and the other arts of cultures throughout the world. The foundational works of Western literature are replete with monsters: the Sirens and Polyphemus the cyclops of Homer, Virgil’s harpies, Grendel of the Beowulf saga. Popular culture is populated with demons and devils, ghosts, ghouls, and golems, witches and werewolves, and, of course, zombies, the monster that has most captured the zeitgeist of the millennium. Many monsters have had sufficient appeal to generate transmedia franchises or to appear in movies because of already-established pop cult franchises, including merchandising such as comics, toys, video games, and clothing. In the 1960s, for example, the classic monsters of Universal Studios were marketed as plastic model kits by the Aurora Plastics Corporation. The release of the studio’s horror catalogue for television in the form of two “Shock Theater” packages a few years earlier helped create a young target demographic for the model kits through locally broadcast horror-film shows with colorful horror hosts like Vampira (Maila Nurmi) in Los Angeles and John Zacherle (“the cool ghoul”) in Philadelphia. Zacherle also tapped into the pop-music charts with the novelty hit “Dinner with Drac” in 1958, while Vampira in turn appeared as a movie monster in Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).

Popular music has enjoyed consistent crossovers with monster culture, from Fats Waller’s “Abercrombie Had a Zombie” in 1940 to Rob Zombie, who straddles careers as musician and horror filmmaker. “The Monster Mash” was a top-ten hit (twice!) in 1962 for the Crypt Kicker Five featuring Bobby “Boris” Pickett, so named because of his ability to imitate the distinctive voice of iconic horror actor Boris Karloff. The entangled connections between the movies and popular music are insightfully satirized in Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974), a rock ’n’ roll musical-horror hybrid. In short, the presence of monsters is pervasive in popular culture, from monster truck rallies to serial-killer television series to their domestication for children in the form of breakfast-cereal icons (Frankenberry, Count Chocula) and muppets that promote mathematical skills in preschoolers.

For David J. Skal, Diane Arbus’s (in)famous photographs of odd-looking people revealed that “‘monsters’ were everywhere, that the whole of modern life could be viewed as a tawdry sideshow, driven by dreams and terrors of alienation, mutilation, actual death and its everyday variations. . . . America, it seemed, was nothing but a monster show” (18). Many horror films suggest that their monsters represent nothing less than the corruption or fall of the United States itself. In 1960, Psycho, one of the first horror films to locate the monstrous within seemingly normal society rather than project it afar, showed that the horrors perpetrated by its youthful serial killer is less a special case than representative of a collective American disposition toward violence—a theme made explicit in Norman’s comment to Marion Crane that “we all go a little mad sometimes.”

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), another defining work of the modern American horror film, begins with shots of a car on a forlorn country road, the trees bare of leaves, the low contrast of the black-and-white images further suggesting dreariness and doom. Tellingly, a roadside sign is pockmarked with bullet holes. The car then pulls into a cemetery, tombstones and an American flag marking the deathly landscape. The film’s negative view of the current state of the nation is continued later, in the scene on the farmhouse television showing an interviewer (played by director Romero himself) vainly trying to get answers about the crisis from officials in Washington—a scene described by one writer as seeming “to be left over from a Marx Brothers movie” (Dillard 80). A few years later, in The Omen (1976), an American diplomat, Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck), and his wife, Katherine (Lee Remick), adopt a child of obscure origin who seems to be an incarnation of the Devil. In the climax the Thorns are both killed, and the film concludes by showing that the Devil child Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) has now been adopted by the First Family, suggesting that evil has permeated to the highest levels of power and that the nation is irredeemably corrupt.

The marked presence of monsters in popular culture is addressed in a number of monster movies. In The Stuff, Larry Cohen’s broad horror satire about junk food, we see the television ads being made and broadcast as part of the marketing campaign that succeeds in spreading the Stuff, a dangerously addictive dessert that causes internal physical changes in consumers. In Pacific Rim (2013), set slightly in the future when humans have been battling giant monsters for almost a decade, there are insert shots of monster action figures and video games. The absorption of “monster” rhetoric into politics and daily life is one of the themes of Gareth Edwards’s Monsters (2010). The film posits that several years earlier, a space probe brought back an alien life form when it crashed on Earth. The alien creatures have flourished in the Central American area where it came down, now a place of regulated travel known as the Infected Zone. Photographer Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is assigned to escort his publisher’s daughter, Sam Wynden (Whitney Able), home safely by traveling through the Infected Zone. As Kaulder and Sam get close to the area, they see images of the aliens cropping up in children’s drawings and on television cartoons. Road sign-age has come up with shorthand iconography for warning motorists about areas where aliens are frequently seen, like caution signs for animal crossings. Amid the husks of buildings destroyed by the monsters, the traditional economy has been ravaged, and a complex underground economy has arisen built around transporting people through the Infected Zone. Kaulder and Sam travel past children playing in places that are marked by destroyed military equipment or the giant carcasses of dead monsters, such otherwise disturbing intrusions apparently integrated as the new normal for the younger generation.

MONSTERS, INC.

Monsters have such a strong presence in movies that we have a name for films with them: “creature features.” Indeed, the cinema has been obsessed with monsters from the beginning. The first public film screening took place in 1895, and by 1903, pioneer French filmmaker Georges Méliès already had made numerous films with monsters, ghosts, devils, and other assorted spirits. In 1897, the same year as the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Méliès produced, among others, Le manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle), which featured Satan and a number of other creatures. Monsters have populated the movies ever since, all of them gestating in both timeless cultural taboos and the cultural fears of the moment.

Like all genre films, monster movies are modern society’s equivalent of cultural myths. Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall (2016) posits an attack every sixty years by a breed of monsters called the Taotie, and a special secret division of the Imperial Army of the Song Dynasty, the Nameless Order, devoted exclusively to repelling the monsters from breaching the Great Wall of China. The movie combines historical fact with sheer fantasy for the clear purpose of creating a cultural myth. Traditionally, the term “myth” refers to a society’s shared stories, usually involving gods and heroes, which explain the nature of the universe and the relation of the individual to it. In Western culture, myths, initially transmitted orally, then in print, and now in digital forms, have been disseminated by mass culture since the Industrial Revolution. Genre films, with their repetitions and variations of a few basic plots, are prime instances of mass-mediated contemporary myth. As film scholar Thomas Sobchack has written, “The Greeks knew the stories of the gods and the Trojan War in the same way we know about hoodlums and gangsters and G-men and the taming of the frontier and the never-ceasing struggle of the light of reason and the cross with the powers of darkness, not through first-hand experience but through the media” (122). Stories of monsters are timeless, no doubt beginning around the prehistoric campfire, just as John Houseman dramatically recounts the monster legend of Antonio Bay to the engrossed children in the opening scene of Carpenter’s The Fog (1980). In mass-mediated society, we huddle around movie, television, computer screens, digital tablets, and smart phones instead of campfires for our mythic tales.

Both M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012) are about the importance of monster myths to our culture. The Village is set in a community living in an isolated wilderness. The time seems to be vaguely mid-nineteenth century—there is no electricity, and the people apparently live by the fruits of their own labor—although the actual time period, which is in fact contemporary, is not clarified until late in the film. There is no trade or contact with neighboring villages, and the village elders tell stories of unseen monsters that dwell on the perimeter of their town waiting to victimize anyone who might stray into the forest, which the young are not permitted to enter. The people have constructed barriers from which they keep constant watch for these monsters.

Eventually we learn that the community exists not in the past but today, in a private tract of land in rural Pennsylvania, and that the legends of the monster have been created by the community’s founders as a deliberate attempt to keep people together and the community cohesive, separate from the corrupting ways of modern technological existence. The monsters provide the community with its boundaries and limits; they are part of what shapes and defines it. The film examines how important myths of monsters are for generating and preserving communal life. Just as the existence of Frankenstein’s monster galvanizes the community to come together (albeit as a cross between a search party and a lynch mob), so monsters, even as they threaten mayhem, offer the possibility of abetting social order. As Stephen King notes in his book about horror, Danse Macabre, “We love and need the concept of monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings” (50).

In The Cabin in the Woods, five college students—the jock Curt (Chris Hemsworth), the scholarly Holden (Jesse Williams), the stoner Marty (Fran Kranz), the sexually active girl Jules (Anna Hutchison), and the virginal Dana (Kristen Connolly)—gather together and head off for a weekend at a remote cabin owned by one of Curt’s relatives. Their story initially unfolds like a conventional teen slasher pic: the group finds a number of strange objects, including the diary of an abused girl who had lived there in the past, and they unknowingly unleash the girl’s zombified, murderous family, who proceed to attack them. This narrative is intercut with scenes of an underground technical facility where workers are preparing for and managing an important ritual. Gradually the two stories come together as we learn that the workers are entrusted with manipulating events so that conventional actions take place, that analogous rituals in other countries have failed, and that the success of the American ritual alone is the last hope for humanity to appease the ancient gods who require it. But when it seems as if the ritual will be successful, with all five stereotypical student characters being killed, Marty and Dana manage to escape into the facility, where they find and release a storehouse of various monsters, including (many of them are obligingly listed on the board in the lab) zombies, werewolves, witches, wraiths, mutants, a killer unicorn, a giant snake, a merman, and an angry molesting tree, all of which proceed to gruesomely kill everyone there.

Fleeing the slaughter, Marty and Dana come upon The Director (Sigourney Weaver), who explains to them, and to us, that such worldwide rituals are held annually to appease the Ancient Ones, a race of giant beings, in the manner of H. P. Lovecraft, who preceded the human race and who dwell underground, remaining dormant as long as the annual blood ritual is performed. The American version of the ritual requires the killing of five young people embodying certain familiar archetypes of the slasher film. It does not matter in which order the five die, as long as “the Whore” dies first. The rules are flexible regarding the Virgin’s death, and there is the possibility that she can survive. But Dana cannot bring herself to shoot Marty, so the film ends with one of the Ancient Ones stirring below, its gigantic hand emerging through the floor. In other words, The Cabin in the Woods suggests, Americans have embraced horror generally, and the slasher film specifically, with all its conventions and clichés functioning on a mythic level to satisfy its audiences’ primordial need for horrifying violence in the real world, which would otherwise erupt without such ritual entertainment to contain it.

The technicians in The Cabin in the Woods can manipulate events by releasing mind-altering drugs into the air of the cabin, thereby reducing, for example, the students’ sexual inhibitions. Their techniques remind us that “the sleep of reason produces monsters”—the title of a famous etching (ca. 1799) by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. In Goya’s image, a man writing or drawing at his desk has fallen asleep and is being besieged by a horde of winged creatures that seem like hybrids of several predatory animals, including owls, cats, and bats (“the creatures of the night,” as Bela Lugosi’s Dracula famously rhapsodizes). Because there is a cat at the feet of the sleeping figure, and the monsters seem to be emanating from the cat, the image might be interpreted to suggest that the sleeping figure represents the artist, whose imagination has the ability to transform the commonplace and domestic into the strange and frightening. As fiction writer Richard Wright has noted, “The artist must bow to the monsters of his imagination” (qtd. in Pine 198). Paradoxically, however, as in the case of Goya’s very image, the artist’s musings bring order to the wildest, most fearful of imaginings by giving it aesthetic shape.

Interestingly, in the original Spanish, the word sueño can mean either “sleep” or “dream.” This linguistic ambiguity is especially relevant when thinking of Goya’s etching in relation to film. Many critics have noted the similarities between dreaming and the experience of watching movies, some even suggesting that film viewing returns us to a womb-like, infantile state. In the dark, images flicker by, speaking to our inner self as well as to our collective psyche. For good reason, Hollywood, during the heyday of the studio era, was referred to as the “dream factory.” This may explain why, while other genres have cycled in and out of popularity, the horror film has consistently been an important part of film history. With roots in such precinematic forms as medieval woodcuts, Grand Guignol theater, and the Gothic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Meeting Movie Monsters
• 2. Human Monsters
• 3. Natural Monsters
• 4. Supernatural Monsters
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author