Table of contents for #12: Horror Movie Monsters in RUE MORGUE

“WHEN I WANT YOUR OPINION, I’LL BEAT IT OUT OF YOU!” That phase – paired with a movie still of the Universal Frankenstein’s monster wringing a neck – was on a T-shirt I got when I was six years old. It was my favourite piece of clothing and I wore it like armour, at least until the iron-on patch started to peel and it got too tight. At that point in my life I knew there was a monster people called “Frankenstein,” he was from a movie I hadn’t watched, and he was scary. Wearing him on a shirt was empowering, like I was part of a club. So by the time my parents introduced me to the 1931 Frankenstein a couple years later, I was entranced. I saw a…

GUILLERMO DEL TORO HAS BUILT A CAREER ON FANTASTICAL MONSTER MOVIES BECAUSE HE UNDERSTANDS AND VENERATES THEM LIKE FEW OTHERS. For the filmmaker behind Cronos, Pan’s Labyrinth, the Hellboy franchise and Pacific Rim, it all began with the original creature classics, especially Frankenstein, which he holds as sacred, revering those who can truly bring it to life. In an increasingly secular society, do you think that fantastical creatures such as monsters take on an almost religious role? I have a serious spiritual life but it’s very oriented towards the Eastern philosophies. But I have another, very intense, spiritual relationship with monsters, and I dare say my relationship with monsters is as deep. I don’t think anything moves me as much as Frankenstein’s creature. It’s the most moving image I’ve ever…

DESTROYING ALL ROMANTIC NOTIONS OF THE FRONTIER WITH AN EQUAL BALANCE OF BRUTAL WESTERN AND BLOODY CREATURE FEATURE, J.T. Petty’s 2008 film The Burrowers is itself a rare creature: a monster western. Set in 1879, on the plains of the Dakota territories, it features a posse hunting whoever took a pioneer family, only to discover it’s actually a whatever and now they’re being hunted too. Looking like giant hairless mole rats crossed with something from Alien, the creatures rise from the soil to paralyze their victims, which they then bury for a few days as their prey’s innards soften up, so they can be eaten alive. Petty (S&Man, Mimic: Sentinel, Hellbenders) discusses the nature of his horrifying creations. What monster movie critters and/or real-life beasties were you modelling your creatures…

FOR A CHARACTER THAT SO EMBODIES RED-BLOODED AMERICAN HORROR, it’s hard to imagine that Freddy Krueger was nearly British. Or at least played by British actor David Warner (The Omen), who was Craven’s initial pick for the character and got as far as makeup tests before dropping out due to apparent scheduling conflicts. Robert Englund then stepped in and impressed Craven so much in an audition that the filmmaker reimagined Freddy as a younger boogeyman. Englund didn’t only bring more energy to the role, he also incorporated specific physical and personality influences, which evolved over the course of the eight Elm Street movies. As he explains, those influences come from all over the cinematic map, proving that movie monsters can originate from pretty much anywhere – not just our nightmares.…

YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING JUST WHAT THE HELL A “GEON” IS. IT SOUNDS LIKE A CRAPPY COMPACT CAR, OR MAYBE A CHARACTER FROM TRON, but a geon is actually a building block of sight, and essential to the way we process visual information – including, of course, monsters. To be more specific, geons are very basic shapes, such as squares, circles, cones, rectangles, pyramids (in 2-D or 3-D) – that our brains keep on file and can use to immediately recognize more complex shapes comprised of multiple geons. This is why, for example, we recognize two ovals side-by-side, with an upwardly curved line beneath them, inside of a circle, as a happy face. If you add a triangle to the top of that circle, it’s someone wearing a party hat. If…

THAT DID DR. JEKYLL SAY WHEN HE LOOKED IN THE MIRROR? LET’S SPLIT! Bad jokes aside, split personalities are a staple of horror films, thanks to the popularity of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jeykll & Mr. Hyde. The story of a respectable scientist who drinks a formula that makes him change into a violent, murderous brute has been retold on film regularly since the dawn of cinema, illustrating one of the most important concepts in psychoanalysis that helps us understand monsters: Sigmund Freud’s model of the psyche. Back at the beginning on the 20th century, Freud theorized that our psyche is comprised of three major components: Id, Ego and Super Ego. The Id is the animal part of our mind that seeks immediate gratification and…

IF VAMPIRES ARE PEANUT BUTTER AND ZOMBIES ARE CHOCOLATE, STAKE LAND IS A CINEMATIC REESE’S PEANUT BUTTER CUP. For their 2010 apocalypse film, director/co-writer Jim Mickle and star/co-writer Nick Damici created something unique by combining the vampire with the zombie: grotesque, feral ghouls with the thirst and superior physical abilities of your average bloodsucker. Damici stars as the John Wayne-like “Mister,” a vamp slayer travelling with an orphaned boy in the remnants of an America torn apart by monsters, both inhuman and human, including an ultra-right-wing cult. By combining the tropes of two well-known undead threats to create something more dangerous than your average rotting shuffler and more numerous than your standard bloodsucker, Stake Land raises the, er, stakes. (Similarly, the filmmakers invented the rat-zombie plague movie for 2006’s Mulberry…

IT’S A HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT TO GO TO A MONSTER MOVIE AND NOT SEE A MONSTER, RIGHT? But if that’s true, how do you explain success of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, which don’t show us the monster at all? It’s because in horror films, the anticipation of the monster is more powerful than the monster itself. Stephen King has an excellent anecdote about this in Danse Macabre (1981, Everest House), his non-fiction meditation on the genre. He relates what famed author William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run) said at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention: Nothing is as frightening as what’s behind the closed door, Nolan said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching behind it. The audience holds its breath, along with…

ONE OF THE BEST MODERN ECO-HORROR MONSTER MOVIES CAME AND WENT AS BARELY A BLIP ON THE RADAR IN 2012. The Bay, directed by Barry Levinson (Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man), is a perfect example of art imitating life in a spookhouse mirror. By that, I mean the film exaggerates reality just enough to be horrific yet still seem plausible. Presented as found footage assembled from news reports, Skype conversations, amateur video, etc., it’s a ripped-from-the-headlines-style story that began as a real documentary about the ravages of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. When Levinson learned there had already been a news piece done on the subject, he used his research to craft a horror movie that he claims (on a DVD extra) is based 90 percent in fact. The…

THE ROAD TO HOLLYWOOD STARDOM IS PAVED IN GOO. AT LEAST FOR JAMES GUNN, director and co-writer of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Before birthing one of the biggest superhero franchises in cinema, Gunn, who also wrote the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, started his directing career with what might be the gooiest invasion film ever made: Slither. Starring Nathan Fillion (Firefly), Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead) and Elizabeth Banks (The Hunger Games), the 2006 movie sees a town infected by an alien parasite that crashes to Earth and burrows into a local man, who then morphs into a meathungry alien with invasive tentacles and a telepathic connection to the zombie-like locals infected with his space-slugs. It’s a paean to the fun liquid’n’ latex monster movies the director…

ON THE BODY HORROR OF HIS MAD SCIENCE MASTERPIECE THE FLY DAVID CRONENBERG HEN IT COMES TO SCIENCE AND MONSTERS, SOME FLY TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN, WHILE OTHERS STAND TOO CLOSE TO THE FLY – just ask Seth Brundle, the protagonist in David Cronenberg’s The Fly. The 1986 body horror film is a remake of the fun but hokey 1958 movie of the same name, but this time, instead of a scientist in a lab coat sporting a fly’s head, the focus is on the slow, tragic and outrageously disgusting metamorphosis of Brundle (Jeff Goldblum). After accidentally fusing his DNA to that of a housefly while testing his teleporter, he slowly morphs into a hideous human-insect hybrid capable of crawling up walls and spewing acid. Rich in metaphor about…

BEYOND THE AMAZING SPECIAL EFFECTS, GREAT STORY, COOL CHARACTERS AND BADASS FLAMETHROWER ACTION, why do we love John Carpenter’s The Thing? Why does this film, in particular, get under our skin? Answer: It contains the perfect monster. Its shape-shifting alien works so well because it pushes all the right buttons in some very big and obvious ways, but also in a few ways that are more subtly effective. To understand just how it does this, let’s look at the 2012 Psychology Today article titled “The (Only) Five Fears We All Share.” Written by Karl Albrecht, Ph.D., it postulates that everything we’re scared of can be boiled down to five basic categories. Here’s how the shape-shifting alien in The Thing expertly exploits our shared fears. 1. Extinction: “The fear of annihilation,…

EVOLUTION HAS MADE US FAVOUR CATEGORIZATION – IN FACT, WE RELIED ON IT TO GET HERE. Way back when, early humans – the ones with cool loincloths and spears – who could best recognize danger and avoid or conquer it survived to pass along their genes. Those who made the distinction between things like friend/foe, prey/predator, edible/poisonous most efficiently, thrived. Categorization is a basic survival skill and we’re genetically predisposed to understand the world that way; in fact, we value categorization so much that when we encounter things that defy our categories, they ellicit a strong response. Sometimes we’re weirded out (remember green and purple ketchup?), delighted (think unicorns, pixies and other friendly fantasy creatures), confused (I’m looking at you, platypus, you beaked, egg-laying mammal), or curiously creeped out (any…

“THEY’RE BACK FROM THE GRAVE AND READY TO PARTY!” – The Return of the Living Dead’s tagline says it all. We all know George A. Romero created the modern zombie with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and refined it with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), so when Dan O’Bannon was tasked with scripting (and eventually directing) an undead film by producers who had the rights to make a Dead movie, he knew he had to make it his own. He wrote a script about workers at a medical supply house, a funeral home director and some punk rockers facing off against zombies that talk, plot and crave braaaiiins. He also gave it a comedic spin, added a punk rock soundtrack, nudity, slime and…

THE FIRST WITCH WE SEE IN ROBERT EGGERS’ 2016 FILM THE WITCH IS A FILTHY OLD HAG WHO KILLS A BABY, pulps its remains and slathers herself in the gore under the full moon. It’s one of the more monstrous sights in a movie about a pious 17th-century New England family being preyed upon by diabolical forces in the woods. Writer/director Robert Eggers’ supernatural nightmare is meticulously researched, combining historical detail (e.g. dialogue in Jacobean English) and fairy-tale folklore. He details the ancient origins of his archetypal witch. Why make a period film about witches? I’m very drawn to the past and I think there’s a lot of weight that comes from that, it’s very fertile. Understanding where we come from culturally, it’s good to know about this stuff. The…

ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING MONSTER MOVIES EVER MADE IS ALSO ONE OF THE MOST OBSCURE. In the 1960s, the human monstrosity of Norman Bates (in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), the shocking violence of Night of the Living Dead and the splatter of Blood Feast made the monster movies of the previous decades seem quaint. The Flesh Eaters is a rare transitional film of this period; made the year before Blood Feast (1963) but released the year after, the film has the feel of a black-andwhite B-monster movie, yet also gore that hadn’t been seen before, Nazi experiments and a biologically bizarre creature. Directed by Jack Curtis, it features a small group – including an aging actress and a beatnik – forced to land their plane on an island after encountering…

YOU DON’T HAVE TO WATCH A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET MOVIE TO KNOW FREDDY KRUEGER, such is the ubiquity of the most famous boogeyman in all of cinema. If you grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, he was everywhere: TV, games, comics, T-shirts, trading cards, Halloween costumes, even rap records (you know you’ve crossed over when you drop an album with The Fat Boys.) Teens hung up Freddy posters, he did MTV specials, there was a hotline you could call to hear him tell a scary story, and he was even on lunchboxes. Lunchboxes! What’s more subversive than parents packing their child’s school lunches in a container celebrating a hideously burned child murderer (with a strong implication that he’s also a child molester) who kills with a glove full…

LONG BEFORE THE ALIEN INVASION FILMS OF THE 1950S EXPLOITED ANXIETIES ABOUT COLD WAR INVADERS, H.G. WELLS WROTE ABOUT A MARTIAN INVASION as a metaphor for British colonialism across the globe in his 1898 novel War of the Worlds. Orson Welles would later adapt it for an infamous live news reportstyle radio show that sent gullible listeners across the U.S. into a panic, and then it hit theatres at the height of Cold War paranoia in 1953. When David Koepp was tasked with penning an updated version of the story for Steven Spielberg to direct, the screenwriter – whose credits include Jurassic Park (1993), Spider-Man (2002) and Mission Impossible (1996) – revisited previous versions of the tale to understand exactly what it is at the core of the story that’s…

LIKE A FRENETIC FUSION OF DAVID LYNCH’S ERASERHEAD, DAVID CRONENBERG’S BODY HORROR AND THE SURREAL STOP-MOTION ANIMATION OF JAN SVANKMAJER – but with a uniquely Japanese flavour – Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo, the Iron Man blew moviegoers’ minds when it was released in 1989. A fast-paced 67 minutes of dirty, industrial, sexual cyber-horror insanity, the black-and-white film begins when an Everyman goes to an ominous junkyard, slices open his leg, and inserts a metal rod inside as thick black blood spurts out. Suddenly the wound writhes with maggots and he runs into the street, where he’s hit by a car. The driver, “Man,” and his girlfriend dump the body but soon the Man starts to mutate into a being made of metal and computer parts, complete with a penis drill that…

ON HIS MOVIE MONSTER MUSE: THE WENDIGO LARRY FESSENDEN ARRY FESSENDEN IS A BIT OF A SHAPESHIFTER WHEN IT COMES TO FILMMAKING, having made a name for himself as a director, writer, producer and actor over the past three decades. As the head of Glass Eye Pix, he’s produced stellar indie horror films such as House of the Devil (2009), Stake Land (2010) and Late Phases (2014). But ever since a grade school teacher read the story of a forest creature with the body of a starving man and the head of a deer, he’s been obsessed with the wendigo, writing and directing several projects about the monster: Wendigo (2001), The Last Winter (2006) and the Fear Itself episode “Skin and Bones” (2008). In 2016, he also curated Sudden Storm:…