- Monsters hold a special place in the history of horror. The killer predators in nature. The nightmare creatures of the fantastic. And the monsters inside us, waiting to escape.
- Monsters hold a special place in the history of horror: the killer predators in nature, the nightmare creatures of the fantastic, and the monsters inside us waiting to escape. They can be frightening, or fun, or both. Whatever their size or shape, whether they're humanoid or utterly alien, monsters are reflections of ourselves.
Pennywise from It (2017) is a nightmare hiding behind the mask of a clown. Director Andy Muschietti's dynamic adaptation of Stephen King's novel turned this classic tale of adolescents grappling with evil into the highest-grossing horror film of all time. It had a great monster, but at its heart it a story about the horrors of the adult world: racism, misogyny, bullying, and child abuse.
It gave us a shape-shifting monster born from our deepest fears. So did the hideous shape-shifting creatures in John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), a true landmark of horror cinema and a monster-lover's dream movie. The decadent, anarchic hellraisers in Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984) tap into a different part of our brains...the part that wants to act on our wildest impulses. Dante's wild visual imagination flared to all-time heights in Gremlins 2, the lesser-seen but nominally superior sequel.
Some of the most terrifying films ever made show us what happens when the animal kingdom rises up against us. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) dramatized an avian uprising while putting icy blonde Tippi Hedren through a psychic ringer. Lewis Teague's adaptation of Stephen King novel Cujo (1983) turned a faithful family dog into a rabid monster bent on murdering a woman and her child - a handy metaphor for every parent's fear of being unable to protect their children from the horrors of the world. Of course, the ultimate man vs. nature story is Stephen Spielberg's Jaws (1975), the movie that gave the words "a day at the beach" a lot more bite. The first summer blockbuster and one of the greatest American films ever made, Jaws is an exercise in horror filmmaking that has yet to be surpassed.
Humans fear the ferocity of nature, but deep down we know that the biggest threat we face is the beast lurking inside of us. The Wolf Man (1941) invented the "ancient" werewolf tropes that most people know today: that a person pure of heart can become a wolf at the full moon, and can only be killed by a silver bullet. In 1981, two great directors, John Landis and Joe Dante, released very different takes on the werewolf: Landis's An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Dante's The Howling (1981). These movies ushered in the great age of creature transformation effects and doubled as black-humored social commentary.
Guillermo Del Toro's fantasy-horror films The Shape of Water (2017) and Pan's Labyrinth (2006) ask, "What makes a monster?" Is it the ugliness on the outside, or the ugliness on the inside? Both films feature people who have positive relationships with monsters, but live in fear of handsome, successful, but deeply evil men.
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