Unnatural ways: a monster movie special

Where would Halloween be without a monster movie? It may be difficult sometimes to look behind the shlock and gore, especially if you’re watching from behind the sofa, but for the environmentally minded viewer this genre can often reveal an interesting analysis of concerns we deal with day in, day out.

Perhaps the archetype of the whole genre is Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, which has proved an irresistible lure to film makers: the first adaptation appeared as early as 1910 – although it’s the 1931 Boris Karloff version that spawned a plethora of sequels, remakes and pastiches.

Monstrous beginnings

It’s a familiar point of correction that the novel’s eponym is the creator, not the monster. However, students of Romantic literature will be able to tell you that here ‘monster’ is something of an inaccurately pejorative term. In fact, the creature’s monstrosity is a response to his mistreatment by Dr. Frankenstein, who further compounds his crimes against nature by cruelly rejecting the portmanteau man he has created.

The novel is a warning against what the Romantics perceived as the transgressive and destructive forces inherent in Enlightenment rationalism and the Industrial Revolution. It may not have prevented a pretty thorough violation of the natural landscape in the years since, but it has certainly had a massive impact on the cultural one. Who knows what flights of the imagination the prospective transition to a more circular, lower carbon economy might spawn!

Since Frankenstein, the idea of nature turned monstrous in response to the transgressions of humankind has become key symbolism in art concerning the dangers of science and industrialism. The motif saw expression in the twentieth century in the form of the monster movie, as cinema struggled to deal with the often frightening pace of science while pulling in audiences seeking a thrill. So, this Halloween Isonomia has chosen to do the monster mash and present a terrifying gallery of our favourite examples of nature gone monstrous in film.

Bugging out

Gordon Douglas’s 1954 creature feature THEM! sees an army of giant radio-actively mutated ants terrorise the United States, delivering mandible inflicted death and stealing vast quantities of sugar. The oversize insects first appear in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project tested the first nuclear bomb in 1945, and during the course of the film characterful myrmecologist Dr. Harold Medford deduces the terrible reality of the man-made origins of the creatures plaguing the desert.

The 1950s saw Hollywood produce a whole series of nuclear monster movies. As the space age dawned, the popularity of science fiction grew, presenting the ideal medium to give expression to the world’s atomic angst, as the terror of nuclear destruction took the form of monstrous radiation-spawned creatures bent on literal and visceral acts of violence.

In the same year that THEM! hit American screens Godzilla premiered in Japan, starring a towering prehistoric monster awakened by nuclear testing in the Pacific. It’s little wonder that Japanese filmmakers should be inspired to such an unsubtle metaphor given the country’s experience of awesomely unsubtle destruction, but THEM! represents a more insidious fear: that the forces America had unleashed during the war would come back – in this case very literally – to bite them.

The feeling is expressed by the philosophical Dr. Medford at the film’s close, in a final scene whose eloquence illustrates why the film holds a place a notch above the trail of creature features which scurried in its wake:

“When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.”

More than brain candy

Since the 1950s, science and politics have thrown up new sources of environmental concern, which have found expression in new monsters. Gandahar updates Frankenstein for the age of genetics, carrying on the tradition of macabre warning, and features one of the most gloriously odd openings in animated cinema.

A man of many parts: the idea of the monstrous has been able to convey a variety of environmental fears. Image via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

In a utopian vision of environmental balance, within a landscape reminiscent of a Roger Dean painting, we see a blue humanoid woman suckling a cross between an armadillo and a beetle which has been birthed from a plant as others gather a bounty of ripe fruit. The surreal idyll is shattered, however, when a round of laser fire enters stage right, turning the peaceful humanoids to stone.

The fantastical brainchild of writer and director René Laloux, this 1988 animation sonorously echoes Frankenstein in its tale of the unwanted child of science come back to haunt its maker. Before achieving oneness with nature, it transpires that our blue race dallied in genetic experimentation, once creating a giant brain which it subsequently rejected and dumped in the ocean. We soon learn that the brain and the programme of violent petrification troubling the land are connected, and that the brain itself does not understand the full extent of the connection. Without wanting to give away too much of the plot, what follows involves a riot of robots, telepathic mutants, and time travel.

Gandahar’s big brain is a fantastic example of humanoids turning nature against themselves through their folly. The giant life form is far from malicious, and is only pursuing a path of survival. The lesson is that while you may master the creation of life, you cannot hope to master the results, and there is nothing to guarantee that the interests of your creation will be compatible with your own.

The fear of gods

Our final monstrosity comes from another animated feature, and in my opinion the greatest cinematic expression of environmentalism. Princess Monokoke is a film by Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, directed by Hayao Miyazaki and released in 1997. While THEM! and Gandahar continue the Frankenstein strand of science fiction, Princess Mononoke draws more on fantasy fiction and folklore, harking back to an imagined past, in which the forests that covered the land were inhabited by tree spirits and animal gods.

The film opens with its hero Ashitaka killing a monster which attacks his village; upon its death, it is revealed to have been a rabid and seemingly possessed boar god. Marvellously animated – frenetic, gloopy tendrils flailing – this creature provides a great, shocking opening. Inside the defeated god is found a ball of iron, and Ashitaka sets out on a quest to discover its meaning.

The answer is found in a human iron town, which through its ore mining is encroaching on an adjacent forest, home to a family of wolf gods and Princess Mononoke – a human raised as a wolf. The humans and forest gods are at war, and in this conflict is a deeply intelligent and sensitive portrayal of the human need to exploit the environment in order to improve our standard of living, and the destruction this need can bring. Neither the humans nor gods are presented as holding a morally privileged position, and Ashitaka’s struggle to remain loyal to both sides is the dilemma of the environmentalist who is also a humanist.

The film remains close to the Romantic tradition in the way it takes the emergence of industrialism as the stage for its drama, but it offers an unusually sympathetic view of the drive to industrialise and its importance to human community. At the film’s ending, we are offered the hope that mankind can build a better, less destructive town – a rare case of a dramatic representation of the goal of sustainable development.

The end

That’s all folks. I hope you’ve enjoyed this Halloween special and that it may have inspired you to check out the films discussed, or even delve more deeply into the well-stocked vaults of environmentally monstrous cinema. If you’re an Alligator aficionado or a Swamp Thing superfan and feel I’ve missed out a classic example of the genre, feel free to share your favourites in the comments below. And don’t forget to safely pack away your monster masks for reuse once you’re done with them and have a spooktacular Halloween.