JL: Except Jaws, much like Moby Dick, really is out to get the hunters. The first half of that movie is a classic, by-the-numbers monster movie, and the second half becomes an adventure on the high seas! Even the music changes. It’s two different movies!
JC: Jaws, I think, is probably a monster movie. The monster in it isn’t like the Mummy or Dracula. It’s more like Moby Dick, and Moby Dick is not a monster: he’s somebody’s obsession.
JL: Ahab is the monster.
JC: Jawsis a “Force of Nature” story.
JL: What about religious angles? What about The Exorcist, the Devil?
JC: What do you think?
JL: I think The Exorcist[William Friedkin, 1973] is the best horror film ever made.
JC: It’s pretty good.
JL: The original version, not the remake. And the reason I say that is that I’m an atheist, and a Jew on top of that: I don’t believe in Jesus, and I don’t believe in the Devil. The reason I credit The Exorcistso much, is that I bought it. I bought into the church, I bought into the power of Christ, and I bought into the possession. I was so pleased when Father Karras showed up. Thank God, you know?!
JC: You see, I didn’t buy into it at the time. Later I came to appreciate what he (director William Friedkin) did there. I remember I thought at the time that this movie requires a belief in the Devil to be believable.
JL: Now, what about ghosts? There are ghosts in your movies who kill people, who are out for revenge.
JC: That’s true.
JL: And the two scariest ghost movies are…
JC: I bet you’re going to say The Haunting[Robert Wise, 1963], aren’t you?
JL: The Hauntingand The Innocents[Jack Clayton, 1961].
JC: The Hauntingis bullshit! It is so awful.
JL: I love it! What about The Innocents? They’re both creepy and scary, and you never see anything.
JC: That’s the bad and beautiful way of making horror movies.
JL: You think you have to see something?
JC: No, not at all. But I get pissed off when you don’t. I pays my money, I want to see what the fuck it is!
This Island Earth[Joseph M. Newman, 1955] A Metaluna Mutant checks out his looks on a sound stage mirror before being filmed. Based on the novel by Raymond F. Jones, this is an exciting science-fiction film in glorious Technicolor.
SPACE MONSTERS
There are monsters fromouter space who come to the planet Earth to be in our movies [ Invaders From Mars, William Cameron Menzies, 1953] and then there are monsters inouter space whom we send rocket ships to encounter [ The Green Slime, Kinji Fukasaku, 1968]. There are aliens who come to Earth to befriendus [ Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg, 1977], there are aliens who come to Earth to warnus [ The Day the Earth Stood Still, Robert Wise, 1951—I refuse to mention the remake!], and there are aliens who come to Earth to destroyus [ Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton, 1996].
Most movie aliens want to destroy us. Howard Hawks produced one of the best scary alien-who-wants-us-dead movies, The Thing from Another World[Christian Nyby, 1951], a taut thriller based on the disturbing short story by John W. Campbell, Jr. Who Goes There?. When remade in 1982 as John Carpenter’s The Thing, Bill Lancaster’s screenplay stayed much closer to the Campbell story and Carpenter, with the aid of the extraordinary make-up effects of Rob Bottin, created a truly horrific and suspenseful classic. The Thinghas one of my favorite lines in a monster movie: When one of the characters sees another character’s decapitated head grow crab-like legs and skitter across the floor, he says, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” Which, in context, is an extremely realistic reaction. Two years later John Carpenter’s Starman[1984] landed on our planet with a sensitive performance by Jeff Bridges in the title role. Almost as if to make up for the ferocity of The Thing, Starman’s alien is so handsome, sweet, and charming, lovely Karen Allen falls in love with him.
Pioneering French special-effects filmmaker Georges Méliès probably made the first outer space movie with his silent version of Jules Verne’s A Trip to the Moonin 1902. Méliès combined Verne’s novel with H. G. Wells’ novel The First Men in the Moonand brought us cinema’s first aliens—the insectoid Selenites. This film is most famous for its iconic image of the Man in the Moon with a rocket ship stuck in his eye! Sixty-two years later, Ray Harryhausen gave us another version of H. G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon[Nathan H. Juran, 1964] with remarkably similar-looking Selenites. The charming screenplay by Nigel Kneale adds an opening sequence in which modern-day astronauts discover a tattered Union Jack, left behind by the intrepid explorers who had set foot on the moon when Queen Victoria was still on the throne!
For every benign alien visitor, there are 50 hostile ones. And we Earthlings almost always greet our guests from space with suspicion and gunfire—like the Ymir in Ray Harryhausen’s 20 Million Miles to Earth[Nathan H. Juran, 1957], which is brought back from Venus as an egg. The rocket ship splashes down off the coast of Sicily, the egg hatches, and the alien creature is eventually gunned down atop Rome’s Coliseum.
One of the greatest of all space monsters appears in Forbidden Planet[Fred M. Wilcox, 1956]. A lavish MGM production, with glorious Technicolor cinematography by George Folsey, and the first all-electronic score by avant-garde musicians Louis and Bebe Barron, this is one of the most influential science-fiction films ever made. William Shakespeare’s The Tempestinspired the screenplay by Cyril Hume and, although some of the costumes and dialog are dated, the ideas expressed are startlingly modern. Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) with his beautiful daughter Alta (Anne Francis) are the only survivors of a colony of settlers on the planet Altair. A rescue mission led by Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) discovers that the two survivors are doing well, Dr. Morbius having learned much about the planet’s former inhabitants the Krell and their amazing technology. But Alta’s innocent sexual curiosity about the handsome men who have come to rescue them disturbs her father. A terrible, invisible monster kills several of the crew. It is an awesome sight, revealed only in outline by the crew’s neutron-beam weaponry. Eventually, Dr. Morbius reveals the terrible secret of the Krell’s disappearance… This splendid movie is clearly the template for the television series Star Trekand all of its sequels and prequels.
Two years after the release of Forbidden Planet, a meteor crashes down near the small town of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. A red substance attacks an old man named Doc. Steve McQueen, in his first starring role, tries to convince the police of what he witnessed: “Something” was killing the Doc! The “something” turns out to be The Blob[Irvin Yeaworth, 1958], a gelatinous goo that grows larger as it consumes more and more victims. This quintessential 1950s sci-fi movie features a wonderfully loony cha-cha-cha title song by Burt Bacharach and Mack David.
Ridley Scott’s seminal Alien[1979] revitalized the genre by placing a monster in an Old Dark House in outer space. Swiss artist H. R. Giger designed the creature, combining organic and mechanical elements in a truly original way. Dan O’Bannon’s screenplay is rife with cliché, but Scott’s stylish direction and a fine cast overcome the silliness and create a handsome, truly scary film. The wreckage of an alien spacecraft they find on another planet comes directly from Mario Bava’s excellent Planet of the Vampires[1965], and once the alien is loose aboard the space ship Nostromo, Alienbasically follows the storyline of It! The Terror From Beyond Space[Edward L. Cahn, 1958] a low-budget picture featuring Ray “Crash” Corrigan in a rubber monster suit.