Excuse me, Sir ... are you a monster?

By Emma West wood

(03/11/08) - When someone thinks 'monster movies', images of atomic oddities – enlarged and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting citizens – usually springs to mind. Yet, monsters come in very different forms, whether sucking on someone's jugular or breaking from 'within' in the guise of a parasitical mutation, to name just a couple of examples.

Given the brief of writing a book called Monster Movies, the first port of call was to contact 'friends' on Myspace. What did they think? What were their favourite monsters and/or monster movies? The top gong goes to the great Japanese lizard Godzilla for being the most mentioned. Surprisingly or not, three people rated Barbra Streisand as their favourite movie monster. Go figure.

But could a Barbra Streisand film actually be a monster movie? And with that question comes the next challenge: How do you define a 'monster movie'? Immediately, the creative liberty was taken to strike off any monster movies of a comedic or child-friendly nature (see you later Monsters Inc) or films not of the author's liking (adios The Toxic Avenger) for the purpose of constructing some realistic parameters.

So, a monster movie is any film that centres around a specific monster, right? Ah yes... but this then brings us to the hardest of all questions: what actually constitutes a monster?

"A monster is, by definition, something that is unnatural," explains Adam Simon, director of Roger Corman's Carnosaur, who is one of the seven filmmakers interviewed in Monster Movies. "Here's one way to look at it: The word itself has roots in the idea of something to be seen or to be shown. It is related to words like 'prodigy' – not in the sense of an intellectual prodigy, but of some kind of unnatural birth, for example. It's very related to the things you might have seen at a freak show."

"The monster is a survivor," Simon says. "It's a holdover from the pre-Copernican world. It's a holdover from the world when magic still lived, when the earth was at the centre and not the sun, when we didn't have the rules of physics and science. It's a survival of the images from fairytales, from mythology, from nightmares into what has otherwise become a reasonable world."

Along similar lines, Simon argues a human loses the poignancy of being a monster. While Hannibal Lecter is certainly a 'monstrous' personality, he can't be considered a monster because he is still 'one of us' (quoting the famous chant from Tod Browning's Freaks). Grappling with the gargantuan task of covering the complete history of monster movies in such a tight word count, Adam Simon's clear-cut definition was the one this author was looking for – no Jason or Michael Myers.

But, of course, not everyone agrees.

Greg McLean, director of monster croc film Rogue and the outback stalker/slasher flick, Wolf Creek, begs to differ with his friend Adam Simon: "The human monster is the person who has always been a monster, but wears the mask of a human being. I think there are human monsters that definitely fall under the category of a monster... When you have a human being who can operate without any understanding of another human being's pain and suffering, you've got a monster."

That may be so – and many a dinner table conversation has defended McLean's stance – but the decision stands. The movies contained within Monster Movies are of the large nuclear variety, the demonic kind, rising from the mysterious depths of the deep or plummeting to our planet from space. Their makers – such as Roger Corman, John Carpenter and Larry Cohen – have all got great things to say about them in the Monster Movies book and the author would like to assure everyone:

"No monsters were harmed during critical dissections, although I now require a nightlight at bedtime, a yummy cup of warm cocoa and the reassurance only a plastic mattress protector provides. Movie monsters are everywhere and they are here to stay. You have been warned..."

Monster Movies by Emma Westwood is out now on Pocket Essentials. Please follow links on the left to buy a copy and support Kamera by doing so.