The Monster Story has changed. As with all genres and sub-genres this happens over time. But the more they change, the more they stay the same. Has anything really changed in two hundred years? Yes and no.
The Monster Story
First off, let’s define what I mean when I say “Monster Story” as opposed to a Horror story. Horror does not always include monsters. In fact, the trend through the 1980s was to move further and further from actual monsters. Charles L. Grant in his Shadows anthologies shied away from big, creepy creatures. The Horror comes from psychological stress rather than an actual invasion of our reality by some kind of supernatural or scientific thing. We saw the same kind of thing over a hundred years earlier with Edgar Allan Poe. Poe created few monsters. (A murderous orangutan and a phantom horse.) Poe was interested in people, usually dead or dying ones.
Many Genres
A Monster Story by its very definition is a story about a monster. That could be Horror (Dracula, Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” or Stephen King’s It). But it could also be Science Fiction (Frankenstein, John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” or Ray Bradbury’s “The Foghorn”). Also Fantasy (Beowulf, Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Robert E. Howard’s Conan series). Sub-genres like Sword & Sorcery, ghost stories and occult detective tales immediately fall in line. These all have monsters in them, supposing a different set of rules than a reality-based/psychological story. The modern serial killer novel tries to walk this line but ultimately falls on the “real” side.
This struggle between psychological versus actual monsters is inherent in the origins of all these types of stories: the Gothic. The Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (published on Christmas eve 1765) as first offered by Horace Walpole, was a monster story. He has giant helmets and phantoms in paintings, none of which is explained as delusion. That fell to his successor, Ann Radcliffe, who gave us The Mysteries of Udopho (1794) as her masterpiece. Ms. Radcliffe felt it necessary to explain away every monster, every horror. This has been labeled the Gothic Explique, or Explained Gothic.
Which you prefer is up to you, of course. It is fairly obvious my train runs down the Walpole Line. Both directions are important. The Gothic Explique gave us two very good genres: Mystery and Science Fiction. When you read a John Dickson Carr locked room mystery, it is pretty evident how such stories fell from Radcliffe’s tree (now it is a tree! stick to one metaphor, GW!) What is less obvious is how Science Fiction came from the same branch. Mary Shelley, when she wrote Frankenstein, was working in a Gothic mode. By moving the explanation to the front, rather than giving it at the end, created the first SF novel.
Yesterday’s Monsters
All that happened a long time ago. What about today? Like many of you I have been watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. How could I resist? Now this isn’t a review. It is just the latest in a line of really convincing CGI monster films. You either love’em or hate’em. What I am taking from this latest one, since it is a TV series as opposed to a film, is something that should have been evident to me a long time ago. It probably was, but I forgot. It was true when I watched Cloverfield (2008), and Kong: Skull Island (2017), even the original Godzilla with Raymond Burr back in 1956. That truth is: good monster movies are about people, too.
If you watch old 1950s black&white B movies (or Bee movies) you can watch Tarantula, giant grasshoppers, The Giant Claw, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, etc. etc. try and destroy America but good old Yankee know-how (which usually created the monsters in the first place) puts them down. This is the Monster Story at its most basic. Frankenstein‘s skeletal plot played out once again. A threat is created then put down. There is something cathartic in this scenario. It is dramatic. It can be horrific. But it always happens to people. And whether you watch it again or not depends on the human story. How are the people who are affected by the monster portrayed. No human story, no real buy-in.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
So when I am watching Monarch I ask myself: is this really new? Do I care about the human story? And there is plenty of human story there with the two lead characters finding out they are half-brother and sister because their father had two families. You have Kurt Russell/Wyatt Russell’s character of Shaw on a redemption arc. You even have the servants of M.O.N.A.R.C.H. questioning whether they are the good guys or the bad guys. These are all good human threads. On this level, the show succeeds.
But what about the monsters? That varies episode to episode. The show hasn’t become the Monster-of-the-Week with a new creation every time (like good old Kolchak did). This is a double-edge sword. Last week’s episode felt like filler when the story focused on retrieving secret files. The threat was all human-based. I am hoping for a monster this week. It’s all about balance. A good monster story has to avoid becoming a soap opera with some giant rubber suits. It also has to remember there are the tiny people running around those crashing titans.
I think one of the most intriguing examples of this balance came out from 2013’s Pacific Rim. They did a good job of making you care about the humans who drove the giant robots or Jaegers but even better was showing how humans would immediately create a market from dead monsters. This is the kind of extrapolation that most monster movies lack. What happens after you kill Tarantula and you have a five hundred ton monster rotting in your backyard? (The Marvel Comics people clued in there too, with characters like Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes in Spiderman: Homecoming making an illegal income on bits and pieces left behind from the Battle of New York.) It is this kind of repercussion from a monstrous event that makes the human story evident.
Conclusion
So to go back to the original question: what has changed? In the broadest sense: nothing. People still enjoy monster stories. Sometimes they are gigantic beasts, sometimes they are sparkly vampires, zombie apocalypses or giant spiders in a Fantasy setting. How are any of these really different than the myths and legends of old that the Greeks or the Anglo-Saxons enjoyed? The monster story is a central theme in all storytelling. (According to Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004) “Overcoming the Monster” is the first plot.)
How well we tell them may have improved a little. That’s an opinion. Maybe it is simply the way monster tales morph for each new audience. Storytelling is a wily sport. Monsters are usually symbols of conflict within our culture. Dracula was a symbol of foreign influence in staid Victorian England. Godzilla was originally a symbol of nuclear destruction. (He seems to be heading toward climate change now….) Audiences process these inner conflicts through story. Why did all the superhero movies (Marvel and DC) have so many falling skyscrapers in them in the last fifteen years? 9-11, of course. You can tell a lot about a culture by its monsters.
So has the Monster Story evolved? Only in the same sense that actual living things evolve: slowly and imperceptively. I see this whenever I try to get my kids to watch old stuff with me. The subtext of a classic like The Exorcist (1973) or Poltergeist (1982) is too distant for them. They don’t remember the 1970s and 1980s. They don’t recall why people had those haircuts, what they were worried about and how they got their kicks. (Logically, neither of us should enjoy the original The Invisible Man from 1933 but that isn’t the case. When I watch something that old I know I am not enjoying it the same way viewers did back in the 1930s. What scared them is pretty tame by today’s standards. But with effort, anyone can enjoy old movies. The experience becomes one of nostalgia or discovery rather than the original intended shock.) It’s usually over when my kids see it is in black&white…
Cover Reveal
This might be a good time to mention my next book: Monster! From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly. I am finally getting around to putting some of the material I write for this blog into book form. (I write about 300,000 words a year!) This first collection of posts is divided into three sections: Horror Monsters, Science Fiction Monsters and Fantasy Monsters. After reading this post, I think the reason for this is obvious: all three genres use monsters.
The cover is by M. D. Jackson who has, as usual, come up with an intriguing image. I have included a few illustrations of my own in this one. The hope is to put out four of these a year. We’ll see. Revising the manuscript has stirred up all these thoughts on monsters.
The book should be out in January 2024.