Monster Movie Roots.

I am not playing games

currently due to my commitment to painting the backlog. I don’t want to bore you with my painting progress, that’s what Twitter is for. I do however want to bore you with thoughts on monster movies that I have been watching and rewatching. So with this came the question what are the core movies that have lead me down this viewing preferential path. I will need to define what I mean by a monster in my universe. A creature that is non human, large and unrelenting in pursuit of its primal goals and invariably in opposition to humanity. So I exclude Vampires, ghosts as they are human in form or derivation. 

1) JAWS, For those of you who lived through the summer of 1975 , films would never be the same again. The impact on creative lives this movie had Is inestimable. Superlatives such as ‘master class in film making’ and ‘primal fear inducing’ are exact. There are some 60 plus shark movies to date that are homages to this film but none have surpassed it.

2) King Kong, For those of you that lived through the summer of 1933, films would not be the same again. He captured the publics imagination at a time in film history when it was being fed an endless diet of star driven domestic dramas. To get away from reality your only options were Westerns. King Kong right guy at the right time.If there was no King Kong , no Godzilla , No Ray Harryhausen , No endless monster remakes. The themes introduced here became a staple of the monster movie genre.Themes such as, Go big and go home, Mysterious Islands, Screaming victims, Corporate greed to name but a few. 

3) Alien, A masterpiece for its play of the human prerogative to survive at all cost. What monster movie can you think of from the last thirty years that hasn’t had its human heroes trying out new and innovative ways of ending a monster. For me this is a benchmark in my enjoyment of a new film. I like to say things while watching like ‘ We didn’t see that one coming’. Along with the phrase ‘ohhh, He won’t be in Alien 2.

Cmon we All Secretly Want To See this Movie.

So Many remakes… 

Often Seen, Never Beaten