Sympathy for the Monsters

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Sympathy for the Monsters

Written by John Michael Decker

Feb 21, 2007 at 01:23 PM

Monsters have been around for as long as man has been telling stories. When most people think of monsters, they probably imagine horrible supernatural beings that are up to no good. We conjure up images of villainous horrors that must be vanquished at any cost. We think of Dr. Frankenstein's lumbering abomination being pursued by angry villagers with torches, Count Dracula getting a stake plunged through his undead heart, or even Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo, vomiting radioactive fire at helpess soldiers. Folklore and mythology are rife with tales of heroes' epic battles with monsters. Consider the old English legend of Beowulf fighting Grendel, the Greek myth of Hercules battling the hydra or even the biblical tale of St. George slaying the dragon. As storytelling has become more sophisticated -- from oral tradition to written word to the cinema -- monsters have continued to play an important role in our modern tales. Think of King Kong's last stand at the Empire State Building, the unstoppable great white shark from Steven Spielberg's Jaws or even the slash-happy Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th franchise and it is apparent that monsters still hold a powerful position in our collective psyche. I think it is fair to say that, more often than not, monsters play the role of the bad guys in our stories. Most people root for the protagonists of an adventure to slaughter the monster -- most people, but not me. I love monsters, and most of the time I feel sorry for them.

I think that my great love of monsters started when I was a young child in the 1970s. I grew up in the small town of Lake Luzerne, NY. It was a very rural area and this was before we had video games or the Internet to occupy our time, so we had to rely on our imaginations for much of our entertainment. My brothers and I enjoyed camping and often our parents would let us pitch a tent and sleep in the back yard on warm summer nights. My Dad, who has always been a great natural storyteller, would tuck us into our sleeping bags and spin us an original tall tale, usually involving he and his brother battling some kind of monster on Long Island, where they grew up. Sometimes, when he didn't have an original story to tell, Dad would read to us from H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allen Poe. Then, about a half hour after he said goodnight, Dad would put on a rubber Halloween mask and attack our tent. First we would hear him rustling around the yard. Then his silhouette would appear on the side of the tent. And finally, he would burst through the flaps, growling out his best Lon Chaney impression. We would end up chasing each other around the yard as he snarled and we giggled. I think the best part of the whole experience was the anticipation. Waiting in that tent with our plastic flashlights, not knowing when the "monster" would strike. From an early age I learned that monsters were cool.

Back in those days we didn't have cable television, in fact, we only had a little black and white TV that got four channels by aid of rabbit ears. On Sunday afternoons there was a television show that solidified my great affection for monsters. It was called the Creature Feature, and it would play classic monster movies. It was the Creature Feature that introduced me to the wonderful Universal monsters like Dracula and the Wolf Man, giant Japanese creatures like Godzilla and Mothra, and even some great Sci-Fi flicks like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And it was watching the Creature Feature that really got me to start sympathizing with the plight of the poor, maligned monsters.

Take for example, the classic Universal monsters. In Frankenstein (1931), it would be easy to judge the creature that the great Boris Karloff portrayed as "evil." In actuality he is a victim of Dr. Henry Frankenstein's hubris. Stitched together from various corpses and brought to life by electricity, Karloff's monster was then abandoned by Dr. Frankenstein (played by Colin Clive). Left to fend for itself in a world that was revolted by its very appearance. No wonder the poor creature struck back. The real villain was Henry Frankenstein, who did not take responsibility for his creation. Frankenstein's monster: Lumbering killing machine or misunderstood man-child? You decide.

I also have great empathy for Count Dracula. As portrayed by Bela Lugosi in the film Dracula (1931), the Count was all class. Lugosi's Dracula was a survivor. He had to drink the blood of other living creatures in order to sustain his existence. He was only doing what he had to, and he did it with great style and panache. The Count knew that he was a creature of the night, and was true to himself. Like the ultimate survivor he was, Dracula always managed to cheat death and return to menace mankind again and again -- you have to admire his tenacity. Count Dracula: Blood sucking fiend or crafty survivor? You decide.

But my favorite Universal monster was not based on any Victorian literature, but rather on ancient European folklore. I speak, of course, of the werewolf from the film the Wolf Man (1941). In the movie, Lon Chaney Jr. plays Larry Talbot, a rich gentleman who has recently returned to his homeland. On a moonlit walk with a pretty girl, he is attacked by a gypsy werewolf (played by Bela Lugosi of Dracula fame) and cursed to transform into a snarling, man-eating beast when the moon is full. In a sense, poor Larry Talbot has contracted a deadly disease, albeit a disease that threatens the lives of everyone around him. The Wolf Man: rampaging beast or lost soul? You decide.

Werewolves, vampires (particularly Count Dracula), and Dr. Frankenstein's monster have appeared again and again in the cinema since Universal's earliest days. Even though the stories they appear in might change, the feelings of sympathy I have for movie monsters have not. Most monsters (Universal or not) elicit sympathy for the same reasons as the big three. Dracula, as I said, is the ultimate survivor. This could also be applied to the shark from Jaws, or the extraterrrestrials from the Alien films. I would not classify the giant shark or the alien bugs as evil so much as following their genetic codes to survive. Frankenstein's monster, as I said, is an accident of science. The same could be said for Godzilla, who is really an allegory for the hydrogen bomb --the ultimate hubris of man. Godzilla is more akin to a natural disaster than anything else. When he comes to town, as with an earthquake or tsunami, all the poor humans in his path can do is hunker down and hope they survive long enough to clean up afterward. And like the Wolf Man, my favorite giant monster, King Kong is more of a victim of circumstance than anything else. The big ape was kidnapped from his home environment and displayed as a curiosity. Is it any wonder that he broke loose and wrought havoc on The Big Apple? As with Africanized honeybees and fire ants, the lesson of King Kong is that some animals should not be relocated.

But there are exceptions to every rule. Sometimes the monsters in horror films really are... well, monsters. Examples of the fiends I speak of are Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Michael Myers from Halloween, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, and Freddy Kruger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. These monsters have become iconic in their own way, although they lack the personality of the classic movie creatures. I cannot argue with the fact that these antagonists are pure evil; this new breed of monsters tend toward soulless killing machines with an inexplicable hatred for teenage hormones. Usually, however, the parade of human victims in these films are so annoying and stupid that by the time the bad guys devise a creative means to butcher them I am relieved -- so once again I am rooting for the bad guys.

And what about zombies? Those shambling, undead, flesh-eating abominations that George A. Romero often features in his films? These things are like anti-ghosts. Instead of being souls without bodies they are bodies without souls. They tend to have even less personality than Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees, but what they lack in conversational skills they more than make up for in sheer numbers. I love zombie flicks. Perhaps it is because in the really good zombie films, the animated corpses represent us at our worst. Take George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, where the mindless undead are compelled to congregate at a shopping mall. Also, I must confess that it is extremely satisfying to see rag-tag groups of human survivors put bullets in the heads of zombie hordes. In movies when Nazis, robots or zombies get destroyed, I never feel any kind of guilt. What I have yet to see is a Nazi-cyborg-zombie combination -- now that would be a cool monster!

As I stated above, there are always exceptions to the rule, and sometimes monsters are not cast as the bad guys. Some examples of heroic monsters are Ben Grimm, the ever loving, blue-eyed Thing from the Fantastic Four (he may be an ugly rock monster but he's the heart and soul of the team), and the Incredible Hulk (who really just wants to be left alone). One of the best recent heroic monsters is Hellboy. Hellboy is the creation of writer/artist Mike Mignola and first appeared in Dark Horse comic books in 1993. In 2004 Hellboy and his colorful cast of supporting characters were adapted to film by the great director Guillermo del Toro. Veteran character actor Ron Perlman portrayed Hellboy beneath a large amount of prosthetic makeup, and invested the character with great amounts of depth and humanity. There are just so many things that I find appealing about Hellboy -- he's literally a giant red devil, complete with horns, a tail and a stone right hand. He looks about as monstrous as they come, but at heart he's just a salt-of-the-Earth kind of guy. He was sent to Earth to be the beast that brings about the apocalypse. That is his destiny, but because Hellboy was raised by kind humans, he chooses to foreswear his fate and fight for humanity. The character arc is almost Shakespearean -- well, if Shakespeare had written about red devils, fish men and women who could start fires with their minds.

So yes, I love monsters of all stripes -- I admit it freely. Be they scary, cheesy, or heroic, I will always be in their corner, rooting for them to keep fighting that uphill battle for respectability. I hope this article will get you to revisit some classic monster movies and view the much-maligned beasts in a different light. Monsters need support too.

Copyright 2007 John Michael Decker. No reprints without written permission.

John Michael Decker is a struggling actor and sometime freelance writer. He used to leave out milk and cookies for the creature that lived in his closet... you know -- in case it got hungry in the middle of the night.