Browsing Tag

creature feature

A man and a woman look down into a manhole to the sewer below.
Posted on June 4, 2024

Are all creature features the same?: Talking The Great Alligator (1979) and Alligator (1980)

Podcast

In today’s episode, it’s creature feature, B-movie summer horror with 1979’s The Great Alligator and 1980s’s Alligator. Despite their very different settings, both films lean into the carnage caused by their snappy, tail-spinning reptilian monsters while simultaneously suggesting that the true villains are more of the two legged variety. But do their eco-critical considerations resonate with today’s audiences? We’re breaking it all down today with spoilers, so stay tuned.

Recommended Reading:

Bould, Mark. The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star (Wallflower Press, 2009)

Gambin, Lee. Massacred by Mother Nature: The Natural Horror Film (Midnight Marquee Press, 2012).

Jones, Matthew. “Antagonistic Nature: The Loss of Anthropocentric Authority in Eco-Horror of the 1970s and 80s.” Supernatural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring/Summer 2021, pp. 33–47.

Mann, Craig. “America, Down the Toilet: Urban Legends, American Society and Alligator,” in Animal Horror Cinema, edited by Katarina Gregersdotter, Johan Hoglund, and Nicklas Hallen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 110-25.

The Great Alligator has just got a 2-disc 4K UHD DVD special release from Severin Films.

Godzilla movie monster looks ready to strike a city
Posted on May 12, 2023

A Disaster of a Movie: Talking Godzilla (1998)

Podcast

On today’s episode, we’re diving into the magnificent world of creature features with 1998’s Godzilla. Directed by Roland Emmerich, the film takes the famous monster’s story and puts a decidedly American spin on it to questionable results. We’re talking about historical revisionism and what makes a really bad horror film in today’s episode so stay tuned!

Articles Mentioned:

Film Recommendations:

Posted on January 5, 2023

Troll and Ecological Folk Horror in the ‘Sacrifice Zone’

Dawn Keetley

Roar Uthaug is a master of genre film. His first directorial feature was the excellent slasher, Cold Prey (2006), and he then helmed Norway’s first disaster film, The Wave, in 20015. His latest is a monster movie – also an action adventure film, a disaster film, and a Norwegian kaiju movie. Released by Netflix in 2022, Troll is about an ancient being awakened by an explosion detonated in the mountains of Norway. The film is fairly self-conscious about its genre origins: one character, early on, suggests that the creature emerging from the mountain is “King Kong” – and in a later montage of “Breaking News” reports, a Japanese journalist asks, “Could this be a Norwegian Godzilla?”

Troll resembles no film, perhaps, so much as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953), in which a long-buried dinosaur is awakened from the ice of the Arctic by an atomic blast test. (I’ve written about the politics of that film here.) Indeed, the protagonist of Troll, Professor Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is, like the protagonists of Beast, a paleontologist, interrupted in her search for dinosaur fossils by the troll’s awakening – and the Norwegian government’s consequent summoning of her as expert. It turns out, moreover, that the troll, just like the rhedosaurus in Beast, is heading toward its “home,” which just happens, in both cases, to be one of the most populated of urban areas: Manhattan in Beast and Oslo in Troll.[i] The film’s respective monsters do some rampaging, of course, on their way home.

As fascinating as Troll is as a monster movie, however, I want to suggest that it also overlaps to some degree with folk horror.

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A creature looks into the distance as half of its face is submerged in the water
Posted on June 4, 2022

The Shape of the Creature

Guest Post

Director Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water was born from a desire to retell the story of The Creature from the Black Lagoon films from the 1950s. Del Toro had always wanted the Gill-man and the human woman he falls for to be romantically together in the end[1]. Getting to such a wishful happy ending required more than just a change to the final outcome. Del Toro’s updated, aquatic “beauty and the beast” inverts much in the Creature narrative, expressing changes in the cultural values and entertainment needs of audiences today. We are no longer expected to fear the monster but to sympathize with him and to desire him. It is the institutions of government and science that are now monstrous. Read more

Posted on May 14, 2018

Island Zero: Indie Creature Feature

Dawn Keetley

Island Zero is directed by Josh Gerritsen and written by Tess Gerritsen, the best-selling crime author of the Rizzoli and Isles series. While undeniably low-budget, Island Zero has a lot going for it –including excellent writing and direction and some stellar performances—especially by Laila Robins as the local doctor, Maggie. There are also some powerful location shots as the director mines the Maine island of Islesboro for its bleak beauty.

Island Zero quickly puts us into the realm of a quite conceivable dystopian scenario as it follows a marine biologist, Sam (Adam Wade McLaughlin), who is trying to figure out why the local fish population seems to have vanished—“sudden unexplained collapse of the fishery” he calls it. His wife, also a marine biologist who vanished mysteriously at sea four years ago, had been studying fishery collapse—a phenomenon happening all along the eastern seaboard. When she disappeared, she had been working on the theory that the fish were being eaten by an apex predator that hadn’t yet been identified. Sam, still grieving, has picked up her work and has become convinced not only that she was right but that the mysterious predator has moved up to Maine.

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