Monster movies tend to transcend genres. Some can be sci-fi, horror, or fantasy, but whichever category they fall into, they seem to be popular. It turns out a lot of moviegoers like seeing what sorts of creepy creatures Hollywood will come up with next, and how the heroes of the story are going to defeat it in the long run. A lot of these films aren’t exactly high art, but there are definitely some that have some pretty profound subtexts.
One subtext that is commonly used is the idea that the actual monsters in the film are nothing compared to the monstrosity that the humans in the film show each other. To put in another way,
humans are the real monsters in these stories
, usually because they resort to hostility or mob mentality when confronted with extraordinary conflict and don’t know what to do. Or perhaps it’s because the monsters in question aren’t all that bad, and have just become victims of what society wants and expects them to be.
Either way, the antagonists of these films were pretty clean cut compared to the people that appear in it.
The Mist
is
based on a novella
of the same name by horror maestro
Stephen King
. In the story, a mysterious mist envelopes a town carrying a whole slew of dangerous monsters with it. The monsters come in various forms, and get away with killing quite a lot of people who think they’re strong enough to venture out into the mist despite the blatant warnings of other people.
The film centres on a group of people who have all holed up in a grocery store to wait out the phenomenon. With them is a woman who is a Christian extremist who is into a lot of conspiracy theories and doomsday rhetoric, and she gradually grows a little cult in the supermarket, with the people believing that it is the end of days and that the mist is God punishing humanity. The animosity between the supermarket factions grows, and they often come to blows with one another. Not only is the mist revealed to be the result of the military experimenting with opening portals to other worlds,
but it also becomes clear that people who are afraid can and will resort to violence and an “us vs. them” mentality, making them just as much, if not more, of a threat than the monsters.
The Descent
is about a group of women who engage in a fun weekend getaway to go hiking in the mountains. They begin to explore a cave, and find that within is a group of terrifying creatures known as Crawlers, who have adapted to the darkness and begins hunting the group. Before long, each member of the party is pointing the finger at the other, and they slowly lose trust in one another.
This fading trust later turns into outright hostility, leading to each woman being just as dangerous as the Crawlers. The Crawlers are still deadly, but at the end of the day, they’re probably just trying to get some food, but they all seem to have no problem working together unlike the people invading their realm. In the end,
The Descent
is about how humans buckle in stressful situations and may often result to blaming each other rather than trying to work together and find a proper solution to their predicament.
It’s also a biting reminder that the Crawlers have no issues doing just that–so why is it so hard for a bunch of friends?
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Under the Shadow
is a
war-horror movie
set during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. During the infamous War of the Cities, in which air raids constantly bombarded the general populace, a mother and her daughter are forced to shelter in their home to escape the chaos surrounding them. The daughter hears about the legend of the djinn, a demon-like figure in Islam, which releases a real djinn, that begins haunting the family.
The kicker here is that the djinn is actually not that big of a deal when compared to the Hell that awaits them outside of their own front door. Being attacked incessantly by a demonic entity is actually kind of preferable to facing the horrors of war. So while the djinn definitely is a scary force to be reckoned with,
the real monster are the people responsible for the war, for causing so much death and destruction in the first place.
Lamb
takes place in the Icelandic wilderness, where a couple who live on a sheep farm awaken to find that one of their sheep has given birth to a human/sheep hybrid. The decide to take in the creature and raise it as their own child, completely disregarding the lamb’s mother, who desperately wants her baby back. She even goes so far as attacking the couple to try and get her young back.
In this one, the subtext about humans being the real monsters is pretty on the nose. First of all, the couple is perfectly aware that they did not conceive or give birth to the child.
They had literally no reason to take the child away from the ewe and from whatever vassel of horror served as the father
, and they definitely didn’t have any right to continue to keep the child after its mother makes multiple efforts to win her lamb back. It’s sort of a universal rule of the animal kingdom–nine times out of ten, a mother will fight to the death to protect their children. The ewe in this case was 100% right to want her kid back–because it’s her kid, not the couple’s.
The Shape of Water
is a
historical fantasy movie
set during the Cold War. In the film, a cleaner at a top-secret US research facility discovers that the government has found and abducted a swamp creature from South America, and is keeping it in the lab to experiment on. The two end up falling in love, though they cannot physically communicate. But the creature is shown to be very gentle and emotionally intelligent.
Of course, humanity subjects the creature to all kinds of torturous experiments, causing it great pain and suffering, without allowing it to leave or have any ounce of freedom.
The Shape of Water
is a film that shows humanity at its worst
, exploring the idea that humans may sometimes think we are above the importance of other living, breathing creatures, even if they are just as sentient and feeling as we are.
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The monster in
The Iron Giant
is actually about a giant robot of extraterrestrial orgin, who randomly turns up onoe day in the United States
during the Cold War
. The Giant (
Vin Diesel
), as he comes to be known, is found by a lonely young boy, and the two become a pair of unconventional, yet close friends. But of course, with this being the Cold War and all, it’s not long before the military comes knocking, thinking the boy is in possession of some sort of secret Soviet weapon.
The basic premise of the film is “what if there was a weapon that didn’t want to be a weapon,” and though Giant is programmed to attack any perceived threats, for the most part, he enjoys just hanging around with his best buddy and not really bothering anyone. But the government becomes so convinced of the danger that they literally launch a nuclear missile at their own town to destroy it. The Giant never bothered anyone intentionally, and the government’s only reason to destroy him is their paranoia surrounding the nuclear arms race.
The Giant may be what he chooses to be, but the vast majority of the humans in the conflict are downright awful.
Let the Right One In
is a
Swedish film about vampires
. The main character is a young boy, who frequently becomes the subject of numerous cruel pranks, insults, and beatdowns by the group of bullies that is constantly on his back at school. He later meets a girl who is moving into his apartment block, and the two begin to fall in love. Except the girl is actually not human whatsoever, and is secretly a vampire.
The vampire is very clearly a thinking, feeling being, understanding the plight of the boy and offering a sympathetic ear when he needs it the most. As for the humans, not a single one really cares about the poor kid, and he is never taken seriously when he brings up his major concerns about the bullies.
The one who helped him the most was a vampire rather than his own kind, which sort of speaks to how the humans in this movie are self-absorbed and only care about their own personal needs.
Frankenstein
is based on an 1818 novel by
Mary Shelley
, and is likely the first ever “humans are the real monsters” story ever created. If not, then it’s definitely one of the most famous. In the story, a deranged doctor builds an artificial body out of parts of corpses, stitching them together and reanimating them into the Monster (
Boris Karloff
), who immediately becomes hostile. But let’s be honest, how was he supposed to react? The first thing he knew was that he was in a huge lab surrounded by invasive machines with some weirdo standing over him and cackling like a maniac. Who wouldn’t flip out in that situation?
In the end, what the Monster wants most is to be left alone and to isolate himself from human society, because they have made it explicitly clear that they do not want him and will not accept him, with some going so far as to even want him dead. The Monster never asked to be alive, and now he has to pay the price it.
Humanity is crueler to the Monster than the Monster is to humanity, and in both the film and the original novel, humans are the clear-cut villains at the end.
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The original
King Kong
is one of the first giant monster movies, about a massive ape that originates from the mysterious Skull Island. Skull Island is a particular spot of interest for a group of filmmakers, and when they find Kong, they decide to take him back to New York to be a circus attraction, because obviously, there’s no other creature like him in the world. However, Kong breaks free from his bonds, and begins to wreak havoc on the city until he is mercilessly shot dead by a group of fighter planes.
At first it seems like Kong’s death is totally justified, but it’s important to understand the implications here. Kong wasn’t a giant, devious monster hellbent on human extinction,
he was a scared animal in an unfamiliar place, and he behaved exactly as any wild animal would in such a terrifying situation
. It’s also made clear that Kong has emotional depth and intelligence as observed by him falling in love with an actress. In the end, he was forcibly removed from his home for the purposes of human entertainment, and then killed when he, naturally, didn’t want any part of it. It’s pretty clear who the real villains in this story are.
Unlike Kong, Godzilla is actually intent on destroying humans and causing as much havoc as possible. The key difference here is why. In the original
Godzilla
, the giant scaly lizard with atomic breath, the monster is created off the coast of Japan due to human nuclear experiements. With the Pacific Ocean being such a hotspot for nuclear tests, it was only a matter of time before all that radiation mutated the life forms and spawned a giant monster.
So while Godzilla is indeed a monster that needs to be stopped, none of this ever would have happened if humans had just left nuclear materials alone, because there’s no way we ever should have meddled with them in the first place. It’s not that Godzilla is right to destroy humanity as much as possible, but he’s not totally in the wrong for it.
He probably started out as a peaceful little fish just minding his own business before human environmental destruction warped him into a giant monster.
So it’s safe to say that the people in this story aren’t exactly squeaky-clean either.
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