Creature Films

[Michele Firmasyah]

Fromvampires and werewolves, to Godzilla and King Kong, monsters have defined various horror and action films, but sometimes these creature features are overshadowed by movies with masked killers. These so-called "slasher films" have gathered a large fan base with franchises like Halloween, Scream, and Saw. Unfortunately, these knife-wielding characters have taken the spotlight away from the creature features that came out around the same time. Here are a few creature features you may have missed, but which have undoubtedly made their way through the cultural zeitgeist. These films have left their mark and show that these monsters are not just distant horrors, but ones that speak to our darkest inner fears.

It soon becomes terrifyingly clear that, while Sil looks completely normal on the outside, she can morph into her other side when frightened, transforming into a deadly alien with the desire for procreation and the ability to kill and defend as it sees fit.

The day has been saved, although not for long. They soon realize the successful enzyme has also inadvertently created an evolved super roach. With grotesque insect features and standing as tall and upright as a man, this new organism is equipped with the survival ability to mold its features and mimic the sounds of its final prey: humans.

The action starts when a vicious werewolf attacks Ginger and her life takes a turn for the worse. As Ginger learns about the curse, she cannot stop herself from becoming a beast of the moon and hurting those close to her. Those who love old-school practical effects will cherish this modern classic and underrated classic.

Joe Cornish's Attack the Block is a great horror action film that features a group of teenagers defending themselves from alien creatures that landed in South London. They're members of the gang, so they're not pretty little angels.

They know how to use weapons and will do anything to defeat the dog-like monsters with glowing teeth. The pace is great, the practical effects are mesmerizing, and John Boyega debuts in a film that won many, many awards when it was released. Still, there's a fair amount of people who haven't seen the film.

After a great season in the documentary series Project Greenlight, writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, and director John Gulager set out to do their dream project: a creature feature. Produced by some very familiar faces in the industry, Feast is a horror comedy that feels like an insane tribute to creature films of the past but has all the tropes of a modern horror film, including gore and the ability to break some rules.

It tells the story of people trapped in a bar, as a mysterious creature is set on destroying all of them. The body count is high, the practical effects are great, and there's a vulgar disregard for rules as characters keep getting killed right as you start liking them.

A romantic comedy set in a sci-fi thriller setting, Love and Monsters is the best film you didn't see back in 2020, and it heavily bombed at the box-office because of a weird release schedule. It tells the story of Joel, a teenager who has managed to survive a monster apocalypse.

Joel is now living in an underground bunker where all survivors have their respective partners. Lonely Joel decides to leave the bunker and face the monsters that now dominate Earth, and see if he can reunite with his girlfriend Aimee, whom he promised he would find.

The Thing is a cinematic world of horror that showcases exploration, paranoia, confusion, and claustrophobia. From the movie's inception, things quickly take an intense turn when a team of unassuming American researchers stationed in Antarctica clash with a group of hysterical Norwegian scientists hell-bent on killing a fleeing dog that takes shelter in the American research base. The situation quickly escalates into a gunfight, but soon they come to realize the death of the Norwegians is just one of many mistakes, for they no longer have any clue what awaits them.

Any film that features Shea Whigham in the lead deserves to be seen. Splinter tells the story of a group of people who try to escape the threat of a parasitic entity with an insatiable hunger.

There's not much more to say about the film that features great practical effects about its creature and how it attacks its hosts: black splinters seem to be its weapon of choice. If you haven't seen this one, and you like body horror, then you don't know what you're missing.

Zak Penn had a great opportunity with Incident at Loch Ness. The prolific Hollywood writer was able to work alongside the famous Werner Herzog for his version of found footage. What he was able to accomplish was a seriously underrated horror film that doesn't resemble anything you've seen in the past.

Incident at Loch Ness is a mockumentary starring the real Herzog as he makes a documentary about the Loch Ness mystery. Penn is his director. Things don't exactly go right with the shoot, as it appears the real creature wants to make an entrance. This film-within-a-film-within-a-film was a conceptual wonder that not many people understood, but in the end, it's also a creature film that has the right amount of exposure for you to cancel your vacations to the Scottish Highlands.

The spy creatures were created by John Downer Productions, Ltd. an award-winning production company based in the U.K. that specializes in making wildlife films. John Downer and his team have pioneered many of the innovative techniques used for filming wildlife in current nature documentaries. In an interview with NATURE, some of the team discussed how their spy cams were made and some of the challenges involved.

Year after year, generations of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) migrate to the same trees as their predecessors, bowing the branches down with the weight of their orange-black clusters. They travel 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) from the temperate forests of North America to hibernate in these wintering grounds in the Mexican Neovolcanic Axis. Though it is believed these trees have microclimate conditions that are ideal for monarch overwintering, the mechanism for this multigenerational migration to these specific trees remains a mystery.

Monarchs are divided into two main populations: western monarchs, which overwinter in California, and eastern monarchs, which overwinter in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico. The number of monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico was down by more than half during the 2019-2020 winter season, and western monarch butterfly populations have also been critically low for the past two years.

In December of this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to decide whether the monarch butterfly should be included in the Endangered Species Act, which would offer significant legal protection for the species in the U.S.

Depending on your own personal taste (and which of his films you're watching), Sam Katzman is either a legendary or infamous figure in the movie industry. As a producer, he's responsible for over two hundred projects, almost all of them rooted in exploitation. From the 1930s until his death in 1973, Katzman courted every trend in the industry, from westerns and jungle pictures to rock and roll and youth gone wild movies. It's notable that we attach so much rememberance on Katzman as a producer; after all, fanfar is usually reserved for directors, writers, and those directly behind the camera, not for the producers who make it all happen. Yet, Katzman's larger-than-life personality and approach stands out against any particular film, director, or actor from his films. One thing is for certain: his savvy business sense and willingness to lean into any and every pop culture trend has given us scores upon scores of interesting and entertaining (note that I haven't said "good") movies that still offer thrills, chills, and the occasional unintentional laugh all these years later.

Arrow Video's new Blu-ray box set Cold War Creatures: Four Films from Sam Katzman perfectly embodies this, and the films included run the gamut in terms of quality. On one end of the spectrum is the exceptional 1956 noir-esque The Werewolf, brimming with tension, tragedy, and pathos. On the other end is 1957's The Giant Claw, an unintentionally-laughable creature feature with a puppet so bad that it serves as an albatross around the neck of the entire film. Individually, these films, made during Katzman's tenure at Columbia Pictures, are enjoyable B-movie romps. And yet, when the four films are viewed as a piece together, they offer us a larger look into Katzman's brief-but-memorable flirtation with science fiction thrillers set against the backdrop of Cold War paranoia. When viewed as a whole, a narrative emerges that is not only worthy of discussion, but is something to celebrate and study, as many of the issues that these films struggle with are ones that we face once again today.

The set begins with Creature with the Atom Brain. As critic and historian Stephen R. Bissette notes in his indispensable presentation on the life and career of Sam Katzman included on the Blu-ray for Creature, the producer believed in the power of the word "atom" and connected it directly with success. The mid-1950s were a tumultuous time where science was growing faster than our understanding of it, and while we could recognize the power of the atom and all the wonderful advances it brought us, we had not yet come to terms with the consequences of such power. With the power of the atom came much fear: fear of those who would exploit and misuse this great power, fear of inevitable destruction, and fear of the cost that must be paid for these great scientific discoveries.

Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) finds a bitter mob boss partnering with an ex-Nazi scientist to create an army of the living dead. Like robots, these empty bodies are now powered by science and controlled from afar by remote control. At the center of the story is Richard Denning (Creature from the Black Lagoon), who must wage war against those who seek to absolute power. Creature is written by Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man) and directed by B-movie master Edward L. Cahn, (The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, Invisible Invaders). Given the experience of everyone involved, this is a cracking little picture with brisk action, engaging cinematography, and a story that feels genuinely eerie.

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