Monsters of the Atomic Age!
Mar 7, 2010 Cool Stuff
Like any great horror movie tag-line or comic-book cover, the above title is a little deceiving. I guess I could have titled this article Monsters of the New Age or Monsters of the New Millennium but both of those are misleading as well. I am talking about the monsters that have sprung forth from the fertile imaginations of modern writers. Creatures that have no correlation in folklore, modern or antiquated, and thereby have an almost surreal believability. I guess that these horrors represent modern man’s fears just as Varney the Vampire did those in the Victorian era.
Certainly writers of prose are almost always ahead of everyone else and I think that you can trace the kind of stuff that Chris Carter has helped make more common to folks like Arthur Machen; “the Great God Pan” for instance melds ancient myth with modern science to create a truly original monster. But it isn’t until good old H.P Lovecraft & Robert E. Howard really started the Cosmic Age of horror that truly modern monstrosities came about. Both authors did have classical abominations in their repertoires, vampires, werewolves, ghosts and witches, and they both helped bring obscure legends into the modern literary fold. Lovecraft with his depictions of ghoul culture in his Dream cycle and Howard the zuvembie; in what still may be the best representation of voodoo in horror with his seminal “Pigeons from Hell”. Both of these men created incredible original creatures, Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, Gugs and Shoggoths being just a few and Howard helped really perfect the anti-hero, as well. I kind of feel both men would be very upset that I attribute the dawning of any kind of “Modern Age” to them but they really flipped the switch.
Fritz Leiber began his stellar career as Lovecraft and Howard’s meteoric lives ended and in 1942 he brought urban despair into the ghost story with a tale that still chills me any time I get on an elevated train, “Smoke Ghost”. Leiber describes his spectre as “…a ghost from the world of today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul…” and it feeds on the oppressive depression that faces many city-dwellers. A truly chilling and original supernatural threat.,
With the advent of television came a slew of new and interesting monsters. THE TWILIGHT ZONE is loaded with post-modern abominations like the Boogey-Man that harrowed William Shatner in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”; based upon a story by the man that made the undead modern, Richard Matheson, and it’s direct descendant THE OUTER LIMITS actually had a monster of the week, referred to by the crew as “the Bear”! These included such unbefore seen creeps like the criminal exiled Zanti Misfits and man-made monsters like Robert Culp’s surgically altered propaganda pawn in “The Architects of Fear”.
I’ve already mentioned Chris Carter and THE X-FILES, despite it’s later foibles, was a breeding ground for both supernatural and pseudo-scientific miscreants. In the episode “The Host” we were introduced to the Flukeman, an anthropomorphic parasitic worm attacking sewer workers in Atlantic City. There were Lanny and Leonard, a simpleton drunk and his vestigial conjoined twin who would detach to seek new hosts. Veteran character actor Vincent Schiavelli’s portrayal of the brothers was one of the many high-lights in the episode “Humbug”, which also starred Jim Rose and the Enigma from Mr. Rose’s Traveling Sideshow. Chester Banton, played by Tony Shalhoub to paranoid perfection in the episode “Soft Light” is a scientist who’s shadow has become destructive Dark Matter. Virgil Incanto, was carnivorous chubby-chaser portrayed by Timothy Carhart in the episode “2Shy”, who subsists on human fatty tissue and “Leonard Betts” is a living tumor that must devour cancer to survive, played by Paul McCrane, known for getting hit by 2 different helicopters on ER. But most memorable of all is Eugene Victor Tooms (Doug Hutchison) the liver eating mutant that can fit through any space, who after his seventh kill hibernates for 30 years in a paper mache cocoon, constructed with Tooms’ own bile as an adhesive. Eee-eh-eh-yeeew!
While I was never a huge fan of the show BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER did a lot of original stuff with vampires and had some keen new twists on old favorites. Like season one’s episode “The Puppet Show” which starred my friend Rich Werner as a ventriloquist in possession of possessed dummy! However the episode from the series with the most chilling and original monsters Joss Whedon has given us is “Hush”. The Gentlemen (played by Camden Toy, Doug Jones and Charlie Brumbly) were a refreshing force for malevolence, demonic undertakers that steal the voices of everyone in Sunnydale. However, the really creepy things in this episode were the Footmen, loosed-sleeve straight-jacketed minions of the Gentleman. With their heads wrapped in filthy bandages, they spring through the streets with a baboon-like gate swinging their arms wildly as the Gentlemen floated along beside them.
I am sure that I am missing a few of my own favorites, I’d like to hear about some of yours! I completely avoided any denizens of darkness that first appeared in four colors. I could probably write a book on the new creatures that have appeared in the pages of Dan Brereton’s NOCTURNALS, Eric Powell’s THE GOON or Mike Mignola’s HELLBOY (much less the films of his occasional collaborator Guillermo Del Toro) so we’ll leave that territory for the next blog. I also feel I would be completely remiss if I wrote a column about original grotesqueries and didn’t mention the work of my friend Travis Louie! Please, go out and look at his book CURIOSITIES. I guarantee you won’t be able to leave the store without a copy. Just pay for it before you leave, okay?
Tags: "Nightmare at 20000 Feet", "Pigeons from Hell", "Smoke Ghost", "the Great God Pan", Arthur Machen, Chris Carter, Doug Hutchison, Fritz Leiber, H.P Lovecraft & Robert E. Howard, Jim Rose, Jim Rose Traveling Sideshow, Paul McCrane, the Enigma, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, THE X-FILES, Timothy Carhart, Tony Shalhoub, William Shatner
