LECTURE ONE

What is a Monster????

The word monster derives from a Latin word “Monstrare” meaning “to point out”. monstrare itself derives from yet another Latin word monere “to warn”. Basically, the idea was that a monster was something sent by the gads as a warning. Typically they were creatures that were half animal and half human. However, we don’t speak Latin anymore and while the etymology is interesting, it certainly doesn’t explain everything about the meaning of the word today.

There is also a question of monsters’ “ontology”. Are they real? Or not real? Gor the Greeks half human jhalf animal things were monsters. They don’t exists – so he problem is can something which is (or was) real be a monster????

PROJECT ONE

Make a list of creatures in real life, literature or film that you would consider (or think people might consider) to be monsters.

SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

A question of definition. Definitions do ot come from God, nor are they carved in stone. Three major kinds of definitions can ge established - (a) by usage (b) technical and (3) operational. A "usage definition" expalins the meaning of the word as it is commonly used. A technical definition is one which is specifically defined by a discipline which hold that the word when used technically has a very specific meaning. An operational definition is one which is used in attmpting top define an area to see what happens in terms of understanding some phenomenon or other.

In a kind of taxonomic analysis words are “nested” so that each word is a kind of the thing it is nested in. We would say “An ‘A’ is a kind of ‘B’ “ or perhaps “A dog is a kind of animal”; “A carrot is a kind of vegetable”.

PROJECT TWO

Can you make a construction that says “An ‘X’ is a kind of ‘monster’” or “A monster is a kind of ‘X’”

How do you feel about “A freak is a kind of monster” or “A giant gorilla is a kind of monster”? or “Hannibal Lechter is a kind of monster”?

Some people have felt that if the creature has its own “label” it isn’t a kind of monster. So, a vampire is a vampire not a monster.

CRITERIA METHOD

What kinds of things does something have to have to put it in a certain category? For example to be a mammal, an animal has to have (among other things) a 4 chambered heart, 7 cervical vertebrae, and give birth to its young alive with a placental connection”

Does the monster have to be dangerous? Does it have to be large? Is the virus in Outbreak a monster?

What about the “Yeti” in Harry and the Hendersons?

PROJECT THREE

What kinds of things are needed for something to be a monster?

WHAT DOES THE MONSTER REPREsENT?

Monsters (in general and depending on definition) don’t really exist, so they are often representing something. What that is tends to vary over time. This is in part a part of the course – what do monsters represent?

MONSTER MOVIES

What constitutes a monster movie? Is it just enough to have a monster in it? Galaxy Quest has a rock monster, but would you call it a monster movie?

The one film we are going to see, The Lost World along with some clips from a never finished film Creation.

These films deal with dinosaur or dinosaur like creature. Other kinds of “monsters” can be found at the end of the lecture

THE DINOSAUR TRACKS!

Dinosaurs:

Dinosaurs first identified in the early 19th Century. The category dinosaurian was created in 1842 by Roger Owen a British paleontologist. Probably right from the beginning people tried to imagine how these animals looked and behaved when they were alive an moving. Behavioral information does not fossilize as such, but rather has to be inferred from other things. Even today there are battles over just how many of these animals stood and moved. The Tyrannosaurus rex is currently a good example of how the animal stood.

Dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals have been seen as the source of dragons, and more recently, some of them have been seen as the origin of the Cyclops and other Greek mythological creatures.

It is less than 60 years from the defining of the taxon dinosauria to the earliest motion pictures. In some ways, it is possible to see that major archaeological and paleontological discoveries has given rise to many of the monster movies. They are things which arouse public imagination. It has been thought that some of these gave rise to folkloric monsters as well as filmic ones. Whether these are the ultimate cause of the legends or the legends are later linked to them is not clear.

SEE NIZCHRE ARTICLE

IN FILMS

Without people, dinosaur films would be rather uninteresting. As a result, getting people together with prehistoric creatures which predate them by millions of years becomes somewhat tricky. Films with prehistoric animals fall into two basic categories – the first deals with these animals in conjunction with prehistoric people (and depending on the animals this may be or may not be accurate. Dinosaurs lived about 160 million years ago whereas people don’t appear until about 5 million years ago. One Million B.C. (and its remake One Million Years B.C.), Quest for Fire, Clan of the Cave Bear and 10,000 B.C. are all examples of these kinds of films.

The other types (equally unlikely) deal with dinosaurs (or other prehistorics, real or implied) who are somehow or another whisked into or have continued on into, the modern world. Films like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Gorgo, Godzilla, Jurassic Park and even Cloverfield and continue this tradition.

The earliest dinosaurs are found in films in the silents. The Lost World (1927) is one of the first to deal with prehistoric creatures. This is the film we will see today.

Shortly after this, Willis O’Brien was interested in making a film about dinosaurs which was to be called Creation (1931). This film merged shots of “dinosaurs” and live animals including humans. The film was never finished (we will see scenes from it today) in order to begin work on King Kong (1933) which incorporated many of the ideas.

Crucial in the history of prehistoric animals (and indeed many “monster” movies) is Willis O’Brien. Born in 1886 in Oakland California 44 years after the dinosaurs had gotten their place in biology, he was involved in special effects, direction, writer and cinematography.

As early as 1915 he was involved in special effects in a short animated film called Morpheus Mike He made two films with a prehistoric films The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915) and The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918) (dinosaurs are seen in a dream sequence)

After these films he became involved with the RKO major films. His first feature was The Lost World. Creation was to follow but was scrapped to work on King Kong. O’Brien continued with Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. On this film he worked with Ray Harryhausen another stop motion animator who would in effect, inherit O’Brien’s mantel. Together they would be involved in some other films O’Brien wrote the story for another dinosaur film (in Mexico) called The Beast from Hollow Mountain which appeared in 1956. In 1959 O’Brien worked on Behemoth the Sea Monster (a.k.a. The Giant Behemoth) another “dinosaur-like In 1962 he worked as tehnical advisor for Irwin Allen’s The Lost World (with Michael Rennie, Claude Rains, Fernando Lamas and Jill St. John). O’Brien died in 1962. In 1969 Ray Harryhausen would bring to the screen Valley of the Gwangi a film O’Brien toyed with for years which dealt with another dinosaur in Mexico

STOP MOTION ANIMATION

Stop motion animation is a kind of animation in which figures which are made on an armature with joints are photographed with a single shot, and then moved and rephotographed and so on. Finally when the film is shown, the models appear to move.

REAL ANIMALS WITH BITS AND PIECES SOMETIMES ADDED

In 1,000,000 B.C. stop motion animation was not used but rather, real lizards, sometimes with “appendages” affixed to them were used. 1,000,000 BC is, like The Lost World a critical film relative to the way dinosaurs look. Unlike the stop motion, the “dinosaurs” in this film were live. The scenes with dinosaurs fighting almost invariably were taken from this film.

COSTUMES AS DINOSAURS

In Unknown Island (1948) there are people inside the dinosaurs, This convention occurs in a number of films incuding many of (the Japanese entries into the arena, most notably Godzilla (Gojira)

REAR SCREEN PROJECTION

Rear screen protection is a technique in which previously shot footage is projected onto a screen from the rear and actors perform in front of the screen. In this way, the actors interact with the material on the screen. By projecting stop motion animation sequences on a screen while actors act in front of it, allows real actors to interact with the animated creatures. Similarly it is possible to project live footage frame by frame on a rear screen projection and then animate the figures in front of that.

In more recent times, rear screen projection has been replaced by blue/screen techniques, in which actors perform in front of a solid color screen which can then be rendered transparent and a different image appears in its place.

The Lost World (1925)

The film is based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an Edinburgh born Scot who is perhaps best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories. The film is the “great grand daddy of most monster films in which the monster is a large animal. Notice in this film the relationship to other films (some of which we will get a glimpse at later today or tomorrow. These include the ground breaking 1,000,000 B.C. (1940) and of course King Kong (1933) ) along with a rehash of King Kong in 1948 called Unknown Island.

The film, like many of its kinds mixes adventure with romance and a host of different dinosaurs and in this case a prehistoric for-runner of modern people.

FILMS

AFTER THE FILM

What can we say about the film? Do the dinosaurs constitute monsters?

Is this a monster film? Are the special effects about the monsters an important aspect of the film?

Do the dinosaurs have meaning? What about the proto human?

There are several general kinds of monsters

Dinosaur/dragon like

The Undead or Nearly Dead

They Come from Outer Space: Aliens

SUPER LARGE MONSTER (MUTANT)

OTHER CULTURES

CREATIONS

Another important aspect of movies and especially monster, horror and mystery films is sound. Clearly there are problems with this version in that the background music is at best, poorly selected and does not in any way match the action of the film. Background music can enhance the film and also involve the viewer with specific characters in the films, reflecting their emotional state rather than some one else’s.

Later sound within the film (diegetic sound) also becomes very significant in these same films. Do the monsters – however defined – make sounds? What kinds of sounds? In the clips from Unknown Island and 1,000,000 B.C. the dinosaurs growl and screech setting a pattern for dinosaur sounds for generations to come.

Can you be made aware of the approach or proximity of the monster just through sound. The sound design of the later films plays a large part in the films.

As is often the case, a major new type of film, sets up the "template" for what follows. As a result, we find that often films in which dinosaurs are also likely to have a proto=human animal in it, a volcanic eruption and sometimes a contemporary primate along for the ride. This begins to establish a kind of format for this type of film which is "played with" or "manipulated" but sequential writers, and allows for the establishment in some cases of a genre.

TEXT AND SUBTEXT

The text of the story is rather clear, but about subtext?

Although it is pretty clear that the film was made largely to look at the dinosaurs and see how they move, there is an inherent meaning to the film which deals with something historical (or perhaps “prehistorical”).

What can you say about the Lost World itself? It is isolated, dangerous, and primitive. It is a place with sudden dangers and volcanic explosions. Danger is certainly mentioned even in the text when says “The girl I’m engaged to won’t marry me until I’ve faced death or --”. There is something of a ritual rite of passage about the idea of testing oneself to see how well one can survive. As we will see as we continue down the dinosaur path that there are clear problems when present meets past, and these are invariably dangerous to the present establishing a kind of mythology of the nature of cultural evolution.