Movie Monster Making 101 with Professor Barton

 

     I bet you have never thought of this, but nearly all great monsters (with some exceptions I will address), from movies to books, have a common theme in them that evokes the terror that makes them so effective. Read on to discover the key to making a classic monster.

     Here it is, the key ingredient to making a monster: the monster must have the ability to somehow meet us at the level of us becoming like it. In other words of saying, there must be the possibility that we could become a monster via the current monster. "What is he talking about", you say? Well, let us take a look at some classic examples. Firstly, we will use the current trending one, zombies. Zombies can eat you, yes. But you must understand that psychologically that is not what makes them so frightening. An army of ants could eat you, in theory. What makes zombies so frightening (when done well), is the fact that you could become one of them, and end up killing other innocents yourself. We wold rather be dead than be a zombie (which is how countless characters die in zombie movies), because as a zombie, any morals, any goodness within us, is gone. This theme plays itself out in a ton of movies, in different forms. We are scared of Dracula, not because he could kill us, but because he could cause us to kill, which is far worse. Same goes with werewolves. Look at The Fly. Or, you can put a rift on it. Look at the Alien movies. Sure, the creatures are trrifying in themselves, but what makes them particularly affecting, especially in the famous chest-bursting scene, is that it inside the character. They have become an incubator, and are no longer, in a sense, human. Or, you can go the route of The Thing, in which the monster is never really shown, except for the fact that we know that someone has the monster in them, or that it at least looks like one of the characters. There are many ways to play off this idea.

     Now, for the dissenters, I will say that I think many of the exceptions, such as Godzilla or The Host, are effective for an entirely different reason. In these movies, the monster represents something. Godzilla directly represents the Cold War tensions over nuclear weapons. This is an entirely different type of monster, and does not so much evoke terror or fear, as it does remind us of an issue or principle (not a bad thing, in my mind). As to the Freddy Krueger or Predator monsters, well, I would have to say it is not them directly that is all that fearful, but how they kill things, which is less fear and more style. It can be shocking, but I am not sure if I would describe it as fear.

     So, remember, if you plan on creating a movie monster, make sure it relates to the audience in a way that shows them, that if they are not careful, they could become the monster they so fear.