King Kong, the Alien, Godzilla — However Monster Movies Change, They Are Projections of Human Fear

From raw physical fear and the rejection of anything alien, to today's reflection on humanity itself, monster movies have evolved along with their times.

King Kong has changed.

In the recently released Kong: Skull Island, the biggest Kong ever put on screen is humanity's guardian. When Skull Crawlers burrow up from underground to threaten the humans, it is Kong who fights these terrifying monsters. In the final battle, Kong fights while shielding the protagonists on their small boat, and pulls the female lead, played by Brie Larson, out of the water. He cups her in his palm, carefully, as if afraid of hurting her.

"Maximum boyfriend energy" — that is how today's audiences describe King Kong. But in 1933, when this figure first appeared on the big screen, no one in the theater would have thought any such thing.

In the 1933 King Kong, a film director brings the giant ape to New York, where he meets the ravishing Ann Darrow and falls deeply in love with her. Ann Darrow, held captive by Kong, feels nothing for him in return. In this one-sided romance of beast for human, the woman is a victim in every sense. And Kong, brought to life with stop-motion animation, moves stiffly and stares with terrible eyes, so that audiences see nothing but a beast bent on carrying off a human girl.

From terrifying monster to guardian of humanity — Kong is not the only screen figure to have gone through this transformation. In 2014, Legendary Pictures rebooted Godzilla. Godzilla's original form was a creature mutated by nuclear radiation, one that came ashore and dealt Japan destruction on a par with the atomic bombs. But in this film, Godzilla kills the monster Muto and, though he is really fighting for his own survival, ends up saving humanity from disaster. The scene in which he solves humanity's problem and then returns alone to the deep sea, into the sunrise, adds a superhero's halo on top of that.

Look back over nearly 100 years of monster movies. There was a time when films like Nosferatu, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy offered up hair-raising monsters that became the audience's nightmares. Today, monster movies are breaking away from the horror genre, and Kong and Godzilla are evolving from threats to be feared into protectors.

For human culture as a whole, though, the function of monster movies has not changed much. Monster movies have always put humanity's greatest fears on screen. That is why, as a film genre, monster movies have not declined the way Westerns, gangster films, and musicals once did — they keep getting remade and reinvented.

The history of monster movies is the history of human fear. Kong and Godzilla may have become protectors, but look past that surface and you can still feel humanity shivering before the world.

King Kong (1933) was not the earliest monster movie, but many still consider it the genre's founding work. Its most famous scene is, of course, Kong climbing the Empire State Building and fighting off airplanes to protect Ann Darrow.

That scene alone leaves plenty of room for interpretation. First, it stands for a primal fear written into human genes: faced with a huge beast, the survival instinct kicks in, adrenaline floods the body, the heart races, blood pressure rises. Depending on which psychological theory you follow, this can be taken as fear itself, or as the psychological basis on which the emotion of fear is built.

And when Kong stands on top of the Empire State Building, a second kind of fear surfaces. At the time, the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world, and the planes attacking Kong were seen as a symbol of humanity's conquest of the sky. Both were products of human intelligence, symbols of civilization. Yet Kong, a mere beast, stands at the top of the world without effort; humanity's advanced technology looks fragile, and modern civilization totters under a savage invasion.

That already sounds frightening enough, but many critics over the years have insisted on adding a racial filter to the film, arguing that it expresses white America's wariness of people of color.

Capturing Kong and shipping him from third-world Skull Island back to New York stands for the century-long transatlantic trade in African slaves; Kong's rampage through New York after he escapes is read as a metaphor for the idea that letting Black people into America means letting them threaten true freedom; and Kong seizing a white girl expresses anxieties about interracial romance and about Black men's supposedly excessive sexual desire.

There is even a rumor that this is why Hitler, the racist, liked the film: a man of color tries to steal away a blond, blue-eyed Aryan woman, and fails. 1933 also happened to be the year Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, when the whole world had the look of a gathering storm.

Faced with accusations of racism, the film's two directors, Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper, both denied it, insisting the film carried no hidden meaning. But whatever their intentions were, people could not help projecting the fears specific to that era onto a giant ape. They wanted to believe that a monster movie was trying to say something about a troubling political question.

The complexity of King Kong (1933) is a big part of why it became a classic overnight. But even before King Kong, monster movies had already begun to flourish.

Early films of this kind did not always feature giant monsters, but they all had a freakish protagonist who did not fit in among humans — either physically deformed or short on humanity. Most of these freaks had also grown dark, even antisocial, from long years of torment; they might look unremarkable in daily life, yet they could still be a lethal threat to normal people.

Tod Browning's much-attacked Freaks is where this comes together most fully. In the film, people of normal physique show hatred and contempt for the circus's deformed performers, and are met with brutal revenge. The film itself was banned for being too grotesque, and critics tore it apart — The New York Times even wrote that it "should be shown in an insane asylum rather than in a theater."

What all these films convey, without exception, is this: unlike giant beasts from some wild frontier, monsters that are deformed, bestial, or leading double lives are right there among modern people — in the circus, the opera house, the café, and, in the werewolf's case, in London — which left people who believed they lived in a civilized world feeling surrounded by danger.

The worst of all are monsters wearing the skin of a normal person, because they strip away every last bit of your guard. Early black-and-white cinema amplified this idea with expressionist technique, producing an atmosphere of twisted beauty that modern horror films rarely reach. The clearest examples are the first two vampire films, which opened up a subgenre of their own: German director F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and Universal Pictures' Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning.

Nine years apart, the vampire looks slightly different in the two films: Count Orlok in Nosferatu keeps the pointed ears and fangs of a bat-like monster, while Bela Lugosi plays an elegant vampire aristocrat. At bottom they are the same: symbols of evil, bloodthirsty undead, "who rise from the grave to feed on and drain the blood of living creatures, destroying their lives."

The fear of blood-drinking corpses in the mid-1930s did not come from nowhere. At the turn of the century, unorthodox medical students were obsessed with dissecting bodies, and many of them would sneak into graveyards and dig up coffins by moonlight in the name of science. At a time when medicine was still struggling to establish its own legitimacy, such behavior made people's hair stand on end. "This might invite the dead's revenge, or wake something even more evil" — people began to imagine what these medical students' work would bring down on them. Plots like that turn up everywhere in Weird Tales, the popular pulp horror magazine of the day.

And when these almost-human things put on aristocratic clothes, it is hard not to read it as shaken trust in the upper class, a new wariness of the danger hidden behind glamour and charm. The renowned film critic Roger Ebert even extended this fear to the most famous case of all: the murders Jack the Ripper committed in Whitechapel at the end of the 19th century do resemble a vampire rampaging through London at night in more than a few ways; and the list of Ripper suspects had no shortage of shady grandees.

You could say early monster movies all focused on "monsters among humans." People feared the ones who looked like us, who fooled us with a human appearance, or who reminded us of ourselves. The audience's threshold was low. This was an age afraid of everything.

From the 1950s on, the standing of technology rose fast. In popular literature, the golden decade of the science-fiction master Isaac Asimov was getting underway; in the Cold War, the US and the USSR were locked in a space race. Fear of the boundless universe, and the threat of a US-Soviet war that could break out at any moment, produced a variant of the monster movie — one aimed at the excitement and tension of new technology, and at thinking through the relationship between people and technology.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is the ultimate response to both fears. The film tells the story of aliens copying the residents of a small town and gradually taking over the whole place. These alien creatures invade human bodies and minds without a sound, turning people into walking corpses with no emotion and no instinct; and once everyone has been brainwashed into uniformity, individuality, human rights, and free will are stripped away, and collectivism takes over everything.

In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, this process was easily read as communist infiltration of American citizens. From the other side, of course, the aliens could just as easily stand for capitalism, a metaphor for how the anti-communist mood the US government promoted threw the public into a psychological panic of mutual suspicion — which is why, in the view of Empire magazine, the film can also be seen as a forerunner of anti-McCarthyist cinema.

Either way, the suspicion, distrust, and panic at having one's own consciousness occupied that run through the film reflect the general anxiety of that era. And that panic was not confined to the Cold War: "from fascism to communism to the capitalist system, from religious indoctrination and psychotherapy to the rise of technology and the awakening of a new-age self-consciousness, all the way to the inevitable emotional attrition every adult goes through — [the film] is the perfect distillation of an intensely anxious existential crisis."

This reckoning with reality and technology was worldwide. Across the Pacific, postwar Japan poured all of its panic into Godzilla (1954).

This film is the fullest picture of nuclear panic there is. Two atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki outright, and then the US military's hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll gave Japanese fishermen radiation sickness — all of which pushed the Japanese public's fear of nuclear weapons to its peak.

In Godzilla, fishermen find the sea boiling; Godzilla is born out of the radiation of hydrogen bomb tests. The moment this huge monster comes ashore it deals the city a devastating blow. It is a nuclear weapon on the move.

The film's theme extends from there. "There won't be just one Godzilla. As long as we keep conducting nuclear tests, a new Godzilla will be born somewhere in the world." That line states the worry about future nuclear testing plainly.

At the same time, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka also spoke of nature's revenge: "Man created the bomb, and now nature will take revenge on man." The chemical the protagonist invents in the film can kill the monster but can also destroy the world, and he destroys it to keep it out of the wrong hands. That is one more reflection on how to handle weapons of mass destruction, and on whether meeting violence with violence is the right answer.

In a word: people who had seen what a nuclear explosion can do never recovered from the shadow of it. Godzilla is saturated with the fear of technology's dark side.

Monster movies fell into a slump in the 1960s. With the raw material of literature and legend largely mined out, and elements like transformation, resurrection, murder, and cults all used up, the sequels made purely to cash in rarely matched the shock of the first film. Son of Kong, King Kong Escapes, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Godzilla taking on a different monster in one sequel after another — bit by bit, all this wore away the fear people had felt for them. They no longer existed to frighten audiences, but to provide pure entertainment.

The American historian and Japan expert William Tsutsui blames the economic conditions of the time: "During the decades when Japan's economy was exploding at an annual growth rate of 10 percent, the monster could become happy, protective, or comical — but not a figure of threat."

Clearly, people living through the postwar boom were bursting with confidence and felt they could do anything. That general climate of optimism seemed to dissolve their fears, and it made monster movies feel trite.

Under public pressure, the studios making monster movies gave ground, and Japan's monster films became suitable for all ages; their political and philosophical undertones, and their existential dread, shrank to less than a footnote.

In 1957, the American TV company Screen Gems bought the rights to a package called Shock Theatre. It bundled 52 monster movies made before 1948 and put them in late-night and afternoon TV slots, which brought monsters into all-ages pop culture. Famous Monsters of Filmland, a monster magazine launched in 1958, began printing gossip about them. Through the 1960s and 1970s, monsters spread their influence as toys, Halloween costumes, trading-card sets, and paperback novel series — overused, much like today's superheroes.

Inevitably, the audience's threshold for being scared, and for special effects, rose. Even space exploration, once a source of fear, lost its terror: Neil Armstrong's 1969 moon landing lifted humanity's confidence in conquering the universe to an unprecedented high. In an age of ever more advanced technology, when monsters had become a joke, nothing seemed able to challenge humanity's understanding of the world.

Until the Alien arrived.

This is a monster loaded with reproductive symbolism, a perfect fusion of the mechanical and the organic. Its juvenile form attacks any prey, forcing the victim to serve as the "womb" that incubates it, and its bursting out of the host's body usually means the host dies horribly. Then the adult form, its head swaying like a phallus, hunts down every crew member aboard the sealed, ghostly ship. Faced with a monster whose whole body, down to its saliva, is lethal, humans truly grasp that they are not at the top of the food chain.

Alien (1979) reflects fear upgraded in every dimension: at a moment of total confidence about opening up the universe, giving concrete shape to a terrifying deep-space nightmare amounted to a heavy blow. The arrival of this powerful species forced humanity to see its real place and taste the fear of being dominated by another species, while human technology proved useless against such an enemy.

Against the Cold War backdrop, the Alien can also be seen as a nuclear weapon out of control, ready to take everyone's life at any moment; the android character, impossible to ignore, and the computer that carries out the corporation's will, reflect people's dread of the new computer-driven technology of the post-industrial age, and their distrust of the corporation acting as the hidden hand behind it all.

The most obvious element is sex, and it is also what sets the film apart. From the shape of the ship to the design of the alien, the whole film is full of sexual suggestion, and above all of male fear about reproduction. In this world, even a man can be brutally penetrated by an alien in a frenzy to breed, and turned into its reproductive tool.

With the second wave of feminism sweeping the world at the time, academic critics have generally argued that the film embodies male anxiety about the future. They fear a future in which the sexes are so completely equal that even physical difference is erased. The woman, meanwhile, goes from ornament to warrior, forming a sustained and resilient force of resistance against patriarchal oppression.

These hidden themes of Alien have outlived their era, and ambitious successors carry them on today, though the emphasis has shifted as the times have moved on.

In the rebooted Alien series, the android played by Michael Fassbender is placed at the center, and the films plainly stress the relationship between creator and creature, between people and what they make. Discussing the latest installment, Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott also warned that humanity should beware its own power to create. That familiar argument calls to mind Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking's worries about artificial intelligence. AI has become the chief culprit behind today's crisis of existence.

Monster movies of every stripe bloomed in the 1980s. Time Out magazine's list of the 50 greatest monster movies includes plenty of 1980s titles such as Swamp Thing, The Toxic Avenger, and Little Shop of Horrors — though all of them carried the B-movie flavor that ran through the decade.

Not until Jurassic Park burst onto the scene in 1993 was the genre carried back to the blockbuster scale of King Kong in 1933. Its worldwide box office topped $1 billion; it was not only that year's top-grossing film but also won two Academy Awards for technical achievement. And on the all-time box-office ranking for monster movies, the Jurassic films hold the top three spots.

As monster movies turned into blockbusters, the villain's role seems to have changed. Monsters became likable, and emotional bonds between humans and beasts began to show up in the best-known monster movies. In 2005, Kong finally shares a real emotional exchange with the beauty; Godzilla (2014) indirectly lends humanity a hand; and the velociraptors in Jurassic World earn credit for steadying the situation at the park.

Then comes this year's Kong: Skull Island, in which humans with ulterior motives invade Kong's home with modern weapons and, after he defends himself, try to wipe him out. Kong instead plays the protector, and moves closer to a god.

But even with the monster turned into a god, human fear remains. In Kong: Skull Island, the officer played by Samuel L. Jackson tries to kill Kong, and in doing so releases the Skull Crawlers, a far greater threat to humans. This relationship maps onto many different situations in the real world.

Some read the officer as the US military, Kong as Saddam Hussein, and the Skull Crawlers as ISIS, now rampaging across the Middle East. In their reading, the film criticizes the many wars the US has launched since World War II — wars that look righteous but have brought the world more chaos.

An environmental theme can be found in the film too. Humans, Kong, and the Skull Crawlers together make one complete ecosystem. Wipe out Kong, and the Skull Crawlers become humanity's nightmare.

By this point, the beast's humanity — even its divinity — stands against humanity's own bestiality. What we now find most frightening is humanity itself. Greed, the urge to conquer, aggression, vengefulness: by reversing the relationship between humans and beasts, monster movies mirror the dark side of human nature faithfully.

After the initial shock and fear, humanity is now searching for itself in its monsters.

Images from Douban.