I've been thinking about this subject for a while, but my thoughts were unfocused. But when I read the
Island of Lost Souls: The Beast Flesh Creeping Back
By Christine Smallwood everything clicked:
In the article Island was presented as a colonial themed movie with the subsequent fear of having the colonialists gene plasm contaminated by the native, and it does seem to be a valid view, though I personally never saw it quite that way before. King Kong* may be seen that way, but then so Creature from a Black Lagoon, etc. Even some memorable scenes in Frankenstein.
The image of the Bug Eyed Monster carrying the babe is too iconic of genre cinema to ignore. And as I said literature does deal with the subject, but it never seems the overriding subject other than in pulpy covers.
Many of the early genre films reflect this fear. But what has happened in the later to current films? Well by now the races (or DNA) already are mixed, and we either live with the results on a day to day basis with no ill, suffer further consequences or await some horrifying future. See Mars Need Women, I Married a Monster From Outer Space, Village of the Damned but also Star Trek and its TV shows (where the subject obviously is race,) but also Species, Alien (a straight horror movie turns into a race mixing nightmare by the end of the series,) all the way to Splice and beyond. It seems we keep going back to this and all movie horror tendencies eventually get there.
The DNA is now mixed, there is no stopping it, we have, seemingly, partially embraced it ...and yet we still fear it.
Maybe it is just fear of the other, of the unknown, of the future. But it could also be simply a fear of other races.
Is this what it boils down to?
http://www.criterion.com/...east-flesh-creeping-back
*It is not for nothing that the sacrifice is known as The Bride of Kong... ...and size got nothin' to do with it, Kong is a native superstition, a god or a spirit or something neither Beast nor man. Something monstrous. All powerful. Still living.
"The real threat here is miscegenation. Early 1930s horror was preoccupied with creatures that resemble normal men but are in some way deformed, deranged, or awfully and miserably inhuman—Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Freaks all came out in 1931–32. Island of Lost Souls, also released during the Jim Crow era, trades in dark makeup and broad noses, conflating the indigenous and the nonwhite with the animal. Moreau is not simply a mad scientist—he’s a colonial nabob who has made himself a god to his tribe of simian men."It seems that many of the genre movies (not so much the literature, though the subject is addressed: it just doesn't seem like such an obsessive thing,) address this issue, right from the start and all the way to the present. What is it about the need for the monster chasing the girl, or the fear of having our women chased by a monster that makes us so fearful?
In the article Island was presented as a colonial themed movie with the subsequent fear of having the colonialists gene plasm contaminated by the native, and it does seem to be a valid view, though I personally never saw it quite that way before. King Kong* may be seen that way, but then so Creature from a Black Lagoon, etc. Even some memorable scenes in Frankenstein.
The image of the Bug Eyed Monster carrying the babe is too iconic of genre cinema to ignore. And as I said literature does deal with the subject, but it never seems the overriding subject other than in pulpy covers.
Many of the early genre films reflect this fear. But what has happened in the later to current films? Well by now the races (or DNA) already are mixed, and we either live with the results on a day to day basis with no ill, suffer further consequences or await some horrifying future. See Mars Need Women, I Married a Monster From Outer Space, Village of the Damned but also Star Trek and its TV shows (where the subject obviously is race,) but also Species, Alien (a straight horror movie turns into a race mixing nightmare by the end of the series,) all the way to Splice and beyond. It seems we keep going back to this and all movie horror tendencies eventually get there.
The DNA is now mixed, there is no stopping it, we have, seemingly, partially embraced it ...and yet we still fear it.
Maybe it is just fear of the other, of the unknown, of the future. But it could also be simply a fear of other races.
Is this what it boils down to?
http://www.criterion.com/...east-flesh-creeping-back
*It is not for nothing that the sacrifice is known as The Bride of Kong... ...and size got nothin' to do with it, Kong is a native superstition, a god or a spirit or something neither Beast nor man. Something monstrous. All powerful. Still living.
