As giants in the horror and sci-fi genres go, Richard Matheson is a unique case. He's not a familiar name for most media audiences, yet his influence is so pervasive that it's impossible to imagine modern horror and sci-fi pop culture without him.
In the early years of my geekhood, I familiarized myself with both classic and contemporary horror and sci-fi movies and TV shows but Matheson's name never stood out in any obvious way. Unlike horror/sci-fi celebrities such as Stephen King and Steven Spielberg--both of whom have been heavily influenced by Matheson--I rarely saw Matheson's name used to promote his work. It wasn't until I noticed the appearance of his name in the credits of many movies and TV shows that I was able to understand who he was.
Even though he is a well-respected novelist and short story author in his own right, Matheson frequently contributed his talents to film and TV production. He would either adapt his written work into scripts (The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Legend of Hell House), adapt the work of others into scripts (Burn, Witch, Burn, The Devil Rides Out), or create completely original scripts (The Comedy of Terrors, Kolchak: The Night Stalker). Outside of his direct contributions to Hollywood, many of his other stories and novels were adapted by others into movies and for episodes of TV shows such as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Twilight Zone, and Night Gallery. Chances are that if you're a fan of any horror/sci-fi movie franchise or TV series within the last 60 years, Matheson probably had something to do with it.
Although he recently passed away, it's still Richard Matheson's world. We horror and sci-fi fans are just living in it.
I like big bugs and I cannot lie. From Them! to the Mimic trilogy, these giant creepy-crawlers always fascinated me with their M.C. Escher-esque distortions of scale. On the other hand, finding big bug movies that are actually worth watching can be a challenge, since the overwhelming majority of them are low-budget, low-talent rip-offs of better movies.
Jack Arnold's Tarantula is one of the better big bug movies from the 50s, the second best movie of its type after Them!. I can't add much more to what has already been said about the quality of Tarantula as a movie, but I've decided to post about it anyway to look back at its impressive effects work. In our modern era where Hollywood's overreliance CGI technology has drained the creative spark out of many horror and sci-fi titles, Tarantula stands as a textbook example of how talented people can make a simple optical illusion yield amazing results. Read on for my complete retrospective, which includes video clips. The big bug movies of the 50s brought their macro-monsters to life by using one of three methods: scale-sized puppets, stop-motion animation, and/or shooting real bugs with miniature sets and then compositing that footage with human actors and human-sized sets through techniques such as rear-screen projections and traveling mattes. Them! and The Deadly Mantis used the first method, and The Black Scorpion used the second method. Arnold used the third method in Tarantula--as did another filmmaker, Bert I. Gordon, during the same decade for the giant monster movies he shot. The end results from both filmmakers couldn't be more different, as you can see in the clips below.
Arnold's Tarantula:
Gordon's Beginning of the End and Earth vs. The Spider:
Arnold would later build upon his experience with distorting the size of a spider in The Incredible Shrinking Man, where he had to reduce actor Grant Williams from human-sized to microscopic:
On the other hand, Gordon shot so many giant monster movies during his career that earned the nickname "Mr. Big", but his creative output strongly suggests that he never learned to refine his trick photography techniques. For example, the giant ants in his Empire of the Ants look just as hokey as his grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End, even though the films were shot two decades apart:
Not all of the spider shots in Tarantula are perfect. A spider's leg simply vanishes into thin air in one shot, while the spider appears to be walking over--and not on--the desert's surface in another shot. The spider's exact size also shifts between shots, and it never casts a shadow on the desert no matter how big it gets. In spite of these drawbacks, the overall effect works much better than you think it should.
I believe that a lot of the film's success is due to how well the spider is placed within the shot and how the spider remains opaque, even in daylight desert shots. By keeping the details of the spider's body concealed, it forces the viewer to concentrate on the spider's body motion instead of the smaller details that could give away the spider's true scale. Then again, the spider's slow, creeping motions suggest a creature of a large size and weight; these motions build a sense of impending doom whenever it closes in on a victim. Compare that to Gordon's bugs, whose twitchy, jerky motions betray their actual sizes. Furthermore, compare Arnold's work in Tarantula to other movies where the "giant" insects, spiders, and lizards--and even rabbits--are shown in complete detail and in full lighting in composite shots with actors, and the difference in quality becomes apparent:
For a special effects technique that is comparative simple in terms of both concept and execution, it's still amazing that Arnold remains one of the few directors to actually get it right. (Of course, having a solid script also helps, since Tarantula is also better written than most of its counterparts.) Tarantula may not be the best creature feature ever made, but it's a welcome respite for horror fans who have reached their limit of CGI effects and want to see an example of when a filmmaker's knowledge of photography, scale and illusion could produce amazing results on a modest budget.
I don't know what it is about creature features from the 1950s. Even when they descend into the depths of accidental camp, there's still something quite charming about them. Maybe it's because creature features were still finding their aesthetic legs, or that the still-new Atomic Age had generated so many larger-than-life anxieties that only creature features could do them justice on the big screen. Regardless, I just re-watched Monster on the Campus, one of Jack Arnold's lesser sci-fi flicks from the 50s. I first saw it a long time ago when running this kind of movie on syndicated TV during the weekend was a common practice, and I was looking forward to seeing it again. Read on for my retrospective of this cult classic, which includes some thoughts as to how it’s connected to Marvel Comics’ not-so-jolly green giant, the Hulk. For those of you who don't know anything about this film, Monster on the Campus is about a college biology professor named Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) who cuts his hand on teeth of a coelacanth, a prehistoric fish that his department just received from Madagascar. As he begins to suffer blackouts during attacks made against him by an unknown assailant, the professor notices how animals that are exposed to the coelacanth suddenly take on attributes of their prehistoric ancestors (larger fangs, bigger body sizes, etc.). After making this discovery, Blake realizes that his attacker could be a visitor from humanity's distant past, a visitor who is much closer to Blake than he ever could imagine.
While the plot is similar in many respects to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Monster on the Campus is actually a rip-off of an earlier creature feature called The Neanderthal Man (1953). (You can watch The Neanderthal Man on YouTube here.) It's also worthy to note that the same ideas from The Neanderthal Man and Monster on the Campus would be re-used in Altered States (1980), a hallucinatory body horror film that was directed by Ken Russell and based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky.
Monster on the Campus doesn't meet the same standard of quality as Arnold's other sci-fi films, such as Creature From the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Arnold himself has voiced his displeasure with the film in interviews, saying that he agreed to direct it as a favor to someone at Universal. Nevertheless, I have a soft spot for this film because Arnold was able to add some polish and charm to an absurd script and poor special effects. Adding to the film's appeal is the enthusiasm of the cast, particularly Franz's performance as Blake. During the movie, Blake does several things with the dead coelacanth that anyone else would know never to do with raw, rotting meat; thus, Blake shouldn't be allowed to cook food let alone teach a biology class. Yet Franz keeps you believing in the sincerity of Blake's motives and actions, no matter how unintentionally funny they get.
I think that the most intriguing aspect about Monster on the Campus is how at times it feels like the missing link between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Marvel Comics' superhero Hulk. Stan Lee has cited Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as one of the key influences in the creation of the Hulk, but there are enough details in Monster on the Campus to suggest that Lee and Steve Kirby probably saw Arnold's film and drew a lot from it when they developed their monstrous hero.
For example, the Hulk is the alter ego of Dr. Bruce Banner, who became the Hulk after being bombarded by gamma radiation. In Monster on the Campus, Blake finds out that the coelacanth itself is not causing the evolutionary regressions (including Blake's own regressions into a Neanderthal) but that the fish was exposed to gamma radiation to preserve it and thus gave its blood a regressive property. The Hulk hates his human half, and Banner feels lingering remorse over the destruction wreaked by the Hulk. Likewise, the Neanderthal that Blake transforms into harbors a raging anger against him--to the point where local police even think that someone is stalking Blake--and Blake becomes overwhelmed with guilt when he realizes that it is he who is the murderous beast that has been stalking his campus. Furthermore, the relationship dynamics between Banner, his love interest Betty Ross and her father General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross is similar to Blake's relationship with his fiancée Madeline Howard (Joanna Moore) and her father Professor Gilbert Howard (Alexander Lockwood). Another bit of Jack Arnold/Marvel trivia: "Donald Blake" was also the name used for the former alter ego of Thor, another superhero character created by Lee and Kirby.
Monster on the Campus isn't the only example of a commonality between creature features from the 40s and 50s and Marvel Comics characters that were first published in the 60s. I've posted before about how the Fantastic Four bears some similarities to other space radiation films, and two of Spider-Man's archenemies, Electro and the Lizard, have backgrounds are similar to the respective titular monsters in Man-Made Monster (1941) and The Alligator People (1959). I can see why Lee would prefer to mention a literary classic by Robert Louis Stevenson over a b-movie as a source of inspiration for the Hulk, if for no other reason than to suggest an air of artistic sophistication to the creation of a superhero. Nevertheless, movies like Monster on the Campus serve as a reminder to fans of the close conceptual kinship between b-grade creature features and pulpy superhero adventures. The way I see it, that's a beautiful thing.
