Inside Cinema's Love Of Monsters

From Georges Méliès to A Monster Calls, Boris Karloff to Beauty And The Beast, cinema’s love of monsters – and audiences’ ongoing fascination with them – has upheld one clear idea: in many hairy, scary and full-blooded ways, the monsters are us…

- Kevin Harley

"I love monsters the way people worship holy images,” Guillermo del Toro told The Guardian recently. He’ll be at home in 2017, in that case, because even a swift sweep of the release schedules suggests that del Toro worships at a broad church. Right off the bat, A Monster Calls merges deep feels with deep-voiced monstrosity. Kong: Skull Island revives a big-hearted beast; later, Universal’s latest crack at reviving classic monsters (and Tom Cruise) arrives with The Mummy. And monster love will be a tale as old as time in Disney’s live-action Beauty And The Beast.

Elsewhere, The Great Wall, Alien: Covenant and God Particle should prove monsters come in many forms: they can be insectoid, abstract, parasitic, mythological, giant, bandaged, furry or even just humans behaving monstrously. They can be metaphors: for mad science or McCarthyism, desire or dread. And they can be funny, from Monsters, Inc.’s scream team to Night Of The Lepus’ bunnies.

Yet the monsters that seduce and scare us most are oddly familiar. Ask David Cronenberg, whose The Fly is a monster benchmark. “I think the further away from the human form a monster becomes, the more it becomes like a natural disaster. If you’re eaten by a shark, it’s almost like being hit by lightning… When a monster is recognisably human, like a Cyclops, that’s when the definition of monster and monstrous and monstrosity becomes very specific and very resonant.”

In other words? We love monsters because, on many complex, historically shifting levels, they’re us.

Monster House