So zombies are starting to get a touch on the played-out side in Hollywood, and Vampires have long since outstayed their welcome, leaving only the real die hard vampire fans around to read their books and watch their movies. Of course, these two movie monster staples will be around for as long as they are movies, but what will be the next trendy movie monster? Werewolves? Dybbuks? Cthulhu (wouldn’t that be cool?)?
Well, it has to be something humanoid, otherwise it’s just a creature feature. People need someone recognizable to be the monster.
Seeing as Count Chocula and Frankenberry are played out, I submit Booberry. Err, ghosts.
Zombie vampires?
Werewolves are making a comeback.
Succubuses & incubuses could both work.
Debbie Does Demons
Ron Jeremy: The Spirit Years
What’s wrong with a creature feature? Aliens were popular for quite some time.
I’ve had one cuppa joe, which isn’t nearly enough to attempt an analysis on movie monsters, but I’m going to run off at the mouth anyway. Aliens From Outer Space were especially popular in the ‘50s, when Americans were worried about the Soviet Menace. Conquering Aliens and various BEMs played on Americans’ fears of a dominating force from Outside coming and enslaving them, much as they were worried that the Soviets would do the same. In the 1960s many giant monsters came from the studios of Japan. Often they were created by nuclear testing, and nuclear weapons were a cause for fear then. Man, in his hubris, created monsters that would destroy him. Pretty clear analogy. Classic monsters such as vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein’s Monster were dreamed up much earlier. Vampires and werewolves came from a time when people feared that the Devil actually walked the Earth, and so did his minions. Here, the monsters were incarnations of Evil. Frankenstein’s Monster, like the Japanese monsters of a century later, show the dangers of Man meddling in things he oughtn’t. (Actually, Frankenstein’s Monster was, as I see it, more of a victim than a demon. Japanese monsters seemed to just like destruction.) So movie monsters reflect the fears of the times.
Most people don’t believe in the Devil Incarnate anymore, so why are vampires so popular? Sex and alienation. Unlike the classic vampire of folklore and Nosferatu, vampires have been sexy for 80 years. They tend to be most popular with adolescents, who are in the awkward phase where ‘nobody understands them’. They want to be in charge of their own lives, but must live by the rules of their parents. Vampires have power. And yet they’re cursed. They have power and are attractive, but they can’t love like a human can. Poor things! Is it any wonder teens like them? The thing about vampires is that even though they’re scary, they offer compensations of wealth, power, and ‘sex’ in exchange for being cursed.
Zombies. People just want to live their lives. Suddenly there are these creatures that take them out of their comfortable existence and try to kill them. Like terrorists, zombies are killing machines that can and do strike at random. George Romero cast zombies as us – consumers motivated by habit. I haven’t seen any zombie movies recently, but the way I see it is that they are now analogous to terrorists. Terrorists want to kill people for their own ends; zombies do the same.
So what’s next? We still have terrorists, unlike the Soviet Union that spawned so many Alien Invasion films. Teens are still alienated. So zombies and vampires still have cultural wells to draw from. But they’re getting played out. The next monsters will have to be something that plays on our widespread cultural fears.
I think aliens are due for some more villainous screen time. I’m talking aliens that get up close and personal, not just attacking us from their ships in the sky or some such. The resurrection of V as a television series and the upcoming Cowboys & Aliens movie could be leading the trend.
The time has come for the rakshasa!
This probably won’t happen, but I’d like to see some long lost species of our genus discovered existing somewhere. Maybe Neanderthals or Homo erectus.
Might be good for a one-off, but I think the OP is looking for a ‘type’ of monster to replace vampires and zombies. With vampires, you have as many different characters as there are people. Zombies aren’t so varied, but the situations where they appear are. The trick is to come up with a type of monster that can be used in many movies. What do we have?
[ul][li]Zombies[/li][li]Vampires[/li][li]Ghosts[/li][li]Demons[/li][li]The Devil[/li][li]Ancient Evil[/li][li]Space Invaders (sentient)[/li][li]Space Invaders (non-sentient)[/li][li]Man-Made Monsters (intentional and unintentional)[/li][li]Natural Monsters (environmental, mutations, viruses, etc.)[/li][li]Werewolves[/li][li]Human Monsters[/ul][/li]What are we afraid of?
[ul][li]Being killed[/li][li]Being eaten[/li][li]Being enslaved[/li][li]Being enslaved, killed, then eaten[/li][li]Being turned into monsters[/li][li]Eternal damnation[/li][li]Death of our species[/li][*]Losing control/being helpless/being possessed[/ul]
You know what I’d like to see? A shapeshifter as a monster. Not a restricted one like a werewolf, but a versatile one like Odo from Deep Space Nine (except able to flawlessly imitate human features). I can think of at least three ways that could work as a villain:
[ul]
[li]The shapeshifters could need to eat humans. They could flawlessly imitate any person or creature they had sampled (i.e, tasted) even without killing him or her, but periodically need to consume an entire person. [/li][li]The shapeshifters could need to mate with humans to reproduce. A shapeshifter might then seduce a human woman, knock her up, and return when the child was five or six intending to take her or him away.[/li][li]Lastly, there could be a hidden society of shapeshifters working slowly on subverting human civilization and enslaving us.[/li][/ul]
Ever see Mimic? Not a shape-shifter per se, but a nice example of a Natural Monster.
Not exactly analogous, as discussed above, but I’d really like to see dinosaur movies become trendy in Hollywood for the '10s. The last one I recall really fitting the genre was Jurassic Park III, which is 9 years old now (there have been a few more recent films with dinosaurs in them, like the King Kong remake, but that wasn’t primarily a dinosaur movie and the “dinosaurs” they did feature were fictional species).
Yeah but they have to be animatronic dinos not those crappy CGI looking ones, sparse CGI and more monster looking dinosaurs like on the first Jurassic Park look great and scary. The velociraptors in the third movie weren’t scary atall! :eek:
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I’ve also heard that the whole zombies destroy society was popular because people want simplicity. At first this sounds like stupidity, but the article in question was actually pretty compelling and had some good points. It discussed how though there was a lot of fear and death and other nasty things it was straightforward fear and could be dealt with straightforwardly (shotguns). It also the distraction of society meant that social pressures are now removed and problems have now been reduced to simple survival. Now realistically we know that a plague of zombies would suck far more than whatever problems we are facing but as fantasy it makes sense to me. I know when I’ve daydreamed my Zombie Survival Plan it doesn’t seem scary. It actually seems relaxing. Of course I could just be odd.
See what happens when I post with insufficient caffeine? I’m thinking of this very point, and I forget to post it!
I’ve recently read Tunnel In The Sky and Time Enough For Love. Heinlein liked to write stories about people making it – or not – on their own. People today (and indeed, when Heinlein wrote, and way before that) have jobs they often don’t like, taxes, worries about mortgages, fears of terrorist attacks, concern about how we’re destroying the environment… How simple it would be if a man could plant crops, hunt game, fish, raise a family, and have the means and the lack of social restrictions to deal with dangers ‘straightforwardly’!
I think there might be a bit of suppressed blood-lust in there too. It’s Wrong to kill a human being except in dire circumstances. Zombies are already dead, so one can feed his blood-lust with impunity.
Well, there is a faithful-to-the-spirit-of-the-mythos Lovecraft movie in the pipeline (In the Mountains of Madness). If filmmakers can resist the urge to play to the lowest common denominator by not going for the cheap thrill/gross-out, this approach might actually work.
As CalMeacham points out here, most of the so-called “ancient lore” about these monsters was created out of the whole cloth by fiction writers and Hollywood over the last century or so. I think the Depression is more responsible for the popularity of the “classic” monsters than fears of the Devil. (Yes, Frankenstein was written in 1816, but was not a, um, monster hit until the 1931 movie.)
In Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (filmed as The Thirteenth Warrior) the monsters were a small group of Neanderthals which survived into Anglo-Saxon times.
Or naga.
Or Rakshasa vs. Naga.