In Defense of Cheesy Monster Movies

               Everybody hates thinkpieces. Periodically, the blogs and publications I follow get a bad case of the ol’ self-righteousness: some ancient evangelical urge bubbles up, and a navel-gazing pundit waddles onto a soapbox and announces This Is The Way It Is! Deal With It, Scrubs!!!! They’ve got the answer to Current Social Problem XYZ, you see, and if you just reblog their position enough, you too can be enlightened… Such intellectual monkey-spanking is endemic—when you run a blog, it’s very easy to go groping for that soapbox, and tell yourself the world just doesn’t get it, maaan. And your two-and-a-half followers might happily back you up with an echo chamber where you never have to be wrong or uncomfortable.

                I’d rather direct my energies towards something a less topical. We’re all sick of topical shit right now—even the supporters of His Oiliness the Cheeto (short may he reign, senile and debauched) are worn out from all their sieg-heiling. So let’s focus on something a little less current-events, and a little more ridiculous. I’m talking about cheesy, shitty monster movies. The absolute shittiest. I'm talking The Crawling Eyeball, Human Centipede XXVIII level stuff.

                The genre’s had a revival, recently. Godzilla and King Kong are lumbering slowly back into theaters, and Toho itself—the company who created Big G in the first place—has stretched its muscles with the excellent Shin-Gojira, 50% horror-Godzilla and 50% men in suits arguing over noodles. Legendary Pictures is brewing up a Pacific Rim sequel, and nerds like me couldn’t be happier. Meanwhile, my family and girlfriend remain totally confused by these schlock-fests. “They’re so juvenile,” a homemade straw-man hypothetically might say. “Why do you watch that junk?”

                Well, there’s nostalgia, to begin with. The things you enjoyed in childhood never quite go away, and men in rubber monster-suits beating the crap out of each other was one of my first passions. But I think there’s a deeper pull towards high-lactose thrills like “Matango” and “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” There’s a dweebish joy to these movies, but also a cultural story, the evolution of the fireside tale into something new and strange. Once upon a time, these monsters scared the crap out of audiences: it seems impossible , but the original clay-motion “Lost World” adaptation convinced people the director had filmed real dinosaurs. And the famous “War of the Worlds” radio adaptation in the 30’s sent hysterical families rushing to lock their doors. We may laugh now, but in a world of “fake news” and paranoid travel bans, these reactions start to make a sort of sense. People jump when they see the boogeyman, and they even jump when they think there's a boogeyman. Or there might be. Our ape-like instinct runs deep, and it teaches us to keep out the menace, the outsider. The monster.

                Monsters have power. They stand in for things, neatly slipping into the role of the scapegoat, the Antichrist, the menacing foreigner. They take the slings and arrows of our natural xenophobia and terror of the unknown—and that's a good thing. If we didn’t have entertainment to soak up our fears and paranoia, the world would be a whole lot worse. We'd go to witch burnings instead of movie theaters, for starters. Even the original Godzilla film was a manifestation of fear: fear of atomic power. A beast rises from human mistakes, and burns mankind. If you go back further, you find the precursors--the werewolf who became Kong, the dragon who became Godzilla. Their power didn’t dry up and go away when we started telling our stories with film projectors—if anything, they got stronger.

                “Cheesy” monster movies are an inversion of this kind of fear. They take the unknown, the terrifying, the cosmic force that stomps buildings... and turn it endearing, almost goofy. They break down the invading evil into something digestible and sane. When Ultraman punches a bug-eyed alien, we cheer, or we laugh. (Or, if you're not me, you turn off the TV and wonder how that station stays in business doing Ultraman reruns. Which is a pretty legitimate question.) The dust settles, and the monster has been neutered by defeat. It can’t hurt us, and this is why B-movies will always make money. The plentiful fears of the modern world have been condensed in these films, locked away on the screen. The monster appears, terrorizes, but is then swiftly dealt with by the Army. Or wild-haired scientists. Or heroes in spandex.

                There is, of course, a dangerous flipside to this.

                When we take the monster and break it down to a punchline, we forget why we feared it. The werewolf has not gone away; in fact, he seems stronger than ever. The werewolf is the betrayer, the cannibal. He is mugger, the office shooter, the lurking terrorist. Each day we are told to See Something, Say Something, and yes—I’m returning to politics. Sorry, not sorry. The parallels are too strong. Our president practically postures with a silver revolver every day, insisting only he can save us from the werewolf among us. And people totally buy it. "Watch for the mutant!" he crows, shaking an orange fist. "Watch for the heretic! Keep those torches ready!" He defies the Other. And we eat that up. We always have.

                We’ve forgotten that the monstrous is fiction. People do horrible things, but not because they're inhuman: they do them because at some point the fragile network of human decency has failed them, and allows them to behave this way. But that level of responsibility as a species is too much for us: we much prefer to see evil as the face of the monster, the face of something alien, and therefore outside our responsibility. There is no longer a division between the xenophobia we direct at our screens, subconsciously, and the xenophobia raging in our own lives. The walls of unreality have been unable to contain the monster-hunters: they have stormed the voting booths, the online forums, the talk shows. Our rubber and CGI “cultural pinatas” have all been beaten to shit, and can take no more; they have failed us.

                But still I hunt for secondhand "Gamera" DVDs, stockpile the history of imaginary beasts in my brain, and write stories about the Creeping Brain-Eater from Venus. Why? Because the monster itself still provides a focus for fear, an escape, softening the blow of the real world’s monsters. And the cheesier the escape, the better. These stories also remind you to be cautious when real horror and fear creep in: once you are familiar with the fake monsters, it becomes easier to handle the real ones with logic and patience. "To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders." I don't think Lao Tzu was talking about the comfortable sanity that comes from indulging in kitschy kaiju movies, but he might as well have been. And he's not wrong.

                We have to control the monster in some way, or he controls us.