The fiend club

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Movie poster

and 3D glasses

Special edition of 50’s horror movies

By Leonardo Gonzalez

The Creature, unlike many of his Atom Age peers, is not a towering beast. He’s big, but Tokyo

need not evacuate. His size distinguishes him from monsters like Godzilla or The Deadly Mantis, but

his scales and gills distinguish him from monsters like the Wolf Man or Mr. Hyde. He is a mixture

of the more man-like monsters of the thirties and forties and the inhuman beasties of the fifties.

Another thing that sets the Gillman apart is his origins. He is not an atomic mutant nor was he

awakened by an atomic bomb. Nor is he trying to take over the earth.

Fear of the unknown is a common theme of fantastic films of the decade. Creature from the Black Lagoon is a 50s monster film, yet it also has many qualities that link it to the horror films of earlier decades. As in movies like Dracula and King Kong, the Creature has a strange attraction to the heroine. When the Creature silently stalks Julie Adams as she swims, it is a scene of monochromatic beauty that would seem more at home in a Universal film of the 30s or a Val Lewton film of the 40s.

Y You have to know where you came from to have any idea of where you are going. This is so true with horror. If the movies of the past hadn’t taken chances or were not successful, we wouldn’t have horror today. Too many of the younger people don’t recognize the past or hadn’t been exposed to it. They think movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Hell-raiser were the movies that started it all, but it was Dracula, Frankens-tein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and many others that laid the foundation for today’s horror. One reason for this I think has been the death of the horror host. I remember settling down before the TV every Saturday afternoon to watch my favorite horror host Dr Shock or Creature Double Feature. The host made it so fun and the movies were really cool. There were whole afternoons of classic and sometimes not so classic horror movies.

With advances in technology that occurred in the 1950s, the tone of horror films shifted from the gothic toward concerns that some saw as being more relevant to the late-Century audience. The horror film was seen to fall into three sub-genres: the horror-of-personality film, the horror-of-armageddon film and the horror-of-the-demonic film.

A stream of low-budget productions featured humanity overcoming threats from “outside”: alien invasions and deadly mutations to people, plants, and insects, most notably in films imported from Japan, whose society had first-hand knowledge of the effects of nuclear radiation.

In some cases, when Hollywood co-opted the popularity of the horror film, the directors and producers found ample opportunity for audience exploi-tation, with gimmicks such as 3-D and “Percepto” producer William Castle’s pseudo-electric-shock technique used for 1959’s The Tingler. Some direc-tors of horror films of this period, including The Thing from Another World 1951; attributed on screen to Christian Nyby but widely considered to be the work of Howard Hawks and Don Siegel’s Invasion of