The Monsters of the Future, Part 1

video sceries here at how Stuff Works. Uh, co workers to the two of you, and uh, it's it's great to be here to discuss the topic here. It's really great to have you. And I'm especially excited to have Robert today because I would say he is the local House Stuff Works resident expert on our topic, which is monsters. Yes. Uh, In fact, you have a show called Monster Science and Stuff to Blow your Mind. Yes and uh and actually now it's hosted on the House Stuff Works YouTube page itself.

But but yeah, I always and I've always been a monster fan since I was a kid, and since my my job here at work involves looking at the scientific world. I've over time just sort of try to see how much I can I can go to the monster well and bring stuff back in and combine work and UH and passion together, and and I find that they generally go together quite nicely. So Robert's going to be joining us in two episodes, two different parts talking about monsters.

In this first part today, we're going to talk about trends in monster lore, in monster thinking, in monster imagination, and what monsters are. Yeah, what monsters are, where they come from, and what relationship they bear to the societies that create them, and especially the times in which they're created.

And in the second episode we're going to talk about future trends and monsters and make some predictions and prognostications and and maybe we'll find out if they come true, or maybe monsters will get us and we won't find out. But for today, we're going to talk about where monsters

come from. You might be thinking, why are we talking about monsters in a show about the future, um, But the future of monsters is actually a really interesting topic that has a lot to do with both the the history and the current technology and all kinds of cultural factors going on. So what is the future of the monster, And by that I mean what are the monsters of tomorrow? Can we guess what kinds of creatures, ghoules, ghosts will terrify us in that thirty to fifty year period in

the future. We so often reference what does the next generation of horror stories look like? In order to predict what the future of monsters is going to look like. I think we need to first investigate what a monster is and how monsters are made? So what is a monster? While we were preparing for this episode, Robert You loaned U is a really great book called Us Speaking of Monsters. I believe compilation shin of essays on the cultural study

I guess of monster ology. Right. David J. Skull wrote a forward to this book called what we talked About When We talk about Monsters, and he went a little bit into the history of the idea of monsters in the word itself. So the word monster, he says, innered English, uh in about the time of Shakespeare. So that would put it in the late fifteen hundreds early sixteen hundreds, which is the part of the history of English we

call early modern English. It's the kind of English that people today can sort of understand if you go back much further. It's hard to understand without training um and the characters of Shakespeare. Actually, he says, find occasion to speak the word more than eighty times. I looked this up. A lot of this is in the Tempest, talking about

the character Caliban, the sort of fishy monster. He's referred to as a very shallow monster, a most perfidious and drunken monster, and a puppy headed monster, and a strange fish by the jester, I think, calls him all these things. But he's sort of taking pity on the monster at the same time that he's lamenting his monstrous nous um. So Skull goes on to say that the term descends from the Latin noun monstrum, which means sort of a

divine important. I guess that would be like a bad omen, and that it comes to English through the French mon arre, not monary. French anyway means too worn. And he adds at the end, I love this that his favorite is the archaic adjective monster ferous monsters. Yes, yes, right in the middle. It's a good word. It should come back. So it's right there in the etymology of the word. Basically, a monster is a warning. It's a bad omen and

instructive lesson. Uh Skull also says, quote, monsters are slippery, ever adaptive metaphors, but above all their natural teachers and teaching tools. Monsters demo straight things. Get what he did there, and I think that that the words actually are linked at the route they demonstrate things, usually of a cautionary kind.

But also the idea of monsters wasn't always the domain of fantastical beings, right, That's another thing that he talks about, right, that these terrifying predatory creatures like vampires and werewolves weren't always the only thing you think of when you use the word monster. It was often, unfortunately, applied to regular humans who were born with physical deformities, who were often and in previous centuries, treated as sort of strange curiosities

are collected in carnival shows. Even in the twentieth century, I think the association remained because the American film director Todd Browning, he was the guy who directed Universal's Dracula, the Big One Bella Legosie Dracula. Obviously he had success with that, but right after browning success with Dracula, he made the movie Freaks in nineteen thirty two, which essentially doomed his career. It was not well received at the time.

To put it lightly, it focused on people who worked in a carnival freak show and featured actors with real physical abnormalities. Audiences at the time really couldn't deal with this. It shocked them, it scandalized them, and I think a lot of why they reacted negatively was the fact that the so called freaks weren't the bad guys in the film. You were asked to empathize with them. So it's really ahead of its time. Yeah, a lot of people think so. Time has been kind to it, so to say, a

lot of critics now really like it. Um. But today, fortunately, I think we don't really have that association with real normal humans anymore. We we we think of the monster as a creature today in the past eighty or ninety years of horror movies in the West, I think it's been shaped into and I put this definition forward as something for us to knock down or supply with more nuanced something like a not entirely human creature that is the object of terror. What do y'all think about that? Yeah?

I would say so, though I mean when you start breaking apart examples of monsters and you look to other things that exist in and just pop culture. I mean look at look at say comic book characters, look at the X Men, like so many of these creatures are essentially monsters, beasts. Yeah, they're monsters, Their monsters, creatures, their hybrids, they in their various are very simbolism um caught up in their design. But we don't necessarily think of say

Wolverine as a monster. That's a good point. Maybe you would say he's not the object of terror. I don't know, there's something inherently negative about the monster. Of course, then again, you could look at all of the cute, cie monsters we have today. You know that that cute little Frankenstein's. So I don't know, it's a complicated concept, and I think because it's complicated, we need to look to somebody who has actually done some writing on this subject, who's

spent time researching it. And Robert you pointed us to a professor named Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who is a professor of English at George Washington University. How did you come across Cohen? Well, I came across his work in the book we mentioned earlier speaking of monsters. Uh, there's a uh kind of an abbreviated and cut up version of one of his essays that appears early on in that book.

And and I just thought that he did a great job knocking out some of these, uh, these core areas of monstrosity, one of these these different areas where we can look at a monster and say, this is what it is, this is what it does, uh, you know, from a cultural and symbolic uh way of thinking, all right, like how we create and and portray monsters in our culture, right, And I think Cohen does an excellent job. I found this really illuminating, and I'm and I'm glad you sent

it to us. So he has seventh dcs about what a monster is, what it represents, and I think we should just run through them quickly because they will help color our discussion of what the monsters of the future are going to be. So the first one of them, and I think this is sort of a good starting ground, is that he says the monster's body is a cultural body. And I think what he means by that is that the form of the monster is not arbitrary. It's a metaphor,

it's a signifier. It's a distinct product of the certain time and place in which it was created, and it actually means something. Yeah, I mean it's very much like science fiction in that regard, because science fiction is is is interesting in its ability to predict what the future will be like, but it's always far more interesting in telling us what people were thinking about at the time, how they were looking into the future, what their anxieties

were exactly. Yeah, and you see that that kind of those anxieties also manifested in the monster. Yeah, so his second thesis is that the monster always escapes. Actually found this the most difficult to get it exactly what his meaning was. But Lauren, I think you you read something about hopelessness into this. Yeah, i'd call hopelessness really this aspect of what monsters are, how we use them, because the thing is they're not as scary if they can

be permanently defeated. So so they always come back. You know, there's always that last scare or that possibility of a return, and they always shift through that the kind of little right right, you know, so like whenever one grave clothes is another opens. Yeah. Sorry, they're they're also, um right there, they're changeable, and I think that that's part of the scary thing about monsters, like, like, you know, being that change itself is scary, So it works as that sort

of metaphor too. Yeah, that makes sense, I guess, which leads us really into his next thesis, being that the monster is the harbinger of category crisis. This one, I think is really important. So basically he's saying that a monster cannot be neatly categorized. It doesn't fit into the taxonomy we create of things in existence. It implies a mixing of classes or categories. He says that monsters are quote disturbing hybrids with quote externally incoherent bodies, a form

suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions. And I think this rings very true to me. I sat there trying to think about monsters, and almost all popular monsters I can think of represents some form of deep category confusion. So all undead creatures, ghosts, vampires, zombies, mummies, whatever you can think of, they confuse categories of life and death.

They violate our taxonomy of of life. Animal hybrid monsters like werewolves confuse the categories of the sapient human and on one hand, and the mindless beast on the other. And when you start looking at this you kind of see it everywhere. I was just thinking about Ridley Scott's Alien, where the xeno morph was designed by hr Geeger, and that incorporates a kind of abstract esthetic category confusion because

it appears to blend both biological and mechanical. I also read it as a little bit of our fear of the illogical or or write the uncategorical. Um, you know, stuff that we can't understand or define, which represents stuff that we can control, which sucks. Yeah, I mean the

beast man is the great example really. I mean, whether you're talking about a werewolf or an eighth man or a moon beast or what have you, is that you see that, Uh, that that divide between the the so the higher functions of the mind and the way that we we want to be and then our our beasteal nature, you know. And that's something we've wrestled with forever. You know.

There's how do we separate the two? How do we come to terms with the with the you know, the best deal ruttings in our heart, you know, and uh, and so in that the monster becomes this category crisis uh in in another flesh, but also within our own flesh and our within our own experience. Yeah. I think it makes sense that category confusion like that causes fear because we have these heuristics for how we deal with

things in the real world. You you encounter a problem, and if you can quickly categorize it and something you've dealt with before, you probably have a set rules established on here's what I do when I meet A. But if you meet A mixed with B, you can't use either set of rules. And also, frequently our internal problems or internal conflicts are a lot less easy to ascribe to it to a single you know, to to see in the black and white kind of way. Yeah, totally okay.

So Cohen's next thesis is very related to this, I think, which is that the monster dwells at the gates of difference. In other words, the monster is difference embodied. Cohen says quote by revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of society, but the very cultural apparatus

through which individuality is constituted and allowed. So this is kind of the classic other, you know, capital oh other Yeah, um, you know, specifically persecuted segments of the population based on religion or class or sexuality or gender, sex or race or culture of origin or x cetera, like like anything about your neighbor that is different than you and therefore

kind of freaky. Um and and yeah, that that it can demonstrate I think, either our fear of the other, or our fear of being the other, of being placed as that undesirable right. I think part of what he's saying is that the idea of the monster as the other sort of brings into focus the fact that you are not normal by your own virtues, that it's sort of arbitrary that you're in the normal camp, and that at a moment's notice, you could be in the other camp. Yeah.

I mean, my mind instantly turns to some of the old red scare monsters and terrifying science fiction that you solve the day, whereas you know, the body Snatchers is that it's some sort of communist force from from outside of our world, that the Dupier version it conquered the world.

And another thing I love about this is just the the idea of monsters sort of emerging these uh, these these kind of fault lines in our culture, you know, these uh, which which which brings to mind some of the theories I've I've read about serial killers, particularly in the United States, where you see that the trend rising in the sixties, obviously a time of great social change, peaking in the nineteen eighties. Uh, we're still you have

change taking place, technological change, culture is changing. Everything seems to be changed. You know, we're still sort of clean to that idea that the future is going to live up to our expectations, and then it begins to fall off. And then but then at the same time, you also see you know, if you want to go with sort of the media um view on serial killers, Uh, you see fewer slasher films. You see the the the psychotic in the woods with the with the knife sort of

falling out of favor. Uh, and you see the more purely monstrous ideas uh coming to light in cinema totally. Yeah. So the next thesis is that the monster polices the borders of the possible. I think we are all pretty familiar with this. It's simply that the more stir is

at the edge of knowledge. Uh, it's it's border patrol. Yeah, it's it's um exposing the danger inherent in being curious or in questioning standards are in stepping outside of convention, you know, off the path um to take the classic fairy tale kind of look at it um and and it's interesting, he says, specifically because the monster itself is transgressive and also punishes people who transgress. Right, So this

could be all different kinds of transgressions. Actually I said knowledge, but it could be there's a place you're not supposed to go, and if you go there, there's a monster, or there's knowledge you shouldn't pursue, and if you pursue it, you create a monster. Or there's a way that you should be and if you are different than you're a monster. Exactly right, where do you create one? Yeah, I mean Frankenstein, which will discuss later, you know, as the classic example.

This is the reason Frankenstein is an adjective now in our science headlines. You know, you can't inevitably you go through you through your science headlines enough and you or you hear enough science commentary and you'll you'll they'll throw out the the F word regarding some particular scientific advancement or another, be it genetics and cloning, the neuroscience um generally regarding the human condition. But we hear it all the time. Yeah, we post a video about something and

somebody it's either the matrix or it's frankens uh. The The idea of transgression, though, leads into the next thesis, which is, the fear of the monster is really a kind of desire um for for that sort of transgression, or for escapism, or for freedom from whatever you're bound by, or for sexy sex sex if you're putting it very literally,

or etcetera. Right, Cohen says, quote the monster is continually linked to forbidden practices in order to normalize and enforce, but he also says the monster also attracts, And I think the idea is that because it's linked with the forbidden, it becomes associated with the no, no pleasures. So and so you have scientific way of putting it. Yeah, there's

a general association between the monstrous and some kind of titilation. Right. Yeah, absolutely, it's supposed to sexy sex sex, which is also the extremely scientific way of putting that. Like the vampire is promiscuous and uh and in his or her own way and is ultimately staked for it, you know, I mean or or all of the teenagers who blank and then get killed terribly in slasher flicks. But it but it

needed in general though. With you know, you see a really great monster and you can't help but want to be that monster. There's always a freedom and being the monster. There's a monster, yeah, and and you want to you know, really good monster you kind of identify with on some level, especially when you look at the like the classic universal monsters. I feel like that's one of the reasons they appeal so much to, especially like teenagers and younger people, you know,

because here are these they're all outsiders. They're all outcast that have that have also found a certain strength in their outsider status. You know. So you can't but but want to be the creature from the Black Wool, and you can't help but but see yourself as Frankenstein. Yeah, and I don't anybody jumping right, I'd say even at a sort of baser level in the lower quality storytelling.

Let's look at the Friday franchise. Early in the franchise, I think you are more genuinely asked to identify with the characters who are the ostensible victims to be with them. As time goes on, you can tell that the pitch to get the audience to identify with the human characters gets less and less. Yeah, it's clear that the audience is coming to identify with Jason. Yeah. Well, because the teenage characters get worse and worse is the films go on,

I mean, and not not more poorly written. I mean they're terrible human beings, and so there's a they're also more poorly written. Well yes, but but so so there's a this this sound sociopathic, I know, but but if you think about it, there's really a pleasure in watching these awful people get terribly murdered. I think the Final Destination series, especially the latter ones, is a really good

example of that. Yeah, I think that's totally true. Now, But when Jason goes to space and to the future X, I remember there being a lot of likable characters in one Android who who had to die at Jason's hands, though, so that one kind of breaks it altot. It's probably an inversion of its own trope. I think that. I think that's really what they were looking to do with that series. It's a very challenging film. I'll give you that. No, No, I think it is. Uh, Jason X is a smarter

movie than some people give it credit for it. Yeah, it's it's what we're seeing if only to see uh Cronin Brook show up and bite. Oh no, I've seen it. Yeah, I actually haven't watched it. I need to check it out. No, you were in for a treat. I mean really, once a horror franchise goes into space, like, that's where it really hits the golden you know, Golden Age Frontier. Yes, I'm really pushing for Leprechaun in space in the hood. I think that's in the hood of space, Yes, the

space hood. Okay, we have one thesis left. Seventh and final thesis is that the monster stands at the threshold of becoming. He says, monsters are children, and I think this makes sense. The monster looks back on us, so it is a way of criticizing us, interrogating us, and

forcing us to consider why we created it. Uh. Sometimes they are literally our children, you know, in like Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist or all of those other parental angst horror flicks that started cropping up in the nineteen seventies um up through the you know now tropes status of that creepy little kid that shows up in every single horror flick um, I mean, portrayed frequently by different actors, because kids have this pesky habit of growing um but

uh less literally. I think it's also part of the reason why um Doppelganger horror resonates so intensely, because the monster there is is literally yourself or or ourselves I suppose um and and coping with at is is really unpleasant and and it's a natural thing that we have to do kind of every day. Okay, So, as we've seen from these thess, especially the first one, that monsters don't appear in a vacuum. They are a result of the conditions in the societies that imagine them or or

revitalize them whenever they become popular again. They reflect a feeling and culture, and these feelings are caused by external events, So they could be social upheaval or changes in in values, or very often changes in technology and science. And I think we're gonna especially focus on that towards the end of the podcast here but I thought we should look back at how some trends in cultural thinking in the past, and trends and technology have influenced waves of monsters human mind.

Just to give you guys a few examples of the things that we were talking about in the last section and all of those theses. Um so okay. So going all the way back to tow ancient myths and folklore, you know, it's stuff that had come out of every

culture from four thousand years ago and and beyond. Basically as long as people have been writing stuff down, they have been writing about monsters, and a lot of the time in the distant past, it was a lot of like force of nature kind of stuff, or that uncategorized

beast sort of thing. Um Uh, the a chipicabra or the lamia, which was one of the precursors to the vampire um and and wrath of the gods kind of stuff, like people being punished by being turned into monsters and uh the arachnid tale from from Greek culture, or um or cautionary tales against stepping off of literal and metaphorical paths. I think a lot of times in ancient literature and

in ancient religions, monsters are gatekeepers. So you can see that in like the epic of Gilgamesh and things like that, where where you have a monster that stands between the hero and his goal. Yeah yeah, or or you know, as as something that's a physical representation of a disease

that wasn't understood at the time. Oh yeah, um or um or of course the other big one, neighboring cultures being made monstrous, like I I read somewhere, I think in one of I think in this in this book something about the cyclops supposedly being a neighboring culture to to Homer, and that he was kind of saying something really racist. Well, there's no shortage of that in the ancient world and somewhat in the modern world. So yeah, but uh, well, let's look at how sometimes the monsters

actually react to science and technology. I want to start with Frankenstein, which is actually, I think sort of the

monster actually not Frankenstein, the person, Frankenstein's creature. I could argue with that one way or another, but sure, yeah, I mean Frankenstein, who is Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus the title of the novel by Mary Shelley, And I think there has been a long, relatively anti science streak in horror, and I think this relates to Cohen's thesis on policing the borders of the possible punishing excessive curiosity.

I think this is perhaps best expressed in the concluding line of Ed woods nineteen fifty five film Bride of the Monster, where they watch Belle Lego Sie get crushed by a boulder I think, and then an octopus. Yeah, there's there's an octopus strangling I think they left the motor off, so he's just throwing the arms over himself. And then they look at stock footage of a nuclear explosion and the police guy who's been shooting a gun at nothing says he tampered in God's domain. I mean, yeah,

that's that's Frankenstein to a t right there. I mean it's a manifestation of our fears and apprehensions about moving forward with their technology, about where it might might bring us. And I think maybe not as much with frank Insteint itself, but in terms of of other works that have that that that Frankenstein quality to them. You know, this warning about the future. I feel like sometimes it's about that the fear of what our technology will uncover about our universe,

about ourselves. So it's it's kind of that, don't don't look behind the curtain, there's gonna be something horrible behind the curtain. In our minds, it becomes the monster, but in reality it is It is the revelation about who and what we are. Yeah, I think it's strange that, at least to me, what's still resonant about Frankenstein's story. And I actually really love the novel, and there are a lot of modern criticisms of it, but I think it's excellent, and it's excellent because of the pathos of

the creature. The scene where the creature is observing the family through the crack in the wall and wishing he could be one of them, but he knows he's ugly. I mean, it brings tears to my eyes. It's really beautiful story. The technophobia, I think doesn't hold up as well, at least to me. But uh, it seems like it's

a reaction to the Enlightenment. Basically that it came. This was written in the early eighteen hundreds, and we just had a couple of centuries of this dominant Enlightenment thinking among the wealthy in Europe, and and that it could be very much a reaction to that kind of you know,

scientific experimentation. Oh yeah, yeah. There was also a lot of a lot of very startling at the time new technology that was that was becoming more widespread electricity and stuff like that, that that everyone was kind of going, oh, oh, this is a thing, this is a thing that is going to change our world. Really hardcore. Yeah, so I think they all use the word hardcore back then. Sorry, yeah, you can understand why people then would be afraid. I think we should now move on to the sort of

the early nineteen hundreds pulp sci fi and Lovecraft. Actually wanted to ask you, Robert, where do you think Lovecraft fits into this? Because on one hand, he's just so weird and out there. Do you think he actually it's in to his cultural time and place. Is the Cathulu mythos and all that actually a reflection of of how Lovecraft saw the world, Yeah, I think very much. So

um stuff to blow your mind. We did an episode a few months back titled The Science of Lovecraft, and and that came out of the fact that I was just rereading a bunch of Lovecraft stories at the time. Some of them I had not read since I was in high school. And and back then, you know, I'm reading them and I'm enjoying them just on that fantastic

and horror and supernatural level. And now I'm rereading them, you know, a couple of decades later, with with a little more science under my belt, and I'm and I'm noticing, you know that he's he's mentioning Einstein, he's mentioning, um, some of the scientific theories of the day, and he's

and uh. And so we did this episode. We interviewed St. Joe she who's one of the world's pre eminent Lovecraft experts, just can rattle off encyclopedic information, dates and and all the fine details just off the top of his head and got him talking about science and Lovecraft. Indeed, you see a lot of science in his work because Lovecraft, in addition to writing these fantastic stories, he wrote about science.

He was always intrigued by science. He kept abreast of the of all the scientific headlines popping up in the day, and um, and his work is I mean, so much of it is essentially science fiction. You have sure fantastic monsters popping out of the woodwork. But so but in many cases they are grounded in uh, in some sort of extra terrestrial reality. Um. And then as far as you know, talking about monsters being a product of the time, I mean, you see Lovecraft writing coming out uh during

you know, the wake of the Great War. Um. At the same time, Einstein's theory of relativity is really a shaking up twenty century science, and so he had to wrestle with the relativity and quantum theory while trying to

maintain materialist point of view. Uh. You look at works like in the Mountains of Madness, uh and uh and he are you see him drawing on his scientific fascination with the Antarctic and scientific discoveries that were coming out of what was the last genuinely unknown terrain on Earth. So so, even though it's easy to ignore the science and Lovecraft, I think it's all there. I mean, it's it's right there in the in the the foundation of

most of his stories. Really. Yeah, I think that was another time of of intense intellectual turmoil, you know, the sort of the modernist period. People didn't know where the intellectual world was headed, especially with as you say, relativity in quantum theory. I mean, those are strange things today

and and now they're they're very well accepted. Back then when they were new, I don't know what you'd make of them, but hey, speaking of ninety one, coincidentally, that is also the year that Um Browning and Lego Sis Dracula and Wale and Carlos Frankenstein came out, which kicked off that entire big budget monster movie treatment. Yeah. I would probably this year as the beginning of contemporary monsterdom. Yeah.

So strangely enough, like I had never put that together before before I was doing the research for the show. You kind of don't think of those two worlds meeting existing on separate planes. Yeah, And and I would kind of argue that that in those very first two movies that that our monsters weren't as sympathetic to to start out with, you know, they that they were pretty monsters. They they were doing the mean stuff, and uh, and it was it was a lot easier to sympathize with

their victims. Um. But it's super interesting to me that over the next few decades they would definitely, like you were saying earlier, Robert become more the heroes than the villains of these pieces. Um, you know, of course, leading to like the complete inversion of of those monstrous others with stuff like the Monsters and the Adams Family coming

out in the nineteen sixties. You know, it's we were inviting them literally into our homes that Oh yeah, yeah, I mean you look at that first Frankenstein film and if you're coming into that, I mean, and I mean I obviously I think all of us here we probably

saw that Frankenstein before we read the book. Uh, but if you were coming into that movie from the book, I mean, it's it's almost insulting how often it is because here's this just lumbering d basically together from corpses as opposed to this French speaking, brilliant, philosophic monster that that you encounter in the in the book. Um, and he was he was easier to identify with when he

identified with Satan from Paradise Lost. Exactly. Yeah, I mean we all right, well there's the other's a strong case to be made there, and there's there's a classic monster. Yeah absolutely, yeah myself, I'm hell And like you were saying, Lauren, you see that evolution coming out of these two films, as Dracula becomes more and more um relatable, and Frankenstein's

monster becomes more and more relatable. In with Frankenstein, you see that the scale tip, especially with the some of the Hammer films yea, where where Frankenstein victor Frankenstein is himself essentially a monster. It's like the films are more about how horrible Frankenstein is than his creation. Oh absolutely, yeah, yeah. Okay.

So after the Universal Monster movie, and simultaneous to all of this kind of stuff that we're that we've been talking about, um, afterwards, we had, of course the atomic age, right, and I think this is a very direct response to scientific It's pretty obvious. So I mean we split the atom. And so between World War two and I would say between World War two and the Countercultural Revolution, the horror was dominated by atomic age monsters. So this would be

between the late forties and the early sixties. Most of the fifties horror movies were based on fears about nuclear experimentation causing mutations. So you get movie after movie after movie about giant mutated bugs, giant mutated crabs, lizards, shrews. They couldn't get enough of this stuff. I guess people just kept going back to see what's the big animal this time? Oh, it's huge limmings. Terrifying. But you had

so many movies like this. You had the high profile like Godzilla in nineteen fifty four created by nuclear weapons, you had them which was nineteen also giant mutated ants, but then you also had a zillium just cornball movies like Roger Corman's nineteen seven Attack of the Crab Monsters, which is about these people go to an island to study the effects of nuclear testing and they discover it's created giant mutated crabs, and some scientists throw grenades at

the crab, and the crab tells them they are foolish, all right, speaking giant mutated crabs. I I can't get over how delicious that would be. More butter, I've just always been fascinated. Uh the Amazing Colossal Man that came out in fifty seven, um which I think I first saw some some clips of that from the movie It came from Hollywood, which was the matchup of clips with like Danackroyd and John Candy and Gilda Radner in it, which which holds up I thought really well when I

rewatched it recently. But amazing Colossal Man you have, you know, an army man and just an everyday Joe. And then the atomic bomb test, uh or unatomic bomb test occurs, radiates his body and he keeps getting bigger and bigger and they have to check his growth. And it's you know, one cannot argue that it's a great movie. Uh it's it's a good monster B movie. But the monster is just a giant man. And I always found that fascinating because here he's not a lumbering, you know, mindless creature.

He's a he's he's he's he's a human, and he's he's dealing. He's trying to deal with what's happening to him. And uh, it's it has a very strong Frankenstein quality to it, almost almost by accident. Huh. I'm sure it's not much like Beast of Yucca Flats where he tore Johnson, gets detonated and turns into tour Johnson without all on his face. Well, you know, it's interesting they did a sequel to Amazing Colossal Man and they couldn't get the same They didn't get the same actor to play him,

to play the man and stuff to play Glenn Manning. Uh, I can't remember Glenn Manning was the character or the actor. But anyway, in the sequel, they just have half his face scarred up in like a visible skull, and he's just a lumbering monster. So they kind of revert to form. But I feel like they really had something in that that first film. I've actually never seen it. Yeah, this

is a great like like possible Netflix key list. There's an MST three K version of it, and that's that's probably the best way to have to check that out. But of course, after the Atomic Age, we got the sixties, all right, the sixties and seventies and all of the social upheaval that was happening then, um, during which I think that there was a partial shift from from that

fear of the other to that fear of being the other. Um. You know, through through all of that social awareness and rebellion, through the civil rights movement and feminism and the Vietnam protests and and just everything was was saying that, you know, you had to be a certain way, and the youth culture certainly was was saying, nah, y'all, we do not

let us not do that. Um. So you know, there we started seeing the monster beginning to be the protagonist, especially in the nineteen eighties On with Um with Fransspard, Coupla's Dracula and and and Rice's Louis, and characters like that who were way more sympathetic than even the pretty sympathetic human characters that we're running around with them now. A horror film from that era that I've I've found

really interesting is one titled Blue Sunshine. Yeah, it's that's that's a great one because it's h it's you know, it's the aftermath of of the sixties. These coming back to haunt. Yeah, the past coming back to haunt you. These individuals who took LSD during the uh, you know, the good times during during the social people in the nineteen sixties. So now they've moved on. They've a lot of them have normal jobs. They're trying to you know,

trying to have a family. They're they're trying to just be a part of the system as opposed to, you know, escape from it. And uh, the the LSD that they took decades earlier is suddenly kicking back in and turning people into monsters, and you know, it's it's a it's a it's an interesting concept that that does play into our our cultural fears, and our and and and are really our scientific fears as well? You know, what have we what are we doing? And what have we done

to the basic human proposition? Yeah? I can see that there's also in there something about the fear of the sort of medicalizing or pharmaceuticalizing of American culture. I mean, there's plenty of fear to go around about that. Oh yeah, I feel like there's there's definitely a whole subgenre of just sort of pharmaceutical horror. And in a podcast where we're talking about what the future holds for us in terms of our answers, I feel like we're only going

to see more and more of that. Yeah, Okay, I've got one more trend I'd like to talk about, and then we can shift to what's the future hold But the last trend I want to talk about is the most recent one in my mind, which is what I

would call the horror. Uh. It's fairly recent, I would say, in the nineties and two thousands, though I think Lauren has a bone to pick about that, but it seems to have mostly come to America and the West through Japanese horror and the monsters of this type in one sense, I think are fairly conventional malevolent ghosts or rates. But what's unique is their association with technology and electronic media.

They seem to associate themselves with and invade your safe spaces by way of electricity, radio signals, videotapes, computer networks. I would think of stuff like the Ring and things like I watched the horrible American remake of a Japanese movie called Pulse. This was recently fear dot com. Yes, yeah, the Pulses. They come get you through your cell phone.

It's just unbelievably bad. But but this is a trend, at least that that we can see, because I can remember when I was a little kid, I associated ghosts and monsters inherently with things that were sort of more ancient and more natural. So the woods or an old house. Those were places that could be full of ghosts. But a computer lab was a safe place. There were no ghosts there. Something about the technology just didn't fit with the ghost scare them right off, and I just never

would have thought that they would be there. But now I feel like that line has been successfully blurred. I can be afraid of a ghost in a computer lab now, I'm still really upset about the ring if I've never mentioned it on this show before, like I am, I'm

still completely terrified of of that character. Um. Though. Though, Yes, my my bone to pick with this is that I don't think it's a wholly new thing, but rather an extension of of a bunch of pre vious technophobia kind of stuff, like like going back to what you were even saying, Joe about Frankenstein, um, and also looking at what sci fi horror writers in particular we're doing with like intelligent and monstrous machines like like Bradbury back in

the nineteen forties, or Harlan Ellison in the nineteen sixties, or Stephen King in the nineteen eighties. Let us not forget maximum overdraft, um, or let us forget it entirely. Um. You know, Plus what what writers like William Gibson and Cronenberg we're doing with the whole uh soul in the machine more than ghost in the machine kind of kind

of concept starting in the nineteen eighties. So I think I think this e horror trend is more of a just just a new twist or a new combination of that good old anxiety about death with anxiety of these specific new technologies. And once you get into the virtual realm and even just the Internet itself, you just see, uh, you know, a transposition of the sort of same idea of we have these accepted pathways in life and in culture and in technology, and if you you stray from

that path, at your peril. You know, the guy walk in between towns at night, if he gets off the beaten path, he might be maybe eaten by a monster. And when you see that with the Internet, you know, the secret forbidden webs to the dark web, then yeah, and then something out there might come for you. So it's uh, yeah, indeed. I mean there's there's a lot there's a lot of shadow. There's a lot of room

for the monstrous, even just on the modern Internet. And then when you start looking ahead, you know, imagining the so called Internet of Things and imagining we are giving potentially giving all the horrors of the Internet the ability to actually crawl out of our machines and come, you know, slavering out of our three D printers and find its

way into our bed. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, not even to mention the fact that we are inviting all of this technology that most of us on a personal base is don't understand how it works into our homes

and into our beds and into our our very private lives. Now, one thing I want to I want to just throw in here, uh that that I think is key to understanding monsters and thinking about monsters, is that you can you can have a monster like Frankenstein's creation that is just you know, superbly crafted and has a lot of thought put into it and is really just the philosophical entity and and you can learn a lot from it.

You can you can sort of hold it up to the light and re examine uh, you know, human culture and your own role in it in the future of humanity. You can write many deep essays about it. But you can also hold up a really bad monster, like a monster just made on the fly for no money with limited fects budget. Yeah, and then that monster can be

just as fascinating. And and a part of that is just because you know, we've talked about already about the the the myth, the folklore, the the the the the cultural crisis that's bound up in the creation of all these monsters, and you end up with all this symbolism and so you can just accidentally or create and almost subliminally create a monster that is just you know, stupid as all get out, or just or based on every cliche in the book, but of its turn, just the

right way, it can just be so fascinating just as relevant. Right, absolutely okay, And so unfortunately we're gonna have to stop there for today, but join us again next time on our next podcast with Robert when he will help us predict the future of monsters and take what we've learned this time and see where we're gonna go down that dark and scary path. Make some terrifying extrapolations. If you want to get in touch with us, you can search

for us on Facebook or Twitter. We're on there on Google Plus also, or you can email us at f W thinking at how Stuff Works dot com and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot Com Problems, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places, h