Man in Suit!
I haven’t done a true monster spec, yet. Sure — people as monsters, but not a ”rise from the primordial ooze” sort of monster. And when I’ve dipped towards the monsters, they’ve always been two-legged: a demon in “Beyond Good and Evil” and Pure Evil in “Blind Eye”.
When I finished “203″ a few weeks back, I started thinking doing the research on the new one (the one Mack wouldn’t pick…). The research can be a killer. Really. There’s a lot of detail work. You have to cram the hook into the settings and the characters. And you don’t want to have paper thin settings. Lotsa details need to be gathered.
So as I’m pulling together situations and set pieces, I start thinking about my Monster. What would it look like? Where would it come from? Why was it there? Why was it so pissed off?
Of course, my horror-addled brain referenced two of the best modern monster movies ever: Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982). Since my creature comes from under the sea, my first thought was a sort of “Creature of the Black Lagoon” type beastie. Half man, half monster, all evil — that sort of thing. But, for a lot of reasons, that didn’t work. Then I looked at scary fish. There’s a lot of them. Things that just look… monstrous — like the dragon fish:
Whoa! Scary! Looks like the chestburster from Alien, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t really fit my story. I need my monster to live under the water, and then come out of the water several times for different sordid reasons. Just like how the Alien grew to be a bipedal creature and crawled around the Nostromo.
But here’s the deal: while the Alien is a scary creature, shot with a masters eye, it’s still just a man in a suit. And as much as the director tries to fool you, your brain tells you: “man in a rubber suit!”.
There were a lot of things about “The Thing” that made it memorable: the acting, the writing, the sense of isolation, the rampant paranoia — all great stuff. The tag line “Man is the Warmest Place to Hide” — how bad ass is that? Wow. Rob Bottin — just 22 at the time — is a stand out with some insane special effects that would pass muster even today. Wild, weird, horrible, strangely fascinating… and definitely not a man in a suit. The special effects were nominated for a Saturn Award but lost to Return of the Jedi (tough competition, huh?).
Here’s a snippet from a January, 1985 article in LA Weekly with John Carpenter about (among other things) “The Thing”:
WEEKLY: What attracted you to THE THING?
CARPENTER: The story. I always wanted to do a big-budget monster movie. And you’ll never see anything like it again, I guarantee you. No one will ever spend that amount of money on a monster. Even ALIEN was low-budget compared to THE THING. Even ALIEN turned out to be a man in a suit. They didn’t go for the home run. I thought, “Let’s really do a monster. Let’s not fool around.”
I don’t know if John was spot-on with his “guarantee” of no one spending that amount of money (1998’s “Godzilla” was budgeted at 130M while “The Thing” was budgeted at 10M) his comment about the man in the suit certainly holds true. Godzilla, by the way, is the ultimate “man in a suit” monster.
So once I grasped that, to be effective, my monster can’t be another take on a “man in a suit” schtick, a lot of my problems sort of worked their way out.
I’m two weeks in with another three (at least) to go.
Talk to you next week.
M A R K