From Sherlock Holmes to Godzilla: History of Giant Monsters in Movies

Not counting the Transformers series, the latest giant monster movie was Cloverfield. Shot in the style of The Blair Witch Project it showed a camcorded video supposedly made by a group of people attempting to flee Manhattan Island during an attack by an unknown giant creature. This was just the latest in a long line of horror movies featuring building sized monsters that dates back to the dawn of Hollywood.

The origins of these stories date back further. In ancient times tales of flying fire breathing dragons and boat destroying leviathans terrified everyone who believed in them. Occasionally these stories were not entirely fiction. An actual sea monster lurked in the Pacific in the early 1800s. In 1810 a white whale was spotted off the coast of Mocha island near Southern Chile by a whaler ship. An attempt to harpoon the whale resulted in the destruction of all the harpooner's crafts and a direct attack on the whaling ship itself which crippled the boat. As word spread about the legendary white whale, ships as far away as Nantucket sailed off to confront the monster. These whalers sailed all the way around Cape Horn in an attempt to be the one to kill the beast. At least 100 whaler ships confronted the white whale which by then was going by the name Mocha Dick. Each was reported to have been either sunk or crippled. Finally in 1838 Mocha Dick was killed while attempting to shield a whale cow from whalers harpoons. It's body was measured at 70 feet long and had at least 20 harpoons in it's body from past encounters with whalers. In 1851 Herman Melville published his novel Moby Dick based on accounts of Mocha Dick.

A decade later in 1864 Jules Verne published Voyage au Centre de la Terra ( A Journey to the Center of the Earth ) which was one of the first science fiction novels where explorers discovered a land where dinosaurs had not yet gone extinct. Verne's novel had the creatures living beneath the Earth's surface in a vast underground cavern that had it's own sea and forest. In Edgar Rice Burroughs The Land that Time Forgot a German U-Boat discovers a land mass in the Antarctic called Caprona where Dinosaurs still live. One of the novels made around this time was The Lost World written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was sick of writing stories about Sherlock Holmes and had even attempted to kill Holmes off in 1893 in the story The Adventure of the Final Problem Looking to create a new character to replace Holmes Doyle came up with Professor Challenger, a burly cantankerous scientist who was often off on an expedition. In total Doyle would write five science fiction novels starring Challenger, the first which would be The Lost World. Once again a story about a land where dinosaurs were not yet extinct, Challenger and other explorers go on an expedition of a plateau in South America where the prehistoric creatures still live. The book ends with Challenger returning to London and when reporters refuse to believe he found live dinosaurs on his expedition. He shuts them up by producing a live pterodactyl, which then escapes and after flying over the rooftops of the city, flies out to sea and is never seen again. In 1925 First National Pictures purchased the rights to make a silent film version of The Lost World and even convinced Conan Doyle to make a cameo appearance in the beginning of the movie. Although Doyle opened the movie suggesting it was a faithful translation of his book, the writers of the film made significant changes. A female character ( played by Betsy Love ) was created and tagged along on the expedition creating a love triangle between two expedition members. Another change was the tribe of ape-men called the Doda was reduced to a single ape-man who harasses the explorers. But the most significant change came at the end of the movie where instead of a pterodactyl Challenger brings back a brontosaurus. The creature escapes from it's crate at the docks and goes on a rampage through the streets of London before swimming out to sea. To pull this off as well as all the other dinosaur footage director Harry O. Hoyt hired stop motion animation specialist Willis O'Brian who recreated the giant animals. This along with some other special effects made it appear that a brontosaurus was causing destruction in the streets of London. ( although the poster for this movie showed a Tyrannosaurus Rex on the rampage through the city. )

With the arrival of sound film many studios were interested in an all talking remake of The Lost World. However after Doyle died his estate was reluctant to sell the movie rights, as there was also some question if First National still held the rights. R.K.O. Pictures had hired the entire special effects team that worked on The Lost World including Willis O'Brian and proceeded to plan an unofficial remake called Creation. After about twenty minutes worth of footage including special effects scenes were completed R.K.O. decided to scrap the movie. Still wanting O'Brian to make a prehistoric monster movie the studio turned to writer and director Merian C. Cooper to come up with a script similar to The Lost World while being different enough that they would not be sued by Conan Doyle's estate for copyright infringement. The script Cooper came up with was King Kong. Challenger was replaced by a new character, Carl Denham ( played by Robert Armstrong), a flamboyant documentary film director who Cooper had modeled after himself. R.K.O. was basically looking for the same formula of The Lost World; explorers finding a land where dinosaurs were not yet extinct, and then bringing one of those creatures back to civilization where it goes on a rampage. Cooper came up with the idea of taking the ape-man from The Lost World and turning it into a giant gorilla. Cooper further found influence in another RKO movie "Ingari", a faux documentary of an African tribe who worships gorillas. The tribe ends up sacrificing one of their women to a gorilla who drags her off into the jungle. The expedition filming the documentary decides to follow the ape into the jungle in an attempt to rescue the woman.

Yet another influence seems to have been the film adaption of Moby Dick released by Warner Brothers. Based very loosely on the novel Ahab succeeds in killing Moby at the end of the movie and after happily carving it apart and turning it into whale oil returns home to his girl. From this Cooper borrowed the idea of searching for the legendary monster, only in this case it was an unknown monster on the hard to find Skull Island only known as Kong. Kong turns out to be the giant ape who in turn falls in love and captures the actress Carl Denham decided to bring along. An expedition into the heart of Skull Island to rescue the actress results in the discovery of live dinosaurs who in turn discover and begin to eat the humans. Eventually only one man in the expedition is left to rescue the actress while Kong is busy fighting a dinosaur. Kong chases them back to the native village where Denham is waiting with gas bombs. As an angry Kong bursts through the giant gate protecting the village and begins to rampage by destroying their huts Denham knocks it out with the gas, then packs it up on a ship to take back to civilization. Bad idea as while Kong is being displayed on a Broadway stage it breaks free, recaptures the actress, and then rampages through the streets of Manhattan where it inevitably ends up being shot to death by airplanes while sitting on the roof of the Empire State Building.

King Kong was a huge success for R.K.O. Pictures and a sequel Son of Kong was rushed into production. This time Carl Denham returns to Skull Island looking for a rumored treasure and discovers Kong's albino son. Kong's son befriends Denham and his expedition and protects them from various giant animals, although he himself was only half the size of his father. The treasure is discovered but the removal of it from it's temple unleashes a curse which causes the island to sink into the ocean. Denham and Kong Jr. scramble to the top of the island's tallest mountain to escape the flood, but as the waters even engulf the peak the gorilla sacrifices it's life by holding Denham and his girl companion aloft in his hand long enough for a boat to show up and rescue them. The sequel to King Kong did not do well at the box office and R.K.O. did not bother with a sequel until nearly two decades later. The movie was called Mighty Joe Young and this time the gorilla was closer to normal sized. Since Skull Island was destroyed in the second Kong movie Mighty Joe Young was presented as a completely new story with new characters. Joe was an orphaned baby gorilla raised by a young white girl living in Africa. Joe grows to a nearly enormous size but still listens to the commands of the girl who raised him, now herself grown into an attractive young woman. The pair grabs the attention of nightclub impresario Max O'Hara ( played by Robert Armstrong as a very similar character to Carl Denham ) who was in Africa on an expedition to capture lions to display at his night club. O'Hara convinces the girl and her gorilla to return with him to America and perform at his African themed nightclub. Predictably things turn bad as Joe goes on a rampage of the nightclub after he gets drunk on some alcohol. Instead of ending with Joe rampaging through the city streets he redeems himself when he rescues some orphans from a burning orphanage.

While R.K.O. had turned monster movies from giant frightening behemoths to slightly large friendly apes, other studios began taking interest in the idea of giant rampaging monsters destroying a city. In the 1950's Hollywood discovered radiation. Hundreds of cheap science fiction movies were made where radiation caused animals to grow huge. The one reason why so few giant monster movies had been made since King Kong was that the special effects used was stop motion animation which in turn was very expensive. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was one of the exceptions, a movie where a nuclear test frees a dinosaur from the ice it had been frozen in millions of years earlier allowing it to attack Manhattan ans Coney Island. Other producers found cheaper ways to recreate giant monsters, such as recreating the leg or arm of the monsters on the end of a giant crane, and optical tricks where a real live animal were super imposed onto scenes of people running. This form of special effects made it impossible to show a monster actually destroying buildings, so you usually saw the aftermath after the monster left the area. Other times small models of buildings were made in hopes that the animals used in the movie would destroy them instead of walking around them. More effective was The Amazing Colossal Man ( 1957 ) and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman ( 1958 ) where actual humans destroyed models of buildings on a set.

Japanese studios realized well before Hollywood studios that the best way of recreating giant monsters was having actors destroy models of buildings. The trick was to build a rubber costume that would allow the actor enough movement. The Japanese feared the repercussions of nuclear weapons and radiation more than Americans, both because of having two nuclear weapons dropped on them at the end of WWII, and because the United States was at the time testing nuclear weapons in he Pacific very close to Japan. In March of 1951 a secret bomb test resulted in a blast much more powerful than the Army had anticipated. The fallout sickened natives living on nearby islands as well as the crew of a Japanese fishing boat. The incident inspired producer Tomoyuki Tanaka to write an anti-nuclear movie called Gojira about a giant prehistoric dinosaur who is brought back to life from fallout from a nuclear test. The creature then storms Tokyo causing massive destruction which was inspired by the actual destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Gojira was a huge hit for Toho studios and equally successful when released in America as Godzilla. Toho began repeating the formula with other giant monster movies, some of which featured Godzilla both as a villain and hero. T

he third Godzilla movie was King Kong v.s. Godzilla as Toho temporarily held the rights to use the R.K.O. character. Toho sought to have American writers contributing to the script to honor America's greatest monster battling Japan's greatest monster. One of them was George Worthington Yates who had written The Amazing Colossal Man and Them! and Willis O'Brian who was the man who began the first giant monster movie four decades earlier with The Lost World. In the movie Kong is somehow still alive and living on an island similar to Skull and with it's own giant monsters. A television producer captured Kong to bring back to Japan for his show. Once in Japan Kong predictably escapes, right at the same time Godzilla has shown up for his annual thrashing of Tokyo. The two monsters take an instant disliking to each other and have a fight to the death which ends with both of them falling off a cliff into the ocean and only Kong emerging to swim home to his island. The film was a success and Toho planned a sequel to be called Continuation: King Kong v.s. Godzilla and had also hoped to build a franchise of King Kong movies. But R.K.O. refused to lend them the character again. The rights fell into the hands of Rankin/Bass who planned to do a stop-motion animated sequel to the original King Kong movies. The studio had already featured a Kong inspired creature called The Bumble in Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer and a direct Kong rip-off called "It" in the movie Mad Monster Party. R.K.O. threatened legal action for copyright infringement which was eventually settled with Rankin/Bass paying for the rights to the character. A King Kong movie would have offset this sudden expense, and Rankin/Bass was fully capable of recreating the same special effects from the original King Kong movie. But instead of producing a stop motion animated version of King Kong Rankin/Bass decided to co-produce the movie with Toho studios who in turn decided to reuse their King Kong costume. The movie King Kong Escapes would be the last time Toho would get to produce a King Kong movie. They would have to settle for their own monster Godzilla.

While Toho produced several Godzilla movies and rival Japanese studio Daiei produced the Gamera series, no new King Kong movies were made. Sure there had been some giant ape movies, and an Italian horror movie with radio controlled apes called Kong Island for it's American release, but Kong would remain unused until the rights fell into the hands of Dino De Laurentiis and his 1976 remake of the original movie, this time with Kong making his last stand on the top of the World Trade Center. A sequel King Kong Lives was planned but held up for another decade before finally being produced. After R.K.O. studios shut down the rights to King Kong had passed to Universal Studios where for the next two decades no move was made until Peter Jackson's 2005 remake. By this time Steven Spielberg had advanced the special effects in giant monster movies with the use of computer generated graphics in his Jurassic Park trilogy. Tri-Star pictures had adapted this technology when they got the rights to make a Hollywood produced version of Godzilla in 1998, as did Walt Disney Pictures for their Mighty Joe Young remake the same year. As of right now making giant monster movies is very expensive and the effects take years to plan which prohibits being able to release a new one on a yearly basis as was done in the past. This does exclude Japan which continued using actors in rubber suits up until very recently. However, there is still interest by studios to produce movies with destructive giants, as the Transformer movies prove to still be successful. Currently Legendary Pictures is in negotiations for a possible American reboot of the Godzilla series, while other studios are looking at the possibility of remaking other classic giant monster movies. And there is still talk of a sequel to Cloverfield that explains where it's monster came from.