The BEST Monster Movies Ever Made

all right i want to keep talking about scary stuff for halloween last time we did horror and this time i want to talk about a different genre which is monster movies and monster movies i have to say are particularly dear to my heart because when i was a kid i just love them and especially the universal picture monsters and you know most of you don't remember but back in the day back in the 60s this was a fad that happened there were these models these plastic models put up by the aurora company uh you could build them and uh take them home here they are i love these things when the frankenstein one came out i was eight years old and i saw that in a store and i was like oh my you know you know that toy that comes into your life these things were so big that mad magazine if you remember mad magazine actually there's a spoof on them in which frankenstein was building an alfred newman uh model but so i i had them all and if you ever read salem's lot by stephen king he has a little boy in in the story the leader of the story has these monster models and i remember reading uh stephen king salman thinking that was me that was me i still to this day in my office have little miniature versions of them that i might keep up just to remember monster you can't make any sweeping statements about monster movies monster movies about this or that because of course they're just about different things that frighten us uh you know when science became an issue the mad scientists became staples of of monster movies that would create monsters like frankenstein frankenstein is a story about uh in my book that comes out in april the truth and beauty i write about mary shelley's frankenstein being a statement about the threat that science poses to femininity to motherhood because it's basically about a man who creates a a life without a mom without having a woman involved and the disaster uh that arises from that and that story that idea of gender of science threatening gender continues throughout uh monster movies alien a great monster movie the original alien is a wonderful monster movie and that's a story of a kind of in a kind of mechanistic future where these beasts are unleashed and they kind of look metallic and they blend in with the metal of the spaceship and they implant life in to men so that men take the female part and are blown to bits producing this horrible mutation of life and a woman has to become the male hero in it the ridley character is kind of this manish woman who takes on the monster obviously godzilla the threat of war was um from the threat of nuclear weapons right nuclear weapons were going to create these monsters the best recent monster movie uh by far i think by a long shot has been a quiet place and a quiet place is uh i believe is actually and even i think this is true even if the the creators john krasinski even if he doesn't know that this was about i think it's about the internet it's about a family uh being torn apart by these monsters who hear every noise they make so that they have to walk around on tiptoe they can't say anything they can't do anything in all the little functions of a family from childbirth the big function of a family to saying grace to teaching for the mother teaching the children all of it has to be done in silence where these things will come and take them apart but the thing i loved about the universal pictures monsters and these aurora monster models with the exception of godzilla is that almost all of them were the size of human beings dracula the mummy frankenstein it's a big human being but still it was the size of a human being they weren't giants they weren't these massive things they weren't uh animal-like monsters like the monster and alien or the monsters in a quiet place there were people but with a problem with some kind of horrific part and that's kind of suggested uh the monster is us we have met the monster and he's us and each one of them really said something about the human condition dracula for instance is obviously has always been a very sexual uh character bomb stoker i believe and i strongly believe was a closet homosexual and he really felt that women and women's sexuality was threatening and he wrote about the sexualities threatening and obviously dracula counteracula is a seducer who takes control of women and seduces women and turns them into voracious sexually hungry uh people who feed on children they actually actually feed on children in them one of the women who becomes a vampire in the novel dracula uh has to be killed by driving a stake through her heart and it's a very very sexualized scene i'll read you just a little bit of it it's a scene of a of a rape basically uh arthur who loves lucy and now she's a vampire he placed the point of the stake over her heart and as i looked i could see its dent in the white flesh then he struck with all his might drives the stake into her and he says the thing in the coffin wry then a hideous blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips the body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut and the mouth was smeared and then the writhing and quivering of the body became less and the teeth seemed to champ and the face to quiver finally so it's an orgasm it's a description of an orgasm so it's a very sexualized story and dracula lost the power to terrify when we lost our sense of sex as being a spiritual enterprise the thing about dracula is he has law he lives forever but he's lost his soul and now he feeds on human blood right but once you take away the concept of the soul dracula just becomes this kind of sexy dude and that really happened in the 70s i think with the play dracula with frank langella i saw it when it came out it was a brilliant play and langella was fantastic in it but he suddenly became the seducer who was kind of really sexy we were almost rooting for him and now you have things like twilight where the vampire is really just very very sexy and not really harmful at all and that's why for me the ultimate monster remains the werewolf because he is the monster within he is the self as a monster and wolf men's stories go back at least as far as ancient rome there have been shapesh shifting and werewolf stories forever really into the primitive ages uh even in the story of um in the bible story where the uh nebuchadnezzar goes mad and becomes a kind of animal eating or feeding on grass um you know there's that but in the middle ages there were real wolfman stories where people were put on trial uh for being werewolves and and put to death some of them when they were convicted um it's a because of of course that idea of the beast within fits very well with christian theology the universal picture wolfman was one of their best films and it's a really complicated film uh it stars lon chaney jr who was the son of the great lon chaney who played the phantom of the opera and that famous silent movie i'm sure you've seen the picture of his mask being torn off he was known as the man of a thousand faces lon chaney jr was not a very good actor he's kind of a clunky uh guy but the whole thing about it this story was i mean for kids watching this movie like i was a kid who had seen frankenstein the monster in dracula the mostly scary guy suddenly you were dealing with a guy who didn't want to be a monster he didn't want to be killing people but he kept waking up with blood on his hands and that's a nightmarish situation here's the scene from the universal picture and i just remember this so well because i just loved it uh where he goes to his girlfriend and he wants to run away because they're chasing him because they believe he is the wolf and he sees whenever he knows he sees his next victim he will see a pentagram on his or her hand and he goes to the woman he loves to tell her he's running away here's that scene let me go with you i'll fetch a few things and be back in a minute no no i'm going alone but i can help you you wouldn't want to run away with a murderer would you oh larry you're not you know you're not i killed baylor i killed richardson if i stay around here much longer you can't tell who's gonna be next wait it might even please i've still got the charm you gave me remember yeah oh yeah i know but i'm afraid [Music] harry what is it your hand can't see anything mr torment forever i'm going with larry no it's not you that's good good dramatic stuff he goes in to run away with his girlfriend he hates the fact he's a murderer he looks at her hand there's the pentagram and he's he realizes that she's next he's going to kill the woman he loves so he's barred from love by the fact that he's cursed personally i think the best werewolf movie ever made is an american werewolf in london in 1981 it's kind of a comedy but it's really really scary and it starred this guy david naughton uh and he became famous doing these incredibly cute cutesy dr pepper ads do we have this dr pepper just a little bit here's the entire ad here's david naughton this is what made him famous doing these ads i drink dr pepper and i'm proud i'm part of an original crowd and if you look around these days there seems to be a dr pepper craze i'm a pepper he's a pepper she's a puffer we're about for wouldn't you like to be a pepper too so a brilliant idea the director john landis to cast this harmless looking kid in a werewolf movie and he makes him a nice jewish boy from great neck which is where i grew up which is why i thought was hilarious when i saw the movie uh and he um griffin dunn who had a long career as an actor this actually kind of ruined david naughton's career not had a career but he was he was big for that moment he was a real it was a real phenomenon those dr pepper commercials and this movie was a hit but he appears nude in the movie and so they cancelled this dr pepper contract uh and that really kind of sent his career into a spiral i don't think he ever made anything uh with the impact of this film but it was brilliant these two jewish kids in england they're taking a hike on the rainy moors uh they walk into a pub and suddenly the pub goes silent and the you know everybody starts to have obviously has this terrible secret that they're keeping and finally the two kids go off into the rain and this is the scene this is really very close to the opening uh as they're traveling through the moors hey wait a minute we're lost oh david what is that i don't know come on come on where anywhere i think we should just keep moving it's moving it's circling us what's the plan plan let's just keep walking that's right a lovely stroll on the moors travel along a lot isn't this fun [Music] it's in front of us what makes it work what makes the whole picture work is the the niceness of the ordinary american kind of goofy niceness of the kids uh the fact that they're nice jewish boys out in the moors but what's really fascinating about it is it doesn't focus on the aftermath of the transformation into a werewolf it focuses really on the transformation itself and it's genuinely a frightening movie i mean frightening in a very good way a very spooky way um it's it's funny but it is also really frightening and it focuses on this transformation and of course part of the transformation is exciting and good he's becoming animalistic he's being freed from this good good nice jewish boy role and he's suddenly becoming a monster which is what every nice little boy kind of dreams of being right he's becoming this sexualized monster and what's wonderful about it is it doesn't have the problem that dracula has once you just sexualize him and take away the fact that he is soulless right you've completely lost the point of the horror right but if you do that with a vamp with a werewolf it becomes even more horrible that it is delightful it is delightful to change and to become powerful this was picked up on a picture that is essentially a werewolf picture even though it's not about a world a wolf which is a remake of an old movie a 1958 film called the fly and this was with uh jeff goldblum and gina davis uh he gets in he's trying to transpose one person from one chamber to another trying to teleport basically but a fly gets into the other teleport chamber and mixes its dna with him and he begins to change and one of the ways he begins to change is he becomes strong he becomes more perceptive he becomes you know his mind starts to perceive things that it's never perceived before and he starts to realize that there is this kind of the flesh is is powerful and gina davis his girlfriend says you know something is going wrong with you and he doesn't want to hear it something went wrong says when you went through something went wrong [Music] no not you you're too chicken to be a member of the dynamic duo club okay then great i'll find somebody else somebody who can keep up with me seth you have to listen to me you're afraid to dive into the plasma pool aren't you you're afraid to be destroyed and recreated aren't you how about you think that you woke me up about the flesh don't you but you only know society's straight line about the flesh you can't penetrate beyond society's sick grave fear of the flesh drink deep or taste not the plasma spring see what i'm saying i'm not just talking about sex and penetration i'm talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh a deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool and what's wonderful about this it's david cronenberg so it's filled with disgusting images which i i'm not a big fan of it you know he's very he loves to be graphic disgusting images but what's wonderful about it is it shows you this sort of nichian superman as a fly and that's that's a wonderful idea and that's why the horror remains with the werewolf if you do it right the horror remains because it feels like power but it's actually destruction and he shows and he really shows you how this sense of genius the sense that you see something more than anybody else can lead to becoming essentially a human insect an amoral insect i have i i cannot keep from saying that my own book my the one book where i have to say ben shapiro is right i gave it the worst title on earth it's called werewolf cop is a it's one of my favorite books that i've written uh and it is a book that looks at this from a purely not a purely but a an essentially uh spiritual christian spiritual uh point of view of what it means to have this beast inside you and what what your responsibility is and what the path to evil is and what the path back from evil is uh it has a scene in it that is the one scene that every single person mentions when they read the book which is a scene between the guy who is the werewolf cop a guy named zach adams and his wife uh which is perhaps the only scene in modern american literature where a an evangelical christian housewife is the hero of the scene that's the only scene and it's really a scene about uh the beast within and about grace and grace of course is the opposite of the monster movie grace is the thing that says to the beast within uh you can be free you can be freed of this monster you can be set into a new level of forgiveness and a new level of love which is the opposite of the werewolf uh love monster movies still loved them thought a quiet place was as good as it was possible to be and next we'll talk about my favorite spooky genre which is the ghost story if you like this great content you should subscribe if you don't like this great content what's wrong [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Klavan

Views: 29,812

Keywords: Halloween, Monster, Movie, Film, Scary, Horror, Universal, Monsters, Frankenstein, Wolfman, Dracula, Alien, Godzilla, A Quiet Place, Twilight, Werewolf, An American Werewolf In London, The Fly

Id: h3Emgi8-U64

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021