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What are the ingredients of a great movie monster? —Xavier
A goalie mask and a really big knife, of course. I'm kidding. The truth is that those live-action figures of jack-in-the-box horror — Jason,
Freddy, Michael Myers, and the Scream phantom — have redefined movie
monsterdom, even though I'd call them mythical slasher icons who are not
quite great monsters. What do they lack? In a word, mystery. To me, a
great movie monster needs a quality of imaginative weirdness above and
beyond its ability to shred you. Freddy, with his redneck rasp, comes
closest, but I'm partial to the poignance of Frankenstein's
patchwork-corpse man, the original King Kong, Dracula, and Norman
Bates — and also, in recent times, to the creature from the original
Alien. That one too is a jumpy slasher, but what takes it into the
pantheon is its fearsome flesh-as-machine design. It's the Darwinian
survival beast as nightmare.
(Got a movie-related question for Lisa or Owen? Post it here.)
