Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (31 page)

Robert Wise’s 1951 film
The Day the Earth Stood Still
initially runs along a vein similar to
War of the Worlds
. In the film, aliens that are far more technologically advanced than humans arrive on Earth and present a threat by their raw power—the lead alien’s assistant is a robot capable of shooting out powerful lasers from its eyes. However, while the aliens in
War of the Worlds
immediately attack, Klaatu, the alien in Wise’s film, tries to speak with the leaders of Earth to warn them that their violent ways are a problem.

Intelligent alien species living “nearby” in space are concerned about the human invention of nuclear weapons and human tendencies to declare war on one another. Klaatu explains humans must change their behavior or risk being destroyed. While Klaatu is not soft and cuddly, his overall appearance and relationship with humans are very different from aliens that engage in invasion, predation, and parasitization. And he is hardly alone.

In Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
aliens collect people, presumably for study. They are initially presented as frightening even though they are never actually seen, due to the brightness of the lights on their ships. Really, the fear invoked during the first three-quarters of the film is based on not much being known about these creatures. However, this fear vanishes once it becomes clear the aliens simply wish for peaceful contact and look like pudgy cherubs. In a sense, the film plays with the very essence of what it is to be an alien monster by pointing out that it is human perception of the unknown that brings on fear rather than any sort of violence spread by alien beings.

In J. J. Abrams’s 2011 film
Super 8,
an alien goes on a rampage, abducting and killing humans in a small town. For most of the story, the alien seems like a classic evil monster. When it is ultimately seen toward the end, it is huge, insectlike, and clawed, much like Ridley Scott’s beast. It attacks and kills many people, but as the unarmed child protagonists engage with the creature, they learn that it is humans who have done wrong. After landing on Earth long ago, the alien was captured by the U.S. military so it could study the technology of the alien’s spacecraft. The children learn that the creature is lashing out only because it is hungry, scared, and longing to go home. Of course, when it comes to aliens feeling trapped on Earth and wishing to go home, there is one film that set the standard for all others.

In 1982, Steven Spielberg gave us an alien that was as different from Scott’s parasite as possible. Small, innocent, and lovable, E.T. just wants to get back to his own world. But as different as
E.T.
is from so many other alien tales, there is one element that arises in all of these stories with remarkable consistency.

In
E.T.,
the antagonists are adult humans who want to capture E.T. for study. They are portrayed as uncaring about the actual welfare of the likable little alien, creating a striking difference from the children of the film, who view E.T. with a sense of wonder and love. This element is also present in
Super 8,
where the adults seem to have little interest in the plight of the alien and only the children are capable of seeing the harm being inflicted by humanity. Neil Blomkamp’s 2009 film
District 9
presents the same sort of story, with humans horribly treating helpless aliens who have come to Earth as refugees. In one particularly heartless scene, the protagonist laughs at the popping sounds made as alien embryos are set on fire; it is cringeworthy stuff. And unlike Abrams and Spielberg, Blomkamp inserts no innocent children into his tale to give audiences any sense of hope for the future.

Remarkably, this story element is found in both
Alien
and
Aliens.
Make no mistake, the creatures in these films are definitely monsters that have no redeeming features whatsoever, but villainous humans play a role in both. In
Alien,
the villain comes in the form of a faceless corporation eager to capture an alien, regardless of the cost to human life, so the creature can be harnessed and used in military science. In
Aliens,
the villain is a slimy corporate executive keen to smuggle aliens back inside the bodies of infected humans so he can sell the alien embryos on the black market.

In essence, the villainous trait that adults carry in recent alien films is a willingness to be cool and unsympathetic toward life. “Cool” and “unsympathetic” . . . the words used by Wells to describe his aliens back in 1898. Have we somehow become the monsters?

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 A theory affectionately known as slushball Earth.

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 Intriguing new research by the parasitologists at Penn State is showing that malaria parasites can tinker with the minds of mosquitoes, making them more thirsty for human blood than the blood of other animals. This, of course, suits the human malaria parasite just fine since it cannot reproduce inside the bodies of other species.

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 Technically,
Aliens
raises a challenging evolutionary question that borders on being a story flaw. It is not in the best interest of any parasite to kill its host outright since it needs the host as a living environment for its young to develop. This is presumably why the aliens capture the little girl, Newt, toward the end of the film and stick her in a cocoon rather than just killing her. Yet lots of marines are violently ripped to pieces by the aliens instead of being captured. Since every dead human results in one fewer alien ultimately being born, such behavior presents an evolutionary quandary. It makes no sense for the aliens to be such capable human-killing machines. Instead, they should be masterful human kidnappers that are adept at feeding on some other species when they reach adulthood. Given the success of the film, it seems likely that nobody cared, but I noticed.

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 Getting permits to infect humans with toxoplasmosis and then feed them to lions in a lab setting is, understandably, an ethically tricky matter.

Conclusion

Cool and unsympathetic human behavior is not unique to alien films. While giant animals, like the Nemean lion and Calydonian boar, were celestially created to plague humanity, Kong, in every version of
King Kong,
is always brought to civilized lands by people who just don’t care about the needs of the giant ape. Similarly, Chimera was a divinely spawned horror, but the chimeric Dren from
Splice,
Caesar from
Rise of the Planet of the Apes,
and Frankenstein’s monster turn toward violence largely because the human world abuses them. Like Kong, they are viewed as specimens rather than as individuals, and this creates the conflict.

This is not to say that these mistreated monsters are not still monsters. They are aberrations and they do harm humans, so they are, by definition, monsters, but their motivations make them more complex and hint at a trend.

The ancient monsters were created by gods. True, they were sometimes sent to punish humans for misbehavior, as was the case with the Minotaur and Calydonian boar, but this was still often the result of the gods being greedy for attention, uncompromising, and harsh. During the Middle Ages, monsters remained largely disconnected from humanity. Creatures like the Rukh and dragons plagued the world, but this was not because humanity had brought them about; they were simply there. However, there is a subtle difference between these monsters and those of the ancient period. Even
though people might not have brought about creatures like the Rukh or dragons, humans definitely elicited the Rukh’s anger by trying to steal its egg, and dragons were always presented as attacking because people were trying to steal their treasure or attempting to enter their living spaces. Thus, humans took a more active role in interacting with monsters by overstepping boundaries.

In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the relationship between humans and monsters changed yet again. With the rise of demons that could possess vulnerable sleeping minds and vampires that could infect with a bite, humans started to become monsters. Yes, the humans who were corrupted by demons, vampires, and werewolves did not enter their state of corruption willingly, but this was still a major change from the way humans and monsters had been interacting earlier.

During the industrial and modern period, humans consistently have been side by side with monsters. While Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, the vicious
Velociraptors
in
Jurassic Park,
the virus in
Contagion,
and the shark in
Jaws
are all terrifying in their own right, human behavior in these cases is largely responsible for these creatures getting utterly out of control and killing many more people than they otherwise would. Humans are not actually monsters in these stories because they do not fit the definition, but in recent years this has started to change.

In 2009, James Cameron’s
Avatar
drew audiences of epic proportions. Set many years in the future, the story focuses on a mining operation taking place on the distant moon Pandora. The humans running the show are all corporate types, eager to get at Pandora’s vast mineral wealth. Working with them are two other groups, ex-marines keen to earn more cash than they could fighting wars on Earth and scientists who are supposed to be studying the biology of Pandora as well as easing tense relations with the humanoid alien population. These aliens, the Na’vi, are blue giants with yellow eyes,
leopard-like stripes, fangs, and tails—aberrations in every sense of the word. Unfortunately for the managers of the mining operations, the Na’vi have their home right on top of a very dense cluster of mineral wealth. They are reluctant to slaughter the aliens because “killing the indigenous looks bad.” Thus, the scientists are ordered to intervene. Using technology to connect their minds to the bodies of avatars grown from a mixture of Na’vi and human DNA, the scientists are sent to interact with the natives and convince them to move.

The lead character in the story comes in the unlikely form of Jake Sully, a paraplegic marine who, through unusual circumstances, gets assigned to the avatar team being managed by the scientists. His initial experience on Pandora is dreadful. After being briefed by the military commander working for the corporation that “out there beyond that fence every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes,” he is viciously attacked by nocturnal six-legged wolves,
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nearly trampled by a hammer-headed rhinoceros-like creature, and almost eaten by a sleek black lionlike beast.

The night scene where he is attacked by the viper-wolves is utterly typical of monster movies. The camera initially reveals only the predators’ glowing eyes fleetingly as they close in for the kill. Then, as they approach, the camera moves as if mounted on their backs. The protagonist’s early interactions with the Na’vi are similar. They hiss, show their fangs, and appear truly alien.

Yet the world of Pandora is flipped upside down for both Jake and the audience as the story progresses. It becomes apparent that the land and the animals are deeply interconnected, and the aggression he met early on was all a matter of misunderstanding the ecology of the planet. This is most strikingly presented when Jake, while being shown the wonders of the forest by the Na’vi, finds the viper-wolves nursing their young and playing in their den.

But perceptions of the animals are not the only ones that change.
By constantly watching Jake take action in a Na’vi body, we, as an audience, have our perceptions of who and what the heroes of the story are reversed. Halfway through the film, we begin seeing the Na’vi as normal and the humans as outsiders; even Jake pauses at one point to consider this, commenting, “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” This is all helped along by subtle shifts in language as the characters begin describing the humans as “aliens.” But all subtlety comes to an end as the tale concludes.

Frustrated by the constant problems presented by the Na’vi and tired of waiting for them to be coaxed out of the way, the corporation wages war. Humans, now frequently encased inside robotic walker units that make them look distinctly nonhuman, attack. Hundreds of Na’vi are mercilessly killed by missiles and machine guns. Finally, revealed to be somewhat sentient, the moon Pandora herself sends bestial hordes into battle. The viper-wolves, the hammer-headed rhinoceros creatures, the lionlike beasts, and the dragons of the sky come pouring out of the wild to kill the humans. It is utterly impossible to not favor these “once monsters” as they trample and rip people apart. By the close of the film, roles are entirely reversed. The aliens are now honorable humans, the monsters are now animals in need of protection, and the humans are now violent technologically equipped horrors much like the Terminators of Cameron’s earlier films.

While many other movies and books have presented tales of tribes that are initially viewed as threatening and later found to be heroic (
Dances with Wolves
and
The Last Samurai
are good examples), what Cameron manages with
Avatar
is something of a first—he creates this same reversal with creatures that are utterly inhuman at the start.

Part of the film’s success in so completely reversing the roles comes from the performance capture technology that enabled actors to perform with remarkable believability as aliens. All actors who played Na’vi or avatar characters were outfitted with suits that tracked their movements and wore cameras that mapped their facial
expressions onto the faces of the fictional characters they were playing. It was this technology—which was, incidentally, first developed for the both loved and hated creature Gollum in Peter Jackson’s
Lord of the Rings
films—that made it possible for the humanity of the actors to ultimately shine through the bodies of the aberrations they were playing and allow viewers to think of them as human.