The Atomic Age and the Birth of the Creature Feature

Universal’s monsters were foreigners. Dracula came from Transylvania with a title and an accent, the Mummy came out of a dig in Egypt, Frankenstein’s creature was assembled in a European castle by a European doctor, and the Wolf Man caught his condition abroad. The 1930s American horror film located the threat somewhere else and had it arrive, and the whole franchise ran on that geography for twenty years.

Then, in the space of about eighteen months in the early 1950s, the monster changed passports. It came out of a test range in New Mexico, or a Pacific atoll, or an American laboratory, and it was made by the same people who were now expected to kill it. That reversal is the birth of the creature feature as a distinct thing, and it is a far more radical shift than the rubber suits make it look.

The films that turned it over

The timing is not mysterious. The Soviet Union tested its first atomic device in August 1949, which ended the American monopoly and converted the bomb from a national achievement into a mutual threat. The first thermonuclear test followed in 1952, Castle Bravo on 1 March 1954 went several times beyond its predicted yield and contaminated a far wider area than anyone had planned for, and the civil-defence apparatus — the drills, the films, the sirens — put the subject into every American schoolroom. A genre that runs on a mass audience’s shared dread had the dread handed to it, pre-installed, with a vocabulary already in circulation: fallout, mutation, roentgen, the test range.

The dates cluster tightly enough to be worth listing precisely.

Eugène Lourié’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) took a loose premise from a Ray Bradbury story and had an Arctic nuclear test thaw a dinosaur that walks into Manhattan. Ray Harryhausen animated the creature, and the film’s success is the proximate cause of everything that follows.

Gordon Douglas’s Them! (1954) is the one that got the machinery right. Warner Bros. put real money behind it, shot it partly in the desert near the White Sands testing grounds, opened it with a mute child wandering a wrecked road and withheld the ants for a genuinely long stretch. It earned an Academy Award nomination for special effects and did strong business, and it is still the best-constructed film of the cycle, because it takes its own procedural seriously — the investigation is honestly conducted before the giant insects arrive.

Ishirō Honda’s Gojira opened in Japan on 3 November 1954, less than eight months after the Daigo Fukuryū Maru — the Lucky Dragon No. 5 — sailed through fallout from the Castle Bravo test at Bikini and its crew came home irradiated. The film opens with a fishing boat destroyed at sea. Eiji Tsuburaya’s effects unit went to suitmation partly because stop-motion on a Toho schedule was impossible, and the constraint produced a monster with mass and slowness that Harryhausen’s articulate creatures never had. The rubber-suit sublime is a real aesthetic and it starts here.

Jack Arnold is the other essential name, and the most underrated director of the period. It Came from Outer Space (1953) in 3D from a Bradbury treatment, Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Tarantula (1955), and then The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) from Richard Matheson’s own adaptation — a man diminished by a radioactive cloud and an insecticide, ending in a passage of cosmic acceptance that no other film in the cycle attempted. Arnold’s sympathetic alien picture is the counter-programme to the whole invasion mood, and he made it before the mood had properly set.

By 1957 the cycle had reached the assembly line. Bert I. Gordon’s The Amazing Colossal Man and Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters arrived through AIP, and the radiation was doing purely mechanical work — a line of dialogue that licenced a poster.

What the bomb actually did to the plot

Here is the structural argument, and it is where the cycle earns its place.

Making the monster domestic breaks the Gothic contract. In the Universal model, the community is innocent and the horror is imported; the film’s job is expulsion, and the villagers can burn the mill with a clear conscience. Once the creature is the product of an American test, the community is implicated, and every subsequent scene inherits the complication. Them! has to reckon with the fact that the ants exist because of something the United States did on purpose in 1945, and the film says so plainly in its closing lines about a door opened into a new world.

The second structural change is the arrival of the scientist as the film’s authority. The 1930s scientist was the problem — Frankenstein, Moreau, Rukh — and horror punished him. The atomic-age scientist is the hero, or at least the only person who understands what is happening, and the plot reorganises itself around his explanation. This produces the cycle’s signature and most-mocked scene: the briefing. A blackboard, a slide, a room of officials, and a man explaining the monster’s biology. It looks like padding. It is doing something else. The briefing converts an unbelievable creature into a solvable problem, which is what lets the last reel be an operation rather than a rout, and it flatters an audience that has just been told science created the mess by insisting science will also clear it up.

Third: the military ending. Universal’s monsters died by mob, fire and folklore. The atomic monster dies by ordnance, deployed by a chain of command, and the film’s climax becomes logistics — the drains under Los Angeles, the flamethrowers, the operation. The genre acquired a taste for procedure that it has never lost, and it runs straight through to The Andromeda Strain and every containment film since.

The mechanic: why withholding the ants matters

The craft lesson of the cycle is a negative one, learned from its own failures.

The films that survive are the films that keep the creature off screen for as long as the budget allows, and they survive for reasons that are technical rather than tasteful. A 1950s giant-monster effect — an optically composited real insect, a puppet, a man in a suit against a rear projection — has a fixed credibility budget. Every second on screen spends it. Show the tarantula for ninety seconds and the audience is thrilled; show it for six minutes and the audience is studying the matte line. Them! understands this exactly: the first act delivers a destroyed shop, a strange track in the sand, a survivor who cannot speak, and a sound — that pulsing chirp, which does more work than any of the puppets. By the time you see an ant you have built one already.

The films that do not survive spend the budget in reel one and then have nothing to withhold. This is the whole content of the restraint principle, and it is why the same rule holds in 1954, in 1975 when Spielberg’s shark refused to work, and today, when the credibility budget is nominally infinite and the discipline has largely collapsed. What CGI did to creature design is mostly the story of a constraint being lifted from directors who needed it.

There is a second mechanic in the sound. Them! built its ant call, Gojira built its roar by dragging a resined glove down a double bass and slowing the tape. Both are unplaceable — they resemble nothing an audience can file. An unplaceable sound cannot be dismissed the way an unconvincing image can, so the sound carries the monster’s reality while the picture is still catching up.

Where the cycle actually pointed

The invasion films sit alongside and slightly askew. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is a sermon against the bomb delivered by a visitor with better manners than his hosts; The War of the Worlds (1953) is a Technicolor apocalypse that ends with an atomic strike failing; Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) drops the creature entirely and keeps only the dread. Britain took the same anxiety and made it clammier — The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) put a returning astronaut’s body in revolt, and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) staged the end of the world in a newspaper office. Japan carried on furthest and strangest, right through to Honda’s own Matango in 1963.

The case against

Most of this cycle is very bad, and I would rather say so than pretend a shelf is uniformly good because I like the shelf.

The science is drivel. The gender politics are frequently unwatchable, with a whole run of films in which the woman entomologist exists to be told things and to be carried. The middle acts are men in rooms. The radiation is usually a permission slip rather than a subject — by 1957 the men making The Amazing Colossal Man were thinking about a poster with a huge bald man on it. And the sincere anti-nuclear reading that critics have retro-fitted onto the whole decade collapses on contact with most of the actual titles, which are matinee product assembled to a formula.

The defence is narrow and I think it holds. Three or four films in the cycle — Them!, Gojira, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers — took the licence the era handed them and made something durable out of it, and they could only have been made in that window, by people who had read the same newspapers as their audience. The rest is the tax you pay for a cycle. Genres are produced by volume, and the volume is mostly rubbish; the alternative is no cycle at all, and therefore none of the four.

Watch Them! and Gojira in the same week, the second in its Japanese cut with the Steve Martin insert footage nowhere near it. One film ends with a warning delivered by a scientist and the other ends with a mourning that never resolves. Between them sits everything the creature feature has done since.