Fangs a million Chris, it’s a monster of a book!
Since the early 1900s, movie monsters have been eating us, drinking our blood, possessing us, enslaving us, and doing all sorts of other unspeakable things to us poor humans, yet we keep coming back for more.
Popcorn in hand – often untouched – we sit there and squirm in our seats as our on-screen heroes endure indescribable pain and terror for the sake of entertainment, adrenaline and our sweet little fix of that ‘glad it’s not me’ feeling.
Cork-based writer and film fanatic Christopher Carton’s latest release, ‘The Ultimate Book of Movie Monsters’, dares readers to plunge headfirst into a century’s worth of guts, gore and even some giggles as he navigates some of the darkest and strangest depths of cinematic history.
So, what is it that draws us time and time again into these voluntary worlds of terror?
Chris believes it has a lot to do with the vicarious nature of it all – to get close, but not too close, to the truly unthinkable.
“I’d say it's the unknown, something that we hopefully will never see or experience in real life, so it's nice to toy with it in entertainment,” explains Chris.
“I love that feeling of being overwhelmed, that's why I love ‘Godzilla’ and ‘Cloverfield’, these giant things that, if they were real, we'd be doomed.
“It's like a rollercoaster, you can watch it from the safety of your house or in the cinema and then when you come home, you're like, phew, that's not real,” he adds.
For Chris’ previous book, ‘A Guide to Video Game Movies’, a lot of the knowledge and opinions needed were already lodged firmly in his brain before he put pen to paper. This time around, with the sheer scope of the subject matter, Chris says he had to do a lot of narrowing down in order to produce a balanced and varied end product.
“I've always been a big fan of movies, and horror movies, probably from too young an age I'd say. It was really hard to bring it in and focus, so I had to try to go for the biggest genres I could think of and then try to vary it as I went along, and bring in some of the more obscure, you know, B-movie kinds of things that you might not know about.
“I didn't want to make it completely horror-focused because monsters are in so many different kinds of film, so I tried to bring in things like anime movies and the fantasy movies I would have watched when I was a kid like ‘Willow’ and all that kind of stuff,” he explains.
Chris, who places ‘Alien’ and ‘The Evil Dead’ at the top of his favourite monster movie list, says a truly great monster absolutely must be scary even when it’s not on screen.
“I think it has to scare you when it's not there as much as it does when it is there,” he says.
“Like, if you heard on the radio right now that there was a zombie apocalypse, that would be as scary as seeing one probably. If a monster isn't scary when it's not there, it's not going to be any good when it finally shows up.”
As one might imagine, researching a project like this is sure to dig up some long-buried skeletons, not just in cinema, but in history and folklore too. Chris’ research certainly took him to some strange places, places he can never unsee.
“The biggest alleyway I went down was, you know when you think of vampires or zombies, you go straight to Dracula and you go straight to ‘Night of the Living Dead’, but they weren't the start of it at all. It goes back years and years, into the 1800s.
“With zombies, it would have been all from voodoo origins, like spells, and the zombies would have been literally these vacant people who would do whatever they were told, and then we see it evolved into the brain eating generic ones that we know now.
“The weirdest thing I found was this one bizarre B-movie that I hadn't seen called 'Evil Bong', which is exactly what it sounds like. I hadn't seen it but I was aware of it and I wanted to get some hokey kinds of stuff in there too to keep it fresh.
“I didn't want it to be all doom and gloom, I wanted there to be a certain amount of laughs in there too.”
‘The Ultimate Book of Movie Monsters’ features fact files and over 150 full-colour pictures of some of the most iconic, grotesque and bizarre creatures to ever grace the silver screen.
Chris’ brand new publication has been published by Pen & Sword Books Ltd and can be ordered from pen-and-sword.co.uk, Amazon, Book Depository, and any good online book retailers.
Asked if he could make his own monster movie set in Cork, what kind of creature we might see prowling Pana, Chris says: “For me, it would be a zombie version of the cat with a Cork accent that took YouTube by storm. Type ‘Cork Cat’ into YouTube and thank me later!”
Cork writer Chris Carton's brand new book is out now.