The Booklet of Real-To-Some Creatures

The bestiary is one of those old literary genres I wish would come back. It was a genre of old, medieval eras, where creatures were described, along with lessons of morality and what we could learn from these bizarre creatures. Fantastical creatures were described alongside real ones, whether by ignorance or metaphor or church mandate, but the real ones were often so exaggerated and inaccurate that they were very much fantastical as well.

But, sadly, it has fallen out of vogue, as zooloogy replaced tale-telling. Not that I mind zoology, nature as it is is an extra-ordinary and bizarre place, with things like barreleye fish and the leucochloridium parasites. But, I do wish there were more catalogues of bizarre fictional creatures described with authorial colour, as a monster lover myself of course.

There are a few carrying on the tradition. Most nerds have read a Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, even if only for the creature-worldbuilding and pictures, and Wayne Barlowe's books of Aliens and Fantasy-Creatures are must reads for those interested in the subject (If one can find them)The website Mr. P’s Castlevania Realm has a fine catalogue of creatures from that anime-gothic video game series.

The Insidious Bogleech’s Mortasheen worldbuilding project is the best horror-comedy-biopunk Pokemon-ripoff ever with a bestiary perhaps even more diverse than that series, and Nemo Ramjet’s Life On Snaiad project contains some of the most wonderfully weird alien life in fiction.

But, one of the most specific examples of a modern-day bestiary is Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Book of Imaginary Beings,” where he catalogued mythical beings from all different eras and cultures, and even made up a few of his own with fakelore to match. This is, in fact, the real origin of the mythical Peryton despite its claims to classical antiquity, a fact that makes it’s existence in Dungeons and Dragons even more ludicrous.

But, you know, as the modern age has progressed, it too has made its own myths. And I, in my visibly-finite wisdom, have decided to cover them in a manner relating to Borges, limiting myself to film and the obscure corners thereof for reasons.

And now, because I cannot think of a better transition, we start with
-The Graboids [Including The Deadly Spawn]-
While the screenwriter/creator of Tremors mentioned being more inspired by the general concept of burrowing creatures than the infamous Dune, one cannot help but draw parallels between the beaked things known as Graboids, and ol’ Shai Huluud (May his passing cleanse Arrakis).

Because, while both have an insanely convoluted lifecycle, that is where the similarities end, as the Graboid’s life-cycle is distinctly differently-convoluted.

The convoluted life-cycle starts with the creature known as the Graboid, which grows from a tiny critter that is coloquially known as a “dirt dragon” into a behemoth that can swallow a car whole. They burrow through the earth at lightning speeds using the spines on their sides, and probe out with their mouthed tendrils (Presumably to save energy), and then burst out with their main, beaked faces if they really need to grab something, or if something’s particularly huge.

As is demonstrated to the heroes of Tremors one on several occasions, they also aren’t dumb, experimenting to learn how to best hunt our heroes, screwing over their plans, and even at one point setting a crude pit-trap. Though, they also are completely blind, and hunt via sound, which is used against them by the heroes many-a-time. And they reportedly smell terrible.

But wait, there’s also two more stages to the things’ lifecycle! First is the shriekers, which burst out of a Graboid  and start hunting. They look an awful lot like eyeless frilled velociraptors, with the Graboid’s distinct beak. They possess infra-red vision, and the ability to cough up more of the little bastards after eating enough. They also hunt in packs. Clever girls.

But, if one of those survives long enough, it becomes an Ass-Blaster, like a winged; much larger Shrieker with a giant bombadier-beetle-type rear that allows it to fly like a rocket ship by expelling a super-hot chemical reactant. It’s also the stage that lays the actual eggs, which starts the whole cycle all over again.

What’s especially fascinating about the Graboids is how they are treated not like solely malevolent; ravening monstrocities, but more like hungry wild animals, albeit very bizarre ones. They have comprehensible behaviors and motives, they learn and probe their environment, they . Hell, there are even some “tame” ones like El Blanco the albino Graboid or Messerschmidt the Ass-Blaster.

But, it is never explained where they come from, especially how they blend categories of many specific biological taxa into one organism. They speculate upon it in the first movie, and a fossil is shown in the second, and the website television series has some biology for them and speculation (But, no real answer) on their origins.

But, there is another film known as The Deadly Spawn, also about growing-over-time worm-creatures that hunt via sound. It’s a micro-budget affair, but it manages to make the most of it with shockingly good writing and incredible creature effects, thanks to the fact that it was made by people who truly loved monsters and classic monster movies.

The titular creature grows into a many-headed toothy worm-abomination, accompanied by lots of tiny; wriggling young, all trying to pick off the humans one by one. Their biology is also stated in-film to be a blurr-er of lines between biological taxa. And, as it’s revealed in a DVD extra, the Spawn are actually bioweapons dropped onto unsuspecting planets so that their alien creators can jump on an conquer them.

So, is it really implausible to guess that perhaps the Graboids are merely a wildly-divergent evolution of a planetary drop Deadly Spawn, done millions of years earlier, a weapon integrated into Earth's ecosystem? Well, that’s at least a good premise for a fanfic...

-Brundleflies-
The original The Fly is surprisingly underrated nowadays, more of a cerebral science-fiction with a bit of horror rather than the B-movie schlock most dismiss it as. But, the David Cronenberg film is it's own, far different beast. For lack of a better word, I would call it far more “Cronenberg-y”

As you may know, even if you have not seen the film, Seth Brundle is a genius scientist who invents a teleportation machine, accidentally zaps himself into another Telepod while teleporting, and slowly turns into a hybrid of man and fly.

He slowly gains superior strength (Breaking open a man’s arm to reveal the bone at one point), a craving for sugar, the ability to crawl on walls and the ability to vomit acid; which is a necessity if he wants to digest food. He also starts losing his body parts in gooey chunks, which he keeps in a collection, eventually sloughing off his skin to reveal himself as the shambling misshapen Brundlefly; a full fleshy human/insect hybrid.

What is fascinating is how the disruption of his body mirrors the disruption of his identity. At first, Brundle swells with confidence; perhaps to the point of narcicism, then he tries to make the best of thing as his body falls apart, and then Brundle goes to the point of trying to embrace and force his hybridization onto others as a means of transcendence, protean and crumbling as Brundle's own corpus. This is also perhaps best embodied in a deleted scene where Brundle grows an extra limb and tries to chew it off.

Compare this to his son, Martin Brundle in The Fly 2, born via Seth’s love interest; who dies in childbirth. Martin starts off super-brilliant and rapidly-aging, being used as a pawn to recreate the Telepods by the corporate forces now holding Seth’s teleportation tech. Their experiments at one point horribly deform a dog Martin has befriended, leading to one of the most heart-rending scenes involving a dog in horror film history which I shall not fully spoil
As Martin learns of the corporation’s plans, he ends up changing during the course of his investigations, eventually forming into a cocoon to reveal himself as Martinfly.

Both Martin and Seth are fly/human hybrids, and both have the same “powerset”. But while Seth is misshapen and lumpy, Martin is sleek and deadly, sleekly slinking rather than grossly shambling. This has been said to be due to Martin being born with his arthropod side rather than having it jammed in via telepod, though having another human parent presumably helps too.

Martinfly swaps his fly genes with the corporate jerk engineering the bad stuff in the film in the first place to save himself from aging to death (Because, again, rapid aging), leading to said corporate jerk ending up in a deliciously ironic equivalent to the dog’s fate which I shall not spoil, though it is odd that the resulting “fate” does not look in the least fly-like.

Presuming the machine keeps records, as it did in the first film, one could plausibly look through the differences between Brundlefly and Martinfly and divine how to safely hybridize human/fly genes, maybe even removing the rapid aging that was a problem for Martinfly.

Given how Cronenberg has said he wants to make a follow-up to The Fly someday , the idea of deliberate insect-human hybridization for transhumanistic purposes seems like a follow-up too obvious not to make happen.

	It’d be the next stage in fictional evolution, and I find it plausible that some people would be willing to turn themselves into giant bug-monsters if there weren’t many repercussions. By some people I also include myself.
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"In Asia an animal is found which men call bonnacon. It has the head of a bull, and thereafter its whole body is of the size of a bull's with the maned neck of a horse. Its horns are convoluted, curling back on themselves in such a way that if anyone comes up against it, he is not harmed. But the protection which its forehead denies this monster is furnished by its bowels. For when it turns to flee, it discharges fumes from the excrement of its belly over a distance of three acres, the heat of which sets fire to anything it touches. In this way, it drives off its pursuers with its harmful excrement"- The Bonnacon from the Aberdeen Bestiary

	When I was younger, I would always seek out video game strategy guides as a child and read them over and over again just for their Enemies sections. I would always be so annoyed when they didn't include enemies, or when the library didn't stock them; despite the fact that they kept bringing up the internet and GameFaqs as a reason why they didn't.

	Of course, that's the reason they all died out, with Wikis and walkthroughs as replacements. But it's not quite the same. There's not as much of a colour and joy to the dry descriptions of how to beat all the dudes, compared to my joy in sharing them with the (mostly uncaring) other people in my life.  I wanted something that shared my joy in cataloguing monsters. And so, that left my monster-hungry soul out for the hunt.
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-Unliving Things-
One of the strangest types of monsters, despite what Lovecraft fans might tell you, are the ones that are not technically “alive’ in the first place. Not even robotic things mind you ,but just mindless chemical phenomenae.

The simplest form of such is a disaster excessively bestial-ized, like the livid fire of the known-only-for-the-Universal-Studios-attraction film Backdraft or the roaring fury of the tornado from Twister. But then there are the weird, science-fictional ones.

The Monolith Monsters are the most famous, stones from space that absorb silicon in their surroundings to grow to staggering heights, destroy anything in their growth path, crumble, and repeat. The absorbtion of silicon also happens to cause any poor sod touching them to paralyze, adding further to their menace, though as with many things’ salt-water defeats them. It was one of the last films of the Universal Monsters cycle, and while not well known, it is definitely appreciated for being clever in its concept.

There was also the film The Magnetic Monsters by Curt Sidomak; the screenwriter more famous for penning The Wolf Man and Donovan’s Brain, about an experimental radioactive isotope that keeps doubling in size; releasing horrifyingly deadly radioactive and magnetic pulses, with the possibility of knocking the earth off of its axis if it gets too large. It is eventually defeated via overloading it with electricity until it stops growing.

If all of this sounds implausible to you, then you’re not alone.

What is fascinating is that, while these are essentially monster movies of their era down to the simple-substance-that-wins-the-day, it is also important to note that these can also be seen as horrific inversions of the “miracle material” stories littering SF, material with just the right properties to make people’s lives hell rather than to enable adventures or technological revolutions.

One of the most powerful (Though sadly overlooked) utilizations of this was the Fire-Ice from the 1967 Soviet film The Revolution of Ice. Created by scientists, the titular turquoise-glowing radioactive-ice was meant as a super-fuel-source that could turn water into more of itself to create endless power.

But, then the scientists started accidentally getting infused with the water, slowly mutating into icy; deformed creatures only able to feed on the ice, spreading the ice to allow themselves to eat. Some even have a near-religious devotion to the ice, and a few actively spread the affliction to other humans out of a sense of bitterness.

In this story, there is no victory. The ice is not defeated, it is here to stay, the people become more and more afflicted by it, but they adapt and learn to live with it, some even praising it as “The true embodiment of the revolution.”

If you are sensing satire of Soviet policy in this, then you have a good nose for authorial intent. The director, Ivan Olesha, was duplicitous enough that the censors only figured out the message after the final cut was printed, after which he hoped to smuggle it abroad.

Due to various shenanigans involved in muggling the negatives and copyright law that would increase the length of this article as-is, It’s currently in the public domain. If you can find it, it's well worth your time.

-Chicken Zombies-
While the zombie has been done to death on film, and nowhere near as creatively as in its basement-dweller cousin video games, but there are some sparks there in films like The Evil Dead; Dead Alive and Return of the Living Dead, where the undead are more polymorphic and grotesque in form; rather than the standard shambling homunculi of many films.

But, amongst the walking dead, none are more insane than the chicken-human hybrid zombies from Lloyd Kauffman’s passion-project Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, shot on such a low budget that most of the crew was unpaid volunteers.

Lloyd Kauffman is a maestro of low-budget productions, with such films as The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke-Em High, and for this film he brought that same insane; gory clarity of vision; so much so that he paid out-of-pocket for large swathes of the production. For the love of monsters, he made this monster of a film.

The horrible hybrids of Poultrygeist were created via a fast-food chicken restaurant built upon the remains of an Indian Burial Ground, starting by possessing chicken carcasses, which leads to a “memorable” scene where a schmuck gets his wanger bitten off by a frozen chicken he is fornicating with. They then start infecting people via the gross-ass possessed; pustuled chicken into various hybrids of chicken and zombie, which proceed to start devouring and preparing humans like they have done before them.

It’s funnier than it sounds, take my word for it.

The main villain, the corrupt owner of the restaurant-chain, gets the worst transformation, multiple bites transforming him into a gigantic egg, which hatches into a giant chicken who sings a song about cannibalism before getting suicide-bombed to death.

But, in the end, it was not bombs or guns which did in the chicken-zombies, but alcohol; which melts them like acid. Because they spawned from an Indian Burial Ground. Holy shit what the fuck Lloyd Kauffman.

-Neon Maniacs-
Named after the director's poem about the Hell's Angels and introduced via cards with their ugly mugs painted upon them before they come into the picture, the creatures of the film Neon Maniacs may just seem like your typical gimmick-slasher-villains-who-go-around-and-randomly-kill-people upon first glance. A whole lot of gimmick-slasher-villains. In the same movie.

Their gimmicks are certainly fun, like an ape-man, a hooded one with knives for hands, a hangman, a samurai, a soldier, and so-on. But, there’s a lot in there that makes them far stranger creatures than “just” slashers.

Like the fact that the Maniacs are melted like acid by water. Or the fact that they are followed around by one-eyed hook-handed dinosaurs that aid them on their murder sprees. Or the fact that they come up through an ice-cream truck underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, implied to be the gate to another dimension.

In the end, just as the cops are about to see whatever horrible world lies within the truck, they are dragged in by the hook-dinosaurs. Boy was I pissed. It probably would've increased the film's budget manifold, but it was a thing that I needed to see.

The idea of other-dimensional cosmic-horrors that come in to randomly kill people, who all happen to look like stereotypical 80s slasher villains, is brilliant in how it blends corny 80s horror with weird cosmic horror and I’m surprised they aren’t more well-known as far as monsters go.

Though, that’s likely because their film is riddled with filler and sequences that go nowhere due to production difficulties, though at least the human characters aren’t abhorrently obnoxious. But, the concept is what keeps them interesting, if only to think of what could be done with it.

Horror is very often a concept-over-execution genre for monster fans, as we think think more about what a monster could be behind the shroud of broken narratives rather than the veil of badly-executed film. This is why there are people who will defend Prometheus even though it commits every story-structure-sin in the book, for the love of monsters.

Thusly, the Neon Maniacs deserve another ride. If only so we could find out just what the mystery horror-land is beyond that door.
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The horrible Owlbear is probably the result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard. These creatures inhabit the tangled forest regions of every temperate clime, as well as subterraninan labrynths. They are ravenous eaters, aggressive hunters and evil tempered at all times. They attack prey on sight and will fight to the death- The Owlbear, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual.

Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manuals were part of my interest in monsters, spurred on by Jared Von Hindman's articles on the stupidest and most ludicrous creatures in the game. I own quite a few shelves of D&D monster books now, and even more PDFs of such “found” online.

I found a lot of monsters via the internet post-game-guides, whether it be on the game shrines of Flying Omlette or Mr. P's Castlevania Realm, and I remember eagerly searching for any online bestiary I found.

My parents didn't understand, called it “boring” when I recited monster facts back to them, and I didn't have many friends in real life to share them with. But, online, I could meet fellow monster kids and develop my interests, like the aforementioned Jared, the Pack forums, and the briliant Jonathan Wojcic, also known as the Insidious Bogleech.

I was a runt and the overexuberant/dumb one amongst them to be sure, but at least I was home.
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-Lady Heartless-
One of the most unusual takes upon the Witch in film, this “creature” so-to-speak, from the 1974 film simply titled Hollow Soul starts out as a mysterious apparently-noveau-riche woman who appears in a town wildly stratified by class, in an old house in-between the “wrong” and “right” sides of the tracks. She starts making social waves in the scene of the rich-types, nicknamed “Lady Heartless” for her aloof attitude, just as soon as the rich start dying mysteriously.

Of course, it s due to her, who in her previous life was a woman from the aforementioned “wrong” side of the tracks, who said rich raised out of poverty only to ultimately humiliate her and throw her back down. And, having acquited magical abilities through the intervention of strange “Powers,” she’s back to both get her revenge.

The trauma of such events is what caused her to manifest the characteristics that make her “monstrous”, a keyhole shaped hole in her eye socket and a huge heart-shaped hole in her chest that actually gave her the name, effects accomplished both by using mirrored glass, allowing her to absorb mystic powers into these “Nothings” to give her her magical might.

Strangely enough, nobody knew who the actress was portraying Lady Heartless, due to her working under a false name, the massive amounts of makeup she placed onto herself, and refusing to leave any sort of trail both real or paper, making her weirdly perfect to play the strange, aloof Lady.

Most of the effects in the film are surprisingly good given the film’s low budget, perhaps because the director was a former magician. Whether it be the false-then-real decapitation scene, the summoning of the fire elemental, the optical-illusion-y distortion of space as visitors walk through Lady Heartless’ house, and some death scenes which I refuse to spoil, they are all incredible.

The protagonist, a detective hired by the mayor to find out the deaths, does find her out. But, he does not ultimately destroy the heart-and-key shaped chunks of flesh that contain her life. Turns out he knew her when they were young, and still carries a fondness for her. So he lets her go, and burns down the house to conceal the evidence, while she leaves for her own destiny, freed from the chains of revenge. The final shot, in which the detective follows the Lady, is something that still leaves me flabbergasted every time I see it.

Sadly, no such happy ending would be found for the director, who was unable to distribute his film. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the film’s take on gothic horror was so unusual, and the boom of slashers; which the film also very much presaged; was years away.

Though, the director sadly took his life due to investing all of his savings in the massive flop, the film did fall into the public domain; as he had no heirs to take his estate. Which has allowed for a small but growing fandom to keep it alive, even though it has never been officially released on any sort of home media. Keep circulating the tapes as they say...

-The Ghoulies-
The Ghoulies are demons, but they are also Gremlins knockoffs, added to the same-titled film; Ghoulies (Which was originally a rather standard occult picture) as a cash-in on Joe Dante’s little bastards; the Gremlins. While this could be chalked up to producer Charles Band’s boner for tiny little monsters, that theory is complicated by the other fact that it was his father, Alfred Band, who produced the first two films.

I have only seen Ghoulies 2, but apparently it is the best one. At least it has a Shakespeare-quoting dwarf in a gorilla costume named Sir Nigel Penneyweight. God bless Phil Fondacaro for playing that part.

But, the first two incarnations of the Ghoulies all have things in common. They are demons, but ones that are much less explicitly intimidating than pathetic, grotesque rubbery imps mirroring the demons in medieval art, with the bald baby-like ghoulie; the yowling catlike one and the large-jawed lizard-like one being the most iconic. They remind one of the demons of medieval art ala the Breughels or Bosch, their capering both more pathetic and more malevolent than the similar Gremlins.

The first film’s poster had the iconic image of one popping out of the toilet, but it was only in the second film that the actual toilet-ry occurred, complete with the film’s resident jerk getting bitten on the taint. In the third and fourth films, an ostentatious toilet is their main method of summoning, where as in the first two it was relatively standard satanic-ritual-stuff.

Medieval demons also had a penchant for toilet humor, most notably in how the original Witches Sabbat had the witches kissing the devil's arse. Perhaps the Ghoulies could be considered more faithful to classical demon lore than modern unstoppable-dooms like the Demon from Paranormal Activity.

But, that digression aside, they do vary from the “mean little bastards” model in some ways. In the ending of the second film, one man-sized ghoulie is summoned to un-summon the others via devouring, only “sent back” itself using a gorilla costume filled with explosives (Don’t ask) The ones in the third film are in-between the sizes of the giant and tiny Ghoulies. They also happen to be at the employ of a professor, who makes use of a magic comic to control the Ghoulies so that the professor can stop his university’s Fraternity Prank Week (Again, don’t ask). They eventually merge final-boss-style with the professor into a super Ghoulie. They get flushed down the Satan-toilet for their troubles.

The Ghoulies in the fourth film, which sticks more to the occult-plotting of the first than the monster-hijinks of the second and third, are little people in makeup. I don’t count them as Ghoulies, because I’m petty like that. But, I will say that they fit into the model of the Repentant Devil, also from folklore, as they have some semblance of a conscience and try to do good while they try to find their way back home (In hell).

Goes to show that sometimes it's the cheesy B-movies that can capture the ideas that so many incarnations of creatures miss, unfiltered by studio mandates, just for the love of monsters.

-The Engineers-
Humans altered by an enigmatic figure known as the Key-Man, these beings from the film Tokyo Gore Police can sprout weapons from wherever they have their limbs cut off, and are ever-hunted by a privatized police force in future Tokyo.

They weapons they sprout include an organic chainsaw, a cannon-penis, a crocodilian set of jaws instead of legs, and the Key Man's eyes become guns when he chops off the top of his head. No, the brain-trauma doesn’t kill him. They only die when the key-based tumors that give them these powers are destroyed, usually by the katana-wielding absurdly-violent protagonist of the film.

You may think the police privatization relates to the effort to fight these things, when in fact it came well before then in-fil,. In fact, protesting against such is what lead to the death of the Key-Man’s father, which leads the Key Man to his studies that allow him to find the key-shaped tumors that create the Engineers

It also lead to the death of the protagonist’s father, as the Protagonist learns when she too gets turned into an Engineer before killing him, afterwards going against the police force which had previously hired her. who have now turned the city into a hecatomb of martial law.

This reminds me of the creature from the Hellraiser series known as the Engineer, who does the mutilating that turns people into Cenobiltes, and yet it is also the complete opposite, chaotic bio-teratoforming instead of the orderly worship of flesh and bondage of the Cenobies

Perhaps that is why the protagonist becomes one to defeat the facistic police force, chaos must be required to defeat law. It’s fascinating how often monsters fight against the forces that create them, isn’t it?
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Engineered as a beast of burden, this elephantine monster is known for its incredibly sour, sulphuric breath, so thick with bacteria that it can be seen as a yellowish vapor that puffs from its rancid maw. Inhaling this foul stench is not only an incredibly unpleasant experience in itself, but can lead to prolonged bouts of dizziness, vomiting and mild convulsions as the various bacteria attack the lungs and sinuses... ...A Malodorodon's flesh is of a color and texture very similar to that of an earthworm, and almost constantly coated in slick, musky sweat. Its fused eye sees the world upside-down and backwards, but this seems to cause it no difficulty. It primarily eats fruits and vegetables; rotten gourds and pumpkins are its favorite. -Entry for the Malodoron from Jonathan Wojcic's Mortasheen

	You have to be a little off to be a monster kid. While they're not ones to share much about it, the home lives of Jared and Jonathan do not seem to have been happy ones. Certainly it is true that I, a loudmouthed; awkward autistic kid with self-confidence issues and a crippled ability to focus on work thanks to executive function defecits, am not the most functional human being.

	Perhaps it is because we are broken that we fill our hearts with these lists of magical; wonderful; broken creatures too good for this world.

	Parallels can be drawn to the suburban angst and isolation in the 1950s, where weird kids left to their own devices got into horror movies and Forry Ackerman's “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine, becoming the first wave of monster kids. Those kids would then go on to produce the goopy creature features of the 1980s that produced the next wave of monster kids. Said monster kids also seem to have included Jared and Jonathan, who had such a huge role in creating me.

	Perhaps, where there are loners, weirdos and freaks, there will always be the monster kids, tutored in the history of the monstrous by fellow strangers.

-The United Spooks Army/The Un-killed Soldates Armada-
One of the most fascinating great; doomed passion-projects in the history of film is Army of Monsters, both for the wild imagination and inventiveness displayed within and for the tragic end of the project's director Maud Robbins.
She was a 50s monster-kid who got into the world of B-budget film-making in 1965 under the ignominious World Cinematic Company run by the infamous Soviet expatriate Ronnie Sharikov.

He had a penchant for cutting corners that would make Roger Corman blush, and though she tried to break her wild ideas out as a one-woman-show screenwriter; effects-artist and director, she still was drastically limited in the execution of her earlier films, not helped by the way the flagrantly-sexist Sharikov would deliberately and maliciously pull the rug out from under her at every turn.

But, that still didn’t stop her from filming her passion project under hook or crook, shooting with whoever she could bring in, with whatever stock sets she had that month, and making effects herself or altering and recycling them from other movies over the course of ten years. The result is perhaps one of the greatest monster movies nobody has ever seen.

The plot follows a researcher (Played by Maud herself for reasons of convenience) who falls in with an army of monsters (Known as the United Spooks Army) fighting a secret war against the U.S. Army; who are trying to capture and harness them for their own secret cybernetics program (The Un-Killed Soldates Armada) using the first test subjects of said program.

This was made during the era of Vietnam of course, and while Maud never was technically a part of “the counterculture,” arguments have been made that she was sympathetic towards such. It could be called the American equivalent to Shigeru Mizuki’s Youkai movies, but I do think it has its own voice distinct from such.

While the researcher is portrayed in a sweet-but-unflattering matter by the notoriously self-effacing Maud, and the other human characters (Portrayed by a small cadre of of B-movie actors who were close friends of Maud) work well, it is clear that the chief concern was the monsters.

There are some re-uses of effects from other films, from the obvious like the character Shokonax; a heavy made from lizard suit with a gorilla mask on top, to the more subtle like the two-headed dual-personalitied Joker/Grim puppet that was actually two puppets combined; one kit-bashed on top of the other.

The most striking of such was the major creature-character named Pik-A-Pax, who looks like he was made up a patchwork of different monster suits and had a puckish, joking personality to match. He also happened to be the researcher's love interest, perhaps indicating a streak of teratophilia on Maud's part. Certainly, the crew later said she did seem more comfortable working with the creatures than with other actors

Some of the original effects were simple but surprisingly effective; like the latex; wrinked “brain-ghost” upon a vacuum-based hovercraft-platform or the flamboyant “Backblal” that was just a super-bright blacklite shone on a mirror.

Some of them were surprisingly elaborate though, such as the rod-operated Spindly Trunker or the hulking reptilian Shell-Thang built around a VW Bug and operated by an actor inside the “head”. It's fascinating how much of the creature's slow-but-philisophical personality they were able to convey with the latter, especially during the creature's emotional death scene.

In fact, they all have so much personality that elaborating on all of them would likely double the length, so I will just say that they were almost a proto-Nightbreed borne of the hippie era, a group of freaks and mutants living together against the world.

The designs of the army which they fight are fascinating too. Their costumes are so simple, yet so striking, each a grotesque mockery of military atrocities with horrid masks and unsettling “cybernetics” so cleverly designed that practical-effects professionals still use it as a case-study of how to do a lot with only very little.

Their names were Napalm, Machete, Air-Bomber, Doc and Sniper, all derived from humans killed in “an unnamed war”, perhaps to make it easier to suit up than the complicated monster suits/puppets. They perhaps presaged the slasher genre in their simple; distinctive designs, weapons of choice, nigh-invulnerability, and cold; relentless pursuit.
Despite the many difficulties in production, which again would be too many to list here, it is considered by those who know of it as one of the greatest low-budget monster films ever made. Or, would have been, before Sharikov got wind of Maud using company resources. He did not like people using his resources; his resources away from his control.

It was approximately after finishing the final cut that Maud died in a car wreck, with the negatives in her car. Some say it was out of sleep-blindness from editing her cut so long, others say that there was evidence of her brakes being cut.

Perhaps that is why she ended her film at a cliffhanger, on the beginning of the final battle between the cloned army of Un-Killed Soldates ready to attack the creatures in their hideout, and the “secret” the doctor has prepared for the monsters that may turn the tide against the Soldates. Friends say she had inklings she was not long for this world, not helped by the threatening phone calls she had been receiving day in and day out.

Sharikov bought the rights to her film via estate auction and set to destroying every print she’d made. He almost succeeded, if not for his death via heart attack on the exact one-year anniversary of Maud’s death, on the exact same road she died on.

Thanks to his death; his tyrannical grip on all his company properties, and his estate’s incompetence at copyright law, almost all of his company’s films (Some of which we may cover in a later edition) passed into the Public Domain. This would be wonderful for these film’s fate. if not for the fact that only a few clips of the full film survived, albeit alongside the many photos; productions notes; and script copies Maud had left with friends.

Groups of film fans have previously made reconstructions with what little is left, to mixed results. But, it has recently been revealed that a private collector has acquired the previously-thought-lost negatives for the film, found in a Swap Meet for five dollars. In the spirit of generosity, helped by the film's public domain status, he has released the file in limited quantities via gifted memory sticks, which have then been circulated via obscure filesharing websites. While it is wildly obscure, even amongst the horror community, I have seen it, and highly recommend you seek it out.

Many times Maud's friends tried to stop her from work on the film. They said that it was not worth risking Sharikov's wrath like that, as they had experienced many times before, and that she could get herself killed with an endeavor like this.

Maud's response for why she kept working on it? “For the love of monsters.”

-The Tragic Mutants-
It’s fascinating how much mutation-related horror overlaps with disability. While Brundlefly could be considered part of this “clade,” there are also quite a few other creatures who are simply humans with very bizarre disabilities.

	The Alligator Man from The Alligator People transforms slowly into an alligator-man via nuclear radiation, leaving his family for the swamps so they do not see his shame. The protagonist from Curse 2: The Bite has his hand (And ultimately, the rest of his anatomy) turn into snakes due to being bitten by an irradiated snake. The effects courtesy of the great; underrated Screaming Mad George turn his body into a fireworks show of blood; gore and snakes as he desperately pursues his girlfriend; the only thing he has left.

The Incredible Melting Man was once an astronaut, not only turned into a melting thing by the cosmic rays that warped him, but also given a vastly increasing super-strength as he melts. He eventually melts into a pile of filth in a jumpsuit that is swept up and placed in a garbage can.

(As an aside, I have no idea how the “more melting=more strength” thing works in any logical sense, but in the words of a wise man, “Repeat to yourself: It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”)

The C.H.U.D.s from the same-titled film are homeless people mutated by nuclear waste into cannibalistic morlock-thingies that live in the sewers of pre-Giuliani New York, their acronym not just standing for their cannibalistic underground-dwelling state, but also the unit sent to “clean up” and “dispose” of them like all of society's trash.
The Amazing Colossal Man from the film of the same name slowly goes insane as he grows in size due to his heart being unable to pump enough blood to his brain, the film focusing less on his climactic rampage and more on his slipping sanity and his strained relations with the rest of humanity as he realizes he is essentially a prisoner

The Hideous Sun Demon turns into a reptilian monster under sunlight thanks to being bombarded with nuclear rays in an atomic age-inversion of the werewolf myth, getting worse and worse the more and more he transforms. Part of this is how he is unable to cope with living forever in the dark at home, and the attempts he does try to make to live end up with his exposure again and again.

All of these creatures are derived from the powers of science, and yet their treatment is considerably more pre-enlightment. They are as good as dead in the narrative’s eyes after their transformations, no survival, no rehabilitation, just a long slide towards tragedy and death. Much like how many of us treat disabilities in real life, to the detriment of the physically disabled and mentally ill.

Now, I’m not saying that these things were created as a deliberate commentary on the status of disability, but like Steven King once said, “It’s not important because they thought about it very hard, but rather because they didn’t.”

-The Commie-Plants of Venus-
Plants from space with tendencies towards being metaphorically related to communism are a surprisingly common recurring element in science fiction. There are the collectivist human-mocking Pod People from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the roaming; conquering hordes invading the West that are the Triffids, the brutish carrot-like Thing From Another World, the ludicrous; conical probe-sending Zontar from It Conquered the World. Even Audrey 2, while not specifically communistic, does have that sort of seductive cajoling to the lower classes.

Of course, I lump these together because I have a hypothesis that these beings are all from the same planet, one that keeps jettisoning these things to earth for whatever reason. Maybe it’s an advanced alien race of super-commie-plants, who have taken over their ecosystem from the presumably wholesome and America-ish space-Animalia that the cynical amongst sci-fi fans just know some hack sci-fi-writer would try to stick in there, either sending the damned things to Earth from their own ecosystem or manufacturing them as bioweapons in there.

Lord knows which ones are the “dominant” caste. Though I'd hazard a guess it's the Audrey Iis, given their intelligence, their general manipulative ruthless-ness and the fact that (As revealed by the deleted original “Don’t Feed The Plants” ending) they can grow to skyscraper-sizes.

In the case of Zontar/Behulah from It Conquered The World, it was said to be from Venus, thought to be a swampy harboror of plantlife rather than the furnace-like chemical deathworld it actually is. While we know now, in this canon I propose the planet all these beings hypothetically come from be called Neo-Venus in honor of this.

I am well aware that this is blatant indulgent fan-theorising, but a lot has been said on the political themes of these monsters and their relation to the Commie menace. So, if they occupy the same narrative ecosystem, why could they not occupy the same physical one, says the monster nerd.

-The Demon-Warp/Bigfoot-
One of the most unusual creatures from one of the most unusual pictures on this list, for the first third of the movie Demonwarp, you might be mistaken for thinking this creature is an “ordinary” Bigfoot from an ordinary Bigfoot movie.

Because, other than a brief; weird sequence of a preacher at a meteor landing in the 1800s in the beginning, the plot starts off relatively standard for a “killer Bigfoot” movie. College students go out to cabin in the woods to study Bigfoot. One of them is searching for a professor who disappeared while doing the same. Then the Bigfoot starts attacking/murdering. Your average stuff.

At least, until the last third, where it is revealed that the Bigfoot is actually a human. Indeed, he is the disappeared professor, transformed by a heart-eating alien to kill people and bring them to the alien's broken spaceship. So that they can be turned into zombies. To repair the spaceship so the alien can leave. And the alien’s sting is what turns people into Bigfoots.

This is a real goddamn movie people.

While one could read an existential statement into this, sometimes monsters do not need to have a point. Sometimes you've you’ve just gotta go stupid and make a bigfoot-alien-zombie movie for the sheer love of monsters, for that is the nature of monsters. Even when they mean nothing, they mean something by sheer virtue of the imagination put into them, many times stumbling into meaning where it was only partially intended.

I mean, this one doesn't, but still.
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And so we end out our miniature book of cinematic creatures (hopefully Part One of many) by noting something. Through these beings we send metaphors and messages about mankind, like the medieval manuscripts; creatures both real and false have something to teach us about who we are. And, perhaps it's those amongst us who're told that their true selves are unfit for

Some people say they’re just “monsters,” deliriums unworthy of consideration by rational; mature human beings. But, they were made by human beings, and through their monstrousness they show us what we truly are as humans, both in our nightmares and in our dreams. But, it is in the weirdest and most outcast amongst us that they truly shine.

We are the monster kids, we are the monsters. We are the weirdos, freaks and beasts we make for ourselves, the things we imagine from the people we are, those strange kids taking the world to ever stranger places with creatures too awful and yet too good for this fallen world. In the words of a song, “And if dreams can’t come true/Then why not pretend?”

But then, that’s the sort of talk that leads into a discussion of monsters from animation, which is another article in-and-of-itself. Come wayward souls...