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The Monstrous Horde and the More-Than-Just-Hors-d-oevres

Banes at 12:00AM, Oct. 3, 2024
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Welcome to October proper, and the beginning of our spooky/scary month of articles.

There's a brand of scary movies where the ‘monster’ or whatever is not just one machete-wielding angry frog manchild. Or ravenous shark or alien or some other kind of monster or killer.

It's a subset of scary where it's an entire HORDE of something. You could definitely go back to Night of the Living Dead in 1968 to see this - the nameless, innumerable walking corpses are the horror there.

But ten years earlier we had THE BIRDS, where there's another horde of deadly danger attacking from the sky. I don't want to spoil what that threat is, but it's in the movie's title.

It's nature run amok, you might say, and the idea is terrifying. Other movies like PIRANHA, various Killer Bees movies, and most zombie flicks and shows go here.

In these stories, the interesting part is not even the horrible horde - it's the people.

The attacking horde has pushed the survivors to the limit of course, but the real guts of these stories, so to speak, is how the humans behave when faced with these threats.

So it doesn't really come down to JAWS the shark or Jason the maladjusted toad boy in the end. It's about how humans survive together, or turn on each other, or who they become under these conditions. It's about whether they survive in the end, sure - but it's more about their actions between each other during the threat.

There's the classic Twilight Zone episode called The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street that illustrate this as well.

Horror stories are STORIES. But these kinds might be where character conflicts can really shine in the spooky genres.

See you Next Time!



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anonymous?

bravo1102 at 4:37AM, Oct. 4, 2024

(Con'd) H.G. Wells "War in the Air"

bravo1102 at 4:37AM, Oct. 4, 2024

One thing about a few of the Invasion books and movies with War of the World's being a great example is that the great enemy horde wins. There's usually only some trick (microbes) or twist that let's the "good" guys triumph. There was a great study of them done back in the day, can't remember the title. However the penultimate one was The Great Pacific War from the 1930s that very much predicted the course of WW2. It's even postulated that since Yamamoto was in the US when it was published he might have gotten a copy. It also amazed the Department of the Navy at how closely it followed their actual war planning and war gaming of the scenario. So reality has been influenced by such horror scenarios. Another great one was the image of hordes of enemy bombers ravaging Everytown in Things to Come(1936) The scenes were so horrifying that people pressed Parliament to give more funds to what would become RAF Fighter Command. So when the bombers did come we got the Battle of Britain instead of

bravo1102 at 4:27AM, Oct. 4, 2024

@Paul and there was the Yellow Horde variant of the invasion novel too. Invasion of the Body Snatchers owes a bit to those more horror/sf treatments of Asian invasion tropes like Fu Manchu. There were a few hokey/campy Red invasion movies in the early 1950s which were all about the people like Invasion USA. There were also a few alien horde invasion films (but we only ever saw two or three because of the low budget) that again were more about the survivors the threat is merely an existential thing never truly specified or explained. And then there are classic bad "horde" movies like Attack of the Killer Shrews, Night of the Lupus (it's bunnies. Killer rabbits!) And the attempted parody of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. And a favorite of mine is the Red Scare/Yellow scare sci-fi movie Battle Beneath the Earth.

Ozoneocean at 6:45PM, Oct. 3, 2024

@Paul- talking about the late 19th century, HG Well's War of the Worlds comes to mind! He wrote that in 1895, a SciFi story about Martians invading and slaughtering everyone. And speaking of Colonialism, it was then that a Great great grandfarther of mine shipped of from Australia as a cavalry trooper in the British Imperial army to fight the Boers in South Africa.

Ozoneocean at 6:40PM, Oct. 3, 2024

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is that I suppose and even a movie like Future-world. And the second Alien film is that while the first one wasn't! Interesting.

Banes at 9:50AM, Oct. 3, 2024

@plymayer - I haven't seen Call to Glory! - but she'll always be the sweet-but-tough babysitter from Adventures in Babysitting for me!

Banes at 9:48AM, Oct. 3, 2024

@PaulEberhardt - Fascinating read, thanks! It's interesting that a horror/scifi version of the invasion, even if it comes from a somewhat xenophobic feeling, can read as "Human Patriotism" and come across as universal. And there's a specific kind of overwhelming fear that comes from "The Horde", agreed!

PaulEberhardt at 4:44AM, Oct. 3, 2024

People like H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds, Empire of the Ants) saw right away that the important thing is not the invader but what people do when facing a crisis together. That's why this stuff is so timeless. Thinking this through a little further, this timelessness is actually a bit scary in that real crises show the more gloomy stories to be quite accurate when it comes to their bringing out the best and the worst in people at once and that people's reaction patterns apparently have never really changed in the last 150 years. None of this explains, though, why I've always found a horde much scarier than a single monster, no matter how colossal. For some reason it works: I can't watch Invasion of the Giant Spiders or Empire of the Ants without having to scratch at all kinds of sudden itches, and after watching my first zombie movie at age 15 (Dawn of the Dead, I think) I actually used to need a moment to pick up courage before walking into a busy pedestrian zone for a few months.

PaulEberhardt at 4:30AM, Oct. 3, 2024

There's a strong link to the old Invasion Novel genre, which originated in late 19th century Great Britain when people became aware that (a) colonization may backfire and (b) that new technologies could make an invasion of Prussia or France an actual possibility (replaced by communists in the second wave of the genre during Red Scare times). The beauty of the horror variety is you don't need to look so desperately for a human nation you could mark as "the other" and could make you part of "the other" by making you go native (except for Dracula by giving him a country of origin). There may be a patriotic message, a cautionary message or, as a subset of the latter, a satirical one. The cool thing that horror can do is it makes even the "patriotic" variety more universal. Also it saved the invasion genre, which would look a bit outmoded. The Western world still has plenty of real threats it could face, but nobody wants to be accused of "othering" any other culture any more.

plymayer at 12:23AM, Oct. 3, 2024

Bring on the old cheesy horror flicks!

plymayer at 12:23AM, Oct. 3, 2024

Never saw the original PIRANHA, but loved the remake with Elisabeth Shue. Even to this day, I have a crush on her going back to her role as the colonel's daughter in Call to Glory.


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