Celluloid Confetti

One of my favourite films of last year was The Host, a Korean monster movie with a heart. Aptly dubbed “Little Miss Sunshine vs. Godzilla”, it’s about a family of misfits who must unite to rescue their beloved daughter when she is kidnapped by a giant tadpole on the banks of the Han River.

The Host is darkly comic, coldly gruesome and unexpectedly bittersweet. And I loved it to bits.

The film contrasts the family’s desperate need to nurture and protect their lost child with the dead-eyed hunger of the beast itself. As rain and mist descends, the creature lurks contentedly in the bone-chilling concrete of the sewer system while its warm-blooded victims huddle together for warmth.

I was thinking about The Host because the buzz has been building around Cloverfield, the new film produced by Lost creator JJ Abrams. After a teaser trailer, which even managed to keep the film’s title under wraps, it soon became apparent that Cloverfield is a monster movie in the classic mold: something large and angry is attacking New York, people will die in their thousands, and it won’t be pretty.

Re-watching the trailer for Cloverfield, it struck me that, apart from The Host, there hasn’t been a decent monster movie in years, if not decades. Godzilla (1998) was a big, scaly disappointment, not least because the beast itself looked like a cross between a turkey and a Labrador. And don’t get me started on King Kong (2005).

What these films missed was that a monster is not a monster per se, but an embodiment of urban panic. King Kong (1933) was not about a big monkey (you hear me, Peter Jackson?!) but about a quasi-racist fear of the primitive, lusty and violent beast lurking within the heart of man.

The original Kong wanted to take Fay Wray somewhere quiet and subject her to some monkey-lovin’ - not take her ice-skating - and that’s why people with blonde daughters found it so scary.

And Godzilla’s 1954 radioactive rampage through Tokyo famously expressed Japan’s experience of mass urban destruction in World War II, as well as that country’s baptism of fire into the atomic age.

American distributors understood the metaphor all too well, and had the anti-nuclear message cut out, and Perry Mason inserted in its place.

Whilst The Host touches upon themes of anti-Americanism, government distrust and environmental peril, it is at its heart a very modern film about child-abduction, with a tadpole in place of a pedophile.

Cloverfield hits cinemas in a couple of weeks, and I can’t wait to see it.

Any film made after 2001 that involves the destruction of New York must be intended to evoke our fears of terrorism, but if it is to become an instant classic, it will need to do so much more.

Fingers (and tentacles) crossed!