Monster #13—Blobs

Sometimes, monsters are scary because they have a horrific shape. Spider faces, demonic visages, twisted bodies, mutant limbs, and more are classic monster parts. But sometimes, the scariest monster is the one without a shape at all. I'm not sure if it was a broadcast of "The Blob" on Creature Features or merely the discovery of amoebas in a science book that introduced me first to the idea that monsters without shapes at all could be plenty scary. Come to think of it... it was probably my dad who introduced me to the concept.

As a kid, I'd take a sheet of paper, then draw a line down the middle and then three lines across, dividing the sheet into eight smaller squares. I'd then bring the sheet of squares to my dad and ask him to draw me 8 monsters in the squares. He never failed to dream up great monsters, but now and then he'd draw a blob. He'd explain how it works—it grabs you and eats you alive, basically—and in hindsight I can't help but wonder if he chose blobs now and then because they were an easy monster to draw when your kid's asking you to draw 8 of them. I remember in particular a giant sea amoeba creeping up on a guy who was bent over a tidepool rock reaching for an abalone... even as the man reached, the blob was reaching for HIM.

"The Blob" is, of course the movie most folks think about when you mention shapeless slime monsters, but as fun as that movie is... it's not the best of its kind. The remake was surprisingly good (and just as surprisingly, a horror movie that came to the Point Arena theater), bu there's also movies like "X the Unknown" and "The Quatermass Xperiment" that feature some pretty creepy shapeless horrors. Interesting how both those two have the letter "X" in their names!

In literature, of course, blobs are all over the place, particularly in Lovecraft's writings. Shoggoths, after all, are the quintessential blobs—workhorses invented by an alien race who managed to become intelligent and rebel against their one-time masters. Hopefully Guillarmo del Toro will be able to get his version of "At the Mountains of Madness" on film some day and we'll have one more blob to ogle!

Some illustrations just name themselves.

Recommended Reading

• At the Mountains of Madness, by H. P. Lovecraft
• "Slime," by Joseph Payne Brennan
• "The Raft," by Stephen King
• Phantoms, by Dean Koontz

Recommended Viewing

• The Blob (1958), dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.
• The Blob (1988), dir. Chuck Russell
• X the Unknown, dir.Leslie Norman
• The Quatermass Xperiment, dir. Val Guest
• The Stuff, dir. Larry Cohen

Monster #10—Fish People

There's something creepy about fish. Sure, they're delicious, but look at their faces! Those big staring eyes... the gasping mouth filled with teeth... the scales... yeah, they're creepy. So it's no big surprise that there's been quite a lot of horror stories about fish people over the years. I've grown up with fish all around me—my father's a retired commercial salmon fisherman, after all, and in those years I've seen plenty of the strangest and scariest fish the Pacific has to offer. Sharks, eels, lingcods, cabazones, eels, hagfish (puke!), sunfish, flounders... the list goes on. All of them are creepy in their own way

Of course, it's to H. P. Lovecraft that we must go to for the classic story about fish people. The concept of icthyic humanoids appears numerous times in his stories, but never to the extent of the deep ones in one of his best tales, "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Since then, there's been a LOT of entries in the genre... some great, like "Creature from he Black Lagoon," some fun but not so great, like "Humanoids from the Deep," (a movie that was filmed in the town of Noyo, about 45 minutes north of where I grew up), and some that are just plain awful.

Like "Screamers."

Back in the day, my dad and I would rent movies every Friday to watch on the VCR. Invariably they were horror or science fiction movies. As the '80s continued to barrel head first into the age of video, more and more choices came up. I'd seen the box for "Screamers" (no, not the Peter Weller movie of the same name, although that one's kinda bad too) several times. The image of a man who'd been turned inside out was certainly eye-catching, and so eventually I rented it, eager to see all sorts of horrific reverse-zombies.

Now... the movie starts out fine. With some folks looking for pirate treasure, only to run afoul of zombies... but then WHAT? They're kiled by a fish man? How are there fish men in my inside-out zombie movie? Turns out, the movie's NOT about inside-out zombies, but about a mad scientist who wants to turn people into fish-people slaves to loot Atlantas. Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty rockin' movie plot.

Not Pictured: Inside-out Zombies

But I was looking for those reverse zombies. And in the end, the movie itself was bad. Maybe I would have liked it better had it been advertised under it's original title, "L'isola degli uomini pesce." Or maybe if it'd not promised me inside out people.

Not "Blood Waters of Doctor Z" bad, but close.

Yeah. We need more good fish-person moives! There's a remake of "Creature From the Black Lagoon" in semi-permanent development out there at Universal, but looking at all their other reboots of their classic monster movies over the past decade or two... I'm not holding out much hope.

Recommended Reading

•  "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," by H. P. Lovecraft

Recommended Viewing

• "Creature from the Black Lagoon," dir. Jack Arnold
• "Humanoids from the Deep," dir. Roger Corman
• "Dagon," dir. Stuart Gordon

Monster #9—The Wendigo

The concept of being lost in the woods and freezing to death is pretty scary. So is the idea of being eaten by wild animals when you're lost in the woods. What could be worse than that? How about being lost in the woods AND eaten by wild animals? Or worse than that? Being eaten by cannibals.

Now... what if you were the one lost in the woods... but YOU were the cannibal? That's pretty frightening too.

The wendigo is a monster that embodies these fears. From the original Algonquian mythology, the wendigo was described as a bloody-lipped gaunt person that reeked of death. Worse... humans could become wendigos if they were overpowered by greed.

From those myths, a number of more modern incarnations of the wendigo have evolved, but the core elements remain the same—there's something out there in the frozen woods that wants to eat you. One of Algernon Blackwood's greatest short stories is called "The Wendigo." From there, the story impressed H. P. Lovecraft and others in his writing circle, notably August Derleth, and as a result, the legend infiltrated the Cthulhu mythos in the form of the Great Old One Ithaqua. The wendigo would go on to show up in Marvel comic books, in video games, modern fiction, and of course in RPGs. I got to be the one to put the wendigo into 3rd edition D&D when for my monster assignment for the 3rd edition Fiend Folio I was asked to stat up some mythological monsters of my choice for inclusion. One of the ones I picked was the ahuizotil (a cool critter I might do in a future monster day entry), but the one I was the most proud of was the wendigo, which was a template you could put on a person or wild animal to turn him or her or it into a ravenous monster. My friend Greg Vaughan got to stat up the Pathfinder version of the wendigo for Rise of the Runelords, but I developed that adventure ("Spires of Xin-Shalast") so I got to get some work in on him there as well.

And, of course, the wendigo's been showing up more and more often in film and TV as well, with appearances in movies like Ravenous and The Last Winter and on shows like the X-Files and (according to Wikipedia) My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Perhaps scariest of all, though, is the fact that, in a way, this monster's for real. "Wendigo psychosis" is a very real mental disorder that causes one to be overcome with an urge to eat human flesh when other sources of food are readily available. That's right. There could be a little bit of wendigo lurking in someone reading this blog at this very moment. Maybe... even in someone WRITING this blog!

You've come a long way, Mr. Wendigo! Don't ever change!

Not a good time to be unable to run...

Recommended Reading

• "The Wendigo," by Algernon Blackwood
• "Pet Semetery," by Stephen King
• "Ithaqua," by August Derleth

Recommended Viewing

•  Ravenous, dir. Antonia Bird
• Wendigo, dir. Larry Fessenden
• The Last Winter, dir. Larry Fessenden

Memo from Midnight—September 9th, 1996

ARKHAM DELAPORE IS A WEALTHY MAN, but all his wealth won't protect him from accidents. Like the time he broke both of his feet while, ironically, walking down a lonely road into town to buy new shoes. In great pain, he hobbles to a nearby estate to secure aid for his plight. He barely reaches the front door to the great house before his feet completely give out on him and he crumbles to the door as he knocks on it. An eccentric old man answers the door and takes him under his wing, but something about the old man disturbs Delapore. This feeling proves to be a keen insight when the old man informs Delapore of a strange fact: Delapore's family line is cursed, and only the old man knows how to lift that curse!

Over the next several hours, Delapore remains trapped in the house. Unable to escape due to his terribly broken feet, Delapore is further put through hell under the old man's care. The old man's attempts to re-set Delapore's bones by pushing the shattered bones back into line (without any anesthetic, of course) only results in increasingly violent breakages and damage to his savaged feet, which only further traps Delapore in the house.


Then things start to get weird.


Now completely immobile, confined to an old hospital bed in the basement, the old man begins pulling live rats and bats out of Delapore's mouth, scratching the hell out of his throat in the process. The pain in Delapore's feet and throat grow so much that, after he begs the old man for anesthetic for hours, the old man finally grants—by breaking Delapore's back so he feels nothing at all below the neck.


No longer blinded by the pain, Delapore can see that the old man has broken and reset every bone in his body, transforming Delapore into a hideous, grisly work of biological "art," and that the old man is now finally ready to photograph Delapore's twisted and ruined body for a photo spread in the man's privately published magazine on "tombstone fashion." The name of the photo spread is, of course, "The Last of the Delapores." Poor Arkham Delapore is the cover story!


Finally, just after the old man finishes taking his photos of Delapore, the sun rises. As the cleansing light of the sun blasts through the window, it strikes Arkham Delapore and blasts him to cinders, conveniently masking all evidence of what the old man had done to him. 


Only the single issue of the old man's magazine remains to prove that Arkham Delapore ever lived at all.

Observations

• Some blatant Lovecraft stuff going on here... "Arkham" is the name of Lovecraft's famous city, while "Delapore" is the name of the protagonist of his story "The Rats in the Walls." To say nothing of all the Lovecraft stories where a traveler ends up being menaced by a spooky old man in a remote house...
• Back in 1996, I was working temp jobs, didn't have a car, and was doing a lot of walking to and from work. Didn't have a lot of money, and shoes are expensive, so I suspect my feet were hurting that September night.
• Not sure what the deal with the sunlight destroying Delapore is all about... although it's amusing to note that the old man is still out there, waiting for more victims to blunder into his clutches!