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Monster Movies & Evolution

by Frank J. Dello Stritto

As I write this piece, the news media are carrying a story on the latest confrontation between the proponents of Evolution and Creationism.  This stand-off is what is to be taught in public schools.  The controversy has been underway my entire life, and captures press attention every few years.  Today, evolution is hard to avoid.  It is explained regularly on public and cable television stations, and figures prominently in movies from ET to Jurassic Park.  Not so forty years ago. I was raised in North Arlington, New Jersey, a short distance outside New York City.  North Arlington is a true melting pot, and hardly a bastion of any particular social or religious belief. I have no memory of “Darwin” or “evolution” ever being mentioned in my school classes.  Yet by the time I graduated high school, my working knowledge of evolution—that living things evolve through natural selection into new species—was basically the same one I have now.  Where did I acquire this knowledge, that came not from school, church or family?  Terms in everyday usage, like “survival of the fittest” and “missing link,” might lead one to a Darwinian frame of mind, but somehow I had acquired specific knowledge of the theory of evolution.  From where? From monster and science fiction movies, the only part of the world of my youth that mentioned evolution. I was 10 years old when the first film version of The Time Machine was released, with its tale set in the year 802701 of Morlocks and Eloi that had evolved from humans.  I read the book shortly afterwards: the Morlocks were pretty close to the ones in the movie, but the nordic-looking Eloi of the movie are actually chimp-like creatures in H. G. Wells’ novel. Popular entertainment’s other great tale of evolution, The Island of Dr. Moreau, was also written by Wells.  The story—the inspiration for all scientists-who-play-with-evolution movies—does not explicitly deal with evolution, but its implicit references  were obvious to readers of 1896.  The classic film version that I saw on television in the 1960s was 1933’s Island of Lost Souls, whose Dr. Moreau is an ardent and overt Darwinian.  Once his secret is out—that the strange “natives” of his island are actually beast-men that he has created from jungle animals—he lectures the shipwrecked Edward Parker:

I started with plant life in London 20 years ago.  I took an orchid and upon it I performed a miracle.  I stripped a 100,000 years of slow evolution from it, and I no longer had an orchid, but what orchids will be 100,000 years from now…by a slight change in a single unit in the germ plasm.  It was a simple as that…I went on with this research just as it led me.  I let my imagination run fantastically ahead...Why not experiment with the more complex organisms?  Man is the present climax of a long process of organic evolution.  All animal life is tending toward the human form…What I have discovered among the cellular organisms—my  work!  My discoveries!  Mine alone!  With these I have wiped out 100,000 years of evolution …With each experiment I improve upon the last.  I get nearer and nearer…Do you know what it means to feel like God?”

Though I didn’t know it when I first saw the film around 1962, Moreau—played with smarmy perversity by Charles Laughton—has a very strange grasp of evolution. The future forms of life are not encoded in some “germ plasm.”  Evolution contends that future forms will be determined by organisms’ adaptations to future conditions.  Animal life will only “tend toward the human form” for those species that must do so to survive.  In a sense Moreau had usurped God, in that he guided life forms towards his idea of what they should be rather than the course that natural evolution might take them.  Thus, at the end of the movie when the leader of the beast men cries, “You made us Thing! Not man. Not beast. Part man. Part beast. Thing!”—he is absolutely correct.

That leader of the beast men—the Sayer of the Law—is played by Bela Lugosi.  Less than a year before, Lugosi starred in 1930s horror’s other tale of evolution, Murders in the Rue Morgue.  Universal transformed Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story into a mad doctor epic, with Dr. Mirakle out to prove his theories.  Mirakle is truly mad, but he does have a decent understanding of evolution:

The shadow of Erik the ape hangs over us all, the dark before the dawn of man…Here is the story of man. [Mirakle points to the mural illustrating the evolutionary trail from single cell organisms to humans]  In the slime of chaos, there was a seed, that rose and grew into the tree of life.  Life was motion.  Fins changed into wings; wings in ears.  Crawling reptiles grew legs.  Eons of ages passed.  There came a time when a four-legged thing walked upright.  Behold the first man!”

The details are a bit off, but the basic explanation of evolutionary theory is accurate enough.  Mirakle decides to prove his theories (for they are indeed his—the movie takes place in 1845, Darwin would not publish until 1859), by mixing the blood of an ape with a human woman.  Even contemporary reviewers saw the experiment as a blatant metaphor for cross-species breeding.  Bestiality, implied or otherwise, became an element of horror movies based on evolution.  In Island of Lost Souls, Moreau sees the culmination of his work as the mating of one of his beast folk with a human.  He first targets Parker to mate with Lota the Panther Woman.  When that plan stalls, Moreau sends the most lustful of his male creations to rape the first human woman to come to his island.

Both Murders in the Rue Morgue and Island of Lost Souls had a rough time with censors, and popular films would scarcely mention “evolution” for the next 20 years.  Mad doctors making ape-men and women in 1940s schlock horror usually do it by manipulating glands.  “Glands” became Hollywood’s by-word for “evolution.”  The actual word “evolution” is mentioned in only a few 1940s movies, and “Darwin” not   at all.

Evolution came back to the cinema by the very low road, via the sub-genre of abominable snowman movies.  The abominable snowman or yeti only became a household term after the first climbing of Mount Everest in 1953.  A year later came the yeti’s first film appearance in Snow Creature, followed over the next few years by Half Human, Man Beast and by far the best of the lot, Abominable Snowman (aka Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas).  Each film moves closer to an evolutionary explanation for the existence of the Yeti.  In Half Human, scientists perform an autopsy of a young ape man: 

Prof. Osborne: Would you say that over a period of 200,000 years this species’ system as it grew might slowly evolve into man?

Dr. Jordan: It might not take anything like 200,000 years.   If we could control the animal part of his brain, and effectively treat his glands, well I should say in that event in perhaps 10 or 15 generations…

Cross-species breeding again appears in Half-Human. Asked if such a creature could be attracted to human women, Dr. Jordan shrugs, “his anatomy at maturity would be almost human.” As the film’s conclusion John Carradine proclaims that work must continue to “learn the complete story of the evolution of man.”  In Man Beast the abominable snowmen are confined in the Himalayas by their need for cold climates, and plan to break out into the broader world by successive breeding with humans.  Varga, the leader of these yeti, is a fifth-generation cross-breed (and therefore only 1/32nd yeti), but still intolerant of warm climates.

Abominable Snowman, starring Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker, is an under-rated film, and arguably the best movie ever produced by Hammer.   As Cushing’s scientist embarks on a search for the yeti, the all-knowing Tibetan lhama advises him:

"Man is near to forfeiting his right to lead the world.  He faces destruction by his own hand.  Now, when a ruler king is near death, he should not be seeking to extend his realm, but take thought who might with honor succeed him.”
Cushing’s character believes the abominable snowman is a lost branch of primate evolution, distinct from man and the great apes.  These yeti are gifted indeed, and protect themselves with telepathic powers.  One-by-one the expedition members are wiped out until only Cushing remains.  His face-to-face encounter with a yeti utterly transforms him.  He returns to civilization swearing that yeti do not exist and are only a legend. 

The finishing school for my education was a film released about the same time as The Time Machine.  Inherit the Wind is a based the 1925 Scopes trial, also known as “The Monkey Trial”  (which like evolution itself also went unmentioned in high school).  I first saw the film when it was released to television in the late 1960s.  Hollywood’s two former Jekyll & Hydes—Frederic March and Spencer Tracy—debate evolution and creationism.  The dialogue is based largely on the actual transcripts of the trial, in which Clarence Darrow (the basis for Tracy’s character) squared off with William Jennings Bryan (March’s character).  In the end Tracy’s sagely pro-Darwin Jekyll humiliates March’s dithering creationist Hyde.  But March’s side, like Bryan’s, wins the court case.  As in real life, the debate is never really resolved.