2012: The Year in Creatures

[Spoilers here, for Cabin in the Woods, mostly, so heads up.]

If I live to be a hundred, publish ten-thousand bestsellers, and cure cancer, one of my proudest achievements will still and always be that John Langan once referred to me as “the monster guy.” I love monsters (it’s right there in my bio), and I love movies about them, and it’s always been my intention to have a sort of unofficial award for Best Movie Monster of the Year every year, though I’ve never managed it. This is me, trying that again.

There are an almost unprecedented number of monsters in the movies these days. If I were ten years old right now, my head would probably explode. Except that somehow the monsters in the movies these days don’t really feel much like the monsters that were in movies back when I was ten years old and in love with monsters. Maybe it’s their very ubiquity that makes them feel different, maybe it’s the fact that CG monsters, no matter how good, will probably never feel quite as “real” as practical ones did. Or maybe it’s that most of the monsters these days aren’t really in “monster movies.” The majority of monsters I can think of on film in 2012 are in movies like The Hobbit (which was chock-a-block with creatures large and small and mostly large) or Men in Black 3 or Snow White and the Huntsman or even Prometheus, which is closer to a monster movie than the others, anyway. There are even the aliens in The Avengers, along with their giant flying prehistoric fish creatures. Basically, almost every big-budget action movie of the year had some kind of monster or another. And none of that’s taking into account kids’ movies like ParaNorman, Hotel Transylvania, or Frankenweenie (of which I’ve only seen ParaNorman).

[ETA: Shit, John Carter came out this year too? There’s another one for the list of big budget action adventure movies that were packed to the gills with monsters.]

Of all those monsters, though, none of them really stand out for me, none of them have the kind of personality that I’m looking for in a Monster of the Year. So this year, the award is going to go, not to any one specific monster, but to all the monsters in one particular movie: Cabin in the Woods, specifically to one particular sequence, one that anyone who’s seen the movie will instantly be able to identify, which is basically everything I’ve been waiting for my entire life. A representative segment is embedded below, but, and I cannot possibly stress this strongly enough, do not, under any circumstances, watch it if you haven’t seen Cabin in the Woods. It will ruin the shit out of it.

There are, of course, movies that had a chance of being in the running that I just haven’t gotten around to watching yet. Off the top of my head, I can think of the aforementioned Frankenweenie and Hotel Transylvania, as well as the (terrible, I’m told) sequel to Silent Hill. If I’ve made any startling or distressing omissions, please do not hesitate to let me know.