The ONE Problem With Modern Monsters In Film And TV

In today's world of Stranger Things, A Quiet Place, and the bevy of other Monster content being made it seems a lot of the Monsters in these properties all start to look the same. It's not due to lack of creativity, but potentially the idea that limitless possibility has created a bottleneck for "what works". The days of rubber Monsters and guys in suits are long gone, but why do we remember those classic monsters so fondly over the modern CG versions?

#MovieMonsters #StrangerThings #Nerdstalgic

Edited by Dan Smiley
Written by Dave Baker

[lukeanatr]

Surprised colour wasn't mentioned. All these modern monsters are washed out greys and fleshy whites. Very rarely will you see a monster stand out visually with a vibrant colour like, for example, Swamp Thing's green or Dracula's black and red.

[tristanmestroni]

I'd say the problem lays more with producers telling artists to copy other things. I seriously doubt it's a lack of creativity. I bet some of these artists have absolutely wild ideas.

[anavaeru]

As an artist, I am always told “limitation is the mother of creativity”. It’s important to stick to a few core ideas and figure out the best way to express them in a meaningful way. Rather than take a bunch of generic ideas and rehash all of them. I think it’s important for modern day character and creature designs to serve a purpose and function rather than just check all the boxes on a list of arbitrary/stereotypical features.

[alexcanniccioni]

I'm a CGI artist for film, I've worked on some of the creatures shown in this video. I just wanted to point out that, when the creature is at the stage of making it look super realistic for the movie, which is where I start my work, the design of it, and the general colors of it, have already been choosen by the director and external vfx supervisor. The concept is already locked in, in 90%+ of the cases, and I have very little play in that area. The director and the vfx sup make all the calls in that regard and they want what's worked on other movies sadly, instead of innovating. CGI always gets blamed but it's the directors that want the same thing and crazy over the top shots on every movie!
I laugh when I hear people say that it should be all practical like in the old days. You can have beautiful props and sets like in dark crystal but as soon as the animatronics start to move, the illusion is broken and it looks like a puppet. You'd be amazed how much CG was right in front of you and unnoticed!

[jasper]

As a working artist, I can tell you it has less to do with the tools and a lot more to do with what investors are willing to take a risk on. It's like how in the nundies you could get funding for any game you wanted to make, so long as it's a first person shooter- and so we had a ton of shooters. In the studio, everything is geared towards what the investors will want, what is 'safe' and 'people will like'. It can even shape your personal work because you need to practice the things that will put food on your table. I work in both traditional and CG, and find the dogpiling on CG that goes on very tiresome.

[Sponska]

Can we get some love for the monster design in “Annihilation”? The shark crocodile, the screaming skull bear or even the shapeshifting alien at the end are all wonderfully creative and utterly terrifying.

[Imgema]

ALL monsters also have the tendency to "roar" before they attack and they all strike the same pose when they do so. Like stretching their hands back and head front while giggling it a bit to make it look like more "effort". It looks like shit and makes all monsters look less scary or intimidating. But it's one of the most overused tropes, along with the superhero landing pose.

[jacobjerny]

Also so many monster movies don’t pull enough on “local monsters.” Ie. The kinds of monsters that mothers would warn children about to keep them out of the woods. Seeing those old wives’ tales brought to life would be amazing.

[julio.dealmeidabranconeto]

"Everyone is just interested in creating what has suceed before".
That quote can be applied to LOT of other things related to the entertainment industry, not just the creation of monsters.

[saltmage]

They’re also pretty infuriating from a biology standpoint. I don’t mean that in the sense of “that body wouldn’t work”— the whole point of horror is that it wouldn’t work!
The issue is that the designers never consider the monsters ecological niche. Long, gangly limbs make a lot of sense for a jungle monster that needs to traverse canopies. Flower-faces make sense in a toxic atmosphere where you want to keep chemicals out of your mouth. Frills are understandable if there’s multiple monsters, and to settle disputes, they ram heads against each other like goats do.
But… those aren’t considered, even though they create MUCH more interesting and believable creatures. Why.

[legitimatemedicine]

I really don't think the blame lies with artists with too few limitations. Modern vfx artists have incredibly strict deadlines and have to give up their creativity to appease the executive that decide whether they can pay their rent. Corporate structure stifles creativity, collaboration doesnt.

[Roufus]

There's more to this than visual design. That is surely a part of it, but there's little to no personality in the actual actions of these creatures. They are very little more then just creatures, having little staying power or enough time on screen to actually do anything, or enough for characters to interact with when off screen to IMPLY personality in actions. The Xenonorph, Predator, the Thing, and all these yesteryear creatures weren't just memorable because of the texture of their suits. They were memorable because they DID things to differentiate them. They were written as characters in their own right. This slew of creatures has less personality than a bear in the woods. They are generic danger and nothing more.

[GameBreaker]

Here is the thing about limitless possibilities. It sucks!
Limitations is what makes creation interesting!
"Make me a monster." will yield much less interesting results as "Make me a sea-monster that can only enter land by night-time and does so to eat the first large-enough living creature it can find, but it has no teeth to do so."
The first request ends with copying one of the most popular designs, but the other one forces the writer or artist to think as there are so many things to look out for.

[Shaddiewolf]

I actually loved the MUTO designs from Godzilla. I thought they were unique and fresh in that their obvious design inspiration came from bugs. They weren't just some amorphous, vaguely human-shaped monstrosity with limbs and features that made no evolutionary sense, like the monsters in Pacific Rim for example. They kept the male smaller and gave him wings, while the female was a flightless powerhouse. This is just like real life phasmids (stick and leaf bugs), and the attention to sexual dimorphic detail was a real treat to see utilized in a film. The male in particular has a really unusual silhouette that I find very cool.

[MissMisnomer_]

I'm just going to say what many have been saying: many of these problems come down to producers and board executives pushing their noses where they don't belong in the process of creating these memorable monsters. It really kills creativity when you have 12 pencil-pushers breathing down your neck telling you to work faster, work harder, and replicate that monster that sold billions of dollars in ticket sales from 2 years ago. An artist can have a stellar idea that gets lost in transit when it is cut down too early before it can really flower.

I feel like that's a major reason why Del Torro's monsters are so memorable, even in this modern hellscape: he's the creative director, and often producer of his own films, so HE gets the final say of what flies. Artists can and LOVE going wild when they have a higher-up that LETS them have fun.

[Wright_Thoughts]

To be fair to the creators, the other thing that really matters here is just regular old diminishing returns. Those OG monsters are memorable in part because there just weren't very many monsters to remember. Now media is flooded with them. There are only so many ways to make a monster, and each new one is going to be less memorable, because it's also less new. I largely agree with the thesis, but after 1000 monster movies, the non-uniqueness is going to be a problem regardless.

[shrugsmemes]

as a designer and fulltime digital artist,

i actually too notice like. how common those monster designs are...admittedly they're more cool than scary. designers! up your game!

[epicazeroth]

I actually really like some of the Pacific Rim monsters, as well as the new Godzilla, because they break enough from this mold to be noticeable. The MUTOs and Skullcrawlers are very similar, but Godzilla and the beefier Kaiju have a totally different physicality that sets them apart for me.

[nickbecerra]

I don’t know, the Demogorgon still feels like terrifying eldridge monster that could kill you within seconds. And even though The Mind Flayer looks derivative in it’s meat forum, in its phy-mist forum, it looks like one of those impossible/ mind blowing creatures that could exist just beyond your line of site. It’s just a big silhouette, feels very classic to me.

[JoeOConnellAllNew]

Hands down, the most memorable, freakiest and most disturbing monster of 21st century cinema has to be the Pale Man from "Pan's Labyrinth." That thing was seriously disturbing. And I've no doubt at all that it was initially sketched out with a pencil on paper.