Aliens and Monsters: Playing with Creatures from the Deep

I knew that a thousand fearful accidents might occur, the slightest of which would disclose a tale to thrill all connected with me.

Mary Shelley
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus
1818

What Is a Monster?

The word “monster” shares the same Latin root as “demonstrate.” And so, the examples of abnormal, hideous, imaginary creatures that haunt myths, ghost stories, and horror fiction and film mean to teach hearers, readers, and viewers a lesson. Something basic has gone wrong with the natural way of things; evil has broken loose. We humans are often to blame for the damage they do. The Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, describes Grendel the “demon grim,” as “unnatural,” “bigger than any,” and “warped in the shape of a man.” Mary Shelley brought Dr. Frankenstein’s hulking unhappy, taunted monster unnaturally to life in her 19th-century classic. And Godzilla was the product of strange, modern, manmade radiation. Science-fiction delivered up a wave of evil robots and malevolent androids, too—Terminators, Decepticons, Borgs, androids, and dysfunctional computers gone rogue. As authors and filmmakers played with these types, they discovered their antitypes—good robots, noble Transformers, reformed computers, and self-sacrificing giant atomic reptiles that turn into defenders by default. When humans join the good monsters in fantasy, battling the bad monsters, children and adults alike begin to conquer their own fears.

When something troubles them, children have to play with it until it feels safer.

Gerard Jones
Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super-Heroes and Make-Believe Violence
2002

I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed: when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon … I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. His eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down stairs.

Mary Shelley
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
1818

Orcs vs. Humans

In his novel The Hobbit (1937), and in the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–1955), J.R.R. Tolkien drew from medieval tales to imagine a race of monstrous orcs—pallid underground dwellers ambitious for conquest and hungry for man-flesh. These goblins resurface in electronic role-playing games that feature titanic struggles between humans and the forces of darkness. They appear vividly in the Warcraft strategy-game series that requires players to gather armies, mine and manage resources, and plan tactics for extended combat between equally-matched enemies on land, air, and sea, and spread across continents on the planet Azeroth and then to other worlds. This game, Warcraft II, sold more than two million copies after its introduction in 1996.

Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, but they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well…. They did not hate dwarves especially, no more than they hated everybody and everything.

J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit
1937

Dream Machines as Perfect Nightmares

Intricate wind-up automata and realistic dolls teeter at the boundary of a comfort zone. They sometimes feel creepy. At play we revel in balancing at the edge of the uncanny feeling that arises from an encounter with an object that moves and talks like it is alive, but is not. In fiction and film, artificial beings like robots and androids can be marvelous or monstrous, helpful or dreadful. Fritz Lang’s searing dystopian vision, Metropolis (1927), explored the frightful side with an evil maschinenmensch, a machine-human, a soulless robot version of the beautiful and innocent Maria. Real, human Maria, a gentle prophetess of industrial peace, had foretold an age of harmony between workers and owners. But bad, seductive, robot doppelganger Maria, devoid of a conscience and without a moral sense to guide her, roused the rabble and invited riot, destruction, and murder.

There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.

Human Maria
Metropolis
1927

Atomic Monster of Awful Warning

Atomic radiation awakened (or created) a “gorilla/whale,” the mutated gojira that emerged from Tokyo Bay with devastating results in Ishirō Honda’s mournful 1954 film, Godzilla. In the 1956 version, aimed at the American market, the beast towered at 400 feet—tall enough to smash the built landscape and set it afire with his “atomic breath.” The monster seemed to arise both as a result of the American atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and as an indiscriminant punishment for the Japanese militarists who started World War II in the Pacific. The film suggests that nature won’t tolerate such human outrages and so promises retribution. The original movie ends when a heroic Japanese scientist deploys a new, terrible weapon against the rampaging monster and takes the secret of his weapon with him to his death. Thus the movie’s second message: man is not meant to hold such power. Mechanical toys, like this one from 1977, sold well after a spate of new low-budget features refreshed the Godzilla character as Japan’s last defense against other, even worse monsters. Kids who played with these fantastic beings wielded them and vanquished them by turns, and so absorbed some of their strength.

This is Tokyo. Once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which up until a few days ago was entirely beyond the scope of Man's imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world. There were once many people here who could've told of what they saw... now there are only a few.


Steve Martin, Narrator
Godzilla: King of Monsters
1956

The only universal message in science fiction is as follows: There are minds that think as well as you do, or better, but differently.

Larry Niven
“The Alien in Our Minds”
Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction
1987

All-American Immigrant Superhero

Superman grew up in the country’s heartland, on a family farm in Smallville. He moved to Metropolis to work as a reporter. A decent fellow with a strong sense of fairness, he’s so well assimilated that it’s easy to forget that he had emigrated to Kansas. In fact, he’s an undocumented alien. He brought industriousness with him from his home planet, Krypton, along with special strengths, the ability to “leap tall buildings in a single bound,” for example, and a gift for flying “faster than a speeding bullet.” These talents came in handy as he fought for “truth, justice, and ‘the American way’” against a staggering variety of bullies and villains—Nazis, criminal gangs, sociopathic geniuses, and rogue generals from the old extraterrestrial neighborhood. Like immigrants, kids spend their early lives as newcomers to often unsettling new experiences. This is why they assume the identities and personalize the tales of the superheroes that they encounter in comic books, television programs, and films, or on this long-playing record, from 1975. At play kids feel the power.

A boy in a Superman costume is Superman until he removes the costume.

Vivian Paley
Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner
1984

Something is approaching from the southwest. It is now quite close!

Robby the Robot
Forbidden Planet
1956

Ray Guns: Tools of the Imagination

Fanciful blasters and ray guns became the props of fantastic cosmic sagas. Fueled by comic strips, radio serials, and books, and armed with toy weapons, American kids imagined themselves as heroes of their own space adventures. The backyard became a Marsscape, the picnic table an alien fortress. As Americans considered future travel and exploration in space, they often looked backward. Rocketry, developed during World War II, opened up a new, near-earth future frontier in the 1950s and 1960s; but as minds traveled to exploration and then to conquest, space-toy design partook of forms familiar in the Wild West. Spacemen and later spacewomen toted hand-held energyweapons that blasted out electron beams, radiated focused heat, or emitted atomic particle waves that disintegrated menacing aliens. The weapons could also paralyze rather than kill; a sub-lethal option that preserved fictional opponents and playmates for the plot twists of prolonged pretend play. A playmate merely stunned could revive to play some more.

I had one when I was five years old. It was the blue metal 'Buck Rogers Rocket Pistol.' I don't remember the sound it made but I clearly recall the color, the heft of it in my hand and the excitement and fantasies it was key to.

Leonard Nimoy
Ray Guns
1999

Playing an Unwinnable Game against Aliens

In 1978, the Japanese arcade game Space Invaders took the U.S. market by storm. This first version of the game set up a dramatic, schematic, suspenseful, no-win scenario. The player, a defender of Earth, wielded a laser-cannon emplaced in fortified bunkers at the base of the screen and moved it back-and-forth, firing upward. Return bolts from above eroded the ground fortifications. Rank upon rank of alien spacecrafts continued to descend, relentlessly. Destroy the invaders, and the game only replaces them more rapidly. The object of the contest? Holding out as long as possible. Note how Japan’s history from 40 years earlier echoes in the background of Space Invaders; after invading their neighbors at the outset of World War II, defenders of that besieged island went down to defeat after decisive, aerial attack.

Space Invaders jammed gnarled, bug-like aliens into columns and rows, then set them two-stepping to a simple heartbeat rhythm. Your job? Lobbing wire-thin missiles from a movable ground-based turret and chipping away as they slowly descended like a parade of hellish line dancers.

Matt Peckham
“Space Invaders”
Time
November 15, 2012

Unidentified Flying Play Object

This home-made artifact, the idea of a flying saucer, came into The Strong’s collections in 2000, without provenance or background explanation. Its silhouette seems to belong to an earlier era. Aliens fly in black triangles now, or in silver spheres, or in boxy craft that look like beach condominium buildings. But this toy seems not too far from the pie-plates flung upward and photographed in the late 1940s and 1950s; hoaxes that purported to document the arrival of real extraterrestrial crafts. The United States Air Force coined the technical term “UFO” in 1952, prudently declining to speculate and identify the thing up there with any specific language. Conspiracy theorists made the most of ambiguity. Hollywood helped us imagine and picture them vividly, too. Thanks to the magic effects of animator Ray Harryhausen, flying disks devastated Washington, DC, in the B-movie classic, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), slicing off the Washington Monument at its base, smashing into the Capitol building, and, alas, making a wreck of the Library of Congress.

The film shows a formation of round, bright objects going like a bat out of hell. They're also maneuvering in the formation, and at the end one of the saucers reverses its course and leaves the rest. But it's what the analysis shows that counts. It proves the things were round machines of some kind, making speeds and turns no plane on earth could duplicate.

Donald Keyhoe
Flying Saucers from Outer Space
1953

Playing Loose with the Truth

Hoaxes, often not especially nice, fun, or fair, lurk at the edge of play. And the scary thought of invading aliens have inspired clever pranksters. This game about invading aliens, for example, came at the end of a long line of fibs and frauds. The story began this way. In 1947, during the Cold War, American scientists from the top-secret “Project Mogul” that monitored Russian nuclear weapons tests launched a surveillance balloon carrying a disk-shaped instrument package for “listening” to far-off blast waves. It crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. At first, the U.S. Army Air Force information office admitted it had recovered a device. But soon they followed up the sketchy account with a fishy cover-story. Press officers insisted that this was merely a “weather balloon.” But the awkward fiction, a snow job if ever there were one, tempted the local press, always eager to sell newspapers, to claim that soldiers had “captured” a “flying saucer.” Conspiracy theorists revived “the Roswell Incident” in the late 1970s and drew in true believers. Then in 1995, a London-based video entrepreneur produced a fake documentary showing the dissection of a very dead buggy-eyed and apparently female “grey alien.” Advertising for the electric Alien Autopsy Game in UFO Magazine in 1996 promised that if you made “one wrong move … its screams will set you running!” Yikes!

We’re regularly bombarded with extravagant UFO claims, but only rarely do we get to hear about their comeuppance. This isn’t hard to understand. Which sells more newspapers or books? Which garners higher ratings? Which is more fun to believe? Which is more resonant with the torment of our times? Real, crashed alien ships, or con-men preying on the gullible?

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
1997

Alien vs. Predator

We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that aliens and monsters are always after us, in particular; sometimes they’re no fonder of each other. Such was the case with the horrible beasts from the Alien and Predator science-fiction/horror-film series. Inevitably, the two met, and when they did, nothing but trouble followed. Video games draw from fantasies about monsters and aliens to create an entirely new and vivid kind of play mediated by an artificial intelligence, the game console. Electronic games proved especially accommodating to the mutual bad feeling between these two extraterrestrial species. In this “first-person shooter” contest, players can choose their role in a complex storyline—playing the impervious Alien that drools acid from extendable mouthparts, the Predator, a hunter who can disappear, or the formidably armed Colonial Marines—all of whom are human, more or less. Players can play individually, or socially in the “multiplayer” mode, as they join teams of hunters and defenders.

Playful children tend to be less aggressive than children who don’t play. One of the important aspects of make-believe play is self-regulation and self-control. In make-believe play, children do a lot of smiling; they’re learning how to control some of their anger and aggression. Children learn that, in order to play, you have to be cooperative and helpful and share.

Reflections on Pretend Play,
Imagination, and Child Development: An Interview with Dorothy G. and Jerome L. Singer
American Journal of Play
Volume 6 Number 1
2013

Aliens Are from Mars and Venus

When toy manufacturers eyed a market for girls, they domesticated outer-space by downplaying the standard themes of combat and conquest and by playing up housekeeping and homemaking. Girls’ toys of the late 1960s made space less hostile and alien. These cute Mini-Martians, for example, could “take you to their world where make-believe is so much fun.” Described as “pinky-high” in advertising copy, they “dwelled at ease” in a carrying-case designed as a space-module, “a home so streamlined, and all their own.” This cozy Star House featured elevated sleeping bunks, closet space for space suits, a video screen to keep in touch with friends, and a transparent wall to observe (but not battle) the rockets or conquer the planets in the vacuum outside. Though transported off-world, this toy-set envisioned girls’ homey play that emphasized security over adventure and that promised friendly relationships rather than conflict.

Boys’ toys appear to encourage imaginary play that is at least somewhat removed from everyday life, for example, outer-space toys. Boys’ toys also involve more violence than girls’ toys do. Girls’ toys, on the other hand, encourage imagination of everyday domestic life and focus on appearance and relationships.

Judith Owen Blakemore
Gender Development
2008

“We Shall be Waiting for Your Answer”

The 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still opens with a disastrous misunderstanding. A space ambassador, Klaatu, has landed his flying saucer in Washington, DC, intending to deliver a message of hope to all humankind. He has brought with him a miraculous gift, a gesture of good will, a device that is small enough to hold in one hand yet will nonetheless enable study of the technology of spacefaring civilizations. But the device looks suspiciously like a ray gun. A skittish soldier shoots the visitor. And the bodyguard, Gort, a menacing, silver, eight-foot-tall alien robot-monster armed with a death-ray, vaporizes the army’s weapons. After recovering, escaping, and then conspiring with Earth’s most famous scientist, the visitor arranges a stunning demonstration of extraterrestrial power, a pulse that instantly disables the world’s electrical systems. Klaatu then delivers an ultimatum: the Earth must cease its warlike ways or “be reduced to a burned-out cinder.” Kids in pretend battle, who overheard the prospects of nuclear war and felt its overtones, recruited this action figure to tip the field of battle in their favor.

I am leaving soon, and you will forgive me if I speak bluntly. The universe grows smaller every day, and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all, or no one is secure. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk.

Klatu’s Sililoquoy
The Day the Earth Stood Still
1951

The Right Interceptor for the Age of Anxiety

Occasionally, fictional aliens wanted to meet us and civilize us. But mostly, science-fiction films in the 1950s thrilled audiences with personalized extra-planetary threats: “radar” moon-men, vengeful Martians, lost planet airmen, mole-men, a “man from Planet X,” cat-women of the moon, phantoms, robot-monsters, strangers from space, killers from space, gamma people, and teenagers from outer space. These fiends stood in for the real worry of the Cold War era, incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with “city-busting” hydrogen bombs. If Soviet missiles could not be intercepted, luckily space monsters and saucer-men could. That is: if you could pilot an interceptor like this one, from 1960, you could participate in the common defense of Earth.

Any sort of ship you have to learn to pilot—it takes a long time, a new full set of reflexes, a different and artificial way of thinking. Even riding a bicycle demands an acquired skill, very different from walking. As for a spaceship, oh brother! Spaceships are for acrobats who are also mathematicians.

Robert A. Heinlein
Starship Troopers
1959

Conclusion: Following Monsters and Aliens down Fantasy Pathways

The monsters of old and the aliens of the future hold much in common because wonder and play power the human imagination to travel along familiar channels. Fantastic beings shift their shapes and transmute their very matter. They travel at unimaginable speed. They communicate without speaking aloud. They fight with desperate strength. They brandish weapons of unthinkable power. When ill-intentioned, they are always outsiders, outcasts, exiles or invaders, vengeful creatures from the underworld or the ocean deep, or jealous beasts from outer space. Against these tormentors, the Earth offers up valiant heroes, sorcerers armed with mysterious wands of power, or space warriors equipped with particle beam weapons just out of range of current technology. It’s magic either way.