Editorials
Liked ‘Predator: Badlands’? Here Are 6 Other Creature Features Where We Rooted For The Monster
It’s not very difficult for movie monsters to outshine their human co-stars in genre films. After all, it takes good writing and believable performances to make a human character relatable. Even then, all you need is a cool design to make people project all sorts of complex feelings and motivations onto fictional creatures.
That’s why it makes sense that so many filmmakers grow up idolizing the monstrous antagonists of yesteryear, only to end up humanizing them in films like Peter Jackson’s King Kong or even Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water. And in honor of Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands becoming the latest Creature Feature to focus on the monster itself, we’ve decided to come up with a list highlighting six other monster movies where we were also rooting for the monster instead of its victims!
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be considering any Creature Feature that either intentionally or unintentionally justifies the monster’s killing spree – regardless of whether or not they’re the main character of the story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own monstrous favorites if you think we missed a particularly memorable example of this trope.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. Exists (2014)
Despite being a Found Footage film covering subject matter tailor-made for this format and boasting one of the directors behind the original Blair Witch Project, Eduardo Sánchez’s Exists plays out more like an over-the-top B-movie than a realistic depiction of Bigfoot, which is actually one of the reasons why I find it so damned entertaining.
Of course, part of the film’s appeal has to do with the fact that, at least from Bigfoot’s point of view, Exists is more of a Revenge Thriller than a horror movie. While I won’t spoil any of the details in case you’ve yet to see Sánchez’s oddball return to the Found Footage genre, suffice to say that it’s easy to sympathize with Sasquatch once you know his side of the story here.
5. I Am Legend (2007)
While we’ve yet to see a definitive adaptation of Richard Matheson’s apocalyptic classic (with George Romero’s Dead films being some of the only movies to engage with the spirit of the novel despite not being direct adaptations), the Alternate Ending of 2007’s I Am Legend at least tries to acknowledge the tragic twist present in Matheson’s source material.
After all, in this superior version of the film’s climax, it eventually becomes clear that the Alpha Darkseeker is only hunting Dr. Neville because, from his perspective, the Doctor has cruelly kidnapped and experimented on his mate like a day-time Boogeyman.
If that doesn’t justify a home invasion, I don’t know what does!
4. Cold Skin (2017)
“Man is the real monster” isn’t as innovative an idea as it used to be, but that’s not to say that monster movies are incapable of surprising audiences with particularly despicable human beings facing karmic justice in the form of otherworldly creatures.
In the case of Xavier Gens’ Lovecraftian thriller Cold Skin, what really makes the story stand out is the way that our main character slowly comes to terms with his own role in provoking the nightly wrath of the sea-people. Much like the aforementioned I Am Legend, it’s hard to blame these humanoid sea monsters for simply wanting to rescue one of their own.
3. Land of the Dead (2005)
“Looks like God left the phone off the hook.”
I’ve already written a whole article about my love of Big Daddy, the true protagonist of George Romero’s Land of the Dead, but it’s impossible to discuss justified movie monsters without bringing up the lone zombie who started a revolution. Motivated by the suffering of his undead brethren, it’s hard to argue against Big Daddy’s quest for social justice when you see just how monstrous the human characters can be.
While the final invasion of Fiddler’s Green is an undeniably gruesome sequence where many of the victims had nothing to do with the suffering experienced by Big Daddy and his zombified peers, you can’t help but cheer as the undead literally and figuratively gut the system that once oppressed them.
2. Wendigo (2001)
The weirdest film on this list by a wide margin, Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo is only barely a monster movie. After all, the majority of the artsy thriller’s runtime is spent following an impressionable young child who may or may not be correct in assuming that the strange events surrounding his family are being caused by the Native American spirit of the Wendigo.
This unreliable narrator of sorts allows Fessenden to change aspects of the original Wendigo legend to better fit his story, with the naïve protagonist re-imagining the cannibalistic creature as an avenging angel after his father gets into an unfortunate “hunting accident.” That’s why it’s safe to say that this version of the Wendigo is more of a spooky hero than anything else, as the mythical creature hunts down the rowdy locals who hurt Miles and his family.
1. The Fog (1980)
Arguably John Carpenter’s most underrated film, The Fog chronicles the plight of a sleepy seaside community that gets engulfed by an otherworldly mist carrying a legion of vengeful spirits. However, if you look past the main characters’ fear and confusion as their lives are both literally and figuratively torn apart by ghosts, it’s actually very easy to sympathize with the town’s destruction.
After all, like many classic ghost stories, The Fog gives our spooky villains a tragic origin: a century before the events of the film, the founders of Antonio Bay purposefully sank a ship full of sick sailors wishing to start a leper colony, and then proceeded to steal their valuables. One hundred years later, the ghosts are simply taking back what’s theirs and exacting justified revenge on the families that originally ordered their deaths.
This doesn’t sound very fair to the descendants of the original criminals, but you can’t really apply modern moral values to 19th-century revenants!
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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