A science-fiction monster can be explained scientifically
and combated technologically.
We have to kill them. It's that simple.
The monster boils down all of our fears
into something that we can see.
I literally went under my seat,
and I said to my dad,
"Tap me on the shoulder when it's over."
That's a big part of what science fiction is...
It is.
...taking that fear of that creature in the forest
and now letting us feel it in a safe place.
It's fun to be in a darkened theater
and imagine your world ending because of a giant lobster.
I have dreams. Creatures are coming at me.
Must go faster.
Suspense starts in the stomach...
and it goes up to the throat,
and then it comes out as a scream.
It's this primeval instinct in us
to escape the bear in the woods.
Will is alive.
Science-fiction monster movies
allow us to explore those dark parts of ourselves
that we don't want to admit actually exist.
This is a creature who asks why he is here.
What is he for?
Who created him?
And we always beat them at the end,
which was our way of ‭keeping the bogeyman at bay.
You're a horror guy, as you tell me
every time we talk about this.
So the question is, where is that inter-zone,
that crosstalk between horror and science fiction?
The great distinction is the fuel for the early horror tales.
It has to be spiritual.
It comes from the belief of good and evil.
And then there comes a point in Western literature
in which the element includes, now, science.
Science. So, today, it's radioactivity,
genetic engineering, robotics.
And, before, our monsters came from
folklore, mythology, demons, the supernatural world.
We created monsters as composites
that warn us about the possible adversity of the natural world.
And one proof of that --
I read somewhere that dragons are universal
because they are the composite
of the three main predators of the anthropods.
- Snakes. - It's snake, feline,
and large, rapacious birds.
So it's a mash-up of archetypes.
Yeah, of things that you need to be afraid of.
So, fear of teeth and claws and being chased
and all those things is a healthy thing.
And it cycles in our brains in our nightmares
and in our monster movies.
I actually think dinosaurs are the best monsters
because they actually existed.
Like, a lot of the crazy monsters in films
and in science fiction,
you can console yourself by saying,
"Yeah, but it's not real. Really, it's not real,"
whereas with dinosaurs, you can't do that.
They were real.
Like, it makes it more scary.
"Jurassic Park" really deserves classic status.
I, myself, remember gasping --
and I think a lot of people in the audience did --
at the first shot, where they pull back
and give you a wide-angle view of this giant, giant dinosaur.
We, as an audience,
are going through exactly what the characters are going through.
We're seeing, for the first time ever in human history,
dinosaurs alive.
When I was a kid, I used to take my popsicle sticks,
and I would basically glue them together
in the form of a dinosaur, and I would bury it,
and then I would wait a week.
Until it fossilized?
And then I would go looking for it again.
That was my closest moment
of trying to be an amateur paleontologist.
Cut to years later, and you're working on "Jurassic Park."
"Jurassic Park," yeah. You know, Michael Crichton
just came up with a perfect concept.
I'll tell you one conceptual line.
I'm writing a book about dinosaurs and DNA.
And that's all he would say.
Right. Well, I got sent the book.
I got to the scene where the Tyrannosaurus rex
licks the windshield with the kids inside...
...and said, "I got to make this movie."
I never even finished the book.
I called up, and he said, "Steven just bought it."
- Well, what happened was... - And you know what?
You know what?
It was the very, very best thing
that could've happened
because I would've make it like "Aliens."
I would've made an R-rated,
scare-the-crap-out-of-you movie,
and you made it just scary enough,
but still a movie for kids.
Cause I was the 12-year-old me...
...telling that story.
Well, some of those dinosaurs, as you know,
were Dennis Muren and CGI, special effects.
Steven Spielberg would be on a bullhorn off-camera
and be going, "Argh," making some dinosaur sounds...
Camera.
...and we'd be looking at a tennis ball.
But some of them were Stan Winston puppetry.
When we came to this clearing
and saw this life-sized,
full-sized Triceratops,
and the seven people who were making it blink and breathe
and do things were kind of hidden behind it...
...oh, that was something.
Steven Spielberg -- he wanted the dinosaurs
to have some monster abilities
and to be seen as monsters,
but I was brought in to make sure that 6th graders
didn't send him nasty notes about things being wrong.
There was a scene
where the Velociraptors come into the kitchen
and are chasing the children around,
and Steven wanted the raptors to come in
and stick out a tongue,
like a lizard or a snake would do,
and I said, "We know for sure that dinosaurs did not do that,"
and so we decided the raptor looks through the window,
and it snorts, and it fogs up the window,
and only a warm-blooded animal can do that.
Science fiction monster movies are very much
about the monster of humanity.
In "Jurassic Park,"
our scientist, John Hammond,
very much wants to re-create dinosaurs
to prove that he can do something no one else has done,
and that creates a chain of disasters
that in turn, creates a physical monster --
the literal manifestation of the bad actions of those humans.
I wanted to show them something that wasn't an illusion,
something that was real,
something that they could...
...see and touch.
John Hammond represents a ringmaster.
He's the Ringling Brothers.
...of bringing these species back to life.
And his intentions are pure.
He wants everybody to come see these dinosaurs.
He wants children to get tears in their eyes
when they marvel at these creatures
that they only could see in storybooks.
And at the same time,
he is blind to what he's doing...
...like all mad scientists.
And Jeff Goldblum is such a great conscience.
He's the voice of the audience.
He says, "Nature will find a way."
He says that, "Life finds a way."
Life finds a way.
And he's right every single time.
Life breaks free.
It expands to new territories,
and it crashes through barriers, painfully,
maybe even dangerously, but, well, there it is.
You're implying that a group composed
entirely of female animals will...breed?
No. I'm simply saying that life,
finds a way.
This idea that, in "Jurassic Park,"
the female dinosaurs are capable of changing
so that they can reproduce is brilliantly foreshadowed
when Sam Neill gets into the helicopter
before they get to Isla Nublar,
and he's got two seat belts that are both female,
but, of course, they can't stick together.
So what he does is he ties them in a knot around his waist,
and that is -- that's the whole film, isn't it?
It's the whole idea that life will find a way.
Evolution is an innovator that finds a way to survive,
even though, against all odds, it shouldn't be possible.
I mean, it's quite clearly the moral at the heart
of "Jurassic Park" is that you can't control nature,
and you shouldn't play God,
but I kind of left "Jurassic Park"
really wanting to see dinosaurs come to life.
Theoretically, we can retroengineer a bird,
genetically, to make an animal
that would have dinosaur characteristics.
We could, right now, produce an animal
that would have a dinosaur-like head.
It would have arms and hands instead of wings,
some semblance of teeth, and we're not finished yet.
We're still trying to deal with the tail,
but when it really comes to the science of making dinosaurs,
or making anything genetically,
I think it's actually a cool thing to do,
and I don't see anything wrong with it at all.
Are we seeing a pattern here?
The early atomic scientist...
...the contemporary AI scientist --
everybody only sees the rosy future...
...the upside.
As they said on the "Westworld" poster,
"What could possibly go wrong?"
And that gets the audience excited
because the audience is going to see what went wrong,
not what went right.
- Who cares about what went right? - It's not fun if it goes right.
It's no fun at all.
You're quoted as saying
that "Frankenstein" is your autobiography,
so are you Frankenstein's monster,
or are you Frankenstein himself?
- No, the creature. - You're the creature?
What happened to me is, when I was growing up,
and I felt different to the world
I was growing up, and I did feel out of place,
and when I saw the monster play with forces
that where outsized to his comprehension...
...I thought, "This creature represents me."
And there was a purity and an innocence to him.
And I empathized completely with him,
and I felt, immediately, a kinship,
and I thought the impact, emotionally, for me...
...was that big,
was life-transforming.
Prometheus ascending!
When you look back, the foundation of science fiction
can technically be put on the shoulders of Mary Shelley.
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"
was very much the birth of science fiction.
Shelley is one of the first authors to think about science
and explore its impact on society.
Mary Shelley -- she was living at a time
when science was beginning to gain a foothold,
so there was a belief
that the world was understandable in a way
that didn't involve religious or mythological mysteries.
Mary Shelley was visiting science lectures --
people like Galvani -- to see how newly discovered electricity
was involved in living processes.
The story of "Frankenstein,"
it's really about a scientist who has the arrogance to think
that he alone can create a living being.
This idea of being able to create a human being
from bits and pieces of other human beings --
it's so potent,
and it is echoed all over the movies,
but that's when it really is crystallized.
In the first film version,
Thomas Edison's 1910 "Frankenstein,"
the creature is made not through electricity,
but through a chemical process.
Thomas Edison was considered the father of electricity,
so he didn't want electricity to have any negative connotations.
In the '50s and '60s,
Victor Frankenstein creates his creature through atomic energy.
In Kenneth Branagh's 1990s version,
we have lots of images of the creature itself
shooting from one tube to another tube
until it's finally taken out of the final tube
by Frankenstein in a very wet and messy birthing scene.
And so, literally, he's created the first test-tube baby.
In the famous 1931 film,
Dr. Frankenstein has a dead body on a gurney,
and then the body twitches.
At that point, Dr. Frankenstein
falls in somewhere between hysterical...
He's alive!
...and triumphant.
In a way, this sums up all the fears
and all the hopes you would have about making synthetic life,
how awestruck we should be that we could do it,
and how scared we should be that we could do it.
Now I know what it feels like to be God!
The problem of "Frankenstein," of course, is that,
when Victor Frankenstein creates something that's ugly,
he throws it out of his laboratory,
and this transforms the creature into a monster
who will eventually kill those people he loves most.
The subtitle of the book is "The Modern Prometheus",
which had to deal with the myth of Prometheus
stealing fire from the gods and bringing it down to Earth,
which was a violation of the natural order.
The creature realizes
that he is that violation of the natural order.
Did you ever consider the consequences of your actions?
This is a creature who asks why he is here.
What is he for?
Who created him?
Who made this happen?
Those are fascinating questions,
and those questions begin with the Frankenstein monster.
So as long as people are thinking about that,
people will be making "Frankenstein" movies
or movies that are very obviously based on "Frankenstein."
I'm working on something that'll change the world
and human life as we know it.
Somehow, I get the feeling you don't get out much.
"The Fly" is really an updating of the "Frankenstein" myth,
of trying to play God with new technologies
and the idea that scientific hubris
can ultimately lead to destruction.
So I invent this teleportation device,
and I experiment on myself,
but, unbeknownst to me,
there's a fly in the pod.
The audience sees it,
but I don't see it...
...and then I, sure enough, I come out of the other thing.
I seem to come out okay at first,
- but, by and by... - What's this?
...you realize that my DNA has been fused
with the the fly's DNA.
You don't see an instant transformation as you do in,
say, "The Hulk."
What you see in "The Fly" is a far more realistic portrayal
of what is likely to happen in that situation,
which is a slow and disgusting breakdown of cells
to the point where, basically, he's falling apart
as he is slowly mutating into a revolting hybrid
of these two distantly related species.
I'm becoming Brundlefly.
So I remember five different stages of makeup.
I'd have to get there at 3:00 in the morning
or 2:00 in the morning
because I had some prosthetics, you know?
And I had funny teeth, too.
I had a few different stages of teeth.
I got a kick out of it.
What these movies grapple with is that question of,
"What happens when we do something we shouldn't?"
and, "What are the ramifications of that?"
and, "What is the fallout?"
And these movies are about that.
The fallout is...
...monsters.
To me, when I see a science-fiction monster movie,
it's about taking our angst and our fantasies
and our terrors and making an escape...
...a nightmare that's safe.
'Cause when you're left alone with your nightmare
at 3:00 in the morning,
you're not safe,
but when you go into a movie theater...
...you're safe. There's people around you.
And you know it's going to last
a certain number of minutes.
That's right. It's a defined thing.
And things are going to get resolved.
Except for "Alien."
I saw it on opening night, in '79
when it came out, in a big theater,
and, man, people were screaming so hard
they were throwing their popcorn.
Me, too. I mean, there's that figure of speech --
"Hide under your seat."
It was not a figure of speech.
I literally went under my seat,
and I said to my dad,
"Tap me on the shoulder when it's over."
The Xenomorph from "Alien" and "Aliens"
is the best movie monster ever
because it is the scariest alien monster ever.
I think what is terrifying about the Xenomorph
is it was barely on-screen.
It was very underlit, lots of flashing lights,
and I think that's very much the power
of the first "Alien" movie, as a scary movie,
is it left a lot to the imagination.
It's, like, the classic monster movie,
and on top of it, you know, it was the first woman heroine
which we have seen in a major motion picture.
- You there, Ripley? - I'm right here.
I was sent the script of "Alien,"
and I think, frankly,
commercially speaking, they thought,
"Let's make the hero a woman.
No one will ever guess that this young woman
turns out to be the lone survivor."
And I like the purity of that.
We weren't making any kind of statement,
and I think the other reason, of course, it appealed to me
was that it was a rockin' good part for a woman.
I'm for killing that damn thing right now.
Well, let's talk about killing it.
We know it's using the air shafts.
Will you listen to me, Parker?!
- Stop talking... - Shut up!
So what possessed you to take Ripley,
who wasn't given a first name,
none of them had first names...
...and say, "Let's make her a woman"?
You know, I hadn't realized
the importance of women's lib
and how women aren't really included
because I was brought up with a very strong mother.
So I had already accepted that women will rule
eventually anyway, whatever we do.
So you weren't making a statement.
You were just observing the world
- that you knew... - I said, "Why not?"
To give Ripley the punch and power...
...was the right thing to do.
Yeah, and science fiction has always been a genre
that pushed boundaries...
...of gender, conformity, racism.
It's a stage where anything goes.
Her character is about facing her fears,
and, over the course of a number of films,
she became a, you know,
kind of a global icon for feminism.
It really was the first movie
where you had a woman that wasn't the victim,
and that was major.
For years, it was a man's job
to slay the monsters in science fiction.
The women, at best, where either sent home so they'd be safe...
Stay here, Kay.
...or they had to get rescued from the monsters,
or, even worse yet, they themselves were the monster.
She'll tear up the whole town until she finds Harry.
Yeah, and then she'll tear up Harry.
Ash, when Dallas and Kane are off the ship,
I'm senior officer.
Ridley Scott did such an amazing job in portraying
Ripley as a straightforward human,
and then Jim Cameron took it to a whole new level
with "Aliens,"
setting up the relationship of Ripley and Newt...
Hard to believe there's a little girl under all this.
...and then paralleling it
with the queen and her offspring.
The Queen Alien has sort of organic,
flowing lines to her because she's feminine.
She's hideous, but she's also very beautiful,
which is fitting of an elegant,
you know, matriarch of an alien society.
So by the time I kill her children...
...and try to escape with mine...
Grab onto me!
...it's not like bad versus good.
It's two mothers fighting for the life of their offspring,
and I think it's done with, you know, respect for both species.
Happily, he gives Ripley the edge.
Get away from her, you bitch!
I watched "Aliens" for the first time when I was 12,
and I had never realized that women could do
the kind of things that Sigourney Weaver was doing on- screen,
or look that way or talk that way.
The whole thing just blew my mind.
There was this primal power that she had...
Come on!
...based on just this desperate need to survive
and save this child.
And I think that becomes that archetype of that female hero.
I think an audience likes to see women succeed and slay monsters.
There wouldn't be as many franchises of the "Alien" movie
if it didn't work.
When the original Sigourney Weaver Ripley arch
of the "Aliens" franchise ends,
we get a brand-new awesome female monster-killer
Alice, in "Resident Evil."
When "Resident Evil" came up, I was just really excited.
I was a huge fan of the video game.
Video games, you know,
I think it answers something very elemental in human beings,
which is we're fascinated with dangerous situations,
and the closest we could get to them
without actually being in danger, you know, we love.
The "Resident Evil" universe is all about "Frankenstein."
I mean, the Umbrella Corporation is using their technology
to create these things
that could very well go out of control.
T-virus manifesting itself in genetic mutation.
And surprise, surprise -- they do!
One of the things that makes Alice a strong character
is she fights what people might believe
is, like, unbeatable odds...
...but she doesn't give up,
and, ultimately, over six movies, she triumphs.
I think monsters tell us everything about ourselves.
I think the things that we're the most scared of
makes us who we are, in a way.
Monsters, in a lot of ways, are representing our fears.
Are we gonna go too far?
What do we still need to learn about this world?
What are we not prepared for?
Which is why, I think, it's so powerful
and cathartic to see a woman slay her monster --
and men, too --
but to see that figure of a woman
literally staring down her fear and conquering it...
We often think about science fiction
as a genre that celebrates boys and their toys,
and yet there is a space for people of all different races
and genders and creeds and colors --
and perhaps even species,
since we're being science fictional --
to explore their hopes and fears and convey them to others
about life in a high-tech society.
Science fiction, at its best, questions,
challenges our belief in, what are we...
...and what makes us human?
Where do we fit in society?
And what shakes us, or tries to shake us up.
So monsters are above nature --
superhuman or suprahuman.
They allow us to question things
that are eminently human.
Right. Now, don't you think that the film "The Thing"
follows that same principle
of making us fear the other in human form?
Absolutely, and that's the point of the story
that I always am fascinated in the Carpenter film...
...because, ultimately,
it's a matter of place in the universe,
and that's what makes that story so important.
Somebody in this camp ain't what he appears to be.
Right now, that may be one or two of us.
By spring, it could be all of us.
So how do we know who's human?
"The Thing" is an incredibly influential movie in science fiction
because it gets at one of our most basic fears --
that we might not be able to tell the difference
between good and evil, or between ourselves
and an evil alien impostor.
The film follows the story of a group of scientists
in the Antarctic
who find a frozen alien.
What is it?
When the alien thaws, it turns out to be
an incredibly hostile, shape-shifting organism
that wants nothing more than to absorb us
and conquer the world.
As it absorbs people, it becomes unclear who is real
and who has become the monster.
We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood,
and we're gonna find out who's The Thing.
You've got a monster story,
and we're going to solve the monster story
by doing experiments.
That is classic science fiction.
The blood from one of you Things
won't obey when its attacked.
It'll try and survive...
...crawl away from a hot needle, say.
The blood-testing scene in the "The Thing"
is one of the great scenes in, I think, in all movies.
All the protagonists are tied up.
At least one of them is actually the monster itself,
and watching Kurt Russell testing the blood...
...where the tension is just unbelievable.
This is pure nonsense.
It doesn't prove a thing.
We'll do you last.
When that thing screeches up...
...you know...
...that was worth the price of admission.
The Thing in "The Thing," --
in some ways, it's one of, I think, the, like, apexes of
that kind of old-school, analog monster.
Like, it was actually there on the set
with the tentacles and the teeth.
I mean, this is pre-CGI.
Guys were doing this kind of stuff.
But the ultimate threat here in "The Thing"
isn't even the monster itself.
It is what The Thing evokes --
the paranoia and terror that engulfs that station.
It isn't Bennings.
"The Thing" was based on a story, "Who Goes There?"
by the most influential magazine editor,
really, in the history of science fiction --
a writer named John W. Campbell Jr.
Did you have any plan in mind
as to what you wanted "Astounding" to be?
I wanted it to be a good science fiction magazine,
and, oh, yes --
I wanted to learn how to be an editor.
So he began to establish a group of writers for his magazine
that became the pantheon of modern science fiction --
Robert Heinlein, for example, Isaac Asimov.
John W. Campbell Jr. -- what he wanted were people
who would write stories in which the science was realistic --
realistic in the sense that the scientific culture
be represented accurately.
He certainly shifted science fiction
from boys' adventure stories in space
to serious considerations of what the future might be like,
and that set up what some writers think of as the golden age.
Campbell said he got the idea
the story "Who Goes There?"
from a very personal incident that happened to him as a child.
One day, he came home, saw his mother in the kitchen,
and started talking with her and became increasingly confused
by her odd responses to his questions.
It wasn't until his mother actually walked in
that he realized he had been talking to her twin sister.
This sort of uncanny moment --
the moment when he thought he saw someone he knew,
and it turned out to be a different person --
stayed with him for all his life.
You ain't tying me up.
Then I'll have to kill you, Childs.
Then kill me.
"The Thing" is definitely about the monster within
and how those monsters within us
that would allow the fear to overtake you to the point where,
your friend, you don't trust.
You go down that road,
and it can be monstrous.
I would say that, you know, "Pacific Rim"
is foursquare science fiction...
...robots and giant monsters,
you don't get any more science fiction than that.
"Pacific Rim" -- what I love is
all the myriad of solutions
that we can come up with to kill 25-story monsters.
The one solution that probably would come out last is,
"Let's create 25-story robots."
Robots, right.
The great majority of monster movies,
you killed the monster at the end.
So it's you stand that fear up,
and then you kill it...
...and you kill it by ingenuity, by willpower,
by courage, whatever it is,
and so I think there's an element
that we create in the monster so we can destroy it...
...like in the '50s,
in all these "B" Monster Movies.
I certainly saw "The Blob" when I was kid,
and the fact that some oozing mass of sticky goo
is going to kill me is a really good idea.
It's a very B-movie, horrible, stupid idea,
but it actually works pretty well.
"B" Movies in the 1950s emerged
because the horror genre went into decline,
and something had to fill the void,
and science fiction was just the right fit
for independent producers
with just enough rubber monster suits
to create something on the cheap.
Well, "Creature From the Black Lagoon"
was probably the first one that I remember getting sucked into,
and it kept me from swimming in lakes for years.
"The Killer Shrews" -- I remember being quite frightened by it.
At the end,
people are claustrophobically in this sort of shed.
I thought that was terrible,
and I still have dreams of fangy kind of creatures.
There's a 1953 film called "Robot Monster".
The monster was a guy in a gorilla costume
with a diver's helmet,
made for $20,000 -- completely ridiculous,
and yet audiences bought it, and it made over $1 million.
The monster movies of the 1950s --
you can see very clearly
the way they sprung out of World War II
and the atomic bomb and this incredible fear
about what had been unleashed.
Never in the history of the United States,
a monster of such size and power...
People had discovered that radiation
can change genetic structures and create,
well, odd kinds of monsters.
The granddaddy of all atomic monster movies
has got to be "Godzilla".
"Godzilla" embodies
the anxiety and the terror of a...
- ...nuclear attack. - Of the nuclear age.
Sure. It's not a surprise that it emerged
as a science-fiction neo-myth from Japan,
which had actually been bombed by nuclear weapons.
And in that way,
monsters respond to the zeitgeist
at the time that they are created.
Right. The zeitgeist.
So monsters are incredibly apt
at embodying the abstract in flesh.
"Godzilla" was made less than a decade
after the atomic bombings,
and there were a lot of issues that were taboo.
Japanese people could not speak amongst themselves
or in the media about Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
about the defeat, and about the fact that Japan,
even after the war,
remained subservient to the United States.
In Japan, you know, you can't make a movie about that stuff,
but what if you make a movie about a giant monster who --
Americans invent this bomb...
...it wakes up the monster,
and one of our cities gets destroyed
and leaves radiation everywhere, and they were like,
"Oh, yeah. That's fine. You can make that movie."
It was like, "Okay. Cool. It's called 'Godzilla.'"
In Japan, the name is "Gojira."
It is a combination of two words --
"Gorira," which means "Gorilla,"
and "Kujira," which means "Whale."
So it literally means "Gorilla whale."
The legend is this was a nickname
of an overweight Toho Studios employee.
The producer heard that nickname
and loved it so much, he gave it to the monster.
The first film is hard-core,
very meaningful science fiction,
and then, you know, they obviously think,
"What can we do next?" and,
"Well, let's have Godzilla fight another creature."
It became a bit silly.
And so Godzilla was transformed
from being this vengeful force
to being more of a protector and defender for Japan.
In our film, we wanted to bring back a little bit of
the kitschy-ness in a modern concept.
Because Godzilla is such a beloved character from Japan,
the creators of "Godzilla" had a bible.
It was this thick, and in it was all the "Do"s and "Don't"s --
what it can do, what it can't do.
And we, like, threw it away.
I hired one of the production designers of "Independence Day,"
Patrick Tatopoulos,
to kind of give me a new Godzilla,
and I said, "If I cannot make that Godzilla,
I'm not making the movie at all."
The first shot that we had about "Godzilla"
was a shot from the street, looking up.
And the first question we asked is,
"What's happening with the genitals?
Should we see them?"
And it's funny because, a joke as it is,
Emmerich says, "You know,
I think she should be a female.
She should have kids."
In many regards, we were trying to reinvent Godzilla.
I think that the people in Japan felt,
"Don't reinvent our Godzilla.
We like our Godzilla just the way he is."
I think, when you're trying to make
a science-fiction monster movie,
you're always looking for what's it really about?
When we made our "Godzilla,"
we definitely wanted it to be serious again.
You know, at the end of the day, it's a giant monster movie,
two massive creatures smacking the crap out of each other.
But all that stuff is pointless if it hasn't got something
at the heart of it that it represents,
and so I feel like there's a sort of Western guilt
that we don't really acknowledge or talk about.
We nuclear-bombed a country,
and I think Godzilla, in our film,
was representing that coming back to haunt us, in a way.
Science-fiction movies could be very cathartic.
The reality is, in all these movies,
humankind ends up defeating the monster,
the world is saved,
and we come together when we most need to.
It's hard to come up with an original story.
I mean, there's a lot of writers out there
nodding their heads.
I think we're all influenced by the stories
that came before us going back thousands of years,
by myths, legends, fairy tales.
I think the worst films just refer to other movies.
The best films somehow connect you to something
that you've actually experienced.
Well, "Stranger Things" has done that very well.
It touches on a lot of the movies that you and I
and others have made, but it does it brilliantly.
It's a amalgam of genres...
...but all having to do with one thing,
and that is you love those kids...
... and you do not want anything bad to happen to them.
- Right. Right. - And "Stranger Things,"
for all of its brilliant imaginings...
...are about those characters.
All I know is Will is alive.
Will is alive.
He's out there somewhere.
All we have to do is find him.
We had a pretty steady, healthy diet
of science fiction and horror movies growing up.
They very much influenced "Stranger Things."
A lot of our favorite stories and movies and books
growing up all revolved around children
dealing with a terror of some kind.
Yeah. I mean, like, Spielberg has a history
of putting children in traumatizing situations.
So does Stephen King.
They would take very relatable characters,
like families and kids,
who, it felt like our family,
it felt like our friends, it felt like us,
and then put them into these extraordinary situations.
"Stranger things" -- it's about a kid who goes missing.
He vanishes into, like, thin air.
And I'm one of his best friends, and we go look for him.
We go on crazy adventures, and they confront this girl.
She has powers.
Then we confront other things like monsters --
not just monsters, but one monster...
the Demogorgon.
The Demogorgon has sort of this, like,
ultimate movie- or TV-monster feel to it,
almost like the prototypical nightmare monster.
We wanted to create a monster
that we could build practically,
and we wanted to go back to that
old-school style of filmmaking,
and the thing is that once you commit to that --
to building a suit -- it limits you.
It was also very important that it was very weird
because, to us, you know, the weirder a design is,
the scarier it is.
And sometimes it's simple things,
like removing -- taking the eyes off.
By the creature not having a face,
it really evokes the same idea of something in the shadows --
a figure that you can't quite make out,
but you have a familiar shape.
But without any eyes, you don't know where it's looking,
what it's thinking, which is terrifying.
Demogorgon -- he's really tall.
I would say he's probably, like, 7-foot-1 --
Shaq's height.
His face looks like a tulip, a flower,
and it opens up with all this teeth and slime.
We can't wrap our brains around what this thing is,
and we can't pinpoint what to do and what it is.
That's why we're afraid of it, and it looks pretty creepy,
and it's trying to kill you.
The Demogorgon head was the most remarkable part
of the entire Demogorgon suit.
Because I don't see the way I normally see,
I don't hear the way I normally hear,
it makes it easier to feel like the monster.
The direction I was given by the Duffers was very concise --
that I was the shark from "Jaws,"
that I was this creature that came from
this other dimension to feed.
I think monsters who threaten children
are particularly terrifying
because it triggers this response in humans
to protect the young.
Children are the ultimate vulnerability.
These kids are right on the brink of becoming young adults,
so some of the unleashing of this other world,
I think, is metaphorical, and it allows us to think about,
"What does it mean to pass from a state of childhood
into being a teen?"
Sometimes you tangle with monsters,
and sometimes you're sucked into a pool.
Maybe these things don't happen literally,
but it's a really horrific, terrifying process to grow up.
Who are you? I'm Maria.
"Stranger Things" is, in and of itself,
a kind of "Frankenstein" monster TV show.
It is all these different parts
of all these different elements of pop culture...
All right, here I go. Okay?
Okay. Here we go.
...all kind of sutured together
to create this new kind of beautiful, horrifying thing.
Out of the way! Out of the way!
The whole bike chase and the van flip
is, obviously, a not-so-subtle nod to "E.T."
Well, dressing up Eleven --
we just couldn't help ourselves.
A lot of Winona's character
was based on Richard Dreyfuss.
Her Christmas lights are his mashed potatoes, basically.
Will?
When you're a kid,
and you're experiencing these films,
there's a sense of wonder and awe and fear
that just -- it stays with you
for the rest of your life.
What we wanted to do was try to recapture
the way those movies made us feel.
Sci-fi is an escape for so many people...
...and I feel those monsters -- not just the Demogorgon --
helps everyone in the world move on
and feel good about the world
when the world isn't doing well.
Well, I think what inflamed my imagination
when I was a kid was simply fear.
Fear, I think, you know --
I needed to do something to protect myself
against everything that I was afraid of.
Most everything when it got dark...
...I was afraid of.
A lot of my process starts with dreams and nightmares.
It's all getting out those childhood terrors
and just making everybody else feel it.
Yeah. Yeah.
You kind of exorcise them from your own life,
and then you foist them upon strangers. On everybody else.
Right. Exactly.
And we love it,
and we can't get enough of it,
and so we can't stop.
Right.