I have talked at different times about filmmakers "breaking" the rules for various monsters. It might be having vampires walking around in sunlight or werewolves that drink blood, while these rules are not written in stone there are reasons for acknowledging them even if you don't follow them. There are lots of good reasons to break these rules, all I ask is that the filmmaker does so out of knowledge and not ignorance. A good example would be a Jewish Vampire. Would a Christian cross be effective? Does the believe in the power of the cross need to lie in the person wielding it or in its intended victim? There are lots of variations of this theme that can be explored in entertaining ways that can keep the viewer on his toes and make the film more enjoyable.

So does this mean it is okay for a filmmaker to have a werewolf die with a wooden stake through its heart? Generally no. Much as mixed metaphors confuse people, so do mixed mythologies. How about a werewolf that enjoys being evil? This actually goes against the normal werewolf story, but if a truly evil person is bitten by a werewolf, then he might not mind the monthly episodes of ripping innocent people to shreds.

As to the Christian morality of these stories. All of these monsters date from a time and place where Christianity was a dominant part of most people's lives. All of these monsters have the reflection of the devil in them. Our heroes and innocent victims are strong god-fearing men and women, though the victims will often be pious but weak-willed and easily tempted by the various vices. Almost all movie monsters are most dangerous at night. They go about their nefarious deeds under the cover of darkness and are sent scurrying back to their dens with the first rays of the morning sun. This is sort of a reference to god, but the "truth" and "light" have been synonymous for quite a while.

I offer the following as a general reference. It is by no means comprehensive or definitive. Also these opinions are not specifically about the movies, they are about the way the monsters are portrayed or used by studio overseers. Even today nearly all American movies have a happy ending (except for slasher films and then usually at least one person survives). Good overcomes evil and the bad guy gets his comeuppance. There is a little bit of morality based censorship here, but it is more marketing based censorship.

Vampires

The granddaddy of them all, Vampires are barely disguised devils incarnate.The origin of the vampires dates back to Vlad the Impaler. Vlad was known for excessive violence. When one of his men complained about the screaming of the people on the stakes, Vlad had him join them. Perhaps this is where the wooden stakes came from that vampires are so susceptible to. By the time vampires hit the big screen they had transformed to Nosferatu, a tall, misshapen, deathly white man with an extra set of joints on his hands.Nosferatu was a far less dominating presence whose weakness was sex. He is eventually killed when a woman manages to keep him at her throat until past sunrise. Soon this malformed hermit was replaced by sophisticated old school royalty from the deepest part of Romania which was usually "disguised" as Transylvania. They would seem the very picture of noble birth when first introduced to London society, but quickly their darker side would emerge. The core vice for vampires is sex. Frequently the victims are young and innocent, apparently virgins are preferred. The vampire would mesmerize the child-like victim and make her do his bidding. Normally we lose two or three before the vampire sets his sights on a girl who has a fine upstanding boyfriend and a father who knows a Van Helsing. These men would combine forces and save the girl despite herself. The moral of vampire stories normally will run along the lines of restraining from pleasures of the flesh. That vampires favor young, virginal girls indicates who this lesson is for.

Strengths		Weaknesses
Very strong Can't be killed by bullets Unusually good hearing and vision Can turn into bats and/or wolves and occasionally mist Able to impose their will on others by staring at them		Silver crosses Holy water Wooden stakes Need blood to thrive and resemble a junkie without it Sunlight Occasionally a vampire will not be able to cross running water
Very fast Can be regenerated from corpses or even ashes Can live for a very long time if not staked through the heart, though for good measure you should also cut off the head and burn it separate from the body		Must return to coffin at night. Often the coffin must contain dirt from their grave which is odd as new vampires don't often lie dead long enough to be buried Garlic Cannot enter hallowed ground Van Helsings No reflection in mirror

Frankenstein's monster

You don't have to dig too deep to find the moral to a Frankenstein movie. Frankenstein is repeatedly told that he is "playing god" by trying to create life. You can usually tell when someone is not steeped in monster lore when they call the monster Frankenstein. Frankenstein is the name of the scientist that creates the monster, the monster is generally referred to as the Creature or occasionally Adam. In Mary Shelley's original story, the creature is faster, larger and smarter than normal men. He prevails upon Frankenstein to create a mate for him. Frankenstein's conscience finally kicks in just about the time that the female creature is to be reanimated and he lets her die on the table. The Creature then terrorizes Frankenstein by killing his fiancee and other family members. While Shelley's Creature is far more interesting than the movie Creatures that were to come, it is pretty obvious why the changes were made. Shelley's Frankenstein made a better man than god, so he wasn't just playing god, he was beating god. Also, having an intelligent creature makes for a much more complicated story and moral. A stupid creature can be put down like a rabid dog, but an intelligent creature who is acting of conscious choice must be dealt with as an equal and then is no longer a creature. So as a result of all this, the movie Creature is unable to talk, cannot move well, and totally unable to tell right from wrong. A common scene in Frankenstein movies involves the Creature accidentally killing a little girl. These scenes graphically tell the audience that the creature might look like a man, but really is an animal with no moral compass. While typically there is very little mention of the church in a Frankenstein movie, the uneducated masses are expected to storm the castle and clean up the mess made by the godless scientist. This sentiment has raised its ugly head time and time again as science has progressed. Who hasn't heard the phrase "If god wanted man to fly, he had given him wings!"? Frankenstein's monster is portrayed much like a rabid dog; an animal that must be put down regardless of personal feelings. Once Frankenstein and his monster became a movie staple, he was portrayed in a number of amusing ways. Besides being paired with the usual monsters like dracula and the werewolf, he also starred with Abbot and Costello and his granddaughter would have a run in with Jesse James. Not to mention "Frankenhooker". Personally my favorite Frankenstein movie is Mel Brooke's "Young Frankenstein" and I am hopeful that this movie gets a proper Blu-Ray treatment soon.

Strengths		Weaknesses
Very strong Usually attacked by villagers with pitchforks, so advantage Creature Movies based more on Shelley's original creature (like this prop for DeNiro's movie) are fast, smart and motivated for revenge, in other words thoroughly pissed off. Not bothered by crosses, silver, running water or full moons Sometimes is able to stay frozen from one movie to another.		Usually dumb, mute and not smart enough to get out of its own way Fire, this may be a phobia rather than a weakness. I am not sure if I have ever seen a Frankenstein monster shot at with a gun, so maybe it is vulnerable to bullets
Shelley's creature took his revenge on Frankenstein when he refused to create a mate for him.		Hollywood decided to go ahead with that plan and created Lilly Munster. Actually Lilly is more vampire but she does have that white streak of hair and Herman never ransacked a village.

The Werewolf

The werewolf is one of the most sympathetic of all movie monsters. While there must be some inherently evil werewolves out there, most commonly the werewolf at the center of the movie is trying to control his urges. Normally he is a good man who seems to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. When his secret comes out, he begs his friends to lock him up during the nights there is a full moon. In the older movies there is usually a gypsy involved. Occasionally a curse is the cause of the problem, but commonly the gypsies will know the reason for his troubled soul. There is only a very tenuous thread to Christianity in werewolf movies. As there is no cure fo r being a werewolf there is nothing that the church can supply except a decent burial and the belief that the tormented soul is finally at rest. More recent movies have moved being a werewolf into something you can live with. Movies like "Ginger Snaps" (great movie by the way) and even "Cursed" imply that through careful management lycanthropy is not fatal or even that bad. I find it interesting that with such an obvious female connection (full moon, curse, kind of sounds like menstruation to me), most werewolves are male. Yes, Howling 2 is subtitled "Your sister is a werewolf" and Sybil Danning is the werewolf queen but this is the exception more than the rule. The Christian connection in werewolf movies strikes me as a sort of purgatory. The victim knows he is going to hell but isn't quite there yet. By fighting against the transformation and trying to minimize the damage he does, the werewolf is one of the damned, valiantly fighting for a chance at redemption. Oddly enough while most movie monsters go from fearsome to friendly, the werewolf has tended to become more evil. The two "Underworld" movies pit vampires and werewolves against each other and "Skinwalkers" finds a cure for lycanthropy using a half-breed's blood. It is possible that werewolves have limited movie sucess because of they are rarely seen on screen. Usually the make up and special effects cannot stand up to close scrutiny which when coupled with a limited ability to speak, makes it hard to center a movie around them.

Strengths		Weaknesses
Animal Cunning Sharp teeth Very strong Can run fast Great sense of smell		Silver bullets in specific and silver in general Most werewolves spend non-full moon days lamenting their actions during full moon days Not very smart when in wolf mode and can't use higher brain functions Easily distracted when Lassie goes into heat (okay, I made that one up)

Dr. Jeckyl and Mister Hyde/Jack the Ripper

I am going to lump these two together because in my mind they are very similar. Jack the Ripper did not in fact rip the hearts out of his victims. The organs were carefully removed with surgical instruments. There is a strong belief that Jack was a medical student or even a doctor who felt that prostitutes were an adequate substitute for lab cadavers. This attitude that god favors a specific group and that non-members of that group are just getting what they deserve is a common religious theme, and Christianity is not the only religion to have practiced it over the years. To be fair, while Victorian England had groups of Christians who believed that they were god's chosen and that poor people were inconsequential, there were plenty of other Christian groups who were very concerned with the plight of the lower classes setting up hospitals and working to make the government grant workers some rights. Dr. Jeckyl mistakenly tries to live up to impossibly high ideals and in doing so unleashes his evil side. Mister Hyde's desire for sex is hinted at, but his violent nature is graphically demonstrated in the novel where at one point he kills a man who simply nodded at him. As these two (or three depending on how you count Jeckyl and Hyde) monsters moved to the big screen, their motives did not change all that much. Jack is usually portrayed as a mysterious background figure who usually dies but is rarely identified. Dr. Jeckyl in early pictures was a walking, talking anti-drug symbol. His initials forays with the drug work out okay and he can control it. As time goes by his dependence on it becomes greater and eventually he gives himself completely over to the drug and loses his ability to control his life. Drug abuse was a problem after the Great War with lots of soldiers bringing home an addiction to morphine. Cocaine became illegal in 1914 and marijuana in 1938. Prohibition was in effect from 1920 to 1933. So at the time of the earliest Dr. Jeckyl movies there was a strong anti-fun faction in Washington that Hollywood played at least lip service to. Robert Louis Stevenson may have been exploring the folly of trying to be too good, of setting your sights to an impossible ideal, but Hollywood played it as a PSA (Public Service Announcement). During the early 70's Dr. Jeckyl would get to explore his erotic side as censorship of movies lessened and there would even be a couple of distaff versions, but the drug theme never was too far buried. The last few incarnations of Dr. Jeckyl have been played for laughs. Perhaps it is a little ironic that the original book which is almost an Icarus tale of flying to close to the sun, would deteriorate into anti-drug propaganda for the Temperance Society once it hit celluloid. The most recent outings for Stevenson's tale include "Jacqueline Hyde" with Blythe Metz, a sex comedy. I think that Jeckyl and Hyde are so often portrayed humerously because of the obvious drug and sex connections. I think that the censors would just as soon these characters be portrayed as jokes. Consider the alternative, that being too good is problematic. Jeckyl's problems start when he questions whether his purity is real when it has never been tested. He turns to science and not the church to try to purge himself of evil. Perhaps Jeckyl can be seen as a fallen angel, someone who looks for answers in science which can be seen as usurping god's role.

Strengths		Weaknesses
Manic strength no conscience		Turns back into his or her goody two shoes counterpart at inconvenient times Like the Frankenstein creature, I don't remember Mr. Hyde ever being shot Always gets into trouble because he doesn't know when to shut up
In the distaff versions of the story, the female Hydes are able to have sex with anyone they want. Sean Young is pictured here from "Dr. Jeckyl and Ms. Hyde".

Zombies

Ah, the living dead. Now there is a monster that has changed tremendously since its original cinematic debut. Originally zombies were created by VooDoo priests and priestesses to do their will. Typically this involved killing someone. The zombies were very fixed on their assignment and did not try to kill and eat everyone they met. There is a drink called a zombie that is loaded with 151 rum. The rum comes from the Caribbean as does voodoo and the potentency of the drink can make you stare vacantly into space, much like a zombie. Eventually George Romano would move the zombie from the creation of an individual to the byproduct of a sick society. Most zombie movies have a touch of the "don't play god" mentality as the zombies are created by scientists. However, much like the "Nature strikes back" movies of the 70's and 80's, the offended deity does not seem to be the Christian god, instead it feels more like Gaea, the Earth Mother or Mother Nature. This does not apply to the numerous zombi films out of Italy which were short both on plot and exposition and were ripping off whatever was popular at the time. I think it was Zombi 3 which featured zombies attacking an Aerobics class. Usually if a zombie movie does not specifically cite a reason for the zombies, you get the feeling that "the way we live today" is the cause. Mother Earth is sending back the people we buried to return our civilization to a less machine and consumer oriented way of life. The problem with zombies is that they are not very interesting antagonists once you get past the creepy makeup and the tendency to kill people and eat their brains. Classic zombies are stupid and slow moving without any ability to talk or reason. While this makes them good cannon fodder, it forces the story away from the monster and the writer needs to provide an interesting side story. Occasionally the side story will be the survivors trying to get outside help or as in "Return of the Living Dead III" Melinda Clark's slow transformation from a thinking, feeling person to an unfeeling zombie. (Insert ex-wife joke here.) I don't recall any movies where zombies are good guys other "Dead Heat" with Joe Piscopo. There is a Chinese porn flick called "Ghoul Sex Squad" that features hopping zombies that (fortunately) look much less decayed than your average zombie. Perhaps "Corpses" has the most likeable zombies around though they still randomly kill people.

Strengths		Weaknesses
All ready dead, so tough to kill Not bothered by normal toxins Not overly annoyed at being shot, stabbed, being eaten by a shark or getting run over by a car		Normally very, very slow Brain cases not so hard anymore (being dead and all) so it is relatively easy to smash their brains out No intelligence and tend to be fixated on eating brains Chinese zombies hop
Some zombies are fortified with 151 rum The ice can cause brain freeze		These zombies tend to be delicious and unable to defend themselves

Some movie monsters mentioned here and many others start out as being dark scary creatures. But once they are accepted as film protagonists, we make them heroes. Vampires went from being evil (Unobservant) to being sympathetic (any Ann Rice) to being lovelorn (Love at First Bite) to being a slightly odd family (The Littlest Vampire). Godzilla, The Terminator, Frankenstein, Mr. Hyde, they all start out as evil and representing our fears only to become cute and cuddly. I suppose I could wax philosophical about living with the fears of our fathers or that by facing our fears we conquer them, but I put more weight on the marketing divisions in the later years and the relaxing of censorship in the 60's. Sure Abbot and Costello had something to do with it by including monsters in their comedies, but the characters kept coming back for sequel after sequel. As they became popular, they could no longer stay evil. Most monsters became sympathetic and then like Godzilla out right friendly and nice. The later sex comedies for Jeckyl and Hyde were simply mining the same vein as "The Munsters". As we get used to new ideas, they no longer seem so scary. It was not that long ago that "Playing God" meant any type of surgery. Then as not dying from appendicitis became a common occurrence, it was transplants. Now that the mean life expectancy of a heart transplant recipient is over ten years, playing god is relegated to scientist working on stem cells and gene splicing. While drug addiction is still a problem, movies that talk about it realistically are not making the problem worse. Despite the pressure to conform that society places on people, it is possible to be a good person and live a good life without having other people set your moral standards. Why the film ratings board can think that sex is bad but violence is good confuses me. "Live free or Die Hard" is PG-13? WTF"?!? It should be obvious that movies don't reflect real life and the morals good or bad displayed in a movie are not going to change a person. We are what we do, not what we watch.

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