12 Days of Monsters: Day 5
12 Days of Monsters is a series exploring the visual design of different monsters - looking at what makes them successful (or not), what trends they represent, and what they mean to me personally.
The Monster
Tentacles from Planet X
from the 2007 film THE MIST
The Set-up
A Creature Feature Sampler Platter
THE MIST is a fine, fun little movie. It's a creature feature that checks a lot of boxes for me: creepy misty little town, unknowable alien secrets, oodles of creepy monsters. I want to love this movie, but it feels like for each thing I love about it, there's a counter-weight pulling it back down. A fun little premise and reasonable progression of stakes and threats is dragged down by ridiculous dialog and an ultimately goofy antagonist. Great monster designs are dragged down by mediocre ones...and by some pretty lackluster special effects. You get the idea.
Except for the ending, though - the ending is fucking great. Even Stephen King said the movie's ending was better than the ending from his novella of the same name (which the movie was based on).
And, of course, it’s got some cool-looking otherworldly monstrosities.
So overall - I like it. But what I really love is that the movie has a ton of different monsters in it. Plenty of creature features only feature one type of creature. Movies that depict a whole ecosystem of diverse threats are more rare.
So I wanted to talk about THE MIST and its monsters; more than the human characters or the theme, the monsters are the core of the movie (in my heart, at least). And one monster in particular is a great lens through which we can examine the rest of the movie.
The Movie
Some Quick Context
THE MIST is a movie about a small town that wakes up one morning to find itself completely covered in a thick, unnatural mist that contains a whole host of lethal alien monsters. Most of the movie takes place inside a small grocery store where some survivors try to barricade themselves in for safety.
Early in the film, as the threat of the creatures in the mist isn't fully apparent yet, someone goes to the back of the store where a cargo door is partially open - and this poor sap is subsequently attacked and then killed by otherworldly tentacles that creep in from the mist, confirming in a very loud way just how dangerous it is to go outside of the store. The survivors nickname these the "tentacles from planet X". I'm just gonna call them "tentacles" from now on, though.
The Visual Design
An Unsolvable Anatomical Puzzle
The tentacles were a good pick for the first monster we get a real good look at, cos they scream "weird" at you. There's a lot going on with them.
Some “tentacles from planet X” gripping their victim in THE MIST
They have these spikes running down the side that can move independently, functioning like claws that can be used to both hold prey and to manipulate objects. These spikes are seen doing both things - at one point sinking into someone's leg, and at another point picking up a bag of dog food. The spikes are also an immediate visual indicator that this is something alien, rather than just a big ugly version of a normal creature, because no living animal has spikes like that. This alienness is emphasized further by its other features.
Like the arms of real-world octopi, the underside of the tentacles is lined with dozens of little appendages. Instead of suction cups, though, these nasties have tubes that end in greedy beaked mouths. That's gnarly, and is the most memorable part of this creature's design. Once those mouths are revealed, you feel a lot worse about the person that the tentacle is holding onto - and that's even before the little mouths start biting chunks out of them.
Close-up of a model of one of the tentacles made for THE MIST (the tentacles in the final film are purely CGI, but use the same design). Note that the chompy bits appear to have gullets, suggesting a connection to a digestive tract or other system.
Aside from being a brutal design for a fictional creature whose main purpose is just to gorily kill a disposable character in the first act, I like this design choice for a couple of reasons.
One: It's actually evocative of real octopi in a way most people might not realize. The tentacles in the movie appear to be able to move all those little mouths independently, and octopi can also move each of their suction cups independently. This still blows my mind when I think about it, and it should blow yours too - these incredible animals have fine motor control over countless individual appendages lining the underside of eight arms. Those suckers can grip, rotate, grab, and taste. Each one! If you thought octopi looked weird before, picture their tentacles as being lined with innumerable prehensile tongues. Octopi are awesome.
Two: It immediately confuses our assumptions about the anatomy of what we're looking at. When we see tentacles on the screen, we immediately make some assumptions about the body plan of the creature they're attached to. We assume that the tentacles are extremities, that grow out from the base of the creature, and are probably used like our extremities (specifically our arms) to grab and manipulate objects. Until the movie hints otherwise, we assume this creature - alien though it is - probably has some features in common with every other animal we can think of, like having one head, one mouth, etc. And then we see that this creature's "arms" are lined with individual mouths, and that starts to mess with our assumptions. Are these the creature's only mouths? Does it have more? Do the mouths fight for food like independent heads, or does it all "go to the same place"? Are these tentacles really the creature's arms, or are they more like its heads? Does this creature even have a head?
This anatomical befuddlement gets exacerbated further as the scene progresses. We see that the tentacles have an additional, different, bigger mouth on the underside toward the tip - and there's really no readily apparent reason why this thing would have two types of mouths on the same appendage. On top of that, one of the additional tentacles is seen to be exploring the area tip-first, almost like a snake sniffing around its environment. This movement suggests that the tentacle is acting with individual agency - again, it looks like a snake, not like an arm or finger - it looks like its gathering its own sensory input and making its own independent decisions based on it. And when it finds a bag of dog food, it doesn't bring it out into the mist to interact with some central head, it just tears the bag open right where it is. At this point, if you're like me, you're starting to wonder if these tentacles even attach to the same creature, or if they are their own independent creatures, and both seem equally bizarre options. This is a great way to introduce an alien creature - with disorienting anatomy. And that's just the part of these things that we can see.
Concept art for the tentacles showing the larger mouth toward the tip, by Bernie Wrightson. The only major change made for the final film was to add spikes.
Which brings us to the final aspect of the monster's design: the part they didn't design. Which is my silly attention-grabby way of saying "the fact that most of the monster is hidden by mist". The questions posed by this creature’s anatomy explicitly don’t have answers. This keeps us uncertain about what we’re actually dealing with, and thus emphasizes the idea that the mist represents an unknowable threat. Like the survivors in the movie, you can't see into it, and thus can't defend yourself from what dangers it hides.
The tentacles dragging their victim into the white void of the mist
Of course, these tentacles also start to introduce some of the shortcomings of monster design in this movie. Here's a hint: Most of the other monsters in the movie are a lot less creative.
An aside
Tentacles Are Actually Weirder Than You Think
For starters, some of that confusion that the audience is experiencing is likely accidental. For example, the tentacle that moves like a snake: Most depictions of tentacles on screen just plain don't understand how real-world animals use their tentacles.
An octopus grabbing a crab using the mid-portion of its tentacles, rather than the tips (which are curled back for safety). Taken from this upload by Woa Videos
Watch an octopus for a while and you will notice that it rarely prods and probes things using the tips of the tentacles - but virtually every cinematic depiction of tentacles works that way. You see, humans tend to try to manipulate the physical world with our arms. And the most sensitive part of our arms is the very tips of our fingers. If we want to explore something - figure out its texture, if it's hot or cold, see how it reacts - we'll prod it with our fingers. And if we want to grab something, we'll grab it with our hands, by wrapping our fingers around it. But octopus tentacles don't work like that. Like I mentioned above, the whole length of their arms are lined with sensitive organs - they have no reason to favor the tip over any other portion. Indeed, other portions of the arm might have more suckers - and more powerful/useful ones. Additionally, the tips are delicate and vulnerable. Octopi will move the middle of their tentacle towards a thing they want to manipulate, not the tip.
So when you see that tentacle moving tip-first towards the dog food bag and seeming to "sniff" it with its "snout", I don't think that was a motivated decision made with the intent to create an unsolvable anatomical puzzle in the audience's mind. I think that was most likely just another thoughtless "tentacles basically work like fingers, right?" moment. This might be a little unfair, but I did read an article where the effects designers noted that the movie ended up opting for entirely CGI tentacles (over the models and props that the effects folks made) because the director wanted the tentacles to have an "undulating" look "like an earthworm", which seems more driven by trying to make it look gross than by a coherent vision of this creature's anatomy.
Back to Visual Design
Skulls And Spiders: Two Great Tastes That Don’t Go Great Together
You also see a bit of that same, somewhat unimaginative instinct come through in the design of another prominent monster that shows up later in the film - the "grey widower", which is a spider-like creature.
I say "spider-like", but realistically, it's just a spider.
Well OK, that’s not entirely fair for sure, especially because the parts of it that are un-spider-like are both prominent and what I think are wrong with it.
Stephen King's original novella described these dog-sized critters as having "as many as twelve or fourteen many-jointed legs", and goes on to say that these are "no ordinary earthly spider blown up to horror movie-size", and "perhaps not really a spider at all". Here, King is using a technique that I most strongly associate with horror master H.P. Lovecraft, which I believe is called a "total cop-out", where you don't really describe your object of horror directly but just say that something is totally not that commonplace thing it sounds like but instead something totally unknowable and scary I promise.
An unused maquette showing an earlier design of the grey widowers that appear in THE MIST which more closely matches their original description. Totally not spiders.
Cheap shots aside, though, a 14-legged-spider is a perfectly serviceable horror movie monster - the regular variety is already scary enough for most people. And indeed, the original design for these things in the movie was essentially just a spider with extra legs and some embellish head anatomy (more spiky mouth parts, bigger eyes - you know the drill).
But once again, the director wanted to make it scarier - a suggestion which lead to the not-spiders getting essentially a human skull for a face. (Technically, they have extra eyes on the sides, but you hardly see these in the movie.) On paper, this sounds maybe like a decent idea - adding human-like features to an alien arthropod should make it more unnatural and creepy, right? And skulls are scary/awesome, right? But when you see them on screen, you don't see a plausible organism - you see a spider that randomly has a skull for a face. It doesn't look unnatural - it looks fake. The design calls direct attention to the motivations behind it (to look scary) that it completely pierces the suspension of disbelief and leaves you, on some level, keenly aware that you're watching a creature feature. Like the name "gray widowers" (I guess that's the more alien version of "black widow"), it's almost impressively uninspired, and draws the artifice of it all into clear view. Like a bad green-screen effect, you can tell it's fake even if you don't know enough to accurately explain why.
A maquette showing the final model of the grey widower that appeared in the film.
The grey widower, as it appears in the film. Finally grey.
Reflections
Why Does Your Entire Ecosystem Eat People
Also, and I know that virtually every creature feature with creepy crawlies in it is guilty of this, but for fuck's sake people: Why does every arthropod, regardless of size, have an insatiable lust for human blood? How many animals in the real world regularly hunt prey that is an order of magnitude larger than it? That's not exactly the default size ratio in most predator-prey relationships, y'all.
I realize that the basic premise of this movie is "the mist is full of lethal monsters", but I honestly don't think that means every single thing encountered in it needs to be utterly obsessed with ending human lives. And in fact, a scene in the film before the not-spider scene does indeed feature animals that don't eat people: As night falls, some alien flies start hanging around the store's windows (attracted to the lights within), and then a crazy four-winged pterodactyl-looking thing crashes into the window trying to eat the flies. This is a cool moment largely because it drives the plot forward (by making the store no longer a safe place to remain indefinitely), but it's also cool because it shows you that there's a whole alien ecosystem in the mist.
And I think that showing a diverse ecosystem where not everything wants to kill you can actually be better for a film's tension. While watching a video about the game BORDERLANDS 2, I heard a designer making a funky observation about treasure chests: when every chest had sweet loot in it, players found it less exciting than when only some chests had sweet loot in it. Even though it meant getting less sweet loot, players got more excitement out of it when some of the chests were effectively duds. Now, there's a ton to be said on that subject and the lesson I'm recounting here is being greatly oversimplified, but I do think a similar principle can apply to the premise of a movie like THE MIST. If some - but not all - of the alien things that our heroes interact with turn out to be dangerous, then each time they interact with a new alien thing, there is tension. If everything in the movie is a frenzied murderbot, though, there's no tension (or at least, a lot less) - instead of wondering how things will go, you're just waiting to see how this particular thing kills someone. The more things you encounter, the more certain you are in what the likely outcome will be, and the less invested in the world of the movie you are.
Especially when you put a goddamn skull face on your spiders.
