The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, 1953
The military scientist turns to his colleague after testing an atomic bomb and says, "I feel like we're writing a new Genesis." This introductory scene captures the human folly in Eugène Lourié's 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Human arrogance is the name of the game here; just after launching the bomb in the arctic, a giant, angry creature is unleashed!
Beast is a sci-fi, eco-horror based on "The Fog Horn," a short story by Ray Bradbury. One scene in particular where the monster comes out from the ocean and destroys a lighthouse was taken directly from Bradbury's story (TCM, 2010). Impressively, Beast was the first live-action bomb-equals-monster film ever made, directly inspiring the more famous Japanese film Godzilla from 1954 (Hood, 2015) and several other monster films of the era. The stop-motion animation made this an entertaining watch. A scene I found especially humorous depicted a police officer attempting to shoot the monster with a tiny pistol and getting very quickly gobbled up by the beast.
The environmental perspective of film is sympathetic towards the short-sighted human animals instead of the nonhuman animal whose hibernation was interrupted by a reckless and historically murderous human technology. The makers of the film certainly would have had the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki top of mind, as it was less than a decade before this was filmed. Beast is the perfect film to set up this eco-horror marathon because it so accurately displays the traditional human-nature stance that has promoted human supremacy and dominance over nature as a natural right and an overall good.
The main players in Beast declare "full-scale war" on the creature, evoking the countless ways humans intentionally battle nature in the modern world: urbanization, pesticides, logging, fracking, agriculture, commercial fishing, you name it. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the global climate summit in Madrid last year, "our war against nature must stop" (Binnie, 2019). If Beast can teach us anything, it is that not all human "progress" is good. We might just unleash a monster with the potential to destroy the planet.
References
Binnie, Isla. “'War against Nature Must Stop,' U.N. Chief Says before Climate Talks.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 1 Dec. 2019, www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-accord-guterres/war-against-nature-must-stop-u-n-chief-says-before-climate-talks-idUSKBN1Y514H.
Hood, Robert. “A Potted History of Godzilla.” A Potted History of Godzilla, 2015, www.roberthood.net/obsesses/godzilla.htm.
TCM. “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) - Notes.” Turner Classic Movies, 2010, www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/68257/The-Beast-from-20-000-Fathoms/notes.html.
