Monster of the Day, #3

When introduced to American audiences in 1956, he was called King of the Monsters.

They weren’t wrong.

  • Ericb

    I’m really looking forward to when you get down the list and shart posting more obscure monsters. I guess you’r probably at least a decade away from the Tobonga.

  • I might start that next week, actually. I agree with you, spending the first month just hitting the obvious monsters would be kind of boring. I’ll probably mix it up on Monday.

  • David Fullam

    The Big G Man, hell yeah!

  • Gojira – the unstoppable force.

    Maybe someday we will get to see him take on Gamera, the immovable object.

  • PB210

    Before I proceed, do you consider sentient entities as monsters? I tend to consider them (pace Jeff Rovin in his introduction to The Encyclopedia of Super-Villains) as “super-villains”. Rovin followed up
    his Encyclopedia of Super-Villains with the Encyclopedia of Monsters. He included Xaltotun, Dracula, the Invisible Man, and Mr. Hyde in SV, but
    Godzilla and King Kong in Monsters. (The Professor and Doctor Jack Quartz did not receive entries in either book; in his 1994 reference work Adventure Heroes, Rovin simply gave them mentions in the entries
    for Holmes and Nick Carter respectively. He may have done the same with Zenith the Albino from Sexton Blake. Fantomas received an entry in The Encyclopedia of Super-Heroes, but only due to the foreign comic books that had him reformed and working as a crimefighter.)

    Anyway, some suggestions:

    Rambo: the first Rambo film and the original novel follows the plot structure of a monster movie than an outlaw hero movie such as Death Wish or The Exterminator or The Spider’s Web. In Horror: 100 Best Books, the authors recommended this as an additional recommended reading.

    Fu Manchu

    Doctor Mabuse

    Tom Ripley

    She (Ayesha): curiously, Rovin did not spotlight Ayesha as a super-villain though in the first two books, she made it plain that she would attempt global conquest, though she did not explain how

    Parker: nobody has ever called him Parker in a film, but numerous people have portrayed him under some of the aliases he has used in the novels

    Sadako Yamamura, from Ringu (the Ring)

    http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/topic/16749/t/Horror-Series-Characters-in-Books.html

    Switching gears to another point, it seems to me that while film series often have sequels, in print, many of the famous monsters did not return in novels by the original author.

    Bram Stoker never wrote a sequel to Dracula, Shelley never wrote a sequel to Frankenstein, Leroux never wrote a sequel to Pof Opera, and Stevenson never wrote a sequel to Mr. Hyde, Guy Endore never wrote a
    sequel to the Werewolf of Paris, etc.

    http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/topic/20493/t/Horror-characters–debuted–prose–appearing–films–origina.html

  • The Rev. D.D.

    #3 in your list, #1 in my heart.

  • I should note that the numbers don’t mean anything. I just wanted to be able to set each choice apart.

  • Toby C

    http://channelnine.ninemsn.com.au/blog.aspx?blogentryid=605453&showcomments=true

    I don’t know if this link will help much, but at least you won’t miss Razorback. (Yeah, I don’t know how it reached number 11 either.