Himmelberg - The Modern Monster

The Modern Monster vs. The Old Fashioned Monster

Unlike other forms of entertainment,such as, literature, plays and music ,which have been around for centuries; film is a fairly new form of entertainment. It is also a very quickly changing form of entertainment because in the span of only a hundred or so years it has advanced tremendously from black and white and all real people to color and digital effects executed from a computer. When you compare movies from 70 years ago to recent movies they seem like completely different types of media.

In the original 1941 version of The Wolfman the character changes from a regular man into a werewolf, but the werewolf resembles a big hairy dog more than anything else and isn't really frightening. At the time audiences may have been scared of this stuffed animal type monster but compared to today it is absolutely laughable. In the 2010 version of The Wolfman the character changes into a very frightening, very real werewolf, his claws and teeth are very much the selling points for me. It is a lot more believable than the hairy costume that served as the werewolf in the 40's.

The big contrast between modern movies and old movies though is what is actually shown on screen. Older movies when showing a horrific or scary scene had two options they could either show the action as best they could using no special effects or computer images (because they didn't exist yet), which usually turned out to be quite unbelievable and cheesy. Or they could simply show the before and the after of each scene and leave the action/gory/scary part unseen. This method some say was the most effective and is still effective today even with all of the advances that we have made. When you leave out the actual gory scene it lets the audience use there imagination to fill in the rest and many times peoples imaginations are worse than anything that could have been done on the film. In modern movies there are tons of special effects, the werewolf is transformed completely by a computer making the character extremely scary. You see every step of the transformation from man to werewolf and the transformation, at least for me, was almost scarier than the actual end product. Nothing is left out in the modern world of film. Every aspect of the scary/gory scene is shown to audiences. Leaving some people terrified and others thinking that special effects are too much and ruin the experience of the movie and the plot. So it really all comes down to the audience member to decide which type of monster / horror film they like the better. The ones where the gory part is left out, but there is suspence and you are left to simply imagine what has happened. Or the ones where you are totally frightened by the computer generated and altered monsters that look absolutely real.

Over all the large , speedy progress that Digital Media has made completely turned the film industry on its heads and changed how we see Monsters forever. The Modern Monsters are much more real and show every aspect and detail of there terrible self's and the Old-Fashioned
Monsters were simply dressed (slightly unbelievable), but they played on a different aspect of fear, suspence and anticipation. Either way the "monster" has gone through many different changes throughout the years for the better or for the worse is the audiences opinion.