Most of the classic movie monsters are fairly human -- they can be played by someone in makeup. Dracula? Guy in a cape. Frankenstein's monster? Guy with skull bolts. Even the werewolf on screen became Lon Chaney under a lot of fur.
The first movie I know of that actually boasted non-human monsters was Merian Cooper's King Kong. Kong wasn't a funny-looking person, he was a titanic ape. He was huge and powerful and scary.
And Hollywood more or less forgot about him for twenty years. The black and white golden age of horror movies concentrated on human monsters. It was only in the "Atomic Horror" era of the 1950s that obviously non-human movie monsters made a comeback. The milestone was 1954. That year saw the release of Them! in the United States and Godzilla in Japan. Everybody knows about Godzilla, but Them! is an excellent and terribly under-rated movie. It's about giant ants (roughly the size of cars) spawned in the desert by the first atomic tests. The storytelling is first-rate: rather than simply showing us people wrestling with big bugs, the film is a scientific detective story. The heroes have to discover the giant ants, figure out where they are hiding, and work out a way to defeat them. Science (atomic stuff) caused the monster, but only Science can defeat it.
These new monsters weren't at all human -- big bugs and lizards, with the occasional giant bird or octopus for variety. They were powerful and destructive, and often came from other planets. (They were also scientifically absurd, one and all.)
The conventional wisdom is that the big monsters of the Fifties represent anxiety about the atomic bomb -- certainly it's hard to miss the parallel when Godzilla is tearing up Tokyo with his radioactive flame breath, or George Pal's Martians are blowing Los Angeles to smithereens with heat rays. But I wonder if the trend to more alien, inhuman monsters also reflects the experience of World War II.
Quite simply, the Nazi regime managed to perpetrate worse horrors than any of the Universal Studios horror monsters ever dreamed of. Dracula wanted to suck a few people's blood. Frankenstein's monster was mad at his creator. None of them bombed cities, invaded other countries, or murdered millions of people in cold blood. So I wonder if, after spending the 1940s reading newspapers, seeing newsreels, and sometimes fighting in battles, the audiences simply couldn't work up much concern about a vampire lurking in an old dark house. Once you've seen Hitler and Stalin, Dracula's pretty small potatoes. Hence the need for bigger, newer monsters.
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