Do Giant Disasters Provide Inspiration for Giant Monster Movies?

It ’s practically a truism to claim that the giant monster movie craze of the fifties was inspire by the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki , as well as the hundreds of atomic tests done afterwards . And some have argued that the Cloverfield ogre ’s plan of attack on New York wasa not - so - elusive computer address to the terrorist attacks on New York ’s World Trade Centerin 2001 . But is there a tangible diachronic basis to these claims ? We ’ve graph some of the biggest cataclysm of the last 100 , and lined them up next to a timeline of giant monster movies , to see what the temporal correlativity is between giant disasters and giant ogre . The solvent let on an interesting giant monster cycle per second in pop culture .

https://gizmodo.com/nevermind-the-monster-cloverfield-is-all-about-9-11-346346

lease ’s go through some of the insights this chart offers .

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ATOMICS / DEADLY fire : As you’re able to see , there is a very exculpated diachronic connection between nuclear bomb and atomic examination and gargantuan monster movie , so that truism change by reversal out to be correct . After a long period of no giant monsters in pop acculturation at all , we get a sudden burst of jumbo monsters in the 50s , many of which are explicitly created by “ nuclear tests ” ( see : the ant in Them , the dinosaur in Behemoth , Godzilla , and more ) . What ’s interesting is that there seems to be about a 10 - year meanwhile between the disaster and the first motion-picture show dole out with it . A like interim encounter between disaster of the 1990s and former 2000s and the gargantuan monster explosion of the 00s . Interestingly , the biggest explosion in elephantine monster movies since the 1950s is give-up the ghost on in the 00s , perhaps as a reply to global terrorism and man - cause disasters ( see below ) .

PLAGUES : “ Call of Cthulhu , ” which is about a giant monster who obsess mass ’s dream and drive them mad , could plausibly be link to the “ sleepy sickness ” plague that was sweep the United States at the time Lovecraft first cogitate up his tentacly threat . The disease made multitude appear to catch some Z’s all the time , and did motor them insane . But generally , as we can see later on in the timeline , pestilence does n’t appear to spawn giant monsters . In fact , the HIV / AIDS plague has probably resulted in more human - sized monster narrative : find the explosion in lamia and zombi stories during the nineties and 00s . So , generally , plague disasters do n’t cause giant monster movies .

NATURAL DISASTERS : One of the bountiful natural disasters of the 20th C , the Yellow River flood in China in the thirties , gave us no jumbo monster . King Kong , the most popular giant monster of the 1930s , was plausibly invigorate by Westerners “ discovering ” gorillas in Africa in the early 20th century . But the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami seems to have had an force : two of the biggest giant teras motion picture of the last year have both involved brute from the sea .

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HUMAN - CAUSED disaster : Yes , human toxic spills and pollution seem to trigger giant goliath movies . Most of the giant monsters in the 1970s and 80s are related somehow to defilement , and do presently after several wide - publicise oil release cataclysm . Note that the 70s and 80 were also a time of human - sized toxic creatures , like the Toxic Avenger , the bears in Prophesy , the whatevers in CHUD , and so on . So these disaster animate both giant and unconstipated - sized lusus naturae . I call back the explosion in 00s monster movies may also be a outcome of the same stave we saw between atomics in the 1940s , and giant goliath in the 1950s . A lot of toxic catastrophe happened in the 80s and XC , and suddenly a clustering of giant monsters toss off up in the 00s .

Chart by Stephanie Fox .

SOURCES :

Lesdilley