Horror Flora

This ICHF was written by Casey, who you can find at http://riftwitch.tumblr.com/.  I may have made a few touch ups and notes here and there, but the bulk of this entry is their work!

Art by Casey

Have you ever stopped and thought about just how bizarre clowns are – or more accurately, how bizarre our perception of them is? Clowns are entertainers, ordinary men and women who perform comedic skits for us, and yet as the surge of “clown sightings” in 2016 demonstrates, we tend to view them as a monster first and foremost. Every Halloween store in America is almost guaranteed to have clown monster masks and makeup right alongside the vampires, the werewolves, the pumpkins, the frankenstoids and the sexy catgirls.

What other professions can you say that about? Plagues doctors? Even those menacingly masked, cloaked figures who follow sickness, tend to actually be depicted doing their job, with the themes of sickness and devastation being an integral part of the creepy imagery. Clowns, meanwhile, you can plop right into a forest, holding a knife, and most people won’t even think anything is out of place. Yeah, clowns are creepy monster-men who stalk you through the night and eviscerate you, right?

About the only thing that can truly be compared to how we see clowns is how we see mimes. Pop culture tends to see mimes as some sort of counterpart to clowns, the hyena to clowns’ lion. Order vs chaos? And yet even then, there are noticeably more non-monster mimes than non-monster clowns in most modern fiction.

It’s thus no surprise that there are oceans of works to choose from, if we wish to analyze the clown-monster archetype. But I think that one in particular stands out above the rest in terms of capturing the essence of the archetype. The clowniest, most monstrous clown-monster movie of all time!

I refer to the 1988 cult classic, Killer Klowns From Outer Space!

Our story begins in the manner that horror movies tend to be known for: A group of teenagers are making out on a cliffside, when something falls from the sky and lands in the woods, prompting our adventurous heroes, Mike and Debbie, to investigate. You can make out whenever you want, but chasing meteorites is a rare treat! I actually really like this as a plot device, as these kids are proactive even before the stakes rise.

The film jumps straight into its own premise, revealing a massive, bizarre circus tent in all its glory. Mike and Debbie very quickly determine that they’re not in any kind of circus they’ve ever heard of, and soon encounter one of the tent’s owners, a short, clown-like creature.

The klowns are designed to give us a pretty solid idea of what they’re about right from the start. What we have are essentially white-skinned trolls of varying height, with bulbous red noses, colorful hair, a diverse array of vibrant facial markings, and baggy, festive clothing that obscures their stocky figures. These creatures are nothing like humans, and yet all the basic parts are there: Eyes, ears, noses, mouths, two arms, two legs, upright posture. Essentially, we are looking at the most elemental distillation of the clown concept, divorced from its human origins.

And this continues well beyond their designs, as the creature responds to Mike and Debbie’s intrusion by blasting them with popcorn, as opposed to anything that could actually stop them. When the teens escape into the woods, one of the klowns grabs a balloon and quickly twists it into the shape of a dog, using it to track the kids.

As the protagonists escape into the town to warn the authorities, the klowns regroup and head in, not to give chase, but to explore and cause as much havoc as they please before the real work begins.

KKFOS is not a movie that skimps on making the main characters likable, or in building the threat up, but it also doesn’t beat around the bush: The klowns are here, and they are the movie’s main attraction. While Mike and Debbie struggle to prove their story to the cops, the klowns simply wreak havoc all across the town, which leads me to the point that I think makes these characters the clowniest clown monsters of all.

The rampage is not framed or shot as a horror movie. It takes place at night, and maintains an eerie atmosphere, but the actual shenanigans are treated… well, like comic skits. We see the klowns set up their lethal pranks, we see unsuspecting townsfolk blunder into them, and we reap the schadenfreude as they succumb. No gag is repeated, no victim is quite like the others, every scenario has some sort of bizarre punchline. Not all of them are funny, but all of them follow the sort of logic one would expect a murderous entertainer to follow. Only a couple of scenes in the entire movie are actually played for straight, sincere horror, and even those still rely on the comic logic of the klowns, merely switching perspective to focus on the victims.

The klowns don’t talk, but they communicate a lot through simple body language – NOT an easy task with makeup that thick, I must add. There are several different individuals who each communicate certain quirks – The short one is sociable and upbeat, but has a vindictive streak a mile wide. The tall one is a sadistic bully who likes to deliberately lure people into a false sense of security, then strike. The skinny one is curious and spends most of his time sifting through(and utterly trashing) a convenience store, trying to figure out our technology.

Throughout the chaos, the klowns repeatedly come back to their ray guns which envelop victims in a cocoon of cotton candy, killing them either through suffocation or through the gun’s own power. While at first, this seems like just one more unexplained quirk, it soon becomes apparent that this ties into their ultimate goal: The klowns want to collect all the cocoons and take them back to their ship. Some victims, however, are taken alive, Debbie being among them.

I might also add that the raygun and popcorn cannon are some of their only unambiguously technological weapons, and even they end up having freaky, biological elements in their function. Most of their other stunts, it’s not clear how many of their tricks are technology and how many are natural abilities, nor is it made entirely clear whether each klown is capable of doing all of these things, or if each has their own special X-men klown power.

During a GLORIOUSLY gratifying scene where a corrupt sheriff is humiliated and murdered by one of the klowns, his not-so-corrupt partner discovers that the klowns, though seemingly bulletproof and impossibly strong, do have a weakness: Their fragile noses, if damaged, will cause the entire creature to spin around rapidly until it explodes in a shower of green sparks.

This is likewise never explained. Is the nose a regulator for the eldritch energies that power a klown’s various abilities? Are they really from another dimension, with the nose being their anchor? We don’t know, and we don’t need to know, because the essence of a clown is nonsense!

Oh, some things are explained, sure. As our heroes infiltrate the ship, we discover the purpose of the cotton candy cocoons, as one of the klowns enters the larder, feels several of them, before settling on one and plunging a crazy straw straight into the mass, slurping it up like a spider drinking the melted insides of a fly. The klowns did come to Earth with a purpose besides chaos for its own sake! Unfortunately, that purpose was to round up some snacks for the road.

Finally, in the third act, the teens attempt to bring some reason into this candy-coated nightmare. These creatures must have visited the planet centuries ago, and inspired what we now think of as clowns.

This raises SO VERY many more questions: Would we really find murderous monsters like this humorous, in real life? Did we create clowns as an act of defiance, mocking our oppressors? Were the klowns that previously visited us even as malevolent as these hungry bastards, or were they friendlier? Are these kids just full of shit?

These are more questions the movie knows it doesn’t need to answer. Brevity is the soul of wit, and nobody knows that better than a comedian. The klowns don’t need to be explained. We can tell right away what they’re about, and that’s what drives the story.

A clown is more than just its appearance. Its colors and proportions are outlandish, and this can add to the humor, but it’s the actions, the timing, the wit that ultimately makes them funny. By that same token, a monster clown is so much more than its appearance. Putting makeup on a snarling, feral beast might make it slightly creepier, but a true monster clown relies on comedy for its carnage.

There are many evil clowns in fiction. There are evil men who wear clown makeup to make a mockery of the horrors they inflict. There are pranksters with no regard for the damage their jokes do. There are otherworldly horrors who disguise as clowns to lure victims in close. There are demented show hosts who torment for the sake of entertaining in-universe audiences. But the Klowns are, in my opinion, the most distilled of them all, because everything about them revolves around their being comedians. We don’t know if they deliberately do what they do to amuse themselves, or if they’re simply psychologically incapable of not being funny because it’s how their species is wired. Do they choose to be clowns, or can they be nothing else? It’s such an integral part of them, it may be all of the above!

When the klowns fight, it’s with weapons that are meant for style more than effect. When they kill, it’s as a punchline to a skit. When they communicate, it’s in a language we can’t understand, because you never explain a joke. When they drive, it’s invisible mime cars. When they feed, they do it through crazy straws. When they pilot their ship, it’s in a big circus tent shaped like a top, because of course clown ships are visual puns. EVERYTHING about them revolves around the fact that they are clowns.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space is devoted 100% to following its premise to the end. Its characters are fleshed out, but they’re archetypal. Its plot is briskly paced, but ultimately simple. And its monsters are the purest expression of their name that they could possibly be. There are other clown-monster movies, but this is THE Clown-Monster movie.

Editor’s Note: You really do owe it to yourself to track this movie down and see it.  It is an absolutely unique horror-comedy experience – there is no movie quite like it.

This entry was written by AkityMH, who you can find at https://www.deviantart.com/akitymh.  I may have made a few touch ups and notes here and there, but the bulk of this entry is their work!

In the year 1974, world known writer Peter Benchley wrote a book and probably was the very first book that had a killer shark as its monster. As far as I can do quick referencing on, this is the very first shark based piece of media in terms of a horror film or book. No one could have guessed the juggernaut that was to come in decades prior to our own that idolizes the sheer majesty of what is popularly known as the world’s most perfect predators that have been around since long before dinosaurs, or even the ancestors of dinosaurs for that matter.

About a year later the movie adaptation hit the silver screen, and forever more changed the world. Like, literally, the movie sparked a huge hype for shark fishing and culling. The movie was very convincing and made everyone afraid to take a bath in their own house, but it’s that same imagination that strikes primal fear into the heart of man to which gave rise to many, many, many, many…. I would dare think there is close to a hundred shark based movies alone.

As time went on, shark education rocketed the animals into a much better position. However, the idea of a fin breaking the water surface forever remained a unchanged image our our minds.

Ever since the movie jaws, Shark based media has utterly exploded into a proverbial supernova of colors from good, to mediocre, to just plain bad, to a celebration of just how bad a shark movie can be. It’s a spectacular mess… Shark movies are about as numerous as the sharks in the ocean as we near the end of the late twenty-teens.

But in the last fear of 2018 and a slew of horrible, horrible shark movies, a legit decent movie came out of a very good shark horror novel at long last. The Meg.

But now, symbolically, let’s step back many, many years when the shark movie formula was still primitive and new, hosting a serious fear before we got some outrageous movies. For the movie in story, it’s been well over a three MYA or so, if not a only a few hundred thousand years… for us in real life, it’s been two decades. The Meg is the movie adaptation of the Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, written by writer Steve Alten and was about the first book I actually picked up and actually read back in 5th grade. Back then, shark based horror was still a bit sparse, so it really stood out among other novels. Too my knowledge, it was also the first book and the very first story that took the prehistoric monster shark known as Carcharodon megalodon and made it a starring monster for horror movies to come for better… or most likely worse.

Since then, there have been an absolute ton Megalodon movies. By this point in 2018, Megalodon movies are pretty well known alongside the shark itself.With the rising popularity of what seemed like an actual monstrous sized shark, more and more movies began to use the extinct species for their plot points of a runaway beast that still lives even after it’s time has long gone. Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, probably started that.

Let’s get a brief overview of the story though, back where this all began with this particular species of now very well known shark species.

The story goes that some odd years ago in the first book, the man known as Jonas Taylor was on a dive in the Marianas Trench on a top secret mission on behalf of the United States Navy.. While down there, he sees a mysterious and horrifying sight of a massive shark of glowing alabaster emerging from the volcanic clouds of deep sea vents to attack the mini sub. In a panic, Jonas rises the submarine faster than it should, resulting in deaths of everyone in the submersible besides himself.. When he recites his story and reason to those on the surface, Jonas is discredited and thought to have suffered a paranoid based delusion, and his career as a deep sea diver is ruined forever, as well as leaving him with some trauma.

We cut to years later and he is speaking aloud to a crowd about his theories how a long extinct species of shark may still yet be living at the deepest trench on the planet by source of the volcanic vents creating a tropical, sunless environment that is rich enough to support a small population of these sharks in this deep trench.

Now something about this book and the books following… there is a heavy mix of Science Fiction and Horror. Less horror as the series actually goes on, but the first one is a ringer and the horror element is strong. Horror would preside in every book though by some regard.

Now as you could probably guess, Jonas is dragged back one day to the Marianas Trench on behalf of a friend no less. His task is to dive down and check a Seismic Detecting Device to help predict earthquakes by the named if UNIS. One such machine was damaged, and not only just, but also crushed into a mangled heap of machinery.

After coaxing and thinking about it, he goes down to help retrieve the device and face past demons. Thus begins a long, bloody and horrible series of events that ends up forever haunting him and his family and friends for the next couple of decades.

Now I will say this… If you seen any shark based media, you seen a lot of this. In fact, this book is not far off from the movie Jaws in many ways. There is a shark, albeit a massive near sixty foot long female, running amok in the Pacific Ocean, and there is a race to either kill or capture it.

What sets it apart though from movies like Jaws and the Megalodon based movies to come out of Hollywood’s discount downtown area is that the sharks and characters of this particular book and its sequels have more personality. More so the shark than the humans, because other shark movies have given us decent, good human characters prior.

No, it is the sharks of these books that make this series stand tall among many others. I can promise that nearly any other Megalodon movie, or any shark movie, will use its killer creature just to tally up bodies and have no real character other than a brainless, thoughtless, unrealistic killing machine. To an extent, that holds true here, but there is so much more to the Megalodon that escapes the Marianas Trench than a killing machine.

They have evolved to new heights. As a result of living in a deep sea, sunless environment, their bodies now are leucistic, all white and glow faintly to attract prey in the depths. They can sense various things from miles and miles away, hundreds even if it’s another shark or a whale. They retain their size of course, and their immense jaw strength. Their bodies have slowed down to compensate for a lack of prey. As a result, rising to warm, prey rich waters full of blubbery whales sets off our prehistoric beast into a frenzy. Relentlessly it chases whale pods, making many whales run to shallow waters and beaching themselves in a panic. Boats of all sizes are attacked and sunk, people die as a result of this.

And it just gets worse. People run in with all sorts of ways to try and capture or kill our runaway monster, and as a result more people die yet. Everything we known about sharks in real life is applied to these sharks in one powerful package.

And that is a common theme that is present in all of these books. Its very much like a Kaiju flick, a well done japanese giant monster movie. These creatures are insanely violent, and very efficient in surviving and hunting what they are supposed to hunt. They are not entirely to blame. They are not evil. It is when mankind dove into their last bastion of on all of Earth and drawn them out into a world they don’t belong in anymore. Almost every bit of damage that is done is when people were just in the way of something too big and too aggressive, and should have known better.

That’s something that the lead character, Jonas,  learns first hand.

That reasoning somewhat gets shot in the foot in later entries, and many other parties in the book just want the sharks dead from the start or want to benefit from them. This series of books may have Kaiju story formula, but the rest has a strong western angle. Few actually just wish the sharks were never discovered or returned home.

The character Jonas, through the books series, has a lot of development too. I’m not too good at articulating, and it has been some time since I read the books, so I can’t say too much other than Jonas learns quickly things should be a certain way. Either the sharks shouldn’t be drawn from the trench, or at the very least contained as in several cases the main characters do exactly that: contain the sharks in massive aquariums.

Such as that of Angel, our main star of sorts of the series who has a name and has most screen time.

Yeah, for this entry to be about one individual shark, I sure haven’t talked about her, have I? It’s hard to talk about such a prominent character, though, when that character is literally only named at the start of the second book. That’s because everything Angel does is more or less what her mother did, the Meg in the first book, but would go on to be even more than her parent.

Angel raises the stakes of these sharks tremendously. As a result of being born at the surface of the ocean near California and raised on a steady diet in captivity, she becomes a healthy adult at nearly eighty feet in length, exceeding any previous estimations of just how large these sharks could become.

It is from Angel that we get most of our information of just how powerful, smart and well adapted our monster of the books really are. She is trained well to an acoustic system at feeding time, recognizes humans, and is known to watch people through the glass intently as she passes by the underground observation room.

Angel is so driven, so damn strong, that she naturally breaks out from her seaside home in California and begins making a mad dash for home at the Marianas Trench and causing havoc along the way for mankind and anything she can hunt down. Once more, and much to the fear of those concerned for the environment, hundreds of whales beach themselves trying to flee from their long forgotten predator. It’s even suggested that one Megalodon, or the return of the species, could radically change whale migrations as a whole and change the ocean’s ecosystems.  

That’s how serious just one or few sharks is. As the series go on, other sharks do appear either as a mate, one of Angels offspring, or as we learn later, the sharks ability to reproduce without mating at all via parthenogenesis. They will even devour each other without so much as blinking an eye.

The series really takes the whole “sharks are nature’s perfect creatures” to the extreme. They ain’t even afraid to inbreed and form social groups as we see later on depending on their situation. This, again, works for the hellish, harsh world that is the Marianas Trench, alongside some other prehistoric surprises… But in the world where the ocean is frequented by mankind, is another story of a creature of a bygone era lost in time.

Never once do these sharks seek out humans specifically. They don’t go for revenge, or plot… They just survive as best they can in a world that demanded one to adapt or die. And adapt they did.

As a whole, though, it seems the consequences are made specifically for humanity. As these sharks can reproduce on their own, outmatch anything humans generally throw at them, and threaten to make a new balance that makes traversing the ocean much more dangerous than it ever needs to be. Either by, again, going to look for the sharks, near their prey, or any place they call home. They are best to be left alone in their natural environment.

As the books go on though, these themes falter slightly, but it retains that fault of people are invading into places they don’t need to be as as result there are consequences. The characters, namely Jonas and his family, go from being part of the problem, to cutting off the problem, to being haunted and forced back into the same problem, right until Jonas himself and his family are aging and a new generation of Man and Sharks are starting the cycle all over again as slowly but surely, these sharks are starting to return one at a time to the Pacific Ocean with a new set of people that may or may not be doomed to repeat the mistakes of trifling with forces that they should not deal with.

Yeah, the books are… getting up there with numbers and getting dragged out… But I will let possible readers of this article make the decision or not to read the series. There is a good horror story with the first book, and even the second.

Behind some squicky stuff and a bit of bad writing, there’s good stuff, even when those flaws keep returning with the blunt force of a bat to the head. Even Godzilla movies went on a bit longer until things ran thin. Even the later books are kinda stupid fun like some of the worse giant monster movies, and are even complete with giant monster fights as Angel and her species has a slew of many contemporaries.

Angel would be the star and face of the series, being our main Maid Monster of Honor, and would be up front as the books monster through three books and would remain named for ones after. And even though her stardom comes and goes, other leviathans come to fill the role who are stronger, smarter, and cooperate at a terrifying level that makes them a deadlier.

And as of this year, the six book is released and a seventh is on the way. To top it off, Steve Alten’s other writing of The Loch, a very similar story, attached itself to this series. I could easily go on about that one and its sequel as well… but I would ramble and be a salty writer on that subject.

So there it is. A decent, good shark book and its sequels that deserves to be well known by all at the least. Much like a few good few horror movies, the continuation skews off the beaten path, but what good story hasn’t had its rainy day in the end…

Editor’s Note: Well it’s taken a while, but we finally have a giant shark in the ICHF gallery.