This movie poses a real conundrum: does something have to be alive to be considered a monster? In this case, the filmmakers obviously don’t think so, because they put “monster” in the title—but make no mistake, the titular Monolith Monsters are simply space rocks whose reign of terror is caused by chemical reactions, an inanimate cycle of cause-and-effect. In that way, they’re probably closer to a natural disaster than a monster. Still, it was 1957, and I imagine that in the minds of the bigwigs at Universal (because yes, The Monolith Monsters should technically be part of the same Universal Monsters canon as Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the fifties Sci-Fi inflected counterparts like The Creature From The Black Lagoon) it was a lot easier to sell a movie with “monster” in the title to the kids who went to see Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis than if it were “just” a science fiction disaster movie. So, these rocks became monsters.
Part of the reason I started writing the New Creature Canon in the first place was to highlight creature features that fell outside the norm, so this that is about giant rocks fits right into it. How the rocks operate and how the story progresses is really not that different from the movies featuring flesh-and-blood (or mechanical, I guess) monsters, and applying those tropes to something outside the usual alien invader scenario does provide some interesting new ways to look at them. For example: the space-themed paranoia that is a constant in so many of these genre movies in the fifties being projected onto something as seemingly simple as minerals from a meteorite indicates to us that anything that comes from outside our planet, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral, is potentially a world-ending intruder. This is so pessimistic as to be outright existential, imagining a universe so hostile that even rocks are to be feared, and so The Monolith Monsters intentionally or unintentionally brings that particular recurring Cold War era theme to its peak intensity.
Although the premise of the movie may sound odd or silly, depending on who you ask, what’s sort of astonishing about it is how seriously it takes it central conceit, refusing to heighten or sensationalize it in any way, and never talking down to the audience (they aren’t afraid to have characters throw around legitimate scientific terminology and concepts.) Now, that also has the effect of making The Monolith Monsters come off as the squarest films imaginable, but I find the choice rather daring, even if only in that straight-laced fifties way. At the very least, it opens in a more traditional Sci-Fi way: having an uncredited Paul Frees (who dominated expository VO in SF movies for thirty years, probably) explain just how many space rocks drop onto Earth every year, and then making sure every early scene featuring the jet black rocks are scored almost bombastically, apparently by an equally uncredited Henry Mancini, among others. They really want you to know how much trouble the space rocks are going to cause, even before we see them do anything other than be rocks, and when our first character stumbles on them in the deserts of California and picks one up, the score bellows ominously.
(Also worth noting that the story is credited to Universal stalwart Jack Arnold, who was the studio’s top monster movie director at the time.)
Of course, the first one to discover the rocks is the local geologist in that small desert town, but he doesn’t think much of it, even when the local newspaperman inquires about it, desperate to find something interesting to print. Yes, we have a secondary character whose primary motivation is “this town is so boring, why doesn’t anything ever happen around here?”, which is amusingly quaint. By sheer bad luck, the wind picks up later that night and knocks over an inconveniently-located jar of water, getting the rock wet, and causing something to happen—but we don’t see it until we go to the next day, when the town’s other geologist (played by Grant Williams, who had starred in Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man that same year) comes back and sees the lab destroyed and his partner not just dead, but literally petrified. Also, there are rocks everywhere. I wonder if those are connected? We find out soon enough, as an elementary school class goes out into the desert and a little girl finds the same rock, brings it home, and drops it into a bucket of water—guess what happens? Although the audience knows about this longer than the characters do, it doesn’t take them that long to figure it out, and there’s more revelations along the way, so the catch-up investigation doesn’t feel too painful.
The rest of the movie then becomes a race against time, as the geologist, the schoolteacher/love interest, the local police chief, a doctor in Los Angeles, and the geologist’s mentor (with drop-ins from our sad sack newspaperman, who can see things unfold but is told he can’t print them because it would cause a panic) all try to determine how the rock functions, and more importantly, how to reverse the effects it has on people, as the little girl is slowly becoming more petrified. The early scenes with the girl, who doesn’t speak after being affected by the rocks and mostly stares blankly, invoke similar scenes in Them!—some of the most effective stuff in the movie, so they’re stealing from the best—and I can only imagine that seeing a child in an iron lung not long after America’s Polio outbreaks was probably still a chilling sight. This is the kind of stuff where the film’s sober approach works best—the doctor’s grave explanation about how the girl’s lungs are slowly being petrified is given a reasonable amount of weight, enough to make you forget that the cause of the condition are space rocks that grow and multiply in water like Gremlins and vampirically suck out silicon from the human body. Later scenes where other victims of the rocks are trucked into town are also treated in a similar manner—although the condition itself doesn’t have enough of a visual component to really stand out (their skin becomes a little more grey, which barely registers in this black-and-white movie), the basic idea of it is still fairly effective, all the more because of the small town setting and feel it invokes well before the situation becomes all-out apocalyptic.
(The small town stuff does provide some other highlights—the newspaperman’s big moment comes when he prints a message to evacuate the town, and then gets his paper boy to round up all the other kids to deliver them—and along the way we get a joke where the kid thinks his friends won’t help unless they get paid, leading to your classic “Kids these days!”)
The rocks don’t provide a visually spectacular threat early on—we don’t even see them do anything except fizzle when they’re wet—which is a weird thing to say, because they’re rocks. Things definitely pick up in the second half, when the rocks left behind in the desert get soaked with rain (which features a scene where our heroes grill a comic relief meteorologist over the phone), grow to massive size, and then begin tapping into the underground reservoirs to keep their growth cycle going. The special effects of the giant growing rocks, which then topple over and break into chunks which then grow into more monoliths, are pretty good, and effectively portrays that ceaseless process as menacing. They way they just keep going, constantly self-replicating, sells the idea of this borderline unstoppable event heading your way. Despite how imposing they are, though, a solution is determined (after many scenes involving trial-and-error experiments in labs and conversations about said experiments—it’s not always an exciting film, folks), which involves a salt solution that they can recreate en masse by blowing up the local dam and flooding the salt flats—if they get approval from the governor on time. Of course, those political fat cats wait until the last minute, so our geologist hero has the dam exploded before getting the approval—but that’s okay, as we end the movie on a laugh line about how the governor was totally okay with millions of dollars worth of private property damage. Totally realistic.
The climax feels like the closest The Monolith Monsters comes to the absurdity of “normal” monster fare—more than a few of this era’s creature flicks prominently feature dynamite in their finales—after spending the rest of it treating it like a different sort of disaster. The smaller-scale devastation the monoliths cause feel completely different from the massive kind they gets into later, but I find that makes the concept a bit scarier, because the things have so many different effects on the world around them. Also, after some characters talked about the absurdity of the salt flats early in the movie, it ends up being the natural environment itself that repels the extraterrestrial menace—which the movie itself does not comment upon. That’s this movie in a nutshell, though: it has an earnest workman quality in its execution, so most of its more intriguing implications feel projected onto it one way or another. But they’re still there, and the movie still feels like it’s responding to the tenor of its era, giving it a place within that pantheon if only for its uniqueness. Monsters could be defined as anything outside our usual understanding of the natural world—which extends outside the world, too—and with this movie, we can see that quality applied to something outside even that definition, expanding it outside of life itself.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 