When most people think of the Universal Monster movies, they think of them collectively, not as individual horror films that just happened to be put out by the same company and featuring many of the same actors. When you think of Dracula, chances are Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy are lurking around as well. This was something that Universal themselves leaned into, as their second era of monster movies in the 1940s eventually started just throwing in all the monsters, giving you the most bang for your buck. By the fifties, most kids experiencing these movies for the first time were either seeing them revived in theatres as double bills, aired on TV under the Shock Theatre banner, or featured prominently in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland—so, in the minds of generation after generation, the monsters were always hanging out in the same dusty castles and spooky moors, making them into a group not unlike how the yokai spirits of Japan are portrayed. The continuing existence of “The Monster Mash” makes that abundantly clear.
Speaking of Japan: despite coming from another continent, Konami’s Castlevania series is very much following the tradition of those monster mash-ups, reintroducing the classic creatures to a new generation of kids through a new medium (I’ve written about that before.) The original 1987 entry could basically be described as “Conan the Barbarian with a whip fights the Universal Monsters”, and as the series progressed, it developed more of its own style, as well as its own nonsense mythology and timeline (which somehow is able to include Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, even though the book is bereft of mummies and skeletons and fish-men), but never strayed that far from that original pitch. No matter who was fighting through the dark corridors and at what point in history, Castlevania has still been about Dracula and his castle housing an accumulation of monsters from all sorts of sources, and reappearing every century or so for another Monster Shindig. The atmosphere the games perfected was a fun celebration of every Gothic horror trope they could cram into one setting, pulling from not just the movies, but also literature, folklore, and demonology, making it seem sensible that all these disparate evil beings hang out together in this one big house. No other game franchise really has this very Halloween-y spirit.
There are quite a few recurring monsters that made consistent appearances across Castlevania‘s thirty odd years, many of which debuted in the first game: of course, Dracula himself (and his penchant for transforming into gigantic demons after his fireball-throwing antics prove futile) appears in the vast majority of the games, as does his second-in-command Death (as in, the actual Grim Reaper, who I guess just looks at Dracula and the gang as good for business), alongside first game bosses The Creature (the non-specific name given to Frankenstein’s Monster, whose appearance always maintains some Boris Karloff qualities even as they change him up), the Mummy, and Medusa, alongside the hordes of zombies, skeletons, tiny Flea Men, and fish-men (who are clearly a Creature From the Black Lagoon homage) blocking your way through the actual levels themselves. The inclusion of Greek mythological figures like Medusa (and her endlessly appearing, endlessly annoying flying heads) is the first sign that the developers at Konami are pulling from a wider array of monster sources than just the Gothic horror represented by the Universal Monsters, although the early NES titles didn’t stray too far from those initial pools. Sometimes, they’d bring in some deeper Gothic cuts—one of the bosses in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is based on the titular female vampire from Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Carmilla, and becomes another semi-recurring foe throughout the series in different forms, and later games integrate Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Alraune by interpreting its titular character as a human/plant hybrid creature. They even find a way to get Count Orlock from Nosferatu into the series as a separate character. These pulls from the last two hundred years of horror fiction, alongside the mythological figures, sort of set a baseline from which the designers could expand upon.
Which they did, especially when entering the 16- and 32-bit eras, which allowed Konami’s teams to take everything that was still quite distinctive about the monsters and give them even more detail and character. This is especially true when it comes to what could essentially be considered the series “original” creations: in those games, you may have to contend with flying severed horse heads (logically named “Mr. Hed”), furniture possessed by a Ouija board, dancing ghost couples (infamously named Fred Askare and Paula Abghoul in the English version of Super Castlevania IV), living puppets, a creature created from gears, a conductor from Hell who guides swarms of locusts, and giant bats made out of jewels. Then there are the skeletons, the most populous monsters in all of Castlevania: potentially 99% of all video games have you fighting skeletons (although not nearly enough have you fighting as skeletons), but Castlevania probably does more with them as recurring minor enemies than any other series, always finding new innovations for Dracula’s calcium-rich cronies. Aside from the usual bone-throwing types and the reptilian Bone Pillars, we’ve had skeletons taking on all sorts of jobs: sword-fighter, boomerang-thrower (while wearing fancy neon green gloves), taxi for skeletal dragon heads, farmer, professional runner, waiter, Kamen Rider enthusiast, biker, and bartender. There are floating skulls, giant caveman skeletons, ape skeletons that throw barrels (another fantastic nod to something else), and even the oddly specific were-panther skeleton. The most amusing skeleton of all is probably Yorick, the entirely non-dangerous one constantly chasing its own rolling head. As you can probably tell, the horror trappings of these games hide a very silly sense of humour that was present from the very beginning (which includes pseudonymous credit names like “James Banana”, named after Hammer Films composer James Bernard), and only becomes more clever as the games grew in scope.
It’s that cleverness and that devotion to small details that endear players to all the series many monstrous obstacles. Especially starting with 1997’s Symphony of the Night, considered to be not just the best in the series, but one of the greatest and most influential video games ever made, a whole lot of loving care was poured into every single one—every creature given its own unique animations and behaviours, far more than was probably considered necessary then (and even now is rarely seen.) It’s the little things that stick with you: when you kill the owl companion of the Owl Knight, it will mourn its lost friend before resuming its attack on you, the witches will turn into a cat (in a hat) when defeated, and the the long-ranged Skelerang will cower in fear if you stand beside it. Although still mostly a continuation on the graphical style of the celebrated Rondo of Blood from four years before, Symphony feels like a real demonstration of what could still be done with 2D sprites in the age of polygons (although it still throws in a few polygonal tricks to fit in with the times, such as with the living books), and this can definitely be seen in some of the game’s gigantic bosses, the most impressive and memorable being Legion (also known as Granfalloon, a very esoteric Kurt Vonnegut reference), the demonic being (taken right from the New Testament) that covers itself in a ball of corpses (maybe that part wasn’t taken from the New Testament.) Symphony established the status quo of the series from that point forward: co-director Koji Igarashi’s sidescrolling adventure style with a giant map—the hallmarks of the “Metroidvania” genre—as well as its approach to its monsters as well.
One of the ways later games took after Symphony is by wholesale reusing monsters from it—once the series took to portable consoles like the Game Boy Advance and DS, they could import sprites from Symphony (which in some cases, was itself reusing sprites from Rondo of Blood and Super Castlevania IV) without anyone really complaining, so many of the classic monsters could be seen again and again. In some ways that could come off as cheap, but it allowed the series to extend its life for another decade, and while there are many old sprites, they always found ways to expand upon the older monsters in small ways, and also provided a host of new monsters alongside the old ones. Yes, you might have to fight Legion again, but you’ll also get new, equally impressive-looking creations like Gergoth or Balor (or fun ones, like the Head Hunter), and sometimes having a recurring presence like demonic duo Slogra and Gaibon (who looked more or the less the same since their debuts on the SNES) is fun and gives the series a sense of continuity. They also tend to utilize the range of historical settings found in the series’ stories (which can take place from the twelfth century to the year 2035) when creating new monsters: you’ll have rifle-packing skeletons in some games, and when they enter the 20th century, you’ll find monsters with gatling guns, or demon maids who attack you with a vacuum cleaner (you might also have to contend with the Invisible Man, or Leatherface, or maybe even a famous cryptid like the Yeti or the Mothman, the latter of which can be attracted by turning on a searchlight) Whether by bringing back classic monsters (sometimes after long gaps, such as the bizarre, worm-infested skull creature from Super Castlevania IV making a surprise comeback in Aria of Sorrow and then Order of Ecclesia) or by coming up with new ones that fit a new setting, the run from the mid-nineties to the late two-thousands, when the Igarashi-led era of the series ended, never lacked for depth in its menageries.
Aside from the just quality of the individual monsters, though, what the series really did as a particular purveyor of monsters-in-game is give the impression of a coherent group, just as the Universal Monsters did decades before, rather than the somewhat random grab-bag found in series like Final Fantasy. No matter how weird they got, no matter if their origins lie in Greek, Norse, Celtic, mythology, in the Ars Goetia, in more recent horror fiction, or in a little bit of goofy humour, all the creatures in Castlevania feel like they should be denizens of Dracula’s castle. Maybe that was strengthened even more when the Metroidvania epoch of the series turned the castle into one big world rather than something separated into discrete stages—the cohesiveness of the setting led to an even greater cohesiveness in its inhabitants. In any case, way more than any video games with huge collections of monsters to fight, the Castlevania hordes come as the biggest Monster Party the medium has to offer.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 