Before Godzilla: Willis O'Brien, Dinosaurs, and The Lost World (1925)

Before Godzilla is a sequence of essays examining the origin of the giant monster film prior to Godzilla.

Monsters have been a part of human storytelling since the beginning, and film as a medium is no different. Numerous films made by cinematic pioneer Georges Melies and his company feature the likes of full-size dragons, aliens, demons, oversized insects, and terrifying anthropomorphic moons. The stretch of Melies’ work from the late 1890s through the early 1900s inspired many contemporary artists in the emergent medium, who created their own fantastic effects or simply copied Melies’ creations with a few tweaks added.

Dinosaurs started to appear a little later in film history, with Windsor McCay’s “Gertie the Dinosaur” and D.W. Griffith’s live-action “Brute Force” both debuting in 1914. The former sees Gertie the long-necked Brontosaurus brought to life through cel animation; the latter briefly depicts a carnivorous dinosaur via a model being moved off camera, as well as an unspecified prehistoric reptile played by a lizard with fake appendages attached. 

Yet another method of depicting prehistoric beasts emerged the following year, with the release of stop-motion animator Willis H. O’Brien’s short film “The Dinosaur and the Missing Link.” This was the first of several comedic shorts O’Brien made during the following years on the theme of prehistoric life, including “Prehistoric Poultry” and “RFD 10,000 BC.” These shorts reveal O’Brien as a major talent: though their models are largely crude and the stop-motion unpolished, the shorts are gems of playful storytelling and imagination, with an appealingly silly sense of wit. The various cave-people and prehistoric creatures that appear convey a sense of charm and personality that belies the lack of polish in the technique bringing them to life.

O’Brien would get a chance to practice his talents on a larger canvas with 1919’s The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, the earliest known film to combine live-action actors and stop-motion effects onscreen. Though the film proved a financial success, the production was a troubled one for the animator. Producer Herbert M. Dawley cut the finished forty-minute film to nearly a quarter of its length, took credit for much of O’Brien’s work, and pinched the discarded footage for use in another project, the short film “Along the Moonbeam Trail.” It would be half a decade before O’Brien would finally secure another feature-length showcase for his effects, but this time he would achieve proper recognition for his work. The production in question was 1925’s The Lost World, director Harry O. Hoyt’s adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s first and most famous novel featuring his explorer character, Professor Challenger.

Whether The Lost World is the first true giant monster movie or not is up for debate; what is certain is that it is the earliest still-existing feature-length dinosaur film. The plot concerns Challenger’s expedition to a hidden plateau in the South American rainforest, where a missing explorer claimed to have found dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Sure enough, the prehistoric creatures are alive and well, portrayed by O’Brien’s claymation effects - or, in the case of an ape-man with a truly terrifying expression, a man in a suit.

Most of The Lost World’s claymation effects sequences successfully reiterate the formula of those in The Ghost of Slumber Mountain and “Along the Moonbeam Trail”, though this time, the effects were more expansive and realistic thanks to the contributions by innovative model-maker and key O’Brien collaborator Marcel Delgado. Still, the content is much the same: the dinosaurs and other prehistoric denizens of the plateau forage, fight among each other, and terrorize the human cast. It’s at its conclusion that The Lost World introduces a new wrinkle into the proceedings. Once the human cast escapes from being stranded on the plateau, they find that a Brontosaurus has fallen off and survived thanks to landing in a giant mud pit. The humans endeavor to have the dinosaur transported back to England, only for it to break free by the time it reaches port and rampage through London before thankfully making its escape and swimming toward home. Which means that for the first time in cinema history, a giant creature is brought to a (then) modern metropolis to wreak havoc. 

Is this the origin of the giant monster movie as it is understood today? Certainly the key building-smashing, street-stomping pleasures of the genre are present and correct in the sequence, other than the absence of any sort of military response. But there’s a key ingredient missing. The Brontosaurus is not, after all, a monster in the traditional sense; it’s a dinosaur, an animal. While dinosaurs are indeed an awesome source of the spectacle that defines the giant monster genre, they are still creatures of the natural world. The phrase “giant monster” implies something outside the norm, existing in defiance of the laws of nature and of God. 

Willis O’Brien’s work had brought together the trappings of the giant monster film. Now the nascent genre needed its central draw, a source of spectacle that was unique from everything else around it, from beyond the confines of nature. It needed some kind of strange beast, or kaiju, if we were to use the Japanese term.

And as it happens, O’Brien’s next major project would deliver just that. Enter King Kong.