Author Archives: the monster philologist
The Seven Gods of Chaos
In the coldest regions of space, the monstrous entities Ogdru Jahad — the seven gods of chaos — slumber in their crystal prison, waiting to reclaim Earth… and burn the heavens.
Des Vermis Mysteriis, page 87
Abe Sapien Returns
Abraham Sapien returned in Hellboy: The Golden Army. Jones reprised the role, and the creature design was largely kept the same, although lighter color tones and different schemes were used for certain areas of the skin. Although the design was the same, the much larger onscreen presence throughout the film dictated a different approach to the make-up process.
Exclusive: Interview with Paul Taglianetti!
Following our brief conversations, filmmaker Paul Taglianetti agreed to do an interview with me! Paul has worked on many famous films, but of course in this interview we focus on the creature effects he collaborated on over the years.
Shelob
The conspicuous presence of spiders in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth imaginarium is rooted in Arachnophobia, an irrational fear Tolkien’s son, Michael, was affected by. In the universe of Arda, the spiders were originally spawned by a single being — Ungoliant, a massive demonic entity which entered Middle Earth before the First Age, perhaps one of the Maia corrupted by Melkor. The Sindarin (Elvish) word for spider is, in fact, ‘ungol’. The creature gave birth to innumerable progeny, among which was Shelob, “the last child of Ungoliant.”
Special: Of Dragons and Wyverns – Part 2
The Hungarian Horntail in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
The overall idea we now have of the so-called “Western” dragon is the result of a stratified conflation of different traditions, and this process culminated in the Middle Ages, wherein traditional dragons, due to their innate serpentine quality, as well as common traits with the Leviathan of the Book of Job, began to be associated with the Biblical serpent — the one that tempted Eve to engage in the Original Sin.
Lo and Behold, dragons acquired some traits we now recognize them for, all associated with the iconography of the Devil: horns and bat-like wings, as well as the infamous dragon-fire, which is both an association to hell itself and an inheritance from the Biblical Leviathan.
Special: Of Dragons and Wyverns – Part 1
Here be Dragons.
When a dragon in a fantasy work — be it a novel, a film, or a videogame — is depicted as having just two wings (often also locomotory limbs) and two legs, the argument is often made that “it is not a dragon; it has two wings and two legs, therefore it is a wyvern, and should not be called a dragon“. This belief of an absolute dragon-wyvern dichotomy is held by surprisingly many as a sort of dogmatic truth — one that is radically false, in the face of actual data, history, literature and classical art saying otherwise. Of course, in no way a completely arbitrary classification reflects the plasticity of the word dragon, as well as the concept(s) of dragon.
Allow me thus to take you readers into a flying journey through the fantastic and languages, and explain why dragons can have as many limbs and wings as they please and still be called dragons.
Exclusive – Relic Kothoga pictures from Paul Taglianetti!
The Gatekeeper and the Keymaster
Among the vast array of creature effects that Entertainment Effects Group had to arrange for Ghostbusters, a rather large role had to be filled by the Terror Dogs: Gozer the Gozerian’s loyal servants, whose purpose is to open the portal that allows the travelling entity to set foot on a new world to conquer.
Special: Monster Legacy’s Monstrous Hundred – Part 4
In the last part of the Monstrous Hundred, here’s a carousel of films from the 2000s onwards!
Pitch Black (2000)
This film packs a clever, outside-the-box narrative with an equally interesting subversive man as its main character, pitting him and an unlikely crew against swarms of truly outlandish alien creatures that are neither hammerhead sharks, nor bats, nor birds of prey.
Monster Legacy 