With finals coming and PhD applications looming for many of us, it is no wonder WIRED’s retrospective “The Creatures that Ate Hollywood” delighted me.

King Kong Vs. Godzilla, 1962

Cloverfield, 2008

Oh how far we have come!

This gallery of monsters reminded of how far cinema’s monsters have developed. However, cinema has not only developed in monster creation; in tandem, the cinematography of those monsters has changed. Monstrous realism is not the only difference between these still frames. Film technology has facilitated a shift from objective camera positions to increasingly subjective cinematography.

Upon the release of Cloverfield earlier this year, the WIRED reviewer writes: “With the exception of few-and-far between steady shots, the view from the handcam pushed upon Rob's friend Hud, played by T.J. Miller, is the viewer's lens as well. It's a vantage we are stuck with for the rest of the film.”

As a student of Laura Mulvey, I would identify this increasingly common technique as Hollywood’s way of confessing - without apology - the despotism of the male gaze in mainstream film. Beyond that rather obvious feminist critique, I think this trend has significance for conventions of horror films in particular. Filmmakers are not only taking on the challenge of creating realistic monsters – they are representing them subjectively, placing the viewer within the mise-en-scene.

Critics seldom praise monster and alien films as cinema’s most prestigious creations. Never the less, in an effort to create new spectacles and visual horrors, these filmmakers have championed technological developments that have changed filmmaking in the 21^st century. One of England’s most famous filmmakers, Peter Greenaway, states: “We (filmmakers) keep talking, keep paying lip service to the multimedia revolution. We should try and do something about it, harness its energies, utilize it, try and make the artifacts for the next millennium. There is a way that we ought to be able to become Picassos and Michelangelos on our own, to utilize this vocabulary.”

Film theorist, Tom Gunning, argues that cinema before 1915 celebrated the way of viewing created by film. The newness of the medium generated an art that celebrated the visual pleasure, suspense, and pain of cinema. Greenaway seems to suggest that the newness of this multimedia revolution can push cinema in a similar direction. Digital film and multimedia techniques allow filmmakers to revel again in the new experiences created through these technologies. Science fiction, horror, and anime filmmakers were the forerunners of the technologies that revitalized spectacle of contemporary filmmaking.

The moral of this story – sometimes confronting the unknown monsters and aliens can be the catalysis for very rewarding change. Now I’m going back to work on my applications.