Varieties Of Evolutionary Experience In Sci-Fi Media

I admit, right off, much of my affection for Del Tenney's deliriously hokey The Horror Of Party Beach (20^th Century Fox, 1964) stems from delight in the novelty of it having been shot in my hometown of Stamford, Connecticut.

Watching it recently for the first time on DVD (after years of childhood screenings at the local library), brought home anew just how much its curious take on mutation and the evolutionary process contributed to its charms, not to mention to that of other fantastic films and video of the last century.

Instant Monstrosities

Like the giant bug films of the prior, post-Hiroshima decade, such as the ants-take-LA spectacle Them! (Warner Bros., 1954) and Universal's response, Tarantula, the following year, with occasional exceptions, radiation provided the most common explanation for spectacular and rapid changes in otherwise mundane fauna and flora.

Just as improbable as such developments remain from the perspective of real-world considerations, like the Square-Cube Law (which, in assuming a giant creature's volume to expand unavoidably faster than its surface area, would render its body too heavy to move), the monsters of Horror are just as improbable for their character and genesis.

In the opening credits we see at the bottom of Long Island Sound dumped nuclear waste accreting onto human skeletons, whom, courtesy of a little time-elapsed animation, turn into googley-eyed scaly bipeds who bear what resemble dozens of closely-packed hot dogs protruding from where their mouths should be.

In short order, they make their way to the surface and begin marauding the town, along the way, disrupting a beach party performance by the Del-Aires, business at a local deli (still in operation, I might add) and even a slumber party before dispatched to rubber suit oblivion by a scientist hero and his girlfriend.

In contrast to their great numbers (one or two monsters become a horde courtesy of trick photography), they have an unlikely uniformity of appearance one would normally associate with organisms developed from progenitors of the same species, rather than the unwieldy impact of ionizing radiation. But then, the idea that toxic waste can inspire tissue growth and novel, complex life starting with nothing more than a collection of pirate bones is even more outlandish than giant spiders—even as a similar idea held sway for centuries prior to Pasteur.

Abiogenesis, allowing for the origination of fully-formed organisms from inanimate matter, like fossils, was, itself, a form of spontaneous generation, a belief which maintained that living things could appear from circumstantial associations--a favorite example being the rural notion that field mice were somehow spawned from grain, since they were so frequently sighted around barns filled with it.

Evolutionary Overdrive

Though these and other pre-scientific notions have long-since been dispelled, they hold a superficial logic that finds more intricate expression in other atom-inspired fare, like Day the World Ended (ARC/AIP, 1955), directed by low-budget maven Roger Corman.

Seven diverse survivors of nuclear war, including a gangster, his moll, a prospector and a geologist take refuge with a prepper and his daughter in their home, cradled in a valley whose generous lead deposits protect it from the worst of the catastrophe.

With the grim threat of impending fallout, rations must be spread thinner than expected, reducing the chances for everyone's survival... except for Radek, one refugee who seems to be adapting readily to the altered world beyond their haven, dramatized by such disturbing habits as venturing out at night to mingle among the encroaching mutant beastiary of the surrounding forest and even noshing with gusto on radiation-tainted meat.

The dialogue between Richard Denning's geologist hero and Paul Birch, assaying an ex-Navy man with a Pacific bomb test background, demonstrates scriptwriter Lou Rusoff's earnest appreciation of how a given habitat selects certain species to thrive and others to die off based on which do or don't develop useful characteristics in response to its various pressures. The story's brazen departure, however, that dramatic changes to denizens of an entire ecosystem (forget a disaster so lethal as to warrant thousands, millions of years for recovery) can foster the development of adaptations in weeks, versus the conventional crapshoot impact of random chemical, electromagnetic or other influences, expressed over countless generations, is what makes Day almost creepily poetic.

As a contemporary aside, Alex Garland's Annihilation (Paramount, 2017) from Jeff VanderMeer's celebrated Southern Reach Trilogy (FSG Adult, 2014), while applying a less aggressive wave of extraterrestrial transformation, rather than the messy Cold War variety, in its own fashion, still supports the flattering misconception that emerged not long after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace's articulation of modern evolutionary theory in the 19^th century: that it embodies a direction and purpose.

Evolution's Darlings

Contrary to the dominant focus regarding the former's 1859 publication of On the Origin Of Species and its subsequent impact on the religious sphere well into the following century (the Scopes Monkey Trial, Creationism/Intelligent Design), productions like Joseph Stephano's eerie ABC program The Outer Limits (1963-65) reflect an equally enduring reactionary defense of species chauvinism in the secular world.

The episode "Sixth Finger", starring David McCallum of Man From UNCLE fame, depicts the metamorphosis of a lowly, resentful Welsh miner into a macrocephalic superman of the future, after he submits to an inventor's evolutionary-accelerating cabinet. The more he uses it, the more powerful the abilities his changing form exhibits as he hurtles toward human 

biological destiny.

While the results are as reliably pitiable and frightening as most of the entries in a science fiction anthology from the screenwriter of Psycho, the premise slavishly hews to the conviction that because homo sapiens sapiens has the power of reason, our debut on the planet is, logically, the goal of Nature—or at least puts us on the right path toward whatever that may be.

The dreadful socio/political fallout from such movements as the eugenics policies of the 1920s (not to mention the more recent fascination with genetic determinism) to serve this teleological fixation makes little difference, as adaptive evolution has no direction.

Familiar expressions like "next step in evolution" are as meaningless as "devolution", because, far from being antiseptically removed from the surrounding environment, like the miner in the cabinet, life's success lies in how effectively its multifarious expressions fill various ecological niches via incremental, sometimes beneficial, mutations in response to what different settings throw its way—not on how clever one facet of it might be.

Some shark species have remained virtually the same for millions of years as robust predators of the deep because they have become adapted to an environment that has been 

more consistent in its challenges than others. And before we prize ourselves for our unique ability as accomplished toolmakers to adjust to a vast range of climes (including outer space), it's worth noting that, to date, as a species, we have only been on the Earth about one fifth of the time of our first upright ancestors, homo erectus, who thrived for two million years.

Looking Backwards

Going in the other direction, the Jekyll-and-Hyde update behind Jack Arnold's Monster On the Campus (Universal, 1958) yields its own equally whimsical take on the pageant of life, courtesy of a prized extant ceolacanth preserved against bacterial decay with a dose of gamma rays by the ever-professorial Arthur Franz. Unfortunately, the irradiated blood of this "living fossil" (once thought to have been extinct for 70 million years), has acquired the ability to revert whatever animal ingesting it into its ancient counterpart.

Much of the plot revolves around a series of contrived episodes wherein, alternatively, a German Shepard, a mosquito and—via his ubiquitous pipe—Franz's paleontologist character, turn, respectively, into a proto-wolf predator, a giant insect and a murderous ape man, following contact with the blood.

Though it makes for maddening viewing waiting for anyone to put two-and-two together as the academic death toll mounts, the idea that the embryological phenomenon (at least in vertebrates) of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny could be jammed into reverse is, in its way, an intriguing maguffin and presages Ken Russell's Altered States (Warner Bros.) by twenty-two years--not to mention the wilder speculations surrounding the origins of intronic, or so-called "junk" DNA.

Conclusion

Coming full-circle to the monster bash of Stamford's Cummings Beach, the true value of this representative sampling of modest (and occasionally bizarre) productions lies less in any consistent quality of acting, writing or direction, but in what their themes reflect about our collective sense of our place in Nature... with exalting and unsettling results, alike.