July brings picnics and picnics bring ants. BIG SCARY MUTANT ANTS! Every culture has its Boogie Man. There's the Ashiarai Yashiki from Japan, a spirit that manifests as a giant foot that stomps into your house and reeks havoc in your home until you agree to wash it. It may not sound terrifying, but image it crashing into your living room while you're trying to enjoy the Super Bowl.
In America, we have the Hidebehind, a fierce creature that...you guessed it...hides behind trees and terrorizes people in the woods. Lumberjacks swear that the only thing the Hidebehind is afraid of is alcohol. I guess that's why they drink so much. :) In Central America, they have a Boogie Woman! She's called the Sihuanaba. This is a beautiful woman who appears naked (chika-chika-whaa-whaaa). Men see her and immediately go crazy for her and chase after her until she, well...leads them off a cliff or something else equally unpleasant. She's really only looking for a partner, but she doesn't want a human, so when she finds out the guys chasing her are human, she looks at them and she has the head of a horse...which scares the guys to death. Hey, it happens. Japan also hosts a Boogie Man Baby named...wait for it...Tofu Kozu. yeah, I know..it gets worse. It seems this is a giant baby who wears a cute bamboo hat and offers strangers tofu...by the side of the road...in the middle of the night. So sweet, right? Until you eat the tofu and it gives you a stomach fungus that kills you. I guess an agonizing death by tofu is what anyone deserves for taking a big block of the stuff from a giant baby in them middle of the night. These are just a few of the many cultural Boogie Men..uh...Women...uh...Babies...I'd say Boogie People but that sounds like we'll be talking about John Travolta. For our purposes, I have decided there's only one rule for qualifying as a monster movie: it must be a critter. That's right, a born and bred or hatched or genetically mutated or chemically douched...ew...creature that has an axe to grind with the world it finds itself in. We'll explore that Man V. Nature subject we all love to ponder. You know you sit at home at night really wondering where to hide during a Sharknado or if the can of Raid you keep under the sink will work against the giant Ant gnawing your neighbor in two. So that's what Monster Movie Monday is all about. I hope you enjoy meeting these creatures as much as I have! |