Introducing the Next Sci-Fi Monster Franchise

I won’t lie to you, the title’s a bit of a trick - I’m not here to tell you about an upcoming movie but rather to pitch my own idea. But don’t click away just yet! Take a minute to think about it : what’s our generation’s “Godzilla”? Based on how many Godzilla movies are coming out recently, studios sure seem to think that Godzilla is all we need, but is it really?

More than anything, Godzilla represents a fear of nuclear weapons - there’s a reason why the first film came out in Japan in 1954 (if you don’t know what I’m referring to please learn some history). It was then rebooted in 1984, which again makes sense given that that was the middle of the Cold War. Later reboots, though, make a little bit less sense. I can understand the 1999 reboot as playing on nostalgia in an age where there weren’t any major societal fears to base a new monster on, but everything since 2014? After 50 years, we’re not worried about nuclear war anymore - we’re worried about global warming.

But how do you make global warming into a sci-fi monster?

It’s easier than you think. If you want to make a sci-fi monster movie, the two major questions you have to answer are “what does this monster look like” and “what does this monster do”. The answers to both of these questions should relate back to the central theme - in our case, global warming - and then you have the heart of your story. All that’s left is creating a story to show your monster off.

So what does a global warming monster look like? Well, global warming looks like… nothing. It sounds like nothing. It’s something that creeps up on you so slowly that you don’t notice it’s there, really, you only notice that something is just wrong, like a warm winter’s day. The monster, then, should also be invisible and silent. The only way we should even know it’s there is through the characters' paranoia - are their goosebumps caused by a real breeze or something more sinister? Did the bird on the street die of natural causes or something more sinister? Just from this basic characterisation, then, we know our subgenre : psychological horror.

Onto our next question : what does the global warming monster do? Godzilla already plays on the idea of the monster as an amoral force of nature, but the global warming monster could take that a step further by not killing anyone… at least not directly. Maybe there’s weird rain one evening and when the dog is let out it comes back whimpering with feet covered in blisters. Maybe the main characters go fishing and start bleeding from cuts in their mouths when they eat the fish. Maybe there’s a heatwave that just keeps getting hotter and hotter, cooking people alive like lobsters in a pot.

Having a monster that’s not only imperceptible but which also causes harm in so many different and seemingly random ways hasn’t been done before as far as I know, but it’s absolutely perfect. The main characters would start to connect the dots, but nobody would believe them. Eventually, they would have to create a device to detect the monster’s presence, and even then many people would assume it was an elaborate hoax. The concept by its nature has to engage with the concept of ignorance and denial - just like with real-life climate change deniers - and could even humanise that perspective while condemning it.

At the very least, I think a trilogy could be made. In the first movie, we see characters grapple with the weird things happening to them and ultimately connect the dots. In the second, the characters would have to figure out how to make people take the threat seriously, and maybe we’d learn about how human actions somehow created the monster. Finally, in the last movie, there would be a movement to fight the monster, though how many people tried and whether or not they succeeded depends on how hopeful you want to be.

This is just the concept, of course. There’s a lot of flavour that could be added depending on the atmosphere someone wants to create. The setting, for example - I imagined the story taking place in the modern day, as the brutal immediacy feels appropriate, but it could happen on an alien planet or in 200BC without changing much. Or the monster’s origin - it could be anything from a strange element released from melting permafrost or an ancient god angered by human disregard for nature. The allegory is the core of the story, so the rest of the details can be as crazy and creative as you want.

So there you go - our generation’s Godzilla, a sci-fi monster that would be culturally relevant and not just nostalgia bait. One question remains, though…

What should we name it?