We Need More Dinosaur Horror—Here’s Why
Chad Collins
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After the monumental success of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to presume Hollywood was going to go all-in on dinosaurs. Sure, they might not all have the scale of Spielberg’s blockbuster classic (just look at what happened with shark horror post-Jaws), but dinosaurs meant money, right? Well, we got several more Jurassic Park entries, though each strayed further and further from the roots of the original. Jurassic Park, at its core, is a horror movie, no different than Jaws being one. Subsequent entries sacrificed tension for scale, and terror for effects. Fallen Kingdom endeavored to cultivate some gothic ethos in its third act, and it’s the closest the franchise has come to feeling like the dinosaur horror it originated as. Dinosaur horror as a subgenre is almost nonexistent. The closest, big-budget release might be Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ 65, released one year ago this month.
Dinosaur horror seems like the perfect dovetail from the broader, more encompassing subgenre of animal attacks. Whether that’s piranha (Piranha) or barracudas (Barracuda), bears (Grizzly), or snakes (Anaconda), the animal attack subgenre is, in breadth, nature striking back. Often the result of callous policy or ecological devastation, some poor animal mutates, developing unkempt bloodlust, and some variant of a ranger, ecologist, or generalized movie scientist (trademarked) must endeavor to stop it in its track. Jurassic Park isn’t about ecology, per se, but it is still straightforwardly man being punished for venturing into a domain where they do not belong. Man seeks dominion over nature, man gets Jurassic World: Dominion. We’re punished for our hubris.
Also Read: ‘A History of Carnosaur’: The Ultimate Record of Dino-Horror
Dinosaur horror today is presently the province of low-budget mockbusters. There’s Jurassic Island, Dinosaur Hotel, Dinosaur World, Dinosaur Hotel II, and, of course, Mega: Shark, Octopus, Croc, Scorpions, Piranha, ad infinitum. Those are more dinosaur-adjacent than dinosaur primetime, but it’s close enough to count. In terms of big-budget Hollywood fare, there’s the recent Jurassic World trilogy, last summer’s Meg 2, and, 65, but beyond those, the subgenre might well be extinct. Extinct before it even had a chance to grow.
Beyond film, dinosaur horror has a little bit more bite. Capcom and Shinji Mikami’s bygone Dino Crisis series (Dino Crisis 3 notwithstanding) endeavored to supplant the Resident Evil survival horror formula with a lab full of errant dinosaurs to great success—and, if there’s any justice, maybe a remake or remaster soon. ARK: Survival Evolved is more survival crafting than horror, but some of those beasties are plenty terrifying. And, of course, there’s the forthcoming Jurassic Park: Survival, a long-gestating survival horror game set, of course, within the Jurassic Park universe from developer Saber Interactive.
Check out a trailer for that below because, seriously, it’s sick.
Still, 65 is probably the closest I’d say film or games have come to creating dino-centric horror on a mass scale since Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park. I can’t dissemble to know more than I do concerning why. A likely explanation, at least to me, seems rooted in the nature of merchandise and marketing. In broad terms, dinosaurs are for children. ABC’s Dinosaurs was a family sitcom. Disney and Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur had some scary pterodactyls and groundbreaking effects, but it was, at its core, a message movie with dinosaurs as a gateway for young kiddos and their parents. A dinosaur ripping someone apart isn’t exactly going to sell toys. Remember when Dinocroc ate Jake Thomas of Lizzie McGuire fame? I can’t see that in any Happy Meals.
There’s also the cost, of course. Aliens and other creaturific cryptids are considerably less expensive, I imagine, to render convincingly on-screen than giant, fluid, nimble dinosaurs. Jurassic Park is more than 30 years old now, and it still has the best-looking dinosaurs we’ve seen. But it wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t cheap.
Also Read: 4 Ferocious Creature Features to Pair with ‘Carnosaur’ [Double That Feature]
Beck and Woods’ 65, remarkably, had a reported budget of somewhere between $45 and $57 million. With a cumulative haul of just over $60 million, 65’s performance doesn’t help the argument that audiences are hungry for carnivorous horror. Which is a shame, really, as someone who both loves dinosaurs and thought 65 was pretty good.
Growing up, I had this Jurassic Park Tyrannosaurus rex toy. It was a rubbery thing, maybe over a foot high, and its key feature was a slit in the belly. The interior was hollow, and the intent was to have it eat all my other Jurassic Park figurines with the assurance I could simply fish them out of its stomach later. I did that. A lot. 65 is the closest I’ve come to capturing that feeling again. Like Spielberg’s original, eroded in the years since on account of product placement and corporate antics, 65 is principally a story of majesty. The majesty of dinosaurs, in their natural habitat, rendered for all to see.
The story is simple enough, akin at times to A Quiet Place (which was written by Beck and Woods), but with dinosaurs. Adam Driver’s Mills has some perfunctory family problems as he embarks on a two-year space expedition that’s cut short when some meteors strike his craft. He crash lands on Earth, but not today’s Earth—in this world, Earth is still in the age of the dinosaurs. There, he comes across Ariana Greenblatt’s Koa (remarkable in a mostly silent role), and the pair plan to survive and escape several dino swarms as they search for a way off the planet. Any guess what the inciting meteor is a catalyst for?
Also Read: Turning 30 With Jurassic Park
While 65 certainly adheres to the A Quiet Place formula at times, notably in its more horror-centric scenes, I’d wager it has more in common with the pair’s slasher Haunt than it does their big, breakout success. Haunt was high concept yet deceptively simple. Not simple as a pejorative, but simple insofar as tension and atmosphere were the key concerns. It was a one-off with a complete story, one untethered to franchise demands or complicated lore. 65 ends with Earth literally blowing up. No more dinosaurs. It’s a survival movie through and through, and it never risks overstepping to pantomime as something it isn’t.
It helps that the dinosaurs are convincing and, reasonably, pretty damn scary. They don’t look quite as great as they did courtesy of Stan Winston, but they’re not bad looking by any stretch, demonstrating that $45 million can go a long way. It’s not quite mid-budget, but it isn’t inordinately expensive, either. In other words, if the studios wanted to, they would.
But 65 didn’t go over well with either audiences or critics, so dinosaur horror, once again, stopped as soon as it started. Recent news that the forthcoming Jurassic World movie lost David Leitch over creative differences doesn’t seem promising. It’s too early to tell, though the chance the new film will prove as groundbreaking, subversive, and scary as Spielberg’s original is unlikely.
I want more of this:
But mostly, I want more dinosaurs. I want more filmmakers trying their hand at films like 65. Big dinosaurs. Little dinosaurs. And, most importantly, really, really scary dinosaurs. 65 was a start. Let’s see if the genre can now evolve.
Categorized:Editorials
