Slime. Goo. Muck… There’s a certain kind of monster that, as it hulks or slithers from one place to another, leaves a trademark residue behind. Sometimes (as in so many of the Technicolor sci-fi/horror films of the ‘50s and ‘60s) this stuff is a garish red or green -- or even blue. At other times (as with the gelatinous proto-pods that take root all over San Francisco in 1978’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) it’s colorless and transparent.
But whatever its specific color and consistency, all varieties of monster ooze have this in common: they both gross us out and attract us.
Why is monster goo both repellant AND attractive? Because it’s a symbol of our origins. Ooze of all sorts reminds us that we are biological creatures – that we come from goo, and to goo we will return.
That’s why horror/sci-fi films with a lot of ooze in them are so often about issues of human identity. In the cold and creepy universe of Body Snatchers, for example, Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams learn the hard way that what ultimately matters is survival. Being nice – or human – doesn’t count for anything at all in the end, because neither quality has any genuine usefulness. If a species is really going to be a going concern, it's got to be vegetative, impersonal, and pitilessly predatory. Nothing short of that will cut it.
That’s the same message delivered by my personal favorite among all of horror/sci-fi cinema’s great goo-excreters: the original (1979) Alien. Ridley Scott and the rest of that film’s creators took great pains – and spent a lot of money on pharmaceutical lubricant – to present the Alien as a creature capable of generating virtual oceans of protective mucous. This goo-dripping is absolutely central to the Alien’s character, because this monster is first and foremost a symbol of impersonal biological life – and of our mingled fear and fascination with our own biological origins. (That’s also why the Alien is such a transparently SEXUAL monster. As designed by H. R. Giger, it brilliantly manages to symbolize both the male and female sexual organs equally.)
Gooey monsters are usually very tough monsters. It’s hard to kill them because they’re built to survive, not to be nice. Are we humans that way too? And if we’re not, should we be? Those are the questions that – along with a lot of mess -- the great goo-making monsters always generate.
