The Day the Earth Stood Still + The Thing + The Remakes of Both

I am posting these pictures to see how the new actors that portrayed the monsters further took the idea of humanizing or dehumanizing them.

In the original, Klaatu displays a caring, yet foreign personality. We can relate to him through his humanity yet, he seems out of the ordinary.

Keanu Reeves portrays Klaatu in the remake, he's a familiar face. Unlike Michael Rennie, it might be hard to believe that he's an alien, since he's widely known. Maybe the role of Klaatu would've been better served by an unknown. Casting unknowns can do great things for a film and its characters, just look at the original Star Wars trilogy.

In the original The Thing, the monster still looks a lot humanlike, but displays no human qualities during the movie.

Looking at pictures of the thing in the remake, they made it appear even less human and more like a monster. Maybe they were limited in how different and weird they could make the thing look back in 1951. With the technology of today how would the movie look if that technology was made available back then?

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) + The Thing (1951)

Something that caught my interest was how the "monster" was portrayed in both films. In The Day the Earth Stood Still the alien is shown to have a caring, humanistic quality about him. He's a nice person who doesn't want to see other people harmed. Klaatu is misunderstood by the others to have negative intentions, which is the very opposite.

In The Thing the monster is portrayed as something that could not have a shred of kindness inside. The only moment that the monster is given a chance to be seen as good was when the scientist approached him trying to make communication. But the monster only threw him to the side and continued his pursuit. We never learn what his intentions were, or what he thinks about the people.

As an audience, we're left to hate The Thing, without a shred of doubt. With Klaatu, we look at our own downfalls and how we may be making a huge mistake when resorting to violence first.

Frankenstein: Images

The first image is of Boris Karloff, before his makeup work.


Jack Pierce was the make up artist for Frankenstein. He also created the look of many other famous monsters like the Wolfman and the Mummy.


Jack Pierce came up with the iconic square shaped head of Frankenstein's monster. He believed that if someone were to transplant a brain, they would saw through the head and attach a latch to the top.


Karloff and Pierce worked together for The Mummy (1932), with Karloff playing the part of the mummy.

Frankenstein Journal Entry

The film raises interesting questions about meddling with things that we don't yet fully comprehend. Dr. Frankenstein played with life and mentioned he was being like god, but ended up creating a monster. He created something that was alright to begin with, but without understanding how the experiment could go wrong, how he could make people suffer through his actions, he looked at his experiments with a heavy bias. He had no concern for anyone else but his research. He failed to recognize when he had to start over, or do something correctly, for example, upon being told that the brain he was using was faulty, he simply brushed it off. The brain might've contributed to the monster's violent nature.

This type of mistake is one that other scientists try not to make. With the hadron collider, scientists are taking every measure possible to make sure it isn't dangerous and creates a black hole. For any small problem that may occur, there's a delay in the project. It's been run once and the scientists would like to run more tests with it, but they have to be completely sure it can't go wrong. If they were blind like Dr. Frankenstein, they possibly could've ended the world already with the hadron collider.

We have to be careful when conducting new research and passing the limit. We have to fully understand the next step and know how it can go wrong and prepare for it. Instead of rushing into things and ignoring the consequences.