Sometimes the backstory has to do with events that created a great monster, other times it’s just an ultra cool breeding story. Either way, origins are a great way to add depth to a flick, and occasionally give us a tick more sympathy for our villain.
Since there are nearly as many of these look backs as there are movies in the genre, this list by definition will have to miss some good ones. Don’t be scared to spit bullets on anything you think should have made it.
A classic example of the phrase oldie but goodie, is there any more famous origin story than that of Frankenstein’s monster? Nope. This sucker has been done, re-done, satirized, reborn, rebooted, and given any other treatment you can think of. And why not? It’s a f*cking doozy. Stitch together the body parts of multiple corpses, plug in the brain of a criminal, and then add lightening. It almost seems reasonable that you could make that shite work. Almost.
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I would guess that if as a young child I found my father in bed with another man, and then had the misfortune to be raised as a girl even though I was a boy, I’d probably be pretty f*cked up too. It’s difficult to feel anything other than sympathy for Angela/Peter, because any time you have to use he/she to refer to one person you’re likely dealing with a highly confused individual. I get annoyed as everyone else by it’s the parents’ fault explanations, but in this case IT WAS THE PARENTS’ FAULT!
As lifecycle origins go this is easily the top of the heap. We’re all so familiar with the process that it’s easy to lose sight of what a phenomenal creation we have here. Egg to face hugger. Face hugger to implanted symbiote. Implanted symbiote to full blown Alien. It’s a master class in how to tweak some of the natural world’s more creative relationships and create a monster than truly terrifies on every conceivable level.
We get various origin stories for the Cenobites throughout the whole Hellraiser series, and technically the second is probably the most instructive in that department. But no matter how you break it down, the overall message is that if you are a sick enough sunuvabitch that all the freaky shite this world offers no longer moves you, then there is a place that will take you to a whole level of pleasure and pain you could never imagine. Although honestly it all pretty much looked like pain to me.
This cruel piece of work ends with our killer having performed a lo tech C-section on the protagonist. While the real mother lies bleeding to death on her staircase, the killer sits with stolen baby looking like she’s going to get away with all this madness. And the reason? Simple but brutal. The killer was pregnant and lost her baby in a car accident with the mother she literally just took apart. Not fun, but compelling nevertheless.
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Here’s a story more heartbreaking than that poor Voorhees child. A bunch of kids tried to scare little Victor by hitting his house with fireworks, but the damn house caught on fire. Vic’s dad rushes to save his son. Unfortunately he doesn’t realize Victor is pressed against the front door as he hacks through it with an axe. Bye bye lil V. Hello vengeful killer.
Dying of cancer? Survived a suicide attempt? Why not play God with other people’s life motivation. When you get right down to it, as righteous as Jigsaw tries to come off, he’s really just an arrogant motherf*cker who is holding people to a standard he couldn’t uphold himself. That’s part of the ingenuity behind his origin. It’s a philosophy that kinda sounds reasonable at first, until you give it a little thought and realize no, this dude’s just a stone cold hypocritical bastard.
Serial killer on his way to execution gets covered in a genetic soup during a vehicle accident which causes his body to fuse with the surrounding snow. Go ahead and read that a few more times if you need to get your head around the ridiculously awesome concept. Fortunately, most of the rest of the movie lives up to about what you’d expect from the concept – including the classic scene of Shannon Elizabeth getting raped to death by a snowman.
The great thing about Melvin’s transformation really isn’t the falling into a vat of nuclear waste, because who hasn’t done that at some point in their lives? What lifts this particular case of irradiation gone wrong (or right), is when on top of getting slimed he also catches on fire. Adding that sort of insult to injury is just what you need to make a standard concept like this rise above the fray.
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Poor neglected Jason. If those damn counselors hadn’t been off getting high and having sex he might not have turned into the hulking homicidal post-drowning victim that we’ve all come to know and love. Of course he was severely retarded, so it’s not like life was going to be easy for him no matter what. In fact, given his likely life trajectory, he just might owe those counselors a debt of gratitude.
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