In the Dust of This Planet by Eugene Thacker

Author:Eugene Thacker [Thacker, Eugene]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 978 1 84694 676 9
Publisher: O-Books

6. Caltiki the Immortal Monster ~ X: the Unknown ~ Leiber’s “Black Gondolier”

In our previous readings we considered the theme of the hidden world as manifest in “mists” – clouds, gases, and the like. There we saw how the hidden world often manifests itself in ways that are cataclysmic – at least for the human characters in those stories. Not surprisingly, genre horror is also replete with ooze. Ooze seems to always attach itself to monsters, dripping off their tendrils and making them all the more abject and repulsive. Ooze is also an indicator of the threateningly near presence of the monster; it is the footprint or tentacle-print of the monstrous creature. More interesting, however, are those horror stories in which ooze in and of itself is the monster. The most popular example is the 1958 American film The Blob, which features a gooey, pink substance that lands on Earth via a meteorite, and which then proceeds to engulf everything in sight (with a special appetite for screaming teenagers). As with many American films during the period, The Blob generalizes fears about invasions of all kinds (Communists, immigrants, nuclear war) into a blank, unspecified menace that threatens a Cold War-era town and its inhabitants. The Blob relies on a fairly conventional relationship of inside and outside, “us” and “them,” with the key to survival laying in the protection of the former from the invasion of the latter.

But not all ooze-horror stories utilize this inside-outside boundary. That the gooey entity in The Blob comes from outer space – the outside of all outsides, as it were – is noteworthy, for it implies a safe boundary that must be secured at all costs. Other ooze-horror films depict the entity coming not from outside but from inside, from within the Earth itself. This is exactly what happens in the 1959 Italian film Caltiki the Immortal Monster. Directed by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava – two directors who reinvented the Italian horror film – Caltiki is in many ways a classic, low-budget, monster movie. Shot in black and white, with stilted acting and special effects techniques that include a giant honey-drenched cheesecloth, Caltiki takes the ooze-horror motif in a different direction that of The Blob.

In Caltiki the ooze comes not from outer space, but from the bowels of the Earth. The oozing creatures are linked to an ancient Mayan myth about an indescribable monster – Caltiki – raised by vengeful gods. The film itself takes place in modern Mexico, where we find an American team of government scientists conducting an archaeological dig. Amid the all-too-human drama of lover’s quarrels and tensions between the local villagers and the American scientists, the expedition comes across an ancient, underground temple – that also happens to contain buried treasures, and a very high degree of radioactivity. This is the magic site, a forgotten, dead temple that contains a still living curse. Once Caltiki is revived – as the expedition attempts to steal away the relics and treasures – it proceeds to attach itself to anything and everything in sight.

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