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time (the 1950s) when it was well known that birds of prey attack snakes far more often than they attack people. Whether this knowledge was what guided his decision to present giant eagles as allies rather than enemies is unknown, though. What we do know is that giant animals have continued to exist as monsters all the way up to the present day.
An end to mythic proportions?
    Many modern giant animals are not taken seriously. Indeed, in Rob Reiner’s 1987 film The Princess Bride, as the protagonists wander their way through the perilous fire swamp, the princess turns to her protector and asks, “Westley, what of the R.O.U.S.’s?” He responds, “Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.” Westley is then, of course, promptly attacked by a giant rodent.
    This scene is not intended to frighten viewers. The giant rodent isn’t realistic, believable, or scary. When it yelps in pain, it sounds more like a Muppet than a monster. The humor in the scene stems from mockery because, to modern audiences, animals of mythic proportion seem totally absurd.
    Yet these monsters are not as extinct as they might at first seem.Giant boars and huge birds of prey may no longer feature as monsters in modern culture, but many other animals do. Consider the birds that feature in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds or the spiders that are the stars in Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia.
    Here are animals that, like the Nemean lion, are tweaked in some very basic way. Hitchcock’s birds look like normal birds but behave like crazed predators, hungering for human flesh. Marshall’s spiders are different from other spiders only in that they are highly resistant to insecticides. Indeed, the really scary aspects of the monsters in these movies—the fact that the birds swarm people and that the bite of the spiders is lethal—are very much real. Birds can and do swarm people and there are spiders that have bites so lethal that they can kill people quickly. 15
    Once again, study of the natural world is responsible for the birth of these monsters. The idea of birds killing by swarming or spiders wiping out an entire village with their venomous bites could have come about only as a result of people seeing such things happen in the real world. And it is precisely because these monsters are so easily accepted by educated modern audiences that they have succeeded in striking so much terror into our hearts.
    So animals still exist as monsters, but instead of scaring people with their size and strength, they now do so with natural abilities that are subtly altered by creative Hollywood minds to be more malevolent and threatening than they actually are. Yet there is, of course, one monstrous animal that is an exception. Hardly small and venomous, or even remotely in the same category as any other modern animal monsters, is the colossal ape, Kong.
A king among the giants
    Created for the cinema in 1933 by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, Kong has since been reincarnated for King Kong movie viewers nine times. In every single film, Kong is found in a remote part of the world that has remained unexplored for one reason or another. These remote places are always home to other huge animals; in some cases these are dinosaurs, in others, they are just very large versions of common animals like snakes and lizards. The story line for each film brings humans to Kong for different reasons, but the ape always develops an emotional bond with the leading lady, nurtures and cares for her in the wilderness, and ends up being shot by aircraft while trying to protect her from harm.
    Yes, Kong is big, frightening, and lethal. In every film dozens of humans are slain by Kong’s actions, but he is not specifically revealed as malevolent as the man-eating Nemean lion or the orchard-ravaging Calydonian boar. Moreover, all of the films end with a sense of sadness over the death of the giant ape. There is no feeling of terror or fear of Kong by the end of the films, only