The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

Ant writes "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters is a published paper about the reality of movie-monster anatomy in 2003. In the paper, Michael C. LaBarbera explores the implications of extremely large and extremely small fantasy creatures, whose mass, volume and surface-area scale at different rates as they are shrunk/enlarged (e.g., ants can carry many times their body-weight, but if they were the size of tigers, they'd be crushed under their own carapaces). Other issues covered include the respiratory difficulties of Mothra, the biomechanics of Jurassic Park dinosaurs, and the reason E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial is so effing cute.."

Comments

Chicken.

[ozmanjusri]

Sadly, LaBarbera completely avoids the issue of whether Godzilla steaks taste like chicken. Enquiring minds want to know.

ET

[megrims]

ET was designed to be cute!?

I shall never trust the film industry again.

On Being the Right Size

[Richard W.M. Jones]

This classic paper, On Being the Right Size written by JBS Haldane in 1928 covers the same ground in a very readable style.

Rich.

Re:On Being the Right Size

[hotdiggitydawg]

While we're talking B-Movie monsters, it's worth mentioning the recent paper(PDF warning) by a couple of physicists proving the nonexistence of vampires and ghosts. Interestingly they didn't show zombies couldn't exist - although they at least came up with a more plausible explanation.

Re:On Being the Right Size

[quin_chance]

I've seen most of this before in various places, although the colourful comparisons lift it above the normally high school-like accounts.

I think the writer could do with a few more palentology lessons before reassessing the comments on JP though.

He seems to have a biologist's preconceptions that life then is exactly the same formula as life now... with species occupying identical niches to those today, a vision that's as alien and unreal as the pro-evolutionist's "Noah couldn't get the triceratops up the gangplank" to what actually comes out of the ground from the fossil record.

The debate over swamp dwelling versus gyraffe model for sauropods will continue to run and run, probably past successful cloning, until some bright slashdotter builds a time machine, and heads off to see. My money's on a animal that sleeps in the water, and comes ashore to feed....

Re:On Being the Right Size

[Anonymous Coward]

Vampire mythology deals with the problem by positing that only some who are victims are turned to vampires - I'm surprised even a joke paper is ignorant of this (even Bram Stoker's book which arguably launched the modern vampire myth was careful enough to note that vampires choose whether their victims should become vampires in turn).

As for ghosts - supernatural forces by definition are not natural forces. But if you want to deal with "walking" and moving through walls we only need to posit that ghosts exert a magnetic force, or follow flows of electric potential in the air. They float but give the illusion of walking, eg. a stretched form of ball lightning :)

I'm guessing the physicists behind the paper really didn't think through their logic very thoroughly :)

Re:On Being the Right Size

[grahamlee]

They did show that zombies which bite you and turn you into other zombies couldn't exist, for the same reason that the vampires couldn't. Although didn't the Romero trilogy end up with the entire world being zombies except for one human outpost? Anyway, the existence of zombie poison has been widely documented for decades. It's not merely a plausible explanation, it's the explanation.

Re:On Being the Right Size

[ultranova]

While we're talking B-Movie monsters, it's worth mentioning the recent paper(PDF warning) by a couple of physicists proving the nonexistence of vampires and ghosts.

Ghost can't be touched => ghost can't touch the floor => ghost can't walk.

Unless, of course, the ghost can fly (for example, by expelling neutrinos or some other hard to detect particles that nonetheless can have nonzero momentum) and is simply pretending to walk to mess with your mind - one would imagine that after overcoming death gravity would not be much of a challenge ? Or maybe the ghost is walking on the ghostly version of the stairs - a bit like it's still wearing clothes despite the clothes not being alive when it was alive (in other words maybe the stairs are part of the ghost) ? Or maybe the ghost is actually somehow imprinted in the house and is just projecting an image of itself walking ? Heck, maybe the ghost is normally dormant (since it has no functional neurons) but jumps into living brains when some come near, and you sense its presence in your body as chills and strange visions ?

About the sudden cold it's hard to say anything, since the author failed to say anything but suggest that there might be drafs in old houses, which is certainly true but does absolutely nothing to prove the nonexistence of ghosts or even rule them out as the possible source of sudden cold.

In other words, the paper fails to prove anything about ghosts but plenty about its author's lack of imagination.

The proof against vampires runs into even simpler problem: a vampire is supposed to be an intelligent being with full access to its logical faculties. In other words, a vampire is quite capable of understanding what will happen if it lets everyone it feeds upon to become a new vampire, and can easily prevent this just by destroying the corpse. In fact, several vampire mythos (such as Dracula) indicate that in order to become a vampire you must drink vampires blood; simply being drained dry by one kills you dead.

Now, I understand that it may be hard to think about the existence of ghosts and vampires seriously; however, when you start accusing others of "pseudoscience", you'd damn well better get even basic logic right yourself. A half-assed paper is half-assed and does no one any good. The paper fails to show that the existence of vampires or ghosts is "contradictory to simple facts". The writer of the paper should devote less time to accuse others of lack of critical thinking and concentrate on improving his own.

Classic Hollywood

[Chaffar]

I don't think anyone expected Hollywood to actually WANT to have accurate physics in their movies, all that counts is "how cool" they look. It's not a bad thing, mind you. Who'd want to see a King Kong that would die 'cause his bones snapped from the shear weight of his body? Pretty cool read though... shocking to see an article that isn't split into 14 pages to cash in on advertisers.

Re:Classic Hollywood

[Chabil Ha']

I know this is slightly off topic, but along that same vein, I was thinking about the Matrix the other day. I mean, if you were stuck in a little pod from birth until adulthood, do you know how atrophied your body would be? I doubt you coauld even reach adulthood. I mean seriously, you're muscle mass would be practically nil. Your eyes wouldn't be able to see much at all since they've never been exposed to light. You wouldn't be able to walk. Talk. Manipulate your arms and hands. About the only thing you would be able to do with any efficacy is wet yourself.

But you're right. When we walk into that movie theater, we're already stepping out of reality. We go to the movie theater for that exact reason. We don't want to be bothered by the nitty gritty details of how plausible something is, as long as the artist has successfully suspended our belief, we're happy.

Cacoon

[sporkme]

When my dad and I first watched Cocoon http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088933/, few words were exchanged for most of the movie. toward the end, when the old people were on the boat fleeing the US Coast Guard, my dad stood up and shouted, "There is no way in hell that a little pleasure yacht like that could outrun a Coast Guard cutter!"

So he was totally satisfied that intergalactics and geriatrics would hit it off, he believed without question that aliens visited earth in the first place, and did not quiestion that the first notion the US government would have had was to chase down a pleasure boat, but once that boat had exceeded its real-world limitations, he was totally disillusioned.

So my dad is a boat man. This guy is a body size ratio man. Neither seem to posess the skill of suspension of disbelief, a prerequisite for watching a movie. I further the "waste of time" motion.

Re:Cacoon

[Flounder]

Think that's bad? Try going to see ANY WWII war film with a group of military history buffs. I saw a yelling match break out in the middle of Saving Private Ryan over the authenticity of the German squad structure as depicted in the final battle scene.

Re:Cacoon

[asuffield]

Neither seem to posess the skill of suspension of disbelief, a prerequisite for watching a movie.

"Suspension of disbelief" is a skill exercised in creating a movie - specifically, it's the art of creating a movie that is unrealistic, but not so unrealistic that it triggers the "wait, this is a load of crap" instinct in the watchers. It's the difference between reasoned speculation and juvenile wish-fulfillment. It's the trick of creating a movie that "makes sense" even though it's fiction. It's okay to be unlikely but you have to avoid unreasonable or impossible or the intelligent parts of the audience are going to (rightly) say that your movie sucks.

It is, in absolutely no sense, the job of the watcher to make the movie not suck. The watcher is the customer. They are paying the maker to make a movie that doesn't suck. If you make a movie and expect the watcher to make it not suck, then you (the maker) need to pay them to watch it, because they're the one doing the work.

A movie that fails to entertain you is not your fault for being a bad watcher, it's a bad movie.

Re:Cacoon

[fatphil]

I'd like to agree with you, I dearly would. However, if movie makers simply kept to the believable, then none of them would ever make any movies. They have to aim a movie for the demographic sector which they believe will be forgiving of the unbelievable aspects - i.e. will suspend disbelief.

If you are not prepared to suspend disbelief because you insist that superman must obey the laws of conservation of energy and momentum, then it's not the film-makers fault - it's your fault for going to a movie where the lead character by design violates the laws of physics.

It doesn't always work that way - the 'everything blows up/bursts into flames' device is unbelievable to anyone with more than double-digit tally of axons, and yet trashy film-makers (yes, that means 99% of Holywood) insist on using it frequently - and indeed that _is_ bad film-making.

FatPhil

Re:Cacoon

[robson]

"Suspension of disbelief" is a skill exercised in creating a movie - specifically, it's the art of creating a movie that is unrealistic, but not so unrealistic that it triggers the "wait, this is a load of crap" instinct in the watchers. It's the difference between reasoned speculation and juvenile wish-fulfillment. It's the trick of creating a movie that "makes sense" even though it's fiction. It's okay to be unlikely but you have to avoid unreasonable or impossible or the intelligent parts of the audience are going to (rightly) say that your movie sucks.

The willing suspension of disbelief is the viewer-side term for the phenomenon. What you're describing, the author-side element, is called verisimilitude. That is, the creator's ability to infuse a believability into their work, even if that work involves unrealistic elements.

Re:Cacoon

[Dirtside]

There's an old saying about movies -- audiences will accept the impossible but not the improbable.

Re:Styx revived

[pipingguy]

Old sci-fi/monster movies are very cool, I wish we could see more of them re-broadcast instead of the current shaky camera scenes of might-be monsters. Might I add that most "horror" movies these days are actually "startle" movies.

Watching AVP right now, it looks like WWF/WWE had *way* too much influence.

he's missing something

[circletimessquare]

i think it would be absolutely impossible to explore the subject matter he does without talking about Alien (and i suppose its followup, Aliens as well, with its exposition of social insect behavior)

Alien is almost an excellent primer on parasitology, taking some of the more bizarre lifecycle aspects of certain parasites and insects, and exploding it into a scifi universe where humans are the host (with some great neato "what if" aspects of contemplative exobiology like acid for blood, organometallics for an exoskeleton that can resist the vacuum of space, the mouth-within-a-mouth, etc.)

wikipedia has a good exploration of the subject

the point is, Alien satisfies both mass audiences with requisite scares, but it also satisfies the scientifically-minded audience, because it begins with a good grounding in biology and expands upon it in a scholarly manner. Alien is entertaining on both a shallow bug out manner, and is also fodder for intellectual rumination as well. so many movies are just one or the other (usually the former), and it is very rare to find a movie that can do both very successfully like Alien

Re:he's missing something

[1u3hr]

Alien satisfies both mass audiences with requisite scares, but it also satisfies the scientifically-minded audience,

ORLY? How does the Alien grow from the tadpole that bursts out of the crewman's chest to the full-sized adult, without eating anyone or thing? (Apparently there was a cut scene showing the humans it had caught paralysed and used to incubate more Aliens (like wasps, etc) so it never eats anything at all -- unless it sneaked into the galley and microwaved a TV dinner.) And let's not even consider the economics of an interstellar freighter shipping ore; no ore is that valuable or rare. Yeah, a fun movie, many good things about it, but not at all scientific.

Re:he's missing something

[NoMaster]

Not to mention how rarely people in space go to the toilet. I mean, in almost every space sci-fi movie or series there's usually at least one or two scenes where everybody eats - well, the captain, senior crew, and important visitors at least (you never see redshirts eating, but they never seem to last long enough for the hunger pangs to set in anyway...)

But I digress. The crew of the 'Nostromo'? Fair enough, I would have shit myself when that squeaky thing jumped out of his chest. But Kirk, Spock, McCoy, & Scottie? Plenty of times we saw food go in, but never come out. (Actually, that may explain the bloated mess that is Shats today - but what about Nimoy?). We saw Yoda cook a couple of big meals, but never saw him dropping the kids off at the pool. Capt'n Mal & the crew had meals in almost every episode, but 'Serenity' doesn't seem to have a head?

And you can't tell me that, after a few drinks at the cantina, Han Solo didn't have to go and drain the main vein to make his bladder gladder...

Re:he's missing something

[Pollardito]

Not to mention how rarely people in space go to the toilet. I mean, in almost every space sci-fi movie or series there's usually at least one or two scenes where everybody eats - well, the captain, senior crew, and important visitors at least (you never see redshirts eating, but they never seem to last long enough for the hunger pangs to set in anyway...)

what is this obsession you have with the captain's log?

Re:he's missing something

[Creedo]

In the Alan Dean Foster novelization, the alien tore open food packages that the crew used. So, it's not true that it didn't eat. Also, part of the point of having the cat onboard was vermin. I imagine that the alien fed on them as well.

Re:he's missing something

[Creedo]

The novelization was based on the original script, so it was at least originally going to be addressed, then cut for time, I'd imagine. In the novel, the alien had broken into the food locker, and ripped everything open. Of course, all of the "food" on the Nostromo was recycled waste, so basically everyone was eating sewage.

Scaling in aircraft

[Bromskloss]

Sometimes you see RC airplanes hovering (propeller upward), which tells us something about the scaling of engine power versus mass. And this RC helicopter does crazy things you would never see a large version do. Very cool.

Re:Scaling in aircraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Gah. Two points;

* Engine power /does/ scale with volume, in fact rather better than that due to various economies of scale. If model engines really were more powerful per unit mass racecars would have thousands of tiny engines instead of one large one. There are in fact full-size propellor planes that can hang on the prop, but most planes aren't built with such extreme power-to-weight ratios because things like payload and range are more important.

* This author once again makes the idiotic 'lift is proportional to wing area - so big flying creatures are impossible' mistake. I assume that he looks at Cessnas and proudly pronounces that 747s are impossible, because they'd have scaling-factor-cubed mass but only scaling-factor-squared lift. In real life lift is dependent on lots of complex factors, but the best simple model is area /multiplied by/ speed. Large planes have higher cruise speeds than small planes with the same airfoil shape (in practice large planes make greater use of high-lift devices than small planes to keep landing speeds down). For a hovering insect the 'speed' part translates into the up and down velocity of the wings, which scales linearly with size if frequency is kept constant. The real limitation is the structural strength of the wing supports, which is the reason why large insects have proportionally larger wings and beat them slower (reduces stress on the supports and joints).

Re:Styx revived

[snuf23]

Oddly enough the CGI snakes in Snakes on a Plane also look out of place and unnatural yet it somehow added to the atmosphere of the movie.
Fastest anaconda eating person ever!

Oh common. . .

[ookabooka]

I think its perfectly natural to forgive inaccuracies like that if you aren't familiar with the material. For instance, my mother is horrible with computers, she knows that they can't do half the things they do in the movies, but it doesn't really bother her. Now have her sit down and watch tv show House (She's a doctor) and she will fret the whole way through. What am I getting at? It's easy to look past the 1 or 2 facts you know about a subject and enjoy the fiction, but if you are an expert it's natural for your mind to dissect it.

So while I watch House and think "I doubt that that many people could get soo many rare diseases" she thinks "Those test results aren't indicitive of that, why don't they screen for this? That disease can't progress that quickly. That disease doesn't present symptoms like that at all! Doctors don't go to patients houses like that. " etc etc It's hard to shut that voice out.

Totally missing the point

[Per Abrahamsen]

The point of the article isn't to make fun of B-movies. The point is to teach science in an entertaining way.

Published Paper?

[drphil]

Sorry to nitpick, here, but this is not a "published paper" as described in the parent post which implies some sort of scholarly work. As others have pointed out, this ground has been well-plowed before and there are no citations. This is an "educational resource" provided by the U of Chicago - reuse of the ideas are free, and you only need author's permission to reproduce charts, etc, and you can't, of course, freely incorporate the exact text into something you are going to sell.

It's a pretty good site, actually, IMHO. Archive is worth a couple of hours of browsing.

From the home page:
"The University of Chicago, through a consortium of 14 leading educational and cultural institutions called Fathom, provided high-quality, free educational resources on the Internet from January 2000 through March 2003.

This Library archive offers access to the complete range of free content developed for Fathom by University of Chicago faculty, researchers, and departments. Feel free to browse this archive of online learning resources, which include lectures, articles, interviews, and exhibits.

Faculty interested in finding other venues to disseminate materials for educational outreach should contact Stephen Gabel, Associate Provost, University of Chicago (sgabel@uchicago.edu, 702-0790)."

Cool and comprehensive site on movie physics

[Seiruu]

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

Movies get better

[suv4x4]

Very interesting article and I've learned a lot. Here's one more:

could an invisible man be a reality? Maybe, who knows, but one thing is certain: to be invisible, photons should pass straight through you, so you are in fact invisible. Your eyes won't be able to register anything and you'll be effectively completely blind.

So I guess that's the other side of the coin, noone can see you, but you can't see anything at all.

On the point whether we should "suspend our disbelief" when going to see movies: depends on the movie. For a fantasy movie with magicians, elfs, and trolls, suspending your disbelief is only natural.
But a "sci-fi" is called a "sci-fi" since it's based on a scientific probability. Of course most people do not specialize in biology and chemistry and all this and for them it's all the same.

But you can see for yourself how amazingly irritating it is for a Slashdotter to watch a movie with preposterous ideas about computer technology and Internet (err infinite detail raster photos and magic "password hacking" boxes anyone?).

However we gotta give it to Hollywood. I know it's modern to bash movies nowadays, but just compare the level of sophistication of modern sci-fi movies with what people were fed in the 50-s. It's definitely better, and definitely has more science put into it.
It's the only thing we can expect with an increasingly better informed and discriminating public as people are nowadays.

Re:Movies get better

[zero_offset]

Why would you assume things like bones, blood, and all the other tissues of the body could somehow be rendered completely transparent yet functional normally, but not the rods and cones in your eye? It's easy to dream up a lot of explanations if you're also willing to accept an absurdity such as invisibility: perhaps the rods and cones are so sparsely distributed that they are effectively invisible to nearby observers. Or perhaps the rods and cones only subtly deflect the incoming photons instead of absorbing them. Or maybe the invisibility process is so fabulously amazing that your rods and cones are altered to emit the same light they absorb.

In fact, I submit that since the rest of your head and the surrounding eye tissue is transparent, you could actually see in every direction at once, simultaneously.

How's that for a fucked up spin on human vision?

Galileo's Two New Sciences

[tinkerton]

consists, surprisingly, of two parts. The part about inertia is famous. The other part is about scaling laws, why bones must become thicker if you scale up an animal and so on.

There is another possibility.

[nathan s]

If you google around, there have been several discussions on Slashdot and elsewhere of so-called meta-materials which can essentially deflect light around an object. No light bouncing off you = no way for a human eyeball to detect you. It's interesting, and apparently theoretically possible and compatible with physics as we know it.

B-Movie What???

[Nom du Keyboard]

Who cares about the biology of B-Movie monsters? How about the biology of B-Movie Actresses instead? Brinke Stevens and Julie Strain are my favs, and they span the gamet between small and sexy to big and sexy.

I mean, think about it for a moment. What surface area do you really care about? The monster's hide, or the amount of boobage exposed? Does anybody really watch those movies for the monsters, or for the showers?

Them

[Sloppy]

He's partly right about the ants in "Them." I live in New Mexico, and while these ants are indeed impressive-looking, they aren't really all that dangerous. Even children learn pretty quickly, that the way you defend yourselves against these things is to break their legs. The real social problem related to these insects is that juvenile delinquents are always torturing Them. Something about it is just too irresistable.

But then there's that persistent rumor about them having diamonds in their joints. It's not true, and it just creates a poaching problem. You wanna come to NM and get fined for giant-ant poaching? Ok, come on over and get your ass fined. You'd be shocked out how much it costs, and it's a significant source of our local governments' revenue.

Alien and Jaws vs E.T.

[Sloppy]

Argh, you're talking about Alien, and the article mentions E.T., which brings up a painful memory.

I went to the midnight opening of E.T., knowing almost nothing about the movie. All I knew was that Spielberg -- you know, the guy who made JAWS -- was involved, and I had recently seen Alien.

I had certain expectations, as you can imagine. They were not met.

Re:Styx revived

[Nom du Keyboard]

Some people clearly just have too much time on their hands! Writing a serious paper about movie monsters is like thinking some silly reference to the Simpsons or Futurama is really funny.

Or a PhD dissertation on Star Trek.

Opps, someone just did that.

Re:Diamonds are a giant insect's best friend

[Badge 17]

Definitely not physics or chemistry - the section where the author tries to puzzle out the physics of shrinking is just wrong:

... halving the number in each cycle of shrinkage. But molecules are integer quantities; sooner or later, this strategy is going to lead to half a molecule, which won't work.

The "half-molecule" explanation is kinda naive. In a gram of material, there's on the order of 10^23 molecules - or around 2^77 (a lot of halves!). To move from a linear size of micrometers to meters is 10^6 in linear dimension - or 10^18 in number of molecules. Running into half-molecules isn't the problem - it's that you're dealing with many fewer molecules - so new physics scales come into play!

Another way to shrink an object would be to decrease the distance between an atom's nucleus and its electron cloud-atoms are, after all, mostly empty space. I'm not enough of a physicist to have any intuition about what this would do to basic physics and chemistry, but one result of this strategy would be to leave the object's mass unchanged.

... OK, we'll let the fine structure constant of the Incredible Shrinking Man be four. This is fine until all your electromagnetic interactions start to diverge.

This is why...

[AgentPaper]

...nobody in my family can watch medically themed shows. Dad's a surgeon, Mom's an OR nurse turned hospital administrator, I'm a surgical device rep turned healthcare IT consultant. When we're not trying to beat each other to the diagnoses, we're screaming over the inaccuracies.

Suspension of disbelief only works if you willingly decide to shut off your rational mind and buy into what you're seeing. I'd argue that not only does one's level of expertise in the field being portrayed play a role, but also one's degree of rationality in general. Someone who engages in a great deal of magical thinking may be more likely to suspend his/her rational faculties than someone who, by profession or personality, operates on a more logical basis. To wit, one who has a great deal of scientific training will be less likely overall to buy into the notion of cloned dinosaurs or fifty-foot-tall space aliens than someone who doesn't - even if the scientist doesn't know much about the specific field being portrayed, he/she knows that general logic precludes the existence of such things.

Of course, this is all conjecture on my part, so I could be dead wrong. It'd make a great topic for a psych paper, though.