Before there was The X-Files, there was Kolchak: the Night Stalker.
Most of his cases saw the intrepid reporter, Carl Kolchak, battling vampires, monsters and in one case, an alien visitor.
The episode “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be” is one of the episodes cited by Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, as a big inspiration for his iconic work.
It has aliens, flying saucers and government cover-ups that make us forget just how incompetent government bureaucracy can be.
There are two primary symbolic elements to this piece. One is distrust in the government, a growing horror trend at the time to create more tension. In the 50s and 60s, when the government got involved, the day would be saved (see the horribly tacked on ending to Invasion of the Body Snatchers). In the late 70s, the Government didn’t always save the day in fact, more often; it either exacerbated the problem or was the source of it.
But the symbolism of the monster I think is far more frightening. The Visitor, as I like to call it, is not deliberately out to harm humanity, he kills more cats than people during his visit. He isn’t here to probe us, contact us, conquer us or even consider us.
The Visitor has no interest in humans, it completely dismisses humans as anything other than a convenient snack. It bypasses everything about humans outside what it needs, giving us no more a glance than we do animals and plants.
“What happened? It’s all a point of view really. A traveler has a breakdown, stops to fix it, gets a road map, has a bite to eat and goes on his way—it’s happened to all of us. This traveler happened to be light years off his course, instead of miles.”
The title of the episode comes from H. P. Lovecraft’s writing when talking about his alien Great Old Ones and this creature shares their uncaring, alien views. Humanity is but ants to it. Leaving us alone and unloved in a vast, cold universe.
A very cerebral horror concept.
Biology
Invisible monsters are some of the cheapest monsters a movie can create, but they are rarely done well.
My golden example is the titular Invisible Monster in Jonny Quest’s “The Invisible Monster”. The cause of the invisibility in this case is simple human inability to see the colors that make up its primary composition. As invisibility explanations go, it’s palatable, and circumvents the problem pointed out by Warren Ellis in Planetary, that if your retinas are invisible, they can’t detect light striking them.
The world would be invisible to you as you would be invisible to the world.
Being invisible, and apparently leaving no footprints to work from, it’s pretty much impossible to determine what it looks like, though there is one interesting bit of information about it. When it tears down a cement wall, the wall appears to explode outward. This may indicate some sort of suction it created or an ability to hook into small parts to pull the wall down from its center.
The creature appears to feed on bone marrow, and has a two pronged feeding tube to penetrate bone and suck the marrow out. Most likely is an insertion probe for a proboscis of some sort, but I wouldn’t rule out raw suction given the power of the thing.
Like most monsters for a TV show, it has one weakness that the hero learns to exploit.
Though in this case, unlike a stake to the heart, it’s not an instant-kill weakness. Rather, the simple sound of a flash charging up again in Kolchak’s camera drives it away. It probably found it annoying to a degree, or perhaps painful to be near. Sonic weaponry has been in the development for years and the Active Denial System uses focused, high volume sound to drive people away. The creature, being so alien, may have viewed the sound of the flash recharging in a similar manner. The frequency it heard was the right decibel volume to drive it off, but it was too high pitched for humans to hear.
However, a weird thing occurs that shows that maybe the writer did pay attention. One of the signs of the creature is a black substance that looks almost like a chunk of rubber with the gloss of flint. The gunk is apparently composed of hydrochloric acid, acetone and bone marrow. Apparently, even though it did eat a lot, it had trouble digesting it. This is because of how alien the animal is. It tried to eat, but the chemistry was just too different for it to digest. It’s lucky that the food it chose didn’t kill it outright.
This happens a lot with invasive species (usually, they are poisonous to degrees the native predators are not used to dealing with) and is a very realistic take on an alien creature.
A nice nod to reality.
