The behaviour of monsters

[bunn]

 I do wish that television monsters - the ones that are supposed to want to eat people -  would behave more like real animals that are behaving in a predatory manner.  I'm sure they'd be more scary that way. 

In TV and films, monsters almost always spend a lot of time posing and going RAOWRRR!! in an impressive manner.   Only after they have shown off their impressive teeth and claws and spent a fair bit of time poncing up and down, will they finally get their act together and try to eat someone. 

I can't think of any real predator (including humans) that does this.  It would be a spectacularly unsuccessful hunting technique.  Their prey would be half a mile away by the time they'd finished posing. 

This may explain why there are so disappointingly few monsters in daily life (they have all died of starvation, as they are so terrible at creeping up on their food).

Animals that go 'RAOWRRR!' are generally not wanting to eat the person/animal that they are going 'RAOWRRR!' at. Usually, that tactic is used to make another person or animal go away. So, perhaps there is a tragic subtext, in which the poor beastie is just trying to get on with life, probably living on a diet of cockroaches and used tissues, or something similarly useful, and heroes keep leaping out of the undergrowth and having to be scared off. 

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

TV monsters hardly ever do eat the people they're going RAOWRRR! at*, so maybe your final suggestion is right. If the victim is the Minor Doomed Character Of The Week, they will get killed in a slightly gory (but not too gory for TV) manner, and their body left for the heroes to find. If the victim is a major character, they will get wounded and left to stagger on. Once the monster has killed one person, it carries on and tries to kill as many people as possible, confronting the heavily-armed party full on, rather than dragging its kill somewhere quiet, to eat it and then sleep for a week.

* Except for river monsters and crocodiles. River monsters always eat their prey, leaving just a hat or a shoe floating in a poignant pool of blood.

But, then, TV super-villains never behave like real life super-villains behave, what with all this "not actually killing the hero straight away, but concocting a cunning death trap which he can escape from - oh, and also telling him the entire plot first" thing. At least aspiring villains have the Evil Overlord List to help them avoid these traps, but the poor monsters are left without such a useful checklist, and don't know any better than to stand there going RAOWRRR!

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

This is one of the reasons I like Primeval so much ... the dinos etc are so supremely daft and bad at catching humans. Except for Minor Doomed Characters (as you so rightly say). Sometime they manage a light nip on the heroes, who are ALWAYS rescued just before the obscure poison/blood loss does for them.

It's very soothing, I find.

Once the monster has killed one person, it carries on and tries to kill as many people as possible,

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I don't mind that bit. I reckon cats would do that if voles were stupid enough to hang around in gangs waiting for MonsterMog to finish mangling Minor Doomed Vole 1.

Also, it's probably a bit like being hungry in a supermarket isn't it - first you grab the first delicious looking item, then you think, oooh, last time I ate a bald one and he was delicious, maybe I'll have that again, then you go on a bit and THAT one smells of curry and I've never eaten a curry flavoured human. Oh, go on, just one more, I'll have him for tea tomorrow...

And before you know where you are, Monster has arrived at the checkout with his basket piled high with far more people than he can reasonably consume...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed that you managed to detect I was watching Primeval from the clues given. :-D

Re: Once the monster has killed one person, it carries on and tries to kill as many people as possib

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

But monsters don't have capacious shopping baskets. If the monster kills the chocolate-sprinkled accountant in aisle 1, he can't put him in his basket and keep him safe while he goes off to kill the strawberry-flavoured doctor in the Taste the Difference range aisle 2. Instead he has to abandon the accountant's body and leave it unattended, thus running the risk that Monster No 2, a pack of carrion monsters, and some cackling hyenas had eaten the accountant down to bare bones, leaving not even the tiniest chocolate sprinkle behind.

The day I see a TV monster carrying a shopping basket, pushing a shopping trolley, or even wearing a large coat with voluminous pockets, I will accept your argument, but not before.
 

Re: Once the monster has killed one person, it carries on and tries to kill as many people as possib

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I think this is really how Komodo dragons work...

They have poisonous saliva, and although they often can't kill prey straight off, they give it a good bite, it then staggers off randomly, and they leave it for a few days, then waddle along the scent trail to wherever it's got to, and nom it down once it's dead and nice and mature...

Obviously if they accidentally bit a hero, his amazing Hero Antibodies would then fight the infection off, after a certain amount of puffing, agonised groaning, and sweating through the rags of his shirt, he'd be bouncing about good as new. So probably you need to bite several of them when available, so as to be sure that there will be at least one body left and nicely niffy just when you fancy a snack... :-P

Re: Once the monster has killed one person, it carries on and tries to kill as many people as possib

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Well, I now know a lot more about Komodo dragons than I used to, thanks to Wikipedia. If you suspected you were Minor Doomed Character of the Week, you really wouldn't want to share an island with a creature who can smell a dying animal at six miles.

However, I still think that the "kill it/fatally wound it, then leave it for later" approach can work only in either of the following circumstances:

- You're the only predator around, so there's no competition. Either that, or all the other predators hate your preferred treat of chocolate accountant, and wouldn't touch it even if it was presented to them on a china plate, with lashings of cream

- TV Monsters have a strong sense of honour when it relates to kill stealing. Once you've killed your accountant, you tag it with a "property of Grraaahl" label, and no other TV monsters would dream of touching it.

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

Lol! Definitely why so few are scary. The first monster I ever saw that I found very scary [apart from Daleks and Cybermen of course] was the thing in the original Alien. Probably because that did just nab people without all the preliminaries!

Re: Once the monster has killed one person, it carries on and tries to kill as many people as possib

[bunn.livejournal.com]

3) you are working for the greater good of all monsters? As long as *someone* gets to eat the juicy accountant, that's the main thing. :-p