In the book Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), author Danny Peary declares the 1933 film King Kong “the greatest of all horror films” with “masterly special effects”. To modern audiences, even those that appreciate the original King Kong as an important landmark in the history of cinema, this might appear a hyperbolic assertion that sorts it into the wrong genre. While the film has more than its fair share of violence, bloodshed, and screaming characters, its almost non-stop action and bold fanfare score could not differ more from the eerie, quieter style of today’s entries in the horror genre.
Nonetheless, there can be no dispute that moviegoers back in the 1930s found it pretty scary. For example, one critic from the Los Angeles Times called it a “first class nightmare” and warned prospective viewers that “some of the horrors, it must be said, are a little strong.” (Morton 2005).
So what was it about King Kong that made it a horror film in the eyes of 1930s audiences? I will argue that this original perception is rooted in the film’s presentation of subject matter that the generation that created and consumed it, most especially Europeans and Americans of European heritage, would have generally perceived as horrific as a product of the imperialist culture they had partaken in.
First there is the subject of Kong himself, who for all intents and purposes is a gorilla that has evolved to gigantic proportions. Back when the film was made, few if any people in the European cultural sphere understood gorillas as the relatively peaceful, primarily vegetarian relatives of humanity studied by Dian Fossey (1983) and other primatologists. Beginning in the 19th century, the common European stereotype of gorillas was one of violent brutes prone to abducting women and attacking hunters in the Central African rainforest (Brightwell 2014). Such portrayals of course had less in common with these animals’ actual behavior than the Victorian-era appetite for exotic sensationalism and prejudices about how “subhuman” beings (including non-European people, as will be explained later) would act.
The character of Kong is nothing if not a scaled-up, one-dimensional embodiment of these originally Victorian myths about gorillas. His oversized fangs and bug-eyed glare, especially when contrasted with the dark coloring of his body in the black-and-white film, convey an appearance of predatory and inhuman menace further supported by his homicidal behavior towards almost every living thing he comes across. Not only does he kill every prehistoric beast that challenges him on the island, but he tramples and slaughters some of the local population and their dwellings after breaking through their gate, not to mention the equivalent carnage he causes when he escapes in New York City.
The only living creature he does not treat with violence on first impulse is the character of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), which he carries off after the islanders offer her as a sacrificial “bride”. However, given that the gorilla myth that Kong represents stated that they were prone to abducting women from “higher” races, it is doubtful that Kong’s treatment of Darrow was meant to be sympathetic or endearing. At most it embodies the film’s explicitly stated theme that beauty has a way of taming and even killing the beast within men.
For all the terror that he causes, Kong is by no means the only character in the film that audiences in the 1930s would have regarded as scary. He shares his jungle island with a variety of oversized dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures that surpass even him in scale. These menace both Ann Darrow when she is in Kong’s possession and the team of rescuers that pursue her during the middle act of the film. It is not only the carnivorous Tyrannosaurus rex which Kong defeats in battle that poses a threat either, for even supposed plant-eaters like the Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus are seen attacking the human characters without apparent provocation. The wanton aggression of all these animals, whether flesh- or plant-eating, reinforces the theme that the island’s jungle is a particularly dangerous and uncivilized place even if one subtracts the brutality of Kong himself from the picture.
And then there is the matter of the island’s human inhabitants. Although the island itself is said to be located off the western coast of Sumatra in Southeast Asia, the islanders are all played by African-American actors and so are depicted as having dark skin and tightly curled hair. I consider it most likely that they are meant to represent a population of Melanesian or Negrito affinity. Regardless, they too were probably intended to be objects of horror for the film’s contemporary audience when you consider how they treat the character of Ann Darrow.
In the 1930s, the archetype of “subhuman” males lusting after women from “higher races” would have been forced not only onto gorillas and other non-human primates, but onto men from darker-skinned racial groups. The racist belief that men of African descent in particular found European women more desirable than their own and so pursued them aggressively was a major source of paranoia among European-Americans (Pilgrim 2000). Even black men who so much as whistled after white women could be savagely lynched.
To audiences of European descent watching King Kong in 1933, the scene where the islanders’ chieftain (Noble Johnson) offers six of his own population’s women in exchange for Ann Darrow must have appeared as ominous foreshadowing. And once a troop of the islanders climbs onto the boat to abduct Ann Darrow, wrapping their dark-skinned and bracelet-adorned arms around her, we can imagine how these same viewers’ racial fears would have been titillated. Of course, that the islanders bang drums interpreted by the European-American visitors as ominous, dress in stereotypical tribal attire such as loincloths and face-paint, and have a tradition of sacrificing young women to Kong further plays into European perceptions of dark-skinned peoples as uncomfortably foreign, superstitious, and barbaric. As symbols of faraway savagery, they would have counted as another element of horror in King Kong.
To understand why giant gorillas, dinosaurs, and Melanesian “savages” would have all been understood as horrifying, we need to consider the cultural context that begat the film King Kong. In the 1930s, European countries still controlled large swathes of tropical regions such as Africa and southern Asia which they had conquered over the course of the 19th and earlier 20th centuries. To justify their exploitative imperial projects, Europeans exaggerated the inherent savagery of the human and animal inhabitants in these regions, saying it was the “white man’s burden” to civilize them. Africa for example was stereotyped as a “Dark Continent” populated by cannibalistic natives and monstrous wildlife. Associated with this was the perception that tropical areas of the world represented a throwback to an earlier and more “primitive” era, with the indigenous people even claimed to represent an evolutionary “missing link” between Europeans and non-human primates.
The island setting of King Kong is the perfect realization of this imperialist vision of the tropical world. The presence of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic fauna creates the impression that the island is an anachronistic relic from a bygone era, a message reinforced by the Melanesian population with their barbarous and superstitious customs. The character of Kong himself, a subhuman brute who abducts women and brutalizes everyone else in his path, is a classic example of how post-Victorian Europeans and European-Americans envisioned gorillas and other creatures of the African wilderness. It is as if all the beliefs these audiences would have held about distant tropical countries have been rolled into one place that exemplifies their supposed worst attributes.
This is the reason King Kong counts as a horror film. The perception of horror in the film would have depended on the prejudices that Europeans and European-Americans would have developed and nurtured about the tropical areas they had conquered and exploited. By portraying the targets of European imperialism as innately dangerous and uncivilized, the film would have both aroused feelings of terror in its intended audience and rationalized the imperial projects that benefited them. It was very much an experience of horror for the age of imperialism.
Works Cited
Brightwell, Eric. “Gorillasploitation — Giant Gorilla Movies.” Amoeblog. July 8, 2014. Accessed November 13, 2016. http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2014/07/eric-s-blog/gorillasploitation-giant-gorilla-movies.html.
Cooper, Merian C. and Ernest B. Shoedsack. King Kong. RKO Pictures, 1933.
Fossey, Dian. Gorillas in the Mist. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1983.
Morton, Ray. King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. New York: Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2005.
Peary, Danny. Guide for the Film Fanatic. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
Pilgrim, David. “The Brute Caricature.” Jim Crow Museum. November 2000. Accessed November 13, 2016. http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/brute/.