Fantasy films that are actually about something.

Joshua David Bellin, author of Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (2005, Southern Illinois University Press, 240 pages, U.S.$30), is clearly a fan of the fantasy film genre, which for him encompasses horror, science fiction and conventional fantasy. He wrote that, while many fantasy films can be read on a superficial level, they can also be seen as commentaries on modern society.

The book opens with, "My favorite movie of all time is King Kong" (the 1933 original version, that is), and Bellin believes that it is both a fantastical film about a giant ape and a social condemnation of racial integration (and, in particular, inter-racial relationships). Kong, Bellin stated, is meant to represent the African American male--his demise at the hands of white America, atop the Empire State Building, is the ultimate lynching.

Working from the premise that other films also convey covert moral messages to viewers, Bellin examined the purported meanings in a set of films: Kong, The Wizard of Oz, producer Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad trilogy, Species, Jurassic Park, The Cell 12 Monkeys, Freaks and Edward Scissorhands.

The first chapter is dedicated to the original Kong. Framing Monsters was written before Peter Jackson's 2005 version was released, thus denying Bellin the chance to compare the two.

Bellin gave a concise history of race relations in the U.S. from 1915 (the year D.W. Griffith's racially offensive Brith of Nation was released) onward, in order to "resituate King Kong within its historical and cultural matrix, to illustrate that it is coextensive with the racial ideology and racially motivated violence of its era." When discussing a scene from the 1933 version in which Kong disrobes the captive Ann Darrow, Bellin set the stage by saying that of "the nearly 3,000 African Americans lynched between 1889 and 1933," three quarters were justified by mere rumors of a black-on-white rape. The disrobing scene was found to be so inciting that it was cut when the 1933 film was re-released to theaters in 1938.

The next film tackled, 1939's The Wizard of Oz, is, according to Bellin, "a cautionary tale ... that promoted the core values of heart and home over the perilous phantasm of technological advance." Seen in the context of the 1930s and the Depression--a paradoxical time of poverty and technological advancement--the films is really, according to Bellin, about a young girl with big dreams who comes to embrace the familiar and familial (i.e., rural and poor) as better than the fantastic (i.e. urban and wealthy). The message for the young Dorothys of America: be happy on your farm in Kansas; it's where you belong.

Chapter three tackled producer Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad trilogy: The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). Harryhausen is, Bellin said, guilty of propagating the negative stereotypes of Arabs as Bedouins, belly dancers and terrorists (armed with magic spells and charms, rather than guns).

"Throughout the history of American cinema as a whole," Bellin wrote, "no region of the world has been so regularly identified with the exotic and evil as the Middle East." Given that two of the films were made in the 1970s, at a time of heightened tension between the U.S. and the oil-producing Middle Eastern countries, the films, in their portrayals of Arabs as the antagonists and Westerners as the heroes, helped conservative America justify fear of, and violence in, the Middle East.

Next, Bellin tackled the anti-feminist messages in a variety of films. Species is about a man-eating alien who, disguised as a sexy woman, seduces men in order to become pregnant with a human-alien hybrid. Jurassic Park is about an isolated group of cloned dinosaurs, all female, that change gender in order to fertilize their own eggs and reproduce.

And non-fantasy offering, Fatal Attraction is, according to Bellin, relevant in the discussion because it too is about women using sex to reproduce: a desperate seductress wants her married ex-lover to impregnate her before she is too old. The films help alienate single mothers and women who are too assertive by portraying women with strong minds and active biological clocks as antagonists.

The next chapter discussed films' portrayal of the mentally ill. The Cell is about detectives who enter the mind of a schizophrenic criminal and see his fantastical mental world. 12 Monkeys tells of a criminal from a virus-ravaged future who is sent back in time to try and help the future's scientists find a cure. Disoriented from the time-travel, he is mistaken by 1990s policemen as homeless. Bellin examined these films in terms of society's abusive portrayal of the mentally ill and the homeless, stating that these films "disguise the social forces that shape both madness and homelessness ... and stigmatize these conditions."

Chapter six examined Freaks, a 1932 horror film about a deformed, but wealthy, circus sideshow freak who is tricked into marrying a beautiful, money-hungry trapeze artist. When the circus' other freaks discover her plan to kill him for his money, they permanently mutilate her, transforming her into a sideshow freak herself. Bellin also analyzed Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, a modern-day Beauty and the Beast-meets-Frankenstein, about a young man created by a scientist who, when his creator dies, is left unfinished, with hands made of scissors. These films promote a long-held belief in Western culture: "From classic times to the present, the freak has functioned ... as a figure ... of physical-cultural soundness versus depravity, order versus chaos."

Bellin is far from a concise writer: sentences are routinely five lines long--with the occasional ten-line, semi-colon-heavy sentence thrown in. Nonetheless, he provided a detailed examination of how fantasy films can be read with an eye toward both what the films' creators might have intended to say and what viewers, in the context of the times, took away from the films. Many viewers, Bellin admited, watch movies on a purely superficial level. But many more pick up on films' subtle messages: Bellin remembered that the very first time he saw Kong, at the age of five, he cried when the ape fell to his death. He wondered if, as a white male, he might have been crying because, "in Kong's death I saw my own hand?"