King Kong (1933)

Film: King Kong

Director: Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack

Country: USA

Released: March 1933

Runtime: 100 minutes

Genre: Horror

Studio: RKO

Influenced: Joe Dante, John McTiernan, Bong Joon-Ho, Guillermo del Toro, Peter Jackson

My 6-year old son found the clip I showed of him of the King Kong vs T-Rex scene hilarious. Comedy was obviously not the intention of the directors of the movie when it was made in 1933, but inevitably the film has lost its power to shock and scare modern audiences owing to the vast advances in CGI and special effects. My son is a connoisseur of the current crop of MonsterVerse King Kong and Godzilla movies so he was up for watching the original versions of both films – this and Ishiro Honda's Godzilla (1954) – but sadly neither held his interest for long. That said, we both found the scene above gripping and the ending where King Kong smashes the jaw of the T-Rex particularly brutal.

The early 1930s were a golden era for monster movies, with King Kong the crowning glory of this emerging genre. Other notable releases were Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931), White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932), Island of Lost Souls (Erle C Kenton, 1932), Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932) and The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932), making film stars like Boris Karloff a household name. Thanks to advances in film technology, cinema during the 30s had the unique ability to tap into people's darkest fears and the studios cashed in.

King Kong climbing the Empire State Building is one of the most iconic scenes in movie history, and I defy anyone not to get emotional seeing this love-struck great ape protecting his beloved Ann (played by Fay Wray) and uncomprehendingly beating his chest and swatting at the aeroplanes trying to gun him down. Special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien was responsible for the film's cutting-edge stop motion animation, while scriptwriters Ruth Rose and James Creelman give the film its emotional and narrative depth, making King Kong much more than a straightforward monster movie.

One of the unique features of the film for me is its fable-like atmosphere, it's a work of true craft, and this fairytale quality is lost in the 1976 remake, with its undue focus on the love story element and its unfathomable decision to feature a green monkey. Peter Jackson's 2005 version of King Kong came closer to capturing the unique magic of the original, but nothing for me beats the 1933 version and its menacing undercurrent of horror, especially in the first half of the film in the way Skull Island is portrayed as an unforgiving landscape where tribes live nasty, short and brutish lives.