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Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

So begins the Middle English General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales where Geoffrey Chaucer praises the sweet spring rains and the flowers they bring. Whether you consider this collection of stories to be the birth of modern English literature or the death of your will to live in fourth-period high school English 101, it is a quintessential window into the world of medieval Europe. 

What you may not know is that it is also the template for the opening of one of the darkest, I’d say even horrific, poems of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from 1922. You’ve probably heard its opening line “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land …” This is Eliot in the aftermath of World War I and the great influenza pandemic of 1918 reminding us that spring showers also stir up the ground, awakening memories — and things — that might be better left under winter’s numb blanket. It’s easier for a revenant corpse to crawl out of wet earth.

As in The Waste Land the medieval world has informed, colored, and often frightened the present. We love our tales of wizards, dragons, potions, quests, and dungeons. Poems, novels, stageplays, musicals, role-playing games (hey Dungeons & Dragons and Dark Tower!): nearly every modern art form mines the rich ore of the Middle Ages. And cinema is no different, of course. But what about horror cinema, dark cinema? Friends, like pilgrims telling tales on our way to Canterbury, we travel today to a segment called Here Be Dragons.

Medieval and darkness go hand-in-hand. We used to call it The Dark Ages (and many non-historians still do) to distinguish the period from the supposedly gleaming classical world of ancient Greece and Rome and to make ourselves feel good about our supposedly rational, industrialized modern era. This attitude largely came about during the European Renaissance with the widespread rediscovery of the texts of classical antiquity. In the best case, “dark” refers to the relative legitimate lack of historical records during long periods of the 5th through 10th centuries.  But mostly it was arrogance: it’s tough to believe you live in an age of enlightenment if you don’t characterize what came before as darkness. Looking at you, Voltaire. Glancing at you, Thomas Jefferson. 

The truth is, the medieval period in Europe was anything but dark. It saw the invention of the modern calendar, movable type and the printing press, non-load bearing monumental architecture and stained glass, the modern university, paper money, coffee houses, water and wind mills, illuminated manuscripts (the world’s first multimedia!), all manner of scientific gadgets, the Magna Carta, and Dante’s Divine Comedy — to pick only a few of its brightest spots. 

But we’re here to talk about scary things, are we not, terror pilgrims? 

Probably the first monsters in a language that would become English come from the epic poem Beowulf, written at the end of the 10th century. Grendel and his even meaner mother are descendants of the biblical Cain (the “first murderer”) and the main baddies — along with a dragon — in Beowulf. It’s a simple story, really. Grendel just doesn’t like fun and merriment. If you’re a Germanic warrior laughing it up with your buddies in the mead hall after a long day on the moors, Grendel is coming to devour you. Beowulf of course has other ideas, killing Grendel with his bare hands, Grendel’s mama with a sword, and the dragon with the help of his buddy. Then Beowulf dies and is immortalized in a poem that would terrorize even more high school students than The Canterbury Tales — and inspire at least eight mediocre films, none of them true horror.

Monsters — especially dragons — figure prominently in the medieval world. As does magic. Both in some ways are methods of dealing with the unknown or the unknowable. Can’t understand the reason all your crops died? A magical curse might explain it. Afraid of the dark reaches of that forest over there? Probably ogres. Have an unexplored area of the vast sea and no real knowledge of what’s there? Just label it hic sunt dracones (“Here be dragons”) because, let’s face it, there are probably dragons there. This preoccupation with the supernatural is the very basis of fantasy, the bedfellow genre of science fiction and horror. But with the scientific method several centuries away — and the notion of fiction itself somewhat foreign to the medieval mind (history and myth were tough to disentangle) — what we mostly take from the Middle Ages is this sense of the fantastic and hoo boy it is often very dark.

There was nothing darker than the big black ink splot that spread out in all map directions from a lake in northeast modern-day Kyrgyzstan. This was The Black Death. Between 1347 and 1351 this pandemic killed nearly 200 million people in Eurasia, leaving putrid swollen corpses stacked like cord wood as far as the eye could see, emptying out towns so completely in some cases they were only rediscovered with the advent of aerial reconnaissance during World War I. “Bring out your dead” indeed!

Let’s break down how this killer worked. First there’s the Black Rat, Rattus rattus. These suckers were virile: two black rats mating pretty much continuously for three years could produce three million offspring. They could climb nearly vertical surfaces, survive a fall of five stories, and enter openings a mere ¼” wide. And their jaws could cut through lead. OK gross, but who cares? 

Well we care because these rats had fleas, specifically the Rat Flea, Xenopsylla cheopis. This small terror could live for a month even without a host on almost any surface and could jump a 18”. OK gross, but who cares?

We care because these fleas carried the real devilry: the Yersinia pestis bacterium, the actual murderer of 200 million people. This plague bacteria would multiply so ferociously inside fleas’ guts that it would block the digestive tract, hindering a flea’s ability to ingest a meal. Which meant that the dumb flea would just keep biting its target over and over again, regurgitating more bacteria into its host. Yersinia pestis attacks the human lymphatic system, the very castle walls our bodies have built against invading pathogens. But that was just an irony. Victims of the Black Death rarely lived long enough for a secondary infection to finish them off. 

Of course, none of this was known in the medieval world. Germ theory did not exist and antibiotics were 600 years in the future.

This triple cheeseburger of death — rat, flea, and bacterium — traveled by over-land trade networks and via advancing armies in the more-than-normally bellicose 14th century. But mostly it traveled by boats plying the Mediterranean and disastrously entering ports like Marseille and Venice. Venice, interestingly, tried to get ahead of the threat by immediately torching ships suspected of carrying plague-infested passengers (not rats — remember they did not know this was the actual payload). Less drastically they would isolate ships and crew for 40 days — or quaranta giorni — which is where we get the modern English word “quarantine”.

So what would actually happen to if you were infected by the black plague? Pretty rapidly you’d develop a stigmata of purple-black swelling in your armpits and the groin (called “bubos” from which we get the term “bubonic” plague). Your lymph nodes would grow so large as to permanently disfigure you, if you somehow survived the infection. (But you’re not gonna survive.) Often the swollen nodes would explode, spewing infected fluid all over. Your last hours would be characterized by bloody vomit, high fever, delirium — an agonizing death. Even before death, infected people would often smell of internal gangrene as their organs started to decay from within. Entire families and neighborhoods would be wiped out in days. And that was the least bad of the three variants of this disease.

Trenches called plague pits were just stacked with corpses until full, then covered with a thin layer of dirt. Heavy rains would often unearth the bodies which would then be feasted upon by rats and dogs, further spreading the bacteria. April really was the cruelest month.

There was no actual way to treat this infection, but people sure tried. Often “doctors” would lance the buboes, draining them, then mixing herbs and human excrement into the wound. This ended poorly in nearly every case. Some sought clean air (believing the disease was airborne). Others went the other route, seeking very noxious air. People would just stick their heads into poop-smeared latrines and fill their lungs. Other supposed cures: drinking non-plague urine, ingesting crushed sapphires, qnd applying flame directly to the skin. This last one — not a ridiculous idea as fleas do not like fire, but there’s the whole burning your own skin thing. And about those plague doctors. The bird-beaked medieval hazmat suits were actually very clever. The thick leather did protect from the fleas and the beaks were filled with herbs and flowers to block the stench of decay. But the doctors saved no one and came to be seen merely as symbols of death. They were often the very last thing a stricken person saw.

Then there were the religious “treatments”. Those who saw the plague as divine retribution for humanity’s sins would parade through the street as flagellants, whipping themselves with ropes studded with hooks. This bloody penance for the pestilence only served as a transmission vector for the disease, of course. You could almost follow the blood-streaked roads that the flagellants marched along to trace the spread of the disease, house to house.

As a sidenote: Poland has the distinction of doing comparatively well during the plague years, mostly because of the institution of an extreme quarantine known as — here’s a great word for you — immurement, literally live entombment — basically bricking someone in, often in their own house, until they died or were clear of the disease. (But also there’s a theory that Poland’s abundance of cats did a number on the bacterium-bearing rats.)

I guess what I’m saying here is, Covid was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. At least we had horror movies to watch during our recent pandemic. 

Pilgrims, let’s stop for a moment to rest our beasts of burden, maybe dismount to hoist a flagon of ale, and let me tell you about a few medievally-inspired horror films. 

Fans of this show may remember Ken’s birthday pick a few months back, Tombs of the Blind Dead. You really can’t go wrong with this one. Featuring truly scary blind zombie Knights Templar who crawl out their crypts when the sun sets, this 1972 film by Amando de Ossorio (whose last name means alternately “container of bones” or “wolf-hunter” — how badass is that?) is an excellent introduction to the use of medieval setting and lore for a straight-up fright fest. It’s set in the present day with flashbacks to the medieval setting, but the graveyard most of this takes place in might as well be the 14th century.

Let’s go back a little further. 1964 gave us The Masque of the Red Death  and The Long Hair of Death, both castle-based costume pieces with very dark themes. The Masque of the Red Death, part of Roger Corman’s octology based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, features Vincent Price at his most effetely diabolical. Price is Prince Prospero, just a real asshole lord of a castle seemingly immune to the “red death” plague ravaging the countryside. This immunity has been won via a pact with Satan, however. It’s a theme we’ll see again in medieval horror: witchcraft as the only effective deterrent to plague. There are many highlights in this film including a shocking courtly jest that involves dressing a man up as an ape, hoisting him above the masque’d revelers, and burning him alive. WTF Roger Corman? But mainly it’s the spooky personifications of various forms of death, each with its own color, that stand out. Red of course for the immediate plague. Our flea-borne friend black is there, but so is white for Tuberculosis, yellow for Yellow Fever, orange for Scurvy and so on. As the Man in Red tells Prospero near his end, death fears neither God nor Satan. It just is. (As a sidenote, the Poe short story this movie is based on was recently the framework for an episode of Mike Flanagan’s Fall of the House of Usher. It is, in my opinion, one of the best and possibly the goriest. Red death comes to an illegal rave inside an abandoned factory.)

The Long Hair of Death, while not as philosophical as The Masque of the Red Death, makes up for it in Disneyland-esque medieval set design. It features horror icon Barbara Steele as the daughter of a witch burned at the stake; she too is killed by being dumped off a cliff and returns to exact revenge. Classic gothic horror, appropriately in black-and-white. The problem with this movie is that its pacing is as slow as combing through all that long hair of death. 100 minutes is too many minutes of mostly creeping around a castle watching others creep around a castle. Also, somehow I watched a Spanish dub of this Italian film and, while the languages are similar (and of course I had sub-titles turned on), it still was strangely off-putting.

Fast forward to 1992 and Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness. Say what you will about the weird narrative evolution of the first three Evil Dead movies, you cannot say Raimi aimed low with this one. Except maybe in tone, but then slapstick was woven throughout all the originals. As a plot refresher, the movie picks up directly at the end of Evil Dead II where Ash is somehow whisked from the haunted cabin in the woods back in time to the 14th century with his chainsaw, shotgun, and Oldsmobile. He’s immediately captured, believed to be some sort of warlock and taken inside the castle walls. Instead of the plague being kept at bay outside the castle walls we have the deadites from the first two films. (Yep it’s the ol’ zombies-as-disease metonymy. Classic!)  Ash has to retrieve the Necromicon to get back to the present and ends up accidentally summoning an entire army of … darkness. The thing about Army of Darkness is the line it rides between farce and horror, which really is the line ridden by many treatments of the Middle Ages. We laugh at the peoples of the medieval world as dirt-caked idiots or as festooned jesters loping around a court of half-drunk hangers-on. There’s a reason Monty Python and the Holy Grail was so effortlessly funny. Now add Jason and the Argonauts-style skeleton battles. Sounds like an Evil Dead film doesn’t it?

We come now to the actual Black Death … or at least a movie from 2010 called Black Death. Starring Sean Bean, this is the story of a quest to find a village supposedly immune from the plague. Bean plays a Christian soldier sent by the local bishop to bring back the necromancer who is assumed to have made a pact with the devil to secure the village’s immunity. He enlists the help of a young monk who knows the area and who joins the quest secretly looking for his lover. (Monks have needs too!) This is a surprisingly good movie, touching on themes that must have been top of mind to people surrounded by death 700 years ago: What is god in an age of plague? For that matter what is belief in anything? Though it isn’t called out as such — and wouldn’t be proposed for 300 years — what’s really at the center of this film is Pascal’s Wager, the decision theory that plots the existence of god on one axis and belief/disbelief on the other. There are only four outcomes:

1. You believe in a god who does not exist. No problem.
2. You believe in a god who does exist. Win!
3. You do not believe in a god who does not exist. No problem.
4. You do not believe in a god who does exist. Uh oh!

There’s only one scenario where you’re truly screwed and this film hinges on that. Plus, spoiler, you get to see Sean Bean drawn-and-quartered on screen. Worth it for that alone!

You know who else comes from the Middle Ages? Our favorite child abductee-turned-impaler-turned-vampire Vlad Dracula! And while most of the hundreds of treatments of Dracula are a mish-mash of semi- or non-historical fabulation, Dracula Untold from 2014 at least attempts to situate the myth in the original medieval history that nursed it. Here we have Vlad, the good-hearted ruler of the vassal state of Wallachia. But he’s up against the Ottoman empire and that’s … a lot. Luckily he’s recently met an ancient vampire in a cave and agrees to be turned and given all the powers that come with that, freeing the old demon in the process. There’s some liberty taken here with received vampire lore (if you don’t drink blood for three days after turning you will revert to your human form — huh?) and a lot of liberty taken with actual history (Vlad did not kill the sultan Mehmed II). But this was a fun flick. More action/adventure than pure horror, but good gore, spooky settings, and some clever touches involving the use of silver. Dracula Untold was intended to retroactively kick off Universal’s interconnected Dark Universe but this was all shelved when Tom Cruise’s The Mummy tanked. (Lesson: don’t put mega-celebrities in horror movies.)

In the end we return to monsters, as close to the themes of Beowulf as I have seen in film. The Head Hunter from 2018 is basically a one-man show of decapitation and alchemy. A warrior who is basically a Viking Nick Offerman lives in a cabin in the woods, mourning the death of his daughter at the hands of a hideous beast, all the while continuing his job as a bounty hunter for the local village. When the horn sounds in town that means it’s time for this guy to trot off to behead another creature. It helps that he has a goopy mixture that heals his wounds somewhat magically. This film starts slow — none of the beheading kills are on-camera, though you see his cabin slowly become a bestial museum of taxidermied heads. And then the monster who murdered his daughter returns and things get good. There’s a super dark twist that rather shocked me out of my brain. Then again, if I were actively thinking of Beowulf while watching this maybe I would not have been as shocked. The Middle Ages, man, they sure were dark.

OK, pilgrims, this is where I leave you. Keep telling your tales. Never stop that really. It’s what separates us humans from beasts. Canterbury is just a couple dozen leagues that-a-way. Give St. Thomas my best. And see you next time on the Terror Tourist!

The Terror Tourist is my occasional segment on the Heavy Leather Horror Show, a weekly podcast about all things horror out of Salem, Massachusetts. These segments are also available as an email newsletter. Sign up here, if interested. Here’s the episode containing “Here Be Dragons”:

The Terror Tourist is my occasional segment on the Heavy Leather Horror Show, a weekly podcast about all things horror out of Salem, Massachusetts. These segments are also available as an email newsletter. Sign up here, if interested.

Tourists, our journey today takes us to a place but also to a time — approximately 66 million years ago. We’re headed to a day, actually — the most horrifying and deadly single day in the history of life on our planet. Grab your snacks and lots of water. If you have a Kevlar body suit, pack that too. OK let’s go!

We are off the coast of Mexico, just to the northwest of a small fishing village called Chicxulub on the Yucatán peninsula. It is the end of the Age of Reptiles. Humans do not exist yet and won’t for 65 million years or so.

Dinosaurs dominate every continent of Earth and have for several hundred million years. Some of the most popular dinosaurs in our current public imagination are here now — T. Rex, Triceratops, Ankylosaurs (the armored ones), Pachycelphalosaurs (the one with the giant ramming dome on its head), and Velociraptors. They are all around us, whether we see them or not; they see us.

We look up and a light appears in the northeast sky. It’s becoming larger and larger by the minute. It’s a meteor — a chunk of the early solar system that just happens to be on a collision course with Earth. Meteors had collided with earth before and will again, but this time the chunk is large (more than 6 miles across) and fast (traveling at about 12 miles per second). In the blink of an eye the meteor slams into the shallow ocean with the energy of 72 trillion tons of dynamite. 

All horror, fictional or real, pales in comparison to what comes next.

Everything within 100 miles of the impact is instantly vaporized. Life anywhere within 1000 miles of the impact zone is destroyed only slightly less quickly by 620 mph winds, 330’ tall mega-tsunamis, and earthquakes whose magnitude would not even register on our current Richter scale. Dinosaurs here are the lucky dead.

The impact ejects 25 trillion tons of sea floor into the atmosphere. Hot dust, ash, steam, and rock are tossed so high that some achieve escape velocity and scatter throughout the solar system (giving rise to the not entirely implausible theory that there could be dinosaur fossils or even mummified body parts on the moon). But most of that 25 trillion tons of junk falls back to earth, heating to molten temperatures on re-entry. And this is where the real hell on earth begins. 

The infrared radiation and heat generated by all this returning material cooks the air globally (our planet’s rotation spreading the heat evenly like a giant earth-sized rotisserie). The air itself is on fire. Basically if you are a living creature and you can not burrow deep into the earth or dive deep underwater you are incinerated by the scorching air. And let’s face it, most dinosaurs are large and not adapted for digging or submersion. Wildfires ignite — only further raising ambient temperatures. This happens all in the course of the first day, nearly everywhere on earth. 

Some life survived, obviously, or we wouldn’t be here as tourists. But even most of the initial survivors would eventually perish. All the smoke from those fires only adds to the carbon-rich gunk that is now lodged in the high atmosphere, creating a years-long “impact winter” that basically blots out the sun permanently. Photosynthesis stops so plant life ceases. Without any food herbivorous creatures die. Then any carnivores which eat the herbivores die. In the end 75% of all life on earth is wiped out. A few of our ancestors, tiny burrowing mammals, thankfully make it past this extinction boundary and here were are, ready to talk about dinosaurs in horror movies.

Today’s itinerary is called Terrible Lizards, the literal meaning of the word “dinosaur”.

Dinosaurs are perfect for the big screen in so many ways. They are, of course, some of the largest creatures ever to inhabit the earth. But they also fascinate because of the length of their dominance atop the food chain — and their cataclysmic demise. But most of all apex dinosaur predators are scary. There’s a reason the T. Rex’s arms were so laughably tiny. With a neck so strong and teeth so long the head was all that’s needed to do what a T. Rex does so well: rip its prey apart.

Cinemagenic and terrifying! So obviously there are hundreds of dinosaur-based horror movies, right? I am here to regretfully inform you, fellow travelers, that the answer is no, no there are not. Dinosaur horror, such as it exists, seems to bend toward action-adventure, thrillers and even comedy. There are very few straight-up horror movies involving dinosaurs.

Certainly creature features owe much of their power to our culture’s knowledge and latent fear of dinosaurs. From the Black Lagoon to Godzilla reptilian predators have been a staple of horror and horror-adjacent films for almost a century. But these baddies are almost always not quite dinosaurs. Take the Sleestaks from the television show Land of the Lost: reptilian, sure, but also humanoid and even insectoid with their giant unblinking eyes. Are they scary? This tour guide child of the 80s is here to say: you bet they are. Are they dinosaurs? Not really. The Loch Ness monster — centerpiece of at least one not-great group watch on this show — is, if anything, a plesiosaur. We won’t get into it here, but these large marine reptiles are not dinosaurs, frightful though they are. The Megalodon? Not a dinosaur either.

And yet, dinosaurs have been the subject of filmmaking almost as long as it’s been a medium. From their first depiction in 1905’s Prehistoric Peeps to the seminal model animation of 1925’s The Lost World up through the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park, dinosaur films are a massive part of the history of cinema. There’s even a dinosaur museum in the middle-of-nowhere Utah called, uh, The Dinosaur Museum, with a truly impressive permanent exhibition on the history of dinosaurs in film, including a physical recreation of how stop-motion and forced perspective were used to achieve their presence in early film. If you’re ever in Blanding, Utah you should visit.

So why so few true horror movies with dinosaurs? I have a few ideas.

1. The size and complexity of dinosaurs make them difficult to portray convincingly. Doing so requires ample budget, something our beloved genre often lacks. For much of movie history the technology to portray dinosaurs well simply did not exist widely. Claymation and stop-motion only go so far. 
2. Dinosaurs are not great villains. Big and reptilian doesn’t automatically mean scary. Many dinosaurs just munched on treetops. Even the Rex and raptor were just doing their thing, looking for prey — like a lion or a wolf. They wanna eat, that’s their motive. Concerning if you’re a delectable human, sure, but not horrifying.
3. Related to this is that many people grow up loving dinosaurs. They are a staple of children’s programming. Many people have a favorite dino. Few children have a favorite serial killer or zombie. Those who do grow up and participate in podcasts about like this one.

So, yeah, almost zero horror movies involve dinosaurs. Almost, because there are plenty that attempt it, but they are never played completely straight. Or, the terror is not sustained for the entire film. The original Jurassic Park is a great example. The scenes of running from a rampaging T. Rex or hiding from door-handle-operating Velociraptors is without question frightening. But this is the punctuation rather than the grammar of the film. (It could also be the music.) And we may have Jurassic Park to blame for the relative crap that exists today calling itself dinosaur horror. That movie’s advances in CGI inspired legions of filmmakers to pop dinosaurs into situations that would otherwise have been cost-prohibitive. But without a blockbuster Hollywood budget nearly all these films become laughable the moment the CGIsaurus appears.

Let’s visit a few of these films, my tourist friends.

1993 wasn’t only the year of Jurassic Park. It was also the year of Jurassic Park knock-offs. Enter our man Roger Corman. His film, Carnosaur, was meant to directly compete with and capitalize on the marketing machine behind Spielberg’s film. Roger Ebert called it the worst film of 1993. It’s probably the best dinosaur horror film I have seen. Make of those two statements what you will. Featuring Diane Ladd and a young Clint Howard, Carnosaur’s main plot point is the use of infected chicken eggs, which contain a lethal virus that impregnates women with dinosaur embryos, to exterminate the planet of humans and repopulate it with dinosaurs. There are, alas, almost more chickens in this film than dinosaurs. And being a Corman flick the actual dinosaur effects here are all puppets and animatronics — not horrible for what they are, but still pretty bad. Ironically, Carnosaur gets the science a bit more right than even Jurassic Park. The main baddie is a Deinonychus, a more accurate depiction than Jurassic Park’s Velociraptor which is in actuality is the size of a turkey, partially feathered, and did not hunt in packs, but it has a cooler name. The climatic battle between a T. Rex and a guy operating a front loader is straight out of Aliens. Carnosaur spawned four sequels/knock-offs, almost all using the same models and/or footage from the original because … Roger Corman.

One year later in 1994 we get perhaps the strangest entry in this tiny sub-genre, Tammy and the T-Rex. This film answers the obvious question: what if Frankenstein but with a dinosaur and set in a high school? Featuring Denise Richards and Paul Walker, Tammy and the T-Rex is about a teenager killed by bullies whose brain is then implanted in a robotic Tyrannosaurus rex by a mad scientist. The bullies get their due, naturally, at the disproportionately small hands of this cyborg Tyrannosaur. This is a bizarre movie, but it’s fun and absolutely not something you’ve seen before. In 2019 Vinegar Syndrome restored much of the original, intended gore removed upon release. Find that one for the full experience. 

Hands-down the winner for best title in all of dinosaur horror is 2017’s The VelociPastor. You know what you’re in for even just seeing the title in print as the P in “velocipastor” is intercapped uppercase to make absolutely certain you understand the play on words. The VelociPastor is many things, but subtle isn’t one of them. Because none of it makes any sense whatsoever I’ll just lay it all out as a sequence of words: distraught priest being pursued by ninjas finds an enchanted artifact that turns him into a dragon (which is really a dinosaur) who then sets about killing criminals with the assistance of his prostitute sidekick. For what it is, this movie succeeds. And what is it exactly? A $36,000 film that uses an actual discarded high school dinosaur mascot costume for its protagonist. There’s even a scene of a car explosion where no car explodes and a caption reads [insert VFX here]. Sometimes when you have a title this good the movie it’s attached to doesn’t actually matter.

Claw from 2021 seemed promising, as it is built on classic horror tropes. A stand-up comedian and her agent are driving through the American west and have car trouble. They end up stranded in a “ghost town”, one of dozens of tourist attractions that prop up the facades of buildings from a forgotten past. Good start, yeah? They meet the proprietor of the ghost town, a gent named Ray, who also collects dinosaur fossils. Turns out there’s a living raptor on the property as well — we’re never told how or why — and almost the entirety of the remainder of the film is just an extended scene of the protagonists hiding from the beast in and around a camper trailer. But wait, there’s almost a one-year-later epilogue that involves a dream sequence and a T. Rex nowhere near the ghost town. Claw goes to show that the pieces to make real dinosaur horror exist, it just didn’t put them together very well.

I could go on, but you deserve better than all this, my travel buddies. If you need more for some reason, just search any film database for the word “Rex”. Ebola Rex, Poseidon Rex, Anonymous Rex, Theodore Rex. All lizards, all terrible. Dinosaur Prison, The Dinosaur Project, Hatched, Area 407, and last year’s 65 with Adam Driver. Not worth your time or, frankly, worth the legacy of the amazing creatures they depict.

If this is your thing, my recommendation is to go back earlier — discard some of your need for pure horror — and watch more sci-fi entries like Dinosaurus (1960), Valley of the Gwangi (1969), The Land that Time Forgot (1974), or Planet of the Dinosaurs (1977). These aren’t masterpieces but they aren’t parodies either. Best of all: zero bad CGI.

And if you are a filmmaker this is your opportunity. Which one of you will make the first truly great dinosaur horror film? We have the technology and the more science teaches us about dinos the more novel story lines abound. Let me leave you with two ideas, royalty-free:

1. For real-world crazy, creationists can’t be beat. Did you know that one of the centerpieces of their belief is that dinosaurs and humans existed side-by-side? There’s even a museum in Texas that purports to show early human footprints next to dinosaur tracks. This is of course complete bullshit, but … what about a horror movie that somehow plops creationists into the world 66 million years ago? They look for fellow humans, find none, are hunted by dinosaurs, and ultimately take a giant meteor to the face. I’d watch that.
2. Fossil hunting itself presents plenty of great opportunities for horror. There’s secrecy about and danger all around the dig sites (super hot, dangerously dry, poachers, snakes, bears, etc) and tons of potentially lethal digging and blasting equipment. Someone give me a serial killer paleontologist. Living dinosaurs not even required!

OK everyone, I’ll leave you here. Don’t forget to tip your tour guide. We look forward to seeing you on our next journey.