“. . . . some lofty concepts . . . involve truths remote from the category of causation . . . .(,) . . . . ephemeral and accidental . . . . things . .(;) . . their causes and effects thrust themselves . . . . on our curiosity . . . .”
     —D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson

“. . . . what is it? . . . .”
     —Anonymous police officer,
Them, 1954

“. . . . what is it? . . . .”
     —Anonymous naval officer,
It Came From Beneath The Sea, 1955

Abstract

This essay examines certain films wherein naturally occurring species appear (recorded in their original state), and are transformed into a mutated or monstrous form, replete with a repertoire of monstrous behaviors, are then identified, and subsequently dispatched. The working premise is that the cinematic register provides a unique and privileged field of inquiry containing primary data on extremely short-lived aberrant species. In almost all such films one finds embedded classifications and embedded theories of aberration which isolate and define a given species at the point of its emergence. These occur as enunciations, vocal traces produced by actants within the film, interacting in various ways with representative taxa. In a sense, the cinematic data theorizes itself, though this must be taken with no small amount of skepticism.

It is, nonetheless, a consistent phenomenon, across a large number of cinematic data-sets, that films providing evidence of monsters also find it necessary to enunciate theories for the generative conditions of monstrosity. This is what is defined as an embedded theory of the mechanism for induced aberration. In most cases, the base-species is identified in an embedded classification which serves as intra-cinematic evidence for the embedded theory/mechanism.This identification, or embedded classification of the taxon, may be a precise and detailed scientific or quasi-scientific speculation, or it may be something as simple as defining a species as “unknown,” and replacing actual evidence with a montage of fissioning cells, rapid edits, or verbal disputations on the nature of a given ‘monster.’  While specimens are occasionally misclassified, or misrecognized, both embedded theories and embedded classifications are important evidentiary traces of the processes of cinematic aberration. In the following excerpt a short theoretical preface is followed by three case studies, and related tables, diagrams, and images, with a reference section and guide to films organized according to the standard Linnean taxonomic system for biota. Notes and complete bibliography have been deleted for this publication.

Key Words: Aberration, Cinematic Taxa, Embedded Classification, Embedded Theory, Mechanism, Species

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