Mediating Monstrosity: The Threat of the (In)Visible in the MonsterVerse

Drawing on Susan Sontag’s understanding of the anxieties about contemporary existence lurking beneath the surface of science fiction films, this article argues that the focus on media monitoring, mapping and materializing the giant monster in the MonsterVerse functions as a negotiation of the limits of visibility of catastrophe. Hiding, waiting, lurking underneath the surface in the “Hollow Earth”, the giant monsters are—paradoxically—invisible and hypervisible, absent and present at the same time. Throughout and across the films and series in the narrative universe, media in the MonsterVerse are charged with “proving” the threat of the (in)visible, while at the same time challenging mediated registers of truth and trustability. Making the monster is simultaneously presented as the promise and problem of technological mediation. With the emphasis on flashbacks to different time periods—including the 1940s in Kong: Skull Island (2017), the 1950s in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023) and the 1990s in Godzilla (2014)—this not only appears to be about the mediatization of the monsters but rather their analogization. Captured in hand-drawn maps, grainy images and static sound recordings, proving the existence of the monstrous threat becomes a question of materiality as well.