“It is like the pollard willows of our Dutch meadows or the oak bushes of our dunes; the rustle of an olive grove has something very secret in it, and immensely old. It is too beautiful for us to dare to paint it or to be able to imagine it.”
--Letter from Vincent Van Gogh, May 1, 18821
“There was something that lurked in the dark. It could not be imagined. It could not be described.”
--The Monster from Earth’s End2
Amid the cabbage plants, mosses and lichens, tussock grass, stunted forest tangled with daisies and buttercups, something else spread across the tundra of Gow Island in 1959. The violence, insanity and horror that steadily took over there appealed to director Michael Hoey who confessed, “Around 1959, I read a book called The Monster from Earth’s End by Murray Leinster. I was very taken with it and thought, ‘Gee, this could be an exciting film.’”3
The administrating officer, Drake, tries to remain rational throughout his experience on the small island, “In a real world, everything follows natural laws. Impossible things do not happen. There is an explanation for everything that does happen.”4 Despite such assurance, Drake begins to slip and admits to himself, “On the other hand, if something sufficiently unlikely occurred, he might disbelieve the evidence of his senses. He might become convinced of his own insanity. He could act on the assumption that he himself had gone mad.”5 As people, dogs and birds die and fear takes over, it becomes clear that existence is as much a battle for sanity as it is a battle against an unknown terror. Drake insists, “But I’ve been having all the experiences of a madman. I’ve got to be a little bit stern and make him tell his hallucinations. They may not be delusions. Maybe they’re facts. On this island you can’t use the standards of a sane world to decide what’s crazy and what isn’t!”6 What caused such a collapse and unleashed the hysteria and bloodshed to follow? The sight of trees…
“Its actual appearance in that place was as if some insane artist had traveled thousands of miles to create.”
--The Monster from Earth’s End7
“As for me, I tell you as a friend, I feel impotent when confronted with such nature, for my Northern brains were oppressed by a nightmare in those peaceful spots, as I felt that one ought to do better things with the foliage.”
--Letter from Vincent Van Gogh, 18898
If only Drake and the others trapped on Gow had been aware of a parallel place with an open door to their shadows. Thousands of miles away on the mirror other side of the world lies the North Pole, “that enchanted continent in the sky, land of everlasting mystery.”9 Long a land of free imagination, this arctic source of myth and legends includes the horror of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In 1818 she set the scene: “I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks…Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight…there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.”10
This vision became part of Admiral Byrd lore when the polar explorer hinted at greater mysteries in 1947, “I’d like to see the land beyond the Pole. That area beyond the Pole is the center of the great unknown.”11 There are rumors that Byrd found that ‘center of the great unknown’ and even flew inside to explore, landing and finding that both poles have holes leading into the Hollow Earth. Already revealed in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Oz historian L. Frank Baum also used this location for Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, published in 1908. Dorothy says, “We are somewhere in the middle of the earth, and the chances are we’ll reach the other side of it before long. But it’s a big hollow, isn’t it?”12 She and her traveling companions observe, “On some of the bushes might be seen a bud, a blossom, a baby, a half-grown person and a ripe one.”13 It doesn’t take long before one of these plant creatures threatens them with a cruel death.
Next page: "An exploitative, dumb title"
