Let's go through some of the insights this chart offers.

ATOMICS/DEADLY ATTACKS: As you can see, there is a very clear historical connection between atomic bombs and atomic testing and giant monster movies, so that truism turns out to be correct. After a long period of no giant monsters in pop culture at all, we get a sudden burst of giant monsters in the 50s, many of which are explicitly created by "atomic tests" (see: the ants in Them, the dinosaur in Behemoth, Godzilla, and more). What's interesting is that there appears to be about a 10-year lag between the disaster and the first movies dealing with it. A similar lag happens between disasters of the 1990s and early 2000s and the giant monster explosion of the 00s. Interestingly, the biggest explosion in giant monster movies since the 1950s is going on in the 00s, perhaps as a response to global terrorism and human-caused disasters (see below).

PLAGUES: "Call of Cthulhu," which is about a giant monster who haunts people's dreams and drives them mad, could probably be linked to the "sleepy sickness" plague that was sweeping the United States at the time Lovecraft first thought up his tentacly menace. The disease made people appear to sleep all the time, and did drive them insane. But generally, as we can see later in the timeline, plague doesn't appear to spawn giant monsters. In fact, the HIV/AIDS plague has probably resulted in more human-sized monster tales: witness the explosion in vampire and zombie stories during the 1990s and 00s. So, generally, plague disasters don't cause giant monster movies.

NATURAL DISASTERS: One of the biggest natural disasters of the 20th century, the Yellow River floods in China in the 1930s, gave us no giant monsters. King Kong, the most popular giant monster of the 1930s, was probably inspired by Westerners "discovering" gorillas in Africa in the early 20th century. But the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami seems to have had an effect: two of the biggest giant monster movies of the last year have both involved beasts from the ocean.

HUMAN-CAUSED DISASTERS: Yes, human toxic spills and pollution seem to trigger giant monster movies. Most of the giant monsters in the 1970s and 80s are related somehow to pollution, and come soon after several widely-publicized oil spill disasters. Note that the 70s and 80s were also a time of human-sized toxic creatures, like the Toxic Avenger, the bears in Prophesy, the whatevers in CHUD, and so on. So these disasters inspire both giant and regular-sized monsters. I think the explosion in 00s monster movies may also be a result of the same lag we saw between atomics in the 1940s, and giant monsters in the 1950s. A lot of toxic disasters happened in the 80s and 90s, and suddenly a bunch of giant monsters pop up in the 00s.

Chart by Stephanie Fox.

SOURCES:

Chemical Disaster in Bhopal [Greenpeace]

Oil tanker leaks [BBC]

AIDS number one cause of death for men in US in 1992 [Kaiser Foundation].

AIDS in Africa numbers [WorldStats]

Atomic Tests causing deaths [CNN]

Early in Cloverfield, when the monster first attacks New York, we see nothing of the giant beast — only the destruction it's leaving behind. As bloodied people stumble from the wreckage of leaning skyscrapers, dazed and covered in a thick layer of dust, one cannot help but recall the first, terrifying images that leaked from New York after the World Trade Center was hit. Most of it came from shaky, amateur footage. Likewise, Cloverfield is shot to look like it comes from a handheld camera dragged around by a group of rich twenty-somethings fleeing the wreckage of a party. So Cloverfield isn't just reenacting the attacks. It's reenacting TV news images of the attacks too. There is something genuinely shocking and brilliant about those moments in the film when you know you're watching scenes so clearly inspired by 9/11. It feels risky and wrong, and therefore you are profoundly relieved to see the comical, rubbery monster come on the scene, stomping and roaring and shedding lice the size of great danes. That creature, who does all the appropriate monstery things like resist conventional weapons and open its mouth really wide to reveal layers of weird teeth, is profound reassurance that we are firmly in the realm of fantasy. New York has not been attacked. It's just a silly dream about a monster so goofy-looking that you can hardly look at it without giggling. (Don't believe me? See the Cloverfield monster do its funky chicken dance in our morning spoilers.)

Director Matt Reeves knows what he's doing with his monster, bringing it blundering into the story whenever we get too close to remembering the real disaster that inspired it. In fact, one of the most genuinely horrifying scenes in the film has no monster at all. Several characters decide to rescue their friend from a sixty-story building that has collapsed against another one. Exhausted and in shock from watching their other friends die, they climb those sixty flights up the non-collapsed building, and jump into the slowly-crumbling one next door to get to their friend. Nothing is more terrifying than these vacant, tottering buildings whose blasted walls howl with wind.

And then, just as you start to contemplate those other blasted buildings, those other terrified people trapped inside them, the monster arrives and suddenly everything is fun, B-movie goodness. It takes smart writing and directing to make a movie like this, that pushes raw historical tragedy right into our eyeballs and then deftly distracts us with old-fashioned entertainment.

Sure, you can go see Cloverfield for the stomping and roaring, and you won't be disappointed. But when the movie's images of a destroyed New York fallen into chaos haunt you for days afterward, you'll start to realize that Reeves and his twangy-ass monster have given the U.S. its first great movie about 9/11.

The best part of this made-for-SciFi Channel movie is that they couldn't stop with undead mammoth; they even couldn't stop with alien-controlled undead mammoth; no, they had to make it a vampire undead alien-controlled mammoth. At the end of this clip, you can see the mammoth sucking life force out of the special agent. Using its trunk. What kind of drugs enabled this pitch meeting? Seriously, I need to know so I can take some.