Beasts and Beauties

A major horror and fantasy sub-genre of cinema's first decades was that dealing with rampaging gorillas - either jungle-wild, circustamed or trained to serve wicked masters - killer apes, and a range of ape-human hybrids, either evolutionary 'missing links' or creatures spawned by medical experimentation and radical surgeries. Inspirations for this genre came from both fantasy-horror literature and the populist cultural trope of gorillas as abductors and ravishers of human females, a fear which arose from early European expeditions into Africa. This idea found its apex expression in RKO's King Kong (1932) - with Fay Wray as the blonde snatched away by a giant ape - while its unspoken logical conclusion, a grotesque miscegenation of species, was shown in the infamous Ingagi (1931). Charles Gemora, Ray 'Crash' Corrigan, Emil Van Horn and Hollywood's other delinquent gorilla men - seen in feature films, shorts and serials alike - persisted into the 1940s and only began to slow with the