Beowulf’s Monster Discourse Now: Grendel in Twenty-First-Century Film

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on Monster Studies, this paper develops its own syncretic theoretical approach to focus on recent transformations of Beowulf’s archetypal plot of the Hero Overcoming the Monster in film discourse, as part of the broad popularity that Beowulf still enjoys in different art forms. Significantly preceded by McTiernan’s The 13th Warrior (1999), an attempt to adapt Michael Crichton’s literary ambition to make Beowulf’s story appealing to modern audiences, the new century opens with a revisionist approach to it in Hartley’s No Such Thing (2001), whose heroine empathises with the monster. While crude adaptations such as Lyon’s Grendel and McCain’s Outlander (2008) still abound, Gunnarson’s Beowulf & Grendel (2005) and Zemeckis’s Beowulf (2007) enhance the story by focalising it from Grendel’s mother’s perspective without renouncing its grotesque and sublime elements. Similar elements are likewise present in monster movies which are not ostensibly Beowulf adaptations, such as Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), Bayona’s A Monster Calls (2016), and del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), yet whose monster discourse is sustained by ingredients ultimately deriving from the Anglo-Saxon poem: the monster as a tester of moral fibre, the cultural syncretism which gives sociohistorical meaning to the alien entity, and its human kinship.