By PAYTON MCCARTY-SIMAS
“Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur?” Bryce Dallas Howard asks in Jurassic World (2015). “First time you see them, it’s like… a miracle. You read about them in books, you see the bones in museums, but you don’t really… believe it. They’re like myths.”
JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH (2025)
Picture a dinosaur in your mind. The image you conjure, likely toothy and covered in scales, is a product of the kind of mythmaking Howard’s ClaireDearing means here, characterized by a mix of wonder and fear that was popularized most famously by Steven Spielberg in the movie that spawned generations of childhood dinosaur obsessions: Jurassic Park. With the latest in the franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth, now in theaters, let’s look back at the inception and evolution of the dinosaur on screen and unpack some of that mythmaking. In many ways, the Spielbergian dinosaur captures some of the fundamental tensions around dinosaur imagery, foregrounding awe (listen to that iconic bit of John Williams score; see characters look to the sky, eyes wide, taking in a Brachiosaurus) and terror in turn. As we’ll come to learn, dinosaurs’ relationship with the horror genre has always been defined by this potent mix that tells us much more about ourselves than these creatures that once roamed the earth.
Since their first formal discovery in 1824, when British scientist William Buckland introduced the world to the Megalosaurus, dinosaurs have been the subject of a surprising amount of contestation, speculation, and commoditization. These iconic “terrible lizards” first appeared to the broad viewing public as a kind of sideshow spectacle. In the late 19th century, scientists and profiteers alike descended on the American West to find new fossils in a gold rush known as “the Bone Wars.” This period was, for some, just as much about clout as it was scientific progress, and when taxonomizing a class of extinct animals about which very little was concretely known, that meant misidentifications, mishaps, and all-out hoaxes were common. Even the most well-meaning scientists got it wrong a lot of the time. For a while, paleontologists used the proportions of modern-day lizards for reference, leading to the belief that dinosaurs regularly reached mind-boggling sizes of almost 200 feet (the longest dinosaur of all time, according to the American Museum of Natural History, was the Titanosaur, which reached 120 to 125 feet). At the time, one itinerant showman, sometimes likened to P.T. Barnum, named Albert Koch, even went so far as to build a 114-foot-long “sea-serpent” that he called the Hydrarchos out of prehistoric whale fossils and take it on the road as an attraction. Scientific accuracy wasn’t exactly at a premium, even if the price these bones could draw certainly was.
GERTIE THE DINOSAUR (1914)
When dinosaurs first appeared at the American Museum of Natural History in 1905, there was concern that their presence would associate the institution with hucksterism and vaudevillian antics (quoth The New York Times of this gaudy display: “humbug”). Enter the movies, the perfect home for this exact kind of mass, pop-entertainment spectacle. The first dinosaurs on screen appeared in 1914 and ‘15 in a handful of comedy shorts, Gertie the Dinosaur, Primitive Man, and The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy. The spirit of laissez faire fantasy was already thoroughly entrenched in dino lore by this time, when heated debates around evolution and creationism (not to mention the works of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs) – had brought about the image of humans and dinosaurs coexisting (first literalized in Primitive Man, the first ever live action dinosaur film, and the first of many to star a normal lizard in a silly costume). However, Gertie, in particular, speaks to the first Spielbergian dinosaur principle: Dinosaurs are awe-inspiring and kid-friendly. In that cartoon, the mammoth dinosaur dances for the camera, eats a pumpkin, and gives a circus conductor a ride on her back. Yet, horror was soon to follow. And it was far more topical.
THE LOST WORLD (1925)
Reflecting the still coalescing politics surrounding dinosaurs in the 1910s and ‘20s, the first feature-length dinosaur picture was a horror-adventure film. The Lost World (1925, based on the 1912 story by Arthur Conan Doyle) actually took on the intersection of hoaxes and legitimate science directly in its plot, which follows a disgraced paleontologist out to prove that dinosaurs still live in seclusion on Earth. It’s in this film that dinosaurs as terrifying monsters would first rear their great and terrible heads with the aid of soon-to-be special effects legend Willis O’Brien. Among various stop-motion dinosaur fights and attacks, the film also features a showstopping climactic scene of a Brachiosaurus terrorizing downtown London. This narrative, so fundamentally a product of its time, would eventually come to define most dinosaur stories to this day, from Godzilla to Jurassic Park.
KING KOONG (1933)
Soon thereafter, another monster flick would carry the film industry on the broad backs of dinosaurs, solidifying the Jules Verne-esque tropes of The Lost World. It’s commonly believed that the success of King Kong (1933) went a long way towards saving the movies during the slump of the Great Depression, and it did so through terrifying spectacle shot through with pathos. Cutting-edge stop-motion, layered rear screen, and puppets (all orchestrated by Willis O’Brien) conjure up a forest of brutal pre-code horrors, from a Stegosaurus who gets bombed to oblivion to a T. Rex whose tangle with Kong ends with its jaw getting ripped apart. One scene featuring a pit full of giant spiders and a Spinosaurus was deemed so terrifying that director Merian C. Cooper had it excised from the film and destroyed.
THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
After the success of King Kong, dinosaurs would become the almost sole purview of the horror-adventure film for decades to follow, in large part thanks to the stop motion effects wizardry of the likes of Ray Harryhausen, who learned his craft from O’Brien. These films, often cheap, formulaic B-flicks like One Million B.C. (1940), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The Land Unknown (1957), and The Land That Time Forgot (1974) typically pit humans against dinosaurs in bloody battles for survival, with at least one dino-on-dino dustup. True to the genre’s roots in Victorian spectacle and speculation, fake dinosaur species were common alongside the obvious historical inaccuracies of their premises. When working on the effects for One Million Years B.C. (1966), Harryhausen famously quipped that it wasn’t scientists who paid to watch these movies; It was kids. Fascination with the subject, in horror as well as comedy, had already become associated with childhood. In this looseness and play with the past, we can almost find echoes of AMNH’s curator, the famous cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, in 1905, when discussing the controversial dinosaur display: “[Museums] must, first of all, be entertaining.”
As Svetlana Boym put it in her book The Future of Nostalgia, “Dinosaurs are ideal animals for the nostalgia industry because nobody remembers them.” Thus, they become stand-ins for human concerns, from fights around evolution (consider the passionate reaction to the discovery of dinosaurs or the Christian roadside attraction “The Ark Experience,” including dinosaurs as creatures on Noah’s Ark to this day) to fights about climate change and extinction – all ripe subjects for horror. This is where Michael Crichton pulled his inspiration for the novel that would eventually become Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster. Crichton claims that he was reflecting on the state of the world: “The question that we have when we look at dinosaurs is, ‘They’ve become extinct, and are we next?’” Ripe with images that recall the scientific trends of its day (I can’t watch Jurassic Park without thinking about Bill Clinton and the Genome Project – “Dino DNA!”), the film’s fears are fundamentally about humanity’s lack of control over nature, about our self-destructive impulses. When raptors or rexes attack, someone usually has a snide remark about how we did it to ourselves.
JURASSIC PARK (1993)
Beyond galvanizing the dinosaur craze of the ‘90s and ‘00s, Spielberg’s classic also excavated the dinosaur film from decades of fossilization in the cinematic dust heap. This dino blockbuster harkened back to the success of the horrifying King Kong, while also instilling the creatures with totemic childlike innocence. The scares in Jurassic Park are undeniable, from the Velociraptors with their long claws and clever minds to the Dilophosaurus whose frills and acid plumes shocked me even more as a kid. Most importantly, perhaps, Jurassic Park also takes these prehistoric animals seriously – consulting with scientists on their designs, centering the importance of scientific inquiry over commerce in its plot – while never losing sight of their power to awe, terrify, and satisfy that particular human need for spectacle. Who better understands the maxim that museums must be entertaining than John Hammond?
These same themes play a fundamental role in the kind of terror explored in the more recent Jurassic World trilogy as well. These films straddle the line between old and new dinosaur films in their blend of legacy blockbuster sequel antics, wild historical inaccuracies akin to the B-movies of the mid-20th century and avowed love for the creatures at their core that Spielberg made foundational. They also focus intently on climate change and extinction fears with a renewed sense of urgency, a notable historical shift from decades of carnivalesque attractions using dinosaurs to promote fossil fuels, from a Sinclair Petroleum dinosaur exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair to the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing at the American Museum of Natural History today.
JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM (2018)
Of course, some these new movies also verge on high camp melodrama (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom should be a cult classic), but that blend of serious and silly (and seriously scary) as the evolution-forward politics of Primitive Man or the consistent humor of Jurassic Park itself tells us, is part of what dinosaurs are all about. As Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong), the franchise’s new Dr. Frankenstein, explains of his creations in Jurassic World, “You’re acting like we’re engaged in some kind of mad science, but we’re doing what we have done from the beginning. Nothing in Jurassic World is natural!”
This sentiment has certainly been carried over to the latest in the franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth, with its draughtsmanlike approach to action-adventure-horror stylings that are a veritable tour through dinosaur movie history for good and ill. In that film, dinosaurs have become old hat to the point that a graffiti-covered Brachiosaurus can stop NYC traffic, and all anyone does is honk, an image that, in a meta sense and unlike the drivers in question, certainly struck a chord with me. With this metatextual boredom to contend with, this re-reboot delivers a menagerie of mutant monsters meant to refresh the viewer’s imaginations, a tale as old as dinosaur films themselves.
As Dr. Henry Wu’s reminder indicates, our myths around dinosaurs are never really about naturalism, though they convey our wonder at the natural world. Dinosaurs, these real-life mythic creatures whose lives we can only truly resurrect on screen, provide us with all the thrills that an amusement park – or a museum – can offer.
