Monarch Season 2's Creepiest Storyline Pays Homage To One Of The Scariest Stories Ever
Apple TV's "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" is a sci-fi/action series that delves into the world of giant monsters, blending elements of horror and maximalist tone. The latest episode, "Resonance," delves into a mysterious remote village on the island of Santa Soledad in Chile in 1957, paying homage to H.P. Lovecraft's 1931 novella "The Shadow over Innsmouth."
In this episode, Lee Shaw, Bill Randa, and Keiko Miura investigate the villagers' hostility towards outsiders, which mirrors the narrator's experience in Innsmouth. The villagers' cult-like behavior, their worship of the Titan X, and the sacrifice-like vibes of their ceremony are all heavily Lovecraftian, adding to the episode's tension. The inclusion of such a tribe in the MonsterVerse is a nod to the legacy of Kong as a character, and the original 1933 "King Kong" also involved a native tribe that regularly made human sacrifices to a monster.
The question remains: are the Santa Soledad villagers a neat little riff on Lovecraft and a sly tip of the hat to the heritage of Titan worshippers in the MonsterVerse? Or do they represent another faction of people whose relationship to the Titans is not as harmonious or non-violent as the Iwi's is? The answer may lie in future episodes of "Monarch" or a MonsterVerse film, where the descendants of the villagers may turn up, hoping for a better outcome than Lovecraft's doomed narrator.
