This neutered computer tent-pole syndrome is most obvious in the contemporary zombie film, which reached its demoralizing zenith in last year’s World War Z. This adaptation of Max Brooks’s unsettling global horror novel scrapped most of the source material’s haunting subtext so as to emphasize marauding armies of the undead that were so clearly the product of generically composed ones and zeroes that they resembled, oddly, the grain you might find on the images of problematically restored older films. Those zombies were scrubbed of personality just as efficiently as they’d been robbed of any potentially unsettling thematic point.

Even the filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro—an almost solitary hero of the modern monster movie, not to mention a specialist to rival Ray Harryhausen in designing creatures with pathos and texture—recently stumbled with Pacific Rim, a versus film that featured murkily lit inter-dimensional warlords composed of interchangeably vague tentacles and horns and scales.

Perhaps most discouragingly, though, American cinema’s monsters bear little metaphorical connection to the theme and intent of the rest of the film to which they belong—a connection that is the cornerstone of a great monster.