Monsters.

Oregon is a state where monsters live. I mean, come on, have you ever been here?

And we’re not just talking about Sasquatch. Yes, this is Squatchville. Bigfootland. Skookumtown. They lurk in the trees and mountains and rivers quietly avoiding the cameras. Since they don’t really care about proper borders we happily share them with Washington. And you’re welcome.

But there are others. Other monsters.

Just have a look at what Oregon offers to the would-be monster.

The moody Oregon Coast where a mummy of a logger that was hacked up in a sawmill accident now haunts a stretch of Highway 101. The Bandage Man.

The barren central Oregon basalt fields that host ravenous creatures outside of Lakeville. Lava Bears.

The St. Johns Bridge with its Gothic towers rising out of the mist over the Willamette. It looks like something a production designer invented in a nightmare.

Pittock Mansion and Forest Park, one of the largest urban forests in America, where the trail skirts along the walls of an abandoned Witch’s Castle (which in reality is a 1930s public restroom).

And, yes, these latter settings are all specifically featured in LAIKA’s upcoming film Wildwood.

That brings us to our point: we love our monsters. Love them so much that they are embedded throughout our filmic history.

It could be argued that this all started in 1979 when Stanley Kubrick wanted to set the tone for The Shining. That loooooong opening credit sequence that starts out skimming over the mountain lakes onto that winding road through the Rockies, then sliding up into that aerial reveal of the Overlook Hotel. Yes, Colorado was the inspiration for Stephen King and it owns a lot of that, but, onscreen, that’s Mt. Hood’s Timberline Lodge.

Later on, Grimm spent six years trying to make our monsters seem normal. They were part of the Portland Police force. They had houses and domestic partners and mortgages. And seemingly profitable stores that just sold spices. And they spent the better part of their workday morphing into creatures that then tracked down their Wesen enemies on Burnside and in Pier Park.

Nowadays people come to Portland specifically to find those locations. There are podcasts and blogs that keep the series alive and well in the hearts and minds of its fans. In the city, neighborhoods got used to finding camera trucks on their streets and actors, stuck mid-morph, on their doorsteps. And, not surpisingly, they loved it.

Three years into Grimm’s run, Dean Devlin’s Electric Entertainment brought The Librarians to Portland.

Electric had been here before. Several seasons of Leverage were shot in Portland. This gave them an insider’s view of how things worked. The depth of the crew. The ease of use. The look and feel of the locations.

And they came back.

The Librarians told the story of an eclectic group that has been brought together to protect magical artifacts stored in an ancient Library hidden beneath the streets of the city (and elegantly played by the Oregon State Capitol in Salem in the first season). The entrance to this magical library was through a door in one of the pedestals of St. John’s Bridge. Remember that old chestnut?

That’s the same bridge featured in the upcoming Wildwood.

Each episode brought its own historically embellished monster or monster-adjacent trying to get one-up on our intrepid Librarians. But they always prevailed.

And our genre tradition runs deeper than just these two shows.

The Goonies was released in 1985 and the still-standing Walsh residence played host to the film’s 40th anniversary last year in Astoria. Admittedly, there weren’t any specific monsters, per se, but Chunk, Sloth and One-Eyed Willy certainly had their quirks.

But, arguably, one of the best Oregon monsters was in The Ring. Who can forget the wet hair, the jerky movements, the VHS tape, the phone call and that water well.

Oh, that water well.

That monster emerged right out of the white noise of the TV screen, dripping water onto the floor. Eeech! So creepy. Yaquina Head light stood in for the Moesko Island light and Astoria was the setting for the sequel when Naomi Watts just had to get out of Seattle (and, I mean, who could blame her?).

Cthulhu was also shot in Astoria which, by this time, had started to really own it’s title as Oregon’s Monster Central (Kindergarten Cop and Free Willy notwithstanding). This was a reimagining of H.P. Lovercraft’s story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” that played on the brooding overcast skies of Oregon’s North Coast. (Coincidentally, the H.P. Lovecraft Festival still runs every year in Portland just as it has since 1995 celebrating the very underpinning of gothic moodiness.)

On the more grounded and personal monster front, Jeremy Sauliner’s Green Room found a rising punk band paying a gig in Astoria only to be confronted by a sinister Patrick Stewart and a violent gang of neo-Nazis. Perhaps this helps us uncover the origins of Portland’s Antifa roots.

Later, Dave Franco and his wife Allison Bree came to Bandon to produce their thriller The Rental. Once again the ever-changing Oregon Coast added to the foreboding quality that haunted every frame of that film about a group of friends renting a house that…just…isn’t…right.

All of this doesn’t even begin to let us dig into the first Twilight and some of the more enigmatic locally produced monster movies that have come out recently including Bampire, His Monster, To Kill a Wolf, Bad Fish, Half Sisters and Frank and Zed. And many, many others.

There is something specific about Oregon’s relationship to genre that isn’t easy to name.

It is not that Oregon is dark. Other places are dark. And it’s not just moodiness. Every teenager these days is moody.

What Oregon has is a quality of earned strangeness. It has centuries of unexplained creatures roaming the dense woods. It is a comfortable place for monsters to set up shop, put down roots and find a home. They fit in. They belong.

Oregon doesn’t just pretend to be a monster ally.

It has proven it time and time again.

And the monsters have always been here.

We just keep making it easier for them to find good crew.