Gooooood evening, my devious deconstructionists, my slithering semioticians, my ghastly grammatologists! You have tuned into the only broadcast that lingers between meaning and madness, between terror and trace—**Dr. Moribund’s Midnight Mausoleum of Misread Monsters!**
Tonight, we plumb the crypts of cinema’s most neglected nightmares, a **trilogy of terror that slips between categories like a shape-shifting signifier!** That’s right, we’re digging up the festering corpses of **The Being (1983), Without Warning (1981), and The Milpitas Monster (1975)**—three films that *think* they are about creatures, but oh-ho-ho, my dear viewers, the horror runs deeper than rubber suits and VHS decay! These films, like Derrida’s most devilish texts, show us that meaning is never stable, never final, always slipping, always… deferring.
So buckle in, boils and ghouls! **It’s time to examine the horror of différance, the terror of trace, and the monstrosity of meaning itself!**
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### **"THE BEING: A SLIMY SLAB OF UNSTABLE SIGNIFICATION!"**
Ah, *The Being*! 1983’s favorite toxic terror, oozing out of an Idaho waste dump like a **text that refuses to be contained!** Our titular nightmare is a radioactive sludge-monster that **cannot be pinned down**—sometimes humanoid, sometimes pure ooze, always *becoming* but never fully *being*.
If Derrida were to step into our haunted drive-in tonight, he’d raise a clawed finger and say, “Ah-ha! *This* is différance in action!” The Being **exists only in mutation**, deferring its true form, slipping between the grotesque and the absurd. The film itself struggles to decide if it’s a creature feature, a detective thriller, or a Reagan-era eco-horror—it mutates as wildly as its own monster!
And consider this, my decomposing Derrideans: what is The Being but **a text that resists closure?** The town tries to explain it—“It’s pollution!” “It’s a government experiment!”—but no one theory is ever enough. It is an excess, a horror beyond articulation. **It is the signifier that refuses to settle into meaning!**
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### **"WITHOUT WARNING: THE MONSTER THAT IS ONLY A SIGN!"**
Now, my lovely lurking lexicologists, we move on to 1981’s *Without Warning*—a film that plays like the dusty blueprint for *Predator*, but with something even more terrifying than an alien hunter! That’s right—**it gives us the horror of the pure signifier, the monster that is only a function!**
In this B-movie marvel, a big-brained extraterrestrial prowls the wilderness, **but it does not kill with its hands!** Oh no, it hurls *living, pulsating, flesh-eating discs*—creatures that have no *essence*, only function. **They are pure difference, weapons that are only defined by what they do!**
And is that not the very nature of horror itself? The alien never speaks, never explains itself—it is merely the **thing that stalks**, a predator without history, without essence, existing only in its actions. **It is the Derridean nightmare of pure exteriority—nothing inside, nothing original, only an endless chain of floating terror!**
And if that doesn’t chill you, dear viewers, consider this: the film **itself** exists in a state of différance! It is neither fully an alien invasion film, nor a slasher, nor a monster movie. **It hovers between categories, destabilizing the genre just as its monster destabilizes our sense of safety!**
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### **"THE MILPITAS MONSTER: A GARBAGE MONSTER BUILT FROM LINGUISTIC REFUSE!"**
Ah yes, my loathsome lovers of lost media, we have finally reached **the Milpitas Monster (1975)**—a beast born not from the depths of the cosmos, nor from the cauldron of nuclear waste, but from the **rotting refuse of meaning itself!**
Our titular terror is a **trash-golem, a monstrous assemblage of garbage and debris**, a beast literally cobbled together from the excess of a decaying society. And tell me, my poststructuralist poltergeists—**is that not the very nature of the text itself?** Language is never pure, never whole, never fixed—it is always an accumulation of fragments, of cultural leftovers, of borrowed signs and broken meanings.
The Milpitas Monster, much like Derrida’s view of language, is **a construct built from discarded meanings**, a monstrous bricolage that reflects a world where signs no longer point to stable referents. The town itself is complicit—it is their waste, their cast-off language, their failures that have given birth to the beast. It is a **textual revenant, a walking, rampaging example of différance, where meaning—like trash—never truly disappears!**
And let us not forget—this was a **student film** made in the forgotten corners of the 1970s, a cultural relic that was never meant to endure. But oh, how it *returns*! Every time it is rediscovered, every time it is rewatched, **it reasserts itself as a trace, an undead signifier that refuses to rot!**
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### **"THE MONSTER IS NEVER TRULY DEAD!"**
And so, my diabolical deconstructionists, we reach our horrifying conclusion… or do we?
For if Derrida has taught us anything, it is this: **meaning is never final, the text is never closed, and the monster is never truly dead.** You may **burn The Being**, but its toxic residue lingers in the town’s soil. You may **kill the alien in Without Warning**, but its flesh-eating discs will still fly through the air, seeking their next victim. You may **bury the Milpitas Monster**, but the garbage of culture never stops accumulating, never stops threatening to rise again.
Horror, like language itself, is **always haunted by what came before, always deferring true resolution.** And is that not the greatest terror of all?
So lock your doors, sharpen your critical thinking, and remember: **the signifiers are always watching… and so am I!**
Until next time, boils and ghouls… **Pleasant screams!**
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