Again, the closest parallel I can think of here is Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which positioned the apes, essentially, as a derided, mistreated ethnic minority.Īn in-depth discussion of Gargoyles reminds me that in the 1970s, our pop culture often examined things from a somewhat more nuanced and even-handed place than it does today. He's turning the page on an age old animosity, and re-setting the state of human/gargoyle relations for a more positive future. When Boley lets the Gargoyles go free in the climax rather than burning them in their egg chamber, he is striking a blow, perhaps, for racial justice. If Gargoyles - children of evil - and humans can achieve a rapprochement, what's to stop us from healing racial divisions amongst our own kind? In America, alas, we have also witnessed a long and ignoble tradition of people referring to other ethnic groups as Satan's representatives on Earth, and this real life parallel casts the film in a new light. We both possess 'desires.' We both love our young. In Gargoyles, there is also a well-recorded history of animosity between the two peoples, but also an acknowledgment that in terms of our desires and characteristics, humans and Gargoyles are very much the same creature. And as the lead Gargoyle states, this is the end of ' our age' and the beginning of his. In Gargoyles, you also see the idea of a separate ethnic group existing within our national borders, seeking to redress past wrongs. The diary speaks of the seduced woman's frenzy, but does not make clear if that frenzy is terror, sexual, or some unique (and pleasurable?) combination thereof. Read a little deeper however, and I suspect, on some level at least, that Gargoyles is actually a horror treatise concerning race and race relations in America.įor instance, there's the specter of forbidden love between a white woman and 'monster' here (as well as the concurrent mythologizing of the ethnic 'Other' as a kind of sexual Goliath).

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