The latest installment in Legendary MonsterVerse—the Apple TV+ series, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters—is more about some complicated multi-generational family issues than Titans like Godzilla. That doesn’t mean, however, that some very large and very deadly creatures don’t make an appearance.
One of those creatures is the tentacle-faced Frost Vark, who we first meet at the end of the third episode where it exacts its terror on a too-warm airplane. The Titan isn’t one we’ve seen before, and we owe its existence, in part, to the young son of the show’s co-creator, Matt Fraction.
“My son is the kind of kid who goes, ‘Oh, hey, fun fact!’ And then whatever he says next is not fun. It’s always horrifying,” Fraction told me in an interview with his co-creator Chris Black.
Not one to pass up an opportunity, Fraction put his son to work. “I paid him five bucks a file for Monarch files,” he said. “And the challenge was to find crazy animals, give me the Wikipedia page summary, give me a page of photographs of them, and then a bunch of random facts.”
Fraction’s son didn’t disappoint—his father would show the reports, which contained “these real awful things” to the writers’ room for inspiration. “It was great because part of the legacy of the films that Barnaby Legg, the Mythology Manager at Legendary, bestowed on us is that there are always root connections in our world to what the Titans are,” Fraction told me. “It’s not arbitrary. It’s not an alien that you’re just making up—there’s some kind of analog in Earth stuff. So what better than a hyper-curious fourteen-year-old into gross animals? He was a perfect Monarch junior field agent.”
For the Frost Vark, two of the Monarch junior field agent’s reports—one on the star-nosed mole and one on the pangolin—morphed into a very detailed description of the creature in the script, including a note that those tentacle appendages on its face were how the Titan sensed the world. That description was helpful for VFX supervisor Sean Konrad, though he told me in a separate interview that the journey to get to the Frost Vark we meet in the third episode had some twists and turns.
“We had this one design of it early on that everybody really loved,” Konrad said. “And then once we actually put it into our pre-viz scenes and our post-viz [scenes], once we shot, we were like, ‘Oh, that’s just not scary enough.’ And so we started giving it these big teeth and other things.” Other additions to the Titan include giving it its heat-sucking abilities, which absolutely ups its fear factor (though, to be honest, I still think it’s kind of cute).
Konrad and his team also added clumps of snow, dirt, and debris to the scales of the creature to give us a sense of its scale. (If you’re looking for another measure of the Frost Vark’s largeness, it’s about the size of two double-decker buses.)
The creative team also made sure to frame all the monsters appropriately to help viewers appreciate the largeness of what they’re seeing. “The monsters are too big to fit in the frame,” explained Konrad. “That undergirds all of our creatures, even the smaller ones.”
Another consideration, however, was the desire for some of the set pieces to be on a more human scale, so not all monster encounters are outside in a big field where a 300-foot tall creature can roam. “We wanted to be able to make the sizes variable to what the circumstance that the people were going to be in,” Konrad explained. “That gives stakes to the action because it feels like the people are actually there.”
And, of course, while Monarch: Legacy of Monsters includes new Titans like the Frost Vark, Godzilla also makes an appearance, as he should.
“Godzilla, of course, is a fan favorite and one of mine because he’s so complex,” Tory Tunnell—who, along with her husband Joby Harold, executive produced the show via Safehouse Pictures—told me in a separate interview. “He’s always been a great metaphor for so many tricky moments for humanity. He was first born as a reference for nuclear power, and we’ve talked about him as being a reference for climate change, Covid, et cetera. He’s a dynamic monster to revere.”
You can revere Godzilla, the Frost Vark, and other monsters every Friday when new episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters become available on Apple TV+.
