Kong: Skull Island director elaborates on his tribute to Cubone with the film's Skull Crawler monster

A portion of a Den of Geek interview with director Jordan Vogt-Roberts...

DoG: I also picked this up - I'm such a nerd - that the reptile monsters, the two-legged creatures [called Skull Crawlers], are partly based on Cubone out of Pokemon.

JVR: [Laughs and gives your humble writer a high-five] My man! Yeah, that creature was the funniest thing. I was like, "If I'm putting a monster on screen, this has to be my movie monster". The little kid in me, the nerd in me who had his brain rewired by Harryhausen films and kaiju films and anime and videogames - I get to make my monster! So initially, it was a rip-off... in the 1933 film, there's one creature that's not a dinosaur. In the log scene, when they're hiding, this creature starts climbing up the side of a wall. And it has these two big forearms, and it's cut off at the bottom so it gives the impression that it has two forearms and no hind legs. You never really see it, so you have no way of truly knowing what it does. But I thought that was really interesting, and it reminded me of Bong Joon-ho's creature in The Host, which had such an oddness to the way it moved. I liked the way that creature had an inelegance, as though it had somehow evolved poorly. Because it was a mistake.

So we used the creature from the 1933 film as a jumping-off point, just for pure anatomy. Then I want to have it feel like an evolved version of the creature in The Host. And move with inelegance. And as we were designing it, I kind of gave a handful of references to people, and my best friend in the world came and did some concept work with me - this was my friend where we'd have LAN parties as a kid and, like, didn't know how to talk to girls and spent our time in a basement playing videogames, drinking pop and eating junk food.

And we're looking at this creature, and we're like, "What does this remind us of?" Because I was, like, "I want it to have this white face - this weird, bone-white face, and this black, scaly skin." Both he and I were staring at it, and we had this weird moment where we were like, "Oh my God." We realised that we'd created this unintentional fusion of all of our nerdy childhood influences.

DoG: Because I love Cubone. Cubone has the saddest story of him wearing his dead mother's skull on his face.

JVR: Oh god, yeah!

That's so incredible to me. So I loved that idea. But then it also reminded me of the first angel in Evangelion - it has this these giant shoulders and black skin, and this weird white face. But it's also a rip-off of No-Face in Spirited Away. So we had this funny moment where we said, "This is just our childhood throwing up on the screen as a creature." I'm really proud of this creature, and ripping off other influences, and hopefully it feels like something people haven't seen - like, a generic monster.