This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

Like a lot of people from my generation, the 1984 film The Neverending Story has a special place in my heart.

While full of escapist fantasy and fun, it also challenged me in a way that most

other family films just didn't, pushing the boundaries of what I was capable of processing at a young

age, from the trials of the swamp of sadness to the terrifying menace of Gormorke, the great wolf,

an agent of the power behind the nothing.

As you'll remember, Gormorke appears as a great wolf, much like the Norse Finre, capable of

speech and reasons sent by his mysterious benefactors, referred to as the manipulators in the

original 1979 novel by Michael Enda to kill the hero Atreou.

Realized through practical effects like the Luck Dragon Falcourt, there's just a tangible threat to the creature.

And we experience just a nihilistic hatred. It oozes off the screen.

Now it would be many, many years before I finally read the novel for the first time,

with my own child, by the way, and it has become one of my all-time favorites. The events of the

film only encompassed the first half of the novel, and as is almost always the case, the book

explores its various concepts with greater depth and nuance. For example, we learn much more about

Gormork and his mission. Gimork is a werewolf, but one that differs significantly from the

common folklore and horror movie creature. In the world of humans, he has a human form. In the

world of fantasia, the world of human fantasy, he has a wolf's form, but he is neither and is a creature with no world of his own.

As such, he is driven by spite and hatred for humans and vantations alike, quote, because you creatures had a world, and I didn't.

...