The locus classicus for the conceptual practice of “monstrous Cinemascope” is probably Richard Fleischer's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), based on Jules Verne's classic novel, one of Hollywood's earliest Cinemascope films and the Disney Studio's very first. As J. P. Telotte has convincingly argued, virtually everything about this movie is monstrous (in various senses of the term: enormous, hideous, terrifying, unnatural, malformed, repellent, evil, abject): the wide-screen process itself, of course, as well as the budget, the hype, the risk, the special effects, the language, the visual style, and, most tellingly perhaps, the narrative. The story is driven by an expeditionary quest for a mysterious, ship-sinking, South-Sea monster, which turns out to be the prototype submarine, Nautilus, created by its mad-scientist Captain Nemo (James Mason), a “self-professed ‘avenger’ against humanity's own monstrous nature,” a human “monster” himself, whose “facial features” in “extreme [Cinemascope-distorting] close-ups … as he plays his organ” “evok[e] a cinematic tradition of monstrous madmen, specifically recalling” here Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Nemo is rehumanized and redeemed in the battle against the giant squid, a “more traditional cinematic monster,” and in his decision to blow up his nuclear-powered home-island base, “produc[ing] a familiar mushroom cloud” that “marks the final monster of the film.”