Monsters was conceived as time-travel exercise, simultaneously revisiting the distant era of the dinosaurs and the more recent world of the Victorians. The Victorians built the railways and in doing so discovered fossils that challenged and contradicted Biblical accounts of Creation. These discoveries gripped and unsettled the Victorian imagination. The looming, anatomically incorrect statues that feature in this film stand in London's Crystal Palace Park and represent the Victorians' first attempts at imagining the prehistoric.