Kong: Skull Island, the latest big-budget, mega-hyped King Kong movie, just hit theaters Friday. It’s easy to see why this character has proven so enduring: as humans, an affection for giant apes seems hard-wired into our DNA, and everyone loves freaky mystery islands full of anachronistic dinosaurs and fantastical beasts. But there’s another reason King Kong has never left us. Like vampires, zombies, and superheroes, the story of a giant ape from Somewhere Else—a creature worshiped as a god in his own world, who is kidnapped and taken to the United States in shackles to serve as a plaything for a wealthy white elite—has proven especially metaphorically rich.

We wouldn’t want you to miss the deeper symbolic significance of movies about a simian monster climbing phallic skyscrapers in pursuit of sexy yet unavailable actresses—so here’s a brief primer on the larger metaphorical elements at play in the major American King Kong movies through the decades. In other words: here’s what all that monkey business is really about.

King Kong (1933)

Perhaps the nicest thing that can be said about the racial politics of the original King Kong is that they reflect the tenor of the times, which were, alas, very racist. An astonishing technical and creative achievement that time has rendered deeply problematic, King Kong takes place in an imperialist fever dream of the East. It’s the film that introduces the fictional Skull Island, located off Sumatra in the Indian Ocean—although its inhabitants are generally coded as African, and sometimes Asian. Either way, Skull Island is a terrifying, otherworldly realm, more like another dimension than another continent, full of superstitious, glowering villagers and fantastical creatures. In this film, King Kong himself is the dark, mysterious East personified—a brutal, vicious beast who destroys adventurers, dinosaurs, New Yorkers, and New York alike.

At the same time, the film can also be read as an anti-colonialist allegory in which Kong is actually a proud and untamed indigenous warrior—a king and a free soul in his own world who is captured, kidnapped, taken in shackles across the ocean, and forced to put on a show for the amusement of debauched white people. No wonder he rebels so righteously. In this interpretation, Kong is still a beast rather than the increasingly anthropomorphic creature he would become over the decades. But even in his savage original incarnation, he was already more sympathetic and, yes, human, than his captors and hunters, who complicate the film’s colonialist and racist undertones by being so over the top in their boorish, ugly American awfulness. They come off not as heroes, but as satirical caricatures of Yankee voraciousness and greed.

King Kong (1976)

The 1976 remake of King Kong made the leering, heavy-breathing sexual subtext of the first film into text by featuring a heroine (Jessica Lange as ditzy actress Dwan—yes, not Dawn) who is practically sex incarnate. In a performance that gives little indication of the powerhouse, Oscar-winning actress she would become, Lange radiates incandescent sensuality as the unfortunate object of King Kong’s carnal desire—as well as everyone else’s. This includes hunky Jeff Bridges as a rugged animal-lover type, who is so hairy that he puts off a distinct ape-man vibe himself.