The 50 best monster movies ever made

Director: Andy Muschietti

Whatever you do, don’t trust a clown
For some, Tim Curry will always embody Pennywise the dancing clown, a manifestation of fear itself. But in this 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s epic novel, replanted in the 1980s instead of the ’50s, it’s Bill Skarsgård who scares you witless. As Pennywise, Skarsgård’s eyes roam in two different directions, making the character look truly monstrous and deranged. When he interacts with the children, he drools, as if starved, ravenous to consume them and their fear. Great performances from the young cast also prevent any ‘child acting’ awkwardness, while the themes of friendship and the loss of innocence are reminiscent of Stand By Me (another King adaptation) and ET. It might be sentimental at times, but when it scares – and it really does scare – it’s a chilling reminder that, no matter your age, clowns are terrifying.

Director: Clive Barker

Superfreak!
Paperback sadomasochist Clive Barker leveraged his success with Hellraiser to make what he promised would be ‘the Star Wars of monster movies,’ only for the studio to get cold feet once he turned in what turned out to be… well, Clive Barker’s vision of the Star Wars of monster movies. What was released in 1990 was a fascinating, near-unwatchable mess. In 2014, however, Barker unleashed his long-promised director’s cut, delivering very much on his promises and leading viewers into a wild, psychosexual underworld of gnarled beasts and one particularly nasty masked killer played by none other than David Cronenberg. The final product is of a piece with the monstrous worldbuilding Guillermo del Toro would make mainstream with Hellboy… only with way more leather and puncture wounds. 

Director: John Krasinski

The sound of silence
A truly successful monster movie can frighten audiences without giving you many clear glimpses of the monster itself. A Quiet Place doesn’t exactly hide the extraterrestrial beasts tormenting John Krasinski, Emily Blunt and family, but if we’re being honest, most viewers couldn’t describe them from memory – if you’re struggling, they’re basically fleshy, toothy insectoid alien things from the Cloverfield genus. But Krasinski, as director, does such an effective job of ratcheting up the tension via the film’s central conceit – the creatures hunt by sound, making complete silence imperative for survival – that it hardly matters if we actually see them at all. 

Director: William F Claxton

That rabbit’s got a vicious streak a mile wide, it’ll do you up a treat
‘Attention! Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way, and we desperately need your help!’ Yes, narrowly beating out Frogs and Grizzly to take the coveted No 50 spot is this bright-eyed, bushy-tailed bunnysploitation classic. You may assume there’s nothing particularly terrifying about rabbits, but that’s exactly what Janet Leigh and Mr Burns’s fetish icon Rory Calhoun thought until those twitchy-nosed, floppy-eared hell-fiends started taking over their town, leaving destruction in their...holy shit, that’s Bones McCoy with a handlebar moustache!

Director: Steve Sekely

Danger: heavy plant crossing
As anyone who watched TV this Christmas knows only too well, the definitive version of John Wyndham’s template-setting apocalyptic masterpiece has yet to emerge. The reasons for this are manifold, but one stands out: there’s just no way to make plants scary. Just ask M Night Shyamalan. This British effort makes a decent fist of it, particularly in the eerie early scenes in which the entire global population is blinded by a convincingly psychedelic meteoric light show. But once the real villains show up, things fall to pieces: okay, they’re eight feet tall, homicidal and blessed with a multiplicity of variegated blood-red suckers. But they’re still, you know, plants.

Directors: Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman

Don’t you know that you’re toxic?
Remember when low-budget horror movies were more interested in wit and invention than flat-out gore? When Toxie ruled, his straight-to-video adventures capturing the hearts, minds and guts of a nation of splat-crazy horror heads? Well, those days are long gone, but their sweet memory remains: a time when a carload of drunk disco-jocks could reverse over a kid’s head for kicks, when an extra could poorly conceal his supposedly ripped-off arm under his camo jacket without anyone batting an eyelid, when a grotesque, musclebound nuclear-wastoid could have rough sex with a bubble-permed blonde and audiences just went with it. Halcyon days.

Director: Ron Howard

Because two heads are better than one
Doesn’t the two-headed monster in ‘Willow’ resemble a pair of generic Spitting Image puppets balanced on the end of two camouflage sleeping bags? For a kids’ film (c’mon nerds, it is!) it’s a pretty scary beastie to plonk just prior to the final good (dwarf) versus evil (old woman) showdown, especially when it chooses to wolf down some of the extras between fiery breaths. It’s kind of a shame that a mild flesh wound – okay, a sword through the brain – causes its head to explode (a nagging physiological shortfall if ever there was one) but any monster that allows you to use the term ‘straddled by a stop-motion Kilmer’ in your write-up has got to be worth its SFX-money-shot salt.

Director: Wes Craven

It’s not easy bein’ green
You know that green pulp you get when you leave spinach boiling for too long? Well, that appears to have been the inspiration behind embittered bogman Swamp Thing, originally created for the pages of DC comics to suggest that when we discuss the environment, we must consider hideous mutated avenging vegetable men as well as majestic redwoods and fresh bunches of azaleas. Out to save the quagmire of effluent pond weed he calls home from evil government agents, Swampie made his way into two films: 1982’s beloved original directed by Wes Craven, and 1989’s inevitable The Return of the Swamp Thing featuring Heather Locklear, the cinematic equivalent of the expression ‘nuff said’.

Director: Jim O’Connolly

The movie that time forgot
Seemingly inspired by the kind of logic-free games enjoyed by eight-year-old boys, this rarely seen gem pits cowboys against dinosaurs in a stark New Mexico. It was based on an unrealised project of King Kong creator Willis O'Brien, and the great man's protege Ray Harryhausen lent eerie life to a host of prehistoric gobblers as a two-bit Wild West show discovers a herd of tiny prehistoric horses in a remote desert valley. Unfortunately for the dollar-eyed cowpokes, the little equine wonders are the prey of the ‘Gwangi’, a ravenous Allosaurus intent on bringing Jurassic mayhem to the Old West.

Director: Matthew Robbins

Not to be confused with Dragonheart, Dragonlance or Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
Before Peter Jackson gave Sword and Sorcery (for it is they) an irresistibly sexy sheen, this 1981 effort took a proudly cod-medieval stomp through damsel/dragon territory, becoming the lodestone of dark-tinged family fantasy. In a world, the trailer might have intoned, where the dung hovel is the standard unit of social housing, a boy on the brink of manhood is all that stands between a great fire-breathing beast and a rather fey cadre of aristocrats bent on offering up their virgins to the monster. Not an ideal arrangement, but one that worked well enough until Sir Ralph Richardson’s permanently flummoxed wizard turns have-a-go pensioner and sets up a nice revenge saga for his young apprentice. Richardson steals the film despite his early immolation, but the Industrial Light & Magic special effects come a close second and, nearly thirty years on, have an ethereal charm that CGI-drenched descendants like Beowulf can't match. Disney's graphic mash-up sequel, Pete’s Dragon Slayer, was pulled after test screenings left young audiences in states of extreme distress.

Director: Frank Henenlotter

Say hello to my little friend
Once a byword for inventive cinematic sleaze, the name of Frank Henenlotter has been all but forgotten by modern horror enthusiasts. Basket Case was his early '80s calling card, the tale of a browbeaten, morally ambiguous twentysomething and his homicidal, basket-bound vestigial twin as they undertake a mission of vengeance against the doctors who separated them against their will. To modern audiences, this darkly comic tale of monstrous brotherly love is most fascinating as a depiction of New York in its hideous heyday, a shattered urban hellscape populated almost exclusively by hookers, thieves, junkies and murderers, lit by flickering neon and the flash of ambulance sirens.

Director: Karl Freund

That's a wrap
Brendan Fraser may have been co-opted as a kid-friendly Indiana Jones-a-like to star in Stephen Sommers’s mediocre modern Mummy franchise (and the less said about Tom Cruise the better), but Karl Freund’s 1932 original (of which the aforementioned was a fairly close remake) remains the definitive stab at bringing that iconic, muslin-swathed zombie killer to the big screen. It sees Boris Karloff as the ancient Egyptian priest who springs back to life when a British expedition team interrupts his slumber, and it marked yet another quality entry in Universal’s worldbeating canon of classic horror yarns. As you can see from the trailer below, the delicately visceral make-up work was extremely disturbing, and the film itself spawned a number of sequels, namely The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Curse, The Mummy’s Tomb, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb... you get the picture.

Director: David Twohy

Hello darkness, my old friend
A peerless example of a filmmaker turning limitations into advantages, Twohy keeps the angular bat-like inhabitants of the desert planet of Hades very much in the dark for his small but perfectly formed sci-fi thriller. Vin Diesel’s noble savage Richard B Riddick and an agreeably clichéd band of crash survivors have to contend with the bone-white desert wastes by day, but it’s at night when the fun really begins, as the darkness literally comes alive with shapeless fury. Of course, it would be easy to contend that Diesel and Co are the real monsters of the piece and that the bat-things were the ones under attack from alien invaders… But where’s the fun in that? 

Director: James Gunn

A slug’s life
A throwback to the throwback B-movie boom of the 1980s, James Gunn’s copy of a copy probably shouldn’t work as well as it does. But it’s clear the future Guardians of the Galaxy director knows his reference material on an intimate level. In this case, that includes everything from ’50s space invader cheapies, retro-minded creature features like Critters and Tremors, Cronenbegian body horror and the gleefully gross splat-a-thons of early Peter Jackson. It all adds up to an icky, sticky mini-masterpiece that bombed at the box office but nonetheless rocketed Gunn up the Hollywood call-list. It’s a movie bursting (sometimes literally) with hilariously disgusting set-pieces, but the pièce de résistance is turning Michael Rooker into a massive, oozing mutant controlled by parasitic slugs. It sounds appalling – which probably explains why audiences stayed away – but it’s delivered with such over-the-top zeal you can’t help but smile even as you wretch.   

Director: George Waggner

Shut up and comb your face
The humble werewolf has received an enviable number of screen outings in modern times, from Jack Nicholson prancing around as a hirsute sex pervert (insert gag here) in 1994’s Wolf, through murderous menstrual tension in the underrated Ginger Snaps (2000) and wishy-washy teenwolf traumas in Twilight: New Moon’ (2009) to Joe Johnston’s megabudget remake, The Wolfman, but it’s this rock-solid olde-worlde charmer we’ve chosen for this list. As usual with these classic horror films, the tragic curse comes into play when the hapless Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr) gets scratched while fending off an attacking wolf, then as the full moon rises, a revolting transformation takes hold and as quick as you can say ‘those slacks are going to need a new crotch’ he’s hot on the trail of human blood. 

Director: Steve Miner

What a croc!
Let us, for a moment, pause to examine the career of Steve Miner. Having brought cheap thrills to the masses with Friday 13th Parts 2 and 3, and much-loved skeletons-in-the-closet charmer House, he decides to try his hand at a little social comedy with notorious race-relations misfire Soul Man. Miner spends the rest of the '80s wandering in the wilderness of The Wonder Years, before bouncing back with daft timeslip romp Warlock. More fruitful years follow, until Miner, again, makes a major misstep: the US remake of French comedy hit Mon Père ce héros, in which Gérard Depardieu lumbers threateningly after his nubile daughter through a series of lurid tropical locations. Once again, teen TV beckons: this time its Dawson’s Creek, at least until deliverance arrives in the form of the severely underrated franchise instalment Halloween: H20, the success of which leads directly to this superbly cast, solidly entertaining giant-croc tale.

Why am I telling you all this? Because Lake Placid is nothing if not the work of a reliable, hardworking journeyman: occasionally inspired, occasionally flat, always fun, never dull. The work, in fact, of a man equally at home in Camp Crystal Lake or Dawson’s Creek. God bless you, Steve Miner, and all the other unsung Hollywood heroes. We even forgive you for Soul Man. 

Director: Irvin S Yeaworth

There’s always room for Jell-O

It seems absolutely ridiculous on the surface, and, well, it is – it’s a movie about a mound of carnivorous gelatin very slowly devouring a small town, after all. But in the realm of monsterdom, ridiculousness can be a virtue, and this sci-fi cheapie endures as perhaps the ultimate example of B-movie silliness. It’s got more going for it than just sheer audacity, though. For one thing, it’s the movie that inaugurated a young Steve McQueen as a leading man, playing a teenage hoodlum turned hero. (Nevermind that he was in his late twenties at the time.) It also introduced many tropes that would come to define various strands of genre pictures in the coming decades, from ‘amorphous alien forms threatening humanity’ to ‘won’t someone in power believe what these kids are telling them?!’ Most of all, the premise has proved as malleable as the title organism itself – while in the original, the Blob is meant to symbolise the slow creep of communism, in the gory ’80s remake it’s an escaped bioweapon reflecting America’s growing mistrust of its own government. Honestly, not too bad of a legacy for a barely-sentient glob of space goo.

Director: Frank Oz

Does this look ‘inanimate’ to you, punk?
This film version of the stage adaptation of the low-budget Roger Corman original should have been a complete trainwreck, but ex-Muppet man Frank Oz somehow delivered one of the greatest intergalactic carnivorous plant musicals of the '80s. Lovelorn Big Apple florist Rick Moranis breeds a nondescript houseplant into a ravenous monster with a taste for human blood and doo-wop music before realising that it is in fact a ‘mean, green muthah from outer space’ with plans to colonise Earth. Funnier than Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers and with catchier showtunes than M Night Shyalaman’s The Happening, Little Shop... is still the Big Boss Daddy of violent vegetation vehicles. 

Director: Joe Dante

1981’s other werewolf movie
Following a decade-long apprenticeship with Roger Corman and New World Pictures which bore ample fruit in the shape of Piranha, Joe Dante knuckled down and got serious with this heartfelt tribute to werewolves he had known and loved. Which, it transpired, was precisely what the public didn’t want, as proven by the massive global success of An American Werewolf in London, in which John Landis indulged in all the subversive slapstick splatter which Dante had so conscientiously avoided in his own movie, but which would later come to define his career. The Howling is, however, notable for having one of the most magnificently seedy and unsettling openings in cinema; shame it can’t quite maintain that level of tension.

Director: Fred Dekker

The gang’s all here
If it had come around in the era of instant-franchising, this Shane Black-penned tweenage horror-comedy would be on its fifth sequel, with multiple streaming spinoffs and book tie-ins and merchandise sold by the coffinful. C’mon, a movie about a gang of smartass kids defending their town from a cadre of classic cinematic monsters come to life? That’s branding gold, baby! As it is, Monster Squad stands as an oddly isolated little creation: fondly remembered by 80s kids, undiscovered otherwise (perhaps except for its most famous quote). A reappraisal isn’t likely in the offing, unless Generation TikTok suddenly gets really into Gill-Man and the Mummy. But it remains a fun, daffy tribute to a bygone era of horror that was already beginning to fade back when it first came out. Think of it as Goonies meets Ghostbusters, or Stranger Things if a portal had opened to the Universal backlot rather than a parallel dimension.

Director: Erle C Kenton

Manimal!
In an ideal world we’d be listing Richard Stanley’s take on HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau here - as anyone who’s read Stanley and Michael Herr’s original script can attest, it would’ve been amazing. But that movie was handed to John Frankenheimer, and became one of the shoddiest monster movies ever made. So instead we turn to the best surviving adaptation, this retitled Charles Laughton vehicle, in which ropey makeup effects and a hokey romantic subplot are more than made up for by Kenton’s genuinely eerie directorial style and Laughton’s magnificently seedy, sweaty and grotesque central performance. 

Director: Matt Reeves

Half-monster, half-marketing

In the days before trailers had their own trailers, it was possible for a movie preview to catch audiences off guard, and Cloverfield producer JJ Abrams took full advantage. The film’s first teaser revealed next to nothing - not even the title. All it showed was home video footage of pretty young New Yorkers partying in a loft, followed by chaos and the disembodied head of the Statue of Liberty crash-landing in the middle of a Manhattan street. Was it a live-action Voltron, as some websites speculated? Another Godzilla reboot? A Lost spinoff? Cthulhu? As it turned out, everything we really needed to know was right there in the trailer. Applying the found footage concept to a large-scale disaster, it follows a group of friends the night some fleshy, skyscraper-sized alien thing rises out of New York Harbor in a supremely bad mood. It’s that simple, yet it felt revelatory. It still does. Sure, the characters are paper-thin, and the shaky handy-cam is especially nausea-inducing, but that just makes the experience more immersive. Many critics interpreted the movie as a 9/11 allegory. Maybe so. But even taken at face value, it’s a thrill ride in the most literal sense.

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Well red
Comic fans have long been used to seeing the wit and intelligence of their favourite stories surgically excised by zoot-suited Hollywood bean counters, so Del Toro's faithful vivification of Hellboy was something of a landmark in judging its audience to be some way above high-functioning cretins. With creator Mike Mignola onboard and Ron Perlman at his best since his ‘Penitenze Agite!’ days in The Name of The Rose, the movie tapped a rich vein of outsider humour and was so teeming with ideas that it could throw away on a prologue a story that Spielberg would have made into a three-picture franchise. Best of all, for a brief, glorious moment, it seemed that Niles Crane had been transformed into a mind-mangling aquatic superhero. Abe Sapien's disdain for dry sherry and his watery inability to attend the Seattle Philharmonic's opening nights put paid to that beautiful illusion, but in blending humanity and monstrous action, Hellboy and its even more monster-stuffed sequel have raised the stakes when it comes to bringing inky imaginings to the big screen.

Director: Stuart Gordon

Dead and loving it
Evoking a mixture of HP Lovecraft’s 1922 serial, Herbert West – Reanimator, and Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, director Stuart Gordon whisks us to the campus of Massachusetts’s Miskatonic Medical School to tell of a mad, mad scientist (Jeffrey Combs) who believes he has bridged the gap between life and death with the help of some lime green goo. Alongside the Evil Dead films, it’s one of the few horror-comedies that actually delivers a laugh with every scare (see the entire Troma output for examples of how not to do it), and even though it doesn’t contain a monster per se, the reanimated severed head of a stuffed-shirt neurosurgeon is an example of low-budget prosthetics work at its ketchup-soaked finest. Also worth noting is the sly reappropriation of Bernard Herrmann's seminal Psycho score which, it being 1985 an' all, has been augmented with some echo drum beats. 

Director: Larry Cohen

Enough is never enough
Though his career as a writer-director remained in fitful if failing health for another decade, The Stuff is generally regarded as Larry Cohen’s last and perhaps greatest subversive statement. Turning his laser-sharp satirical eye on the American tradition of boundless consumerism, Cohen presents a world in which a mysterious sentient dessert substance known only as ‘the stuff’ has conquered the hearts, minds and stomachs of an increasingly couch-bound populace. Once more featuring the great Michael Moriarty in the lead role of shambling huckster corporate spy Mo Rutherford (see also Q: The Winged Serpent), the film skewers its intended target with a slew of brilliantly constructed, hilariously off-kilter mock ads.

Director: Ron Underwood

I’ve got worms!
A raft of creature features and B-movie revivals hit theaters in the ‘80s, but none have had the staying power of this monstrously fun horror-comedy about the residents of an isolated desert town battling massive, carnivorous sandworms slithering in the ground underneath them. A lot of its success has to do with the chemistry of the ensemble cast, led by Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward as handymen in rural Nevada thrust into defending the small town they’ve grown sick of. Another element are the monsters themselves, designed essentially as mutant, murderous burritos. Most importantly, director Ron Underwood keeps the tone breezy and the pace brisk, but still manages to craft moments of legitimate tension: the scene in which Bacon, Ward and Finn Carter pole-vault across rocks to avoid getting eaten is an all-timer, as is Bacon’s climatic mad scramble to kill the bastards off once and for all.

Director: Frank Darabont

It’s a real pea-souper
Most of the conversation revolving around The Mist focuses on that gut-punch of a downer ending. But until its pre-credits rug-pull, Frank Darabont’s Stephen King adaptation is a sadistic blast. Between building-sized tentacular behemoths, skull-faced giant spiders with acid webs, razor-taloned crab creatures and flies with scorpion tails, the film is a symphony of slime, dismemberment and gleeful ghoulishness horror that would leave HP Lovecraft trembling with joy. Throw in a manic religious monster in the form of Marcia Gay Harden and you’ve got a hell of a fun creature feature that slams into an unspeakably bleak wall at the finish line, yet still can’t shake off the fact that it’s a master class in B-movie bravado.

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Ai caramba! El Diablo!
Now the dust has finally settled, can we agree on the fact that Guillermo del Toro’s baroque historical fantasia (Alice In Wonderland meets Land and Freedom, as one wag put it) is not the masterpiece everyone said it was. In fact, it feels like the perfect film to be sitting mid-table in a list like this, an impressive but overreaching political allegory whose underused trump card is some of most ornate monster model work in modern cinema. Starring Doug Jones - who’s fast joining the ranks of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney and Nicolas Cage in the pantheon of classic screen demons - as the faun who offers inquisitive young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) three tasks in order for her to be reunited with her absent father, the film never manages to find a happy medium between fantasy and reality, though it does show the breathtaking results of sticking some googly eyes onto the palms of your hands (see above). 

Director: Joe Dante

One school you don’t want to get into
The jewel of the post-Jaws nature-on-the-loose boom, Piranha was also one of the last and greatest movies from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in its ’70s heyday. The irony is that the film responsible for Piranha’s very existence, Spielberg’s world-masticating box-office behemoth, would also be the film that unwittingly wiped out everything New World stood for: once the B-movie had become the new A-movie, there’d be less and less room for the kind of madcap invention and subversive undertow that Joe Dante and writer John Sayles packed into this giddy, grisly little fish story. 

Director: Jack Arnold

Weird and gilly
What is it with ancient, primeval beasts attacking hot chicks in bikinis? It's certainly a question on Guillermo del Toro's mind. Sure, sex has been a primal urge since the dawn of time, but you’d think studs like King Kong, Jaws and the fish-faced hero of this frenetic ’50s frightener might not have to resort to terror tactics to lure in the opposite sex. But then again, when you’re the bastard son of man and lungfish (as the labcoat-wearing boffins solemnly inform us), perhaps you’re born with a built-in inferiority complex. Cheer up, Gill Man. No one remembers so-called ‘stars’ like Richard Carlson and Julie Adams, while your multi-fronded mug has become the defining image of ’50s horror. Float on, chum, and let the ladies swim to you... 

Director: Larry Cohen

Gods and monsters
The legend of ‘loopy’ Larry Cohen is little heard round the movie-critic watering holes nowadays, but that doesn’t make his career any less remarkable. The Jewish TV drone who became a blaxploitation legend. The gritty Sam Fuller enthusiast who turned to Cormanesque splat. The inventor of killer babies (It’s Alive!), killer dessert food (The Stuff) and, yes, killer alien Jesus (God Told Me To), Cohen is arguably American exploitation cinema’s number one unsung hero, and Q: The Winged Serpent might be his finest hour. Intending, with his tale of a resurrected Aztec god stalking the citizens of NYC, to create an old-fashioned monster movie like the ones he’d seen as a boy, Cohen just couldn’t let go of his pet themes – male insecurity, racial tension, religious short-sightedness and social inequality – long enough. So what emerged was a curious, fascinating hybrid: part King Kong, part Shaft and part Crimes and Misdemeanors, as Cohen’s infamous penchant for beautifully sketched dysfunctional pairings reaches fruition in Michael Moriarty and Candy Clark’s fractious but loving central couple. All this plus some wild piano scat, a dollop of human sacrifice and New York City in all its grimy New Wave glory.

Director: Rouben Mamoulian

Two faces have I
Marking himself out as a key innovator with his spry putting-on-a-show yarn Applause and the lively Gary Cooper gangster thriller, City Streets, Rouben Mamoulian proved that he wasn’t just a theatre director in moviemaker’s jodhpurs by producing one of the most scandalous and tense early monster movies. Aside from the jaw-dropping panoply of in-camera effects (the cross-fade transformation scenes are extraordinarily convincing considering the time they were shot), the film is notable for its towering performance from Fredric March and its fearlessness in presenting Jekyll’s vile alter ego as one of the screen’s most shockingly violent sexual predators. 

Director: Brian Yuzna

Consider yourself one of the family
Released at the tail end of the body-horror cycle, Brian Yuzna’s film had to go some way to out-gross the stomach-churning chills of The Brood, Re-Animator and The Fly. Billy Warlock – third banana on TV nork-fest Baywatch – finds himself literally knee deep in family entanglements when he discovers that his blue-blood parents and all their preening yahoo friends are in fact not just a pack of wheedling, self-obsessed poshos, but a sub-species of mutant, body-melding cannibals given to orgiastic bacchanalia, eating the poor and a ghastly practice known has ‘shunting’ that looks only slightly more inviting than grinding one’s genitalia into overcranked farm machinery. The finale, in which Billy is inducted into ‘society’, pays off a beautifully constructed film with a scene of truly repulsive excess that is hard to get through without blanching like an anaemic milquetoast. 

Director: Steven Spielberg

The theme park that costs an arm and a leg
You can irradiate ‘em, re-animate ‘em or drag ‘em kicking and screaming from the darkest corners of the id, but you’re never going to outdo Mother Nature’s first and best tilt at the monster mash. Dinosaurs were so utterly rock-hard that it took nothing less than complete global cataclysm to put paid to their 160 million year reign of terror. Hubristic at best, then, for an elderly Scottish flim-flam man (Dickie Attenborough) to revivify the most ferocious species imaginable: including the T Rex and the Velociraptor – and parade them through an ill-maintained Costa Rican petting zoo. Spielberg has never been one to skimp on the ketchup, and there’s a goodly amount of goo, guts and gore flying around a film that’s as red in tooth and claw as anything on this list. 

Director: Walerian Borowczyk

Sexy beast
Rarely does the monster movie tackle the sexual impulses of its beast with such garish candour as in Borowczyk’s censor-baiting fable that dared to stare down that perennial societal no-no – bestiality – with cheekily sympathetic eyes. From its opening shot of two horses having sex in which the wagging, steaming genitalia are filmed in extreme close-up, there’s the suspicion you’ve stumbled onto something genuinely seedy and illicit. By its 30-minute finale where a comely maiden fantasises about being chased around a woodland glade and raped by a hairy beast with an obscenely large (and very spurty) phallus, you’ll either be nervously trying to ring the Daily Mail newsdesk or chortling along with the crass absurdity of it all. 

Director: Joe Dante

It’s not such a wonderful life
The ‘80s were a boom-time for unchecked malice and bonecrushing violence masquerading as children’s entertainment, but nothing came close to the full-tilt mayhem of Dante’s extravagantly chaotic sideswipe at consumerism, conformity and conspicuously observed small-town values. The Gremlins themselves are way past crazy - as if the Alien had cross-bred with a toilet brush - and exhibit all the manners of a revved-up pit bull while decimating the Xmas jubilations of idyllic backwater hamlet Kingston Falls. All manner of high-minded allegories can be drawn from the carnage wrought by these punky little furbags, but all that matters on this list is that they’re fast, loose and out of control. 

Director: John McTiernan

Let us prey
The genius of Predator is its simplicity. It’s a movie about Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting an intergalactic sport hunter in the jungles of Central America. That’s pretty much it. Maybe there’s an undercover political message tucked somewhere among the bulging biceps, severed limbs and machine gun fire, and sure, Arnie’s crew of misfit mercenaries each have their memeable moments before meeting their gruesome demise. Ultimately, though, all that matters is the battle of wits and blunt-force power between two fantastical creatures. But it’d be a mistake to say this is purely a Schwarzenegger film, because his nemesis is one of cinema’s truly grotesque pieces of work: a dreadlocked humanoid whose face suggests its designer – effects legend Stan Winston, with a purported assist from James Cameron – has a few issues with the female anatomy in need of working out. The sequels would aim to expand the lore, but this is a series that needs no backstory: a beast that fearsome looking is much scarier the less you know about him.

Director: Pete Docter

Get that thing back where it came from or so help me...
Purists may question the presence of this relentlessly upbeat and cuddly Pixar classic on a list of lurking lurchers from beyond. To them we can only say this: if a film has the word ‘Monster’ in the title, it pretty much by definition deserves a place on this list (Aileen Wournos biopics notwithstanding). Plus, Monsters, Inc is just comic genius, running the gamut from daft, Zucker-esque wordplay (Business Shriek magazine, Harryhausen’s restaurant) to some of the most sophisticated quickfire visual comedy Pixar ever produced. Not to mention some wild creature design, wonderfully sympathetic characterisation (‘why don’t they call me The Adorable Snowman?’) and arguably the current gold standard in madcap climactic chase sequences. Pure joy. 

Director: Clive Barker

Hit the head right on the nail 
Clive Barker’s signature movie franchise explores the triangulation of pain, pleasure and sin via some truly gnarly images, not the least of which being the disfigured presence of a clan of supernatural sex fiends known as Cenobites. As the series went on, the grotesqueries grew increasingly extreme and silly, but the original movie succeeds in creeping under your skin thanks to one prickly abomination in particular. Barker says he didn’t intend to make Pinhead the star, though in retrospect that seems a bit dubious. He gave him all the best lines (‘No tears, please, it’s a waste of good suffering’), the coolest (as opposed to grossest) look, and cast English actor Doug Bradley to portray him with almost Shakespearean authority. Regardless of what Barker claims to have wanted, as the films continued, ol’ Pinny became the central figure, and while the returns have been inconsistent, audiences have kept returning, in large part due to that kinky interdimensional pincushion. Because while he may be unrepentant in his brutal defilement of human flesh, he is, like so many articulate monsters, kind of a cool dude.

Director: Bong Joon-Ho

Putting his Korea on the line
If ever there was a bracing cautionary tale explaining the hazards of pouring tainted formaldehyde down the kitchen sink (we’ve all done it!), then Parasite director Bong Joon-Ho’s superlative The Host is it. Standing toe-to-toe with Spielberg’s Jaws in terms of both its masterly introduction of the beast and its savage attack on regional government bureaucracy, Bong pulls the canny trick of pumping old-school genre tension into an intricate (and in the end, harrowing) human drama. 

Director: John Landis

There’s a bad moon rising
It would be interesting to see polling data showing exactly how many fortysomething Brits recall John Landis’s hysterical gore-spattered masterpiece as that all-important pubescent rite of passage: their first 18. Well, a couple of years ago the good folks at the BBFC went and ruined all that: in reclassifying the film to 15, they’ve made all our childhoods seem that little bit less dangerous. Which is no reflection on the film itself: horror-comedy is overfamiliar nowadays, but this only makes Landis’s achievement more impressive. Not just gory but actually frightening, not just funny but seriously clever, American Werewolf has its flaws, but these are outweighed by the film’s many, mighty strengths: the soundtrack is astounding, the characterisation and performances (Jenny Agutter! Brian Glover! Rik Mayall!) marvellous and the one-liners endlessly quotable (‘a naked American man stole my balloons!’). Just don’t go off on the moooooooors! 

Director: Ishiro Honda

‘I am Godzilla. You are Japan!’
After years of rubber-suited b-movies, anime features, video games and reboots both horrid and serviceable, it’s hard to fathom that when Godzilla first stomped into Tokyo, it was downright terrifying. In its original form – and stripped of its bad dubbing and wedged-in American characters – the Toho studios creation did what great monsters do: It laid waste to sprawling cityscapes while prickling raw nerves. Released less than a decade after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla was the embodiment of Japan’s nuclear anxieties, a monster forged from destruction and human malevolence. Long before fighting King Kong and various other ridiculous rubber-suited beasts, the radioactive lizard was something wholly unexpected… and genuinely terrifying. 

Director: Sam Raimi

A farewell to arms
It would be wrong to discuss one Evil Dead film without the other, especially as personal taste and a negligible increase in budget appear to be the only factors that divide the two movies. Both tell the comic book tale of schlubbish wage slave Ash (the inimitable Bruce Campbell) and his blood-splashed battle with a tranche of accidentally awoken Kandarian demons who want nothing more than to swallow his soul. Both, too, offer some of the most inventive, revoltingly tactile and lovingly crafted gore effects you’re likely to see on film. The ‘monster’ in both is a howling spirit that takes on many forms. In the first film, it memorably brings a tree to life and proceeds to rape a teenage girl. In the second, it takes possession of Ash’s severed hand (which he gleefully amputates with a chainsaw) and proceeds to try and strangle him. In addition to this, the first Evil Dead film also contains one of the most spectacular (and elongated) death scenes in modern film, as we witness an actor covered in flaps of latex reduced to a pool of bubbling Plasticine pus. 

Director: James Whale

Stitched ’im up like a kipper
Arguably the single defining image in the history of Hollywood horror, Boris Karloff’s Monster, with his sutured skin, neck-bolts and childlike expression, remains the poster child for ‘sympathetic’ monsters. Okay, so he kills a kid, but we’ll let him off because he’s all lumpy and cute, and doesn’t really, you know, get it. So while Bride of Frankenstein is arguably the better film (it’s funnier, sweeter and has Elsa Lanchester’s hair in it), James Whale’s original take on Mary Shelley’s lumbering pseudo-scientific behemoth remains the gold standard for loveable monsters, and a masterful evocation of what it’s like to exist in a world that only wants to batter you down (a feeling Whale, a gay man in ’30s America, knew only too well). Just take care to avoid Ken Branagh’s soupy, luvvie-stuffed remake. 

Directors: Merion C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack

Sexually frustrated ape inadvertently invents base-jumping
Anyone who has never shed a tear as this love-struck great ape uncomprehendingly swats at his tormentors from the top of the Empire State Building is as stone-hearted as Skull Island itself. Special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien made Kong one of the few cinematic monsters to occupy the emotional as well as the narrative heart of their own movie and his towering achievement is still the benchmark for anyone who would make a myth from a ropey old monster yarn. The 1976 remake was a dull rehash that paired Love Boat-style soap with an inexplicably green monkey, and while Peter Jackson came close to capturing the wonder of the original, the 1933 vintage remains a dark fairytale unmatched by modern pretenders. 

Director: John Carpenter

Baby, it’s cold outside
John Carpenter’s remake of Howard Hawks's tense ’50s sci-fi thriller The Thing From Another World is enough to make you forget Keanu Reeves in The Day The Earth Stood Still or Nic Cage in The Wicker Man, proving that ploughing old furrows can throw up treasure as well as dried-out old cowpats. Kurt Russell as the impossibly maverick Antarctic helicopter-cowboy MacReady is one of the most ludicrously entertaining horror-movie creations, at once wholly implausible and entirely engaging. Fighting infestation by a shape-shifting alien parasite from the cold comfort of their Arctic research station, MacReady’s already cabin-feverish scientist chums are whittled away in a series of increasingly sickening/wondrous set pieces until some horrifying choices become necessary. The kennel scene is the one everybody remembers, but the intelligent, open(ish) ending is one of the greats of any creature feature. 

Director: Ridley Scott

The phallus with malice
It says something for Hollywood’s faith in the survival of the human race that they allowed us a 4-0 run of victories against perhaps the most malicious bunch of graphite-domed killing machines ever to have graced the outer reaches of the galaxy. Modelled on the design concepts of (possibly troubled) Swiss painter and sculptor HR Giger, the fact that the Alien itself was assembled from a vast arsenal of pulleys, levers and even the cooling tubes from a Rolls Royce doesn’t make it feel any less repellent and real.

Seeing the film again, it’s remarkable that Top Gear-man's idea of the ultimate Hollywood director, Ridley Scott, was able to craft such an impeccably modulated and eloquent space opera in which structured exposition and intricately drawn characters help to embed the nightmare of the situation far deeper than any crummy gore effects or slap-dash set pieces ever could. Yet, beyond that majestically sculpted creature which takes down its human prey slowly but oh-so-surely, we must not forget to offer a hearty salute to the late, great Dan O’Bannon, a giant among modern sci-fi screen writers and a rare mortal who was able to post out his imagination into the furthest reaches of the galaxy and have it return with credible, jubilant and freakin’ scary tales of a future fantastic. 

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Girls just wanna have fur
An object lesson in how horror movies have always tackled subject matter which straight drama was afraid to touch, albeit in strictly allegorical terms, Cat People is not, as it has largely been regarded, simply a bloke’s-eye view of the suspect female ‘other’. That element is present, to be sure, but this is a much more sympathetic and heartfelt picture than such a description suggests. True, it’s the story of a woman who turns into a ferocious beast when she becomes sexually aroused. But again, this description only tells one side of the story, and Cat People is a film dedicated to exploring every angle on its subject: the male and the female, the victim and the murderer, the monster and the human being.

Taken, for example, as a metaphor for childhood abuse and its destructive psychological legacy, the film becomes a study of a corrupted woman’s terror of her own emotional potential, and her seething sexual and violent impulses: in a way, the gender-reversed mirror of Cronenberg’s The Fly, but with a far less romantic, more oppressive and doom-laden atmosphere. Taken more simply, as the tale of a woman so constricted by social propriety that she becomes a monster, it’s no less rigorous and challenging. Either way, Cat People is, as Jacques Tourneur no doubt intended it, the ultimate Freudian stew, offering a different meaning to every viewer, but delighting all equally.

Director: Steven Spielberg

You’re gonna need a bigger quote
Spielberg’s enduring shark-tale tour de force addresses many of the key factors that make monsters, well, monsters. First there’s the fear of the unknown: a dreadful and primordial force that lurks in the deep reaches of our imaginings, an unnamable horror from the abyss from which we sprang but can never truly hope to escape. Then there’s the fear we experience when we encounter a force that is beyond our ability to control. And ultimately of course there’s intense and profound shit-yer-pants terror that comes with being faced with an unstoppable fury that can’t be reasoned with, bargained or bought.

All of which would count for nought if not placed into the hands of such a master technician and gifted storyteller as Spielberg, and despite its arduous shoot (Spielberg broke down with nervous exhaustion mere hours after the film wrapped) the Magic Beard managed to fashion an effortless and streamlined example of pure cinema, and created one of its most durable and elemental horrors. 

Director: David Cronenberg

The dream is over, and the insect is awake
If the sign of a truly great monster movie is that it provokes broader emotions than mere horror, then The Fly is a masterpiece. Our feelings for the tragic Brundlefly run so much deeper than mere disgust or even pity: we admire his scientific genius and his goofy, loquacious charm, sympathise with his romantic uncertainty and tendency for adolescent jealousy, recoil at the grotesque transformation of his body and mind, and finally weep for his hubristic but inevitable destruction. It seems ironic that we’ve chosen The Fly to top this list because it is, after all, the most painfully human of all monster movies. The fact that Cronenberg spends the bloodless first half patiently setting up his characters pays phenomenal dividends when the slime starts flowing: we care for these people in a deep, entirely genuine way. It’s a romantic pairing of which Preston Sturges would’ve been proud: flawed, funny, fucked-up and beautifully performed by the then-an-item double act of Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.

Cronenberg’s other great strength is the way he introduces his themes: subtly at first, but with increasing force and ferocity. The Fly is a catch-all metaphor: is it about ageing, cancer, Aids, or simply destructive transformation and dark self-discovery? One thing’s for certain: like most of Cronenberg’s films from the period, it’s about flesh: how it defines us and defeats us, how it conspires against the self, the mind, in an ongoing battle for bodily dominance that we are ultimately doomed to lose. These themes are woven beautifully into the narrative, voiced calmly in the early scenes as Brundle and his computer ‘learn about the flesh’ and reaching fever pitch as Brundle finds himself powerless against the increasingly urgent demands of his corrupted and rebellious body. That, ultimately, is the film’s primary lesson: life is a losing game. The flesh will get you in the end.