Dear Monster Fans,
Get ready to unleash the beast!
For the latest video in our Greatest Movies A-Z series with WatchMojo, we’re looking at the ghouls and goblins and giant creatures that the movies made us believe were real. Enjoy.
As you can see, we gave ourselves some guidelines:
- One film per letter
- Articles don’t count (the, an, a, etc.)
- Final list should encapsulate the genre
We also got a bit more specific for defining what qualified as a “monster”:
- No aliens
- No vampires
- No zombies
- No demonic possessions
Zombies and aliens already have their own dedicated videos, while vampires and demonic possessions hued a little too close “human” than monster for our purposes. Plus, we want to give ourselves room to explore those options in a future video.
So here’s some takeaways from our monster findings - one of the oldest and most successful genres in all of filmmaking history:
TOP DECADE: 1980s
The peak of prosthetics and in-camera effects saw incredible remakes of monster movie classics and some truly frightening original visions that still hold up to this day. From An American in Werewolf, which inspired the Academy Awards to create a make-up category, to Cronenberg’s classic The Fly, to Little Shop of Horrors, it really was a monster of a movie decade.
BEST LETTER: B
Completely unfair that we had to choose between movies decade-defining monster movies like The Blob (1958), La Bete (1975), and The Babdook (2014). But chose we did - and we went with one of the earliest, and best examples that the monster genre could evolve beyond cheap scares - The Bride of Frankenstein (1934).
CHEATED OUT: Jurassic Park
Maybe an even more classic “monster” movie than Jaws, especially since their re-creation comes from scientists, but this Spieberg classic just had to play second fiddle to his original man-eater.
HARDEST CHOICE: The Fly vs Frankenstein
We had a way out of picking The Fly, since it made our Sci-Fi list, but we didn’t want to use that as an excuse to take off David Cronenberg’s master vision of transformation from man to monster. Plus, we thought Bride of Frankenstein was a pretty good 30s substitute - and arguably the better film.
SPECIAL CONSIDERATION: Pan’s Labyrinth
An argument can be made that this movie shouldn’t count because the monsters only in the child’s imagination, and that argument can also be lost.
Think your list would be better? More balanced? Less heart-breaking? Let us know.
Sincerely,
Dear Cast & Crew
