So why not curl up and give yourself a good scare? It’s probably too cold and rainy to go outside, anyway. But early fall itself also just feels spooky – a time when the air gets crisp, the days get darker and the spices more pumpkin-flavoured. Most of us have been told since we were children that October is Spooky Season, and for the rest of our days, the month will always represent frightful fun, even when we’ve long outgrown the ritual of dressing up and going begging for candy around the neighbourhood. He’s a hybrid of Homer’s cyclops and Goya’s harrowing ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’, a painting directly reference when he chews the fairies heads off, and inhabited with a terrifying sense of slow undeniability by del Toro’s long-time man-in-the-suit Doug Jones, for whom every hour in the make-up chair translates into about a billion nightmares for the rest of us.- Phil de SemlyenĪny time is a good time to watch a scary movie, but let’s be real – there’s just something incredibly satisfying about watching a horror flick in October. Of course, he’s also scary because he’s a sallow bastard with fingers like razor-sharp carrots, who resembles a bin liner filled with teeth and ill-will. The Pale Man is scary because he represents unpalatable political truths. He meant that this classically inspired ghoul is a cipher for all the corrupt systems of power that devour and deny the needy – here, the young, hungry Ofelia, who attempts to retrieve a mythical dagger only to be tantalised by an off-limits table of treats – and you know the horror auteur would only double-down on the sentiment in these troubled times. ‘These are Pale Man times’, tweeted Guillermo del Toro of his monstrous creation back in 2017. The Thing itself? As the ultimate malevolent disruptor, it might have inspired a tech CEO or two.- Phil de Semlyen Carpenter and Bottin, who worked so hard on making it happen that he almost died of exhaustion, inspired generations of filmmakers with their visceral Alien -on-Earth opus. For lovers of truly horrifying, icky, old-school special effects, this insidious extra-terrestrial is the capo di tutti capi. With some help from fellow SFX pioneer Stan Winston, Rob Bottin’s creature effects remain a marvel as the parasitic alien morphs and shapeshifts from one scientist to another at an Anatarctic base under siege from within. At the time, The Thing had the biggest monster budget in film history, and that money is there in every chest chomp, scurrying spider head and supporting character spewing out gunk and tentacles. Nothing disguised as an adorable pooch could be evil, surely? Alas for dog lovers, the answer is a resounding ‘hell yes’ in John Carpenter’s classic fusion of sci-fi smarts and creature feature chills that gave us the slimy Dog-Thing. □ The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories □ Cinema’s creepiest anthology horror movies □ The 100 best horror movies of all-time But zombies? Trolls? Brundlefly? You’ll find them all below. A few caveats: this list largely follows the same parameters as our monster movies list, meaning that it steers away from non-mutated animals – sorry, Bruce the Shark and the spiders from Arachnophobia – as well as slasher villains such as Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. But as with actual human actors, some of the most memorable creatures in film history can be found slumming it in subpar productions – and they deserve to have their moment in the spotlight. But not all of cinema’s greatest monsters inhabit great movies. Didn’t we already write a list of the best monster movies of all-time? Indeed we did. If you’ve read this far, you may be experiencing some déjà vu. Others, meanwhile, are more instinctual, killing either for food or just for the sheer fun of it. Some represent the biggest fears of society at large, others are manifestations of their creators’ personal hang-ups. Some may take the form of giant irradiated lizards or skyscraper-sized apes, others amphibious swamp creatures or slow-creeping mounds of gelatin. Movie monsters are a many-splendored thing, with a strong emphasis on ‘thing’.
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