Monsters
Something with teeth is loose, it is not from around here, and the film is about surviving it, or about what it means.
Monsters5 to start
- 1Gremlins1984
- 2The Thing1982
- 3The Babadook2014
- 4The Host2006
- 5Tremors1990
What defines it
- Era
- 1954 to today
- Mood
- adrenaline, awe, design
Monster movies are the oldest promise in horror: there is something out there, it is not human, and it is hungry. The form runs from rubber suits at a 1950s drive-in to a pop-up book in an Australian bedroom, and it has never needed much more than a good design and the discipline to keep it in the dark until the right moment.
The rules are the creature's. Something non-human, animal, alien, mutant, ancient or imaginary, is loose, and the film is organized around encounters with it. There is usually a place it belongs to, the ice, the river, the attic, the dark under the bed, and people who have wandered into it. And there is a reveal, staged and delayed, because the form learned early that the creature is scariest as a rumor.
The lineage begins in 1954, the year of Godzilla, Them! and Creature from the Black Lagoon: atomic fears, giant ants, a man in a scaled suit. Then Jaws (1975) rewrote the rulebook and invented the summer blockbuster at the same time, by hiding its shark and letting John Williams do the work. Alien (1979) took the form into space. The Thing (1982) made the creature anyone in the room, and Gremlins (1984) made it a Christmas present with rules. The 1990s and 2000s produced the friendly Tremors (1990), the claustrophobic The Descent (2005) and the political The Host (2006). The 2010s found that the monster could be a metaphor and still have teeth: The Babadook (2014), It Follows (2014), A Quiet Place (2018), and Nope (2022), where the thing in the sky is also a question about looking.
The signature techniques are about sight lines. The shot from the creature's perspective. The reaction shot before the reveal. The slow pan that stops where the thing is standing. And the design itself: monster movies are where practical effects earned their legend, from Rob Bottin and Stan Winston to the people in the suits, and where a good silhouette can carry a film.
- adrenaline
- awe
- design
Adrenaline and spectacle: the creature is held back until the film decides to show it, and then it is all chase, or all meaning.
- Axis
- Scare Score
- And
- Loved it
How it scares
This is adrenaline. Where a ghost story leaves you cold, a monster movie raises your heartbeat and keeps it there, through chases, near misses and the moment the door does not hold. The fear is physical and immediate: fight or flight, with the film mostly choosing flight. The form has a second register that no other subgenre reaches as often, which is awe. The first full look at the thing in The Host, or the dog kennel scene in The Thing, is horror and wonder at once. And a third, newer register, where the monster is the shape of something the character cannot say, and The Babadook's book is a dread machine before it is anything else.
Monster movies get to people who hate being hunted, which is a very old part of the brain. They get to anyone with a specific fear of a specific shape. They are less effective on viewers who need the uncanny or the unexplained, because a creature, however big, is a known quantity that can be shot. Those viewers often love the form anyway, as fun rather than fear, and that split is exactly what the heart is for.
How to rank it in Gasper
You answer which was scarier a handful of times, and the film finds its place among everything you have ranked. Loved it? Heart it.
- 1
Monster movies produce the clearest version of the question Gasper asks. You answer "How scary was it?" with Terrifying, Some scares or Barely flinched, and then "Which was scarier?" against films you gave the same answer, in head-to-heads. The Thing against a possession film is paranoia in the ice against violation in a bedroom; Gremlins against a slasher is a kitchen against a hallway. Neither answer is wrong. Your gut places the film, and a handful of comparisons finds its spot.
- 2
Scores on this page scatter by branch. The Thing lands as Terrifying for a lot of people and Tremors as Barely flinched for most, and both are correct. Your first answer sets the band and the comparisons settle the order inside it, so a creature comedy you grinned through is only weighed against the other films that never frightened you, and its Scare Score, 0 to 10 with one decimal, is honest about it. The Babadook is the one to watch: a lot of people answer Terrifying and cannot point to a single jolt.
- 3
This is also the subgenre where the heart and the score most often agree on the greats and disagree on everything else. The Thing is a high score and a "Loved this?" heart for almost everyone. Tremors is where the split shows: a heart and a low score, because you had a wonderful time and never once felt threatened. If a monster got to you harder than you would like the feed to know, Stealth mode keeps the rank private and still counts it toward the Taste tab, where Monsters is a common Top subgenre for people who came to horror young.
- 4
In Discover, the Monsters shelf sits beside Kaiju, Killer Sharks and Animal Attack, and the Subgenre filter narrows any search to one of them; a film like The Thing may turn up on more than one shelf. The Community Scare, the average of everyone who ranked a film, is useful here because it separates thrill from fear: if your scores sit well below the crowd on the chase films and above it on The Babadook, you are hard to chase and easy to haunt.
Where to go next
Kaiju is the same form at city scale, and Godzilla (1954) is where both pages begin. Killer sharks and animal attack are the monster with a zoology. Sci-fi horror is where Alien and The Thing live when the ship or the ice is the point. Body horror shares the effects tradition, and The Thing is the bridge. Psychological horror is where The Babadook goes when you decide the book was never real, and werewolves are the monster that used to be a person.
For deeper cuts, try The Mist (2007), Frank Darabont's Stephen King adaptation about a supermarket, a fog and the people inside, with an ending that still divides rooms. The Descent (2005) sends six women into an Appalachian cave that is not empty, and the second half is one of the great sustained chases. And Nope (2022) is Jordan Peele's film about a horse ranch, a thing in the clouds and the cost of looking at it, more awed than frightening and worth it anyway.
Questions about monsters
- Partly budget, mostly craft. Jaws hid its shark because the mechanical one kept breaking, and discovered that the fin and the music were scarier. The rule stuck: what you imagine is worse than what you see, so a good film spends the reveal carefully. The Babadook shows its monster for a few seconds in total.
- Yes, and that is the argument the film is having with itself. Mister Babadook is a real creature with a design, a book and a voice, and he is also what grief does to a house. The film works either way, which is why it is on this page and on the psychological one.
- Scale. A kaiju is a monster the size of a city, and the fear is of being underneath it. A monster on this page is something you could be in a room with. Gasper keeps separate shelves for Monsters, Kaiju, Killer Sharks and Animal Attack because the fear is different at each size.
- Tremors, then Gremlins. Both are friendly, both are funny, and both are real creature features underneath. The Host is the next step. Leave The Thing for when you want to be properly chased, and The Babadook for when you want to be properly sad.
Why do monster movies hide the monster for so long?
Partly budget, mostly craft. Jaws hid its shark because the mechanical one kept breaking, and discovered that the fin and the music were scarier. The rule stuck: what you imagine is worse than what you see, so a good film spends the reveal carefully. The Babadook shows its monster for a few seconds in total.
Subgenres like this one
- SubgenreKaijuA monster the size of a city, and the city underneath it: fear measured in blocks, not rooms.
- SubgenreKiller SharksA fin, a stretch of open water, and the knowledge that you cannot see what is under you.
- SubgenreAnimal AttackNothing supernatural, nothing from space: an animal that exists has decided you are food, and it is faster than you.
Keep reading
- FeatureHead-to-head rankingAnswer which film was scarier a few times and Gasper places it in your rankings. You never type a number.
- FeatureScare scoreA measure out of 10 of how scary a film was for you, read from your own ranked list and shown in skulls.
- GlossaryPractical effectsPractical effects are special effects made physically on set, with prosthetics, puppets, animatronics and blood rigs, rather than added digitally.
- GlossaryDreadDread is the sustained, building fear that something terrible is coming, the slow counterpart to the jump scare in horror.
- GlossaryStealth modeStealth mode is Gasper's per-rank switch that hides that activity from the feed while the film stays in your rankings with its scare score.
Rank your monsters list.
Free on the App Store. Log a film tonight, answer which was scarier, and watch your rankings take shape.
