1933 to 1958 · The giants
Apes, ants and atomic lizards
King Kong (1933) climbed the Empire State Building and into film history, powered by Willis O'Brien's stop-motion effects. Kong is a monster we pity, and that sympathy runs through the best creature films ever since.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the monsters grew radioactive. Them! (1954) unleashed giant irradiated ants in the New Mexico desert. That same year in Japan, Ishirō Honda's Godzilla rose from Tokyo Bay as a walking memory of the bomb. The original Japanese cut is solemn and devastating, far from the playful sequels that followed. Then The Blob (1958) oozed into small-town America with a young Steve McQueen trying to warn adults who would not listen. Fear of the bomb, fear of communism and fear of the unknown all wore rubber suits in the 1950s.
1975 to 1979 · The blockbusters
Don't go in the water
Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) famously had a mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce, that kept breaking down. So Spielberg hid it, and John Williams' two-note theme did the work instead. The result is one of the most suspenseful films ever made and the first modern summer blockbuster. A generation stayed out of the sea.
Four years later Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) took the same idea into space. The crew of the Nostromo answer a distress call and bring back a stowaway designed by Swiss artist H. R. Giger. The chest-burster scene is legendary, but what lasts is the slow, sweating tension in dark corridors, and Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, one of cinema's great survivors.
1981 to 1990 · Latex and slime
The golden age of practical effects
The 1980s belonged to makeup artists. Rick Baker's on-screen transformation in John Landis' An American Werewolf in London (1981) won the first competitive Academy Award for Best Makeup. John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), with Rob Bottin's grotesque effects, was a box-office failure that is now hailed as one of the greatest horror films ever made. Its alien can imitate any living thing, so the real horror is that nobody at the Antarctic base can trust anybody else.
David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) turned Jeff Goldblum's slow transformation into a tragic love story, and Tremors (1990) proved creature features could be scary and hugely funny at the same time.
2005 onward · New teeth
Caves, rivers and silent fields
Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005) sends six friends into an unmapped cave system in the Appalachians, and it is claustrophobic long before the crawlers appear. Bong Joon-ho's The Host (2006) has a creature rampaging out of Seoul's Han River and is as much a family drama and political satire as a monster movie.
John Krasinski's A Quiet Place (2018) built an entire film around silence, with creatures that hunt by sound, and Jordan Peele's Nope (2022) turned a UFO into a predator and a story about spectacle. Our creature watchlist: King Kong, Godzilla, Jaws, Alien, The Thing, The Descent and The Host.
Next: The New Wave of Dread