Grotesque, gargantuan, grumpy and gluttonous, the monsters are coming, from outer space, the ocean depths, deep underground, dimensions dark, the pits of Hell and the labs of bad, mad scientists. To terrorise and chase us. To squish and chew and claw us. To feed our nightmares and forewarn us that we may not always be top of the food chain. That said, please enjoy our terrifying top ten collection of featured creatures!
Kaiju
"To fight monsters, we created monsters of our own."
Deadly, diverse and titanic alien beasts that spill from a dimensional rift to wreak havoc upon the Earth, the kaijus of Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim aim to render mankind extinct.
"When I watched monster movies as a child," recalls del Toro, "the money shot for me was the monster. That’s what Japanese kaiju films are all about." For the record, kaiju is Japanese for monster.
"To honour the spirit and feeling of the classical kaiju, which were, for the most part, men in suits, I asked Pacific Rim’s designers to think of how a man might fit into the creatures they created. Though not exactly humanoid, they definitely recall the days of Godzilla and the like.
"Kaijus themselves have many forms," continues the director. "Though essentially outlandish, they echo real animals, so we have a reptilian kaiju, an insect kaiju, a crustacean kaiju… From the moment you see them on the screen, it’s clear they’re very deadly and destructive."
Godzilla
"The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control... And not the other way around."
Inspired by the stop motion dino designed by master animator Ray Harryhausen for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Godzilla is an enormous amphibious reptile with radioactive breath. Initially 50 metres tall and 20,000 tons in weight, the King of the Monsters ballooned over the years to 100 metres tall and a portly 60,000 tons.
Conceived as a metaphor for atomic weaponry in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the beast was initially revived by nuclear testing in Ishiro Honda's 1954 kajira classic, Gojira, registering his displeasure by squishing Tokyo. Running rampage through scores of films since, Godzilla doesn’t always play the bad guy though, occasionally rising to defend mankind from the likes of Gigan and King Ghidorah.
Director Gareth Edwards, whose 2014 reimagining of Godzilla sees the mighty beast stomping from one end of the world to the other, asks of the title character, "Is he the hero or is he the enemy? I think maybe the best description is that he's an anti-hero. We [humanity] are insignificant to him. We’re irrelevant as a race. Like ants."
Bruce
"You’re gonna need a bigger boat."
Thanks to Steven Spielberg’s superior 1975 adaptation of Peter Benchley’s ho-hum bestseller Jaws, the man-muncher nicknamed Bruce is a monster superstar with an Oscar-winning theme, courtesy of the great John Williams, that plays inside the head of everyone in any body of water larger than a bath.
An uncommonly aggressive great white shark, Bruce is a 25-foot, 3-ton killing machine who quits eating seals in favour of more human-shaped morsels. Hobbies include ramming, chewing and ruining the ocean for generations of holidaymakers.
The Blob
"How do you get people to protect themselves from something they don't believe in?"
Originally named The Mass and then The Glob, The Blob first wobbled across the screen in 1958, an amoeba-like alien who wasn’t really scary until the juicy '88 remake.
Falling to earth in a hot little meteorite, alien jelly-thing The Blob dissolves and ingests every living thing it slimes over, growing larger every time. Defeated by cold, it eschews British summers.
King Kong
"Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast."
Plucked from his position of power as the alpha ape of Skull Island, a lost world in the Pacific Ocean, King Kong is shipped to New York as a colossal curiosity. Enraged by paparazzi, our hairy anti-hero takes an enormous bite out of the Big Apple in the monster epic that defined the genre.
Created by adventurer and filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, and brought to life by pioneering stop motion effects wiz Willis O’Brien, scale-wise, Kong ranges from 18 to 70 feet tall in his startling 1933 debut.
Reimagined many times since, the Eighth Wonder of the World enjoys a kaiju iteration with an electric touch attack and is currently the star of an Australian stage musical.
Graboids
"You’d think after eating all those sheep they’d have to take a dump someplace."
The stars of Tremors (1990), three sequels and a short-lived telly spin-off, Graboids are a fictional species of sandworm based on the legendary Mongolian death worm. As smart as they are stinky, these massive, worm-like bitey creatures live underground and burrow at incredible speeds towards anything with a heartbeat.
Roughly 9 metres long, 2 metres wide and weighing anything from ten to twenty tons, they’re belligerent, indiscriminate carnivores with tentacles possessing mouths of their own. Though eyeless and noseless, they’re attracted to anything that vibrates and operate a strict ‘eat first, ask questions later’ policy.
The Alien Queen
"Get away from her, you bitch!"
Originally created to battle Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Jim Cameron’s monster-sized sequel, Aliens (1986), The Alien Queen is mother to a race of bug-ugly alien xenomorphs with armoured bodies, piercing tails and acid breath.
4.5 metres tall with two pairs of arms and a head shaped like a crown, she produces more eggs than the Easter Bunny and is aggressively protective of her brood. Pet hates include flames, defensive humans and being sucked out into space.
Shelob
"Let him go, you filth. Let him go! Described by author J.R.R. Tolkien as an "evil thing in spider form," Shelob is a nightmarish beast with a bone-lined lair located just outside of Mordor. Though she appears in Tolkien’s The Two Towers, Shelob’s crowning movie moment came in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), where she quickly gets the best of poor Frodo.
A giant arachnid whose big screen stylings, says Jackson, are based on Australia’s infamous funnel-web spiders, Shelob, notes Tolkien, "…served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness."
Vermithrax Pejorative
"Unclean beast! Get thee down! Be thou consumed by the fires that made thee!"
Designed by graphic artist David Bunnet for the otherwise lacklustre fantasy Dragonslayer (1981), Vermithrax Pejorative is a formidable titan who lives to torch, torture and terrify puny humans. A 400 year-old dragon with a taste for virgins and a bad case of fire breath, Vermithrax is, declared Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin in The Daily Beast, "the best dragon ever put on film," with "the coolest dragon name as well."
Id Monster
"My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it!"
A hulking, invisible beast from the tortured subconscious of mad scientist Morris (Walter Pidgeon), the Id Monster roars, claws and stomps its way through the cast of seminal sci-fi Forbidden Planet (1956).
Created by Disney Animator Joshua Meador for the one sequence in which you actually see it, pulsing with electricity and laser fire, it’s powered by unfathomable alien tech and brutal beyond belief.
Written by guest blogger Marshall Julius
