>> Speaker 1: They live in our closets, under our beds, and on our screens.
They've been making us scream like little kids and yell at our TVs for
far longer than we'd like to admit.
These are our picks for the top ten movie monsters of all time.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: [SOUND] Kicking us off at number ten, let's ease into the terror and
knock off some of the more whimsical monsters first.
No, they might not have us wetting the bed in fear, but
we were out of clean sheets anyways.
We're talking about fun monsters like Mike and Sully from Monsters Inc,
the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, Audrey II from
the Little Shop of Horrors, and even oddities, like the tire from Rubber.
However for our pick, is there a more awesome monster light, then The Gremlins?
>> Speaker 2: No matter how much he cries, no matter how much he begs, never,
never feed him after midnight.
>> Speaker 1: These formerly adorable sociopaths are equally hilarious and evil,
which wasn't always the case.
Former drafts had them eating Billy's dog, decapitating his mother, and
tossing her head down the stairs at him.
It's pretty obvious they ended up as animatronic puppets, but
that didn't stop the filmmakers from trying to cast a monkey in the role.
They actually stuffed one into a gremlin mask.
At which point it apparently flipped the [BLEEP] out and stumbled around the room,
pooping on everything in terror,
which honestly sounds like something I would pay a lot of money to see.
[SOUND] Of course, on pretty much the exact
opposite end of the spectrum, we've got the evil demon sort of monster, the kind
of bad mother [BLEEP] who's got about as much whimsy as a My LIttle Pony genocide.
This is your Darkness from Legend,
your Pinhead and other assorted Cenobites from Hellraiser.
It's Chucky or the Creeper or Pennywise.
More recently, it's Samara/Sadako from Ring/Ringu, The Babadook and
our pick for number 9, whatever, It was from It Follows.
>> Speaker 3: I think we're going to a place that
doesn't have more than one exit.
It's very slow but it's not done.
>> Speaker 1: Definitely one of the highlight horror films of 2015.
And it's partly because it is pretty much the anti-jump scare.
Sure there are a few, but this is a monster that isn't really trying to
sneak up on you or jump out at you or roar like a harpy in your face.
It just walks slowly and never stops.
The slow burn tension is palpable and
when you combine that with the brilliancy of sexually transmitted haunting, and
that it can manifest itself in any form, terrifying or benign, it makes for
one of the scariest unnamed demons in recent memory.
[SOUND] At number eight, we wanna carve out a spot for
those monsters that fit the term in a more mystical fantasy sense.
So that might be Smell, or
the Balrog, Q, the winged serpent, The Nothing, or Rankor.
There's Medusa from Clash of the Titans, the trolls from Troll Hunter,
and even the leprechaun, that Irish hip-hopping motherfucker [BLEEP].
Pan's Labyrinth's Pale Man basically inhabits our dreams every other Thursday.
But for our number eight pick, there's no fantasy monster with more accumulated
nightmare hours and the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal.
Sure, maybe it's because most of us encountered the misimpressionable young
Whippersnappers, but these aristocratic reptile birds are equal parts disgusting,
cruel and reprehensible.
And you have one of the all time creepiest moments is when the whiny,
sniveling chamberlain is strip naked and revealed to be an emaciated coward.
They're bizarre and weirdly complex and utterly unnerving,
which is why we have no problem throwing back to them for this spot on our list.
[SOUND] Of course not all monsters are perverted-looking, oversized,
naked mole vultures.
Some of them almost look human, all too human.
And we thought the humanoid monsters worth considering were those like the Phantom of
the Opera, the Beast from Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, and
especially The Descent cave people.
We want to tentatively shout out slasher goons like Mikey Myers, Jay Vorhees, and
the Freddie Krugster, even though we here at Cinefix totally couldn't agree on
whether they're monsters or not.
But for our number seven slot there's no denying the monsterness or
the classicness of the Gill Man from the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
>> Speaker 4: I have never seen anything like this before.
>> Speaker 1: First and foremost, this is one creepy-looking homeboy.
Some kind of prehistoric pisce amphibious humanoid, but
that doesn't stop him from joining the limited ranks of monsters who can love,
along with a few other classic movie goons that we'll get to later.
This lizard man is the Mac Daddy forefather and originator of Lizardman,
and thus we pay him Lizardman homage with this spot on our list.
[SOUND] Next up at number six, we have the transformed monster.
These are the scary bastards that started out as human and have either mutated or
simply turned into something less friendly.
The classic werewolf is the prototype here, whether it's from Ginger Snaps or
The Howling or The Wolfman, or our personal favorite,
An American Werewolf in London.
But there's also other shape shifters, like Mr.
Hyde, AKA the monster formerly known as Dr. Jekyll.
Or Irina from Catpeople, or the awesome looking mutants from Tokyo Gore Police.
However, if we're talking changelings and
mutants we think the Brundlefly takes the cake.
>> Speaker 5: Be afraid.
Be very afraid.
>> Speaker 1: This ugly son of a bitch hit us with a two-fold terror.
The obviously frightening threat of the Brundlefly itself, and
the body horror of watching Jeff Goldblum deteriorate into it.
There's something especially [BLEEP] up about body horror.
The mutated deformity of the human body hits us on some deep subconscious level,
where we know that something's just off.
And because there's pretty much no one better at body horror than Cronenburg,
we think that The Fly is a shoe-in for this list.
[SOUND] Of course, when we humans, aren't busy transforming into werewolves, or
mutating into Brundlebeast, we're fouling up the world by creating monsters.
I mean, think about it.
We conjured up Der Golem, we spliced up Dren,
we build some terminators which went worse than expected.
We even cloned some T rexes and
22 years later, we still haven't learned our lesson.
However, if there's a monster creation we think deserves the most attention
in our number five slot it's gotta be the original Frankenstein's Monster.
>> Speaker 6: It's alive.
It's alive.
>> Speaker 1: Well, maybe not quite the original.
Mary Shelly actually wrote the book on it.
But it's safe to say that her novel has been completely
eclipsed by the 1931 film adaptation.
The flat head, the neck electrodes, the hunchback assistants, the castle and
a lightning storm all came from the movie, not the book.
Hell, even though the film is in black and white,
the greenish pallor that's so iconically Frankensteinian comes from the make up
used on the original on-screen goon that nobody actually even saw.
Massive, imposing and yet altogether human,
he still stands up to modern viewing, which is why he has to make our list.
[SOUND] Now, nothing says monsters quite like a giant.
Giant human, giant insect, giant whatever.
And in movie monster terms, that could be the 50-foot woman,
Clover from Cloverfield, the giant ants from Them!, the beastly King Kong,
the Kaiju from Pacific Rim, Bong Joon-ho's The Host.
It could be Mothra, or Ghidorah or Gigan, or
any of the other mutants from the clearly highly irradiated Japanese seas, but
it's pretty much impossible to beat the OG, Godzilla.
[SOUND] The name Godzilla is,
in fact, originally a Japanese portmanteau of gorilla and whale,
which sounds like a sci-fi channel movie worth a sequel or three.
But Godzilla has a far higher pedigree than B-movie mashups,
or at least most of the time he is.
This beastly monstrosity, both hero and villain, savior and
destroyer, an unsightly consequence of nuclear proliferation, and
mortal nemesis to skyscrapers everywhere, Godzilla is a cultural behemoth, and
a godamn icon, and we wouldn't dare leave it off our list.
>> [MUSIC] >> Speaker 1: [SOUND] Closing
in at number three, who says that all monsters need to be make believe.
So don't hold that against some of our favorite zoological monsters like Cujo,
the piranhas, and especially the spiders from Arachnophobia.
However, for our top animal kingdom pick,
we have to crown the great white shark from Jaws.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: And technically he has a name.
Bruce, after Spielberg's lawyer.
Bruce is one of the few monsters to make our list,
despite hardly ever showing up on screen at all.
Which as you may know, had to do with the animatronic shark
looking pretty much exactly like an animatronic shark.
But the lesson learned here, is that less can be more.
Spielberg fed us morsels, and we filled in the blanks, conjuring up a force of
nature shark that totally isn't the reason we never go in the ocean anymore.
It's just, you know, we're allergic to salt water or something.
[SOUND] Now we can't have a monster list without honoring the undead.
For mummies, we give an honorable mention to 1932's The Mummy.
Of course, there's also vampires, for which we have to honor those from Let
the Right One In, Blade, Thirst, Dracula and most of all, Nosferatu.
However, if there's an undead monster worth mentioning, it's got to be a zombie.
I know, I know, you're probably suffering from zombie fatigue by now.
Don't worry.
We are, too.
But let's go back to a simpler time,
a time when zombies were first coming into their own.
A time when we had Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, and
28 Days Later to look forward to.
The time was 1968 and
the movie with our number two slot monsters was The Night of the Living Dead.
>> Speaker 7: They're coming to get you, Barbara.
>> Speaker 1: This movie was the originator.
It's the reason zombie movies exist.
It's the reason we all secretly really kind of have an idea where we'd go when
the shit hits the fan.
P.S., dibs on Alcatraz.
And while you might prefer running zombies, or crawling zombies,
or climbing zombies to Romero's out for a casual evening stroll zombies,
they're all ultimately remixes of the original unstoppable brain-eating beasts.
[SOUND] And finally finishing strong at number one, we're looking at all those
spooky boogy men that have come to get us from a whole other world.
An holy [BLEEP] are there a lot of good choices out there.
First of all, you've got the Predator, then you've got the Blob,
the parasite from Slither, the invaders from Attack the Block, the body snatchers,
the id monster, and those goddamn ugly mother [BLEEP] from Pitch Black.
[SOUND] And we really, really love the xenomorph.
But we put it on our top ten villains list without thinking ahead,
and now we feel guilty about double dipping.
Luckily, we already had another top contender for this spot in mind.
So we can tell you, guilt free, that our number one pick goes to The Thing.
>> Speaker 8: I don't know what the hell's in there.
It's weird and pissed off, whatever it is.
>> Speaker 1: Combine the could be anyone transmutation of It Follows,
the body horror of the Brundlefly, the fortitude of Godzilla,
with the multiplication of the Gremlins, and you've got yourself The Thing.
We've gone on and on about Rob Bottin's excellent special effects in
our top 10 practical effects list, so we won't belabor the point.
But regardless of the craftsmanship in tech behind this monster is awesome.
Hiding in plain sight, incredibly dangerous, nightmarishly creepy,
it's everywhere and anyone and it might very well take over the entire world,
which is why it's our pic for the number one movie monster of all time.
So what do you think?
Do you disagree with some of our picks?
Did we leave out one of your favorite monsters?
Let us know in the comments below and hit like to show us some love and
be sure to subscribe for more Cinefix movie lists.
>> [MUSIC]