12 Best Monster Movies Of All Time, Ranked

First, an explanation: What is a monster movie? Or, more accurately: What is a monster? The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives a few clues: "an animal of strange or terrifying shape" or "an animal or plant of abnormal form or structure." That's a big field to play on, especially within the realm of the horror genre. But not all horror movies are monster movies: Hannibal Lecter and Sadako are monstrous, but you wouldn't call "Silence of the Lambs" or "The Ring" monster movies. 

So for the purposes of this ranking of 12 of the best horror movies, let's limit our monsters to creatures, big and small, and no humans or supernatural entities. (But what about vampires and werewolves, you ask? Good point, but for the sake of argument, let's say that their ultimate forms are monstrous, and decidedly non-human and non-ghostly). Also: if your favorite monster movie is not this list, hopefully, one of the titles mentioned here might become a new favorite.

Any reference to humans and animals combined by science owes a debt to H.G. Wells' 1898 novel "The Island of Dr. Moreau." It was adapted to film at least six times, while the number of references in other media is probably 10 times that number. But they all pale next to 1932's "Island of Lost Souls" for sheer creepiness and memorable creatures.

"Island of Lost Souls" take liberties with Wells' novel but retains the core premise: A traveler (Richard Arlen) is shipwrecked on a remote island where rogue scientist Moreau (Charles Laughton) conducts experiments to transform animals into humans. While several adaptations — including the misbegotten 1996 version with Marlon Brando — paint Moreau as misguided, Laughton's Moreau clearly relishes the pain he inflicts. For that reason, several countries banned "Lost Souls".

The "beast men" may seem quaint by today's standards, but Kenton keeps them in shadow save for one devastating scene. When Arlen encounters the creatures and their ape-like Sayer of the Law (Bela Lugosi), they rush at the camera, chanting Moreau's rules ("Not to go on all fours? Are we not men?"). It's an electrifying moment that no modern effects could surpass; as the Sydney Morning Herald wrote in 1933, "It has the appalling, monstrous quality of a nightmare."

Starring: Richard Arlen, Charles Laughton
Director: Erle C. Kenton
Year: 1933
Runtime: 70 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88%

A monster movie that's also an amusing comedy, a political satire, and a family drama? Such a thing seems impossible, and yet, Bong Joon-ho's 2006 film "The Host" accomplishes it. Bong has always mixed genres  — his Oscar winner "Parasite" is a harrowing thriller, a broad comedy, and an examination of class inequality. Mixing extreme opposites like drama and monster movies requires an understanding of the rules of all genres.

But Bong delivers not only one of his best movies, but also a wholly satisfying creature feature. His reputation for unflinching violence is on display here. His rampaging tadpole-like creature (created by Weta Workshop) devours vast numbers of background players, and in one gruesome shot, a locked door in a trailer containing both fleeing victims and the monster issues a torrent of blood. Those expecting a laughable monster were either pleasantly surprised or horrified by "The Host."

A movie monster is only as good as its opponents, and the family-in-shambles in "The Host" seems unable to get their act together, much less fight off a giant creature. But the monster provides the family with the impetus to pull together, and in doing so, fuels some of the film's most emotional and memorable moments. "On almost every level, there's never quite been a monster movie like 'The Host,'" wrote Variety.

Starring: Song Kang-ho, Ko A-Sung
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Year: 2006
Runtime: 119 minutes
Rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Given the love today for John Carpenter's "The Thing," it's worth noting that it was not only a failure in 1982, but also critically loathed. As The New York Times wrote, "'The Thing' is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk." Today, it's considered the best sci-fi horror movie of all time, earning a 2011 prequel and even an attraction at Universal's Halloween Horror Nights.

The reason "The Thing" occupies our collective moviegoing unconscious is its full-court press on our senses. Every element feels like an incipient anxiety attack: The cold remoteness of the Arctic setting, the animosity between the characters, the warren-like structure of the research base, and the howling Arctic wind, which sounds like a Halloween effects track on a loop.

Once the horror engine heats up in "The Thing," Carpenter and effects creator Rob Bottin offer no quarter. Unlike the humanoid alien in the 1951 version, this Thing has no form, preferring instead to tear its victims apart and reassemble them like freakish toys. Being assimilated by an alien force is bad enough; being re-formed as a human-dog-insect-what-have-you is a childhood nightmare made real. "With a thick air of intense paranoia and jaw-dropping monster effects work, 'The Thing' stands as one of the greatest films of both the horror and science fiction genres," wrote Under the Radar.

Starring: Kurt Russell, Keith David
Director: John Carpenter
Year: 1982
Runtime: 109 minutes
Rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88%

Make no mistake: The 1958 version of "The Blob" is not a great film by Hollywood standards. Modestly budgeted even by 1958 figures ($110,000), "The Blob" is rife with leaden dialogue, expends far too much time on star Steve McQueen's drag racing, and the origins of its gooey monster — inspired by a surprising real-life incident, and made from silicone and red dye —are obvious. And yet, "The Blob" warrants inclusion because it's a lot of fun. That may seem like a minor consideration, but how many critically-praised films have you seen and found them a slog?

Everything about "The Blob" is geared towards audience enjoyment. It has charismatic leads (McQueen and Aneta Coursaut), a gross monster (the opening, in which the Blob consumes an old man, the doctor who treats him, AND his nurse, is a memorably icky trifecta), and a briskly-paced plot which positions kids as heroes and grown-ups as dolts. There's even a catchy theme song (composed by Burt Bacharach!). These elements have helped "The Blob" earn its place in pop culture history, as well as generating an excellent remake, influences on everything from "The Thing" to "Hotel Transylvania," and even a yearly festival. Take that, "Babadook"!

Starring: Steve McQueen, Aneta Coursaut
Director: Irwin S. Yeaworth, Jr.
Year: 1958
Runtime: 86 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 67%

Many of the films on this list operate on a combined sense of homage and reinvention. They are keenly aware of the horror films that preceded them, but also seek to put their own stamp on their respective subgenres. John Landis' "An American Werewolf in London" is no exception: It loves werewolf movies, but also knows that they had descended into self-parody after 1941's "The Wolf Man." So Landis made "An American Werewolf in London" a horror-comedy that winked at the sillier aspects of werewolf movies, and also delivered the most astonishing transformation scene ever filmed.

Those scenes, created by Oscar-winning effects legend Rick Baker, remain the film's high point. The effects take a realistic approach to a fantastical notion: How would a person transform into another species? The answer isn't slow dissolves and yak hair, like in "The Wolf Man," but rather, an agonizing litany of elongating jaws, torn flesh, and painful skeletal realignments. Those effects not only made the reputation of "An American Werewolf in London," but also signaled to subsequent directors, including Sam Raimi and Edgar Wright, that a horror-comedy doesn't have to dampen its scares. "That jagged, irreverent volatility is a large part of the film's spell," wrote The Guardian.

Starring: David Naughton, Griffin Dunne
Director: John Landis
Year: 1981
Runtime: 97 minutes
Rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 89%

The Creature from the Black Lagoon is the most monstrous member of Universal Studios' classic monsters: Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, et al, are all essentially humans, but the Creature is a missing link between mammals and marine life and as such, lacks human traits like speech and reason. And yet, as seen in its 1954 screen debut, it's one of the most sympathetic Universal monsters, struggling with fear, and most memorably, love.

Director Jack Arnold made sure that "Creature From the Black Lagoon" delivered for the monster movie faithful plenty of shock-jumps, as well as the indelible image of star Julie Adams' white one-piece swimsuit, all made more vivid in 3D. And yet he also emphasizes that the Creature is more like a character from fairy tales like "Beauty and the Beast." It's fearsome but also vulnerable, especially when reaching out to Adams during an underwater pas de deux where it appears aware that it can never consummate its affections.

These moments captured the imagination of fans for decades, including Guillermo Del Toro, who won an Oscar for his "Creature"-influenced "Shape of Water." As Slant noted, "What distinguished Jack Arnold's [picture] from mutant spinoffs/knockoffs is even more imperative to sci-fi today than it was in 1954: wonderment."

Starring: Richard Carlson, Julie Adams
Director: Jack Arnold
Year: 1954
Runtime: 79 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 80%

While most movie vampires are depicted as darkly romantic types, 1922's "Nosferatu" hews closer to folkloric interpretations of the monster as a figure of destruction and disease. An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" — which resulted in a lawsuit that nearly resulted in the film being lost to the ages — director F.W. Murnau strips away not only the characters' familiar names but also any sense of a Gothic adventure yarn. Count Orlok has none of Dracula's regal ego; he barely qualifies as human. Orlok is solely intent on leaving devastation in his wake. The only way to fight an embodiment of death like Orlok is extreme sacrifice.

Decades of subsequent vampire movies have blunted some of "Nosferatu's" magic, and some have even borrowed Murnau's shadow-steeped visuals and Orlok's image (see everything from Tobe Hooper's version of "'Salem's Lot" to "What We Do in the Shadows"). But the familiarity has also heightened the reputation of "Nosferatu" as a foundational horror film, and one so significant that two major filmmakers (Werner Herzog and Robert Eggers) have tried to remake it. "To watch F.W. Murnau's 'Nosferatu' is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself," wrote Roger Ebert. "The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires."

Starring: Max Schreck, Alexander Granach
Director: F.W. Murnau
Year: 1922
Runtime: 65 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

An internet search for "'Alien' influences" yields countless lists detailing all the media to which Ridley Scott's "Alien" allegedly owes a debt. These include everything from A.E. van Vogt's novel "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" to 1958's "It! The Terror from Beyond Space" and even John Carpenter's "Dark Star," which shares a writer (Dan O'Bannon) with "Alien." But none of them is as frightening as Scott's 1979 film — not even the endless stream of "Alien" franchise movies.

Why does "Alien" hold us in its sway? For one, the pace: Scott recalled watching "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" prior to filming "Alien," and his picture has a similarly long build-up that descends into non-stop terror. The characters seem unable to fight off nasty extraterrestrials, just as we would be. And nearly the entire film takes place in the dark.

And then there is H.R. Giger's Xenomorph, a walking uncanny valley of human, insect and mechanical elements in a troublingly sexualized package designed solely to kill and reproduce. Everything about it is drawn from our nightmares: it hides in the dark, it changes shape, it smothers and dominates you, and seemingly worst of all, has no eyes. As New York Magazine noted, "'Alien, like 'The Exorcist,' works on your nerves and emotions with the practiced hand of a torturer extracting a confession."

Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt
Director: Ridley Scott
Year: 1979
Runtime: 116 minutes
Rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Giant monsters wreaked havoc on screen long before "Godzilla" arrived in 1954" A brontosaurus rampaged in 1925's "The Lost World," and  "King Kong" and "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" terrorized New York in 1933 and 1953, respectively. In all three films, humanity pays the price for breaking nature's laws — a theme magnified by "Godzilla," which features a monster that harnesses atomic power to punish mankind for unleashing that force during World War II.

The devastation in "King Kong" and "Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" is limited, but when Godzilla emerges from Tokyo Bay in 1954, it lays waste to the entire Shinagawa district. Director Ishiro Honda doesn't shy away from showing the human toll: People are killed en masse, and the survivors suffer radiation sickness, all echoing the real experiences in Nagasaki and Hiroshima nine years prior. "King Kong" is leavened by moments of romance or derring-do, but there are no such scenes in "Godzilla," which becomes a desperate race to stop the monster.

Though dismissed upon release and tempered by sequels which portrayed the monster as a superhero, "Godzilla" today is considered a potent warning about the misuse of science. And as the Oscar-winning "Godzilla: Minus One" showed, that theme still resonates today. "These terrors have not gone away, and 'Godzilla,' a classic, is not going away either," wrote SFGate.

Starring: Akira Takarada, Takashi Shimura
Director: Ishiro Honda
Year: 1954
Runtime: 96 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94%

Sexuality had always been a coded component of the vampire myth, but early screen incarnations sought to obscure it through physical repulsion ("Nosferatu") or sinister elegance (Bela Lugosi's courtly Dracula). But with 1958's "Horror of Dracula," Britain's Hammer Films was clear about the Count's carnal nature — as BFI Online noted, "Fisher's foregrounding of the Dracula myth's sexual element also contributed to the film's success and the disapproval of critics."

Casting the darkly handsome Christopher Lee as Dracula helped sell this lustier take, but director Terence Fisher steeped his entire film in earthy physicality, from Carol Marsh's rapturous reaction to Dracula's appearance in her bedroom to the transformation of Van Helsing from kindly elder to Peter Cushing's vigorous man of action. Photographing the film in vibrant color — the first vampire movie to receive such treatment — also provided an arresting palette of pale white, midnight black, and of course, blood red.

A runaway hit on both sides of the Atlantic, "Horror of Dracula" made Lee and Cushing into horror stars and Hammer one of the genre's leading proponents for almost two decades. More importantly, the film helped transform screen vampires from spectral figures to sexual beings, and gave rise to "True Blood," "The Hunger," and many more.

Starring: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing
Director: Terence Fisher
Year: 1958
Runtime: 82 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 89%

George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" is horrifying, but not solely because its antagonist are the recently deceased brought back to life. The 1968 film remains not only one of the best zombie movies of all time, but still frightening after five decades because its monsters are unquestionably human. The zombies in "Night of the Living Dead" look like people you'd see at your job or the post office. The terror comes from the fact that these familiar-seeming strangers are actually mindless animals devoted to one purpose: To kill and eat other people, preferably alive.

Romero and "Night of the Living Dead" took the monster movie out of the laboratory and the Gothic castle and turned it loose on a world that appeared to be losing its grip on right and wrong. As Richard Harland Smith wrote for Turner Classic Movies, "It is difficult to appreciate just how completely George Romero taboo-shattering [film] sucker punched a nation weaned on bloodless Universal monster rallies and the Eastmancolor gloss of Great Britain's Hammer horrors." Romero's zombies represent a dawning apocalypse: Societal norms don't stand a chance against implacable hunger and homicide. Traditional heroes die, families are (literally) torn apart, and the brave catch a bullet for their pains. "Night of the Living Dead" upended the horror paradigm by reminding us that no movie monster could ever inflict more terror and pain than our fellow humans.

Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea
Director: George A. Romero
Year: 1968
Runtime: 96 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 95%

Universal's "Frankenstein" is a landmark horror film, an elegant exercise in German Expressionism and Hollywood shocks that established Boris Karloff's genre icon status. But "Frankenstein" can also feel ponderous, especially when Karloff's Monster is off screen. Its sequel, 1935's "Bride of Frankenstein," suffers no such restrictions. James Whale's film shares its predecessor's Gothic gloom and pathos, but also adds sly subtext and Elsa Lanchester's arresting turn as the Bride.

Much has been written about "Bride's" subversive qualities, including Christian iconography (the Monster seemingly crucified by villagers) and queer allusions which suggest that Dr. Praetorius (Ernest Thesiger) has more than an academic interest in Colin Clive's Frankenstein. But it's the humor that makes the film unique: The Monster smoking with O.P. Heggie's Hermit clearly indicates that Whale is having fun, and hopes you will, too.

"Bride" never fully exits the horror lane. As the National Society of Film Critics (via the Library of Congress) notes, "The film rushes magisterially towards its climax, and the highwater mark of Hollywood horror: the creation of a new Bride of Frankenstein." Her birdlike movements initially mark her as a comic element, but her blood-curdling scream at the sight of the Monster dispels any laughs. The (literally) explosive finale, and Karloff's mournful pronouncement ("We belong dead!") have an emotional punch that few horror films then or now can emulate.

Starring: Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester
Director: James Whale
Year: 1935
Runtime: 75 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 98%