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15 films from the creature feature hall of fame
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items What if your next nature outing ended with you in the jaws of some great beast? Or…what if nature broke into your home to eat you? The great outdoors is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, and no movie genre has tapped into this primal fear like the ...
The one that started it all! The original King Kong still slaps after all these decades, thanks to its groundbreaking stop-motion animation that brought the titular ape and the dinosaurs of Skull Island to life, and its sense of pathos, as Kong's pat...
King Kong (1933)
A lot of creature features are intentionally schlocky, playing for laughs and thrills in equal measure. Them! is a more somber and unsettling experience. A commentary on the horrors of the nuclear age, it involves giant radioactive ants, which make t...
Them! (1954)
The thought of discovering a hybridized human and amphibian creature is already intimidating in its own right. But what if the creature rises from its watery home and kidnaps a member of your expedition party? Creature From The Black Lagoon and its i...
Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)
The coexistence of mankind and nature is a finer, more delicate balance than we like to imagine, and what makes Alfred Hitchock's classic creature feature so unnerving to this day is how well it depicts what losing that balance could look like. What ...
The Birds (1963)
The epitome of “so bad it's brilliant,” Night Of The Lepus is one of the great unintentional comedies of the 20th Century. When a growth hormone meant to slow down the breeding cycle of rabbits transforms them into giant flesh-eating furballs, a comm...
Night of the Lepus (1972)
Steven Spielberg's early masterpiece remains unprecedented for maritime thrills and terror. A series of attacks by an extra large great white shark off the coast of Martha's Vineyard leads to the local police chief, a marine biologist, and a grizzled...
Jaws (1975)
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring inspired a lot of movies which imagined how mankind's destructive impact on the environment could create some nasty ripple effects. Take Day Of The Animals, in which the collapse of the ozone layer causes mountain lions,...
Day of the Animals (1977)
Yes, Orca: The Killer Whale is an obvious attempt to rip off Jaws. But you know what? Sometimes rip-offs manage to create some magic of their own. What makes this lesser known creature feature work is the hard edged subtext. A vengeful orca wreaks ha...
Orca: The Killer Whale (1977)
During the 1980s, as slasher movie reigned, the creature feature went into a hiatus. But that didn't stop the filmmakers responsible for Alligator, in which a baby gator flushed down a toilet and into the Chicago sewers grows into a gargantuan killer...
Alligator (1980)
Some creature features take a real-life creature and supersize it. Tremors invents one: the Graboid. These giant man-eating worms burrow through the surface of the earth, drawn by footsteps, and it's up to two handymen played by Kevin Bacon and Fred ...
Tremors (1990)
In general, there are not enough movies about big ass snakes. Anaconda is about a big ass snake stalking a film crew in the Amazon. The film crew includes Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube. The creepy snake hunter they run into is played by Jon Voight. If ...
Anaconda (1997)
In the most straightforward sense, Bong Joon-ho's genre-breaking creature feature is about a giant tadpole-looking beast (the result of a U.S. army base polluting the Han River) that starts terrorizing Seoul. But it's so much more than that. The Host...
The Host (2007)
Liam Neeson vs. A Pack of Wolves might sound like the kind of movie idea that you cook up with a friend after killing a six pack. But The Grey is serious stuff; a visceral and surprisingly moving tale of an oil drilling crew finding itself at the mer...
The Grey (2012)
Backcountry is a slow burn depiction of how a couple of bad decisions in the wilderness can spiral into a nerve-shredding nightmare. For the couple at the heart of the film, out on a backpacking trip, the nightmare eventually takes the form of a terr...
Backcountry (2015)
If you're wondering how on earth the original Godzilla didn't make this movie list, that's because Godzilla Minus One is even better. Bringing the series back to its roots, as a metaphor for the devastation of nuclear war, Takashi Yamazaki's reimagin...
Godzilla Minus One (2023)