10 Horror Movie Monsters Who Make You EAT Your Words
Better start eating your words before these surprising movie monsters eat you.
In horror it can seem like as many bad ideas get made into movies as good ones. Anyone who has had the misfortune of Tarot, Night Swim or The Watchers in the last few years knows that, even with a supposedly original premise on their hands, and a decent size budget at their backs, filmmakers can still lead us on a road to nowhere, where despite the blood and gore there’s nothing to keep us coming back.
But sometimes we judge too soon. Sometimes we hear an idea, and readily dismiss it as preposterous, impossible or downright crap – and so often it’s because of the monster at the heart of the movie. Indeed, what if I told you there were horror films that relied for their scares on seagulls, sheep or woodland trolls, or ones that made splinters, cars and puppets the main event?
Indeed, there are a good many horror movie monsters out there that you think will be lame, not scary or merely too silly an idea to work, but which turn out to be just what the witchdoctor ordered. The Birds, The Blob, Gremlins – all these movie monsters are here to show you the error of your ways and make you eat those words of woe.
10. Gwoemul -- The Host (2006)
Bong Joon Ho has had an eventful time of late, breaking into Western cinema with weighty Korean-language black comedy drama Parasite, and following up with an all-star sci-fi clone flick in Mickey 17. But he’s far from a new talent. Long before the director was rubbing shoulders with R-Patz and Tilda Swinton, he was dishing up sensational cross-genre flicks straight outta Seoul.
Never one to settle into a genre or rest on his laurels, Bong followed up two crime movies by dropping The Host in 2006, a monster movie in which a creature is born from a chemical spill in Han River and goes on the rampage. There’s only one catch: the monster, known as Gwoemul, is a giant tadpole. Given how ridiculous this sounds, it’s a surprise he even got the project funded.
But funding he got – $11 million of it. And Bong put this to use on creating a monster that is frightening, sympathetic and anything but silly. Tactfully keeping the creature in the background of most of his shots, Bong allows mystery and suspense to build around it, while showing precisely what it’s capable of as it slinks onto land and snatches people for its lair. It works a treat, and after the initial surprise at what you’re watching, it’s all too easy to forget that this is just one giant step up from frogspawn.