10 Terrifying Horror Monsters That Only Need A Second To Scar You
Blink and you might miss 'em; keep your eyes open and you'll never forget.
Horror movies arrive in many shapes and sizes, sometimes dripping with goo and almost always drenched in bodily fluids. While the genre accommodates everything from extraterrestrial phenomena to angry white men, the lifeblood of the genre is the good, old-fashioned monster.
Usually drawn from fantasy or the natural world, horror monsters have a storied history, developing from the vampire through to whatever the hell the Smile entity is. Some of them have massive presence in their movies, dominating every scene and becoming the mascot for entire franchises, and others are more sparing, reaching in only when the time is right and good to give us a proper scare.
These are monsters that are here for a good time not a long time, coming in hot and leaving us with lasting nightmares before packing up and moving on. These monsters either linger in the background and only spring themselves on us when they're good and ready to give us the willies; or have just a short chunk of screentime from beginning to end (theirs, usually) in which to do their worst.
Let’s take a look at ten of the best, covering what they are and, crucially, how or why they manage to scar us in record time.
10. Clover -- Cloverfield (2008)
Matt Reeves and Drew Goddard’s found footage monster movie Cloverfield took everyone by surprise in the noughties. A found footage film that sidestepped the micro-budget approach that had been popularised in Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity, it delivers handheld-at-scale moviemaking with a $30 million budget and a great looming behemoth of a monster stalking its frames.
The film takes us onto the streets of NYC, where an alien has appeared and is tearing apart buildings in an all-out rampage. Nicknamed Clover by those attempting to flee it, the kaiju razes whole chunks of the city, with the US military playing catchup, and contemplating interventions that could harm their citizens as much as the monster. Yes, this is post-9/11 filmmaking at its most obvious.
But, despite the scale of the monster, we see precious little of it throughout the film. The human characters we follow – Rob (Michael Stahl-David), Beth (Odette Yustman), Hud (TJ Miller), Lily Ford (Jessica Lucas) – spend most of the film conducting ground-level recues and escapes, fighting for their lives in real time against Clover’s environmental effects. It’s not until the final act that we get a full clear look at the monster, from the skies, as it’s lit up by military stealth bombers. And the moment after we think it’s dead when it comes munching back up out of the smoke is enough for one lifetime.