10 Monster Movies That Totally Screw With Your Brain

The creature feature has been a staple of the b-movie sub genre since the 1950s, with monsters from way beyond the stars, deep beneath the earth and fast behind the doors of the mad scientist’s laboratory.

Of course, monsters originated in prose, before the cinema had the capability to realise them to the fullest. H.P. Lovecraft, in particular, devoted a lifetime to writing about monstrous entities so appalling that they could drive you mad.

Anyone can pull together a film about a giant lizard stepping out of the ocean to trash Tokyo, and most humanoid monster movies are essentially just capering serial killer flicks with a garish cherry on top. These, however… these are the jagged fragments of cinema which recast the monster as something truly monstrous, a deviation from the norm, a reflection of the grotesque id.

Spawn of the unconscious, they represent the primitive instincts, the sex urge balancing the death urge: eros versus thanatos. Some are misunderstood, some are barely capable of rational thought, but they horrify and unnerve in equal measure.

In collecting this clutch of bug-eyed boogeymen, I’ve limited myself to only one Asian flick: Japan and Korea between them could fill a list like this fifty times over without breaking a sweat...

Some might query the inclusion of Jennifer Kent’s brilliantly haunted study of grief and loss in an article devoted to movie monsters: but the Babadook isn’t a ghost, a spook or a poltergeist, and this isn’t a haunted house movie, despite the bottled up nature of the narrative.

No, the Babadook is a true monster, a thing torn straight from the depths of the protagonist’s psyche. Amelia is an emotionally withdrawn widow trying to raise a son in the absence of his father, who died the same day that the boy was born. As a consequence, poor little Sam hasn’t had a single birthday celebration: Amelia claims that she avoids thinking about her loss, but the absence of her husband inflects every aspect of her life, and therefore by proxy the life of their son.

The Babadook originates in Sam’s dreams: he’s begun acting out, building weapons and tools with which to fight some beast that exists within his imagination. Or at least, that’s where it starts: but once they find a child’s pop-up book on his shelf about a sinister creature called Mister Babadook, the real games begin.

Odd, erratic events begin to plague the house: strange noises can be heard, and doors open and close on their own. Amelia destroys the book, but it reassembles itself and reappears on the doorstep with all new pages describing that the Babadook will make her do to her boy...

It’s difficult to oversell the impact this wonderful film has on a first-time audience. It’s terrifying and desperately sad in equal measure, with astonishing, visceral performances from Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman as mother and son.

As a horror film, it’s a complete and overwhelming success: as a proper headf*ck, it’s not far behind. Contrary to some interpretations, the Babadook clearly isn’t purely in Amelia’s head, the product of hysteria, post-partum depression or bereavement trauma… but there’s no denying that the creature has its origins inside her skull, having been summoned as a direct consequence of her refusal to deal with her pain and loss.

In that sense, the Babadook is a literal monster from the unconscious, but not just Amelia’s personal headspace: it’s the spawn of the collective unconscious, an archetypical nightmare of grief and despair given tattered, shrieking form.