11 Most Terrifying Sci-Fi Movie Monsters
3. Mutated Pineal Gland - From Beyond
What could be scarrier than your own body turning against you and mutating in horrific and goopy ways? That's what Stuart Gordon's 1986 body horror flick, based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, postulates happens when accessing hitherto unseen plains of existence with the powers of "the Resonator", a machine built by a sociopathic scientist obsessed with acheving new heights of sensual experience at all costs.
Inside this other dimension are all manner of spooky-looking and hostile alien lifeforms, but what's most frightening is what prolonged exposure to it does to your body. For some, like Barbara Campton's Dr. McMichaels, it causes radical shifts in personality. But for our protagonist Crawford (played by Jeffrey Combs in one of his best performances), it's something far far worse.
The exposure quickly mutates his Pineal gland into a semi-sentient, bloodthirsty creature that bores it's way out of his head and hijacks his body, forcing him to kill innocent people and suck their blood and brains out through their eye sockets to satiate its bloodthirst. What's more, the mutated gland lets him access the other dimension at all times whether he wants to or not, leaving him and those around him in the company of all manner of abnormal and unearthly creatures.