5. The Creature Feature
The general populace these days has become highly desensitised to violence, meaning that most contemporary horror films have to either employ psychological elements or rely on ridiculous levels of graphic violence in order to elicit a reaction from audiences. Once upon a time, however, all it took was a man in a suit to scare cinema-goers, who flocked to see the likes of Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. in assorted Universal Horror releases throughout the thirties and forties. Such films were followed in the fifties by the likes of The Creature From The Black Lagoon and nuclear monster movies such as Them! The rise of the B-movie in the fifties meant that the genre quickly became saturated with cheaply produced rubbish, which contributed to audiences moving on to different things in the sixties, particularly as the growth of technology began to make 'creature features' look cheap and tacky in comparison to the likes of sci-fi, though later films such as Jaws (which focused predominantly on a great white shark) and Alien (which focused the despicable Xenomorph) are ranked amongst the best films of all time. Today, the SyFy channel continues to churn out terrible films about monstrous beings every few weeks, but these are deliberately kitsch given that monsters are rarely capable of satisfying or scaring an audience any more, particularly now that once terrifying creatures such as vampires and werewolves have been forever ruined by things like the Twilight series.