About This Quiz
Horror movies can be divided up into a number of sub-sections that each have their own unique spin on terror. Slasher movies give us terrifying killers who stalk their prey often across numerous sequels. Body horror is all about some nightmare altering who and what we are physically. The zombie genre explores the walking dead, while vampire horror features bloodsucking creatures of the night. When it comes down to it though, no sub-genre is anywhere near as cool as monster movies.
A good monster movie can be fully immersed in horror or dabble in sci-fi. It can have elements of comedy like "Gremlins" or it can even have a Western flair like "Tremors." You can make a musical horror like "Little Shop of Horrors" and you can make it into a box-office smash film like Stephen King's "IT," which broke records and gave everyone nightmares. Monsters can be used to represent all of our fears and anxieties in the coolest and most fun ways imaginable, plus they can make you jump a little bit if they're done right. If you feel like you have an eye for monsters in movies, let's see how many you can recognize from a single image!
Steven Spielberg's legendary "Jaws" was apparently bogged down with problems during the filming of the movie, which actually made it a better film. It was so hard to get the shark to work properly they were unable to use it as much as they wanted, and that ended up heightening the film's tension by keeping it hidden so much.
"Creature from the Black Lagoon" is one of the classic old-school horror movies alongside "Dracula" and "The Wolfman." It has almost been remade close to a dozen times but it never panned out. John Landis, John Carpenter, Ivan Reitman, and Guillermo Del Toro among others have at one time or another been signed to direct a remake.
Few movie monsters have been as realistically realized as the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park," or at least that's what many people think. The movies actually took a lot of liberties with dinosaurs, especially with velociraptors. In real life, they were roughly the size of chickens.
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"Tremors" was the first of what has become a classic B-movie franchise that mostly focuses on the character of Burt Gummer, played by Michael Gross. The franchise is soon to be up to 7 films plus a very short-lived TV show.
One of the most iconic movies of the '80s, "Gremlins" is responsible for the creation of the PG-13 film rating, alongside "Indiana Jones." "Gremlins" was PG when it was released but was heavily criticized for being too intense for younger audiences. It obviously wasn't for adults only, so the MPAA needed a middle-of-the-road rating and PG-13 was born.
Decades later, John Carpenter's "The Thing" is still touted as a masterpiece of practical monster effects. It was actually a remake of the 1950's sci-fi movie "The Thing From Another World," which has the same basic plot but was nowhere near as terrifying.
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"A Quiet Place" was an immensely popular film that, like "Get Out" came from a comedian no one expected to be so deft at making horror. The movie is chock full of little touches that made it extra cool like how the grocery store is cleared out of all the food except bags of chips because they'd be too noisy.
1998's "Godzilla" was pretty much a resounding failure unless you're a "Simpsons" fan. Outside of "The Simpsons" itself, "Godzilla" had more of their voice cast than any other production thanks to the appearance of Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer, and Nancy Cartwright.
"Kong: Skull Island's" all-star cast was very heavily a part of the MCU. Brie Larson and Tom Hiddleston are the film's central stars alongside Samuel L. Jackson. It also featured MCU alums John C. Reilly and Corey Hawkins.
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First released in 1958 then remade in 1988, "The Blob" is just a carnivorous slime ball from space. There have been rumors for some years that another remake was in the works, and for a while, Rob Zombie's name was tossed around as director.
One of the most beloved series in horror history, "The Evil Dead" spawned two sequels, a remake, and a TV show. For a time there were also rumblings of a potential one-off move in which Ash would fight Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. The movie never materialized but there is a comic book.
"Piranha" was a horror-comedy by Joe Dante, the director of "Gremlins." The movie was basically a parody of "Jaws" and Universal tried to sue as a result until Steven Spielberg watched "Piranha" and loved it.
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"Lake Placid" was clearly inspired by the B-movie creature features of the '70s and features a giant alligator. Betty White is the standout of the film, though, as the sweet old lady who has a filthy mouth when she gets going.
One of the few sequels that surpasses the original, "Aliens" was a huge hit. James Cameron had yet to make a name for himself when he got the job. He's known nowadays for being a brutal taskmaster on set, but since no one knew him back then the crew was so disrespectful he had to fire his assistant director for having a poor attitude.
Guillermo del Toro's "Pacific Rim" featured comedian Charlie Day as a monster expert. Day got the role specifically as a result of his work on "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" because Guillermo del Toro was a big fan of his work on the show. De Toro actually has a cameo in an episode of "It's Always Sunny."
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The original "Alien" made Sigourney Weaver a household name and set the standard for female action heroes. Back in 2015, "District 9" director Neil Blomkamp announced plans for a 5th "Alien" movie with Sigourney Weaver reprising her role but that idea was eventually scrapped. That said, James Cameron may be working on a new one to this day.
Stephen King's "IT" wasn't just a popular horror film, it was the highest-grossing horror film of all time with over $700 million at the box-office. That also made it the 5th highest-grossing R-rated movie ever.
'"Jeepers Creepers" is a song that plays during the movie of the same name when the Creeper is coming during one particular scene. It's actually a perverse joke in the movie as the Creeper literally takes a character's peepers out of their head.
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Hollywood loves a good shark movie and "The Meg" is no exception. Shark horror is actually a very active sub-genre, and movies ranging from "Sharknado" to "Sky Sharks" keep finding new ways to attack people with sharks.
Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder had a long history together that all started with "Bram Stoker's Dracula." Winona Ryder once said that, during the filming of the wedding scene in that movie, director Francis Ford Coppola had hired a real Romanian priest so she and Reeves might really be married.
The movie "Cloverfield" was very hush-hush during production, as was the look of the monster in order to keep audiences in the dark. One of the most famous scenes from the movie involves the head of the Statue of Liberty crashing onto a New York Street, and the head was actually much larger than the real statue's head because test audiences didn't believe it was really that small in real life.
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Back in 1931, Boris Karloff became the face we associate with Frankenstein's monster, complete with bolts in the neck and a flat top head, which weren't really parts of Mary Shelley's novel but have become synonymous with the monster nonetheless.
The Predator has become a classic movie monster, but it all started in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the jungle. In the original version of the movie, Jean-Claude Van Damme was cast to play the alien, but he complained so much they fired him.
John Landis took cast and crew to Wales and other parts of the UK to film "An American Werewolf in London" and even managed to film in Piccadilly Circus. No one had made a movie there for 15 years before Landis got permission, which took a small bribe to the London cops to pull off.
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"Rampage" started life as an old-school video game in which you can play as either George the ape, Lizzie the Lizard, or Ralph the wolf. If you only played the NES version back in the day you never got to experience Ralph as he was cut from the final game.
Rick Moranis and Steve Martin starred in this remake of the 1960 film that featured a young Jack Nicholson. The musical had a much darker ending than what most audiences saw. The original cut, and the play based on it, featured the plant Audrey II taking over the world.
The original version of "The Fly" is quite corny by modern standards, so much so that it deserves a word like "corny" to describe it. Cronenberg's 1986 remake, however, has stood the test of time as a supremely disturbing film with an amazing monster.
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The 2006 Korean film "The Host" was inspired by an actual event in which a mortician flushed a large quantity of formaldehyde down the drain. The movie uses that as a jumping-off point as the cause for creating the film's monster.
Because the studio wasn't convinced American audiences would want to watch a Japanese monster movie, scenes with Canadian actor Raymond Burr were shoe-horned into the original "Godzilla" to give a recognizable protagonist for Western audiences.
Stephen King's "The Mist" was brought to life by director Frank Darabont. Darabont has long been a big fan of the works of Stephen King and also adapted "The Green Mile" and "The Shawshank Redemption."
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"The Monster Squad" was brought to audiences by Fred Dekker and Shane Black, the same two guys who made "The Predator" in 2018. Black also wrote the original "Predator" as well as "Lethal Weapon" and "Iron Man 3."
"The Descent" is one of the few horror films ever made with a cast made up almost entirely of women, plus a good deal of monsters. The US version of the film has an edited ending because test audiences didn't like how depressing the original ending was.
"Them!" was one of the earliest movies in the science fiction genre to deal with fear of nuclear radiation. The giant ants in the movie may look silly by today's standards but they were so good in 1954 that the film was nominated for an effects Oscar.
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A stop-motion classic featuring one of the most recognizable monsters in movie history, "20 Million Miles to Earth" features a Ray Harryhausen stop-motion creation called the Ymir that supposedly kept growing as a result of Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere.
"Critters" has long been compared to "Gremlins" and considered something of a knock-off as it featured tiny, voracious and darkly funny monsters. In fact, the script for "Critters" pre-dated "Gremlins" so even though it came out after, it wasn't technically a rip-off
"Ghoulies" was the feature film debut of "Law and Order: SVU" actress Mariska Hargitay. There's a scene in the movie in which Hargitay has to scream that was dubbed over by someone else because Hargitay's real voice was too low and the producers didn't think she screamed convincingly enough.
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Never quite as popular as Godzilla, the giant flying turtle Gamera still made an impression, and 12 films were made over the years since it first appeared in 1956 with the most recent being in 2006. Word is a reboot may be in the works.
John Boyega's Finn from "Star Wars" is much more unsure of himself than his "Attack the Block" character Moses. The creatures in the movie started life as actors in gorilla suits with animatronic jaws, then some more effects were added to make them more interesting.
The first film in what became the Riddick series, "Pitch Black" featured an army of light-sensitive aliens. As of summer 2019, Vin Diesel has confirmed plans for a fourth Riddick film.
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"Monsters, Inc." debuted back in 2001 and went on to be the highest-grossing movie of the year, another in a long line of successes from Pixar studios. Bill Murray was the first choice to voice Sully and read for the part, but when the studio wanted to offer him the role they couldn't get ahold of him.