5 Forgotten Monster Movies That Still Hold Up Today

On the VHS edition of Clive Barker's "Nightbreed," the director appears in an introduction in which he explained why monsters, the main characters of his opus, were always appealing to him. "I've always loved monsters," he said. "I think there's a corner in all of us that envies their powers, that would love to live forever, or to fly, or to change shape at will." And, really, Barker nails it. We keep watching monster movies because, while we may be repulsed by a creature's aggressive savagery, there is a freeing quality to seeing them at work. A monster cannot help but be a monster, so why not allow ourselves to feel a little bit at home in their presence? Barker said they were "repulsive and fascinating," which are opposites ... yet both are true.

I, too, have always loved monsters, repulsed and fascinated just like Barker. Monsters are regular stars of all human stories, stretching back to the earliest days of our species. And throughout the history of the medium, filmmakers have incessantly and enthusiastically invented creatures, mutants, aliens, and other spirits from the imagination, visually realized to terrify us. Who doesn't love a giant animal with dripping fangs, a radioactive gorilla-whale, a shambling zombie, a humanoid killer with claws, or some kind of bonkers chimera with a hunger for human brains? These things are our friends.

While we may all remember creature features like "King Kong," "Godzilla," or "Alien" (all of which made our list of the 15 best monster movies of all time), some of you may not recall the following titles. Allow us at /Film to introduce you to the following five forgotten monster movies that, despite their ages, hold up today.

William Castle might be one of the greatest of all American filmmakers, although he is rarely celebrated as such. For many years at the beginning of his career, Castle was little more than a hard-working Hollywood journeyman, directing over 40 throw-off movies from 1939 to 1956, most of them Westerns and adventure pictures. In 1958, however, he directed and produced "Macabre," a whimsical horror movie that was the first to make use of in-theater gimmicks that Castle would become known for. 

His 1959 film "The Tingler" is perhaps Castle's best film, as it is possessed of a very strange premise and features a very unusual monster. Vincent Price plays a pathologist who's discovered that humans, when experiencing extreme fear, spontaneously manifest a centipede-like parasite on their spines. It's the parasite that makes your spine tingle, hence he nicknames it a Tingler. When you scream, however, your fear is released and the parasite shrivels. This leads Price's character to conduct strange experiments in an attempt to capture a Tingler outside of a human body. A deaf woman (Judith Evelyn) might be the key to his experiments. 

Naturally, by the end of the movie, a Tingler was extracted from a human spine and ran amok ... in the very theater where audiences were sitting! 

"The Tingler" was shown with a gimmick called Percepto!, wherein random seats in the theater would vibrate during key moments of the movie. The climax of the movie comes when the Tingler gets loose, and Price directly implores the audience to "Scream! Scream for your lives!" "The Tingler" is a prime example of the communal nature of horror; you need to see it in a theater with other rowdy people to get the full effect. 

Seekers of great exploitation movies will know that Australian genre films have a very special, ineffable je ne sais quoi that lovers of shlock just adore. I recommend that you seek out a fantastic documentary called "Not Quite Hollywood," which traces the rise of Ozploitation movies during the Australian New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s. The "Mad Max" movies were born of this movement, as were classics like "Dead-End Drive-In" and "Turkey Shoot," both helmed by Brian Trenchard-Smith.

It was that doc that first shed light (for me) on Russell Mulcahy's creature feature "Razorback," one of the most stylish animal-attack movies of its era. The film begins with a man named Jake (Bill Kerr) who, while babysitting his grandson, witnesses a wild boar breaking into his house and kidnapping the infant. That boar will make life hell for everyone.

Fast-forward two years, and that pesky boar is still running amok, attacking and eating the locals who trek into the wilderness. What's more, the boar seems to have a posse, perhaps giving boar orders to other, smaller attack pigs. Jake teams up with a guy named Carl (Gregory Harrison), whose wife the boar devoured, and they go on a hunt. The film will eventually boil down to Carl and the boar facing off in a factory. The boar is a big, scary, seemingly supernatural monster, and it's gross and terrifying. 

Two years after "Razorback," Mulcahy would have a cult hit with "Highlander," a film that spawned many sequels and even a few TV shows. Mulcahy seems to know what audiences want to see. He certainly did with the gripping and strange "Razorback." 

Celebrated horror author Clive Barker has only directed three feature films in his career to date: 1987's "Hellraiser," 1990's "Nightbreed," and 1995's "Lord of Illusions." We once ranked all nine features based on Clive Barker stories, including his directorial efforts, because we love the guy. 

The second of Barker's directorial efforts, "Nightbreed," is easily the biggest and most ambitious, possessing an outsized, fantastical mythos that feels like it could have expanded into a whole cinematic franchise. "Nightbreed" did eventually spawn comic books, video games, and a high-profile extended Blu-ray cut, but it never became as big as it ought to have. 

This is a pity, as "Nightbreed" is terrifying and comforting in equal measure. Like "The Addams Family," it merrily celebrates being an outsider, enjoying the fact that mutants and monsters get to play by their own rules. The main character of "Nightbreed" is Boone (Craig Scheffer), a man who has nightmares about monsters and murders. He dreams of a place called Midian, an underground city where monsters live. 

He eventually finds Midian in real life, and learns that he is one of the Nightbreed, the monstrous denizens of the city. They induct him into their society, much to the terror of his girlfriend Lori (Anne Bobby), who eventually goes looking for him. David Cronenberg plays Dr. Decker, Boone's shrink who moonlights as a masked serial killer. The movie ends with a monsters vs. cops shootout and a lot of awesome makeup effects. The score by Danny Elfman is first-rate. 

The film concludes with a setup for "Nightbreed 2," with Boone leading the monsters to a new home, but sadly, Barker's movie bombed when it was released and only eventually found an audience on home video in the years that followed. 

Peter Hyams' 1997 creature feature "The Relic" contains one of the coolest monsters of that decade, in my estimation. The bulk of the film's action takes place in a Chicago natural history museum where the ailing institution (led by Linda Hunt) is hoping to attract funds with an exhibit about superstition. One of the displays will be a statue of a mythical forest creature called a Kothoga, recently shipped in from the jungles of South America. Penelope Ann Miller plays a hard-working and exasperated evolutionary biologist, while Tom Sizemore plays a local cop who is investigating a weird string of murders. It seems that someone — or something — is puncturing human skulls and ripping out hypothalamus glands. 

Oh yes, and there is a monster lurking about. A big one. A mean one. A monster that has the body of a giant lion, big radial claws, and facial pincers like a stag beetle. It's a pretty badass monster. 

The creature was designed by master movie monster maker Stan Winston, who created yet another marvelous beast for his massive menagerie here. Winston worked on creatures for hits like "Aliens," "The Thing," "Predator," "Jurassic Park," and many more. Stan Winston was the only man that Steven Spielberg trusted to bring his dinosaurs to life, and he'd fully earned that trust. When Winston died in 2008, monster fans everywhere mourned. 

To my eye, the Kogotha is one of Winston's most fun monsters, but "The Relic" isn't a prestige release by any stretch of the imagination. It's a schlocky B-movie about a brain-eating super-monster running amok in a museum. It's slick and professionally made, but ultimately just a bunch of shadowy monster fun. I dig it, and maybe you will, too.

Director André Øvredal most recently directed the haunted road trip movie "Passenger," which was full of jump scares and clumsy mythology. But Øvredal proved that he was capable of exciting, scary horror movies way back in 2010 with the release of "Trollhunter," made in his native Norway. "Trollhunter" is a slick, low-budget mockumentary about a gang of filmmakers who are attempting to track down a craggy old man named Hans (Otto Jespersen) who they suspect is a freelance bear hunter. It turns out that he is actually a trollhunter. Trolls, Hans reveals, are very real, and the Norwegian government has hired freelance hunters to keep them at bay.

When exposed to sunlight, trolls turn to stone, and if not con-troll-ed (heh heh), they can do quite a number on the local infrastructure. Rather unusually, Trolls can smell the blood of Christians, so it's terribly important that trollhunters be atheists. Later in the film, the documentarians call in a new helper, and they don't know if the fact that this person is Muslim will activate the trolls' murderous instincts.

Øvredal does a marvelous job of blending the terrifying immediacy of a found-footage movie with an absurd, comedic premise. "Trollhunter" is scary, but you'll be laughing a lot. The designs of the trolls are classics, evoking the works of Brian Froud, the concept artist for fantasy films like "The Dark Crystal" and "Labyrinth." The film snaked its way through the American arthouse scene and caught the attention of the right kinds of horror fans. Word spread, it took root, and now it's widely available to curious seekers. You can rent it online.