Another Top 10 Lesser Known Movie Monsters

Like a classic giant monster, a Daimajin, or “great demon god” is large, destructive, and arguably the hero of the film. This shogun-like, revenge-seeking spirit – or yokai – usually possesses a massive stone idol or statue wearing samurai armor as its body and responds to the pleas for help from women, children, and the poor. When it comes to life, it’ll defend those who’ve paid it the proper respect and kill those who haven’t through the typical rampaging as well as its mystical powers. Fast and virtually invincible, it won’t stop until all evil is vanquished – or a kind act is performed. It will then leave the statue and move onto where it’s needed next.

#9: The Crawling Eye “The Trollenberg Terror” [aka “The Crawling Eye”] (1958)

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Top 10 Lesser-Known Movie Monsters

There’s nothing unusual about clouds in the mountains. Now make that cloud radioactive and imagine tentacles coming out of it. The crawling eye is an alien species that generates its own mist to hide and run around in, and to decapitate humans in, just because it can. Note that this one-eyed blob doesn’t have to move fast to kill because it can control the person standing across the room from you and force them to do its bidding. Your best hope is having a psychic on hand to track it as well as a lot of fire, especially in the form of Molotov cocktails.

#8: Giant Octopus “It Came from Beneath the Sea” (1955)

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Does anything good ever come from the bottom of the ocean? Believed to have been driven from the depths of the Pacific Ocean by a military sub testing H-bombs, this giant sea-beast begins to forage for a new feeding ground. Ship after ship begins to go missing as it wanders the ocean. Long before it’s seen, we get clues to its destructive power and hints to its size – but even so, the actual reveal is still surprising. And the fact that we now know similar giant tentacle monsters like this exist makes this gigantic, possibly radioactive cephalopod even more disturbing.

#7: Monster from the Id “Forbidden Planet” [aka “Fatal Planet”] (1965)

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A relief ship is sent on a mission to a distant planet to check on an expedition from two decades ago. After reaching it, one of survivors of the expedition, Dr. Morbius, warns them against touching down. He tells them of a mysterious force that killed everyone except for his family. After they discover his experiments with the mind-enhancing technology of an ancient alien race, this force reappears. It sabotages equipment and kills some of the new arrivals. When it comes to a deadly and invisible creature that can slip in and out without a trace, the first step in defeating it is convincing people it exists at all – the fact that it also comes from Morbius’ subconscious further complicates matters.

When it comes to this giant monster, you get no warning or explanation - just destruction. Thanks to some found footage from a camcorder, we get to watch as New York City is suddenly shaken by explosions, with an unknown creature at the center of the mayhem. Due to the filmmaking style used in “Cloverfield” and the many close-ups, we only really see glimpses of Clover throughout the first half, which makes it all the more terrifying. In fact, it’s temporarily covered with parasites that have a taste for human blood. By the time the creature is fully shown, the military has become fully involved, and that’s when we get to see how truly unstoppable it is.

Reviving a dinosaur has been a dream of scientists for a long time. It’s too bad that it always seems to go so wrong in the movies. When nuclear testing accidentally awakens and frees a dinosaur from the Arctic Circle, the confused beast finds its way to the coast of North America and begins terrorizing New York City. Things only get worse as they find the dinosaur isn’t the only thing revived. Its blood carries an ancient virus that begins infecting people after the beast is harmed, which means the military has to get creative...

#4: Mutant Creature of the Leviathan “Leviathan” (1989)

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Sometimes man is the true monster - literally. In this Italian-American sci-fi horror flick, an unfortunate group of undersea miners finds a scuttled Soviet ship. Taking some souvenirs back aboard their own sub, including vodka, members of the crew soon begin to feel ill and start dying. The bodies then start to change and merge into a grotesque husk. The result of a mutagen produced by experiments from the former crew of the Leviathan, this monstrosity can continue to mutate and absorb more material to grow into a truly disgusting sight even after the death of the host - or when its limbs are cut off – resolving the mystery surrounding the Leviathan’s deliberate shipwreck.

There are plenty of psychological thrillers about the fragility of human sanity and morality. Combine that with the claustrophobia of being stuck in a cave and the panic of being trapped, and you’d think that’d be enough. But nope, in “The Descent,” they toss in some feral man-eating creatures too. The crawlers are a subterranean cousin to humanity. Using echolocation, they are perfectly adapted to the dark, and extremely territorial. They don’t kill for fun; to them, this is a battle for survival, and so they aren’t pulling any punches.