Editorials
The 13 Scariest CGI Monsters in Movies! [Editorial]
Let’s be honest here: everybody loves a good, old-fashioned practical effects monster. Films like John Carpenter’s The Thing feature effects so detailed, so tactile, so gooey and strange that they look infinitely more real than their expensive, CGI reboots. And even cheesier films like the majority of the original Godzilla flicks have a homemade quality that makes them, arguably, more inviting than their big budget Hollywood counterparts.
But CGI technology has evolved over the years. The remake of The Lion King is pushing photo-realism to new heights (even if it’s not doing the actual story any favors), and the trailer for Tom Hooper’s Cats is, frankly, the scariest thing on the internet in a long time. There are, by now, quite a lot of damn good, very scary CGI monsters in movies.
So, although we’ll always have a special place in our hearts for practical effects, it’s time to give credit where credit is due, and hail the following films for scaring the crap out of us with a series of ones and zeros!
(Note: We’ve focused on films that feature scary monsters, biological in origin. Monsters are eligible whether or not the films are firmly in the horror genre, and although many of these monsters are created using a combination of practical and CG effects we are only highlighting the creatures which use a significant amount of CG throughout their presence on-screen.)
Annihilation (2018)
Alex Garland’s acclaimed sci-fi/horror thriller, about a team of scientists who venture into an extraterrestrial singularity where evolution has gone haywire, is chock full of nightmare imagery, and picking only one monster is a fool’s errand. The doppelgänger at the end of the film is an eerie creation, unlike just about anything else we’ve seen, and the bear with a skull face that screams like a person is an absolute terror.
Beowulf (2007)
Robert Zemeckis spent years trying to perfect motion-capture animation technology, and the results were decidedly mixed. One of the better films he directed in the medium, Beowulf, was a mature fantasy epic based on the classic tale, and features one of the scariest CG-creatures around. Grendel, played by Crispin Glover and brought to mutated and grotesque life by the animation team, is a tragic but violent creature who just wants his neighbors to shut up and will absolutely destroy them to get some peace and quiet.
Cats (2019)
Look, we haven’t seen Tom Hooper’s Cats yet, but the trailer is one of the most off-putting previews we’ve seen in years. Famous actors, covered in only 50% convincing CG, transformed into weird cat monsters, with physiology that makes no sense and a scale that makes them look even tinier than real cats. If you saw these things running around your house you would lose your damn mind, and no one could blame you.
Harry Potter (2001-Present)
The Harry Potter movies have featured a lot of CGI creatures, including giant spiders and centaurs and dragons and cat leviathans, and some have been more convincing than others. But although your mileage might vary across the whole series, certainly the Dementors are iconically creepy creations. These floating reaper monsters, which violently suck away your capacity to feel anything but misery, are one of the biggest “big bads” of the whole franchise, and every time they show up it’s a spooky thrill.
The Host (2006)
We’re not sure how, exactly, dumping formaldehyde into a river led to a giant fish monster, but that’s science for you. Anyway, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host tells the story of just such a creature, about the size of a van, which terrorizes Korea and looks damned scary doing it. Although not the most convincing CGI ever, Bong Joon-ho has confidence in the creature, and lets the audience get nice long looks at it in the daylight, which makes its existence all the more surreal.
Jurassic Park (1993-Present)
It’s easy to overlook the fact that, although the Jurassic Park movies are mega blockbusters for the whole family, they’re also obviously monster movies. Mad scientists on a remote island play God, create man-eating monstrosities which – what a shock! – run amok and eat man. The special effects in the original film, which also incorporated some practical effects, are still extraordinarily convincing, and the sequels have always tried to top the original with more killer dinos to make audiences shriek.
The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
J.R.R. Tolkien’s dream of a beautiful Middle Earth was always undercut, at least a little, by how many terrifying monsters there were in it. Orcs, trolls, dragons, wargs, wraiths, you name it, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies had it, and they were all intimidating creations. And yet none of those towering creatures were quite as scary as Gollum, a Hobbit mutated into a monster by exposure to the One Ring, played with troubled inhumanity and insidious menace by Andy Serkis; and, of course, a team of talented CG animators.
Mortal Engines (2018)
Audiences slept on Christian Rivers’ Mortal Engines, and that’s their loss. Christian Rivers’ sci-fi epic may have had a formulaic plot but it was rife with visual wonders, including thrilling car chases where entire cities were the cars, chase scenes through metropolises getting demolished by giant buzzsaws, and of course Shrike, one of the most unsettling movie villains in recent memory. A cybernetic corpse, Shrike pursues the movie’s hero to prove his love for her by turning her into an undead monster just like himself. Shrike is played by Stephen Lang, and a team of animators, who infuse the character with disturbingly unnatural movements and a grim, frightening glare.
The Mist (2007)
Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s harrowing story only made The Mist more frightening. A group of people get trapped in a grocery store as a mysterious mist fills their small town, and inside there are all kinds of unbelievable monsters, ranging from killer insects to Lovecraftian behemoths that stagger the imagination. It’s their world now. We only live in it… while we can.
A Quiet Place (2018)
The acclaimed monster movie A Quiet Place features novel beasts that attack and brutally slay anyone who makes any kind of sound, forcing our heroes to live in absolute silence for fear of instant death. It’s such a scary concept that director John Krasinski probably could have gotten away with not showing them at all, but when they do appear they are unusually freaky creatures with segmented heads and razor-sharp teeth, and they absolutely live up to the movie’s hype.
The Ritual (2017)
We don’t want to go into too much detail about this one, since it’s a relatively recent film and the monster isn’t in a lot of it, but David Bruckner’s excellent horror film The Ritual – about a group of hikers who get trapped in the woods with a cult – features a grotesque image of a monster that comes back into play later on, in a most unexpected and surprising reveal that’s hard to describe and way creepier to discover on your own. It’s one of the most disturbing CGI monsters of its kind.
Shin Godzilla (2016)
The classic version of Godzilla, walking around and punching monsters like an old-fashioned bouncer, is so familiar now that he’s more beloved than scary. But the impressively smart reboot Shin Godzilla made him horrifying again. Godzilla emerges from the water half-formed, a giant fish-eyed writhing monstrosity that doesn’t move like any Godzilla you’ve ever seen before, and as it rapidly evolves into something a little more familiar, that shocking introduction sticks in your head, making him more unnatural than ever before.
Starship Troopers (1997)
Paul Verhoeven’s epic sci-fi/blockbuster satire, which uses fascist propaganda storytelling tropes to subvert our whole understanding of the action genre, features some of the most monstrous creatures imaginable: giant, killer bugs. The film’s outlandish violence makes these alien insects seem huge and dangerous, so much so that you have to look closely at the film’s subtext to realize that they’re not the oppressors, they’re the noble resistance fighters who are being dehumanized by filmmakers with an agenda. They’re scary, but only because we’re buying into the film’s disturbing meta-narrative. Impeccable VFX, in one of the most daring big budget films in history.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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