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.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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