Monster (read Brad’s review), the latest film from Bryan Bertino, is already available on DIRECTV and will be hitting limited theaters and On Demand this Friday. To celebrate the upcoming release, we teamed up with Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff of Studio ADI, who designed the creature FX, who shared their top 5 creature features flicks with us. Here’s what I promise you: unless you love old-school horror, there’s a good chance that you haven’t seen let alone even HEARD of some of these titles!

Originally titled There Are Monsters, the film was directed by Bertino, who was the writer, producer, and director of The Strangers, as well as the criminally underrated Mockingbird.

Starring Zoe Kazan (In Your Eyes, Fracture), Ella Ballentine (The Captive), Scott Speedman (Underworld), and Aaron Douglas (“Battlestar Galactica”), The Monster focuses on a mother and daughter who are trapped and tormented by a ruthless creature.

Gillis tells Bloody-Disgusting:

Picking 5 favorite Creature Features is never an easy task. There are great ones in many different categories. You love some for their sheer kitsch value (‘Attack of the Killer Tomatoes’) some for their game-changing art quotient (‘Alien’) and there are some I worked on (‘Pumpkinhead’, ‘Tremors’, ‘Predator’). I shall recuse myself of commenting on these categories and stick to films that impacted me when I saw them as a kid.

So, without further ado and in no particular order, here we go!

Alec Gills:

Caltiki the Immortal Monster

…scared the crap outta me when my dad took me to see it at the drive in. The exotic locale, weird dubbing and monster-made-of-raw meat had me lying awake at night. This was a good thing as I had a bed wetting problem at the time: less time asleep meant less chance of leakage.

20 Million Miles to Earth

…was one of stop motion genius Ray Harryhausen’s darker efforts. This ’50’s monster-on-the-loose low budjer was set it Italy and had unusually moody lighting particularly in the barn sequence. It also had a cool creature hatching from a gelatinous pod, then growing rapidly. This was 2 decades before ALIEN did it. Take that, Sir Ridley! (respect)

The Blob (original)

…always bothered me as kid largely because the adult world just wouldn’t listen to teenagers trying to warn them that their town was in danger. Sure, the ‘kids’ looked 30,and drove a jalopy, but my god if Steve McQueen couldn’t fight the blob, what chance did I have? I mean, the Blob was so badass they couldn’t kill it. All they could do is drop it in Antarctica and forget it like a box of Gino’s Frozen Pizza Rolls. The words THE END morphed into a question mark because someday you just might be dumb enough to thaw those pizza rolls. Oh, and the bum who gets his hand melted was wicked too.

The Monolith Monsters

…is in a bit of a tie with KRONOS for giant, slow moving non-anthropomorphic terrors. The monoliths were space alien crystals that sucked the silica out of the ground, grew to the size of skyscrapers, then toppled, shattering into a million pieces… each of which grew into more monoliths! Aside from massive water droplets in the dam burst scene, excellent miniatures.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die

…had just about the goriest scene permissible on TV in the mid-60’s. I have no cohesive memory of the story, but I always seemed to tune in at the same moment. Dude’s arm gets ripped off by a creature in a cell, he staggers away, leaning against the wall and grinding his stump leaving a schmear of blood. If that ain’t enough, the still-living severed head of a lady wearing a bathing cap and Joan Crawford eye makeup smirks and steals the scene without uttering a word. She’s clearly a victim, but has somehow turned the tables on her tormentor. She proves that a gal can succeed if she has a good head off her shoulders.

Tom Woodruff:

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

The original and still the best man-in-a-suit ever, Ever. In a decade when 50’s “B” movie atomic monsters became the rage, Bud Westmore (ahem… et al) put together something with grace and realism and a design that enhanced a human frame underneath rather than tried to hide it. Lucky fluke or fate? After all, this was the team that also glued veins on the Metaluna Mutant’s space trousers. Performances by Ricou Browning and Ben Chapman and Black Lagoon environment all made it work.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

I hope the mastery of the art of animation that the legendary Ray Harryhausen achieved is never forgotten. And with a legacy of such fantasy-rich stories left us, it should endure. This was THE film to discover on TV on an afternoon after school or the weekend. No matter where I tuned in to the broadcast, there was a rich assortment of creatures that stood with one foot in realism and the other in magic. The Cyclops is a favorite as is the sword-fighting skeleton, both of which had stellar performances nearly across the board, and both complimented by Bernard Herrmann’s score. The dragon/cyclops fight, though short, is very memorable. Oh yeah, and Sinbad is in it.

Curse of the Werewolf

One of the best of the Hammer horror films of the 50’s and 60’s. This is a decent enough story and with Oliver Reed’s work, a great monster movie. This was back in the day when werewolves and wolfmen were interchangeable and nobody went “full wolf”. It’s definitely an upgrade of the Jack Pierce style we loved on Lon Chaney, in part because the film is in glorious Hammer-Color but mostly because Reed’s pirate shirt gets ripped enough to allow us to see his spotty, hairy torso, proving he is a werewolf. Great eyes, great brow, great boots. The closest to the Aurora monster model milestone guys like me grew up with.

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein

I was about 10 years-old when I watched this alone in my room on a cheap B&W TV. Something about deadly car accidents haunted me in real life and here’s this doctor building his monster from pieces of teenagers killed in a car crash! There’s lots of tension when the girl goes against the doc’s orders and opens the cadaver drawer in the lab revealing a reanimated dead teenager to bolt upright into our faces! It’s the only time I had to turn a TV off and huddle in the dark for 10 minutes before talking myself into turning it back on and watching until the end.

The Monster of Piedras Blancas

I was already to buy a Batman comic book (12 cents) when I saw for the first time, a Monster mag titled, For Monsters Only. Inside was a picture of this man-like sea monster holding a severed head, driving the Batman comic book back to the shelf! Turns out, this was the Monster of Piedras Blancas (guess where he lived)! And yeah, a creature suit not unlike the Black Lagoon’s Gill Man because it was assembled by Jack Kevan who was part of the Bud Westmore team. Maybe that’s why this creature had the hands of a Moleman (The Mole People) and the feet of the Metaluna Mutant (This Island Earth). For all I know, maybe THIS was the guy who glues veins to trousers…