#Here Are 5 Elements That Make For a Legendary Monster Movie

For decades, audiences have been obsessed with movie monsters. Here is an in-depth look at what makes these films so fascinating.

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Here Are 5 Elements That Make For a Legendary Monster Movie

From Godzilla to The Shape of Water, audiences can’t get enough of the creepiest creatures of cinema. Across fantasy, horror, and action, these beasts are the stars of films across all genres. As a cultural touchstone, monster movies have been invading theaters for decades, and the genre now comprises several dozens, if not hundreds, of movies. What makes these movies so compelling, and what do they have in common?

For this list, monsters are considered creatures, zombies, aliens, vampires, werewolves, and beasts of folklore. Anything with a body that can be touched (but please don’t) can be considered a monster, which means ghosts and other paranormal phenomena will not be considered.

The elements of a great monster movie are not so different than the elements of any other great movie, except, in this case, the monster is considered a focal point for the different aspects of production. When all the different branches of production come together, a monster movie can be a truly thrilling experience.

Here are five things that make a monster movie great.

Impeccable Creature Design

Many horror movies wisely avoid showing too much of their monsters for fear (get it?) of losing the mystery behind them. The Ritual deftly addresses this problem by designing a monster that, when shown, will undoubtedly scare the pants off of children and adults alike. There’s a balance to be struck between teasing the identity of a monster and creating real dread when it finally appears. That’s why good creature design makes certain monster movies stand out from the crowd.

Other famous examples include the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth (and any other creature that director Guillermo Del Toro has put to screen), the mutated bear from Annihilation, and Godzilla from the massively successful franchise of the same name. In all cases, the creative teams behind the monster have thoughtfully combined shapes, textures, and colors to bring these nightmares to life.

Monstrously Good Sound Design

The success of A Quiet Place: Part II and the original film are testaments to the fact that sound and sound design play a huge role in the effectiveness of monster movies. With no dialogue at all, those movies rely entirely on ambient noise to great effect, and the near-absolute silence creates a beautifully paranoid, chilling atmosphere.

Even in non-monster movies, filmmakers rely on creative sound design to make concepts and moments feel visceral. Imagine a movie set in space without that familiar auditory canon of eerie space sounds that audiences have enjoyed for decades? Without quality sound design, the sensory impact of what makes movies so exciting in the theater is completely lost.

In the case of monster movies, the filmmaker is striving to convey the fear of seeing something inherently unreal. The sound design has to be supporting that goal – whether that means a low, foreboding cello as in Jaws, or a resonant waterphone like in Aliens comes down to the expertise of the sound designers. A grand orchestral arrangement set to the arrival of a movie monster may make a scene feel epic and impactful but maybe not as horrifying or otherworldly. Horror movies make good use of distorted human vocals and electric noise to characterize inhuman entities. Most good monster movies align horrifying creature designs with strange and unnatural sounds to impart the experience of that unique fear onto the audience.

Cinematography

Yes, a film’s cinematography may be affected by its creature design (both being in the realm of visuals) but the cinematography is more a part of the film’s foundation than anything else. Good cinematography operates as more than eye candy – it is where atmosphere, tone, and momentum are first established. Simply put, good cinematography in a monster movie accomplishes the same goal as good cinematography for any other movie: creating an aesthetic that supports the mood desired by the filmmaker.

Monster movies may be grounded in the real world, where you’d find common visual iconography like city skylines, forestry, bodies of water, etc. They may also take place in fictional settings and use stylized imagery like the interior of space ships, alien structures, etc. The frame of a shot can impart lots of information depending on what is contained inside of it and what isn’t. The monster may lurk out of sight, move between sides of the frame, between light and shadow, etc. All of these choices by the cinematographer can have a huge impact on how scary or imposing the monster feels. It’s the combination of the set, the lighting, the framing, and the movement that determine whether or not the monster accomplishes its purpose.

Thematic Impact

Visuals and sound design do the explicit legwork of creating the emotion surrounding the beast in the first place, but what about the symbolism of the monster? Does it represent something specific to the other characters? Does its victory or demise make a comment on something or contribute to an idea?

Take zombies for example. Taken literally, a zombie is much the same as any other monster: gruesome, erratic, and threatening. But some stories choose to characterize zombies as an existential fear, where the mass decay of people’s minds (in a zombie apocalypse) is proof that the wonder of human intelligence is meaningless, and nature has proven its dominance over human beings. If a theme like that is expressed fully (through the script, performances, etc.), it furthers the instinctual fear of something grotesque into a lingering, more depressive fear of the meaning behind death. Movie monsters with any kind of thematic depth can achieve the same effect of turning a momentary scare into a haunting image that remains in the minds of viewers.

Human Characters To Compliment The Monster

This might seem counter-intuitive, but one of the most important components of a great monster movie is having great human characters. A “great” human character in this context has little to do with intelligence, kindness, or the power of will, and more to do with the depth of the interaction between human and monster. In plenty of monster movies, the human characters exist as nothing more than prey for the monster, and if the point of the film is to make audiences afraid of the monster, that’s no problem at all.

The best monster movies are the ones that establish a relationship between the monster and the humans it interacts with. Take Ridley Scott’s Alien for example: Ripley is a fantastic protagonist because she spends the movie suffering but also learning from the monster. It’s behavior, desires, intelligence, etc. By the film’s third act, the drama is built not just on the encroaching threat of the monster, but also on the small hope that Ripley and her instincts may just outwit the beast. Expanding on the struggle between a movie monster and its human characters can elevate this kind of film beyond its genre trappings, towards the type of film that leaves viewers thinking and wondering long after the credits have rolled.

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