I particularly like #10, the ghostly villain of Joe Hill's "The Heart-Shaped Box", which was genuinely one of the most frightening books I've read of late, and most frightening early on. In fact, it kicks into high gear so early I wasn't even ready to be scared.
So, then, what are your ten "new classic" monsters?
I'll submit mine:
- D'anna/Number Three - The defacto leader of the Cylon's, she's a modern day Bride of Frankenstein, only with all the wit, courage, and determination expected of a genocidal madwoman. Oh, yeah, she's pretty sexy too.
- Cloverfield - Yeah, I'm still trumpeting this movie. It was what so many critics mistakenly call other films: a roller-coaster ride. The mini-creatures were terrifying, the main creature itself, origins shrouded in mystery, was perfect to me.
- Sutter Cane/The Town of Hobb's End - From John Carpenter's terribly underrated film In the Mouth of Madness, where poor Sam Neil goes looking for the Stephen King-esque novelist Sutter Cane. He tracks the missing writer to the fictional town of Cane's stories, where literally all hell breaks lose. The movie is one of the single scariest movies I've ever seen... Much like the books it's supposedly based upon.
- The Cigarette Smoking Man - Besides being the chief adversary to Agents Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, CSM also assassinated President Kennedy, was responsible for the aliens kidnapping Mulder's sister, and took part in the plot for the self-same aliens to colonize Earth. And he propagated cancer.
- Venom - Sure, Carnage was meaner and nastier, but Venom was the original, and remains the best. Able to hide in plain sight, possessing all of Spider-Man's abilities PLUS superior strength, and an evil alien symbiote who hated Spidey as much as Eddie Brock. His action figure screamed "I WANT TO EAT YOUR BRAINS." And he had that suit...
- Freddy Kruger - I don't care who you are, the gloved-knife hand, the face, the hat, the sweater... It's terrifying.
- Velociraptors - Yes, the T-Rex was scary awesome, but the Raptors changed what and how we perceive dinosaurs. No longer large and lumbering, the Raptors are cold, calculating hunters who could click-click-click their talons and claws along the kitchen floor before disemboweling you...and you'd never even know it.
- Serpentor - A true Frankenstein, made up of the greatest warlords history has ever known. And that snake he wore on his shoulders that he could straighten and then throw into your chest... Also, he rode a hover board. And he had a cape.
- G'Mork - The wolf from Never-Ending Story. This is the single-scariest creature from my childhood, as I would have nightmares about the wolf's glowing red eyes in lurking in my closet, in the hallway...wherever. That it talked made it even scarier.
- Joe Quesada - the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, he's responsible for some of the laziest, most damning story lines in all of comic history, such as last fall's Spider-Man opus "One More Day", which saw Peter Parker make a deal with The Devil to disavow his marriage to MJ. This is the one monster who should be chased with pitchforks and torches.
2 comments:
Some of these guys don't do it for me. Some of them work. Cloverfield which I liked as a movie ended up being a scary critter to me only because it was just impervious to every conventional weapon. However, if the Fantastic Four showed up I think they could have figured out how to tackle the thing without nuking NYC.
Serperntor! Interesting. He is an amalgamation of the worlds best militry conquerors and because of the royalty status Cobra placed on him, it opened up the US government to allow the Cobra organization to be seen as a constitutional monarchy rather than a terrorist group. Everything went right for Cobra when Serpentor came along in the comics except a civil war that ended with an arrow from Zartan's well trained bow. Somehow, Cobra-la freaks me out a little more.
And Joe Quesada! Yes! A man who has past his prime. I remember being so excited reading comic books in 2001 through 2004 while things were going really great a Marvel and here we've gone back to that drippy Spider-Man logo that harkens to the terrible late 90s of comics, multiple varient edition covers, and Spider-Man with freaking bone claws that just out of his wrists!!!! Not to mention THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA!?!?!?! All of which is a sick marketing ploy which will be retconned as soon as someone with a sense of reality cones to the charge and which will be used as a stupid shock ending 'someone repairs the woorld' trick in the end. Because no one really dies in the Marvel universe.
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