The 10 Best Monster Movies of The 21st Century
The best monster movies of the 21st century… does the 24 hour news cycle count? No? Alright, I’ll put the horrors of real life aside and stick to fiction only. If you’re looking for creature features, you’ve tuned in to the right frequency. These ten films feature the most terrifying critters you can witness, all viewable from the comfort of your own home! No more 3am gas station stakeouts for you! You can observe all the creatures of the night from your couch! Malignant, menacing, and sometimes misunderstood, these monsters are modern day cinematic marvels – the 21st century’s leading lights of terror.
The Ritual
Directed by David Bruckner, The Ritual is 100ccs of Norse nightmare fuel injected right into your eyeballs! The story follows four friends who make the ill-thought out decision to backpack through the Scandinavian wilderness in honor of their deceased bestie, and behold the horrors hidden within! What sort of horrors? Well, their own guilt, grief and rage regarding their friend’s untimely death are some of them, and the nightmare human/deer hybrid running around the woods is the other! The four friends have run afoul of an ancient, slumbering god – a chimera of man and beast sure to leave you sleepless in Seattle, or wherever you live. I really hope it isn’t Scandinavia – or you’re in for a rude awakening on your next hike. A rude awakening with a human torso for a face! Yikes.
Godzilla Minus One
One of the best Godzilla stories ever told, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One reimagines the mythic lizard for the modern era. An origin story for the 21st century, the plot begins in the middle of the 20th – following a kamikaze pilot whose unit has the misfortune of stumbling across Godzilla on a remote Pacific island. Years after the war, the pilot Shikishima is crossed by fate twice – and runs into a mutated Godzilla while working as a minesweeper on a small vessel. A metaphor for the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, Godzilla is the ghost of a nation’s trauma – haunting Japan in the modern day. This is one of the most interesting interpretations of Godzilla around, one that imagines it as a fish-like, primordial horror. Eyes lifeless and blank as a shark’s, but just as filled with killer instinct.
The Host
One the greatest K-horror films ever created, Bong Joon Ho’s The Host is creature feature metaphor for human pollution. The film begins with two scientists making the poor decision to pour laboratory waste into the sewer system, a choice that has dire consequences half a decade later. Food stand vendor Park Gang-du and his family are set upon by a mutant monster fish/lizard while working by the Han River, and the amphibian abomination ends up absconding with Gang-du’s daughter. What began as catastrophe soon transforms a rescue mission, as Gang-du and his family take the fight to the sewers where the creature dwells. The film asks what you would do save a family member. Would you go to toe to toe with a giant nuclear salamander/trout? Blood is thicker than water, but the water is sure to be thick with blood by film’s end.
Attack The Block
Joe Cornish’s Attack The Block is a story of anti-heroes turned regular heroes, who rise to the occasion and fight off an extraterrestrial menace. After a mugging gone wrong, a group of teenage delinquents are set upon by a gorilla/dog looking critter with a neon mouth. After narrowly escaping with their lives, the teens discover that these meteorite spawn hunt in packs, and they come face to jaws with the rest of the species. This film feels like a Guy Ritchie flick that got interrupted by an alien invasion, a crime caper that mutates into full blown cosmic horror. Fast-paced, funny, and ferocious – Attack The Block is a film about a group of kids born into rough circumstances, whose proximity to violence prepares them for a close encounter with a killer third kind.
Zygote
Neil Blomkamp’s Zygote might technically only be a short film, but it packs more monster scares than 90% of creature features on the market. A sci-fi inspired by Alien and The Thing, the film follows the last surviving remnants of spaceship crew who are tormented by the sentient corpses of their coworkers. The Zygote is one of the greatest horror movie monsters around, a fleshy mass of limbs and eyes that feels like the result of an orgy between The Thing, The Necromorphs from Dead Space, and the Rat King from The Last of Us Part II. But the Zygote is actually worse than all of them! Why? Because with every person it consumes, it’s also able to consume their knowledge and memories. Equal parts brains and brawn, the Zygote is an apex predator that could challenge the android Ash’s definition of a “perfect organism” – not even the Xenomorph is as nasty as this thing.
It
Named after the King of Horror’s most iconic creation, Andrés Muschietti’s It is a 21st century adaption of a classic Stephen King novel. Like pretty much everything else King writes, the plot is set in Maine – following a group of children who are hunted by a shapeshifting killer from beyond the stars. You think these children are safe from death just because they’re children? Obviously you’ve never read a King novel, think again. Pennywise the Dancing Clown is a horror movie monster that feeds on fear, and has solidified itself as a pop culture icon in its pursuit of children to consume. The film is relentlessly scary and funny in equal measure, bolstered by Bill Skarsgård’s Oscar worthy performance of a killer clown – the most mortifying since Heath Ledger’s Joker.
The Mist
Another adaption of a Stephen King classic, Frank Darabont’s The Mist is set in a small New England town shrouded in a creature filled fog. A group of survivors have taken shelter from the monster miasma in a supermarket, but the extraterrestrial horrors are fighting their way in. The film features some of the freakiest creature designs ever conceived, a nightmare menagerie of predatory extraterrestrials. Giant lobster-scorpions, terrible pterodactyls, tentacles covered with mouths, these creatures must have crawled out of the mind of a cosmic horror master! But the true monster of this film? It’s soul crushing, hope destroying, throw your remote control at the screen in disgust downer of an ending – one of the most brutal in cinema history.
Cloverfield
A giant monster movie for the modern era, Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield did the genre-unthinkable and combined the creature feature with found footage horror. The plot follows a group of twenty somethings throwing a farewell party for a friend in Manhattan, unaware that their goodbyes will come sooner than they think. The city has been set upon by a skyscraper sized extraterrestrial, one that ripped the head off of Lady Liberty as a warmup. The group struggles to escape the island alongside eight million other terrified evacuees, and one of them just so happened to capture the chaos on his camcorder! Good thing too, because after this beast finished with New York City, few were left alive to tell the tale.
The Descent
Yet another reason to avoid cave diving like the plague, Neil Marshall’s The Descent combines the claustrophobic horror of regular spelunking with the added terror of subterranean cavern critters. The film follows an all female group of adrenaline junkies who make the ill-advised decision to explore an uncharted cave system, and find that sub-human things have beaten them to the punch. These cannibalistic creatures are thrilled to see outsiders, these explorers are probably the last good meal they’ve seen in a long time. Not content to serve as walking Uber-eats deliveries for creepy crawlers, the women fight to make their way back to the surface. When there’s no map, no light, and no hope, that’s a hard course to chart.
King Kong
Peter Jackson’s King Kong – a legendary modern monster movie about one of cinema’s most iconic creature creations. Set in the early 1930s, this film within a film follows a camera crew who journey to a remote island in order to make movie magic. After arriving at Skull Island, the group are learn exactly why the place deserves its name – it’s full of things that will kill them. A struggle for cinematic greatness soon becomes a fight for survival as the crew contends with giant lizards, giant bugs, and one very large ape. While the dinosaurs and the insects can’t be reasoned with, King Kong’s aggression is soothed by the sight of the film’s leading actress – whom he abducts and protects. Brought to life by motion capture legend Andy Serkis, the prehistoric primate is equal parts sinister and soulful. A creature out of time, misunderstood by the modern world, mankind thinks that Kong can be a cinema star, but the great ape has other ideas – ending his budding film career in tragedy.
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