The Criterion Collection

Reptilian, mammalian, extraterrestrial, or all-purpose oozy, there are monsters in the Criterion Collection, and they can elicit pity or screams or, like Godzilla, both. The rampaging prehistoric beastie of Ishiro Honda’s classic Japanese creature feature is a powerful metaphor for nuclear annihilation and the most iconic piece of latex and rubber ever.

The “lounge lizards” originally envisioned by Hunter S. Thompson and illustrator Ralph Steadman come to vivid life in Terry Gilliam’s film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Drunken, fornicating, slithering social parasites, these hallucinated monsters are perfect manifestations of American excess as Thompson sees it.

Of all the kooky creatures that haunt House, the beautifully bizarro cult horror film by Nobuhiko Obayashi, the most note-perfect—and deadly—is surely the carnivorous piano that literally devours young Melody (Eriko Tanaka).

Greta Garbo herself swooned over Jean Marais’ dewy-eyed Beast. Legend has it, when she saw him transformed back into the sadly human Prince Ardent in Jean Cocteau’s spellbinding romantic fantasy Beauty and the Beast, she exclaimed, “Give me back my Beast!”

A band of monster-mad young guys, including Dennis Muren (to become one of the most influential special-effects gurus of all time) and director Jack Woods, fashioned the low-budget stop-motion extravaganza Equinox, which features such supporting characters as a winged skeleton, a murderous cephalopod, and this huge simian named Taurus.

To give form to William S. Burroughs’s Mugwump, a creature that, in the author’s words, “has no liver, maintaining himself exclusively on sweets,” for his loose adaptation of Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg created this foul-tempered, heinously scaly barfly, a figment of the drug addict protagonist Bill Lee’s imagination.

It’s hard to imagine anything more gruesome than the monsters that wreak havoc in Arthur Crabtree’s splatter-movie benchmark Fiend Without a Face: viscous, leaping brains with teeth that bite and spinal-cord tails that strangle their victims. Based on a story by Amelia Reynolds Long originally published in 1930 in the horror magazine Weird Tales, this movie brings new meaning to the word pulp.

Frankenstein’s monster himself makes a cameo in Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, in which little Ana is terrorized by her memories of seeing James Whale’s classic adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel. Though the monster seems to haunt the girl’s every waking moment, it’s only as a reflection in a lake at night that we finally see him, staring out of the black water with silent menace.

The fully human characters are disturbingly outnumbered in Erle C. Kenton’s Hollywood horror landmark Island of Lost Souls. The film’s tropical antiparadise is taken over by more mutant man-beasts (created by Wally Westmore) than you can shake a stick at—a horrifyingly hirsute Bela Lugosi and Buster Brodie’s “Pig man” among them.

The good news: First Man into Space’s cocky navy test pilot hero has returned from outer space in one piece. The bad news: he’s contracted some sort of intergalactic disease that slowly transforms him into a slimy bloodsucker. Needless to say, his girlfriend isn’t pleased.