The scariest monster

[Armageddon]

The scariest monster ever?

[abstauber]

While we're at it, could somebody explain me, why the Cenobites should be scary? They are designed to look scary but for me they're completely implausible. Why should any villain in the world attach throat-opening wires to themselves? And where do they buy their gear... The hardware store?

[Gilbert]

These may not be the scariest, but since my movie-watching count is pretty low I don't have much suggestion.
I think the original Alien (mainly for its "unseen" feature and for the "seen" disgusting one the chest burster surely counts; Aliens in, errr, Aliens aren't as scary but it's intentional and understandable as the point of that movie is to just blow up a lot of ants; the one in Alien³ is just a stupid harmless small animal; whereas those in the fourth movie are laughable) and the head spider/crab thing in The Thing (the 80's one, as I've never seen the 50's and the most recent adaptations) could get into the list.

[Calin Leafshade]

I find the cenobites entirely unscary.

They are not threatening to me in and of themselves. What gives the cenobites power is that they threaten to do the same to others that has been done to them. They are architects of pain in a very artistic and almost gluttonous sense. They revel in pain and that idea is *disturbing* to us but not terribly frightening in the same way that a monster is. The idea of masochism features heavily in Clive Barker's stuff because he is a nutcase.

Also, if any of that sounds familiar its because the chzo mythos is basically a retelling of the hellraiser mythos.

[an Urpney]

You can find some explanation in the novel (Hellbound Heart) and first two movies where they explain their motives (“We are explorers of the further regions of experience”, etc.) and see creation of a cenobite (their tools and outfits come from their dimension: endless, techno-organic labyrinth). They aren’t really villains either â€" Frank and Chennard are the villains there (only in the later movies they are turned into villains to bring more focus to them).
Maybe they aren’t really scary, but at least interesting. Showing the monster and keeping it scary is nearly impossible.

[Crimson Wizard]

What gives the cenobites power is that they threaten to do the same to others that has been done to them.

There are different kinds of fear. Being afraid of monster's visage is one thing, being afraid of possible actions is other. Is there a reason why you want to focus the first type?

[Calin Leafshade]

visual fear is more interesting i think because it is not as studied (at least not in my mind). When we think of visually frightening things we think of big teeth and claws and other evolutionary responses but most of the things that have been posted have been (superficiall) human. So what are we afraid of? Why are visually unappealing humans frightening to us and what makes them so? Also, why is there a point at which it goes too far? you can distort the human form too much so that it becomes laughable even though that should be just as terrifying visually..

It's these questions i'd like to answer.

[Crimson Wizard]

Here's the fairy tale I read when I was a child; according to their names I guess it was originally written and illustrated by Romanian authors. Because of artist's peculiar drawing style the pictures were terribly disturbing and scared me a lot.

Here's a page where I found all of those pics:
http://cat-arch-angel.livejournal.com/69482.html

Specifically, monster images:
http://ljplus.ru/img4/c/a/cat_arch_angel/_____4.jpg
http://ljplus.ru/img4/c/a/cat_arch_angel/__11.jpg

[an Urpney]

When we see a human, we know what to expect. All the people share similar facial features, body shape, way of speaking and walking. When some of those features are removed or alerted - we fear the unknown. When changes are overdone â€" the creature becomes laughable. When there’s just little something like lack of facial features (Pan’s Labirynth monster, chatter cenobite), unnatural eyes colour (Grudge ghosts, 30 days of night vampires) or unusual behaviour (Orlock, Pan’s Labirynth monster â€" just look how they walk).
This might come from primal fear of the ill and disfigured; in animals world sick, disfigured or insane ones are feared and isolated.

[Mouth for war]

You babies...scared of some movie monsters...pssshhhhh No but seriously...I'm thinking hard about this...If i can come up with something I'll post it!

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

What is scary to look at is pretty much determined on an individual level.  There are people who find the xenomorphs in Aliens to be tame but at the same time find the large-eyed depictions of Grays (a type of alien associated with abductions) from films like Communion to be horrifying, and vice-versa.

As someone who watches pretty much every horror and sci-fi horror film imaginable I can only remember feeling an unsettling sense one time and that was during a few of the scenes during Fire in the Sky when Travis Walton is abducted and being dissected.  You're only given rather quick, tense shots of the aliens and the machinery they are using but all the fast movement and shock reveals are pretty effective, and there's certainly something unsettling about having other lifeforms treat us like we do lab rats.

I definitely think that with horror, 1940's horror movie directors rightly understood that less is more, because the more you see the monster the more desensitised you become to its presence, much like violence itself.  If you have to reveal the monster, save it for some pivotal moment in the story like the climax otherwise you've just got another Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees tramping about killing people by the dozen and camping it up.

[Crimson Wizard]

the more you see the monster the more desensitised you become to its presence, much like violence itself.  If you have to reveal the monster, save it for some pivotal moment in the story like the climax otherwise you've just got another Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees tramping about killing people by the dozen and camping it up.

I think there's still such factor as compassion (is this word correct in this context?) to characters. I saw a number of movies where you know who the "bad guy" or "bad monster" is for a quite a long time, and yet movie keeps you in tension because you worry about characters' fate.
(I don't mean dumb teenage movies where you feel no care about the 'cannon fodder'.)

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I don't think that makes the monster scary visually, though, which is what I was talking about.  It just makes you worried about the fate of the character you've invested emotion into.

[Crimson Wizard]

Ah, sorry, I keep forgetting this discussion is primarily about visuals.

[NickyNyce]

I understand that the discussion is about visuals, but the less visuals the better. Fear comes from the unknown mainly, and I think that a good back story really helps conjure up those fears too. If you can leave it in the hands of the people watching the movie to build their own fears about what the monster looks like or how it will act or what it will do, that goes a long way IMO.

This was mentioned before....seeing too much of a monster drops the fear level considerably.

So I think the scariest monster is the one that's less seen, and left more to the imagination. Do it this way and everyones worst fears are true until proven (shown) otherwise.

The blare witch movie did this and I really liked not seeing any monster or ghost at all. By doing this, me and everyone else that put their mind to what she probably looked like was better than actually seeing her.

If I had to pick something that I had to look at for a good amount of time, I would say stuff like the thing which can take almost any disgusting shape is great. It almost never looked the same way twice. It walks in different ways, crawls in different ways etc. You never seem to get used to it.

[Anian]

Del Torro creates monsters that should be scary, but I always find them beautiful, from the imagination aspect of things.

From what I've read of Lovecraft again it's more of imagination than horror, though the monster from the stories Dunwich Horror and stories like Rats in the walls are what I visually find scary, when there's an overwhelming number of creatures, it usually goes to dread of something around you that you might not see but you can hear for example. Again, stuff like the Tooth faeries from Hellboy 2.

Hard to find the actual line where "scary" and "disgusting" dwell. Too many horrors go for shock scares and just overload of gore, instead of there actually be horror.

[kconan]

  The only movie monsters that ever really got to me were the kiddie vampires scratching at the bedroom windows in Salem's Lot.  Visually and otherwise, watching that movie as a kid freaked me out. 

  Pinhead was obviously disgusting, but I actually thought some of his minions were worse.  If I'm realling correctly there is one monstrosity that were twins somehow combined into a deformed creature; that one was kind of disturbing.

[Ryan Timothy B]

It's been far too long when I've actually been horrified by a movie monster. I sorta miss those days. I also can't remember examples.

But I do remember being frightened/adrenaline rush by encountering that large monster in Half Life when it was first released. The big guy in the parking garage that you need to run ahead of as he's knocking cars and such trying to keep up to you. The screen shaking with his footsteps. Yes. I do recall being very frightened by it.

The other reason for fearing it was likely that I escaped it on my first attempt. I didn't know if I was going the right path or if I was missing something. Other than that, Fear had some moments and especially Dead Space.

[LimpingFish]

Reggie Nalder, as Mr. Barlow, scared me in "Salem's Lot", but I was only about eight at the time.

But I agree that the unseen (and the unexplained, for that matter) are almost always scarier.

[Igor Hardy]

Dr Jennings from Howard the Duck.

The zombies in Thief: The Dark Project.