Man, I’m fed up with vampires, werewolves, and zombies. Even ghosts are rather “meh” by this point. So, what other genres or mythologies have particularly nasty nightmare fuel? We need declare a moratorium on the same old same old and see some movies with different critters.
No aliens (this includes Lovecraftian horrors, since Hollywood has shown time and time again that they DO. NOT. GET IT.)
No city-bashers (Godzilla and his ilk), and no serial killing superhumans. Boring.
Demons, Satan, and other hell-spawn are still OK, but there had better be 1) a fresh take on it, and 2) no baddies made up out of whole cloth (no “Maleficon the Masher of Souls” or similar garbage. I like my demonic powers to have some basis in ancient writings.)
How about Harpies? Screaching vulture women swooping down from city rooftops clawing men and carrying them away.
Otherwise dragons, evil sorcerers/witches/whatever else, trickster gods, et al have been done a lot as well. There’s potential with succubae, but there has to be more than “evil demoness who destroys the helpless men until the hero dispatches her with a quip.”
Gargoyles are another thought. I miss that cartoon and I know they were heroes as opposed to the scary monsters, but I wouldn’t mind seeing someone resurect the franchise with a really good live action(ish) movie.
The nuclear war of the Rama empire, their ray weapons and flying ships would be a good series if done right. I do believe it was supposed to be Atlantis that they fought with, but I’m not looking this up to check.
I wholeheartedly support the OP, and second the nomination for lamia.
The Sidhe and other elven races have always fascinated me. I think there was a Swamp Thing story where he met an enclave hidden in the Appalachia. I always thought that would have made a cool premise for a stand-alone series. I also saw them used effectively in some fantasy novels I read long ago of which they are all that I really recall. I always loved it when the Fay would show up in Gaiman’s Sandman series. As I recall they were not necessarily the nicest folk.
I never quite liked Tolkien’s or Gygax’s take on them. Made them sound to noble. I see them treating us as we treat apes - distant cousins, but vastly inferior and definitely not equals. If a few happen die in some unfortunate experiments, it’s all in the name of progress and science (or magic in their case.)
The problem with the sidhe is that laurel hamilton has done a book series on them that is just as sex crazed as the anita blake series … though the mercedes lackey version is wonderfully full of child abuse angst … :rolleyes:
How about the Windigo, a cannabalistic monster that was once human and is driven mad by the craving for human flesh which he can never sate because for every person he eats, grows proportionately larger and thus is constantly starving.
When reading the *Book of the New Sun *series, I found the bit with the alzabo intensely creepy. It’s an alien predator that absorbs the memories and thoughts of its prey, and Wolfe describes a scene where the creature kills and eats a child that it catches playing in the woods, then it proceeds to go back to the house the child lived in and mimics the voice of the child to lure the parents outside where it can devour them as well.
I know you said ghosts are meh, buf maybe utbards would be different enough from the usual: “The utbard, “child left outside” is the ghost of a baby left to die of exposure. Truly horrid creatures whose first victim is invariably their mother.” Although they appear in the form of an infant, they have tremendous physical strength and like maiming victims in addition to eventually killing them.
Hellboy, the comic not the films, is great for an odd collection of obscure monsters and myths.
I like the more original monsters. Remember Eugene Tooms from The X-Files? He was the serial killer with the mutant stretchy body like Reed Richards. He’d hibernate in a nest of newspaper and bile/saliva for up to thirty years at a time. When he awoke, he needed to eat five human livers to go back into hibernation. Creepy.
Do you not know about Troll, or its amazingly bad sequel Troll 2 (which had no trolls, only goblins), or Troll 3, which I have not seen, but apparently has no trolls either.
Yeah, but it was a dude, and had nothing to do with snakes or other things associated with the creature.
Are there any ghoul movies, in the Arabic myth sense? Zombies are close enough, but not the same.
The last book kind of sucks, but The Veil trilogy by Christopher Golden has dozens of fae/supernatural critters from across the globe not commonly found in Western Literature. I had to look several of them - like perytons - up in my encyclopedia of mythical creatures.