The 10 best monster films of all time

1. 'Jurassic Park' (1993)

This time, Steven Spielberg’s effects shop was working beautifully, and the clever plot provided the framework for some of the most thrilling spectacles in film history. The Spielbergian wit — “Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear” — was never sharper.

2. 'Jaws' (1975)

“Smile, you son of a bitch.”

Spielberg was 27 years old when he took a pulp novel and turned it into a Hitchcockian masterpiece of dread and suspense. That the mechanical shark on the set didn’t work well most of the time freed Spielberg to come up with the idea of making it mostly unseen.

3. 'Aliens' (1986)

James Cameron’s big contribution to blockbusters was to add to the sly wit that set apart Spielberg’s best films, and turn Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley into a feminist hero during the Reagan-era renaissance of military pride to create a hugely entertaining adventure.

4. 'King Kong' (2005)

The 1933 original was state-of-the-art for its time, but Peter Jackson’s respectful remake has an elegance and beauty matched by few dramas, much less monster movies, with a vertiginous climax atop the Empire State Building providing an appropriately tragic finish for the misunderstood beast.

5. 'The Mummy' (1999)

A swashbuckling desert adventure that makes much of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz’s charms, the movie turns into a blowout monster epic when the Mummy is finally awakened by an incantation and roars through the desert.

6. 'The Thing' (1982)

Building on the campy 1951 film “The Thing From Another World,” John Carpenter had the finest moment of his post-“Halloween” career in this explosive, gruesome tale about an extraterrestrial killer discovered in the Antarctic.

Borrowing the idea (also featured in “Alien” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”) that a friend could be secretly harboring a nefarious parasite, it adapted the anti-Communist terrors of 1950s films for a new era of fear of infectious disease.

7. 'Frankenstein' (1931)

Quietly creepy, James Whale’s Boris Karloff movie was a freakout effects-fest for its time, and even today, its theme about messing with the laws of nature remains chilling.

8. 'The Fly' (1986)

David Cronenberg’s spiffy update of the 1958 film was a violent, queasy shocker that made excellent use of Jeff Goldblum’s oddball, insect-y quality and echoed both “Frankenstein” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in its warnings on scientific overreach.

9. 'Alien' (1979)

Pitched as “Jaws in Space,” Ridley Scott’s dazzler wound up being much more than a retread. Scott made a leap forward in monster design using the late H.R. Giger’s expressionistic, primordial imagination, then turned the limited area of a spaceship into claustrophobic terror.

10. 'Godzilla' (1954)

Sure, the special-effects revolution has made it hard to watch a guy in a monster suit anymore, but the breakthrough of the movie, since imitated dozens of times, was to provide a bridge between a real-world scare (radioactive contamination) and a children’s nightmare (big scaly thing that breathes fire).