IF bigger means scarier, director Jon Turteltaub’s upcoming film The Meg should be a terrifying treat. Starring Jason Statham and Ruby Rose, the film sees a 70-foot shark ruin a few holidays by feasting on helpless surfers and beachgoers.
To mark the release of this colossal shark flick, Close-up Culture have picked ten of our favourite scarily sized creatures from film history.
10) Shelob
FINDING a two-inch spider in the bathroom can be scary enough, let alone the large creature that stalks Frodo in Peter Jackson’s 2003 fantasy film The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Shelob’s stealthy scurrying and drooling fluids only add to the horror of this nightmarishly oversized spider.
9) Cyclops
MUCH of Peter Jackson’s creature work has been inspired by one of the greats of cinema – Ray Harryhausen. The master of special effects created this hideously ugly cyclops for Nathan H Juran’s 1958 film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
8) Allosaurus
WILLIS O’Brien, another pioneer of early film special effects, helped bring Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 book to life for the 1925 film The Lost World. The Allosaurus is a menace for both humans and dinosaurs in the film.
7) Jabba’s Rancor
IN Return of the Jedi (1983), one of Luke Skywalker’s first big hurdles is to slay Jabba The Hutt’s slobbering monster the Rancor.
6) Rhedosaurus
PRECEDING Godzilla by 16 months, the Rhedosaurus from Eugène Lourié’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) was cinema’s first atomic monster. Another creation of Harryhausen’s visionary stop-motion animation, this reawakened prehistoric creature causes havoc in New York City.
5) Hydra
IN what Tom Hanks once called the greatest film of all time, another of Harryhausen’s giant creature creations provided iconic cinematic sequences. The multi-headed Hydra is the perfect daunting final foe for our hero in 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts.
4) T-Rex
68 YEARS after O’Brien brought the Allosaurus to the big-screen, Steven Spielberg and his team wowed audiences with the roaring arrival of the T-Rex. Thanks to incredibly crafted scenes and special effects that hold up to this day, Jurassic Park’s T-Rex remains one of cinema’s scariest creatures.
3) Godzilla
THERE is a reason we still frequently see Godzilla on the big-screen some 64 years after he first debuted. This monstrous creature still connects with audiences, no matter how many times he has scared them.
2) King Kong
JUST like his atomic sea monster friend, King Kong is a character that remains at the forefront of the cinematic consciousness – especially when it comes to scarily sized creatures. The biggest triumph of Willis O’Brien’s legendary career, the King Kong film in 1933 is still considered one of the greatest films of all-time.
1) Jaws
SPIELBERG’S robotic shark kept people out of the water and helped revolutionise the film industry. Jaws (1975) has inspired a long list of giant shark films, including Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows (2016) and The Meg.