25 best horror movie monsters

1. Brundlefly (The Fly)

If I sat down and asked you to watch a movie where Jeff Goldblum turns into a giant fly monster, you might think that we were in for a campy treat. Certainly, this film is a remake of sorts of the 1958 film The Fly, which has firmly established itself as a kind of goofy horror film.

Yet, when David Cronenberg set out to remake this movie in 1986, he had very different intentions in mind. This version of The Fly takes itself seriously, and to great effect. Jeff Goldblum, in one of his finest on-screen performances, is a tragic hero rather than a sly, winking protagonist. Don’t be fooled by this movie’s pedigree.

Goldblum plays brilliant scientist Seth Brundle, who is working on cutting-edge teleportation technology. He’s so eager to move forward in his research that he uses himself as a test subject, despite the earlier gruesome fate of a baboon. Brundle emerges from the chamber whole and thinks that everything has gone swimmingly.

Then, he begins to change. He gains incredible strength. He finds that he can crawl around on the ceiling. While that sounds like the beginning of an X-Men story, don’t be fooled, for terrible changes soon become apparent. Brundle’s body starts to deform and begins to discard his no-longer-useful human appendages. You know, dumb things like teeth or fingernails, which Brundle collects and keeps inside his bathroom cabinet.

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It turns out that a housefly entered the teleportation chamber while Brundle was conducting his fateful experiment. The teleportation device unthinkingly assumed that the two were one creature, and so combined the DNA of man and fly.

This is all a lot for Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a reporter who becomes romantically involved with Brundle. At the finale, she encounters Seth’s final form, which he has dubbed “Brundlefly”. It’s essentially a hideous combination of human and fly, with the proportions of a man and the bug-eyed grotesquerie of a fly’s face. It’s an intense and frightening end to the film.

That wraps up our 25 most horrifying horror monsters.