It’s not very difficult for movie monsters to outshine their human co-stars in genre films. After all, it takes good writing and believable performances to make a human character relatable. Even then, all you need is a cool design to make people project all sorts of complex feelings and motivations onto fictional creatures.
That’s why it makes sense that so many filmmakers grow up idolizing the monstrous antagonists of yesteryear, only to end up humanizing them in films like Peter Jackson’s King Kong or even Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water. And in honor of Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands becoming the latest Creature Feature to focus on the monster itself, we’ve decided to come up with a list highlighting six other monster movies where we were also rooting for the monster instead of its victims!
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be considering any Creature Feature that either intentionally or unintentionally justifies the monster’s killing spree – regardless of whether or not they’re the main character of the story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own monstrous favorites if you think we missed a particularly memorable example of this trope.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. Exists (2014)
Despite being a Found Footage film covering subject matter tailor-made for this format and boasting one of the directors behind the original Blair Witch Project, Eduardo Sánchez’s Exists plays out more like an over-the-top B-movie than a realistic depiction of Bigfoot, which is actually one of the reasons why I find it so damned entertaining.
Of course, part of the film’s appeal has to do with the fact that, at least from Bigfoot’s point of view, Exists is more of a Revenge Thriller than a horror movie. While I won’t spoil any of the details in case you’ve yet to see Sánchez’s oddball return to the Found Footage genre, suffice to say that it’s easy to sympathize with Sasquatch once you know his side of the story here.
5. I Am Legend (2007)
While we’ve yet to see a definitive adaptation of Richard Matheson’s apocalyptic classic (with George Romero’s Dead films being some of the only movies to engage with the spirit of the novel despite not being direct adaptations), the Alternate Ending of 2007’s I Am Legend at least tries to acknowledge the tragic twist present in Matheson’s source material.
After all, in this superior version of the film’s climax, it eventually becomes clear that the Alpha Darkseeker is only hunting Dr. Neville because, from his perspective, the Doctor has cruelly kidnapped and experimented on his mate like a day-time Boogeyman.
If that doesn’t justify a home invasion, I don’t know what does!
4. Cold Skin (2017)
“Man is the real monster” isn’t as innovative an idea as it used to be, but that’s not to say that monster movies are incapable of surprising audiences with particularly despicable human beings facing karmic justice in the form of otherworldly creatures.
In the case of Xavier Gens’ Lovecraftian thriller Cold Skin, what really makes the story stand out is the way that our main character slowly comes to terms with his own role in provoking the nightly wrath of the sea-people. Much like the aforementioned I Am Legend, it’s hard to blame these humanoid sea monsters for simply wanting to rescue one of their own.
3. Land of the Dead (2005)
“Looks like God left the phone off the hook.”
I’ve already written a whole article about my love of Big Daddy, the true protagonist of George Romero’s Land of the Dead, but it’s impossible to discuss justified movie monsters without bringing up the lone zombie who started a revolution. Motivated by the suffering of his undead brethren, it’s hard to argue against Big Daddy’s quest for social justice when you see just how monstrous the human characters can be.
While the final invasion of Fiddler’s Green is an undeniably gruesome sequence where many of the victims had nothing to do with the suffering experienced by Big Daddy and his zombified peers, you can’t help but cheer as the undead literally and figuratively gut the system that once oppressed them.
2. Wendigo (2001)
The weirdest film on this list by a wide margin, Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo is only barely a monster movie. After all, the majority of the artsy thriller’s runtime is spent following an impressionable young child who may or may not be correct in assuming that the strange events surrounding his family are being caused by the Native American spirit of the Wendigo.
This unreliable narrator of sorts allows Fessenden to change aspects of the original Wendigo legend to better fit his story, with the naïve protagonist re-imagining the cannibalistic creature as an avenging angel after his father gets into an unfortunate “hunting accident.” That’s why it’s safe to say that this version of the Wendigo is more of a spooky hero than anything else, as the mythical creature hunts down the rowdy locals who hurt Miles and his family.
1. The Fog (1980)
Arguably John Carpenter’s most underrated film, The Fog chronicles the plight of a sleepy seaside community that gets engulfed by an otherworldly mist carrying a legion of vengeful spirits. However, if you look past the main characters’ fear and confusion as their lives are both literally and figuratively torn apart by ghosts, it’s actually very easy to sympathize with the town’s destruction.
After all, like many classic ghost stories, The Fog gives our spooky villains a tragic origin: a century before the events of the film, the founders of Antonio Bay purposefully sank a ship full of sick sailors wishing to start a leper colony, and then proceeded to steal their valuables. One hundred years later, the ghosts are simply taking back what’s theirs and exacting justified revenge on the families that originally ordered their deaths.
This doesn’t sound very fair to the descendants of the original criminals, but you can’t really apply modern moral values to 19th-century revenants!