The films

WATCHobscure

Night of the Demon

Bigfoot tears a man's genitals off. That is the scene, that is the film, that is why it was prosecuted.

WATCHcult

The Werewolf and the Yeti

Paul Naschy in the Himalayas. On the list almost certainly because somebody read the title and stopped.

WATCHcult

Night of the Bloody Apes

A luchadora, a heart transplant from a gorilla, and real open-heart surgery footage spliced in.

WATCHcult

Contamination

An Alien knock-off with exploding chests and a Goblin score doing heavy lifting throughout.

WATCHcult

Q: The Winged Serpent

An Aztec god nests atop the Chrysler Building and eats sunbathers, and Michael Moriarty is extraordinary.

WATCHcult

Matango

Toho's mushroom people, made by the Godzilla team, and it is far bleaker than its reputation.

WATCHcult

No One Will Save You

A woman alone in a farmhouse fends off an alien home invasion, with almost no dialogue in the entire film.

WATCHcult

Sting

A girl raises a spider that fell from space in a New York apartment block, and it grows.

WATCHcult

The Wretched

A teenager suspects the woman next door is a witch wearing the neighbours' skins. A word-of-mouth streaming hit.

WATCHcult

Xtro

A British alien-abduction film so incoherent and disturbing it has never been fully explained, by anyone, including its director.

WATCHknown

Phase IV

Saul Bass's only feature. The ants are shot like a nature documentary and it is deeply strange.

WATCHknown

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

The real Santa Claus is a horned thing frozen in a Finnish mountain, and a drilling company has found it.

WATCHknown

The Funhouse

Hooper on a real budget with Rick Baker's monster. Nowhere near nasty enough to be on this list.

WATCHknown

Prophecy

Mercury poisoning produces a mutant bear in the Maine woods, and it is angrier about logging than most activists.

WATCHknown

Cuckoo

A German alpine resort, Hunter Schafer, and Dan Stevens doing an accent. Deeply strange.

WATCHknown

Alligator

A baby alligator flushed down a toilet grows huge on discarded lab animals in the sewers. John Sayles wrote it and it is a delight.

WATCHknown

Overlord

Nazi zombies with a real budget and a unusually good first act. Better than the premise deserves.

WATCHknown

Lamb

Icelandic, extremely slow, and entirely dependent on you accepting the thing in the second act.

WATCHknown

Troll Hunter

Norwegian students follow a poacher who turns out to hunt state-secret trolls. Deadpan and enormous.

WATCHknown

Border

A Swedish customs officer who can smell guilt meets a man who smells like nothing she recognises.

WATCHknown

Cat People

Val Lewton was told to make a film from a title and a poster. He made one about a woman afraid of her own desire.

WATCHknown

Phenomena

Jennifer Connelly communicates with insects at a Swiss boarding school, and there is a chimpanzee with a razor.

WATCHknown

Piranha

Joe Dante's Jaws cash-in, written by John Sayles, and it is far smarter and funnier than it needed to be.

WATCHknown

Godzilla Minus One

Seventy years on, the series returns to what it was for: the war, the guilt, and the cost.

WATCHcanon

Tremors

The monster has rules and the film obeys them. A perfectly built piece of engineering.

WATCHcanon

Creature from the Black Lagoon

The last great Universal monster, and a suit design nobody has improved on in seventy years.

WATCHcanon

The Host

Opens with a real incident: formaldehyde poured into the Han river in 2000. Funny, which nothing else here manages.

WATCHcanon

Cocaine Bear

A black bear ingests a fortune in dropped cocaine and goes on a rampage. Loosely, very loosely, based on a true event.

WATCHcanon

M3GAN

A robotics engineer builds an AI doll to parent her orphaned niece, and the doll takes the job seriously.

WATCHcanon

Nope

Peele's best-looking film. About spectacle, and about what happens to the people who handle the animals.

WATCHcanon

The Descent

Six women, an uncharted cave, and a group dynamic already poisoned before anything goes wrong.

WATCHcanon

Alien: Romulus

Fede Alvarez taking the franchise back to basics: young colonists, a derelict station, and one very bad idea.

WATCHcanon

Christine

Carpenter directing King's killer car in the same year he made almost nothing else work.

WATCHcanon

Cloverfield

A monster attacks New York, filmed on a camcorder from street level, and the marketing invented a genre of mystery.

WATCHcanon

The Fly

Under the effects it is a film about watching someone you love get a terminal illness, and Goldblum plays it that way.

WATCHcanon

A Quiet Place

A high-concept gimmick executed with real discipline. The nail on the stair is the whole film.