The Best Creature Feature Movies List Of 21st Century So Far

From the horrifying to the hilarious and everything in between, swipe up for the best creature feature movies list as of 2021.

There’s nothing like a creature feature movies list to get your heart racing, a perfect blend of adrenaline-fueled thrills and stomach-churning scares that often feels like the cinematic equivalent of a death-defying rollercoaster ride. At the same time, creature feature movies have long been the proud home of allegorical storytelling; gorgeously designed stand-ins for the real-life fears that plague and control us, and in the film’s below you’ll see an especially interesting assemblage of both modern panic and technology-age terrors, born specifically out the era in which they were created, and more universal, primal fears, timeless reminders of the dark corners of the human mind. You’ll also see some plain old downright fun monster mashes.

Godzilla vs. Kong

Let’s start the list with new creature feature movies from Legendary Pictures. If you want to watch monsters beat each other up? You’ve come to the right place. The movie is laced with a great story and buildup and the climax battle between the monsters is amazing. The plot merely connects rounds 1, 2, and 3 of Godzilla and Kong’s head-to-head, and you might be pleased to note that director Adam Wingard gives you a definitive winner.

Pacific Rim

Guillermo Del Toro proves himself a master of monsters once again with his epic Kaiju vs. Mecha spectacle-fest, Pacific Rim. Set during a war between mankind and a monstrous race from another dimension, the world is ravaged and the humans turn to obsolete Jaeger technology as a last line defense after a foolishly constructed wall fails entirely to keep the threat at bay.

King Kong – one of the best creature feature movies on Netflix

Giant ape meets girl. Giant ape loses girl. Giant ape goes ballistic and escorts girl to the top of New York’s tallest skyscraper. It’s a familiar love story that gets a few new twists—including a dose of tenderness—in Peter Jackson’s rollicking, three-hour extravaganza, King Kong. Inspired by the 1933 original (the movie that lit a filmmaking fire in Jackson’s belly at age 9, as opposed to the 1976 update that didn’t ignite much of anything), the story opens with snapshots of Depression-era New York City. Shantytowns. Soup lines. Vaudeville shows. In fact, that’s where we find lovely company player Ann Darrow givin’ ’em the ol’ razzle-dazzle in a theater about to succumb to hard times.

Alien

Next to an immortal monument of creature feature movies 1970s, we have Alien. At its most fundamental level, “Alien” is a movie about things that can jump out of the dark and kill you.  With screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Ridley Scott created an essay on the hell of other people, the vulnerability of our bodies, and the idea of space as a limitless new extension of human paranoia. Alien also functions as a nightmare parody of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which had happened just 10 years previously, and the biological weapons industry.

Strange Invaders

An homage to the sci-fi horror of the ’50s, Strange Invaders sees a college professor (Paul Le Mat) set off on a search for his ex-wife (Diana Scarwid), whom he learns disappeared while attending her mother’s funeral. It leads him to the town of Canterville, an idyllic place seemingly trapped in 1958. That’s because aliens invaded in 1958 and took over, using the human residents as hosts. It’s a satire that plays off of other classics, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and favors quiet mystery. In other words, it’s not your average creature feature, and the alien reveal is effective.

It Follows

True, the monster that stalks Jay and her friends takes on a variety of grotesque forms and isn’t any one thing, but this is precisely what makes it so terrifying. What follows and haunts isn’t just something sinister and deadly, it’s the past. We might try and suppress our darkest secrets, but grief and trauma persist and force us to reconcile what we don’t want to face. “It Follows” has been described as everything from an allegory on sexual abuse to a commentary on STIs, but it also exposes the monsters we bury deep inside, which constantly threaten to devour and upset everything and everyone we touch

The Mist

The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile director Frank Darabont proves his grasp of Stephen King’s sensibilities once again, soaking up all the drive-in, B-movie ambiance of King’s novella and transposing it to the screen with a prestige drama sheen and gut-punch ending for the ages. It’s a brutally angry, borderline misanthropic film that ends with the most utterly hopeless reminder to never give up hope you’ve ever seen. But that’s not why we’re here, we’re here for the monsters. Designed by the inimitable Berni Wright, The Mist’s creature creations run the gamut of insectoid and biological terrors, from tentacled beasties to the Impossibly Tall Monster, there’s a Harryhausen-era flair to the extra-dimensional creepy-crawlies that helps them endure, even if the low-budget hampered the digital effects a bit. And as for the men who prove themselves to be monsters in the end, well, that character drama is fantastically satisfying as well.

Attack the Block

The directorial debut from Joe Cornish is a ballistic B-movie creature feature that’s as vibrant and energetic as it gets. Set in a dodgy South London neighborhood, Attack the Block pits a team of teenage criminals in the making against “big alien gorilla wolf motherfuckers,” and follows their adrenaline-fueled fight for survival that follows.

A Quiet Place

John Krasinski sure pulled off a heck of a surprise with his third directorial effort, A Quiet Place. A self-confessed non-horror fan, Krasinski channeled an intensely emotional tale of family survival through the creature feature genre and came up with one of the tightest, most compelling monster movies in recent memory. Running a trim 90 minutes, A Quiet Place follows the Abbott family through a post-apocalyptic earth where armored monsters hunt by sound. That means no talking, no sudden movements, and an entirely new way of living where the threat of sudden death looms over every moment. Krasinski makes the most of the brilliant concept, creating a soundscape of silence that grabs the audience and drags them into the action, demanding silent stillness and gluing you to your seat.

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