Here's my list of Giant Monster (and Kaiju) movies because, well... you've been just too lazy to make your own. And who else was gonna do it, huh? Because there's so many titles, I've broken the list into decades. Here's the first installment.
Now there is naturally some debate over how "big" is considered giant. Does 10 feet tall qualify? How about 100 feet? Should we use the metric system? And where exactly do we measure? Head to tail or how tall it stands? What if it doesn't stand at all, but swims? And what if this monster is a huge beautiful woman? Or perhaps a sentient breakfast cereal? If so, is it still a monster? These are the questions that keep scientists up late at night. Well, the dedicated ones anyway.
So in the interest of providing a more complete list, and not getting into an argument over silly minutiae of what "exactly" constitutes a GIANT MONSTER MOVIE (don't we all hate it when that happens), I've decided to be more inclusive. Namely, to include anything that's kinda large, sorta menacing, and well... appears in a movie. Such as: deadly over-sized animals (whales, sharks, radiated spiders and ants, etc.), ancient monstrous creatures (dinosaurs, etc.), huge mythical beasts (dragons, minatons, etc.), legendary cryptids (Bigfoot, sea monsters, etc.) large terrifying aliens, super-giant people (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Big Man Japan), enormous violent robots (Transformers), and in one case gigantic interminable growing crystals (The Monolith Monsters), ... and of course food. That's right. Food that swallows you! (Such as in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs). And OF COURSE Godzilla, Gamera, Mothra and all your Toho/Daiei favorites are here too.
I purposely left out some movies such as all of Universal Studio's monsters like Frankenstein, Wolfman, creature from the Black Lagoon, and stuff like Kujo (just a dog) and Hitchcock's Birds (too small) and Speilberg's Duel, 1977's The Car, Christine, and Maximum Overdrive because vehicles are not really monsters in the sense I'm using here. (Although I have included the Transformers films because they are also GIANT monstrous robots that smash stuff.) I also did not include Honey, I Shrunk/Blew Up the Kids because in Part One the kids are small (the bugs aren't enlarged) and the giant toddler in the sequel is not really meant to be a true monster. It's merely a comedic plot device and visual gag. I also left out stuff like The Three Worlds of Gulliver and Gulliver's Travels. Yes the guy is huge but he's certainly not a monster. I'm also NOT including hand-drawn animated films like The Iron Giant, Akira, the Fantasia films, Dinosaur, Superman: The Arctic Giant, We're Back, Allegro Non Troppo, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Jack and the Beanstalk, Princess Mononoke, etc. etc. otherwise this list would be littered with a dozen Land Before Time entries. And no Oogie Boogie man from A Nightmare Before Christmas. For this list, we'll stick to live-action films and a handful of CG movies (since the monsters these days are usually rendered via computer graphics anyway).
French "cinemagician" Georges Méliès created many incredible visual tricks in his pioneering short films of the late 1890s and early 1900s. One such film, released in 1912 featured a "Frost Giant" realized through the manipulation of a large puppet. In 1914 Winsor McCay had a popular live vaudeville-style act whereby he stood in front of a movie screen and "interacted" with a projected film of his cute animated character, Gertie, the Dinosaur. I'm including it in this list as it's probably the FIRST appearance of a huge animal (albeit cartoonish) in cinematic history.
But perhaps the very first live-action dinosaur film was Brute Force, released in 1914. The film was silent and only lasted 32 minutes, but audiences were amazed and terrified by the images of moving beasts on screen. The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy and The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (also short silent films) soon followed. They are considered animator Willis O'Brien's test films for his next opus. His ground-breaking stop-motion animation work on the 1925 classic, The Lost World (generally credited as the first real full-length giant monster/dinosaur film), was in turn practice for his crowning achievement, the highly influential box office smash King Kong released in 1933. That film set the standard for monster movies for decades.
And the world... and certainly the world of cinema, hasn't been the same since. Unleash the BEASTS!
I'm sure I've overlooked some, so feel free to make suggestions at the bottom in the "comments area" and maybe I can add to the list.
The Early Years
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| Conquest of the Pole (short, 1912)
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| Gertie the Dinosaur (short, 1914)
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| Brute Force (short, 1914)
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| The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915)
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| The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918)
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| The Three Ages (1923)
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| Siegfried (1924)
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| The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
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| The Lost World (1925)
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| King Kong (1933)
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| Wasei Kingu Kongu (short, 1933)
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| Son of Kong (1933)
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| The Secret of the Loch (1934) |
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| King Kong Appears in Edo (1938)
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| The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
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| One Million B.C. (1940)
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| Mighty Joe Young (1948)
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| Unknown Island (1948)
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The 1950s
Ooops, almost forgot to include these:
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| The Golem (1920) |
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| Gorilla at Large (1954) |
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This Island Earth (1955)
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| Moby Dick (1956) |
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| The Manster (1959) |
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| The Birth of Japan (1959) |
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