When “Crawl” opens in theaters this week, Alexandre Aja’s latest film promises to do for alligators what other offbeat horror movies have done for such wacky villains as tires, worms, and tigers. While the monster movie subgenre has long enjoyed scaring up audiences with traditional baddies like zombies, werewolves, vampires, even alien beings and large-scale kaiju, it’s also played home to a number of films that capture the terror of some unexpected evildoers.
From hurricane-crazed gators in “Crawl” to a strikingly similar hurricane-crazed tiger in “Burning Bright,” giant worms in “Tremors” to a giant formaldehyde-fed sewer monster in “The Host,” and even man-made freaks in “The Fly” and “Splice,” monsters don’t only spring from the ill-fated Dark Universe or the wide world of Godzilla and King Kong.
Sometimes, they’re swimming in your flooded house, popping out of your desert dirt, and even rolling along the highway on rubber edges. They’re monsters, but they’re not the kind that Hollywood has always embraced. Here are eight more of them.
