How do we define a “monster movie”?

I’ve been flirting with creating an index for monster movies. The problem is I don’t really know what qualifies as a “monster movie”? Are Ghosts, Demons, Dinosaurs, Sentient Aliens, Robots, Killer Animals (like Jaws) or “human monsters” like slashers (Norman Bates, Micheal Myers, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, etc), cannibals (Hannibal Lector) and deformed characters (The Phantom, Quasimodo, Elephant Man, etc)?

Monster movies have been their own separate category, usually involving creatures or giant animals. Here's Wikipedia's article on them.

Examples include Jaws, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I'd say almost all of the films made by Guillermo del Toro.

Edited by Scarecrow4774 on Feb 27th 2021 at 10:20:39 AM

Kaiju films are a sub-genre of monster movies, that's for sure.

I don't think films about murderous humans are monster movies, unless they have some sort of supernatural powers. Films about killer animals are monster movies, though.

I tend to treat movies about killer animals in a separate category, unless said animals have some fantastical or science-fiction quality to them (the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, for example). If it's just a regular animal that happens to be attacking people, then it doesn't really belong in the "monster" category IMHO. We have those in real life, after all.

So in my opinion, Jaws wouldn't exactly count, since it focuses on an ordinary great white shark. The Meg, on the other hand, would count, since it involves a prehistoric Megalodon shark inexplicably surviving to the present day in a deep-sea trench.

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Mar 18th 2021 at 12:03:23 PM