I’m not going to talk about a particular monster here, but about a kind of monsters.
I think that in cinema, the monsters that scare the most are the ones you don’t see (or see very little) on screen. For what ? Because it gives free rein to our imagination. And knowing that a monster is stalking us without us being able to see it gives it a kind of supernatural dimension that makes it even more frightening.
Alien
Take for example the first Alien , released in 1979.
In this film, the creature attacking the crew of the ship is rarely seen on screen, which does not prevent it from wreaking havoc. And that’s what makes her so scary. The protagonists know that she is prowling around them, that she is terribly dangerous and seeks to kill them all. But they don’t see her, except at the last moment and then it’s often too late.
Put yourself in the place of the protagonists. When you have to face an enemy, you need to see it. So the fact that he can act so easily without being seen is particularly disarming, and therefore very frightening for them. We know that this enemy is there, not far from us, but when we finally see him we are already screwed.
Jaws
Again, take here the first film, released in 1975. It’s the same thing, Spielberg made the skilful choice not to show us (to us, spectators) the shark attacking its first victims. All we see are the victims being dragged underwater, while hearing their cries of terror.
In another scene, when men are also about to be attacked by the shark near the shore, we don’t see the latter directly either, the only thing we see of him is the pontoon in wood on the surface that he tore out and clung to him.
PS: although this film is very good on a purely cinematographic level, it unfortunately gives a very bad (and especially false) image of sharks. In reality, these animals have nothing to do with the monster depicted in the film. Shark attacks on humans are relatively rare, and when they do occur, the animal almost always releases its victim instead of devouring it.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
The Basilisk is of course creepy when seen at the end of the movie, when Harry confronts him inside the Chamber of Secrets. But long before this scene, the monster was already as much, if not even more frightening.
We already knew that a killer monster was prowling Hogwarts, but we didn’t see it. You could only hear his malevolent voice, which moreover terrified me when I was a kid. And we only found the petrified bodies of his victims after his passage. But the monster, we never saw him (we, the spectators). And that was probably the scariest thing.
Seven
Monsters of this kind can also take human form, for example in Seven . The serial killer whom the cops embodied by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt hunt down is little seen until the end of the film. We only find the bodies of his murdered victims, as well as the messages he left in reference to the seven deadly sins.
The elusiveness (and even almost invisible) of this serial killer gives him a kind of supernatural dimension, as I said at the beginning, to the point that the cop played by Freeman has to remind his colleague in a bar that this killer is actually just a human being.
Conclusion
Finally, I will say that it is obviously not necessary for the monster to be invisible to the eyes of the spectators for it to be very frightening.
Take Darth Vader for example, he’s on full display from the opening scenes of the original trilogy, and yet he’s excellent. For me he is the most charismatic villain in the history of cinema.
But in a movie, the villains (or monsters) you rarely see are scary in other ways, and probably even more so than many of the monsters you often see on screen.
And I think that monsters of this kind have become rarer since the era of digital technology and computer graphics, which now make it possible to create spectacular special effects.
Indeed, before digital technology, special effects were obviously less impressive than today. The filmmakers therefore had to find tricks to make the monsters in their films very frightening. Making them inconspicuous was a good solution.
But that’s less the case today because spectacular special effects, made possible by technology, have become an almost unavoidable norm in movies, especially blockbusters. Under these conditions, it is important to often see the monster on the screen.