I am a massive fan of the 'Creature Feature' style of horror movies. What I mean are films which pit humans against an animal antagonist. While these films can be poorly made and full of terrible CGI, I appreciate the simplicity of them. No need for complicated back stories, just a nonstop rampage.
For the purposes of this list, werewolf movies and films featuring dinosaurs will not be counted.
10. Snakes on a Plane
2006 New Line Cinema
Snakes on a Plane is a reasonably well known film, if only for Samuel L. Jackson's notorious line. It centres around a witness being flown to Los Angeles to testify against a mob boss, who decides the best way to get rid of said witness is to... put a bunch of snakes on a plane. The mob boss plot is fairly secondary to the events, basically just an excuse to loose snakes on hapless passengers. However it's also a decent creature feature, combining confined spaces with an animal that a lot of people are uncomfortable around. The snakes themselves were done with a combination of real snakes (harmless lookalikes for the more venomous counterparts), CGI for the strike scenes and animatronics. While the CGI snakes are fairly distinctive due to 2000s limitations, they don't detract from the film over all.
9. Shark Night 3D
2011 Incentive Filmed Entertainment
Shark Night follows a group of college students who take a trip to a lakehouse, only to fall victim to the plots of a pair of rednecks who intend to cash in on the Discovery Channel's shark week by making shark based snuff films. This film is basically an excuse for young actresses to run around in bikinis with occasional blood and gore. The characters themselves are fairly interchangeable but what I appreciate about this film is that it uses a variety of sharks. All of the sharks filmed were animatronic, the film using two versions for each type - a swimmer and an attacker. A lot of shark films rely on the Great White as an easy bad guy, but here the viewer gets to see tiger sharks, cookie-cutter sharks, hammerheads.
8. The Breed
2006 Film Afrika Worldwide
The Breed is another 2006 film, focused on another group of college students on holiday, this time on a small island, who are terrorised by a pack of dogs. This one tries a bit harder with the plot, adding genetic engineering and an abandoned military base into what is otherwise a fairly paint by numbers story. It's main issue is that it never really expands on these elements fully, which can lead to rather random moments and discarded subplots. This film used twenty nine different dogs for shooting and all the actors did dog training before filming started.
7. Rogue
2007 Dimension Films
Rogue is an Australian giant crocodile film about a group of tourists on a river cruise in Kakadu National Park. After their boat is destroyed, they find themselves stranded on a tidal island at the mercy of the hungry predator. It's based on a real saltwater crocodile called Sweetheart who used to attack boats in the 1970s. It's an enjoyable film with a mixture of characters and it employs similar tactics as Jaws, preferring to keep the crocodile hidden for much of the film. Unfortunately when it does actually appear it's rather disappointing. The ticking clock element of the film heightens the excitement as the tourists know that the small sanctuary they've found will disappear within hours.
6. Jaws
1975 Universal Pictures
Jaws is a film that needs no introduction. It is well known as one of the original creature features, as well as the first summer blockbuster. The classic soundtrack, the ominous shots from below all combine to make a tense experience. While much of this was due to mechanical difficulties with their animatronic shark, Bruce, I think everyone can agree it worked out for the best. The film also triggered hysteria in some areas with incidents in California and Florida where beachgoers panicked at what they thought were sharks in the water (in actuality,the incidents were caused by dolphins and a sperm whale respectively).
5. Open Water
2003 Lions Gate Films
Open Water is another shark film, this one based on true events. It follows a couple who are left behind by mistake during a scuba diving tour. It ranks higher than Jaws, simply because while Jaws managed to work around its animatronic issues, the shots of the animatronic shark are still fairly clunky. Open Water used no special effects for its shark scenes, instead using live Californian Reef Sharks and having its actors film in the shark infested waters. The behaviour is less exaggerated than the relentless hunters of other shark films who seem to have an almost malicious nature. While it only focuses on two people so it doesn't have as large a body count as some shark films, it allows for a more character driven experience.
4. Black Sheep
2006 New Zealand Film Commission
Black Sheep is a New Zealand film and one of the sillier entries on this list. It's a horror comedy featuring a fair amount of gore. A young man with ovinophobia returns to his childhood home, a sheep farm, to find that his brother has transformed the gentle vegetarians into aggressive zombie-esque mutants. It's an incredibly stupid film but it's funny and if you can get past the premise of killer sheep (along with the various sheep jokes) it can make a pleasant change from the overdone creature features that typically rely on a very narrow range of animals. It employs a lot of practical creature and make up effects, put together by Weta Workshop who did the effects for the Lord of the Ring films.
3. Arachnophobia
1990 Hollywood Pictures
This film focuses on a stowaway Venezuelan spider who ends up in the United States and breeds with the local spiders, producing a plague of venomous arachnids. A lot of people can understand the fear factor of this film. I am not a fan of spiders and there were moments of this film that made my skin crawl (including a particularly nasty scene involving a corpse and spider in a nose). Two types of spiders were used for filming, harmless Avondales for smaller spiders and a type of bird eating tarantula that was nicknamed Big Bob by crew. 300 of the Avondales were shipped to the US for filming (and that was just the initial batch) and due to New Zealand immigration rules, they weren't allowed back after shooting. While I may not like spiders, i do appreciate that the safety of the creatures was a priority for the crew and that all dead spiders had died of natural causes (and not, say, by someone throwing a book on them)
2. Willard
2003 New Line Cinema
Willard is one of my favourite creature features. There are actually two versions of this film, both based on the 1968 novel Ratman's Notebooks, as well as a sequel to the 1971 version. All incarnations of the story follow a somewhat awkward man (unnamed in the book) who forms a bond with the rats living in his basement, eventually training them to commit crimes on his behalf. I've only seen the 2003 version which has a good mixture of humour, mild gore and Crispin Glover does a great job of making the titular Willard both
sympathetic and creepy. Over five hundred rats were used to film the 2003 incarnation, who were all trained to perform different actions, along with a giant Gambian Pouched Rat to play the antagonistic Ben. The crew had to ink numbers onto the rats' tails to keep them organised.
1. Cujo
1983 Sunn Classic Pictures
Cujo is another more well known film. Based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, it's about a Saint Bernard who goes crazy after being infected with rabies. It's a very simple premise and most of the action is centred on a woman trapped in her broken car with her son at the mercy of the dog. They used five different St Bernards for the film, as well as a mechanical dog head, a man in a dog suit and a rottweiler (used because they couldn't get the St Bernards to look mean enough). I love this film and the book its based on. It's interesting from a production standpoint, the methods used to create the attack scenes and the difficulties they had with the friendly dogs are both amusing and engaging to read about. From a film standpoint, the simple terror of a once friendly pet turning savage and the anguish of the mother trying to protect her son make it an engaging horror.
Honourable Mention - White Dog
This film is another dog attack film however I don't think it really falls into the creature feature subgenre. Instead, it's an exploration of racism more focused on the characters around the titular dog than the attacks themselves. It's based on true events and makes for an incredibly interesting watch that I do really recommend.
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