Some people like a good slasher flick, others enjoy Satanic themes, and an annoyingly large segment of the population is still on the torture porn kick. Us? We've always been fond of monsters when it comes to horror films. Jaws, Prophecy, Q, the Host, Cloverfield, that kind of thing. Maybe it's just because we read St. George and the Dragon at a young age, but we like our bad guys huge, otherworldly, and utterly unhuman.
Even though you'd think there's an infinite range of bogeymen from folklore to choose from, Hollywood seems to have run out of good beasts of late. Hell, there are now so many horror movies starring Bigfoot being made that they have their own sub-genre; Sasquatchxplotation. Well, long ago we checked out the Encyclopedia of Legendary Creatures by Tom McGowen from the library, where it was put in the children's section by a sadist because Victor G. Ambrus's illustrations are the stuff that nightmares have nightmares about. Recently, we managed to pick the book back up on eBay, and this seemed like a fantastic time to inflict those images on you by stumping for movies starring...
The hills may have eyes, but the American forests have this freakin' thing. Bay-kok is the original Predator. The emaciated hunter stalked the Chippewa hunters, his rattling bones often being the only warning. He had two ways of stalking people. If you were lucky, he shot you with his invisible arrows or beat you to death with his club.
If you were unlucky he would come across you when you were asleep. In that case, he would cut a small hole in you and start eating your stomach. Days later you would rot to death from the inside out, becoming a bay-kok yourself.
Al? Really With One F? Yes, really. Listen, we know that he looks kind of like a cross between an Ewok and William H. Macy, but the Al is no one you want to mess with. They're Armenian in origin. Some legends have them being the first attempt by God to set Adam up with a mate, and when Adam promptly said, "No way!" the als were cast out of Eden and held a grudge against Eve and her daughters forever after.
They have brass nails and iron teeth. Their big thing was to cut out the organs of pregnant women, who always slept with a knife in the bed just in case of an Al attack. They also could cause babies to be born deformed, or steal them outright to be eaten by the al king. They combine everything that is terrifying about pregnancy and childbirth with the instinctive horror of being eaten.
