The Descent (2005)

If there is any consistent thread you can find throughout the most well-regarded monster movies that premiered after the new millennium, it’s an attempt to bring a classical sense of economy and imagination to a subgenre that had been overtaken by bloat and complacency. While the possibilities of digital filmmaking are utilized, special effects are kept practical, both in the sense of being generally handmade and in that they are cost-efficient and serve a purpose other than showcasing soon-to-be-outdated CGI rigs—that also means budgets are low enough that actual risks can be taken in the subject matter and tone. Neil Marshall’s The Descent is generally held up as one of the best examples of that: here is a horror film based not on impossible effects or haunted house thrills, but a general ratcheting of dread to the point of physical discomfort, one that builds from a grounded place and then introduces its monsters as a form of escalation. This is a return to some of the most unsparing horror of the seventies and eighties, while adding some of its own stylistic touches that mark it as part of a growing movement of bold experiments from genre experts.

Tremors (1990)

Big Hollywood studios have a hot-and-cold relationship with monster movies—they’ll cede that territory to B-movie productions for years, or decades, at a time, and then start investing some bigger budgets into a select few before dropping the whole thing again. The nineties was one of those periods with a minor streak of classic-style creature features—”classic-style” in the sense that they’re more or less following the structures that were laid down in the fifties. Their special effects may be more sophisticated, the dialogue less stiff and expository, and the violence more explicit, but in the end it’s still a movie where a group of people have to deal with the sudden appearance of a monster or monsters, and the expected plot beats are barely changed, even after forty years.

Tremors, which could be considered the first in that wave, wasn’t a significant success in its original release, and likely accrued its cult following through home video and TV airings, leading it to become a direct-to-video franchise with a surprising amount of longevity (as in, it’s most recent sequel came out in 2020)—it even had a short-lived TV show, and a more recent series attempt that wasn’t picked up. Technically, it’s also an end-of-the-eighties movie that was delayed into the dead early months of 1990, just like Nightbreed, making it something of a liminal artifact. Looking at it now, you can see how it heralds some of the ways the subsequent decade of monster movies attempted to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, some minor tweaks in presentation likely meant to pull in new audiences—while Tremors and what followed tended to resemble the old school entries in basic plotting, they change just enough of the surface details to make themselves feel contemporary, with a particular emphasis on comedy.