Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 8

In 2001, the Media Psychology Lab at California State in Los Angeles polled people across the United States from ages 6 to 90 in all ethnic groups to determine which movie monsters ranked as the favorites. According to the survey, the most frightening motion picture of all time for all groups was The Exorcist (1973), in which a demon possesses a young girl.

The favorite top ten monsters after The Exorcist were the following:

1 Dracula, with the majority of respondents favoring the 1931 version with Bela Lugosi as the blood-sucking count.

2 Freddy Krueger who uses razor-sharp metal talons on his fingers to attack teens in their dreams in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).

3 The Frankenstein monster, especially the original version in the Boris Karloff film (1931).

4 Godzilla, the prehistoric giant reptile that spews radioactive rays and stomps cities to rubble, who first appeared in the Japanese film Godzilla of the Monsters (1954).

5 King Kong, the giant ape from the original that features the Willis O’Brien stop-action figures (1933).

6 Chucky, the perverse, demonic murderous doll from Child’s Play (1988).

7 Michael Myers, the masked murderer who is described in the film Halloween (1978) as the essence of pure evil.

8 Hannibal Lecter, the erudite, cannibalistic serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

9 Jason, the unstoppable monster in the hockey mask from Friday the 13th (1980).

10 The multi-jawed, many-fanged extraterrestrial creature that terrorized the crew of a spaceship in Alien (1979).

Inspired by the Media Psychology Lab’s poll of movie monsters, I decided to survey a number of cryptozoologists, paranormalists, psychical researchers, Forteans, and ufologists and receive their nominations for the Top Ten List of Real-Life Monsters—and thus I planted the seed for this present book.