Five-Legged Iguana

AFTERTHOUGHTS (77)
NEIL’S NEW CLASSIC MONSTERS

Amidst all the “New Classic” craziness currently going on at ew.com, Neil Gaiman has a list of his choices for 10 New Classic Monsters. (And by “New Classic,” they mean anything that saw the light of day from 1983 till the present.)
Among Neil’s choices:

9. The Pale Man from Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto Del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth)

7. The Nightbreed, from Clive Barker’s Nightbreed

6. Eugene Tooms, from The X-Files episodes “Squeeze” and “Tooms”

5. Grendel, in Gaiman’s words, “The first and the best,” seen most recently in Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (which Neil co-scripted)

4. Hannibal Lecter (though Gaiman specifies the Lecter from Thomas Harris’ novels Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, “… back when he wasn’t quite human and was all the scarier for it.”)

2. Max Schreck, as portrayed by Willem Dafoe in E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire

And at the top spot…

Swamp Thing. As Neil puts it, “The 1984-87 Alan Moore/Steve Bissette/John Totleben revival. The best muck-encrusted monster in the best comics.”

You can find the entire list here.

Parting shot: Reviews of El Laberinto Del Fauno, Beowulf, and Shadow of the Vampire, can be found in the Archive.

(Images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com [El Laberinto Del Fauno and Shadow of the Vampire]; amazon.com [Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles cover art]; fredfarm.com [The X-Files]; and dccomics.com [Swamp Thing Vol. 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing cover art].)