But they are--oh boy, are they ever. Make-up effects artist Rob Bottin has rightfully entered the pantheon for his work here, some of the most exuberantly imaginative and grotesque horror effects in the history of film. Taking cues from sources like Salvador Dali ("The Great Masturbator"), Francis Bacon ("Study for Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion"), David Cronenberg (pick a film, any film), and of course the creature-features of yore, Bottin creates images so bizarre, so utterly unique in their own logic of absorption, disintegration, and transformation, that they simply must be seen to be believed. The very first time we see them in action--it's one of those cases where the filmmakers make sure you see something coming, but not that--the effect is so overwhelming in its out-of-nowhere explosion of viscerality that we the audience end up being as shocked as the characters. From that moment the film has us, and makes the characters' every ounce of fear, mistrust, and terror our own.

But these spectacular rendings and transformations wouldn't work if Carpenter didn't bother to ground them in some sense of the real. So laced throughout the film are small, relatable moments of pain and discomfort--surgical stitching, extreme cold, cut fingers, heart troubles, putting down sick dogs, and so forth. Because of this, the gargantuan, explosive moments--pain and discomfort writ large--are more powerful, since they've been seen in scale.

A similar bait-and-switch is visible in a more recent, often overlooked genre effort--2001's Jeepers Creepers. Directed by Victor Salva (a man who, unfortunately, has firsthand experience with monsterdom--he's a convicted sex offender; this does affect a lot of people's decision as to whether or not to see the film), this was another one of those sight-unseen recommendations I've been fortunate enough to receive, this time from Clive Barker himself. "Just a little movie made for nothing that does something genuinely scary and weird," he says, and he's right.

The movie stars Gina Phillips and Justin Long as a bickering brother and sister whose long roadtrip home from college through countryside backroads--well, I imagine you can guess that things don't go well from there, and you know what? That's all I'm saying, because I think this film is best seen with the same amount of foreknowledge I myself had when I first saw it: none.