Tiny, Terrifying Monsters In Horror And Sci-Fi You've Never Heard Of

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While there's plenty of attention and press devoted to both giant movie monsters and human-sized ones — like Dracula and Frankenstein — it sometimes feels like the littlest creatures get the least amount of attention. It's unfortunate, because many of these bite-sized beasts are just as terrifying as their bigger relatives. Joe Dante's "Gremlins" is not only a perfect example, but also produced countless imitation pint-sized creatures, some good ("Critters," "Ghoulies"), some not ("Hobgoblins"). Made-for-TV terrors from the 1970s gave us the tiny, whispering trolls in 1973's "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" and the relentless Zuni fetish doll in "Trilogy of Terror" from 1975, while mainstream features offer a horde of little menaces, from the invasive Hammerpede in "Prometheus" to the man-eating Tooth Fairies in "Hellboy II: The Golden Army." 

These are some of the better-known examples, but a deep dive into the horror and sci-fi movie ranks will yield many more mini-monstrosities. Following is a list of little movie terrors from the past half-century, many of which may be making your acquaintance for the first time due to the relative obscurity of their origins. Don't be fooled by their appearance: as these monsters prove, tiny doesn't always translate as cute and cuddly.

And spoilers will follow.

One of the most offbeat films in the "nature runs amok" cycle of the early 1970s that followed in the wake of "Willard," "Frogs" folds the critter-attack formula into a "Ten Little Indians" scenario, with the flora and fauna of the Florida Everglades doing away with the members of a tart-tongued Southern family. A mustache-free Sam Elliott is a nature photographer chronicling the toll of pollution on the swamps; the culprit is cranky Southern patrician Ray Milland, whose celebration of his birthday and the Fourth of July with his venomous family is interrupted by Elliott and later, everything creepy and crawly around their mansion.

The cast, which includes future TV star Joan Van Ark, appears to enjoy playing variations on Rich White Privilege (with model/party guest Judy Pace offering Black perspective), but their primary role is victim to various swamp reptiles and insects. Actors do their best to look frightened while pretending to die by tarantula bite, turtle attack, snake assault, and what appears to be sentient creeping moss. Despite their prominence in the title, frogs only claim one major kill, but it's Milland, who comes to regret his anti-ecology stance when he's overrun by a tidal wave of toads.

Bats have been staples of horror movies for decades, most notably in any number of vampire films. But their participation in these films is largely relegated to atmosphere; when directors have tried to move bats to main bad guy position, like in 1979's "Nightwing" or 1999's "Bats," the results have been underwhelming.

"Chosen Survivors," a little-seen 1974 hybrid of disaster movie, science fiction and horror, folds bats into an already unusual scenario: 11 people have been chosen by computer to shelter at an underground fallout shelter after being told that nuclear war has decimated the surface world. That horror is quickly compounded when the group discovers that hordes of vampire bats have invaded their shelter. What follows is a series of standoffs between humans and bats, as well as a out-of-left-field plot twist involving the truth behind the shelter.

Director Sutton Roley -– a veteran of episodic TV — ably handles the unusual premise and a cast of capable actors, including Oscar nominees Richard Jaeckel and Jackie Cooper, who would play Perry White five years later in the '79 "Superman." He also has considerable (and creepy) footage of real bats, which compensates for scenes in which subpar optical effects are used to depict their attacks.

The challenge faced by the makers of 1976's "Squirm"? Transforming worms into terrifying movie monsters. The solution: lots and lots of worms, which descend on a small Southern town after electricity from a downed power line turns them homicidal. Writer-director Jeff Lieberman — whose credits include the unnerving cult thrillers Blue Sunshine and Satan's Little Helper – got the idea from a childhood incident in which his brother ran electricity from a toy train transformer into the ground to bring up worms for a fishing trip.

Lieberman finds a number of novel ways for worms to dispatch humans, the most gruesome of which is a sequence in which the film's heel, R.A. Dow, is attacked by sandworms that burrow into his face. Rick Baker's prosthetic effects design is shocking, but even that moment can't quite compare to the finale, in which thousands of worms appear to descend upon and engulf the town and its inhabitants.

To achieve a memorable set piece in which an entire room is filled with worms, Lieberman and his crew built a scaffolding over the floor and then filled it with canvas. Lieberman told Fangoria that after pouring thousands of worms onto the false floor, he invited a local Cub Scout troop to hunker under the canvas and "make the whole sea of worms undulate." The effect is as creepy as that sounds.

A positive review by Stephen King in the pages of Twilight Zone magazine briefly gave the low-budgeted and, until recently, little-seen creature feature "The Boogens" a spotlight back in 1981. Shot entirely in a pre-Sundance Park City, Utah, "The Boogens" concerns the re-opening of a Colorado silver mine which, at the turn of the 20^th century, had been closed after a disaster claimed the lives of 27 miners. But as two miners and their girlfriends discover, the mine excavation has also released the real source of the disaster: small, tentacled, turtle-like creatures with a taste for humans (motivated, no doubt, by their displeasure at being dubbed "boogens").

Though saddled with a clunky script by David O'Malley ("Fatal Instinct") and TV vet Jim Kouf (writing as Bob Hunt), director James L. Conway –- who later served as executive producer for "Charmed," which featured his wife, "Boogens" star Rebecca Balding, in a recurring role -– maintains a steady pace by keeping the body count high and his monsters off-screen until the final, frantic scene. That decision may have also contributed to its poor showing at the box office, which preceded a long absence from home media until a DVD release in 2012. But for devotees of '50s-era horror — which "The Boogens" resembles closely — it's enjoyable, old-fashioned monster movie fun.

Writer-director Frank Henenlotter's first movie, "Basket Case," featured what would be a charter member of the Tiny Movie Terror Hall of Fame: the profoundly disabled and certifiably psychotic congenital twin, Belial. In 1998, Henenlotter unleashed another sample-sized monster: a parasite with an appetite for human brains in his psychedelic 1988 shocker, "Brain Damage."

The slug-like parasite, named Elmer and voiced with boundless good cheer by legendary TV horror host John Zacherle, acquires its meals by getting its host — here, it's nice guy Brian (played by future soap star Rick Hearst) — hooked on an excretion that it injects into his head. The "juice," as Elmer calls it, is not only highly addictive, but also makes Brian unable to resist Elmer's demands for brains, including those of his girlfriend and brother.

Like "Basket Case," "Brain Damage" strikes a balance between the darkest sort of black humor and grindhouse-style gross-outs. It's also an surprisingly on-target metaphor for addiction — the rollercoaster of ecstatic highs and crashing lows, and that bottomless, never-ending need, perfectly summed up by Zacherle's crooning, insinuating baritone.

The Africanized bee –- also known as the "killer bee" –- has enjoyed a fearsome reputation in real life (which is rarely backed up by actual dangerous behavior) but a lousy presence at the box office. Most horror and science fiction movies centered around killer bees, which include "The Deadly Bees," "The Swarm," and "The Bees," are notorious stinkers, but there's a chance that, with "Killer Bee Invasion," the insects are in line for a comeback. 

The Chinese production, which has yet to enjoy an official American release (though a version without subtitles is available on YouTube), offers an action-packed take on killer bee movie tropes. The premise is overly familiar: scientific experiments with bees, conducted on a remote island, go spectacularly wrong and release a swarm of homicidal bees to bedevil the surviving scientists and a well-armed rescue team.

As depicted on the one-sheet, the bees look like a monstrous hybrid of bee, murder hornet, and mosquito, though in the film itself, they resemble slightly larger versions of garden-variety bees. But they definitely have the aggression attributed to killer bees, as evidenced by the film's body count.