Film Chronicle: A Quiet Place dir. by John Krasinski, and: The Shape of Water dir. by Guillermo del Toro, and: The Creature from the Black Lagoon dir. by Jack Arnold, and: Godzilla dir. by Ishiro Honda, and: The Day of the Triffids dir. by Ken Hannam, and: Cat People dir. by Jacques Tourneur, and: Cat People dir. by Paul Schrader, and: The Hunchback of Notre Dame dir. by Wallace Worsley, and: The Hunchback of Notre Dame dir. by William Dieterle, and: Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam dir. by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, and: Through a Glass Darkly dir. by Ingmar Bergman (review)

Creature features are horror films with bestial, gigantic, alien, arthropod-like, fanged, winged, tentacled, finned, slime-ejecting, radiation-altered, or otherwise terrifying antagonists projected outward from our nightmares onto the big screen, and they have been having a good few years at the box office—monster years, as Variety magazine would doubtlessly put it. Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, from 2017, about a creature from the Amazon gifted with miraculous powers for good and evil, earned a lot of festival prizes and four Academy Awards, including those for Best Picture and Best Director, while two blockbuster productions of 2017, Jordan Vogt-Roberts's Kong: Skull Island and Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant, though not critical triumphs and not films I particularly recommend, made hundreds of millions of dollars each, sustaining the popularity of the mega-franchises to which they belong. Then there is the remarkably successful film I have touched on previously in these pages, A Quiet Place, from 2018, directed and co-written by John Krasinski, with its visually challenged but acutely hearing (and appallingly nasty) creatures arrived on earth to terrorize mankind, especially mankind represented by a likable American farm family, who must remain quiet if they are not to be hunted down and killed.

A Quiet Place and The Shape of Water are interestingly different. To begin with the simpler of the two, Krasinski's film honors all the conventions of the genre. It moves briskly and excitingly along (the total running time is 90 minutes); it supplies just enough backstory to account for the arrival of the creatures; it provides sympathetic human characters with whom we instantly identify; it is fundamentally about bestial cunning versus human resourcefulness; and in the end it allows a certain triumph to that resourcefulness. Krasinski plays the husband in the family under siege, Emily Blunt his wife, who in a time-honored trope of the genre—one calculated to ratchet up the anxiety level as much as possible—is pregnant for a long stretch of the film. The baby, once born, cries, as babies do, and part of the family's resourcefulness involves finding ways to muffle the cries so that they do not attract bestial attention. A Quiet Place handles all these conventions with assurance, plus the film techniques appropriate to them. Though not especially original, the camera work brings attention to exactly the right details (watch for a close-up on a nail sticking up from a wooden stair step), while the film's necessarily muted soundtrack is superbly conceived and executed. So are the special effects rendering its half-spidery, half-humanoid creatures visible; first they seem all whorled ears, then all rapacious mandibles. Nevertheless I liked best...