My Favorite Monster Movies

Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen the movie. 

There's a ton of great monster movies out there, but I believe my favorite monster movie has to be Cloverfield. Director Matt Reeves and Writer Drew Goddard created a movie that is almost as much about mystery as it is about terror. The main character Robert Hawkins has received a new job in Japan and is going to work there. A group of friends are throwing him a going away party and they hear a horrible sound outside and some terrifying earthquakes. The scene unfolds like a Blair Witch clone with a shaky camera setup that is run by Roberts friend Hud who is played by TJ Miller. What transpires in the next few hours is their attempt to go back into the city and save Robert's girlfriend Lily who has been trapped in the top of a high rise. After they are able to save her, they attempt to escape from New York and the carnage of the monster. 
As stated, the movie is shrouded in mystery. You see parts of the monster but the full monster is never really revealed until the very end. You see parts of the monster, and from many different angles, but one of the best things in this movie is that you are in the middle of it with one perspective. The camera of Hud. It seems as if it was filmed with a camera that was shaking around from place to place to place. But it's not all in shaky camera, the main scenes are stationary with some amazing filmmaking. 
The back story and story around the film was a mystery that could be played in the real world. There were websites about a company called Slusho and a disturbance on a station out in the sea. There were all of these threads that tied many different things together. And it was exciting to play. It was marketing for the movie that was not basically talked about as the marketing for the movie was very quiet. It basically was a date that was released with basically no information about the date. We knew JJ Abrams was involved as a producer, and it felt like a Super 8 sequel. 
There were two monsters in the movie, a mother and a baby. And there was a story behind why the monsters were doing what they were doing. It wasn't a malicious monster. It was a monster that was frightened. 
And we really felt connected with the characters. There is a particular frightening scene with small animals who were falling off the larger animals. These animals were impregnating other humans in an aliens scenario. There were so many influences from the movies that this movie had it all. 
It will forever be one of my favorite movies in the monster genre. It was overlooked because of the way it was filmed but will be looked back at as a classic in a couple of years.