Everyone’s heard of history’s greatest monsters, but this All Hallows Eve, I recommend watching the monsters come to life on screen. Below are the five best monster movies ever made, according to the Rolling Stone (2013).

No. 1: “Godzilla” (1954)

The original “Godzilla” was a black-and-white film with special effects that are impressive for the era, but also has a certain seriousness that makes it more memorable than the plethora of rubbery monster face-offs that have spawned from it.

Godzilla (“Gojira” in Japanese) is a relic of the era of the dinosaurs who awakens from 65 million years of lying low at the presence of radiation. Sure, it doesn’t seem very plausible, but to an American movie-goer who has been subjected to some pretty terrible science across the years, this really doesn’t stand out as too much of a stretch. In fact, the black-and-white format makes the scientific charts look less cheesy then they would if they were done up in modern graphics.

The radiation is an important point of context because the film is set less than 10 years after the end of World War II. Godzilla is awakened and fed by the radiation from the atomic bombs, but he also becomes a destructive force in his own right, equal to any bomb.

The military is called in, but the film doesn’t say explicitly whether they are American occupation troops or Japan’s new Self-Defense Forces. It hardly matters, since as in all monster movies, conventional forces are useless. Instead the reptilian invader is brought low by a new scientific invention, a tablet that when deployed in water destroys all life in the vicinity. It’s an ironic twist that a creature summoned by one weapon of mass destruction can only be defeated by another.

A movie like this could seem dated, but it’s really appropriate to modern Japan, recovering from the Fukushima disaster.

No. 2: “King Kong” (1933)

What scene is more pressed into Americana than the image of a giant gorilla atop the Empire State Building, clutching a screaming Fay Wray in his hand as biplanes circle around? A classic image to be sure, but the question one might be inclined to ask is: Can this ’30s version of “King Kong” be dethroned? Surely, with modern special effects, one could imagine a more convincing ape. After all, it’s happened before that a canonical movie has been replaced. For example, Charlton Heston in “Ben-Hur” displaced an earlier black-and-white movie in the collective consciousness.

But “King Kong” has proven to have staying power. Peter Jackson, fresh from making the “Lord of the Rings,” had the perfect shot in 2005. And certainly Andy Serkis’ motion-capture Kong looked more realistic than the original clunky puppet. It’s not just Kong, there are a myriad of monsters in the new movie, but watching the 500th computer-generated giant insect before reaching the title character can get surprisingly tiring.

The 2005 film failed to improve on other aspects as well; for instance, its treatment of the Skull Islanders. You’d think it wouldn’t be hard to beat a 1930s movie for cultural sensitivity, but the islanders are reduced from feather-wearing tribesmen to completely dehumanized zombies. You could attribute this to Jackson’s background in fantasy, but even LOTR’s orcs aren’t that inhuman. If you gave an orc a chocolate bar, it would probably eat it, not bat it away with an empty look as one native girl does. The original movie can rely on the fact that it is a product of its age.

So why does the “King Kong” image stay so fresh but update so poorly? For one thing it’s a movie about a movie, about the relentless pursuit of success and its devastating consequences. The director, Merian C. Cooper, had a fascinating life as a bomber pilot in the Polish-Soviet War that rivals that of his fictional counterpart. It makes it harder to remake a movie that’s so much about its own making.

But more deeply, the 1933 film is anchored to an era. It is a world at the edge of the present, a time of airplanes, electric lights and skyscrapers, but it is still a time of undiscovered islands and uncontacted peoples, when the edge of the map still reads, “Here there be monsters.”

No. 3: “Frankenstein” (1931)

Remember the movie scene where the book-smart and sensitive but clueless Dr. Frankenstein, working alone in his laboratory, makes a creature and then abandons it for no apparent reason? Where the creature, after many unsuccessful attempts to reason, threatens to kill the doctor’s future wife (who is also his cousin or stepsister)? And where the doctor leaves his wife alone on their wedding night, condemning her to death in a moment of supreme stupidity? No, neither do I, because “Frankenstein” the movie did not follow the plot of Mary Shelly’s novel of the same name.

Instead, we get lightening storms and hunchbacked assistants named Igor, creatures with bolts out of the sides of their heads, angry mobs armed with pitchforks and torches and all the other trappings of future depictions of the mad scientist.

The culture has certainly gained something from this — if nothing else, the possibility for infinite sequels and spoofs. The question is whether we lost something as well.

Whether a good movie could have been made honestly following the book is not apparent. I’ve never seen one, but it might be possible. But it may be that the 1931 film has forever fixed all future movie Frankensteins as something totally distinct from the book version, and thus is less an adaptation than a separate creation.

One thing the book and movie have in common is the ambiguity in the idea of monster. Who is worse: the Creature, a reanimated being forced to follow the path laid for it in undeath; or the creator, Dr. Frankenstein, who made it and laid that path? When the monster ceases to be some ancient being and becomes instead a modern creation, a work of human hands, somebody has to take responsibility.

No. 4: “The Wolf Man” (1941)

When people think of a werewolf, they likely picture a man who turns into a wolf under a full moon. In imagining what a werewolf looks like, it probably is something more like a human-wolf hybrid. And that is because of the movies.

In “The Wolf Man,” the main character’s transformation into the werewolf isn’t perfectly smooth, but the process is slight enough that it seems almost convincing. Perhaps more significant is the fact that he is forced to kill, not as an animal, but as something almost recognizable as himself.

Of course, with any werewolf film there is an element of the ridiculous. It’s hard to look at a poster for this movie and think you’re looking at an actual, real monster and not just Lon Cheney in hairy make-up.

In the movie, our hero is a bright, aristocratic young man who certainly sees himself as above believing in this sort of absurd superstition. He spends the early moments mocking the idea when townspeople try to warn him.

But that’s the thing about werewolves. The idea is easy to dismiss by the light of day, but when the chips are down and the moon is out, do you really want to take the chance?

No. 5: “Alien” (1979)

Sigourney Weaver journeys to the distant frontiers of space to confront a menace to humanity. Many of us know the story. All who have seen it have the image of the alien bursting out of a human midsection permanently seared into our memories. In fact, this movie seems primarily remembered for that one scene.

Which seems a pity, given that an honorable mention should go out to another bit — the look on the cat’s face when one of the crew members gets impaled.

In all seriousness, this movie was most notable for is how alien its alien is. It’s so alien, in fact, they had to invent a new word for it, “xenomorph,” because alien didn’t sound alien enough.

We’d seen extraterrestrials before, but this wasn’t the rubber forehead “Star Trek” cast member or the thinly-disguised humans of the “Twilight Zone.” It was obviously a life form, but not a life form that could have evolved on Earth.

And in terms of motivations, it isn’t at all clear what it wants. It’s not out to persuade, or teach humanity a moral lesson, or even to conquer us, as far as we can tell. Movies made later in the franchise would deal with that, but for now it seems the xenomorph just wants to kill, and you may never be able to wrap your earthling brain around why.

That’s why “Alien” makes it onto the list of monster movies, even if the creature isn’t a monster in the classical sense. It’s to our age what Kong was too an earlier one, and what ghosts and werewolves were before that.

It’s the unknown. And that unknown isn’t located so much on Earth — where we’ve scoured the surface and plumbed the depths and checked under all our beds in search of the unknown and unexplained — it’s out there, in the 99.9 percent of the universe we’ve barely begun to look at. We don’t know what it is yet. Are we ready to find out?

News clerk Arthur Fretheim can be reached at 758-4433 or records@dailyinterlake.com.