Although a silent version of The Lost World was made eleven years earlier (with effects also by Willis O’Brien) it was King Kong which single-handedly defined the genre of monster movie (although these are distinct from the supernatural monster stories of the Dracula/Frankenstein sort).  The pioneering technique of stop-motion was still being used nearly fifty years later by Ray Harryhausen – who had been tutored by O’Brien – and was even considered for Jurassic Park, which doffs its hat to Kong on more than one occasion.  However, a demo of computer-generated effects persuaded Mr. Spielberg to use digital technology for his production, and stop-motion – in a live-action setting – become extinct.

Halliwell called Kong:

‘…the grand-daddy of all the monster animal pictures which proliferated so boringly in the fifties and sixties, when for no very good reason they were labelled ‘science fiction’.’

Virtually any movie featuring a monster derives from this 1933 classic, from Tarantula and Them! in the fifties, to Alien and Predator three decades later.  Other than that there have also been two direct remakes, with Peter Jackson’s recent version adding nothing to the original – save irrelevant subplots – despite more advanced effects.

Year: 1933