Then sharks are portrayed as evil man-eaters that should be killed off for the sake of us and everything else that so much as gets their toes wet.

Thankfully, many people nowadays, (including many here) have found a reasonable middle-ground. Take the proper safety precautions when swimming in the ocean, but, if a shark gets too close, try to ward it off nonlethally, as blood from the shark will attract more sharks.

Oh, and, in response to Black Sheep: Uh, angry sheep? That’s the monster this time? What are they angry about, improper wages? Sheepie want a raise? Why don’t they just go on strike? Or are they just mortally afraid of shears? lol

I think the reason Them and the original The Thing (From Another World) are still successfully creepy is because they have few hokey moments (to me The Thing has none) and never talk down to the audience. It helped that the ants in Them were so well done; even though they don’t move fast enough for real ants (but of course it’s impossible for ants to reach that size anyway, and whose to say, if they could reach a such elephantine proportions, how they’d move?) they somehow look frighteningly realistic. Tellingly, the film doesn’t explode the ants up to utterly ridiculous, Godzilla or Deadly Mantis size… they’re large enough to be horrific and yet still within some kind of nightmarishly believable proportion. They behave like ants (more or less) and aren’t invulnerable. Somehow this makes them scarier.

The Thing (the original) also still scares me somehow… Arness’ “intellectual carrot” in that film is some kind of soulless, utterly evil Frankenstein. I remember watching it late at night a couple years back and actually having a nightmare, which hasn’t happened to me since I was a little boy and was rendered terrified by the giant spider in Tarantula. But The Thing is of course in reality a disguised, classic horror film. Instead of the isolated Carpathian village, we have an isolated Arctic science station. Instead of villagers with pickaxes and torches, we have Air Force officers with pistols and machine guns. There’s a Monster that even looks like Frankenstein’s… and even a mad scientist who almost brings destruction down on everyone. Great film. The John Carpenter remake was closer to Campbell’s Who Goes There, but I still prefer the original 1950 version. It fits into a long line of Hollywood horror.