But some writers seem to struggle with this concept. Badly. So, you wind up with movies like...

You wouldn't think it would be that hard to come up with a movie monster. You just take what people are already afraid of, and make it either bigger, stronger or uglier. People are scared of crime, so you make a movie about a super-strong killer with a messed-up face behind a hockey mask. Boom. Collect your money.

5 The Gingerdead Man

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The Monster:

Pastry.

Why it Could Have Been Scary

Six words: Gary Busey is the Gingerdead Man. Picture it: Busey dressed up in a gingerbread man costume, hacking, slashing and making pastry-based puns along the way. You can't imagine the amount of money we would have paid to see that. Actually, you probably could have imagined it (it's four dollars).



"I don't know where I am right now!"

Why it Wasn't

Well Gary Busey is the Gingerdead Man, kind of. Gary only appears in the movie's first five minutes as the world's worst robber: He enters a diner, riffles through the cash register but takes no money, shoots people instead, gets caught and, in the end, is sent to the electric chair. So what we get from then on is a very, very shitty puppet voiced by Gary Busey.

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And to transform Gary Busey into said puppet, we have to take one hell of a deus ex machina roller coaster: Busey's corpse is cremated and then his evil mom mixes the ashes into a gingerbread mix which she delivers to a local bakery. There, a worker accidentally cuts himself and bleeds a gallon of blood over the mixture that he bakes anyway, and then the oven is hit with a power surge causing the mixture to turn into the Gingerdead Man.

Not all that realistic, according to the experts we talked to.

Most Pathetic Attempt at Horror

Allow us to take you to the film's climatic showdown (WARNING: SPOILERS!). We see Gingerdead Man's absolute failure as a movie monster demonstrated:

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In order for him to be scary, they had to arm him with a revolver.

Though we do have to agree this was probably the only ending possible ("Why don't we just have one of the good guys eat him?"). Still, when you use "Got Milk" as a pithy bon mot in your screenplay, you officially must turn in your Writer's Guild Card. It's true, look it up.