IT'S A FUCKING DINOSAUR.

Today's entry in the annual 31 Screams series at Arbogast on Film enshrines a fabulous reaction shot from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, wherein a lady on the street has a completely understandable reaction to the rampaging creature that has suddenly arrived on the scene:


My favorite moment in any of the Jurassic Park films comes near the end of The Lost World, when a Tyrannosaurus Rex is just kicking around suburban San Diego. It happens before the carnage and the chase, and Spielberg takes a quiet moment to just let us take in the sight of, as Arbo would say, A FUCKING DINOSAUR WALKING DOWN THE STREET. It gives us just enough time to project the creature onto our own hometown, and though it offers enough frisson to juice the chaos of the final reel, it's this minute that lingers.


In describing the end of this film some critics mentioned allusions to Godzilla or even BF20KF, but this moment was more like Dali. For all our CGI and jadedness, a dinosaur walking down the street just isn't something we see every day. It's not the huge, effects-laden climactic moments of these movies that really resonate; it's the quiet ones where the makers take a second to let us reflect that yes, if this were actually happening, it'd truly flip our shit.