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• C.H.U.D.: This is probably one of the best known sewer monster movies, which is what happens when you bury nuclear waste under New York City. Luckily, a cop, a reporter, his girlfriend, and a street bum band together to fight it. And if you've always wondered what it stood for, you can quit: "Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller". But wait a minute, one of the containers in the film also says "Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal" on it. Thanks for making it confusing filmmakers. It's also the name of a movie website, where it stands for "Cinematic Happenings Under Development," and they've lovingly named their message boards the "Sewer Chewer".
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• The Blob: In the 1988 remake of the Steve McQueen classic, a meteorite falls to Earth that contains a strange visitor who looks like, well... a blob of jelly. It soon starts attacking people and then retreats into the sewer system, where it can roam free and wreak havoc. (In the original film, it doesn't make use of the sewers for some reason). Written by Frank Darabont, and starring Kevin Dillion, it faded quickly into the bad remake file.
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• Them: In this 1954 film, radiation causes ants to grow to enormous size and seek out somewhere homey to set up a new nest. Namely, the Los Angeles sewer system. The ending of the film promises future atomic horrors, and it went on to become Warner Bros highest grossing film for that year. Apparently mutated ants + the sewer = big money.
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• Weird Science: While it didn't exactly come directly from the sewers, Lisa uses her science-magic powers to turn Wyatt's annoying older brother Chet into a shit monster. Literally. He becomes gross ball of farting poop until he finally apologizes to Wyatt and Lisa de-mutates him at the end.
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• Dogma: In Kevin Smith's religious comedy, the Golgothan is the excrement monster that Jason Lee sends after Jay and Silent Bob. He's made up of all the evil shit from all over the world, and even has his own action figure that farts when you squeeze it. Unlike the Charmin.
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• Monsturd: We shit you not (sorry), this is the actual title of this 2003 direct to video gem. A serial killer escapes from jail and gets chased into the sewers, where he falls into a pool of chemicals. As you'd expect, the chemicals transform him into a half-human, half-poop monster who goes on a killing spree.

What could be scarier than a bunch of new agey doctors giving you weird drugs while you're pregnant with Satan, or maybe an alien? Watch Mia Farrow try to cope with city life while pregnant with . . . something. It's all just typical New York stuff in Rosemary's Baby (1968), the ultimate urban mom horror-scifi monsterfest.

Speaking of scary babies, the man who brought you the ultimate evil baby movie It's Alive, Larry Cohen, made one of the great early-80s NY monster movies: Q the Winged Serpent (1982). Not only does it feature amazing stop-motion work on the monster — some sort of resurrected Aztec god — but you simply cannot beat a movie where a semi-naked lady sunbathing on her NY rooftop is snatched up and eaten by a winged lizard.
V, the Miniseries (1983) featured seemingly-nice aliens who came from a ship hovering over New York, but who would later rip off their human skins to reveal their hideous, reptile faces and evil natures. Though they claimed that they wanted to be friends with humans, it turned out they just wanted to eat us, turn us into soldiers, and use us as slaves. Much of the miniseries takes place in New York, though the human resistance to the aliens is located (improbably) in Los Angeles.

In response to rumors that alligators and other nasties were turning mutant in New York's sewers, a band of filmmaking geniuses brought you C.H.U.D., (1984) a tale about "cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers" who come out at night to eat New Yorkers. Now let's not get too picky about details, since if these creatures aren't human it's not exactly cannibalistic for them to eat people. One of the best B-movies of the 80s, if only due to the frantic efforts in movie ads to tie the flick into "current events."

And then, of course, there's the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man who almost destroyed New York in Ghostbusters (1984). Best giant monster ever.

In 1985, Greg Bear gave us the first nanotechnology "gray goo" scenario in his memorable novel Blood Music. In it, an experiment with nanotech goes horribly wrong after a Jekyll-ish scientist injects the nanites into his bloodstream and they become self-aware. After disassembling the scientist's body, they go on a global rampage, turning humans into the raw materials for their new cities. There's an amazing scene where a character looks out over New York City after its conversion to nanotech and says most of the city "looked like it was covered in brown and black blankets."

One of the best monsters ever to hit New York starred (not surprisingly) in a mostly-forgotten movie by Guillermo Del Toro (director of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth) called Mimic (1997). In it, giant cockroaches (you can see one in the top image) from the NY sewers learn to emulate human form in order to camouflage themselves, hide in the subways, and EAT PEOPLE. Seriously great human-size monsters here. Mira Sorvino stars as the detective on their trail.

We try not to speak of Roland Emmerich's U.S. version of Godzilla (1998), but there it is. The movie was made; it had a really lame CGI version of Godzilla in it; New York was attacked. There, I admitted the movie exists. Now I will close my eyes and start chanting again.

And of course no list of NY monsters would be complete without at least a cursory nod to the Fantastic Four, since pretty much every Marvel hero lives in New York anyway. That's why Galactus attacked New York in the most recent Fantastic Four movie. Galactus is just a scary cloud in the movie, but looks more like a regular giant monster or maybe a giant robot in the comic books.

And the outlier: A giant chicken terrorizes Hoboken in Daniel Pinkwater's young-adult novel The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (1977). Later made into a movie, the novel is great stuff — goofy and smart — plus it's the only story we can think of about giant chickens set in New Jersey.