Echoing my belief that the threatening thing you can’t see is ten times scarier than one you can, Variety‘s Todd McCarthy says the following in his Cloverfield review: “At long last, a lingering full-on shot of the monster is served up, and it’s not a friendly sight. All the same, a strong argument could be made for not showing the creature at all. The film’s initial hints at offering a new kind of horror eventually devolve into something essentially familiar, provoking idle thoughts that, in the vein of the ’50s sci-fier Forbidden Planet, it could have been more effective with an invisible but quite tangible threat.”
