It's Alive

Larry Cohen's monster movie with a brain. A couple's newborn baby is a fanged mutant that kills the delivery-room staff and escapes into Los Angeles, and the film is really about parental terror, fear of what we produce, and a father forced to hunt his own child. Bernard Herrmann's score gives it real weight.

Cohen shoots it as guerrilla social commentary, keeping the creature (a Rick Baker design) mostly unseen. It is smarter and sadder than a killer-baby film has any right to be, and it spawned sequels.