What’s the mark of a great movie monster? Ingenuity of design matters, certainly. When you’ve seen a thousand zombies, a fresh configuration of teeth and limbs can make all the difference. They should be scary, too, although that’s subjective: One person’s nightmare fuel is another’s sleeping aid. And the best movie monsters transcend the effects behind them through the intangibles of screen presence. You accept the strange, uncanny reality of their existence — a reality born from how they look, sound, move and behave. They come alive before our awed eyes, compelling us to avert our gaze.

Rampaging mutants, autonomous tumors and the fanciest gentleman in horror since Dr. Caligari — the best movie monsters of the new century have imprinted their own diabolical mark on the collective psyche. We would put the 10 ghastly things ranked below up against the best that Universal or Hammer or Toho has to offer. So long as there are movies, there will be movie monsters. Pray to the Devil that they keep making them this cool.

“The Ritual,” about four friends whose hiking trip leads them into occult danger, is no modern genre classic. But the David Bruckner film does feature a truly remarkable monster: a towering folkloric entity with an elklike body and an antlered head that — if you look closely — resembles a limp human figure with grasping hands. While the word “Lovecraftian” leaps to mind, the reality is that the mighty Moder, worshiped by a woodland cult of true believers, resembles only itself. Sometimes, all you need to make horror-movie history is to give evil a new shape.

Before he unleashed yuletide critters in 2015’s “Krampus” and orchestrated the city-leveling mayhem of 2019’s “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” Michael Dougherty pitted a cranky Brian Cox against a miniature prankster from hell. The final segment in his holiday anthology “Trick ’r Treat” is, well, a treat. Its darkly comic pleasures hinge on the puckish malevolence of Sam, a pajama-clad instrument of chaos who comes to look like the irreverent spirit of Halloween incarnate. His climactic unmasking is a gift from the underworld gods of nifty prosthetic makeup effects, sure to leave monster lovers grinning ear to ear like a jack-o’-lantern.

Though not entirely a horror movie, Alex Garland’s science-fiction whatsit about an expedition into a mysterious mirror realm called the Shimmer does feature one nightmare for the ages: a deformed bear that “speaks” in the voice of its victims, parroting their death screams every time it opens its massive, dripping jaws. Plenty of monsters provoke yelps of fear. This one perversely echoes them, almost mocking the terror of those staring into its maw.

We’ll tread lightly here, as the true nature of this monster qualifies as a plot twist. Let’s just say that the villain of “Malignant,” an anatomically inverted, parkouring shadow slasher, possesses an unexpected relationship to the film’s heroine, played by Annabelle Wallis. When Gabriel finally gets his big, shocking close-up — a scene so brutal in its violence that it begins to look like slapstick comedy — he tilts this unpredictable James Wan potboiler into a new register of deranged fun. The demon lies within, the movie says with a bloody, crooked smile.

No rundown of modern cinema’s best monsters would be complete without something from the twisted imagination of Guillermo del Toro, a mad scientist who has spent most of his career flooding theaters with frightening, sometimes sympathetic new organisms. Arguably his most striking creation is the Pale Man, the gaunt, child-devouring predator whom Doug Jones plays for five suspenseful, unforgettable minutes in the Oscar-winning “Pan’s Labyrinth.” The most inventive touch: those peepers on his clawed hands, rising to give the monster sight at the exact moment that audiences might decide to block their vision with a defensive palm.

Not to be confused with Pennywise the Clown, the shape-shifting menace of David Robert Mitchell’s brilliant supernatural thriller has no original, official form. Instead, it disguises itself as ordinary people, swapping its appearance out every few minutes while slowly but relentlessly pursuing the unlucky teenagers cursed by its attention. That it can look like anyone is the key to its fearsomeness; by the end of the movie, the audience has become as paranoid as the characters, scanning every inch of the frame for the slow approach of danger. Who needs creature effects?

Conceptually speaking, there’s nothing unique about the childlike bloodsucker Lina Leandersson plays in the moody Swedish horror movie “Let the Right One In,” directed by Tomas Alfredson. Vampires are a dime a dozen, right? But Eli is a great character, a tragic creature of the night who has relied on manipulation and self-mutilation to survive for decades. Her relationship with a young, bullied outcast is at once touching and disturbing — a bond forged around the promise of violence. And she cements her place alongside the greatest minions of Dracula in the film’s bravura swimming pool climax, where this ageless girl next door demonstrates her awful, tremendous power.

It’s arguably a spoiler to even include Jordan Peele’s spectacular sci-fi thriller on this list, given how long the film takes to reveal the truth about the unidentified flying object hovering over its California setting. But what a reveal! Only when “Nope” has taken us inside the infernal innards of its mysterious flying saucer do we understand what’s really abducting the local population. The final-boss version of Jean Jacket, peacocking against a vast expanse of sky, is breathtaking enough to attend the Met Gala. Peele’s most wicked trick, though, is unleashing a creature this original and then arguably upstaging it in the scares department with an ordinary chimpanzee.

“The real monster is grief,” insist countless art-house horror movies made in the image of “The Babadook.” But don’t blame the dapper demon for these wannabe trauma phantoms. While Jennifer Kent’s influential creepshow might cast its storybook boogeyman as a metaphor for repressed emotions, that never interferes with his primary duty, which is scaring the living daylights out of you with his croaked mantra, slithering vertical movements and demented vaudeville, silent-movie-villain routine. Few modern movie monsters are so instantly, chillingly recognizable in silhouette. Plus, how many of them have achieved the status of queer icon?

Godzilla for a new generation is how you could describe the star attraction of “The Host,” the genre-blending kaiju movie from “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho. Except that there’s really no confusing this movie monster for any other. Brought to life via animatronics and the digital magic of Weta (the New Zealand CGI shop that worked on the “Lord of the Rings” movies), the Gwoemul is a marvel of singular creature design that suggests a fish crossed with a frog crossed with one of the dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park.” As with the original King Kong, it’s the impression of a sentience, even a personality, that makes the beast so memorable: From the moment it emerges from the water and gallops down a Seoul riverbank like an overgrown puppy, we believe in it.

“The Blair Witch Project” was released in theaters 25 years ago. It changed horror movies, and maybe cinema, too. But it also changed Burkittsville.

First, the film was a hit out of Sundance, parlaying early buzz into a $1.1 million sale to Artisan Entertainment. Then, beginning in July 1999, it became a worldwide box-office phenomenon, grossing nearly $250 million and haunting pop culture for months. (It was satirized by not just “Saturday Night Live” but even Scooby-Doo.) Its lo-fi found-footage aesthetic — which emphasized off-screen horrors rather than blood-soaked violence or elaborate creature design — inspired a vast subgenre that fundamentally changed how studios thought about making horror movies. Without “The Blair Witch Project,” there would have been no “Cloverfield,” “REC” or the Paranormal Activity series.

Robinson, 49, asked whether Sánchez would come to town. Could he do a Q&A? The event would be in the parking lot behind the Burkittsville Ruritan Club, where the town holds its local council meetings.

“‘Yeah, we’re going to do a screening,’” Sánchez recalls the conversation going. “I’m like, ‘Whaaaat?’”

Sánchez and Myrick had been slowly developing “The Blair Witch Project” for four years when they started scouting locations in Maryland. Sánchez, who was born in Cuba but grew up in Montgomery County, was living in the state at the time, while Myrick was down in Miami.

“It was kind of like a no-brainer that, of course, we’re gonna shoot it in Maryland,” Sánchez says. As a kid, he’d been drawn to the vast, spooky woods in rural parts of the state, which seemed perfect for a horror movie. During Myrick’s visits in the 1990s, they would drive around Frederick County. Eventually they stumbled upon Burkittsville, which fit the lore they were already inventing — graying hamlet, haunted forest, murderous hermit, plenty of graves.

Gilligan, 77, credits the film’s found-footage style and clever early internet marketing strategy — which played up the notion that the Blair Witch and the three missing filmmakers were real — for the movie’s success. And also for unleashing a flood of people on Burkittsville.

“It was this place you would never suspect had this dark history,” Sánchez says. “Now, looking back on it, we wouldn’t have set it in Burkittsville if we knew the movie would blow up the way it did.”

How bad was it? “For a year straight, from sunup to sundown, there were people going by in slow cars with a camera,” says Deborah Burgoyne, 69, another former mayor of Burkittsville who has lived in the town for more than four decades. “And it was such a shock because the town didn’t know. They didn’t understand what was going on.”

Reports of “Blair Witch” tourists flooding the town’s streets, goth kids skulking around the cemetery at night, and thieves stealing the “Welcome to Burkittsville” sign featured in the movie eventually became a minor news event in and of itself. “Let’s face it, the movie is not about the Waltons or Mayberry,” Mayor Joyce M. Brown told The Post at the time of the film’s release. “We are a Christian community.” While some residents at the time described getting a kick out of the attention, many more seemed to just want the “Blair Witch” visitors to go away.

The incidents that stick with Burgoyne involve the people who, not realizing the story was fake, came to Burkittsville to rescue children in town from what they gathered was an actual cabal of witches, almost like a Catoctin QAnon.

“They would be disappointed because they thought we were stupid locals who didn’t know [about the Blair Witch] or we were hiding something,” she says. “We brainwashed the kids who are here.”

Burgoyne recalls sitting on her front porch with her then-5-year-old daughter, who had just gotten off the school bus. A woman in a Bentley with Florida license plates pulled up in front of the house and started to interrogate Burgoyne about the Blair Witch’s whereabouts.

“I’m like, ‘It’s not real.’ And she’s arguing with me, and then she realizes [my daughter] is on the porch with me, and the woman says, ‘You have children here!?’” Burgoyne recalls. “And I turned around, looked at [my daughter] and turned back to the woman and said, ‘That’s not my child; that’s my lunch!’ And I yanked her and ran back into the house.”

Just over a year after the release of “The Blair Witch Project” came “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” a sequel that Artisan rushed into production without the involvement of Sánchez or any of the original film’s cast and crew. It also briefly filmed in Burkittsville and was universally panned.

In the DVD commentary, director Joe Berlinger describes meeting with Burkittsville leaders about the project, only to be shooed out of town. “It really was like villagers with torches,” Burgoyne says of that sit-down. As it happened, that film’s plot centered on fans of the first film obsessing over its footage and descending on its setting.

In real life, the fans kept coming in smaller and smaller numbers. Robinson, the current mayor, still happens upon strangers in the town cemetery every now and then.

“You get the occasional people who are like, ‘I want to find the graves of the children who were murdered,’” he says. “And I have to tell them, ‘Well, they’re not real, so they’re not here. You can find a bunch of infants who died back in the 1800s because they didn’t have vaccines, though.’”

Robinson differs from his predecessors in a key way: He’d like the “Blair Witch” tourists to come back.

It’s not just because Robinson is a fan of the film (he stresses he’s not a die-hard), but because he thinks the town deserves to see some benefit from the landmark movie’s success. Robinson is relatively new to Burkittsville — he moved there with his family in 2016 and became mayor in 2022 — but says that he rarely hears people complaining about “Blair Witch”-related incidents these days.

Others would also like Burkittsville to get its piece. Burgoyne recalls several locals trying to sell Burkittsville merchandise emblazoned with the movie’s stickman logo to tourists, only to be met with legal threats. “When they found out people in town were profiting in any way, they sent cease-and-desist orders,” she says.

The three co-stars have an even bigger beef with the distributor of “The Blair Witch Project.” They recently penned an open letter asking Lionsgate, which acquired Artisan in 2003, to provide them fair compensation and back pay for their work on the film. The movie wasn’t filmed under a union contract, as Variety detailed, so Leonard, Hance and Williams have made only a tiny fraction of the movie’s earnings. Sánchez declined to comment specifically on the dispute, citing a nondisclosure agreement, but said he and the original “Blair Witch” team support the three actors’ efforts. “Generally speaking, artists are always exploited,” Sánchez says.

Like its stars, Burkittsville seems to be permanently entwined with “The Blair Witch Project.” “It would be great if the town would make any money off of this stuff,” Robinson says. “Because we haven’t for 25 years.”

To celebrate the film’s 25th anniversary, Robinson has organized another screening in Burkittsville in September. Like last year’s event, the profits will benefit the Burkittsville Union Cemetery — the cemetery featured in the beginning of the film — which Robinson says has experienced wear and tear from the thousands of “Blair Witch” visitors over the years. “It’s not cheap to maintain a cemetery, especially in a small town like this one,” he says.

Sánchez, who went on to make more horror films and has a career directing for TV, will also be back. Before the 2023 screening, he had returned to Burkittsville only once since the original film production, to pose for photos for a 2019 article in a local newspaper about the movie’s 20th anniversary. But last year’s gathering was the first time the town rolled out the red carpet for him.

Under the long, wooden pavilion behind the Burkittsville Ruritan Club, Robinson introduced Sánchez, along with a few locals who were briefly featured in the film, to a standing ovation. There were residents from Burkittsville and other nearby towns in attendance, as well as folks who traveled to the screening from all over: New York, California, the U.K.

For 30 minutes or so, Sánchez took questions. But mostly, people were as shocked as he was that he had come back to town.

Locals shared war stories from the aftermath. Burgoyne recalled how the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office had to divert resources to attend to the hundreds of calls it got from angry people who thought the movie was real. (A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said it had to “pay special attention to that area for some time because of the problems the movie created for the residents.”) But in that moment, Sánchez didn’t feel bad anymore. It was clear that Burkittsville was finally proud to be the “Blair Witch” town.

After the Q&A, the pavilion lights were dimmed, and a silence fell over the crowd, disturbed only by cricket chirps and the low drone of cicadas in an abutting corn field. The film’s opening title card flashed onto the screen:

In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary.

A year later their footage was found.

Robinson remembers standing in the back with Sánchez: “About 15 minutes after it started, he turned to me and said, ‘I never thought this would happen.’”