Fantastic Flesh

So I've always been a believer in real, live special effects in movies.  Unfortunetly there's a growing number of movie productions that only use CG to show special effects.  I don't have a dislike for CG, I just think there's a time and a place for it.  Horror movies are not usually that place.  I found a special on netflix about horror movie effects and how a lot of the directors feel about what to use and when. Fortunetely a lot of the major directors in hollywood agree with me that 'real' special effects have a better screen prescence than CG.

 
This behind the scenes special shows a lot of the props and devices used to create creatures in movies over the last century.  It has fantastic interviews from directors and make up artists from recent movies such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Grindhouse.
One of the best examples of combining real effects and CG is shown in the movie The Mist that was made a couple years ago. To get the desired tentacle effects they used real objects on green screen, then overlayed the textures in CG.
They didn't have a large budget, so the tentacles aren't amazing looking, but I think straight CG would have been much harder to make convincing.

Non CG Special Effects

So I was reading online and came across this article. The article explains that modern technology has effected the special effects in films and shows, but just because we have the technology to add in effects and such, sometimes adding effects in in post-production doesn't necessarily make things look better. This article shows a few examples of ways in which to create effects, while shooting a production. Its actually really interesting. The link is in the title if you want to take a look at it.