Not only is its appearance rather hard to explain without seeing the movie, it's quite ugly too.
#CREATURE MOVIES MOVIE#
Very closely related to the Godzilla example, you don't get to see the entire thing until nearly half the movie has gone by. The Crawling Eye was one of the first movies to do this, with its weird alien monsters hiding without the Fog of Doom on the side of the mountain until the climax.Averted in Clash of the Titans (1981), as the Kraken shows up in one of the first scenes before reappearing during the climax, but played straight in the remake Clash of the Titans (2010), in which the Kraken does not show up until Perseus battles him in order to save Princess Andromeda towards the end.Until then, all that is shown is her hand. Attack of the 50-Foot Woman: Nancy in her giant form doesn't appear in full until the last ten minutes of the movie.The film also plays with this by having the alien repeatedly changing forms so the delay occurs multiple times. and only one of them has anything to do with the eponymous xenomorph. Alien, with the added bonus of including only three jump scares in the entire film.
We see the occasional footprint, and at one point even a shaggy arm reaching through a tent flap, but it's not until the climax of the movie that we get a full shot of the creatures, and even then, they're barely more than silhouettes in a dark cave. The Abominable Snowman fittingly uses this to preserve the sense of the unknown and unknowable around the title characters, as well as to cover up any deficiencies in its 1950s special effects.