Editorials
‘The Monster’: The Most Badass Horror Hero of 2016 May Be a Child
Monsters are real. And sometimes, only children are brave enough to battle them.
Growing up, films like The Gate and The Monster Squad appealed to me in a special way that other horror movies simply did not. Like scary versions of Home Alone and The Goonies, they centered on kids who were tasked with battling evil forces, and being a kid at the time I saw them, there was something incredibly empowering about that. Maybe I didn’t even realize why I was connecting with them back then, but looking back, I realize how important it is for everyone to have heroes they can look up to and, more importantly, relate to: men, women, and definitely children.
In all of those aforementioned films, the children seemed to be so much more equipped to battle the monsters – human and otherwise – than their full-grown counterparts. They were smarter, braver, and tougher than the adults; the adults were often too dumb to even realize what they were up against. Unfortunately, horror movies with young heroes don’t come around all that often these days, nor do good old fashioned monster movies. But this year, thanks to writer/director Bryan Bertino, we have The Monster. As Brad noted in his review here on BD, Bertino’s latest is a throwback creature feature, but it’s also a film that empowers children in a way that few movies do nowadays.
From the opening scene of The Monster, it’s immediately clear who’s in control and who’s not. Young Lizzy (Ella Ballentine) is the daughter of Kathy (Zoe Kazan), who is the very definition of a deadbeat mom. Kathy is an abusive alcoholic who frequently passes out on the couch and just plain isn’t present in her daughter’s life, forcing Lizzy to be the parent figure to her own parent. In the first sequence, we see Lizzy cleaning up cigarette butts and beer bottles from around the living room, the young girl coming off more like the mother to a destructive teenager than the child she physically appears to be.
The plot is set in motion when Kathy takes Lizzy on a road trip to spend time with her equally troubled father. On a long stretch of road at night, rain pouring down from the skies, their car collides with a wolf, stranding them in the middle of the road without any help in sight. They soon realize that the wolf was running away from something else out there in the woods, and like a modern day Cujo, the film mostly traps the mother and daughter in their car while a massive monster roams free outside.
When the shit hits the fan, it’s Lizzy who is forced, as always, to take control of the situation. The young girl is terrified, but her mother insists that she be the one who calls 911. She insists that she be the one who calls her father to let him know they’re not going to make it. And even when Lizzy goes outside to investigate, Kathy stays in the car. Kathy isn’t scared because she’s too dumb to realize they’re in grave danger. But Lizzy knows the score. And like a young Tommy Jarvis in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, she doesn’t intend on sitting back and letting the monster have his way with her.
*AS A WORD OF WARNING, SPOILERS WILL BE FOUND BELOW. SEE THE MOVIE FIRST.*
In the final act of The Monster, Kathy gives up. Her actions may seem heroic, as she sacrifices herself to save her daughter’s life, but if you found yourself feeling like her plan was foolish, well, I’m pretty sure that was the point. Hiding out in an overturned ambulance, Kathy decides to head out into the woods and draw the monster to her, allowing Lizzy to run away from the scene and save herself. In giving up, Kathy essentially abandons Lizzy for the final time, and it’s Lizzy who is the real hero of the situation. Rather than running away, the young girl heads out into the woods to be by her mother’s side in her final moments, resourcefully fending off the monster in the process; she arms herself with a flashlight, and as any kid knows, monsters fear the light. Her next plan is to lure the monster out in the road and set it on fire using a lighter and flammable spray, which she enacts with total fearlessness.
Burnt to a crisp, the monster is still holding on to a shred of life, but Lizzy, like the hero she’s been since the beginning of the film, physically beats it out of him. Tommy Jarvis would be proud.
Like many recent monster movies, most notably The Babadook, the monster in The Monster is actually a representation of something very much grounded in reality. Yes, there is a monster out there in the woods, and yes, it does eat a few people, but by the end of the film, it’s clear that Kathy is the monster that Lizzy needed to escape from. As we see in an emotional flashback scene after the monster is killed, Kathy was well aware that Lizzy was going to be better off without her, and now that she’s gone, Lizzy is free from the darkness that once surrounded her.
She’s free from the monster.
A triumphant Lizzy emerges from the woods at the end of The Monster, having spent not just one night but her entire life, up to that point, battling monsters. She was as brave in the presence of a true monster as she was in the face of the emotional and physical torment she had to endure on a daily basis: a bravery that perhaps only a child is hopeful enough to truly have.
Kids need horror heroes too. And The Monster‘s Lizzy is one of the best in years. She was able to overcome the darkness surrounding her, and if she was able to, maybe we all can.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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