Fifty-two horror and mystery movies made before 1948 were licensed for television in 1957, including the Universal horror movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Invisible Man. The famous "Shock Theater" package (Twenty more followed the next year). On television, they became a huge hit all over again and were part of the spark of the Gothic horror movie revival of the late 1950s. One of the side effects of this package was the creation of a subculture of horror fans, particularly among young people. The so-called "Monster Kids" were a phenomenon throughout the decade that followed, providing a reliable audience for the Hammer films and Corman Poe films and Italian horror movies that filled the drive-in movie circuit in the next decade. The phenomenon spilled over into broader pop culture, too, resulting in horror-themed television shows (The Addams Family and The Munsters and Dark Shadows), horror imagery in car culture (also in The Munsters), cereal festooned with cartoon versions of the classic Universal monsters, glow-in the dark model kits, and dedicated horror culture magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein (and belatedly, Fangoria). Eventually, the monster kids began to be an element in horror media, in a kind of feedback loop. Stephen King was a monster kid and one of the protagonists in his novel, 'Salem's Lot, is a monster kid. Eventually, they started to show up in movies. You had entire generations of kids who knew the "rules" of horror movies, and you couldn't just ignore them if you made a monster movie. You see this in films like The Lost Boys and The Goonies, arguably The Blob, and (tangentially) Fright Night. The living end of this phenomenon is Wes Craven's Scream, which explicitly lays out the "rules" of slasher films in the text of the film, but that's a late mutation of the monster kids. The traditional monster kid phenomenon was largely spent by the late 1980s. Universal has been trying to revive interest in its traditional monster movies for the last couple of decades with indifferent results, but it seems that the world has moved on from that kind of horror movie. Even the monster kid movies in the 1980s seem like nostalgia pieces when they weren't actively trying to integrate with more contemporary horror movie imagery. Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad (1987) seems like a nostalgia piece. It certainly feels that way to this particular Gen X viewer.
The Monster Squad finds a group of kids faced with an invasion of their idyllic suburban town by the forces of darkness. The enemy consists of a cadre of classic monster: Dracula is the ringleader and his minions include a reluctant Wolf-man, a Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Frankenstein's monster. They're on a quest to find the Amulet of Ultimate Good, which Van Helsing attempted to use a century earlier to banish the monsters to limbo. This didn't go well for the fearless vampire hunters back then. Van Helsing's diary comes into the possession of Sean, who leads a group of kids who are monster enthusiasts. They call themselves "The Monster Squad" and when it becomes clear that only they have the deep knowledge to defeat Dracula and his minions, they form a plan. But they're kids. They have to deal with kid's stuff. Sean's parents--his dad is a cop--are having marriage troubles. Horace--who everyone calls "fat kid"--is beset by bullies. Sean's sister, Phoebe, shares the lot of all kid sisters who want to hang out with their big brothers. Sean sees her as an annoying tag-along. Patrick and Eugene are less defined. Cool kid Rudy is in the club because the clubhouse gives a vantage to spy on Patrick's hot older sister. Unfortunately for them, none of them read German, prompting them to approach an elderly German neighbor to translate the text. They're frightened of their neighbor, who they call "Scary German Guy", but he turns out to know a bit about monsters himself. Unfortunately for them all, Dracula knows they have the diary and dispatches his minions to find it and kill the kids. One of those minions, Frankenstein's monster, doesn't have the heart for this and changes sides when Phoebe befriends him. The others remain enemies, though. Sean suggests that they have to invade the creepy mansion where Dracula is holed up in order to steal the amulet. They must find a virgin to reenact the ceremony that Van Helsing failed to complete. And they have to stay alive. The monsters have other ideas.
The last time I tried to watch The Monster Squad, I had a bad time of it. It's a film that I remember fondly, even now. Watching it with my partner, though, who had no such memories and no patience for the film's flaws was unpleasant. She wasn't wrong about it. It has significant flaws, not least of which is a certain boiler-plate image of what tween kid-hood was like for middle class suburban kids in the 1980s. The inevitable school bully is a cliché, as is the leather clad cool kid who comes to the aid of the oppressed (there's a lingering memory of Fonzie from Happy Days in this depiction). There's a leering sense of sexuality in the film, too, both in the voyeurism from the treehouse and the search for a virgin to cast the spell that will defeat the monsters. The way it identifies characters is awkward, too, assigning them designations based on physical characteristics or plot function (ie: "Fat Kid" and "Scary German Guy"). It lends the film a stilted quality. It's an uneasy mix of elements, too. It attempts to conflate the monster kids of the previous generation with the Spielbergian model of The Goonies. I'll bet you anything you like that Fred Dekker was himself a monster kid, dutifully poring over Forry Ackermann's Famous Monster Of Filmland like a Talmudic scholar. I'm less sure about Shane Black, whose subsequent career suggests that he was one of the kids who kicked the asses of the monster kids in fourth grade and took their lunch money. I have no idea if this is the case, though.
In any event, these are movie kids and don't really resemble real kids in any particular. The only one who seems entirely real is the youngest, Phoebe, whose delight in befriending Frankenstein's monster is unexpectedly sweet. One wonders how much of this is contributed by Tom Noonan as the monster; Boris Karloff himself was known to have worked with the little girl in Frankenstein to make sure she wasn't afraid of him and Noonan seems like the same kind of actor. This is essentially a kid's movie, though a more violent and salacious one than usual for the 1980s, and by inference suggests that the old school Gothic creature features of the 1930s were kid's movies, too. It might have point.
What The Monster Squad does well is stage the kind of monster rally Universal could only dream of in the late 1940s in films like House of Dracula or Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. Given some of the comedy elements in The Monster Squad--famously the fact that "Wolf-man's got 'nards!", less famously "Creature stole my Twinkie"--Abbott and Costello are the film's natural ancestor. Even so, the filmmakers have an instinct for the possibilities of the classic monsters. Dracula is scary in all the right ways and the filmmakers even give a nod to the Lugosi film at the start of the movie when we see armadillos in Castle Dracula. This film's version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon might be one of the best Deep Ones ever put on film, and the film's exploration of the powers granted by lycanthropy are elaborate. When the Wolf-man is blown up by a stick of dynamite, he reassembles like he's the T-1000 in Terminator 2. The Mummy, too, has an exploitable weakness that never occurred to the Universal filmmakers. All of this is what makes the film fun and provides a pay-off that makes wading through the less enjoyable elements early in the film arguably worth it. The film has an awareness, too, that these monsters and what they intend for the world are quaint in a world on the other side of the atom bomb and the concentration camp. In the film's sole gesture to the real horrors in the world, "Scary German Guy" has a camp tattoo.
Rewatching The Monster Squad on my own reconnected me with what I liked about the film all those years ago. Movies don't exist in a vacuum, after all and the pleasure (or lack thereof) of one's companions influences the experience of watching them. And if parts of the film remain stubbornly unappealing as I age and if the classic monsters become quaint relics as they drift to the edge of living memory, well, that's life, I guess. The original monster kids are retired now, and the kids of today have horrors all their own to occupy them.
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So begins this year's iteration of the October Horror Movie Challenge. I have no real ambition to finish this year, but I'll make a game attempt. I'll attempt to write about it it, too, although I'm obliged to write about four of the films I plan to watch this year for publication, so those won't be on the blog. In any event, I'm trying to ease back into blogging after a long layoff, and this is a good structure in which to do it. So enjoy.
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