makes should just be like another film that exists already, oth- erwise you’re going to fail?’ Then you slowly start to think it seems like the answer is the film doesn’t have to fit in a box but the marketing does.” Monsters takes a pretty realistic look at what would happen if
creatures from another world crash-landed on Earth. The set-up is that a NASA probe sent to collect samples of alien life crashes back to Earth over Central America. The samples give life to huge tentacled creatures, which take up residence in the jungles of Mexico and cause much havoc when they start clomping around its cities by night. Six years on, half of the country is under quar- antine, treating monsters like an everyday fact of life. Into this situation comes Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy),
an American photojournalist working in Mexico who is unwill- ingly tasked with escorting his boss’ daughter Samantha (Whitney Able) to the coast so she can make it back home to the States before the creatures begin their annual migration, which leaves massive destruction in its wake. But the theft of their passports and the corruption of local officials mean that their only way across the border is through Mexico’s quaran- tined zone, a dangerous swath of land inhabited by the mon- sters. Although actually inspired by Edwards’ love of ’50s monster
movies, Monsters’ most direct cinematic antecedents are the more recent District 9 and Cloverfield, despite being conceived prior to either’s release. All three use a similarly realistic approach to alien incursions, a handheld visual aesthetic, and science fic- tion and horror movie tropes to invoke hot button social and po- litical issues such as immigration and the War on Terror. Even some of Monsters’ ads mimic the look and feel of D9’s outdoor advertising campaign from last summer. Edwards, 35, sold the film to his producers as The Blair Witch
Project meets War of the Worlds until Cloverfield’s first iconic trailer hit the internet (“And then it was like, ‘I can’t do that!’”). He thinks the comparisons to Cloverfield and D9 are, if not accu- rate, at least understandable and ultimately unavoidable.
“I think the reality is that all you can really do is make your
own film and not worry about everyone else because I think everyone’s kind of influenced by the same things,” he says. “Ba- sically the whole Star Wars
generation...growing up now and be- coming filmmakers, we’re going to be emulating that stuff when we get a chance to make a film. I think you’re going to get a lot more sci-fi and a lot more horror and fantasy because now we’re in charge, and we grew up through the ’80s with that stuff.” Edwards honed his filmmaking skills for years working as a
visual effects designer for British television but was constantly on the lookout for a good idea that he could turn into a movie cheaply. He finally came upon one during a vacation to the Mal- dives while watching fishermen struggle with their catch. “I was thinking, ‘I wonder what’s on the other end of that net?
It’s so heavy.’ And, in my mind, I just thought it would be really funny if this giant tentacle, like this dead sea monster, was on the end of this net. And I thought, ‘Well, how hard would that be to computer generate?’” Monsters was initially conceived as a mock documentary in
which Edwards would simply overlay computer-generated mon- sters into everyday situations with everyday people. But as work progressed on the script, he soon realized that actual actors would be necessary. Enter Americans Able and McNairy, a real- life couple at the time of filming. Their chemistry would mutate Edwards’ simple monster movie into an entirely different beast. “Films are like children,” Edwards says. “You can have a plan
for them, and you want them to grow up to be a lawyer, but at some point they’ll turn around and tell you no, they want to be a footballer or something. … You can ignore what the film tells you and just go, ‘No, no, no, you’re going to be this.’ But that’s when it all goes wrong. You get the best result when you’re kind of responding to whatever your strengths are. And for Monsters, once we cast Scoot and Whitney, the strength so clearly was their chemistry and their likeability. So they started to take over the film, probably more than I initially planned.”
Destruction Zone: Samantha (Whitney Able) and Andrew (Scoot McNairy) wander the post-creature wreckage.
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