Unspeakable Horror!

Verisimilitude has always been an important aspect of the horror genre.  Just like the epistolary novels Dracula and Frankenstein, composed entirely of documents, letters, journals, and newspaper clippings, which provide a sense of reality to the fantastic, the use of a hand-held digital camera in Cloverfield provides a similar sense of documentation to the narrative. 

When I first heard of this movie, I was very excited to see a new take on the Godzilla-esque monster genre, which can be summed up as "gigantic monster wreaks havoc in city," and I completely love the cheese-factor in old-fashioned monster movies.  I was disappointed by the remake of Godzilla, which has almost completely faded from my memory, except I do remember wishing Godzilla would win.  So, I was completely surprised when  Cloverfield seriously terrified and disturbed me.  I hoped to be entertained, but I had no idea what I was about to experience.  

First of all, I do have to say that the hand-held motion of the camera did make me sick.  I only ate about half of my large popcorn and soda combo, but I suppose this only contributed to the overall sense of anxiety.  Monster movies in the Godzilla-vein have always preyed on societal anxieties to fuel their impact.  After all, Godzilla himself is a product of nuclear testing the South Pacific.  He is, if you didn't know, a mutated komodo dragon.  Similarly, the gigantic ants of THEM also arrived due to radioactive mutation.  I would argue there is already a political and environmental awareness threaded subtly into the monster movie genre.  However, Cloverfield channels a different societal anxiety (although certainly related), and it is like a roller-coaster ride of anxiety.  

Basically (and this is pretty obvious), the film replaces the anxiety and horror of 9-11 with a monstrous beast from the bottom of the sea (or is it an alien; or is it a governmental experiment gone haywire; we'll never know).  It is amazing how effectively it channels the anxiety from 9-11.  And I believe that the verisimilitude of the hand-held camera single-handedly makes this possible (do you like the pun?).  Also, I thought that the first-person perspective was also reminiscent of Hersey's portrayal of the Hiroshima aftermath.  This film channels powerful stuff, and you can feel it resound throughout the entire film.  

What is shown in the theater purports to be the actual film from a hand-held camera that the government recovered from an area that used to be Central Park.  I thought that was a nice trick to set up the suspense.  Another brilliant feature of this film is the fact that the monster invasion is recorded over another event; specifically, a lovely day filled with romance at Coney Island, and when the films overlap, it provides a palpable sense of filmic irony. 

Another brilliant aspect to Cloverfield, in addition to the frame narrative of how the film was recovered, is the self-reflexiveness in the scene where the camera actually films the CNN coverage, which puts an extra punch in the already disturbing parallels with 9-11. 

I want to bypass any spoilers here, so I will just say that the monster is brilliant and scary as hell.  For some reason, I found myself a little disappointed with the monster design in The Host (another recent monster movie to participate in the tradition of political underpinning), but this monster kicks ass!

Of course, I am also an unapologetic fan of The Blair Witch Project.  I love that movie; it scared the hell out of me when I first saw it in the theater, and I have a lot of respect for it today.  Something weird happened with that film.   Somehow, I think the media hype broke the spell.  People started to attend the theater with a dare in their minds: just try to scare me because it won't work!  And then, the film didn't work because The Blair Witch Project relied on the active imagination of the viewer.  The viewer had to be willing to suspend disbelief and see the monster in the shadows beyond the hand-held camera.  While Cloverfield shares the same sense of verisimilitude through the use of hand-held cameras, it employs a very different sensibility for the suspension of disbelief, and I think Cloverfield is a lot scarier than Blair Witch.  Cloverfield is easily (far and away) the most frightening monster invasion film (on a Godzilla-esque scale, that is) ever!  Unfortunately, I missed The Mist in the theater, and I am looking forward to comparing that monster film with Cloverfield.  I am sure they are very different in many ways.  

As a final note, I am very excited to see the success of this film because the monster-invasion genre is one of my very favorites (probably right next to vampires and all of the vampire permutations), and my very own Bartholomew of the Scissors features a gigantic White Blob from the bottom of the sea, complete with a fight with the National Guard.  I think all the great monster movies should be required to have a fight with the National Guard.  Go see Cloverfield, and please respond to this posting.