Danielle Rae's Midnight Matinee #1: Cloverfield
A true kaiju queen
Welcome to October and welcome to my very first Midnight Matinee! Things are gonna look a little different this month. Gary is working on revisions for his book, so I’ll be guest posting through October! Second, I don’t want to take any potential content from the regularly scheduled cryptids here, so I am going to cover horror movie monsters. With all that aside, its good to meet you and now let’s get started!
The first monster of October comes from a movie I have only seen when it first released, but is a film I think about regularly. It’s one of the first found footage movies from the early 2000s and was a low budget success. I’m talking about Cloverfield, the JJ Abrams produced monster movie in which New York City is attacked by a mysterious but gigantic otherworldly creature now referred to as Clover.
The idea for Clover initially came about when JJ Abrams was in Japan on a promotional tour for Mission Impossible III. Abrams describes a trip to a toy store with his son, “I got the idea when I went to Japan to promote my previous film, Mission Impossible III, and saw all these Godzilla toys in the shops. I realised that America hasn’t had a monster movie to call its own, not since King Kong all those years ago anyway, and thought it was time to change that. I set about thinking how to tell an invading monster story in a very different way. I wanted to make it insane, intense and modern.”
In initial brainstorming sessions it was decided to make the monster into something the audience would be empathetic with. In the movie, Clover is not attacking New York City, instead, Clover is scared and confused in a new environment where it can’t find it’s mom. This is where the “twist” of Clover’s story comes in: Clover is just a baby. A 25 story tall baby that can easily rip off the head of the Statue of Liberty and hurl it across the city, a baby that can jump 560 feet into the air, a baby that can destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with just it’s tail, a baby that can withstand rockets, missiles, and bombs, but a baby nonetheless.
Cloverfield took an approach similar to that in Jaws by having only a few brief scenes in which Clover was featured. This allowed Clover (who when the movie came out, did not have a name and audiences just referred to as “the Cloverfield monster”) to maintain an air of mystery. What got a little more screen time were the parasites that would fall off Clover and attack the citizens of New York. That’s right, on top of being a scared, lonely baby, Clover was also infested with thousands of parasites. These parasites were dog sized and travelled in packs, attacking the overwhelmed and unsuspecting citizens of New York trying to leave the city. The bite effects are best seen in one iconic scene, where a bitten Marlena (played by Lizzy Caplan) begins coughing up blood and says “I don’t feel so good” before being led to a biohazard tent where she subsequently explodes.
Physically, Clover is shown to be quadrupedal with longer front arms than legs to help it prop itself up. This character design was chosen because as I mentioned before, Clover is just a baby. In the scenes that you do see Clover moving in the movie, the movements are awkward, similar to those of an animal that is learning how to walk. As for how Clover sounds, roars were derived from the Jurassic Park Tyrannosaurus rex roars to be used in the film.
Clover’s origin and fate are somewhat debated by fans, which is why I left them for the end. There are two possible ways Clover got to Earth, the first being that Clover was awakened by deep sea oil drilling at the Chuai Station, which was featured in marketing. The other theory is that in the final shot of the film, footage is shown from a few weeks before the events of the movie and in this footage we see something fall from the sky into the ocean. Some think this is a satellite that then awakened Clover and some think this is Clover itself. Personally, I think Clover fell into the ocean. I think it plays more into the ‘monster needs a mom’ part of the movie and explains why Clover’s mom isn’t there to begin with. If Clover was awakened by drilling, wouldn’t other creatures be too? And wouldn’t one be mom? As for Clover’s fate, after the credits of the movie, a voice is overheard saying “It’s still alive.” However, JJ Abrams has gone on record that Clover was killed by bombs. This has been a bit controversial among fans, who for years thought that Clover was still alive after the events of Cloverfield.
Overall I find Clover to be an iconic Baby Queen who is in need of some serious guidance. Cloverfield went on to be parodied and referenced in several TV shows and movies, including Psych’s season 2 episode “The Old and the Restless”, South Park’s season 12 episodes “Pandemic” and “Pandemic 2: The Startling,” in which giant guinea pigs attack South Park, and Pacific Rim Uprising.
Come back next week for another stream-of-consciousness min-essay about my favorite horror monsters!
Thanks for reading Monster of the Week, which is released every Tuesday (unless it isn’t) and features stories of the paranormal, the unknown, and other high strangeness. Gary is currently on hiatus while he edits his novel. So please enjoy Danielle Rae’s Midnight Matinee, where she discuss her favorite horror monsters during the month of October! If you’d like to support me, please consider subscribing — it’s free.