Film Study: Monster Squad (1987)
A Self-Scare Deep Dive into Horror Psychology
In the process of studying what I thought would be mostly a fluff piece with a shadow of a moral structure, I found something surprising and welcome. The much-loved Monster Squad carries a strong message that lies at the heart of virtually every late Gen-X and elder-Millenial: Community = Safety.
In Self-Scare, we pose the theory that community is THE single most important concept that horror itself was created to reinforce and protect. Let’s look at how one of the silliest and least expected films of the 80s drives that point home like a stake to the heart.
Squad Up
Film titles, as we’ve discussed, are supportive material in uncovering the themes that run through films, but they usually do some pretty strong work in that regard. From a producer’s perspective, the title is intended to be the most concise and enticing way to portray a film’s intent. In Gestalt Method, intent is not….intentional, rather a bi-product humanity’s evolution as storytellers. However, the two often merge, and in Monster Squad, we see this clearly. So let’s look at it quickly:
Monster: A threat, something inhuman, outside of society, unnatural, or predatorily natural to the point of otherness.
Squad: A group, community, a gathering of like minds/types/compatible ethos or causes.
Our title (which again, don’t take too seriously without further support) shows us an ‘apparent’ conflict between outsiders and insiders. What’s ‘out there’ and what we ‘in here’ can do to protect ourselves against it. We’re looking at Christopher Booker’s classic plot: Overcoming the Monster.
Set the Stage
If we’re trying to solve a problem, and every narrative is a problem being solved in real time, we need basic elements: where, who, and what.
First: Who are we and what is the world we’re inhabiting? We have to know our character to understand our strengths, weaknesses, and place in society.
And what the situation we’re inhabiting is. This tells us what our obstacles are.
The second part of the opening scene is the ‘problem’; What happened that has upset our otherwise stable existence?
Between these elements, our brains are able to form a coherent question, and the remainder of the film seeks to find its answer. In Monster Squad, the problem is set up from the very beginning. The forces of evil defeated our heroes.
Who: Spiritual descendants of freedom fighters. The ‘good’ guys.
Where: A world inhabited by very real and very dangerous monsters.
What: How or why did they fail?
Note: In a film that uses a frame like this to bookend the main narrative, who ‘we’ are comes into better focus in the second scene, but it doesn’t really matter because we are all of these characters. We’ll ride along with Sean, but the ‘squad’ that fails in the beginning mirrors the Squad that succeeds in the end. This is an error to resolution narrative designed to correct ineffective behavior.
‘Where did we go wrong?’
Our freedom fighters play very much like grown-up children. The mirrors here are abundant. When they first appear, there are five men on screen and one child (a teenager, which is important). This matches the five members of the modern Monster Squad, which happens to match the five monsters in the….other…..monster…squad: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Creature (Gill-Man), The Wolfman, and The Mummy.
Throughout the film, women are tools and otherwise treated as irrelevant (aside from the fact that they save the world). But for the sake of consistency, the vampire brides do balance the scale of female characters on the monster side. (I don’t think it’s even remotely a coincidence that our heroes had to destroy a blood-soaked/seductively dressed woman to reach their goal. We’ll see why.)
What is obvious from the first scene is the fear. And I think this is where we find our solid throughline. The girl in the first scene is scared. She’s terrified. The men (grown-up boys) are shouting at her. She doesn’t want to be here. She is being used for a purpose, but it’s against her will. This is the subjectification and dominance of innocence for selfish purposes, and that message rings throughout. In this case, the purpose is survival, and this message is our moral.
What’s at stake? (Stake….vampire….heh.) Death. Death of self, but now clearly, the death of innocence. Now we have our problem. As our heroes, blinded by fear, make the wrong choices, sacrifice innocence to save themselves, and are sucked into the void…we are presented with the problem our film will try to answer.
How do we inhabit a world full of evils without losing our own innocence in the process?
Monster Squad is one of the movies I had to watch a few times because it gets a little muddled. It’s trying to answer a few questions at once because they all sit at the heart of a very real human fear. That is the death of ourselves and the dangers of the world we live in.
Feel kind of heavy? Because it is, and that weight is balanced best by hiding the truth in a story about growing up. A simplified version of a complex issue for easy digestion. The caricature of Universal monsters plays right into that theme.
Iteration
The next step in problem-solving is to run over scenario after scenario until we find a solution that makes sense. The psychological concept of the rule of three suggests we’ll do this in three specific segments.
Sean and Patrick quickly set the stage again, sitting in the principal’s office, being admonished for their refusal to ‘grow up’ and being subjected to the painfully out-of-touch and cringe-inducing attempts of their principal to be ‘hip’ and ‘cool’. We’re seeing adults as twisted versions of ‘real’ people. Kids in this story are the pure versions of people before they become perverted by the world. The darkness is now defined. Growing up is full of horror, and the results are terrifying. You might end up with a cat head!
Sean sets the stage with pithy dialogue:
Mr. Metzger: Monsters are not real.
Sean: We don’t know that, sir.
Terrified of the many evils that await them, as personified by the adults in their lives, the Squad have positioned themselves to be vigilant, to resist at all costs. But the dangers of adulthood aren’t just being chronically uncool; Monster Squad touches on the real terrors with a lighter hand.
Divorce: Families don’t always stick together. Love doesn’t always last forever, and sometimes, it isn’t enough to preserve the basic protection of a family. What do we do?
Institutions/Government: Designed to educate and insulate children, bullies exist inside the system. You’re not always safe here. The authorities in charge of your future can be biased, threatening, and concerned with their own power. What do we do?
Racism & Fascism: Sometimes, a group of people can do absolutely horrendous things, unspeakable, inhumane things. What…do we do?
Predictably, the Squad itself is the answer. Banding together reinforced the most fundamental of human survival techniques: find people like you and stick together.
But that wasn’t enough. A fact the 1880s squad discovered, and one our 1980s heroes are facing now, with hopefully different results. Their catalyst is the younger sister. Throughout the film, Sean, Patrick, Horace, Rudy, and Eugene attempt to fight together and consistently push Phoebe away. They’re too old for a little girl to be hanging around. I think in its own weird way, Monster Squad tried to address both the aging and forgetting what it’s like to be a kid aspect - always thinking you are the standard - and the rampant sexism of the decade in one move.
Phoebe is the one who shows them that not everything you’re afraid of is bad. Frankenstein becomes an asset, and I do feel like he represents this gangly, teenage version of themselves. Not quite a man but not a child either. He’s awkward, but he has a good heart, and Frank is the way to their survival. Is Frank one of the monsters? Yes…but monsters here are just things they don’t want to become. Dracula could not more accurately represent the lifeless, cold visage of the businessman, something his own father struggles with, balancing the responsibilities of career and family. Wolfman has always stood in as a parallel for pubescent urges and desires (Wolfman’s got nards…), unwanted and surprise body hair, and uncontrollable emotional outbursts. The Mummy, who’s unravelling signals the beginning of their success arc, is the very embodiment of age, decay…mortality and its relentless pursuit of everyone. We rot whether we like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. I believe the swamp creature actually signifies the discomfort of a flesh-and-bone body and all the gooeyness that it entails, but I don’t have the time or the stomach to expound on that here. Maybe later.
Regardless, Pheobe and her willingness to embrace Frank show that there is a bridge between the dark and scary things awaiting Sean and his friends and the past they’re clinging to. That bridge is the pure, open heart of a child. The 1880’s heroes forgot that. The consequences were being sucked into the void and becoming part of the darkness of the world. The 80s Squad’s attempts to blackmail the sexualized neighbor girl are a clear sign that they were headed down the same path. They have completely missed the point, and it may destroy them, too.
In this way, Phoebe might be the light that protects a changing Sean as he becomes something he’s afraid of, and he protects her, giving her a safe place to grow in the process.
Pivotal Text
We find the confirmation text right where it’s supposed to be, prior to the climax. Faced with the realization that all of their fears are true, that the legends are accurate, and they alone can defeat the many terrible things that are coming, they must decide how to defeat it…
“We gotta go to a place where there’s a lot of people.”
They pick a church, but religion wasn’t the answer. Which is quickly made clear because the doors are closed and locked. The church is AN answer, but it’s one version of a fundamental truth: when you’re scared, find friends. Community is essential. None of these kids could have possibly fought off all the dangers of the world on their own; it was because they stuck together and leveraged their unique skills (courage to fight bullies, to face change together, to find their own resilience) that they could fight effectively. Sean and his dad overcome Wolfman (again with a hyper-crotch-focused stick of dynamite). Rudy overcomes the sexualized Brides as they advance (with a very phallic weapon, I might add). Horace finally finds his voice, proud of himself as he is, and so on. Working together gives them the strength to overcome adversaries.
Final Scene:
Our final scene presents us with a possible outcome, the result of our theorized actions from the middle of the film. Can we learn from our past mistakes and be better? The 1880s squad was old, out of touch, and had already forgotten the most important lesson.
Not to be too heavy-handed, but it’s literally Frank, our teenage stand-in, offering a hand to Phoebe that gives her the courage to do what must be done. THIS is where our former heroes failed and where our current ones succeed. So we have our answer.
How do we defeat the darkness?
The two themes that run throughout the film converge in a single moment.
Community: We must band together, use our strengths, and prioritize these relationships.
Innocence: To forget what it’s like to be a child, to lose sight of that purity, is to become something monstrous. We must embrace it instead.
Furthermore we must protect the children and prepare them for the world to come as a community. Sean’s dad does this by watching horror movies with his son on the roof, the neighbor does this by overcoming a lifetime of pain and choosing kindness and hospitality with children who fear him, and Sean’s teenage stand-in, Frank, does this by being a gentle companion despite his changing appearance for Pheobe, a protective presence in her life. This film tells us that life is very scary, but if we stick together, we can get through it.
Conclusion
In this silly little 80s film, which almost certainly did NOT set out to make any kind of profound moral statement, we see the process of human narrative having its way regardless, as it normally does. We get a vignette of life in a terrifying world and the community-focused solution that makes survival possible because of one kind-hearted little girl. Her willingness to see beyond the scary and find a friend is so essential that Monster Squad could easily be framed as a story about how Phoebe joined the club and saved the world in the process.