animated horror movie review

It’s only one day before Halloween, and 12-year-old Dustin James (or D.J. for short) is busy spying on his creepy elderly neighbor, Horace Nebbercracker. He sees that the old man steals a little girl’s bicycle, and that’s a habit that’s been going on for quite some time. Whenever something enters Nebbercracker’s lawn, it’s his. This same day, D.J.’s parents leave for a convention, and the teenage girl Elizabeth (aka Zee) will babysit him. When Dustin and his friend Charles “Chowder“ play basketball outside, they end up losing it on Nebbercracker’s lawn. Ooops, we all know where this is headed. Still, D.J. tries to retrieve it before the old, cranky neighbor notices it, but too late. Nebbercracker comes out of his old house, furious like a bat from hell and wants to give these snotty brats a piece of his mind! He goes completely crazy, lifts D.J. up while shouting “you think you can just terrorize my lawn?!“ while the boy desperately tries to claim his innocence. Then the inevitable happens: the old geezer suffers a heart attack and is taken away in an ambulance.

That same evening, Zee’s boyfriend, Bones, pays a visit and starts talking about rumors relating to Nebbercracker, about how he supposedly cannibalized his wife. He also says that Nebbercracker once stole his kite. Later, when D.J. spies on the now empty house across the street, he notices that when Bones leaves the house, a kite is coming out of the front door of the old Nebbercracker house. Bones goes to retrieve it, and is then dragged into the house. D.J. starts to believe that the old house is now haunted, and the next day they save a candy-selling girl called Jenny from becoming another one of the house’s victims. No one believes them about the monster house of course, especially since today is Halloween, so it’s all up to them to stop the house from claiming more victims.

Monster House is an animated supernatural horror comedy from 2006, directed by Gil Kenan as his directorial debut. Originally, the movie was set up to be at DreamWorks, but one thing lead to another and he ended up having a meeting with Steven Spielberg and Sony Pictures Entertainments picked up the project. The movie was filmed using a technique called motion-capture, where the actors performed the characters’ movements and lines while they were being linked to sensors. And while there were a bunch of parents that got pissed off due to the movie’s horror elements and dark themes, it received generally positive reviews and grossed $142 million worldwide on a budget of $75 million.

Despite being an animated PG-rated movie, it’s one that can be appreciated by adults just as much as the younger ones. It does not only have an intriguing story and a creepy mystery, it also has very charming and likable characters where they’ve done a great job at matching the perfect voices. There’s a sense of both horror and adventure, with an 80s throwback style that fits so well with everything. This being a “children’s movie“ and all, the horror elements are still very prominent and there’s even some nods to Hitchcock’s Psycho and Rear Window. It’s got a predominantly dark theme, which gets even darker than you might initially expect, and kudos to them for having the balls to take it all out. The final part of the movie does go totally wild and proves that it aimed to live up to the title, and while this strays a bit from the more subdued horror elements from earlier in the movie where everything about the house was still a mystery, it’s a very fitting way to end it. After the final showdown we even get a cute little aww-moment.

Monster House is a great animated thrill ride for the young yet not-so-young audience, and I’m afraid this one was very much lightning in a bottle which we’ll never get close to seeing again. An animated movie filled with the sense of adventure reminiscent of what could be found in movies like The Goonies (1985) and filled with an actual horror story and horror elements, very much working as a perfect introduction to scary movies to a young audience…yeah, I doubt that’ll ever happen again.

Kenan later made the Poltergeist remake from 2015, and his latest release was Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire this year. There’s no doubt that Monster House remains his strongest entry into the horror genre. Even to this day it has kept its spooky charm, and I’m sure many of the children who were originally frightened by watching this one when it was released back in 2006, now remembers it fondly. Well, that’s at least how I remember the movies that scared me when I was a kid…

Director: Gil Kenan
Writers: Dan Harmon, Rob Schrab, Pamela Pettler
Country & year: USA, 2006
Voice actors: Ryan Whitney, Steve Buscemi, Mitchel Musso, Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, Sam Lerner, Woody Schultz, Ian McConnel, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Lee, Spencer Locke, Kevin James
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385880/

On a snowy mountain, the witch-queen Tzod is ascending to the peak in order to confront the guardian of the mystic flower known as “The Bloom”. Tzod starts telling the guardian about the events that led her there, and how her people were killed by a young tyrant, Lord Pyrantin, who captured her together with a renegade scholar named Ghal-Sur. She is coerced into showing Pyrantin some of the powers of the Bloom, but ends up blowing the blue flame in his face causing him to become irreversibly damaged. Both she and Ghal-Sur is then thrown into prison, where she uses the power of the Bloom to help them escape. In the events that follow, Ghal-Sur murders her and steals the Bloom from her, wanting its power for himself. He eventually becomes another tyrant, creating war machines to expand his conquest. As the story progresses, the mysteries about the Bloom and the truth behind its power gets revealed.

The Spine of Night is an animated fantasy horror movie directed by Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King, who also wrote the script. The film used rotoscope animation, which is a technique where artists hand-draw over live-action footage. This technique was also used in several of the early Disney movies, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. Most notably in more recent animated features for an older audience, Ralph Bakshi used this technique and the creators of this movie drew inspiration from his work, especially the 1983 film Fire and Ice. The animation process took seven years, and just a few weeks before the premiere at South by Southwest things almost went south (no pun intended) when the entire film was almost lost when King’s Microsoft Windows auto-updated while he slept. I guess this meant a lack up backups, and it makes me shudder just to think about such a close call for disaster. Fortunately, nothing was lost and the film released as planned.

What makes The Spine of Night an interesting and mesmerizing experience, is not just the visuals with the nostalgic old-school animation technique and the beautiful backgrounds, but also the tale of myths, magic and violence. And the latter comes in abundance, there’s so much gore and death here that it’s a shame no one’s made a kill-count video on YouTube yet. People are cut in half with swords, limbs are severed, bodies melted by lava, and loads and loads of blood and carnage. The voice actors also did a great job bringing life to the characters, and the soundtrack greatly enhance the mood. With the story being told backwards and from different times and with different characters, we get a variation of areas where the latter part of the movie even had some steampunk-vibes to it. The dark fantasy and mythological elements gives of a bit of Conan-vibes, and it’s clear that the creators have found their inspirations from a variation of dark fantasy and earlier animation features like the aforementioned Fire and Ice, and Heavy metal from 1981.

Overall, The Spine of Night is a very good throwback to the old-school animation style and techniques, with lots of bloodshed and interesting, sometimes even trippy, visuals. The Blu-ray also included two animated shorts plus a “Making Of”, which showed us several of the live-action scenes that were shot with a variation of props and costumes made out of cardboard. Despite all the hard work that was obviously put into this, it looked like they had a ton of fun!

In 2021, RLJE Films together with Shudder acquired the rights for the movie, and aside from being available for streaming on Shudder it is also available on Blu-ray.

Writers and directors: Philip Gelatt, Morgan Galen King
Country & year: UK, US, 2021
Voice actors: Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, Betty Gabriel, Joe Manganiello, Patrick Breen, Larry Fessenden, Jason Gore, Maggie Lakis, Tom Lipinski, Nina Lisandrello, Rob McClure, Malcolm Mills
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3885422/

Tag: animated horror movie review

Monster House (2006)

The Spine of Night (2021)