Cloverfield (2008)

PEOPLE ARE GONNA WATCH THIS.

by Liz Shannon Miller

Nothing kills me in a horror film like the details. Endless CGI wastelands are not nearly so heartbreaking as a half-burned photograph of a family vacation, or a beheaded teddy bear waiting for the return of the child who loved it. Intimate details like those are the secret sauce that makes movies like The Exorcist so terrifying — the more time you get to know a group of characters, the more you come to like them, the more you dread their inevitable possession, or decapitation, or disembowelment, or what have you.

The first-person horror film is an evolution in this concept, one that, since the premiere of The Blair Witch Project, has often been seen as gimmicky. But to write off the shaky handheld approach in this fashion overlooks why it exists in the first place. I’d argue that Cloverfield is the first truly modern horror film, one that captures how our relationship with not just the genre, but the technology we use every day, is evolving.

Cloverfield is the story of two days, a month apart: one, April 27th, a dreamy day at Coney Island with two young lovers; the other, May 22nd, a night of terror documenting the destruction of Manhattan at the hands of a thoroughly alien monster. The conceit is that both days are being captured with the same camera and the same tape, with jarring cuts in between the two due to technical or user error — this is backed up by the film’s opening frame, an update on Blair Witch’s “A year later, their footage was found”:

The script (which isn’t hard to find illicitly online, not that I would ever encourage you to do such a thing) actually says “digital videocassette” instead of a digital SD card, which goes to show how fast digital filmmaking has evolved in the last five years. According to the IMDB trivia page, the film’s runtime of 80 minutes is deliberately timed to mimic the standard runtime of a miniDV tape, which of course is meaningless given that in the final film, it’s an SD card, which can have all sorts of different runtimes—

Okay, so the actual logic behind the film’s structure may not make sense. Here’s what matters: You’re watching a tape of a happy perfect day being taped over by disaster. We don’t spend too much time at Coney Island, except for the occasional moment of ironic or heartbreaking juxtaposition, but it’s key to the film. See, the first disaster we encounter on May 22nd is learning that in the almost month since their perfect day together, Rob (Michael Stahl-David) has been blowing off Beth (Odette Annable) because he’s about to leave town for an exciting new job in Japan.

So at Rob’s going away party, which Rob’s best friend Hud (T.J. Miller) is documenting with the camera in question and is DJed by the contents of my iPod circa 2007 (seriously, EVERY SINGLE SONG is one I still own), Rob and Beth have an angry confrontation over said blowing-off. Later, when the Godzilla-but-way-freakier monster begins its rampage through New York’s nicer neighborhoods, Rob learns that Beth has been hurt in her apartment and, full of regret and angst, decides to go rescue her, friends in tow.

That’s basically the plot of the movie, omitting the bit where Rob’s brother Jason gets killed on the Brooklyn Bridge during their first attempt to escape the island, and the bit where a shell-shocked Lizzy Caplan (one of those actresses who I always enjoy watching but never ever ever want to meet) tags along only to meet the movie’s most gruesome death. Oh, and there’s this whole thing where little bits of the monster sometimes fall off the monster only to become awful tiny monsters who are like giant spiders but faster. I watch that scene with my eyes closed.

This seems like a good place to say that there are plenty of really good reasons not to like this movie. For one thing, certain moments are decidedly “too soon,” in 2008 or even today. I have a number of friends, who were in New York on 9/11, that find Cloverfield to be completely unwatchable, and it’s understandable. The first moments of the monster’s attack are nothing but explosions and destruction and a decapitated Statue of Liberty; you see the clouds of smoke from a collapsed building rushing down the street, obscuring store windows. Later, when the horror becomes much more clearly monster-related, it’s somewhat palatable, but those images are still so memorable, potent. Even ten years later. Even if you weren’t there.

Also, things vacillate wildly between believability and lack thereof, specifically when it comes to the survival rate of the characters. While poor Rob’s brother gets taken out by a stray whack of the monster’s tail, poor Beth survives hours of impalement inside her apartment and a helicopter crash — only a thermonuclear bomb (or whatever it was the military had handy) appears capable of taking this woman out.

She does get taken out, though; at the end of the movie, the only character presumed living is Jason’s girlfriend Lily, who is last seen riding a helicopter to safety. Everyone else we get to know at all? Not so lucky. Rob could be considered the hero of the film, but what does he do? He goes off to save the girl, which everyone tells him is a stupid idea, and they’re all right. He ends up getting almost everyone killed. In this case, sticking together is perhaps NOT the answer.

That’s the blunt truth of Cloverfield, one that I value deeply, because unlike the plucky heroes of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie, the reality of chaos on this scale is that not everyone makes it. Our bodies are fragile. The world is cruel. The only thing that has a chance of enduring is what we create — ideas, children, art — whatever you can leave behind.

Why I really wanted to write about Cloverfield is this: The conceit of the film being “filmed” by the characters might seem to be gimmicky at first, but it eventually becomes the film’s most essential quality. “People will want to know what happened” is the justification Hud gives for holding onto this consumer technology while fleeing for his life. Rob and Beth’s final moments together are spent using the camera to reach out to whoever might be out there to declare their existence. And we know right from the beginning that what we’re watching has been archived for future generations — if only for its brief glimpses of the monster in action. These people died, but in some sense, they live on.

Cameras are everywhere — my toaster practically shoots 1080p — and they have increasingly become an unconscious part of how we process events, from a baby taking its first steps to protesters under siege on the streets of Oakland. Were the Cloverfield monster* to strike today, we’d see camera phones and web cams and Flip cams and everything else held at the ready, capturing every moment. Yes, Cloverfield wasn’t the first film to demonstrate this behavior. But it was the first film to understand why.

Liz Shannon Miller is very afraid of giant spiders. She writes and other stuff here.