I used to be a real scardey cat.
As a kid, I loved watching THE MONSTER SQUAD, a PG-13 film about children fighting against Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I watched the film repeatedly one summer, practically wearing out a VHS copy of the movie my parents had taped off of HBO. Despite my affinity for the film, I rarely made it all the way through without covering my eyes, hiding under a blanket, or diving behind the couch whenever things got spooky. Until I was a teenager, I struggled to make it through a horror film - regardless of how tame it might be - and few films scared me more than LITTLE MONSTERS.
LITTLE MONSTERS is a 1989 horror comedy directed by Richard Alan Greenberg and starring Fred Savage as a pouty young boy and Howie Mandel as the monster who hides under his bed at night. Ostensibly a low-rent, kid-friendly version of BEETLEJUICE, LITTLE MONSTERS was released by ‘80s low-budget genre powerhouse Vestron Pictures with a PG rating, despite featuring no-small smatterings of Mandel’s Maurice saying “shit” and a scene in which a young boy is tricked into drinking piss. Bottom line, the movie was not meant to be scary as much as be a wacky wish-fulfillment fantasy for kids: “What if the monster living under your bed was actually a party animal who loved pranks and giving you late-night pizza?”
In actuality, LITTLE MONSTERS scared the ever-loving shit out of five-year-old me. Now, to be fair, the film featured a non-stop parade of frightening imagery such as a monster who wore the stretched-tight skin of a human over its MALIGNANT-style face tumor.
Or how about this XXL Sonic the Hedgehog-looking monstrosity, whose only role in the film is seemingly to answer the question of what if one of Babe the Blue Ox’s testicles looked and acted as if it was played by Andrew Dice Clay.
Truthfully, I think I only watched LITTLE MONSTERS once - when it was first released in theaters in 1989. But, being a glutton for fear as a child, I bought the movie’s novelization and would re-read the chapter book version of LITTLE MONSTERS frequently. So, without the film’s visuals dancing in front of my greedy little eyeballs, the part of the film that scared me the most was the third-act revelation that little kids who spend too much time in the underground world of the monsters risk turning into monsters themselves. There’s a moment in the film where Brian (Fred Savage) discovers this rule when his body shrinks into his clothing as a flashlight is shown on him. LITTLE MONSTERS is a weird movie, what can I say?
For some reason, the thought of turning into a monster was even more horrifying than the idea of monsters themselves. There’s a 1986 live-action MY PET MONSTER movie I used to repeatedly rent from the local video store that horrified me in ways H.P. Lovecraft could only dream of. In the movie, a young boy encounters a statue that turns him into a giant fluffy monster. The film ends, as far as my memory goes, with him remaining trapped in his monster form forever.
Sure, he may look cuddely, but that kid is now a full-tilt plush abomination - no longer can he go to school, ride his bike or even play Pogs. The rest of his life is going to be spent running away from people who want to capture or slay him. And this was meant to pacify children!?!
Maybe it’s this fear of turning into a monster that spawned my life-long obsession with werewolves. It’s definitely the reason I have spent my life equally entertained and horrified by Swamp Thing (the comics, the movies, the TV series - Swamp Thing got around in the early ‘90s), the Toxic Avenger and its Saturday-morning santized version The Toxic Crusaders, Goosebumps (half of those books were about kids becoming ghouls), and the X-Men.
Yes, X-Men scared me as a kid. While other kids were on the playground pretending to be Wolverine or Cyclops, I was whispering prayers during Sunday mass, hoping my mutant-gene wouldn’t suddenly pop into place during puberty and turn me into one of Charles Xavier’s less fortunate students.
Were all monster kids afraid of becoming monsters or was it just me? It seems like a lot of adult horror fans empathize with, if not idolize, mainstay slasher kings like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger. While writing WHERE WOLF, I spent enough time in werewolf subreddits and forums to know that most lycanthropy fans have a fantasy of being turned into a werewolf themselves. I feel like I’m relatively alone in my deep-rooted fear of becoming a monster. If I had a therapist, I could probably spend at least a few sessions unpacking what this means regarding a larger fear of losing control. I’m not in therapy, though. Why pay for therapy when you can have a blog?
I rewatched LITTLE MONSTERS this week and I did not find it quite as scary as I did as a kid. I do think the movie holds up in a fun way, acting like a coked-up mash-up of MONSTERS, INC and NIGHTBREED. My fear of being turned into a monster has slightly diminished as an adult - if only because I know all too real that you don’t have to grow fangs or fur to do monstrous things to your fellow human.
In fact, the scariest thing about LITTLE MONSTERS involves considering how much the producers must have paid to land that Talking Heads track that plays over the credits.