The 2024 Movie Monster State of the Union

As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to provide a sort of state of the union on the year’s movie monsters—a quick analysis of what’s still regarded to be scary. However, upon reflection, what was envisioned as 21st century bestiary began to look less like a Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual and more like the aisles of my local Walmart. As the old world dies and the new world struggles to be born, it seems the monsters of 2024 may represent the same fears, but have taken on a more mundane hue. As I’m not sure what to do with this information, submitted for your approval is io9’s 2024 monster revue. 

The Familiar

In a year that saw the re-election of a former president to office, an ongoing war in the Middle East, escalating nuclear brinksmanship, and the return of bird flu, 2024 carried with it a grimy sense of repetition. The feeling we’re going to double down on exactly what we tried earlier, only more so, with a full trilogy of material in a mind so it’s bound to pay off like never before, right? 

It’s no coincidence, then, that the year that was saw new variations of A Quiet Place, Alien, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, Godzilla, Hellboy, Salem’s Lot, The Crow, The Strangers—even Witchboard, the likes of which we haven’t heard from since a direct-to-video sequel in 1995.

Currently, it seems like there’s no end in sight for the return of recognizable IP of yesteryear, with new Saw, Conjuring, Insidious, Fear Street, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Final Destination movies scheduled for release next year. Not to mention 28 Years Later, another nostalgia piece boasting a trailer on track to become the most-watched horror trailer of all time.

As we enter 2025, this “devil you know” attitude will extend to Universal once again doubling down on its stable of classic monsters, trading the company’s previous attempt at a shared cinematic universe for bespoke takes on Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy from no less than the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Leigh Whannell, and Lee Cronin, respectively. 

Today even sees the release of a new Nosferatu, replete with a marketing campaign hopeful to make its cozy gothic trappings into a new Christmas tradition.  It’s interesting then that movie audiences have largely rejected vampires—with an emphasis on this vampire, in particular—the last few years with films like Abigail, Renfield, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter failing to make much of an impact on either the culture or box office. 

The hallmarks of Dracula and/or Nosferatu—feeding on the blood of others, self-isolating, yet maintaining tremendous wealth and influence over others—these are good things wholly endorsed by the culture. The kids call it being “sigma.” 

What feels particularly new about this ongoing trend of sticking with what we know, though, is the sudden reverence we’ve developed toward the humble slasher genre—formally regarded to be horror’s bottom-of the-barrel. Though yesterday’s cultural detritus becoming tomorrow’s critical darlings is nothing new (recent Best Picture winners have included stories about a fish-man falling in love with a human woman; a universe where people evolved pork products in place of phalanges; and a socially minded take on the ABC Movie of the Week, Bad Ronald), nothing that’s achieved this level of cultural significance has been so laser-focused on gore effects. The two-and-half-hour Terrifier movies have more in common with the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis than Dario Argento. In a Violent Nature, which reimagined a film like Friday the 13th or Madman from the perspective of its undead killer, added an experimental flourish to the genre’s classically simple narrative, emphasizing the thin wall differentiating films like these from the French New Wave really are the occasional splats of blood. 

Though the envelope-pushing Terrifier franchise may seem like a litmus test for human empathy, it should be noted people legitimately like Art the Clown and his unrated Harpo Marx-meets-Freddy Krueger routine. Anything too subversive wouldn’t be able to find this audience. It’s for this reason I’m legitimately intrigued by a movie that did not come out this year: Macon Blair’s remake of The Toxic Avenger. Something about a politically motivated judge, jury, and executioner of big business assets was deemed too radioactive to release. I wonder why…

Media

Convergent with the continued popularity of the slasher film has been the taboo-shredding approach of having them star children’s characters who have recently slipped into the public domain. In the last year, new slashers have been announced starring Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Bambi, Popeye, Steamboat Willie, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid, and the Mad Hatter. Something about transposing characters meant to draw as much revenue as possible into the realm of bloodthirsty killers feels “correct” in a way that’s both timely and inevitable—not to mention punk rock.  Once a IP falls into the hands of the people, is not the only moral thing to do to turn into a monster? Especially if all roads have lead to 2024, the consensus must be Mickey and company sold us a bill of goods the first time around. 

One need only lightly dust YouTube these days for an endless array of video essays on dark Pokémon theories or an unusually frightening PlayStation 2 game starring Piglet. In these circles, a lost Cartoon Network bumper or unproduced episode of SpongeBob Squarepants is spoken of in the same hushed reverence as unexploded nuclear ordinance. When everything is available online, something that isn’t—no matter how innocuous—suddenly becomes suspicious and arcane. If we used to tell children scary stories so they wouldn’t venture into the  woods alone, lost media hunters must at least be deterring each other from sharing their credit card info with seedy collectors on the dark net.

Recent films like I Saw the TV Glow understand the sort of fanatical devotion investing too much of yourself in children’s media can bring—the kind people used to describe as “Lovecraftian,” but is now referred to by terms like “Disney Adult.” To a generation where Cthulhu has been available as a plush doll their entire life, the Great Old Ones may just as well have been Garfield and friends, all along. Smile 2 is another film from the last year to understand this, following on the heels of films like The Ring and It Follows, where curses are spread as transmissible memes that move like viruses—and even our celebrities aren’t immune.

As of 2024, “cosmic” horror is strictly earthbound and though the beliefs of its media savvy cultists may seem silly to you, you don’t need to believe in the destructive powers of their particular fandom as long as they do. 

Technology

The last year has also seen a number of movies monster-ifying AI and bleeding-edge technology—movies like Subservience and Afraid, in which machines meant to improve our quality of life are personally invited into the home, vampire-like, only to reveal some unsavory appetites of their own. 

However, as terrified as we are of robots taking our jobs, we’ve paradoxically also collectively lost faith in the concept of technological progress. We’ve had movies about homicidal robot nannies, toys, smart homes, and personal assistants, but we’ve yet to reach that “singularity” in which this burgeoning technology does anything scarier than being better at the thing you’ve outrageously defined yourself to be. 

As our government continues to admit our airspace is and has always been occupied by physics-defying aircraft beyond human comprehension, I’m reminded of Jordan Peele’s 2022 feature Nope, which suggested UFOs are secretly some sort of insatiably hungry, atmospheric beast our zoologists have yet to recognize or catalog. Somehow, it’s easier to believe. Which brings us to…

Life Itself/Old People

Much like AI replacing us in the workforce, one of the more curious trends of the last year have been a string of monster movies focusing on—in one form or another—doppelgängers.  Whether a heretofore unknown biological entity as in Cuckoo, a demonic presence as in Never Let Go and Daddy’s Head, or a voluntarily engineered proxy of oneself as in The Substance, the anxiety at the heart of these stories resides not in becoming a monster, personally, but in being superseded by one—and potentially missing out on the cool things a monster gets to do. 

Nightbitch, a recent film in which Amy Adams transforms into a dog as an expression of her repressed rage, is posed as a net positive. The idea of losing control has tremendous appeal lately. Just like Demi Moore’s fear of irrelevancy in The Substance, the real fear is being left behind.

Speaking of, if 2024 could be defined by a single persistent boogeyman, the title would unanimously have to be given to old people. Films like Heretic, Apartment 7A, and Alien: Romulus, have featured the elderly (if not the outrightly late, as in the specter of poor Ian Holm in Romulus) tormenting the young for a plethora of reasons, varying from financial gain to merely proving they’re still relevant from the comfort of their own booby-trapped homes. 

People often fail to see a distinction between mummies and zombies, but the difference between them is noteworthy. Mummies are distinct from zombies in that a zombie is something clinically dead, but somehow still behaves as if it’s alive. A mummy is something that by all means should be dead, yet somehow biologically is still alive—just as how the Kharis’s heart continues to beat by virtue of the tana leaves in Universal’s The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost, and The Mummy’s Curse. 

With the release of Nosferatu today, in Count Orlok we have a familiar, elderly, copyright-infringing ghoul from the dawn of film who simply refuses to go away. The right man for the time, indeed. 

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