Monster House

Monster House is a children's movie, the kind of movie I used to see quite often when my own children were younger. As the youngest of them now is 16 and Monster House is a kind of film for which he has no tolerance, I therefore have to watch it alone if I want to see it at all. So last night I watched Monster House.

I still have a taste for these movies. Maybe it's a sign of immaturity or some sort of essential superficiality of being. But when I see the trailers for these films on television, my interest is sometimes provoked. I wanted to see Monster House because it riffs on the notion of a haunted house, which is very compelling to children, very frightening. I remember in my childhood neighborhood several houses that we spoke of as haunted, if not by actual ghosts then by dangerous people. In one of them lived an old woman who would chase us away when we entered her yard. At another there was a young man reputed to be a child molester. We didn't go near him at all. A mile away, on the top of a hill by itself, stood a forbidding stone house in which there was said to be, in the main room, a large rug that hid a bloodstain left by the murder of the man who once lived there. My grandmother, an inveterate liar, claimed to have seen the stain.

It is the notion of the haunted house, the fear of entering, the compulsion to enter it against all better considerations, that this movie plays upon.

Monster House is digitally animated. The animation is not cutting edge or particularly imaginative. The animation style reminds me of the Jimmy Neutron cartoon series on Nickelodeon--stylized human beings, thinner, taller than they ought to be, rubbery in appearance. Monster House has a formulaic array of characters: a 10 or 11-year-old boy named D. J., about to enter puberty, his fat best friend Chowder, full of jokes and occasional vulgarities, and an entrepreneurial young girl selling candy. Her name is Jennie. When she tries to sell to the D. J. and Chowder, they both predictably fall for her. The parents in the film are clueless and totally unaware of the lives of their children. The film suggests, subtly, that Chowder's mother is having an affair. Across the street from where D. J. lives is a mysterious old house. Any time children walk into the yard, old Mr. Nebbercracker comes out to chase them away and confiscate their tricycles or their balls or whatever toys they happen to be playing with. When the old man is injured and taken to a hospital, the house begins to act strangely, as if it is alive. It consumes a dog and two policemen, and it tries to consume our three heroes. Because it's Halloween, they are afraid that the house will eat trick-or-treating children, and they set out to defeat it.

Like many cartoons and films aimed at children, this one has an array of stereotypes. Of course there is the fat boy. There is a young black policeman, the incarnated stereotype of J. J. Walker from the Good Times television series. And there is a stereotype associated with the house itself. One may argue that all stereotypes are damaging and offensive. Given the nature of this film, and the fact that these stereotypes will mostly be over or under the heads of the children watching, I don't think they're a matter of concern.

Most haunted houses have stories behind them. The one in Monster House is no exception. The explanation for the house is really more complicated than it ought to be, and even somewhat out of tune with the movie as a whole, but the average children in the audience will not notice or care.

Monster House is aimed at 10-year-olds. It doesn't have much scatological humor at all, unlike many of the current animated films aimed at kids. When I was a kid, I remember, there were seemingly hundreds if not thousands of books aimed at the age group to which this film caters. We checked them out from the library, ordered them from the elementary school paperback book club, and borrowed them from friends. Beverly Cleary was one author whose name I remember. That's the kind of film Monster House is -- not particularly remarkable, not particularly good, but well tuned for its audience. It has its mildly frightening moments, but in the end nobody is harmed. If I had children of the right age, I would certainly take them to see this film. I would not enjoy it much myself, because there's not much in it for adults, even for adults with a nostalgic desire to relive childhood through books or films or memory, but I would enjoy the children's enjoyment of it.