Walking into a movie theater to see Cloverfield in January 2008 remains a pivotal moment for many millennial movie fans.
You probably can pinpoint which moment first told you this movie was special. Maybe it was the reveal of the monster’s face. Maybe it was that terrifying subway attack by those gnarly parasites. Maybe it was the grand finale where you saw Clover, the monster, in full.
Fifteen years after Cloverfield‘s release, the terrorizing monster movie remains one of the best examples of studio ingenuity, taking a worn-out genre and infusing it with something hyper-relevant and truly unpredictable.
Cloverfield p opped up quite literally out of nowhere in 2008 and delivered something fresh, fearsome and fantastic. The story of a gaggle of New York twenty-somethings rushing across town to save a trapped friend during a monster attack remains one of the genuine achievements in genre filmmaking during the aughts.
The passage of time makes you long for more movies like Cloverfield, ones that aren’t based on an existing idea. That over-reliance on intellectual property has put Hollywood in an originality bind, and the reasons why Cloverfield worked as well as it did still ring true 15 years later. Your love for the film can only grow when you see what’s followed it.
Here’s why Cloverfield has such a prevalent staying power as one of the gold standards for 21st-century monster horror movies.
The marketing campaign is legendary
If you went to the movies in Summer 2007 to see the first Transformers film, you likely saw a disorienting teaser trailer with no title or explanation for what on earth you just watched. The tease starts with a video camera capturing a house party, one that dissolves into chaos as something looks to either be attacking or battling in New York.
The most jarring moment is when the partygoers rush into the street and see the head of the Statue of Liberty fly at them. A voice yells, “It’s alive!” Some thought it said, “It’s a lion!” That sparked rumors that this might be a Voltron film (which, in hindsight…no?). As soon as Lady Liberty’s decapitated head hits the roadway, the trailer immediately cuts to a release date, 1-18-08, with no title and absolutely no explanation for what people just watched.
After that teaser hit the world, the marketing campaign utilized one of the definitive viral marketing campaigns of its time. It used a cryptic scavenger hunt online for the most sleuthy movie fans to piece together whatever morsels the filmmakers were willing to let the audience see. Abrams had perfecting his “Mystery Box” method of storytelling with the televised phenom Lost, and since Cloverfield was a Bad Robot project he was producing, the marketing helped give fans of a taste of some of the film’s backstory and what they might be getting into that coming July.
Paramount eventually attached the actual trailer on Beowulf that November, where the film’s name was finally revealed.
The found-footage element felt purposeful and ahead of its time
Once Cloverfield hit theaters on Jan. 18, 2008, the film arrived with a loud roar, taking viewers on a high-octane roller coaster as a gaggle of New York twenty-somethings try to last the night as a giant monster stomps through Manhattan under constant fire from military forces.
Different from other found-footage horror films of the 2000s, Cloverfield really brought a filmmaking bravado to its first-person point-of-view. Having T.J. Miller’s Hud carrying around a video camera to capture the mayhem meant more than a stylistic quirk.
Cloverfield really felt like one of the first horror films to represent the recording generation, the millennials who would first pull out their phones to snap a picture of the Statue of Liberty’s head before running for safety. In the film, Hud gets a key line that adds deep meaning to the film’s found-footage format. Rather than ditching his camera once the monster attack started, he justifies the constant filming with this, “People are going to want to know how it all went down.”
In an age where we still capture the world around us with our phones, and have seen the seismic effects of being able to capture a moment with something in your pocket, Cloverfield felt all at once ahead of its time and perfectly relatable to how something like this might actually go.
The post-9/11 backdrop felt real and stirring
Cloverfield was released just seven years after Sept. 11, 2001. Setting the film in Manhattan brought back visceral memories of one of the worst collectively traumatic events in the nation’s history. Cloverfield spends a good chunk of its runtime with constant movement. Its first-person camera angles captured the burning buildings, the people running in hysteria of explosions and attacks, the smoke enveloping an entire street and the rubble strewn about on the sidewalks.
It felt real. Most monster movies, particularly of the Godzilla variety, veered toward the sillier nature of their genre. However, the first Godzilla film was a morality tale about the fallout from the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan that effectively ended World War II. That film focused hard on the horror of an unimagined threat laying waste to a city, how hopeless it can be to look upon something from the heavens that destroys everything it crosses paths with.
The initial Godzilla was one of the first times American audiences got a taste of Japanese cinema grappling with the nuclear bomb, and Cloverfield remains America’s monster film to deal with the terrifying randomness of 9/11. The film still gives you chills to this day even when the monster isn’t on screen. It’s just sobering to watch people running from something they don’t understand and couldn’t have ever expected. Living through the COVID-19 pandemic alone heightens the particular horror of the unknown that Cloverfield captured so rigorously.
It matched its horror with a deeply humane story
Cloverfield was one of the great theatrical experiences of the 2000s precisely for scenes like its iconic subway tunnel attack.
Going into the movie, there was a genuine sense of the unexpected that lurked at every turn. You didn’t even know the name of the movie until two months before it came out, so how could you know what was coming when you sat down? It was a generational feeling, to feel so unprepared and so riveted by an original monster movie that was such a mystery.
The subway attack also underscores the film’s gutting human component. In monster films, people often start to become more like cardboard cutouts rather than relatable characters you can empathize with. By setting up the film’s house party and giving it grounded emotional stakes, Cloverfield blends the terror of the monster attack with a heart-wrenching story of a guy trying to save the girl he loves with his friends as the world falls apart around them.
The film practically unfolds like a Judd Apatow comedy until everything goes to pot, with a really underrated ensemble cast of Miller, Michael Stahl-David, Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, Odette Yustman and Mike Vogel giving the film its soul. Reeves gets such crushing performances out of his actors, as it really feels like for most all of the runtime that they’re running from the chaos that Clover’s Manhattan ascent has caused.
No monster films have really reached the same height as Cloverfield since its release
There have been plenty of great monster films to come out of America since Cloverfield‘s release, like Gareth Edwards’ Monsters and Godzilla remake, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place films, Jordan Peele’s Nope, the Dylan O’Brien comedy Love and Monsters and Colossal with Anne Hathaway.
However, nothing has quite come close to Clover. After the movie’s release, it was revealed through interviews with some of the film’s creatives that the monster in Cloverfield was just a baby, a wayward animal from the sea trying to get used to its environment and find its mother.
If anything, the unexplained possibilities of what else would be out there make Cloverfield even more enticing and foreboding. It remains the 21st century’s absolute golden standard for American monster movie filmmaking, and one of the most tantalizing universes to spring up out of nowhere and still leave its viewers guessing and contemplating. The genius of Cloverfield was always in what you didn’t see, and 15 years later, it remains one of the definitive genre films of the new millennium.
