In the 1980s, there were a lot of movies in which the kids took charge. E.T. had Elliot and his friends, and The Lost Boys had the Emerson and Frog brothers. The sure foe of classic movie monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Gillman was also a group of kids, good friends who called themselves The Monster Squad. The movie The Monster Squad (not to be confused with the 70s television show Monster Squad) came out in 1987 and had something in it for every kid of the Stranger Things generation.
Main characters Sean and Patrick have a monster club where they venerate horror movie creations with their friends, including Horace “Fat Kid,” the bad boy Rudy, and the young Eugene and his dog, Pete. As Sean dodges his pesky little sister, Pheobe, his parents are constantly fighting over father Del’s occupation as a police detective.
The monster club obtains the German-language diary of Van Helsing as strange things start happening around the town, such as a mummy disappearing from a local museum and a crazed man appearing at the police station claiming to be a werewolf. As the kids in the club uncover the secrets in Van Helsing’s diary, they realize they are the only thing standing between supernatural monsters and world domination.
Sean, Patrick, and Horace are all around twelve years old, Rudy is slightly older, and Pheobe and Eugene are around five. They are 80s kids, so they have no cell phones or Internet; even Rudy gets everywhere by bike. Sean watches horror movies showing at the local drive-in from his roof with a transistor radio.
The movie knew its audience and spoke to it. It didn’t shy away from allowing the kids and their logic to take the lead. Here, we all discovered that Wolfman had nards, and found out that he couldn’t be killed by “falling out of a window, and onto a bomb.” When we were those kids, we could easily see ourselves on the adventures the Monster Squad had on our own bikes, in our own neighborhoods.
Fred Dekker, who wrote and directed, was coming off the arguable success of his directorial debut, Night of the Creeps. Both that and The Monster Squad were love letters to the low-budget horror movies Dekker grew up watching (in Night of the Creeps, several of the characters are named after famous horror directors such as John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, and George Romero). The villains of The Monster Squad are all the classic Universal Monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The “Gillman,” who is obviously the monster from The Creature From the Black Lagoon. The same year, a fellow gateway horror classic, The Lost Boys, was released, but those kids only fought vampires: with more monsters, the stakes in The Monster Squad are somehow even higher.
The movie also gets Frankenstein right. Instead of being a big, scary monster, the movie remembers where Frankenstein came from and bonds him to little Pheobe, forcing her brother and the other boys to let her join the club so they can share in having a classic monster for a best friend. The movie vindicated little siblings everywhere, especially when Phoebe challenges the boys to meet Frankenstein: “What are you, chickenshit?”
The Monster Squad seems to ask the question, “What if the Goonies fought monsters instead of pirates and thieves?” and answers it with a similar group and a cute kid with a dog. Two years earlier, the same kids who would eat up The Monster Squad had been enthralled by the adventures of the Walsh brothers and their friends versus the Fratellis and One-Eyed Willy.
Like the other films of the era, the parents had problems, the kids had each other and their ingenuity, and the odds were overwhelming. We were a resourceful generation, and movies like The Goonies and The Lost Boys gave us role models who were so capable that they didn’t need the adults around them to solve their problems. The only thing The Monster Squad lacked compared to the other two movies was Corey Feldman; it somewhat made up for that by casting Robby Kiger as Patrick, himself a horror icon as Job/Joey from Children of the Corn, as Patrick, co-leader and spokesman of The Monster Squad.
The biggest reason The Monster Squad was able to reach all of us in ways The Goonies and The Lost Boys couldn’t is the setting Sean and his friends live in. The Goonies relies on the goon docks and the caves of its Oregon setting, and The Lost Boys can only take place in Santa Carla, “the murder capital of the world.” The Monster Squad takes place in a suburban town that could be anywhere in the country, the kind of place a lot of 80s kids grew up in. Whether we moved to the city or the country, or stayed in suburbia, these neighborhoods certainly stayed with us. The Monster Squad could have taken place in any of them. It could have happened in our own backyards.
These days, kids have the Internet, and almost everyone has a cell phone. Many kids don’t go anywhere without their parents. It is hard to imagine today’s kids having the kinds of adventures that Sean and his friends had in The Monster Squad. That doesn’t mean today’s generation can’t enjoy it.
Even though it didn’t do as well at the box office as its more big-budget compatriots, The Monster Squad continues to hold an honored place in nerd culture as both a gateway horror flick and a kids’ action-adventure. There is just enough story that we continued to enjoy it when we introduced it to our own kids, because it allows adults to join in on the ride, helping and enabling their kids while still letting them take the reins, as they clearly know better. The horror elements are tame by today’s standards (even in 1987, it was only rated PG-13), so it can be a good family film for the horror-minded set.
Currently, The Monster Squad is streaming on Amazon Prime.
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