David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street (2026) is a glorious throwback. While it may seem a bit of a swerve from Mitchell’s previous films, both The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and It Follows (2014) are actually also suffused with nostalgia: indeed, a key scene early in It Follows involves Jay (Maika Monroe) and Hugh (Jake Weary) at a classic art-house cinema preparing to watch 1963’s Charade, with Hugh talking wistfully about how he wants to be little again. The End of Oak Street evokes – in just about every way it can – a time that is past. I loved it for that, and for all its echoes of mid-twentieth-century film and television. There’s also inevitably a profound regressiveness to it all, too, though.
The End of Oak Street tracks a family (husband, wife, two children) as their neighborhood appears to travel through some kind of portal – transplanted to a prehistorical era when dinosaurs rampaged. Chaos ensues, as the family and their neighbors seek to evade, fight off, and outrun the gigantic predators with whom they now share Oak Street. There’s a sense that everyone’s in shock (not surprisingly) – not thinking clearly. There’s a lot of carnage.
Left: Maple Street sign that opens The Twilight Zone‘s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”; (right) Oak Street sign that opens The End of Oak Street
From beginning to end, The End of Oak Street invokes above all the classic Twilight Zone episode, from season 1, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (broadcast March 4, 1960). Both Mitchell’s film and the Twilight Zone episode begin with a close-up of a street sign. Both are fundamentally about a place, defined by a particular time. Both evoke a nostalgic vision of a “perfect” mid-twentieth-century suburban neighborhood before shattering it. The shattering in both Oak Street and “Maple Street” is preceded by more banal signs – a strange light, a power outage – and the characters in both think at first that they’re experiencing a normal disruption of their lives. But the suburban idyll is, in short order, thoroughly breached, although in very different ways on Oak Street and on Maple Street.
The “monsters” arrive on Oak Street
The monsters really do arrive – and with a vengeance – on Oak Street, while they don’t (yet) on Maple Street. Or do they? “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” famously suggests that we (humans) are actually the monsters – that the ‘monsters’ have been here all along – as the characters turn on and accuse each other, until one of them gets (accidentally) shot and killed and chaos breaks out. If the viewer didn’t get the message, aliens at the end of the episode – yes, there are ‘monsters’ and they’re watching us – spell out that the way to conquer humanity is to turn them against each other: “Just stop a few of their machines . . . Throw them into darkness for a few hours, and then sit back and watch the pattern. . . . They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find – and it’s themselves. All we need to do is sit back and watch . . . and let them destroy themselves.”
Split diopter shots show Denise’s alienation from her family
While there are large carnivorous monsters in Oak Street, it is also true that the characters (proving the accuracy of The Twilight Zone’s aliens’ insight) do turn on each other: the principal adults, husband and wife Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor), for instance, spend a lot of time early on arguing with each other rather than figuring out how to survive. Mitchell uses numerous split diopter shots that visually amplify the alienation of Denise in particular from her family: she’s been ambivalent about putting family first, pulled by her dream of being a writer. In another scene, a neighborhood kid beats up Brian (Christian Convery), continuing a beef with him that should be irrelevant now that the end of civilizations appears to be at hand.
Nevertheless, in the end, Denise and Greg and their two children, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian do learn how to pull together. In the first instance of how Oak Street is a true regressive throwback, the main characters (notably Denise) learn to put family first. As in so many such films of the twentieth century, the drive of Oak Street is powerfully toward (re)constituting a central heterosexual white nuclear family, all the stronger for having overcome its earlier fractures. That that family seems linked, at the end, with a family characterized by ‘difference’ and by a muted non-hetero plot doesn’t make that central ideal any less powerful. Oak Street ultimately turns away, then, from the core insight of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” that humans are their own worst enemies. Here, it really is the monsters.
A strange light suffuses the night in Invaders from Mars
Oak Street is also regressive in this very literalness of its monsters. But the message of The Twilight Zone in 1960 was an outlier in its representation of non-literal monsters, and horror-sci-fi from the 1950s through the 1990s is replete with very visible rampaging monsters. There are scenes in Mitchell’s film that directly evoke not only Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), of course, but also films such as Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), and Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953) – the latter in particular in a scene in which a boy looks out the windows to see strange lights, as Brian does in Oak Street.
Despite its quick move to visible monsters, Oak Street does begin in the more interesting realm of the ‘weird’ – a space in which reality shifts slightly and unfathomably. There are some scenes early on in which Denise’s neighbor finds a strange plant and the two of them, along with the local librarian, try to figure out what it is – directly evoking the 1963 film, Day of the Triffids (and the John Wyndham novel on which it’s based). In both Oak Street and Day of the Triffids, what are at first lone ‘weird’ plants – a tear in the familiar world – harbinger a much vaster coming cataclysm. Here we have, briefly, what philosopher Dylan Trigg calls “the image of a world without us” (3) a glimpse of a “post-human ontology, which delivers us from this obsolete legacy of thinking the world in terms of how it can be accessed for us, and us alone” (3). Oak Street doesn’t linger in this ‘weird’ world – a world that is not ours – for very long, however.
(Left) The ‘weird plant in The End of Oak Street; (right) and the weird plant in Day of the Triffids (1963)
Instead, dinosaurs erupt into the frame. In the end, Oak Street isn’t at all about a slight shift in reality, but the sudden imposition of a vastly different world – what Arthur Conan Doyle (in his book about travellers finding a world in which dinosaurs still roam) called The Lost World (1912). It’s a world moreover, that the characters do understand in some way – and thus can try to assimilate. One child, just before the realization of what’s happened, is singing the theme song from the Flintstones (1960–66). Brian takes out a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica and looks through the entry on ‘Dinosaurs.’ Characters have a basic understanding of which dinosaurs are dangerous and which are not. There’s a stark and unambiguous manifestation of a dangerous set of visible ‘monsters’ in Oak Street, in short, and the characters go about dealing with them in a distinctly regressive ‘us’ versus ‘them’ way.
Finally, Oak Street ends in the most regressive way possible – evincing its adherence to mid twentieth-century horror/sci-fi in the most conclusive way: it isolates, subordinates and destroys its monsters. In this way, I think Invaders from Mars may be the closest analogue, as, in both films, the military takes over and destroys the monsters (see also The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms [1953], Them [1954] etc.). Moreover, we don’t just see the military in action at the close of Oak Street, but the camera offers us multiple instances of what Stacy Alaimo has called “vertical visions” – shots from above that grant a “transcendent gaze” which is all about control:
one way in which recent monster movies control our sight is to grant us a transcendent gaze – most often employed in the conclusions – that removes us from the horror of the monstrous natures below.
“Vertical visions” in The Twilight Zone‘s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”
Such shots are also used at the end of The Twilight Zone‘s “Maple Street” – from the perspective of actual aliens seeking to control the humans – the “monsters” – below them. In Oak Street, these shots represent the reasserted control of the humans over the “invading” dinosaurs. They, specifically, serve to assimilate monsters to a landscape that is, unlike the monsters, “devoid of agency.” Landscapes “neither chase us nor devour us, but instead, they remain quietly in the background,” writes Alaimo (283). Such is the ultimate fate of the monsters of Oak Street – dead or reduced to inert “background.” It’s a happy ending of sorts, but it does prompt us to ask ourselves, happy for whom? And, with what consequences?
*This essay really benefited from my conversation after the movie with Helen Keetley – who immediately picked up on The Twilight Zone reference and the split diopter shots.
References
Alaimo, Stacy, “Discomforting Creatures: Monstrous Natures in Recent Films,” in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by K. Armbruster and K. R. Wallace (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), pp. 279-96.
Trigg, Dylan, The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014).
