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Posted on October 5, 2026

“He’s a wild creature. We can’t ask him to be anything else”: Marine Monstrosities in The Shape of Water

Guest Post

Charlotte Troy

In 2017, renowned Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro released The Shape of Water, asking his audience to find comfort in his sympathetic monsters and further question the slippery boundary that separates the natural from the unnatural. Arguably, Del Toro’s filmography has been largely defined by his fascination with mythological and fantastical creatures including everything from vampire slaying half-vamps attired in leather trenchcoats (Blade trilogy) to cigar-smoking half-demons with an adoration for kittens (Hellboy franchise). In both literary and cinematic form, monsters act as the “patron saints of otherness” (Del Toro, “At Home with Monsters”) who are condemned, alienated and even killed “because their physical existence defies our expectations of normality in ways that offend us” and in turn threaten our social reality (Davies 29). Admittedly, monsters appear in Del Toro films as both protagonists and antagonists, but I argue that their central role as unlikely, sympathetic heroes raises questions about how true monstrosity is not synonymous with the nonhuman.

Posted on August 23, 2026

The Monsters Are Here on Oak Street: David Robert Mitchell’s Throwback Creature Feature

Dawn Keetley

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.

Posted on June 17, 2015

Review of Jurassic World: Of Dinosaurs and Monsters

Dawn Keetley

It may seem strange that I’m reviewing Jurassic World for a horror blog since none of the Jurassic Park films have ever been categorized as horror films: they are action, adventure, thriller, and science-fiction. But not horror. Why is that? Well, in large part it’s about marketing and studios striving to reach the largest possible audience; it’s about making sure the franchise is family-friendly. It’s also, though, because the films feature dinosaurs—natural creatures, not monsters. Right?

Posted on March 20, 2015

THE POSTHUMAN MONSTER OF WES CRAVEN’S SCREAM (1996)

Dawn Keetley

Noël Carroll’s theory of art-horror has always seemed a particularly compelling one to me—that the genre is defined by a monster characterized by impurity, by the yoking together of contradictory categories (the living dead, for example), thus evoking fear and revulsion in the viewer.[i] His theory notoriously has difficulty, though, accounting for the very human “monsters” of some horror films.[ii] What do we make of Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) in Wes Craven’s groundbreaking 1996 film, Scream? Billy is human, isn’t he? In fact he’s the very normal boyfriend of the heroine, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), seemingly no different from any other high-school student.
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