A house eats a babysitter’s ex-boyfriend. That is the premise of Monster House, and it is also the best thing about it. Gil Kenan’s 2006 animated film asks what happens when an entire house is out to get you, then answers with a furnace that has a heartbeat and a front door that swallows a kite thief whole.
Released July 21, 2006, by Sony Pictures Releasing under the Columbia Pictures label, Monster House grossed $142 million worldwide against a $75 million production budget. It earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Animated Feature, losing to Happy Feet and Cars respectively.
Trailer, via Amblin Entertainment.
DJ, Chowder and the House Across the Street
The plot is simple and sturdy. On the day before Halloween, twelve-year-old Dustin James “D.J.” Walters spies on his elderly neighbor Horace Nebbercracker, a man known for frightening children off his property and confiscating their belongings. D.J.’s parents leave town for a convention, leaving him with his teenage babysitter, Elizabeth, or Zee.
When D.J.’s best friend Charles “Chowder” Peterson loses his basketball on Nebbercracker’s front yard, the old man confronts them, then faints and is taken away by paramedics. The boys assume he died of a heart attack.
Zee’s boyfriend Bones then shows up, recalls Nebbercracker stealing his kite, and repeats rumors that the old man cannibalized his late wife. After Zee kicks him out, Bones spots his kite in the front door of the house and tries to take it back. The house abducts him.
What the House Actually Is
D.J. and Chowder investigate and find the house is possessed by a poltergeist, which they take to be Nebbercracker’s vengeful spirit. The next morning they save a girl named Jennifer “Jenny” Bennett from the house as she sells candy for her school. Jenny calls police officers Landers and Lister, but the house lies dormant when they arrive and the officers dismiss the report.
The trio consults local supernatural expert Reginald “Skull” Skulinski, who speculates the house can only be vanquished when its heart is struck. They deduce the furnace is the heart, build a dummy filled with cold medicine and offer it to the house to put it to sleep. Landers and Lister foil the plan, and the house devours them all.
Inside the sleeping house, the trio finds a shrine to Nebbercracker’s wife, Constance, whose skeletal remains are entombed in cement. Kathleen Turner voices Constance, listed as Constance “The Giantess” Nebbercracker, the vengeful spirit possessing the house.
The Voice Cast Does the Heavy Lifting
The film’s cast is deeper than a Halloween cartoon has any right to be:
- Mitchel Musso as D.J., Sam Lerner as Chowder, Spencer Locke as Jenny
- Steve Buscemi as Nebbercracker, Kathleen Turner as Constance
- Maggie Gyllenhaal as Zee, Jason Lee as Bones
- Kevin James as Officer Landers, Nick Cannon as Officer Lister
- Jon Heder as Skull Skulinski, Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara as D.J.’s parents
Buscemi gives Nebbercracker a sourness that turns, by the end, into something like grief. Turner has the harder job, playing a woman who is mostly a building, and she makes the furnace sound like a person.
Motion Capture Is the Wrong Tool Here
Kenan directed in his feature debut, from a script by Dan Harmon, Rob Schrab and Pamela Pettler. Robert Zemeckis’ ImageMovers and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment executive produced, with Relativity Media producing. The human characters were animated using motion-capture, the same technique Zemeckis used on The Polar Express in 2004.
That is the film’s central problem. Motion capture in 2006 gave faces a waxy, dead-eyed quality, and Monster House wears it hardest on its kids. D.J., Chowder and Jenny move like adults wearing children’s bodies. The house itself, free of a performer’s face, looks better than any of them.
Monster House was Sony’s first computer-animated film produced by Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Relativity Media’s first animated film. Both facts show. The movie is a technical experiment that got a theatrical release, and the seams are visible.
A 91-Minute Movie With a Real Mean Streak
The runtime is 91 minutes, and the film earns its horror tag. A house that eats people is a grim idea for a family comedy, and Kenan does not soften it much. Bones disappears into a doorway. Two police officers get swallowed. Constance’s remains are sealed in cement under the floor.
The tagline — “There goes the neighborhood” — sells a lighter movie than the one on screen.
Where Monster House holds up is in its structure. The mystery unfolds in clean steps: the fainting, the abduction, the police who see nothing, the expert who names the rule, the dummy plan, the shrine. Each beat hands the next one a reason to exist. Skull’s rule that the heart must be struck pays off exactly as stated.
The motion-capture faces do not hold up. They date the film to a specific moment when studios believed performance capture would replace animation, and the result here argues otherwise.
Monster House is a good Halloween movie trapped in a bad technological bet. The house is a better character than the children standing in front of it, and that inversion is the whole review. It earned its Oscar and Globe nominations on the strength of its premise and its villain, not its humans.
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