MONSTER SUMMER Director Says Movie Will Scare, Not Scar
Movieguide® Contributor
Director-actor David Henrie is sharing what his goals were for MONSTER SUMMER, a spooky movie that entertainingly “scares” but doesn’t “scar.”
“You said something like really awesome on Instagram when you were talking about MONSTER SUMMER and you said that you wanted to create a film that was just like a worry-free family spooky movie because we don’t recall having those,” an interviewer told Henrie on “The Hashtag Show” on Oct. 1.
“It was a blast, you know,” Henrie said. “It reminded me of when I was a kid Like when I finished the script, I got the feeling of when I was a little boy watching movies with my dad. I would get my popcorn, my bunch of crunch, my soda, and I would go to the movie theaters with him, and it was always a wonderful experience, and there were a lot of movies that were scary but not scarring, and I wanted to recreate that — something that could be scary but not scarring and, you know.”
They aren’t “empty scares” but have a reason behind them.
“It’s like the whole point of the scary genre is to show you that you should face your fears and you can overcome them, and so to me, I was trying to capture a lot of that,” he said. “I was very intentional all along the way that, yes, this is a spooky, fun, family movie, but it’s for a point. There’s lessons to be learned and both parents and children have things to be learned in this story.”
An excerpt from Movieguide®’s review of the movie reads:
MONSTER SUMMER is a teenage horror movie in the tradition of GOONIES. Noah is a young teenager living on Martha’s Vineyard with his mother, who runs a boarding house. Noah’s father was a journalist, but died. So, Noah wants to be a journalist. Noah’s friend, Ben, goes swimming with a teenager girl and gets attacked by someone under the water and turns into a zombie. Noah recruits two of his friends to investigate what’s happening. He eventually finds out that Old Man Carruthers, played by Mel Gibson, is a former police detective who left the force to search for the man who kidnapped his young son. With his help, Noah and his friends search for the perpetrator whom Noah thinks us a witch.
In many ways, MONSTER SUMMER is very clean with no overt sex and almost no foul language. There are also Christian symbols and allusions. However, the movie reveals frightening things about witches, especially their ability to appear as normal next-door neighbors. Also, the final showdown with the witch is extremely scary. Therefore, MOVIEGUIDE® recommends caution for younger teenagers.
To test whether a scene carried too much scare factor, Henrie trusted his gut.
“I’m a scaredy cat big time, and if it scared me too much, then I wouldn’t have done it,” he said. “So it was it was scare not scar. Like, I definitely want some fun jump scares, you know.”
Henrie kept it intentional the whole time and never felt like he took the scares too far.
“We’ve done test screenings for this. There are some great jump scares but immediately followed by laughter. They’re like, ‘I can’t believe I just jumped at that kind of a thing.’ So yeah, I didn’t want to do anything that I think would get in people’s heads, and I wanted the ending to be so memorable that it would be victorious, ultimately. That it would overshadow anything that we just went through.”
Henrie found the perfect person to play Gene when he cast Mel Gibson.
“It seemed like kind of like his character, Riggs, a little bit from LETHAL WEAPON…He just seemed like the role to me,” Henrie said. “I had seen some interviews with him, too, prior to the film, where he had like this beard kind of thing and he looked a little scraggly, and I was like that’s exactly what we’re looking for in this character.”
“He just jumped off the page that this is Mel, and his character has this wonderful kind of pessimistic vibe at the beginning, but it’s contrasted by the boy, who’s an optimist, and they have this great two-hander relationship throughout the film and you know, he loved it because he hasn’t done a family film since Pocahontas.”
Gibson, whose last role was in the R-rated flick DESPERATION ROAD, thoroughly enjoyed his time working with his much younger castmates.
“He was just having a freaking blast,” Henrie said. “He was like, ‘I get to be a kid again in this movie.’ So we had a really good time, and I think that translates on screen. He gives a great performance.”
The cast of kids — Noah Cottrell, Mason Thames, Abby James Witherspoon and Julian Lerner — also had a great time on set and delivered wonderful performances.
“Growing up as a kid actor myself, I saw the good, the bad and the ugly of set culture, and I really wanted a fun atmosphere where they could feel like they could be kids and they didn’t feel like they’re being, I don’t know, beaten into submission or anything like [that],” Henrie said. “If you can create a sporty, fun atmosphere for them, [they’re] like, ‘Okay, we’re here. We need to show up. We need to work hard.’”
It’s “kind of like a sport, but it’s not the end of the world, you know? You’re free to make mistakes. You have a good atmosphere, and we had that atmosphere on set.”
Each of the kids blessed Henrie in a different way.
“If you’re not having fun and enjoying it and counting your blessings, then what are we doing?” he said. “So they reminded me of that when I was working with them. All of them have just such wonderful smiles and personalities and they all touched me in a really positive way.”
“The kids like got a crazy amount of combinations they all wanted to do their [own stunts]. So, like Noah Cottrell had to do some stuff in the water that was gnarly, and we had this whole water tank and rigs and stunt people, and he did it, man. He did it.”
MONSTER SUMMER has been in theaters across the U.S. since Oct. 4.
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