Making Monsters: Jumbled Horror Raids the Oeuvre for Bits and Pieces, Frankenstein-Style

By Thom Ernst

Rating: B

Although something of an untidy mash-up of weathered horror themes and premises, there is enough macabre glee in Making Monsters to make it a worthy addition to your Halloween watch list.

Making Monsters is an odd, slightly off-kilter take on the haunted house story. Imagine Robert Altman's Images (1972) going head-to-toe with Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965). And then imagine someone coming along to toss in a bit of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to even the score.

That makes for a loopy enough experience but add human hunting humans, a few M. Night Shyamalan-worthy reveals, and a heavy dose of Creep (2014), and there's not much else to be done but to let things play out.

Some pretty recognizable images are evoked in the horror hodgepodge Making Monsters.

Making Monsters is one more in the flood of BooTube horror films to skew the price of online fame into something nasty and regrettable. This time the casualty is Chris (Tim Loden), an online sensation who earns fame by terrifying his fiancé with a series of jump scares caught on camera.

Buying into Chris' celebrity is not easy given that the only evidence we have is an unremarkable second-rate prank that a grade-schooler could pull off. Still, his shenanigans earn him a viewership of 10 million, as well as guest spots on entertainment shows and speaking engagements to packed auditoriums.

Chris is more interested in fame than in his fiancé's well-being. The jump scares leveled at his fiancé are the kind of shrewdly nefarious abuse that can be easily dismissed, not unlike the abuse Florence Pugh's character endures at the hand of her boyfriend in Ari Aster's Midsommar (2019).

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

At the center of the story is Chris’ fiancé, Allison (Alana Almer). Allison has inherited her family's history of psychic ability. Unlike her ancestors, Allison doesn't embrace her freakish encounters with the paranormal, a condition Chris is happy to take full advantage. But when Chris and Allison enter an in-vitro program to help get pregnant, Allison demands Chris stop the unexpected scares.

Chris agrees but his word is put to the test when an old friend invites the couple to enjoy a quiet weekend at the newly purchased renovated country church he shares with his partner.

Arriving at the church, made ominous by a slow zoom-out as the couple enters the building, Chris and Allison meet David (Jonathan Craig), their obsequious and somewhat hypersensitive host. The church fills Allison with dread but David convinces them to stay even after news of their friend's delayed flight. And so, the three revel in a night of civil debauchery filled with drugs, drink, and dance. And then things take a dangerous turn.

Both Craig and Almer, by the force of their performances, seem intent of taking the material into a realm of histrionics and hyperbole. Craig performs David with fitful resemblance to the uneasy charm played by Mark Duplass’ character in Creep and Creep 2 (2017) while Almer distorts her face into fits of overwhelming fear and anger, shrieking her lines to the point of being incoherent.

Either way, both actors bring a compelling energy to the film that’s either intentionally satirical or perversely accurate.

The title's vague reference to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is somewhat misleading but not entirely fruitless. After all, Shelley does provide Dr. Frankenstein with his first monster-starter kit. And insofar as Shelley's monster is assembled from the limbs and organs of discarded corpses, Making Monsters too is assembled from scavenging bits and pieces from other moves.

In Making Monsters, the monsters already exist, whether they creep in the shadows of a ghost-infested church, leap out from behind doors or wield axes in broad daylight. No monsters are made in the film, at least not in the way Shelley imagines happening in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory and envisioned in James Whales' film. But if the core of Shelley's story is not the monster wreaking havoc but the creator playing god, then the core of Making Monsters lurks off-screen waiting to be born.

And so, the movie begins in a fertility clinic. Well, it almost begins in a fertility clinic—there are three distinct openings before the film edges its way into acts two and three. The first opening depicts the gruesome daytime murder of a naked man in an open field (a change from a tradition of horror films depicting the gruesome daytime murder of a naked woman in an open field).

The second opening shows a bride-to-be trying on a vintage wedding dress whose previous owner drowned the night before her wedding day. Then comes the fertility clinic, a new life-creating laboratory where, unlike Shelley’s Frankenstein, the doctor is more jokester than mad scientist.

It’s strange that a film set in part at an in-vitro clinic titled Making Monsters does not adopt any of Shelley’s cautionary views around playing god. And yet the topic goes no further than any insinuations created out the circumstances.

There are other ideas and situations that the film introduces then promptly ignores as if events occur for reasons all unto themselves that may or may not have anything to do with the story. But amid the jumbled themes and open plot lines, there is a warped sensibility at play even when it seems unlikely that the story will find a rational way to pull the threads together.

Best you just sit back and enjoy. Whatever is about to happen is out of your hands.

Making Monsters. Directed by Jonathan Harding and Rob Brunner. Starring Tim Loden, Alana Almer, and Jonathan Craig. Available on VOD and digital platforms Friday, October 16..