Ah yes, once again we turn ourselves to the world of Robert Zemeckis-produced spooky projects. I don’t know how we ended up in this pocket of Hollywood filmmaking in the ’90s and ’00s, but I guess the guy had his finger in a lot of pies and a lot of those pies were filled with ectoplasm. Today’s entry, Monster House, doesn’t feel so far removed from one of Zemeckis’s directorial efforts, The Polar Express, which had just come out a few years prior and used some of the same animation techniques. Much like that film, its animation doesn’t entirely hold up (though for different reasons). Still, luckily, it does have a slightly more enjoyable hook and screenplay that make it enjoyable enough in 2025.
Monster House focuses on two kids on the eve of one of the most important days in a kid’s calendar year, Halloween. We focus most on D.J. Walters (voiced by Mitchell Musso), a kind of lanky pale nobody, whose parents are hilariously uninterested in his existence, and so leave for a convention without him right before Halloween. His best friend is named Chowder (Sam Lerner), the typical kind of rambunctious-but-lovable fat kid you see in these types of movies, who gets himself and D.J. into trouble when he bounces his basketball onto the lawn of their neighbor, Mr. Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi). The neighbor runs out of his house and starts yelling at the boys about leaving the ball on his lawn, but after overexerting himself, suddenly faints and is taken away in an ambulance.
While being babysat as their parents are away, the boys start to discover more about Nebbercracker and hear rumors from their babysitter’s boyfriend that the house across the street may be haunted. D.J. and Chowder end up saving a Girl Scout from being swallowed by the house (we see that the house’s front door turns into a mouth and has a Persian rug for a tongue), which leads them to investigating further why the house is alive. This ropes in some wacky side characters, like a couple of bumbling cops played by Kevin James and Nick Cannon, as well as a paranormal expert played by Jason Lee (welcome to the mid-’00s, baby).
The boys eventually go into the house, trying to find the furnace that serves as the house’s heart, since they believe this is the only way it can be stopped. While rooting around the house, they also find that the place isn’t necessarily a manifestation of Nebbercracker’s soul, but actually that of his dead wife, Constance. This is then further explained when Nebbercracker returns from the hospital and tells us their origin story that started with the large Constance being the star of a freak show, which compelled him to set her free and start a household with her. This then leads the kids and Nebbercracker to come up with the idea to finally put Constance to rest.
It’s funny that this movie is about a bunch of scrappy kids getting in over their heads, since it kind of sounds like that sums up the film’s production. Director Gil Kenan (who went on to direct the Poltergeist remake and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire) was just a few years out of film school when he got involved with ImageMovers, Robert Zemeckis’s animation company. He was given a script written by Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, who at that point hadn’t done much, other than the immortal failed pilot for Heat Vision and Jack. Kenan was really taken with their script, deeming it hilarious, but added a few crucial things, like the Constance and Nebbercracker plot.
I will say the script is probably the best thing about the film, as it has plenty of funny moments, many of which are fun for kids and adults (there’s a particularly memorable line involving the house’s uvula). The film also nails a very particular type of ’80s hijinks aesthetic, in line with films like The Goonies, E.T., or The Monster Squad. I even love the way Monster House has these films’ same point of view, where it feels like you’re living in a world that’s only inhabited by adults in a very tertiary way. I do think they maybe could have done a better job of making Nebbercracker and Constance a little more sympathetic, but maybe that was the best they could do for a bunch of rookies being involved in the writing process.
That all said, I really had a hard time adjusting to the animation of this movie. I’ve been trying to figure out why the film was so hard to look at, but I think it mostly comes down to early computer-animated movies having a difficult time animating human characters in a way that didn’t look creepy. I haven’t seen The Polar Express since it was relatively new, but I have to imagine the humans in that don’t look particularly great by today’s standards. I think it works a little better when human characters are made to look more stylized and cartoony, such as in something like The Incredibles or Ratatouille. But the characters in Monster House are somewhere in between, and while it doesn’t look awful, it also doesn’t look quite right either.
And unfortunately, I feel like with a movie like this, the look of it has to hold up well in order for it to remain timeless. Roger Ebert loved Monster House and compared it to the work of Tim Burton, but I feel like Burton’s films hold up because the handcrafted nature of the art design in those movies still looks singular. I’m not saying there wasn’t a lot of care put into Monster House by the animators who worked on it, since they even used the same innovative motion capture techniques that Zemeckis used on The Polar Express. But I guess when there’s just that much technology involved and it’s in such a formative state, there’s a high likelihood that things won’t be up to the standards of our modern eyes years later. Again, the film has enough personality that I think it overcomes some of those barriers, but perhaps not enough to just coast off pure nostalgia, and especially when I didn’t see this movie when I was a kid.