Bite-sized Canadian horror There Are Monsters (2008) is a beguiling brew. The 10 minute short, written and directed by Jay Dahl, hinges itself upon two seemingly contradictory conceits - just how nightmarishly uncanny the human form can be when it has its back turned firmly to you, and just how nightmarishly uncanny it can be when it's staring you straight in the face. The narrative centrepiece concerns a stand-off between an overly-familiar convenience store clerk (Kim Parkhill) and protagonist Garth (Steve Arnold). It has the distinct air of being lifted from a real-life case of spontaneous paranoia, where someone (possibly Dahl themselves) was gripped by the kind of fleeting conception that makes the most commonplace of interactions seem utterly terrifying and has you distrusting your fellow human for no rational reason. It's such a strikingly eerie sequence that the beginning and ending of the film hangs somewhat loosely around it, two superfluous bookends tasked with drawing a complete short story out of what is essentially a really engaging piece of flash fiction. Garth has been sent out on an errand by his wife Maddie (Kristin Langille), to collect a tub of ice cream in preparation for a dinner party they're due to host that evening. The clerk observes that the tub he's picked out is all melted and urges him to head into the deep freeze in the backroom and choose another. Something about her demeanour (and grotesquely exaggerated smile) rubs Garth the wrong way, so he hangs onto his current tub and makes a hasty exit, not even bothering to collect his change. Is the clerk actually conspiring to devour him, as Garth suspects, or is it his imagination that's warping their exchange out of all proportion? The scene is unsettling because the clerk's gestures and actions cannot, for the most part, be completely divorced from the explicable. So much so that when the clerk takes Garth's change and reveals the blood all across her fingertips, it feels almost unsporting of Dahl, the point at which he tips things overwhelmingly in favour of the horrific, although it does also allow for the film's most disgusting observation, when the encounter is subsequently recontextualised as an amusing story at Garth and Maddie's party, and Garth recalls the little "flecks of meat" on her fingers.
The narrative built around this bizarre encounter uses a familiar concept within the horror genre, immediately recognisable to anybody who's seen any of the many versions of Invasion of The Bodysnatchers - the implication that something non-human is slowly but stealthily taking over by assimilating the human populace one by one - but it presents it in a way that's very much steeped in the unrelenting mundaneness of its world as it marches toward the apocalypse. The entire piece is presented in a shaky-cam, almost pseudo-documentary style replete with uneasy close-ups, conveying both an unbearable intimacy with the characters' prosaicness and a non-stop feeling that some kind of inexplicable intrusion is forever in the mix. The nature of the monsters is not explored, with the film offering only the vaguest, blink-and-you'll-miss-it of hints as to how they came to be in this quiet Canadian town. At the beginning Garth is seen reading a web article on the Hadron Collider, which feels significant in that it seems to imply that the monsters wandered in from some tear in the universe's fabric, possible mirror beings from a parallel world. But this too seems superfluous, to my eyes a red herring. Instead, I like to think of the monsters' inception as being teased in the plain matter-of-factness of the film's title; the existence of monsters is a part of everyday reality, as prevalent and as humdrum as the existence of talk radio and convenience store freezers. These are monsters that conceal themselves behind the false gestures and shallow exchanges that characterise a significant part of our social interplay. Hence the dinner party sequence that follows Garth's uncanny encounter with the store clerk; there is not such a world of difference, it seems, between the clerk's misshapen leer and the assortment of awkward snickers exhibited by the gathering in Garth's own living room. Garth himself even produces a strained smile when Maddie rebuffs his attempt to bring her into the discussion and hands him a plate of pie instead. The party scene provides us with our title drop, as an attendee corroborates Garth's concerns about the dangers of smirking strangers. But the discussion is intrinsically hollow, and the characters seem inane in their attempts to laugh it off; it is a futile means of covering up the tensions of their lives.
The primary concerns of There Are Monsters appear to be rooted in isolation and urban alienation. The clue there, I think, is in the tiny bites we hear from the radio station Garth listens to on his drive up to the store, which indicate an underlying theme of seclusion - first, a reference to a desert island and then the question as to how astronauts manage to stay sane in the remoteness of space, with the implication that this is the very problem facing our equally cut-off players down on Earth. As Garth enters the convenience store, his presence is captured both on the security monitor and on the convex mirror, evoking a sense of both an omnipresent surveillance and a vast nothingness all around; Garth's environs seem empty and deserted, the world beyond him seems indifferent and impassive. The artifice of the urban landscape is evoked when one of the guests at Garth and Maddie's party mentions that she has to walk through a parkade to get to her apartment. There Are Monsters makes the case that there is something equally artificial about how we interact with and relate to our fellow humans, whether the implication be that we simply wouldn't notice if people around us were replaced with human-shaped monsters, or that the monsters are directly birthed from the emotional alienation that such a milieu entails. The sting in the tail is that things are ultimately shown to be no different between Garth and Maddie. Garth may be guarded against the feigned familiarity of strangers, but the utter stagnation in his relationship with his spouse is what finally causes him to fall prey to the monsters. Notably, Garth and Maddie seem to have little genuine connection at the beginning of the story. The bland discussion between the couple regarding whether the ice cream should be nut or vanilla flavour is indicative of their general indifference, both toward each other and toward their wider community. Notably, they are never shown looking at one another within the same frame, implying the same kind of disconnect as the mysterious girl who enters their yard, and who seems to be purposely positioning herself so that they can't make out her face. Garth's only moment of genuine interest in Maddie's perspective comes in his attempt to coax her into backing up his tale of a paranoia by raising the girl, and the concern she prompted in Maddie, at the dinner party; her unwillingness to do so unnerves Garth, but not to the point that he isn't shortly obsessing about how an elementary school teacher can afford to have a boob job and a waiter manages to live in an abode of 2800 square feet. Big mistake. He should have kept his eyes on his wife. Because she's a monster now too.
The monsters might be endemic in Garth and Maddie's dry world of middle-class detachment, but they are at the same time antithetical to it. Outside of Garth's convenience store encounter, the monsters seem predominantly aligned with forces that are altogether more basic and veracious - nature, time and children. The first sign of disturbance for Garth and Maddie (besides the reports of unusual dust clouds overheard on their kitchen radio) is in the appearance of the mysterious young girl. Her perspective is represented in the film's opening shots, establishing that she found her way into their yard by emerging from the depths of the snow-covered wilderness. It gives the impression of something otherworldly and alien to our ordained customs - perhaps the part of our own selves that we ditched in the woods when we made the leap to living in houses - infiltrating civilisation in order to bring it down and reclaim its dominance in the scheme of things. This connection between the intruders and the natural world is retained through the intermittent shots of the tree branches outside and the sun sinking into the horizon, signalling the impassive march of time and a sense of impending inevitability. Maddie's final words to Garth are "It's happening" - suggesting that whatever is happening is all part of some predefined process, intuitively understood by them both (even if Garth professes otherwise).
Even before Garth's run-in with the convenience store clerk, the film has already yielded its major jump scare, confirming that there's certainly something spooky happening at least somewhere within this community in the Great White North. Maddie, left alone in the house while Garth steps out to buy nut or vanilla ice cream, attempts to reach out to the girl, only for the girl to turn and rush at her, pressing her freakishly expanded mouth against the glass pane in a voracious frenzy. With this moment in mind, it comes as little shock at the end of the film when Maddie is revealed to have already joined the monsters' ranks. Before Maddie exposes the horrors lurking beneath her perpetually bored expression, we get a reappearance from the girl, who sneaks into the couple's bedroom, now baring a recognisably human face and introducing herself as "Emily", entailing a comically expletive-filled reaction from Garth (who was just as inclined to dish out the expletives at her initial showing). Personally, I like to think that Maddie met less her own doom in Emily's rubbery chops than she did solidarity. I don't consider it much of a coincidence that the girl could pass for Maddie's younger counterpart, perhaps a manifestation of Maddie's childhood self, or a daughter she might have had within another timeline. Her entry into Maddie's life suggests that a rebirth or reconnection is occurring. The monsters present as distorted mirror images of this reality's inhabitants, so that when the strange girl slams her enlarged mouth against the glass, it plays like a reflection of Maddie's own internalised anguish, and the emotion she's conditioned herself to keep bottled up amid the suffocating tedium of her relationship with Garth and their entire mindless friendship circle. The upheaval that has occurred by the film's end is facilitated through the forging of a genuine connection, not with one of her fellow humans, but with one of the interloping entities, in whom Maddie finds an ally and co-conspirator. Their influence seems to extend both ways - having been inducted into the household, Maddie appears more genial and less threatening (she flashes Garth a toothy grin, but one of regular human proportions). Maddie, meanwhile, is fully prepared to have it all out with Garth. What does it mean, exactly, when she tells him that "It's happening"? That the apocalypse is imminent, or that the flaccid veneer keeping their stagnant relationship propped up is about to come crashing messily down? Really, you can take your pick. But it seems imperative to me that the warping Maddie we see at the film's out is the real Maddie coming out from the depths, not some imposter who snuck in when a particle accelerator tore a few holes in the characters' reality. Not that their reality isn't undoubtedly riddled with holes.
In 2013, There Are Monsters was expanded into a full-length feature (also directed by Dahl). The domestic drama was done away with, with a team of film students replacing our stagnant couple as the protagonist, but the signature convenience store set-piece was preserved. On this occasion, it was Langille herself who got to face the horrors of Parkhill's pearlies.
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