Zombies Are Flexible Political Metaphors In Abe Forsyth’s Horror-Comedy ‘Little Monsters’
The film stars Lupita Nyong'o, and is playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
A kindergarten class is trapped on a farm surrounded by zombies in Little Monsters, the new Australian film from writer and director Abe Forsythe (Down Under).
A teacher, Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o), and a student’s deadbeat uncle, Dave (Alexander England), keep the 5-year-olds safe by telling them it’s a game of tip and the undead are ‘it’.
The world is going to hell around these kids, but Miss Caroline finds a way to maintain their innocence. In reverse, the surviving adults see the zombie outbreak from the point-of-view of the kids and realise the world ain’t so bad.
You can cherry-pick anything going on in the world right now and project it onto in Little Monsters; zombies are flexible political metaphors.
Nyong’o reacted to the story strongly. Talking to Junkee, Forsythe says they always wanted someone with a high profile to play Miss Caroline so they got the confidence to send the script to Nyong’o.
Within a day Forsythe got a call from the Academy Award winner.
“At the time she’d just done Black Panther and she was looking for something to get her hands dirty,” Forsythe tells Junkee, “and she was looking for something different … so we had this long Skype call and then 24 hours later she was onboard. It was bizarre!”
In Little Monsters Nyong’o plays Miss Caroline, a kindergarten teacher who must protect her class from zombies while on an excursion. Along for the ride is a kid’s mopey uncle, Dave (Alexander England), and popular children’s entertainer, Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gadd).
“The thing that was scary,” Forsythe says, “but also exciting at the same time was that we were going to attempt something lots of people we’re telling us was too crazy: making a horror film with 5-year-olds.”
Nyong’o shot Little Monsters in Australia before she made Us with Jordan Peele. Miss Caroline is presented in the film as the ultimate kindergarten teacher who can play Taylor Swift songs on the ukulele as well as she can decapitate zombies with a shovel.
“Lupita was totally up for the challenge,” says Forsythe. “She’d never played the ukulele before, she’d never sung before, she’d never played a teacher, she was flying halfway around the world to be part of something that was so, like when people heard she was going to be in the movie they we like, what the fuck?”
Never Work With Children, Animals, Or Zombies
In Little Monsters, Forsythe ticked nearly every box most filmmakers are told to avoid: children and animals, but the film is inspired by Forsythe’s experiences as a dad.
“My son has multiple life-threatening food allergies,” says Forsythe. “So going to school was the first time he was out of my care and out of my sight … it was scary because his kindergarten teacher was going to be responsible for so much more than what their job is. And he got lucky because he got the most amazing kindergarten teacher who totally understood his health issues.”
“I also went on a kindergarten excursion with my son’s class to the farm (where we ended up shooting the film) and I got the spark for the idea about there being zombies there.”
The tradition of school excursions in Australia is captured perfectly in Little Monsters but Forsythe never wanted to be explicit with zombie metaphor in the film.
“The zombies can represent whatever you want them to represent,” Forsythe says. “There’s many different ways you can interpret what the zombies could be … but the whole idea was: if we looked at the world through the eyes of a child, maybe we wouldn’t be in the situation that we’re in.”
the poster for little monsters has to be one of my favourite film posters from this decade! it’s giving off house (1977) and ‘60s vibes..i love it so much ☀️ pic.twitter.com/kp96udC1Dc
— keli williams (@beforesnrise) July 31, 2019
The World is Fucked
The mess of the world has been at the centre of Forsythe’s films.
In 2016, he made Down Under, a comedy set after the events of 2005 Cronulla riots, about two carloads of vengeful hotheads from both sides of the fight. The tagline was: ‘Australia verses Australia — nobody wins.’
Down Under was divisive with critics but it satirised our national identity in the wake of one of the most shameful days in our history.
Perverted masculinity in Australia is a big theme of Down Under and it continues in Little Monsters in the form of Dave who is like a grotesque Hemsworth, and Teddy McGiggle who is something much, much worse.
“With Dave, what was interesting for me was setting up a comic world like one of those Judd Apatow comedies,” says Forsythe. “That conceit of the leading male having to grow up. But the problem I found with most of those types of movies is I don’t usually buy where they end up, so I wanted to take the cliché and genuinely have him [Dave] become someone else through the experience of having to spend time with his nephew and meeting Miss Caroline.”
Forsythe says for the first time he’s beginning to work on projects that step away from the man-child characters that show up in his films, and it’s a relief.
“Obviously, Down Under was a very pessimistic movie,” says Forsythe. “It had moments in there that were meant to direct you into going: there is another way, this isn’t the way. And the whole point of that movie was, well I’m going to make you laugh at stuff but I’m also going to punish you for laughing at things you shouldn’t be laughing at.
“With Little Monsters I wanted to do the totally opposite thing and say something optimistic.”
I'm just very much here for @Lupita_Nyongo's newfound scream queen status #LittleMonsters pic.twitter.com/mQZdRLQazG
— Hanna Ines Flint (@HannaFlint) July 31, 2019
Being Optimistic
Off the back of Little Monsters, Forsythe mentions he’s at work on another project with Nyong’o and is starting to spend more time working in America. Forsythe is humbled by the reaction so far to Little Monsters; it received rave reviews when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Forsythe says the reaction has been heartening compared with the release of Down Under.
“With everything that’s going on in the world right now, and the outrage culture, I feel like this is a time when comedy can become dangerous again,” Forsythe says. “You can make a movie about the more contentious stuff happening in the world at the moment and make a much more powerful statement by making it a comedy.”
Little Monsters has big tonal shifts and a razor-sharp comic sensibility that stretches the concept to extremes. But when it snaps back in its quieter moments there’s a surprising amount of heart in the interplay between Dave, Miss Caroline and the kids.
There are moments where the film could double down on being a dark comedy, but Forsythe’s new-found optimism overrides the temptation.
“I feel like now, what’s going on around the world has progressed to almost beyond satire,” says Forsythe. “But we’re coming into that time again we’re people are going to be looking for satirical comedies … I watched the trailer for Taika Waititi’s JoJo Rabbit, he’s such a brilliant filmmaker, and that’s an example, you need to look for ways of making what’s going on look absurd and remind people about what’s good about the world at the same time.”
Little Monsters is the Centrepiece Gala Film of the Melbourne International Film Festival 2019 and plays 10 August 2019.
Cameron Williams is a writer and film critic based in Melbourne who occasionally blabs about movies on ABC radio. He has a slight Twitter addiction: @MrCamW.