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The monster house gives DJ the evil eye

More troubling is how the film—directed by novice Gil Kenan from a screenplay credited to Corpse Bride's Pamela Pettler and Jack Black veterans Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab—ultimately resolves the question of the house and its identity. Without giving too much away, hopefully, suffice to say that the film shows a remarkable lack of sympathy for the marginalized outsider, plus it is a little unnerving to see a children's film in which one character celebrates the violent end of a bad marriage, and the children go on to hope that this character will find someone nicer, now.

It all makes for a striking contrast with a film like, say, Zathura, where the gradual destruction of the house worked on one level as a metaphor for the end of a marriage and the crumbling apart of the larger family. In that film, the literal and metaphorical destruction was something to be resisted, even reversed if possible—but Monster House positively revels in it. That's not exactly a healthy or mature message to send to kids, no matter how much growing up they've done.

1. If you're an adult, did you trick-or-treat when you were a child? How did you feel when you were suddenly too old to do it anymore? If you're a kid, how do you think you'll feel when you're too old for trick-or-treating?
   
   
2. What does this film say about growing up? Do you think the babysitter remembers being a girl like Jenny once? What do you think the children see when they look at the babysitter and her boyfriend, or at their own parents?
   
   
3. What does this film say about how we regard the outsiders in our midst? How do our sympathies shift over the course of the film? Does the film encourage us to identify with outsiders, or to pick different outsiders to distrust, or what?
   
   
4. Do you believe a house can be haunted or possessed? Are ghosts real? Are demons? Discuss.
   
   

Monster House is rated PG for scary images and sequences (people being attacked and swallowed by a house), thematic elements, some crude humor (including a boy urinating in a bottle, a dog peeing in a Jack-o'-Lantern, an implicit pun involving the uvula and an unmentioned word for a part of the female anatomy) and brief language (words like "crap", "screwed" and "kiss my hairy butt").

Photos © Copyright Columbia Pictures

© Peter T. Chattaway 2006, subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

Moviegoers have visited many haunted houses over the years. Up those broken stairs, across the cobwebbed front porch, behind that forbidding front door, and in the shadowed rooms beyond those battered window shades, monsters of all kinds have menaced naïve trespassers and screaming captives.

In the animated feature Monster House, there's a temperamental old man (voiced by Steve Buscemi) named Mr. Nebbercracker with a face as haunted as Gollum's and a tendency to shout "Get off my lawwwwn!" at curious neighbors. But Nebbercracker's not the real threat to trespassers. That's what young DJ, his chubby friend Chowder, and their shared schoolboy crush Jenny learn the hard way. It's Nebbercracker's house that's really dangerous, snatching those who get close with its carpeted tongue, gnashing teeth made of splintered timber, its windows flaring like fiery eyes.

There are other dangers as well—especially for parents who think this is just another harmless animated movie for all ages.

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