Key Takeaways:
- Film Team: Dracula assembled a unique team in 1987.
- Movie Elements: The film features iconic monsters like Frankenstein and the Wolf Man.
- Initial Reception: The Monster Squad faced significant challenges upon release.
- Cult Following: The movie gained popularity through VHS and cable after its initial failure.
Dracula put together one incredible team in 1987.
We got Frankenstein (or Frankenstein’s Monster if you want to be a stickler about it), the Wolf Man, the Mummy and the Gill-man, all in the same movie! It was a film with creatures from Stan Winston’s shop and a script co-written by Shane Black. Seriously, how does that not work?
But almost everything about The Monster Squad turned out to be more complicated than it looked.
What do you do when the very studio that your monsters built has no interest in making your movie? And how do you now make it without their consent?
In this video we’ll cover all that as well as how Fred Dekker nearly got fired after his first week of shooting, the marketing struggle to figure out exactly who the movie was for. And discover how when The Monster Squad finally hit theaters, audiences basically stayed home.
It’s safe to assume everybody involved had every reason to think they had made a movie nobody wanted. But that wasn’t the end of The Monster Squad story.
To paraphrase one Marty McFly: they just weren’t ready for it yet.
Kids found it on VHS. They taped it off cable. They passed it around to their friends. Lines from the film became part of their vocabulary. And decades later, those same kids were packing theaters to watch a screening of the same movie that had been written off as a bomb.
So how did The Monster Squad go from one of 1987’s biggest failures to a movie people are still obsessed with almost forty years later?
Grab your silver bullets, check the closet for monsters, and make sure the Wolf Man’s got nards.
The Little Rascals Meet The Wrong Neighbors
Dekker was coming off Night of the Creeps, his 1986 directing debut, which managed to cram alien parasites, college romance and zombies into a movie where Tom Atkins seemed to be conducting an entirely separate detective story. Dekker liked throwing together the things he enjoyed watching, and he wasn’t particularly interested in choosing between making something funny and making it scary.
Dekker was already developing The Monster Squad before Night of the Creeps had even reached theaters.
Although The Goonies is the obvious comparison, the idea came from Dekker’s love of the Little Rascals and the Universal monsters. He was especially fond of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which could make him laugh while still convincing him the monster might kill Lou Costello. Now imagine kids having to deal with that.
He brought the idea to Shane Black, a friend from the group of aspiring filmmakers he knew through UCLA. This was before Black became the screenwriter Hollywood paid enormous amounts of money to write action movies. Lethal Weapon would come out in 1987, the same year as The Monster Squad, and you can see the appeal of having him involved. Give the guy a group of people who argue while everything around them falls apart and he’s pretty comfortable.
Black wrote the first Monster Squad screenplay, dated February 15, 1986, with Dekker joining him on revisions. By the July 30 third draft, both men were credited. Dekker specifically praised Black’s ability to write characters. The kids spend a lot of time insulting each other, but you still believe they’re friends. It also gives the movie somewhere to get its laughs without requiring Dracula to stop being dangerous every time somebody needs a joke.
Black’s first version was considerably bigger. Dekker recalled an opening with a zeppelin, machine guns and vampire brides on horseback. Which sounds awesome and also sounds like an expensive way to get through the first few minutes of a movie.
The basic story remained the same. A group of horror fans discover that the monsters they’ve been watching are real. Dracula wants an amulet that can upset the balance between good and evil, and the kids have to stop him while dealing with adults who understandably don’t believe Dracula is currently their biggest problem.
Universal seemed like the place to take it. These were the monsters Dekker had grown up watching, and he wanted to bring them back. After Universal passed, the project landed at Taft Entertainment Pictures and Keith Barish Productions. Jonathan Zimbert produced, with Peter Hyams, Rob Cohen and Keith Barish serving as executive producers. TriStar handled distribution.
There was still the problem of what the monsters could look like. Universal passing on the movie didn’t give everybody permission to copy its makeup designs. The filmmakers could use characters from older literature and folklore, but Universal’s particular versions of those characters were another matter. The Gill-man needed especially substantial changes because the Creature from the Black Lagoon was a studio creation. There wasn’t just some old novel lying around they could go back to for that one.
So, the effects crew had to make monsters everyone would recognize while changing enough that they weren’t simply copying Universal’s work.
Casting The Kids And The Monsters
The kids had to seem like they’d already spent years hanging around together. Sean runs the club and takes all this monster stuff seriously, while Patrick is his best friend. Horace gets picked on, Rudy is older and cooler than everybody else, and Eugene is young enough to think writing to the Army might actually solve the problem.
André Gower originally auditioned for Rudy. He went through callbacks and a screen test expecting to play the older, cooler member of the group and was disappointed when he learned he’d been cast as Sean instead. I get it. Sean has to organize everything. Rudy gets the leather jacket and smokes cigarettes and all.
Ryan Lambert ended up playing Rudy, with Robby Kiger as Patrick, Brent Chalem as Horace and Michael Faustino as Eugene. Ashley Bank played Sean’s little sister Phoebe.
Phoebe keeps trying to join the club even though the boys don’t want her there, and she’s the one who befriends Frankenstein instead of immediately assuming he needs to be killed. That could have become unbearably cute with the wrong performance. Bank plays her as a stubborn little kid who doesn’t see why everyone else is making such a big deal out of this.
Stephen Macht and Mary Ellen Trainor played Sean’s parents, with Stan Shaw as his father’s police partner. Macht makes Sean’s dad a reasonably capable adult. The guy is a cop. He just hasn’t spent his afternoons preparing for a vampire invasion, which seems fair.
For Frankenstein, Dekker cast Tom Noonan, who had recently played Francis Dollarhyde in Manhunter. It was around this time when he was heavily pursued for a role in a much different kind of monster movie: Near Dark. Noonan preferred the sweetness of The Monster Squad to Near Dark. Director Kathryn Bigelow even tried to work out a way for him to appear in both movies, but it didn’t happen.
Noonan stayed in character around the kids and kept his distance between scenes. Gower remembered having to rent Manhunter to find out what the guy actually looked like. That’s quite a movie to rent just to get a look at your co-star.
Duncan Regehr approached Dracula as a sociopath, although he and Dekker didn’t always agree about the characterization. He takes the Count seriously enough to be frightening even while wearing the cape and doing all the traditional Dracula stuff. Once the kids start interfering with his plans, he’s perfectly willing to kill them.
Michael Reid MacKay found the Mummy role through a Variety casting notice, while Carl Thibault answered a notice in Backstage for the Wolf Man. Jon Gries played the werewolf’s desperate human form, and you know, tried to throw a football over mountains. Tom Woodruff Jr. was already working in Stan Winston’s effects shop and pushed for the chance to play the Gill-man himself.
Building The Monsters
The artists in Stan Winston’s shop split the difference and shared responsibilities to bring the monsters to life.
Frankenstein’s bolts moved to his temples, and his face had different seams and proportions from the familiar Universal version. The Gill-man was lean and muscular, with scales and fins that made him look like an actual creature instead of somebody wearing a fish costume. Honestly, the biggest problem with that design is how little of it we get to see. I would have happily watched more of that guy.
They shaved Woodruff’s body cast about a quarter-inch all over so the finished suit would have to stretch tightly over his body. That kept the rubber from folding and ruining the illusion that there wasn’t a guy inside the thing. The Wolf Man’s face used animatronics, which let the crew change its proportions and give it movements they couldn’t get from ordinary makeup appliances.
One effect that caused problems was the arm used for the werewolf transformation. Crew member Shannon Shea helped build an artificial arm with retracting hair and nails. They would film the hair and nails disappearing, then reverse the footage to make them appear to grow. It was a fairly straightforward idea, but changes to the action in the phone booth made the setup more difficult.
When they tried it, the hair pulled through too quickly. Then the camera operator wanted another take, and this wasn’t an effect they could just reset and immediately do again. Shea remembered the whole thing as a painful failure.
Even by today’s standards, the movie still looks great. Bradford May’s widescreen photography gives us a good look at the streets and creepy interiors, and Richard Edlund’s visual-effects team helped with the bigger supernatural effects. For a movie that gets through everything in 82 minutes, there’s a lot onscreen.
Bruce Broughton’s score does a lot for it, too. Dekker wanted the big orchestral sound Broughton had brought to movies like Silverado and Young Sherlock Holmes. The first time he heardthe orchestra performingthe score,the moment overwhelmed him.I can understand that.You spend all this time tryingto geta moviemade,and nowthere’san entireorchestra playingmusicforyourmonstermovie.
The score makesthe adventure feel big,and Broughton reallygoesforitwhenFrankensteinhasto leavePhoebe.Ican’teven decidewhat hurtsworse: theirfinalgoodbye orArtax takingadipinSwampofSadness. That’s some ’80s trauma for ya.
Dekker Nearly Gets Fired
Filming began in Los Angeles on October 13, 1986, with work at Culver Studiosandthe Warner Bros.andUniversal lotsas wellasother locations.Gower remembered shootingthe finalein Warner town squarewith wind machinesgoing,bats flyingandmonstersattacking deputieswhilethings blew uparoundthem.As jobsforakidgo,thissounds prettyhardtobeat.
Dekker hadto figureouthowtoshootallofit.He wasworkingwithchildren,complicatedeffectsandmakeup,andalotofnighttimeaction.Thenattheendoffirstweek,PeterHyamswantedhimfired.
Dekkerwas shootingthepieceshe knewhewantedandbasicallyeditingthemovieinhisheadashewent.Hyamswantedtraditionalmaster shotscoveringentirescenes sotheeditorwouldhavemoreoptions.Hedidn’tthinkDekkerwasgettingwhattheyneeded.
RobCohenwentto… pardonthepun… batforDekkerashewasafanofNightsoftheCreeps.Dekkeragreedtoshoottheadditionalcoverageandkeptthejob.Hyamsalso directedsome second-unitmaterial,includingthewerewolf’sphone-boothscene.Evenwiththatfairlyunpleasantfirstweek,DekkerhascreditedHyamswithteachinghim alotaboutdirecting.
Noonancouldbedifficulttoo.WhenhewasaskedtomakeFrankenstein’svoicelowerheagreedandthendeliberatelykeptspeakingexactlyashehadbefore.Decadeslaterhefinallywatchedthemovieanddiscoveredthatfilmmakershadloweredhisvoiceelectronicallyanyway.Sothatparticulardisagreementgotsettledwithoutevenbeingthere.
Regehrmanagedto scareBankforrealduringthescenewhereDraculagrabsPhoebe.Henormallyavoidedwearingtheredcontactsandfangsaroundher,sowhenseeinghiminthefullDraculamakeup frightenedher.The screamthatendedupinthemoviewasreal.Dekkerworriedthathehadupsether,butBanklaterrememberedtheexperiencefondly.
Itt’sstillanasty littlemoment.Regehris threateningenoughbeforeheopenshismouth,andthenDraculacallsalittlegirlnastynames.Theguyreallydoeswantthese kidsdead.
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