If you’re a horror fan over a certain age, chances are you’re already very familiar with Fred Dekker’s 1987 film The Monster Squad (watch it HERE). Maybe you grew up watching it; maybe you caught up with it later. Either way, most of us older fans have seen it by now. But there are generations behind us who haven’t even been told about this awesome movie yet. So, this video is primarily for you younger fans out there who need to know about The Monster Squad, which is the best horror movie you never saw.
In 1987, moviegoers were introduced to the brilliance of Shane Black‘s writing with the March release of the buddy cop classic Lethal Weapon. But a little later in the year, another Shane Black project came and went without many people noticing: The Monster Squad, which Black wrote with director Fred Dekker.
Dekker had the initial idea for The Monster Squad when he was preparing to go into production on his feature directorial debut, the 1986 release Night of the Creeps. It was an idea inspired by his love for both classic comedies and the Universal Monsters. He enjoyed when those worlds collided in films like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and wanted to do something along those lines. When he pitched The Monster Squad to his college friend Black as something they could write together, he referred to the concept as “The Little Rascals meet Universal Monsters.”
The story Black and Dekker crafted together features several of the famous monsters Universal thrilled the world with in the ’30s through the ’50s, dropping them into 1980s America. Count Dracula, played in the film by Duncan Regehr, has come to America in search of an amulet that is said to be made of concentrated good, which by its very existence helps keep evil from taking over the world. But once every 100 years, this indestructible amulet becomes vulnerable, and if it’s destroyed, the creatures of the night will take control of the planet. That idea sounds really good to Dracula, and he’s recruited a mummy, a wolfman, a gill-man, Frankenstein’s monster, and three vampire brides to assist him in his search-and-destroy-the-amulet mission.
The only thing standing in the way of these monsters is a group of young kids who have formed a monster club, soon to be known as the Monster Squad. That’s Andre Gower as club leader Sean Crenshaw; Robbie Kiger as his right-hand man Patrick; Brent Chalem as the bullied Horace; Michael Faustino as little Eugene, who is usually accompanied by his dog Pete; and Ryan Lambert as the newly inducted Rudy, a slightly older badass who stands up to bullies and is rumored to have killed his dad. He’s the coolest kid to ever pair a leather jacket and fingerless gloves with penny loafers. Sean’s little sister Phoebe, played by Ashley Bank, is always hanging out with the club members as well, though they’re reluctant to let her into their treehouse headquarters simply because she’s a girl.
They know a lot about these monsters that have invaded their town, and thanks to the fact that Sean has acquired the journal of the legendary monster hunter Abraham Van Helsing, they also have all the information they need on the amulet and how to thwart Dracula’s plan. Problem is, the journal was written in German—a language none of them knows—so they have to seek the help of a local they’ve been calling “Scary German Guy,” played by Leonardo Cimino, and hope he’s not the creep they suspected him to be.
Since Sean and Phoebe’s dad, Del, played by Stephen Macht, is a local police detective, he also gets mixed up in the monster action while investigating the very strange things occurring in their town. As the climactic showdown approaches, this squad also seeks the assistance of Patrick’s older sister, played by Lisa Fuller.
If the part about an amulet made of concentrated good sounds silly to you, don’t worry about that too much. The amulet stuff barely matters; it’s just what Alfred Hitchcock would refer to as the MacGuffin. The movie is really about how much fun it is to watch these kid heroes interact with each other and deal with the monster threat, and to see very cool versions of famous monsters running around in 1980s America.
Black wrote most of the first draft of the script by himself while Night of the Creeps was in production. The way he and Dekker approached the writing of the script was to write new material on their own and rewrite each other’s work. They only wrote a single scene—the one in which The Monster Squad is approaching the crumbling old mansion where the amulet has been hidden—together in the same room.
Dekker has said that the scope of the first draft was too large; using Van Helsing’s 19th-century assault on Dracula’s castle at the beginning of the movie as an example of how that draft would have been way too expensive to shoot. According to Dekker, Black’s vision of that sequence involved Van Helsing riding in on a zeppelin that was equipped with machine guns and taking on 40 vampire brides on horseback. Through the rewriting process, they were able to scale it down to something that could be made for a budget that was reportedly around $12 million.
He got the script into the hands of Jonathan Zimbert, who worked for director Peter Hyams. Hyams was told he could help the project get made by putting his name on it, so he took an executive producer credit on The Monster Squad while Zimbert was the main producer. With the backing of Zimbert and Hyams, along with Taft Entertainment Pictures and Keith Barish Productions, The Monster Squad began filming in late ’86, just weeks after Night of the Creeps reached a small number of theaters.
The logical home for The Monster Squad would have been Universal Pictures, thus allowing the film to be an official entry in the Universal Monsters franchise—a true follow-up to their classic films. The project was pitched to them, but they passed. Since they weren’t interested, the special effects crew, led by Stan Winston, were tasked with giving the monsters redesigns that would keep the film from infringing upon Universal’s copyrights. They did a great job with this, creating their own unique takes on the monsters while keeping them recognizable at the same time. These designs would have been perfect for the characters even if the movie was an official Universal movie.
The film didn’t run into any trouble with Universal, but the production didn’t go entirely smoothly. In fact, Dekker has said that he was in danger of being fired from his own movie after the first week of filming, because he and Hyams didn’t see eye to eye on all of the creative decisions. Hyams didn’t just stamp his name on The Monster Squad and let Dekker go off and do his own thing; he was heavily involved throughout the entire production, taking on what he described as a kind of “godfather” position. He wrote the text crawl that the movie starts with, did some second-unit directing, and disagreed with some of Dekker’s directing choices. Dekker has said that Hyams demanded he shoot what Dekker described as “boring masters” and “boring coverage” for every scene. To keep the executive producer “godfather” satisfied, he started doing so. The director would later come to understand why Hyams was so hands-on. Since he was an established pro who had agreed to put his name on this movie from a 27-year-old fledgling director, he wanted to make sure it would turn out well. Dekker has also said that Hyams came to trust him more as filming went on.
TriStar Pictures released The Monster Squad on August 14, 1987, one week shy of the one-year anniversary of their underwhelming release of Night of the Creeps. And The Monster Squad wasn’t the hit it deserved to be either. Its box office haul came in just under $4 million, so it didn’t even make back one-third of its budget. Part of its failure was due to the fact that it was overshadowed by The Lost Boys, which had been released just two weeks earlier.
The Monster Squad would start developing a cult following very soon, but many of its fans didn’t discover it until it was available to rent on home video or airing on cable. The film’s cult following continued to grow over the decades, but it was so under the radar that Dekker and his cast weren’t fully aware of it until some of them were invited to an Alamo Drafthouse screening in 2006. Dekker has even said he had no clue people liked his movie until that screening 19 years later, after the film’s release.
After that screening, Lionsgate took on the challenge of meeting fan demand for a DVD release of The Monster Squad, and they did a hell of a job with it, delivering a two-disc special edition packed with bonus features, including a feature-length documentary and two audio commentaries. That 2007 DVD release not only won awards, but it was also the highest-selling catalog title for Lionsgate that year. Now, the size of The Monster Squad‘s cult following was really becoming obvious. Further home video releases and a lot more revival screenings have followed since then, so the following is still continuing to grow.
In 2018, Andre Gower directed a documentary named after the film’s most iconic line, “Wolfman’s got nards!”, as a way to turn the spotlight back around on the film’s fans and explore their love for this film that at first appeared to be a failure but has become an enduring classic. Universal truly would have been lucky to have The Monster Squad as an official entry in their monsters franchise and might have been able to market it to success in 1987. Even though the movie ended up being released by different companies, it’s worthy of being counted among the Universal monster classics as it’s an incredible tribute to those films. It brings great versions of all the most popular monsters together in one story and puts them all on screen together—something that Universal didn’t even accomplish in their days of making monster mash movies.
Duncan Regehr, who stayed in character while he was on set, plays one of the most evil and intimidating Draculas of all time, threatening a five-year-old girl, tossing dynamite into a treehouse he thinks has a bunch of kids in it, and plotting the apocalypse. The runner-up for the Dracula role was Liam Neeson, who is said to have given a brilliant audition, but they went with Regehr because he was more terrifying. It was the right choice, as his Dracula would rank up there among the best of them—if only more people had seen the movie he’s in.
Another actor who stayed in character was Tom Noonan, who gives a very touching and endearing performance as Frankenstein’s monster. This soft-hearted fellow isn’t into the evil plans his master Dracula tries to force him to participate in, and when he’s sent to retrieve Van Helsing’s journal from the Monster Squad, he befriends the kids and stays with them. He has a particularly strong bond with little Phoebe, and many Monster Squad fans have shed tears over the final moments Phoebe and Frankenstein’s monster have with each other. The actors who play the Monster Squad members never met Tom Noonan while they were making the movie with him; he was so dedicated to not breaking character that they only met and worked with Frankenstein’s monster.
We got a shambling, bandage-wrapped mummy along the lines of the Kharis mummy Tom Tyler and Lon Chaney Jr. played in The Mummy sequels, and the Gill Man gets a couple of moments to shine. There are some terrific moments involving the Wolf Man—not just the one where Horace is shocked to find that kicking him in the nards is an effective method of defense. When the Wolf Man is in human form, he is desperate to be stopped; he’s even credited as “The Desperate Man.” Jon Gries gives an intense performance as this man who wants to be locked up or killed before he can “wolf out” again. The scene where he calls Del to warn him that Dracula is going to kill his son is really chilling.
Opposite all those cool monsters, we get some of the best child characters to ever appear in a movie—characters that a lot of horror fans can relate to. If you had the opportunity and inclination to watch horror movies at a young age, chances are you were a lot like the Monster Squad kids, obsessed with monsters, always talking about creatures and horror with friends, and excited to check out the latest genre release. What’s also great about these kids is when they find out there are monsters carrying out an evil plot in their town, they take it upon themselves to save the world and dive right into a plan to thwart the monsters.
Although The Monster Squad is a movie for monster kids of all ages, Dekker didn’t feel the need to blunt the edges or pander to any age group. There are dark and scary scenes, moments of violence, and the monsters are a serious threat. Dracula even calls a little girl a bitch. The scenes with the kids are so well-written that even viewers old enough to be their parents or grandparents could still enjoy them. If you love the classic monsters, you’ll love this movie. And if you’re just getting started watching horror, The Monster Squad is definitely a great gateway movie. With a running time of 82 minutes, this film moves through its story at the speed of a silver bullet, and much of the second half is packed with action. The kids know they have to get their hands on the amulet and perform a ritual involving German lines spoken by a female virgin, which will open an evil-swallowing vortex much like the one at the end of Evil Dead 2. As they prepare to carry out their plan, we get a wonderfully 80s montage set to the sounds of a song about dancing until your heart stops and your feet fall off. It’s silly, but it’s also perfect, and it’s a lot of fun to see things like Rudy making wooden stakes and silver bullets in shop class while we listen to this goofball tune. Dekker thinks the song is awful, but it’s not likely that many fans of the movie would want to trade it for anything else.
Some of the best scenes in the movie involve Frankenstein’s monster and the bond he forms with the Monster Squad. He has a memorable introduction to the boys, who run in fear while Phoebe stands there holding his hand. Though they run and hide in that scene, the members of the Monster Squad do better handling future encounters with the monsters. Even the unlikely Horace gets multiple chances to be a hero and, in the end, looks like a badass in front of the bullies who were picking on him earlier.
The mummy gets a good scene where he sneaks into Eugene’s house and becomes the actual monster in the closet. And a Wolf Man scene that’s even better than when he gets kicked in the nards is when we find out what would happen if a creature that can only be killed with a silver bullet were to be blown up with dynamite. What happens is awesome.
Fred Dekker has a difficult relationship with The Monster Squad because its box office failure sort of killed his career for a while. But then, decades later, he found out it’s actually the most popular movie he’s ever made. In the Wolfman’s Got Nards documentary, he says, “I think it’s my best movie. I think it’s reached the widest audience of anything that I’ve done as a director. I think it’s probably going to be on my gravestone, and I’m ambivalent about that. The analogy I make is you do a piano concerto in front of an audience and a couple of people applaud, and then they leave. And then 20 years later, somebody comes up to you in the street and goes, ‘I saw that piano concerto you did—it was incredible.’ There’s such a disconnect from what you did to the response that is really hard to codify emotionally. It’s like shooting a basket in 1987 and then it doesn’t go in until 2006. That’s weird, and that’s really hard for me to kind of make sense of. I don’t mean to downplay it, I just have a very personal relationship with it because I put my heart and soul into it, and nobody noticed for 20 years.”
Hopefully, Dekker is able to take some solace from the fact that people do appreciate his work today—better late than never in a sort of way. But it’s not true that nobody noticed how good The Monster Squad was until 20 years later. A lot of fans had already noticed by the end of the ’80s; it just took 20 years until Dekker realized it had such a large cult following, and that following is growing every day.
Before we wrap up here, I’d like to pay tribute to the Monster Squad stars we’ve lost over the years, including Jack Willem, who played Van Helsing and passed away in 2001; “Scary German Guy” himself, Leonardo Cimino, who passed away in 2012; Mary Ellen Trainor, who played Sean’s mother, passed away in 2015; and squad member Horace, Brent Chalem, who tragically passed away in 1997 at the age of just 22. We send our heartfelt condolences out to their family, friends, and fans, and thank them for their contributions to the greatness that is The Monster Squad.
Some previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!