After 'The Orphanage' and 'The Impossible,' 'A Monster Calls' is the perfect final chapter in a trilogy centred on the extraordinary strength of the mother-child bond.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's not a monster movie. It's a supernatural thriller.
'Monsters,' everybody has the thought of monsters in your closet as a kid, and more importantly, the idea of becoming a parent. We're always kind of looking for those emotional nuggets. They're always at the heart of the story.
As a little kid watching horror movies, if you only got to see the monster for the last two minutes of the movie, I thought that movie pretty much sucked.
We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.
While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end.
A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.
I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them.
When I saw the first I couldn't believe I was in another great movie that would be made into a trilogy. This movie is quite visible and I think it will stand the test of time. I think kids and parents will love this movie for a long time.
You have to be very careful when you're working on a sequel, because it has to be a continuation of what you did before.
Some have said that 'Frankenstein' is a story of a bad parenting giving rise to a troubled child.