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.
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.
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.
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 heard the orchestra performing the score, the moment overwhelmed him. I can understand that. You spend all this time trying to get a movie made, and now there’s an entire orchestra playing music for your monster movie.
The score makes the adventure feel big, and Broughton really goes for it when Frankenstein has to leave Phoebe. I can’t even decide what hurts worse: their final goodbye or Artax taking a dip in the Swamp of Sadness. That’s some ’80s trauma for ya.
Filming began in Los Angeles on October 13, 1986, with work at Culver Studios and the Warner Bros. and Universal lots, as well as other locations. Gower remembered shooting the finale in the Warner town square with wind machines going, bats flying and monsters attacking deputies while things blew up around them. As jobs for a kid go, that sounds pretty hard to beat.
Dekker had to figure out how to shoot all of it. He was working with children, complicated effects and makeup, and a lot of nighttime action. Then, at the end of the first week, Peter Hyams wanted him fired.
Dekker was shooting the pieces he knew he wanted and basically editing the movie in his head as he went. Hyams wanted traditional master shots covering entire scenes so the editor would have more options. He didn’t think Dekker was getting what they needed.
Rob Cohen went to…pardon the pun…bat for Dekker, as he was a fan of Night of the Creeps. Dekker agreed to shoot the additional coverage and kept the job. Hyams also directed some second-unit material, including the werewolf’s phone-booth scene. Even with that fairly unpleasant first week, Dekker has credited Hyams with teaching him a lot about directing.
Noonan could be difficult, too. When he was asked to make Frankenstein’s voice lower, he agreed and then deliberately kept speaking exactly as he had before. Decades later, he finally watched the movie and discovered that the filmmakers had lowered his voice electronically anyway. So that particular disagreement got settled without him even being there.
Regehr managed to scare Bank for real during the scene where Dracula grabs Phoebe. He normally avoided wearing the red contacts and fangs around her, so seeing him in the full Dracula makeup frightened her. The scream that ended up in the movie was real. Dekker worried that he had upset her, but Bank later remembered the experience fondly.
It’s still a nasty little moment. Regehr is threatening enough before he opens his mouth, and then Dracula calls a little girl a nasty name. The guy really does want these kids dead.
Deleted scenes reveal that Sean’s parents’ marriage was originally a much larger subplot, including Emily seriously considering leaving Del. You can still tell things aren’t going particularly well between them, but much of that storyline was cut.
I like what remains of it. Sean has something going on at home besides adults telling him to stop talking about monsters, and Macht and Trainor make those scenes believable. I understand wanting to get back to Dracula, though.
This was the decade of Gremlins, The Goonies and Poltergeist, so putting kids in danger wasn’t some completely new idea. Even so, The Monster Squad was a strange movie to sell to a family. The kids swear and bully each other, Rudy smokes, and a conversation about virginity becomes necessary because the fate of the world depends on it. Have fun explaining that one on the drive home.
It also gets pretty violent. Horace shoots the Gill-man, and the Wolf Man gets blown into pieces before putting himself back together. The movie expects kids to laugh at the monsters and still be afraid of them when things get serious.
Some of the dialogue has aged badly, particularly the homophobic insults from the little brat who also fell in love with Pee-Wee’s bike. Then again, that’s how kids talked back then. A studio making it for younger audiences today would probably have a few things to say about the sexual blackmail and the treatment of Patrick’s sister, too. You could change that material and still make a movie where Dracula scares everybody.
The monster jokes hold up better. “Wolfman’s got nards” works because the boys know all about silver bullets and werewolf rules, but now they’re standing in front of one and have to figure out what else might work. Kicking him in the groin turns out to be useful information. Probably should have put that in one of the books.
Then there’s the scene with Cimino. The man the kids have decided is scary helps them, and we see his concentration-camp tattoo. Suddenly his knowledge of monsters means something much worse than what they’ve been talking about. It’s a heavy thing to put in this movie, and Cimino handles it without a big speech explaining everything to the audience.
TriStar released The Monster Squad on August 14, 1987, two weeks after The Lost Boys. Teenagers already had an R-rated vampire movie with cool-looking young people, a terrific rock soundtrack, and an ultra-sweaty saxman. This one had younger kids fighting old monsters, with a PG-13 rating that could make parents wonder whether it was appropriate for the children most likely to want to see it.
The advertising didn’t help establish its own identity. The campaign referenced Ghostbusters, reminding people they knew who to call about ghosts and asking who they should call about monsters. Gower later criticized that approach. The movie had Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy and the Gill-man, yet the advertising was still leaning on somebody else’s hit to explain what it was.
Older teenagers might think it looked like a kids’ movie, while parents might think it was too scary for their kids. That doesn’t prove the rating or The Lost Boys killed it. We can’t know whether changing either would have made it a hit.
What we do know is that it bombed. The opening weekend brought in just under $2 million from 1,280 theaters, and the final domestic total was $3.8 million. Published budget estimates vary, with later accounts putting it around $12 million while a contemporary estimate placed it at $14 million. Neither figure makes that box office look any better.
The reviews were mixed. Kevin Thomas praised the movie’s fun and craftsmanship in the Los Angeles Times, while Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed it as an unsuccessful attempt to combine an Our Gang-style kids’ comedy with classic horror.
The failure also cost Dekker another directing job. He already had a deal lined up to make a Jonny Quest movie, but the opportunity disappeared after The Monster Squad tanked.
VHS and cable gave the movie another chance. Fans rented it repeatedly, recorded it from HBO and passed tapes around. The cast and filmmakers had little idea how large that audience was becoming. As far as they knew, they’d made a movie that had come out, done badly and gone away.
Dekker has suggested that finding the movie that way made it feel like something viewers had discovered for themselves. A friend told you about it or handed you a tape, and you watched it without necessarily knowing or caring what had happened at the box office. The kids in the movie were horror fans whose supposedly useless knowledge turned out to be useful. If you were that kind of kid, it was easy to like these guys.
In April 2006, two Monster Squad reunion screenings were organized at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. Dekker, Gower, Lambert and Bank attended, and both screenings sold out. Audiences were cheering the jokes and action nearly nineteen years after the movie’s release.
They also wanted to know why they couldn’t get a proper DVD. Dekker encouraged fans to write letters to the rights holders, and in July 2007 Lionsgate released a two-disc twentieth-anniversary edition. It included commentaries, deleted scenes and the Monster Squad Forever documentary, along with Noonan’s old interview in character as Frankenstein. For people who’d spent years watching the same tape, that was a pretty good upgrade.
The screenings kept happening, and Gower eventually directed Wolfman’s Got Nards, which premiered at the Chattanooga Film Festival in 2018. Henry McComas produced alongside Gower. The documentary told the story of the movie’s following, drawing on encounters with fans during its revival and thirtieth-anniversary tour.
Some of those stories were much more personal than anybody expected. Gower has described meeting people who said the movie helped them deal with loneliness and being left out, and visiting a hospitalized fan who couldn’t make it to a screening. People had been carrying these memories around for years, and now they could tell someone who’d actually been in the movie.
The documentary also remembers Brent Chalem, who died in 1997. He never got to attend that reunion or see the crowds cheering for Horace. His performance is such a big part of what people love about the film.
Getting Dekker to participate took some convincing. His relationship with The Monster Squad was very different from that of the fans celebrating it. He had made the movie, watched it fail and then lost opportunities because of that failure. Being told it had eventually found an audience didn’t erase what had happened to his career.
And honestly, I don’t blame him. It’s great that people love your movie. You’d probably also like to have made the next one. The documentary gives him room to talk about that instead of expecting him to sit there and act like the whole experience was wonderful.
Kino Lorber released The Monster Squad on 4K in 2023 using a new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative. The release also included Monster Squad Forever and Wolfman’s Got Nards. That’s quite an upgrade for a movie so many people first saw on a worn-out videotape.
Sure, the film still has its problems. Some of the discoveries are awfully convenient, and the Mummy and Gill-man could use more to do. But the last stretch gives the kids things to accomplish that you actually care about. Horace gets to stand up for himself, Rudy sticks with the group, and Phoebe turns out to be a lot more useful than the boys thought she would be. And honestly, I’d much rather be in the Monster Squad than a Goonie any day of the week.
Noonan and Bank make Frankenstein’s goodbye sad even when you know it’s coming. Regehr makes Dracula someone you want to see these kids defeat. The effects look great, and the movie gets through its story before it wears out its welcome. There’s plenty to enjoy without having to pretend everything made in the eighties was automatically better.
Dekker made a movie about kids who save the world while the adults struggle to understand what’s happening. When it bombed, kids were also the ones who kept watching it and telling their friends. Years later, they were still doing it, only now they could fill a theater.
It took a lot longer than anybody involved would have wanted. But the audience came back for The Monster Squad and made sure the thing stuck around.