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Jurassic Park was a generational masterpiece. Much has been said about Steven Spielberg’s enduring blockbuster—how it changed filmmaking forever, how it remains the movie we think of when conceptualizing what we mean by the movies—though for all the discourse about its scale and effects, perhaps the simplest truth is that Jurassic Park, at its core, is terrifying. Those scares, courtesy of hungry, ferocious dinosaurs, are the legacy, yet the series’ six subsequent entries have pulled further and further away from the orbit of dinosaurs as horror. Jurassic Park will likely never be scary again, so thank God for David Robert Mitchell showing us how it’s done.
The End of Oak Street (review here) is scary. Really scary. It’s mean-spirited, dour, exceptionally more violent than I anticipated with a PG-13 rating, and primarily, almost genetically concerned with showing dinosaurs at their most primal and frightening. In an alternate, Oak Street-esque timeline where Jurassic Park’s horror origins endured, that might not be worth much, but as only the second legitimately scary dinosaur movie ever made, that’s everything to this dino (and horror) nerd.
Picture it. Like so many other kids who grew up on a cocktail of Jurassic Park and Jaws’ gateway horror thrills, I wasn’t just obsessed with the movies, but with the science and history behind them. And, sure, that science was controversial at the time, but I was a kid, so I didn’t care about whether Spielberg’s velociraptors were scientifically sound as much as I cared about the fact that dinosaurs were friggin’ metal as hell. I had all the toys, all the encyclopedias, all the books and tapes, and I was going to grow up to be a paleontologist. I didn’t, but a childhood friend (and Jurassic Park superfan) is currently a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. Dinosaurs were everything.
As I got older, my sensibilities gravitated more toward the horror, the possibilities, of dinosaurs as movie monsters specifically. After all, Spielberg did it, and it’s one of the greatest movies ever made, so surely there would be other filmmakers out there desperate to turn dinosaurs into lean, mean, horror-movie killing machines, no? No. The Lost World tried in its cold open, though otherwise, blockbuster antics superseded claustrophobic terror. Jurassic Park III is better (and has some gnarly set pieces), though even that was too indebted to franchise filmmaking to really let the horror shine.
I liken the new series of films to Rita’s Italian Ice. It’s tasty, sure, but it’s not good for me, and I know when I’ve got a stomach-full of it that, really, there’s nothing I’ve gained. It’s filled me up, but at what cost? The End of Oak Street, reportedly trimmed from upward of three hours to a lean 100 minutes, has been a critical success—it’s Amblin-lite for a new generation. That’s what everyone’s saying, but I didn’t really get that. Yes, the optics are there—the 1980s, a family on the fritz, suburbia—but Mitchell’s film reads as imbued with an anti-Amblin energy more than anything. This is his middle finger to thirty years of what could-have-been.
Fundamentally, The End of Oak Street is a horror movie. It’s not a family-friendly adventure with horror elements thrown in for some extra gloss. It’s horror first, everything else second. And Mitchell, absent for several years since Under the Silver Lake (great, by the way), leans hard into the ethos of his sophomore feature and breakout success, It Follows. The End of Oak Street is chock-full of slow, panning shots of tree lines and ostensibly empty suburban streets. There’s always something creeping around just beyond the frame, and Mitchell actualizes the same dread and inevitability he did with his horror classic.
Earlier, I mentioned that The End of Oak Street was mean-spirited, and that, too, augments the dino horror in ways we haven’t seen since 1993. Dinosaurs feast on corpses. Bodies line the street. Even house pets aren’t safe from the savagery. It’s Jurassic Park on a Grand Guignol scale, theatrical and bloody, pushing the boundaries of the ratings system, and hopefully igniting gruesome curiosity in an entirely new generation of kids brought to theaters for what appeared to be just another dinosaur movie.
And those dinosaurs. Wow. There are some expected favorites. I love a raptor, and there are some lil’ baby guys that are vicious (Matt Konopka called them ‘friend-shaped’), but whether centered or peripheral, Mitchell has a ton of fun fleshing out the world with more species than we’ve ever seen before. And, luckily, none of them are fake. Remember the past several Jurassic World movies and their insistence on making the big bad some mutant hybrid?
The standout in Mitchell’s playground of suburban gore has to be (spoilers, obvi, but you’ve read this far, so I’m assuming you’ve seen it) the Titanoboa. I’m calling it now – that giant, blank-eyed snake is the horror movie villain of the year. Right after the death of the family patriarch, Greg (Ewan McGregor), the family returns home to drown in their sorrows. You’re expecting a break from the action, for The End of Oak Street to slow down and let the pathos of loss wash over the audience. It is, after all, a pretty unexpected and sudden death.
No, this giant monstrosity, glimpsed earlier in the film, slithers in through an upstairs window, and Mitchell manages awe, terror, and humor all at once in an Alaskan Bull Worm bit where the damned snake just keeps getting bigger and bigger. As it contorts itself through the entire house, unseen by everyone, more and more and more of it arrives, like a never-ending Laffy Taffy, an ouroboros that’s simply infinite. And then it opens its mouth.
I’m hyping it up because it’s one of the freshest scares in this year’s rock-solid horror slate. It positions itself behind Denise (Anne Hathaway) in the kitchen and opens its maw to reveal rows and rows of sharp teeth. Boiúna, girl, I am so sorry, but the year’s top snake has already been crowned.
It’s one of many top-tier moments, including a savage and breathless finale, a terrifying chase through backyards, and, hopefully, whatever else has been cut and hopefully restored on home video (I haven’t forgotten that basement aquatic monster glimpsed in the trailers, Warner Bros.). Put simply, The End of Oak Street is a full-on slasher movie with all manner of dinosaurs.
Years ago, I’d have thought the subgenre extinct. No one was really trying. The Sound of Thunder flopped. Jurassic World was Jurassic World. Last year’s Primitive War was not only accused of using generative AI, but it also wasn’t very good, and the sequel, set for next year, was just recently shelved. In the wake of Jaws, we’ve had so many killer shark flicks. Sure, they haven’t always been great (or even good), but for an aquatic horror aficionado like myself, there’s always something to satisfy my fix. Not so with dinosaurs.
The End of Oak Street ends on a hopeful note (if you try not to think about it too hard), and here’s hoping the same can be said for the theatrical slate over the next several years. I want more killer dinosaurs. I want more prehistoric horror. Cobble together the DNA of Halloween and The Goonies, stuff them in a Barbasol can, and get to work.
Categorized:Editorials