Terror can come from anywhere. Sometimes it’s a giant kaiju tearing ass across a major city; however, other times the terror can come from much smaller, more intimate places. In a deranged twist, the human monsters often scare us even more than those from another world, and that's the type of monster J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield franchise aims to tackle next. The latest trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane premiered last night during The Walking Dead, and promises a different sort of experience compared to what audiences have come to expect from the franchise. Check it out below.
Although we still know very little about the upcoming monster movie, the trailer offers us some increased insight into the vague film. From what we can tell, a young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up in a fallout shelter after a horrific car crash somewhere in the American countryside. A strange man (John Goodman) has taken her in – asserting that there’s something dangerous outside of the shelter and everyone is already dead. As her time in the bunker wears on, she starts to suspect that things may not be as the man says, and thus commences a war of wits and will as she attempts to fight her way to freedom at the surface.
Unlike its predecessor, 10 Cloverfield Lane seems to be leaning on the idea that there might actually not even be a genuine monster in the film. In fact, the trailer’s use of the phrase "monsters come in many forms" leads us to speculate that the movie may not even follow in the same continuity as the original, but in fact could be an entirely different story focusing upon the insulated conflict between this young woman and her deranged captor.
If 10 Cloverfield Lane does in fact not have a monster, then it could mean that this is the continuation of a "horror" anthology produced by J.J. Abrams. We’ve seen this sort of thing attempted before. Back in the 1980s, it was director John Carpenter’s intention to create a series of Halloween movies that did not center wholly on serial killer Michael Myers, but rather a line of self-contained horror films centered upon the motif of the spooky holiday. The name "Cloverfield" could soon work in the same vain, tying together a series of seemingly unrelated films sharing one common thematic element: monsters.
Of course, the only thing standing in the way of that theory is the brief moment in the trailer where a mysterious – and massive – force appears to bare down on the young protagonist. We really can’t tell what the true "monster" of the film will be, but in many ways that’s the beauty of 10 Cloverfield Lane’s marketing campaign.
We will just have to wait and see what sort of monster this young woman has to contend with when the film hits theaters; 10 Cloverfield Lane will debut on March 11.
