A living, breathing, nightmare of a house!

Monster House is a 2006 American computer-animated children’s horror film directed by Gil Kenan, produced by ImageMovers and Amblin Entertainment, and distributed by Columbia Pictures. The film stars Mitchel Musso, Sam Lerner, Spencer Locke, Steve Buscemi, Nick Cannon,Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jon Heder, Kevin James, Jason Lee, Catherine O’Hara, Kathleen Turner, and Fred Willard.

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Synopsis

DJ, a teen, keeps an eye on his next-door neighbour, Nebbercracker, who lives on the other side of the street. Children’s tricycles that trespass on his yard are destroyed in this suburb. When DJ’s parents leave on Halloween Eve and his harsh nanny Zee stays with him, he calls his clumsy best buddy Chowder to play basketball with him. However, when the ball lands on Nebbercracker’s lawn, the old man declares a war, and they soon discover the mansion is a monster. Later, the boys save Jenny from the haunted house, and the trio tries unsuccessfully to persuade the babysitter, her boyfriend Bones, and two police officers that the haunted house is a monster, but no one believes them. The adolescent gamers have a question for their video game.

5 Creepy facts about Monster House

(1) As of 2012, this is the only motion capture film to feature an entirely original story and not be based on existing source material.

(2) The actors had to go through motion capture acting in order to animate the characters. The actors had to wear motion capture suits with little dots glued on their faces and a headpiece glued to their head with motion capture dots. After they took off their suits, the glue would cause irritation to their hair and scalp, but luckily they’d get a head massage with shampoo.

(3) Homages to various Stephen King stories abound. The idea of a house that comes alive and eats people can be found in the third installment of King’s “Dark Tower” series, “The Wastelands.” And while in the house’s basement, Chowder shines his flashlight on a mechanical monkey much like the one found in King’s short story “The Monkey,” collected in “Skeleton Crew.”

(4) There is a back story involving Skull (played by Jon Heder) and Bones (played by Jason Lee) being in an amateur heavy metal band. When we first meet Zee (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal), she is wearing a top with “Skull ‘n’ Bones” written on, and later puts one of their cassette tapes on called “Live! at the Smell”. She is also dating Bones in the movie.

(5) To keep the movie a PG rating, the victims that were eaten (Bones, the cops and the dog) had to come back to life during the end credits.