It’s one of cinema’s greatest mysteries: Where did the Cloverfield monster come from?

What is the rabbit’s foot in Mission Impossible 3? What’s in Tom Hanks’ last FedEx package at the end of the world? Where do the scary scars on Joker’s face in The Dark Knight come from?

If most fiction films choose to leave the audience with all the keys to their plot, other films, a little less often, take great pleasure in blurring the lines, leaving gray areas to preserve mysteries that quickly turn into theories. The movie is over.

This is especially true in the case of Cloverfield, Matt Reeves’ true cinematic uppercut that won the public over upon its release in 2008. Opting for an on-board camera style, this terrifying sci-fi film tells the story of the destruction of Manhattan by a giant creature. Everything on its way.

Where does the monster come from?

However, awkward and startling, the feature film never offers a clear answer to the question that many fans are still asking themselves today: Where could this monster have come from? Indeed, throughout Cloverfield’s 91 minutes, the film’s characters are too busy trying to escape the creature to care about its origins.

Since nature abhors a vacuum and viewers abhor question marks, they developed several hypotheses to solve this mystery.

As we explain in our special, the most plausible of these theories starts from the premise that the creature comes from the sky (or even outer space) and is based on a disturbing detail noticed by some viewers in the last seconds. Fiction.

A monster comes from space

At 1 hour, 13 minutes and 21 seconds, in a flashback scene where the two main characters are filmed in Manhattan Bay a month before the disaster, we can actually see a small dot falling into the water. Could it be at this moment that a monster has landed on Earth?

This thesis has recently been consolidated by The Cloverfield Paradox, a spin-off of the first feature film released on Netflix in 2019, which is about a damaged space station and a temporal disturbance that may affect the past and future, allowing in particular monsters or sea creatures to arrive in our dimension.

The child is looking for his mother

In any case, and wherever Cloverfield’s creature is, director Matt Reeves, in any case, offered up some basic information about him in January 2023 on the mic. Syfy. Indeed, according to the filmmaker, the creature is nothing more and nothing less than a lost child looking for its mother.

“(…) We had to figure out, so to speak, how to address the monster. And so you heard what was going on emotionally. And the big mystery to me was that the monster was a child and was suffering from separation anxiety.”he explained.

“The reason it loses its character is that He shoots while searching mother So he was just as scared as the main characters (…). Chaos. (…) This aspect is something that we talked about during the development of the creature and that guided the way I shot it. “

With all these elements in mind, what would be your hypothesis regarding the origin of the monster?

(Re)discover all the hidden details of the movie…