Frightfest 2021: Are We Monsters

Dir: Seb Cox

One of the best things about Frightfest is that it looks around for new talent within the genre. It’s often exciting to see young filmmakers taking old tropes within horror and fantasy in new directions. On the other hand, it can sometimes mean that those filmmakers don’t yet have the experience and resources to get all of their ideas up on the screen. For me, Are We Monsters is a case in point.

Maya (Charlotte Olivia) is a werewolf. Trying to understand her monstrous side, she reaches out to Luke (Jathis Sivanesan), who writes about mythical creatures on his blog. The two also meet Everett (co-writer John Black) and Connor (Stefan Chanyaem); brothers whose father taught them to kill werewolves. Through them, Maya learns some history behind her nature, and that even without silver bullets, she can be killed on the night of the blood moon.

The best aspects of Are We Monsters come from the backstory it invents for the creation of werewolves. In extremely expressive, scribbled, black and white animation, it lays out a story about how the god of the sun, wanting to contain man’s evil in a handful of beings, created werewolves, but that even this measure failed. It’s a genuinely different take on the legend, giving a more melancholy feel to the monster, and evocatively told in simple images. These scribbled designs, patterned after Maya’s sketches, also come into play in the look of the werewolf in the last few scenes of the film, and while they are low tech, they’re striking and not a little creepy.

Unfortunately, problems come to the fore in many other aspects of the film. Everything has a very homemade feel to it, so the shonky CGI is to be expected, but some of the design choices early on are baffling. When you think of a ‘werewolf’, there is definitely an image you have in your head; some kind of man/wolf hybrid, be it the more humanoid take of Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man; the much more animalistic look of the Underworld series, or something in between. None of them, though, look like the werewolves we see early on here, with their elongated necks and limbs they sometimes simply look laughable and so little like what we think of as a werewolf that for a long time, you simply have to wonder if Connor and Everett are using the term correctly. It’s a bizarre choice. This is why the animation in the third act works so much better; not only is it more connected to the character of Maya, it looks more like a werewolf.

The leading cast are not massively experienced and, Jathis Sivanesan apart, seem to be part of a building stock company that director Seb Cox has used for his shorts. There’s plenty to be said for working with friends, but the performances are often quite stiff. On the plus side, once their characters warm up to each other Sivanesan and Charlotte Olivia have some effective scenes together, especially as they begin to see the connections between their situations with, shall we say, blood-borne disorders (another interesting theme that feels pretty original in the genre). 

Despite the grade below and the flaws I’ve highlighted here, I don’t want this review to come off as a total slam on Are We Monsters. There are interesting ideas here; original thoughts in a subgenre that often struggles for them. There are also some great design choices. It’s significant, I think, that this is Seb Cox’ first feature following a lot of shorts. There is a brilliant animated short in here, with a live action feature wrapped around it that needs more money and, from the cast, more experience, to be executed to its best advantage. I want to see the next film Cox and his company make, because there’s a foundation here on which he can build something great. I hope he gets the opportunity.

★★