Cloverfield Was the Last Time Hollywood Truly Surprised Us

Before the Internet doomed me to a lifetime of eternal brain fog, and adulthood numbed every nerve ending in my lifeless body, there was a time—one of the last times, actually—when I was goosebumps, how-the-fuck, turn-to-your-friend-and-say-nothing, surprised.

It was summertime 2007 at Destinta Theaters in suburban Pittsburgh, a mildew-and-butter reeking cave with smaller caves inside it, unofficially the capitol building of a suburban shopping center within walking distance of Sonic and Chuck E. Cheese. I was 14 years old and entirely too excited to see Transformers. I was probably fucking around, making fart noises, being shushed, when a trailer queued up that didn’t really look like a trailer. It was home footage, maybe a mistake. It was enough to stop the farts.

“Surprise!” We’re at a birthday party. It’s for Rob. Rob’s leaving for Japan. He has a lot of friends and they’re very drunk. Drinking, dancing, “Good luck, Rob!” Then: Lights out, earthquake, ROOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Oh hell. Not a comedy. Rob and friends run to the roof, look toward midtown New York City, which, shit, promptly explodes in flames. Down to the street they go—What is it? Is it coming this way? I saw it, it’s alive, it’s huge!—where, oh my fuck, the goddamn dismembered head of the Statue of Liberty comes hurling toward them, crashing to a halt on the city street.

Cut to black. FROM PRODUCER JJ. ABRAMS. End trailer. That’s it. No voiceover, no movie title, nothing.

Found-footage movies weren’t unprecedented at the time, but keeping something so mysterious that you keep not only the plot, but the movie title secret? That was something special, something unexpected. So was the viral marketing campaign that followed. This was, again, 2007, when Facebook was two years away from its peak, Twitter was hardly even a blip on the Internet, and print media was still going strong. Meaning: You couldn’t immediately read the Twitter Moment, and figure out exactly that this was a teaser trailer for a monster movie called Cloverfield, and forget about it until it hit theaters six months later. This was a time when we weren't following every step of production and pre-production via online reporting. New movie projects were still largely a mystery.

For maybe the last time in big-budget filmmaking, you had to go to some dude’s Wordpress site to figure out what the hell you just saw. Think about it: With Iron Man and The Dark Knight ushering in the modern era of all-superhero-everything blockbusters that next summer, the period between Transformers’ July 3, 2007 release, and Cloverfield’s January 18, 2008 debut might’ve been one of the last times Hollywood actually surprised us with a blockbuster movie.

I would say the Cloverfield trailer broke the Internet, but that wasn’t really a thing yet. Instead, more people were interested in the mysterious trailer before Transformers than the actual Shia LaBeouf movie. These people found a common, curious, conspiratorial community on CloverfieldClues.blogspot.com, a blog regularly kept fresh with theories about what J.J. Abrams was brewing, hot off his success co-creating Lost.

First, they thought it was a secret Godzilla movie. Then, Voltron, because the guy who screamed “It’s alive!” might’ve actually said, “It’s a lion!” That was all proved false when 1-18-08.com went live. It was an early-Internet, Flash-run website loaded with Polaroids from Rob’s party, and later, clues about Cloverfield’s monster (affectionately nicknamed Clover by fans). Over the next few months, 1-18-08.com would appear and reappear, with new photos every couple weeks. The studio even created MySpace pages for Rob and his friends. The community of sleuths became so monster-sized itself that Cloverfield Clues got a sister site: Italian Cloverfield Clues.

After six months of reading Rob’s friend, Hawk, ask for fantasy football help on MySpace, January 18, 2008 arrived. Fans finally got to see this mysterious Cloverfield movie. Turns out Rob and his buddies were kind of irritating, especially T.J. Miller’s Hud, who’s the kind of sleaze who flirts with a woman with bloody, tennis ball-sized pincer wounds on her back. He also never shuts up. Actually, all of Cloverfield is predicated on Hud being enough of a grating, selfish pest of asshole who would film a guy mourning his brother who just died via giant monster.

As for the monster… it’s OK? Clover gets props for eating Hud, and also for some thrilling, stage-left bouts with the U.S. military. But Cloverfield earned solid reviews for a reason—director Matt Reeves nailed the normally-gimmicky found-footage approach, and, even 12 years later, it's hard not to feel anything when Rob and Beth, facing death in a Central Park tunnel, share I-love-yous.

As strange as it is to say, whether or not Cloverfield ended up being good isn't the point. Abrams and Reeves delivered—get this—a wholly original, successful tentpole movie. (Cloverfield made $170.8 million on a $25 million budget.) Not only that, but they didn't feel the need to give us an origin story for Clover, or keep Rob and Beth alive for a potential Cloverfield 2. Frankly, it's way cooler that we don't know why smaller monsters fall from the big Clover monster, and if they bite you, you blow up like Violet Beauregarde. If Cloverfield was made in 2020, there would've been a solid 15 minutes of some science nerd explaining who Clover is and where it came from.

When Cloverfield ended, there was still a sense of mystery left—an itch you couldn't scratch with a 15-minute lap on Google. You had to work for answers. Zoom in on one of the last shots in the movie and you'll see a satellite crash into a river. Reverse a recording that says "Help us" in Cloverfield's end credits and you'll hear, "It's alive." Cloverfield's fans still haven't switched off their theorize-everything buttons, with some thinking that Kristen Stewart's next movie, Underwater, is secretly a Cloverfield film.

Not even a year after Cloverfield, Hollywood welcomed us to world the we now live in: Remakes, sequels, comic books, nostalgia. Iron Man debuted the summer after Cloverfield, teaching us to watch Marvel movies only to look for surprise tease that teases the next tease which teases the next tease. Eight years after Cloverfield, J.J. Abrams directed the first film in a brand-new Star Wars sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens, which ended up being a movie comprised almost entirely of cameos and surprises—Millennium Falcon! Luke’s back! Darth Vader’s helmet!—and little story.

And if anything Star Wars or Marvel confuses you, don't worry—there's probably some tie-in novel or upcoming TV show that's going to explain it for you. Even The Cloverfield Paradox, which surprise-dropped on Netflix in 2018, couldn't help but fill in blanks in the Cloverfield mythology, teasing the confusing, multiverse-rupturing creation of multiple Clovers. Studios have become increasingly afraid to take risks, and save for a couple exceptions—Inception, Looper, even 10 Cloverfield Lane—no big-budget film has come close to Cloverfield's brave shot at giving audiences something they never expected, and not giving in when they wanted more.

Like Hud explains to Beth when she hears her first ROOOOOOO, it's a terrible thing.