Little Monsters is a thoroughly entertaining horror comedy that returns to the oversaturated zombie genre and finds material there that is, if not entirely new, still plenty of fun. We’re 10 seasons deep into The Walking Dead, and the novelty has kind of worn off of zombie media, but there is something pretty significant about Little Monsters. It stars Lupita Nyong’o, and paired with her other recent leading role in Jordan Peele’s Us, the movie helps to make her one of the rare black scream queens.
In the film, Alexander England plays the initially truly loathsome Dave, a thoughtless man child with rock and roll ambitions, who accompanies his nephew Felix (Diesel La Torraca) on a field trip in hopes of scoring with Felix’s kindergarten teacher, Miss Caroline (Nyong’o). After a disastrous experiment at a nearby military base, Dave, Miss Caroline, foul-mouthed kids TV star Teddy McGigiggles (Josh Gad), and a dozen or so five year olds must fend off the zombie hordes. Nyongo’s Miss Caroline, who dispatches the undead while leading sing-a-longs, and tells her charges that the red stuff she’s covered in is strawberry jam, is, as usual, an absolute delight.
And while blaxpoitation films of the '70s like Blacula told tales of terror unfolded in black communities, in mainstream, big-budget horror, gutsy heroines like Miss Caroline have almost always been white. Film history is full of actresses who’ve been dubbed scream queens, including Jamie Lee Curtis, Neve Campbell, and more recently Samara Weaving, who’s starred in The Babysitter and Ready or Not, and Vera Farmiga from The Conjuring series.
Even more than most genres, horror often relies on stock characters, and the female leads in scary movies tend to be fairly two dimensional—she’s seemingly docile, with hidden reserves of bravery that emerge thanks to the slasher terrorising her high school or the demonic spirits infesting her newfound dream home. The characters scream queens play are often “final girls,” in the term coined by film scholar Carol J. Clover, young women, who, battered and blood spattered, outlive all their compatriots and make it to the end of the movie. It’s impossible not to root for her, and to leave the movie exhilarated that she’s the last one standing.
Before Nyong’o’s back-to-back terror turns, Jada Pinkett Smith was perhaps the closest thing to a mainstream black scream queen, playing the final girl in Tales from the Crypt’s Demon Knight in 1995, and a college student who gets quickly dispatched at the beginning of Scream 2 two years later. 28 Days Later, one of the best horror movies ever, also has a black heroine in Naomie Harris’s Selena.
But one movie does not a scream queen make, and as remarkable as it was to see a black family at the centre of a horror movie in Us, it’s equally awesome to see a black actress making sustained waves in this historically very white genre. And if there was ever a perfect scream queen, it’s Nyong’o, who plays both gentle schoolteacher and zombie-decapitator with equal aplomb and whose Oscar-winner acting caliber elevates everything she touches. Here’s to more scares from her and other actresses of colour.
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Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture. She's based (and born and raised) in Brooklyn, New York.
