Love & Monsters Video Reveals Detailed Look At Movie’s Mutated Monsters

A new Love and Monsters video offers a detailed look at the film’s mutated creatures. Initially titled Monster Problems, the Dylan O’Brien-starring adventure comedy has experienced several release date shuffles on its journey to its premiere. Paramount once scheduled Love and Monsters for earlier this year, but when the coronavirus pandemic shut down movie theaters across the globe, Love and Monsters was delayed to February 2021. Then, in August, Paramount decided to release Love and Monsters directly to VOD in October of this year. It’ll make its much-changed debut next Friday.

Love and Monsters centers on Joel Dawson (O’Brien), one of the few human survivors of the Monsterpocalypse that took place seven years before. Joel lives safely in an underground colony, but when he makes contact with his high school love Aimee (Jessica Henwick), he decides to risk everything to reunite with her. Crossing 80 miles of monster-infested land, Joel will cross paths with other survivors (Michael Rooker and Ariana Greenblatt), a lost dog, and many, many dangerous creatures.

During yesterday’s virtual New York Comic-Con panel, O’Brien and the rest of the Love and Monsters cast assembled to share some new details about their upcoming film. When it comes to a project like Love and Monsters, it’s inevitable that there would be a lot of curiosity surrounding the monsters themselves. Fans were treated to a quick behind the scenes clip delving into the process behind creating the monsters, who are all mutated from real-life creatures. Watch director Michael Matthews and production designer Dan Hennah talk about the monsters 24:42 minutes into the video below.

The first trailer for Love and Monsters largely kept the slimy, scary creatures in the background in order to hype them up, but the NYCC panel shed more light on what audiences can expect. As Matthews says a little after the clip, the monsters within the film aren’t aliens, but have instead evolved from regular animals and amphibians. He and Hennah had to walk a fine line between not making the monsters too scary (as this is a PG-13 film), but also not too cartoony. How well they succeeded will be up to the audience to decide, and they’ll get the chance later this week when Love and Monsters debuts on VOD.

So far, though, Love and Monsters is shaping up to be a fun monster movie with a rom-com twist, as Joel ventures into the relative unknown to reunite with Aimee. Elsewhere in the Love and Monsters panel, another behind the scenes clip explained how Matthews sought to bring a world that’s like ours, but isn’t quite the same to life. Between that and the monsters themselves, it certainly feels like Love and Monsters has created a vibrant world for audiences to get lost in.