Why Cloverfield is still the gold standard of monster horror 15 years later

Walking into a movie theater to see Cloverfield in January 2008 remains a pivotal moment for many millennial movie fans.

You probably can pinpoint which moment first told you this movie was special. Maybe it was the reveal of the monster’s face. Maybe it was that terrifying subway attack by those gnarly parasites. Maybe it was the grand finale where you saw Clover, the monster, in full.

Fifteen years after Cloverfield‘s release, the terrorizing monster movie remains one of the best examples of studio ingenuity, taking a worn-out genre and infusing it with something hyper-relevant and truly unpredictable.

Cloverfield p opped up quite literally out of nowhere in 2008 and delivered something fresh, fearsome and fantastic. The story of a gaggle of New York twenty-somethings rushing across town to save a trapped friend during a monster attack remains one of the genuine achievements in genre filmmaking during the aughts.

The passage of time makes you long for more movies like Cloverfield, ones that aren’t based on an existing idea. That over-reliance on intellectual property has put Hollywood in an originality bind, and the reasons why Cloverfield worked as well as it did still ring true 15 years later. Your love for the film can only grow when you see what’s followed it.

Here’s why Cloverfield has such a prevalent staying power as one of the gold standards for 21st-century monster horror movies.