Monster High: The Movie Failed the Monster High Franchise
As an original fan of the Monster High franchise, I have been waiting years for the movie Monster High: The Movie to be made as it is the first live action film the franchise has seen. This excitement, however, was quickly met with disappointment as I felt myself watching a film that only shared commonality with Monster High in the names of the school and characters. For some context, the movie begins with the main character, 15 year old werewolf, Clawdeen getting an invitation to Monster High, a high school for monsters like her. It is then revealed that Clawdeen is half-human half-monster which becomes an integral piece of the plot for the rest of the movie. Humans and half bloods, much like in Harry Potter, are not friendly with monsters. Clawdeen learns this fairly quickly and becomes determined to find and make a potion that will turn her from just half to a full monster in order to protect herself from her monster peers. With the help of her friends Frankie Stein and Draculaura, Clawdeen successfully makes the potion but is sabotaged by one of her teachers Mr. Komos who has been hiding his half blood identity as well. Upon the take down of Mr. Komos, Clawdeen briefly turns full human and is kicked out of the school immediately. Protestation from her friends and admiration from the Headmistress for her bravery in taking down Mr. Komos, however, lands her a spot back in Monster High despite being different from the rest of her peers. Although Monster High: The Movie included original characters from the line of dolls created in 2010, it failed to stay true to the Monster High franchise as it ignored and swapped key personality traits of the characters, erased the queer coding of multiple characters, and created a “race” war between humans and monsters.
The switching and oversight of personality traits of multiple characters was one of the first issues I found with this film. Although scholars that study film adaptations of books and franchises look down upon those that can’t see past the negatives of not directly following original texts, I still feel that this adaption in specific “immorally live[s] off and drain[s] the spirit of [its] literary sources” in the way that it doesn’t even maintain key components of the characters (Cartmell et al., 2008, pg. 3). Draculaura, a permanently 15 year old vampire, is one of the main characters in both the franchise and the movie. Her Romanian accent is one of her key attributes and duels as one of her most notable personality traits as she is able to charm people instantly at the sound of it. Long time fans also describe her as “sweet, energetic, friendly, sensitive, and easygoing” on the Monster High Wiki Fandom site. She is introduced to Clawdeen as one of her roommates early in the movie, but when Draculaura speaks she is not Romanian nor charming and acts as if she is too good to be having the conversation with Clawdeen and her other roommate Frankie Stein. They try to add witchcraft as part of her passions, too, which makes her appear as a completely different individual than the one Garrett Sander created for the brand.
Minutes after this version of Draculaura is established, another character by the name Lagoona is brought in and evidently has Draculaura’s accent and personality. I first thought this switch was going to further the plot in some way, but it revealed itself to be an isolated swap from the writers of Monster High: The Movie. This left me very confused as I could not figure out why they would switch traits that have been a part of the monsters in the franchise since the beginning if it did not have to do with the storyline.
Here is the time stamp to see Lagoona's introduction: 10:33-10:53
Clawdeen in the film also falls victim to her character losing core foundations as her sporty side does not come through in the movie. She is originally written to be an outstanding athlete with heightened strength, which, if they had kept in the script, would have led to resolution of the plot sooner as she would have been able to break down the door of the room that held the ingredients for her potion. Leaving this aspect of her personality out also took away depth from the monster as she did not have much else from her half blood identity defining her throughout the movie.
The theme of erasure of core character traits prevails into the identities of the monsters as multiples of them were wiped of their queer coding. This is most notable in Clawdeen when she becomes instantly obsessed with Deuce Gorgon in the film, leaving original fans and queer audiences extremely disappointed. Clawdeen never explicitly states that she is lesbian in the franchise, but her queer coding is widely recognized in the fanbase and has been confirmed by creator Garrett Sander along with six other monsters that aren’t prevalent in the movie. People that are not familiar with queer media studies might argue that this was not erasure since Clawdeen’s original sexuality is never directly stated, but “queer readings aren’t ‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along” (Doty, 1993, pg.16). With this background, it cannot be denied that Clawdeen’s queerness was brushed under the rug. What makes this even stranger, however, is the fact that the writers of the film included a non-binary identity for Frankie Stein. I will never complain about the inclusion of marginalized identities that were not originally put into the franchise, but if the movie was planning on being LBTQ inclusive, I struggle to understand why they only included one queer identity when Monster High has many other purposely queer coded characters.
Not only did Monster High: The Movie go against the franchise in terms of how they handled personality traits and identities, but they also went in a direction that original creator Garrett Sander never agreed with for Monster High with the creation of a “race” war between humans and monsters. The main conflict in the film revolves around Clawdeen’s identity as a half human half monster, and she desperately searches for a way to erase her half humanness in order to fit in and not be expelled from Monster High. For a large duration of the movie, Clawdeen experiences cognitive dissonance about the intersectionality of her two identities “as distinctive yet interlocking structures of oppression” in both the human and monster world (Collins, 1993, p. 36). Although this is an important topic to cover in media as it is a largely underrepresented social issue across the world, Garrett Sander has been clear since the beginning that monsters and humans coexist peacefully and have positive relationships with one another. In the Monster High world he envisioned in 2010, the high school would never have a problem with a student like Clawdeen for being half human half monster. In fact, the franchise has many half human half monster students that attend Monster High such as Deuce Gorgon (half human half gorgon), Hexiciah Steam (half human half fairy), and Jackson Jekyll (half human half fire elemental). Because of this, the animosity that the monsters feel towards humans in Monster High: The Movie is shocking and gives the impression that the film writers did not know much about Monster High’s dynamics despite them being written into the original characters.
As someone who has been a fan of Monster High since elementary school, the aspects of the film above are more problematic to me than they would be to someone that had no prior knowledge of the franchise. Though strange to me, the ignored and swapped personality traits and identities of the monsters in Monster High: The Movie do not make the movie alone bad. Not knowing how the characters have appeared over the past twelve years would make Draculaura’s uptightness appear normal in the same way that Clawdeen’s interest in Deuce and not another female monster most likely would not get a second look from a new consumer of the franchise. My background knowledge in queer media studies as well as in societal based communications classes also places me in a position to be more aware of queer erasure and the struggles of intersectionality for individuals part of multiple oppressed social groups. For these reasons my movie review might seem harsh to those coming in blind to the world of Monster High, but I truly feel the film could’ve reached new limits if it had stayed true to the franchise.
Cartmell, D., Corrigan, T., & Whelehan, I. (2008, March 1). Introduction to Adaptation. OUP Academic. Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://academic.oup.com/adaptation/article-abstract/1/1/1/6240?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Collins, P.H. (1993). Toward A New Vision :Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection. 35-45.
Doty, Alexander. (1993) “There’s Something Queer Here” in Making Things Perfectly Queer, 1-16.
Monster High Wiki. Fandom. (2016). Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://monsterhigh.fandom.com/wiki/Monster_High_Wiki
