Spoilers throughout.
The Face That Looks Back Wrong
I found There Are Monsters the way a lot of older, stranger horror films seem to find us now: not through a cinema release, not through a carefully curated recommendation, but through a short clip floating around social media, stripped of context and made suddenly effective by being brief.
That is probably the right way to meet this film: a face, a smile, someone standing a little too still, someone looking human but not quite landing the performance. A few seconds of that was enough to get my attention.
I am not, generally speaking, a found-footage loyalist. I respect the form when it works, but I also know my limits. Too much handheld camera movement and I start to feel like my eyeballs are being punished for showing up. There Are Monsters tested that patience pretty hard. The camera shakes, lunges, loses focus, pushes too close into faces, and often seems determined to make every human interaction feel like it was filmed from inside someone else’s panic attack. There were moments when I wanted to tell the film students in the movie to stop recording and, please, for everyone’s sake, learn how to frame a shot.
And yet the body-snatcher angle hooked me. That old fear still works on me: the idea that the world does not end with fire, bombs, plague, zombies, or a big cinematic sky-beam, but through replacement — quietly, efficiently, one familiar face at a time. Your friend still looks like your friend. Your teacher still looks like your teacher. Your mother still sounds almost like your mother. But something behind the eyes has moved out, and something else has moved in.
Jay Dahl first made There Are Monsters as a ten-minute short in 2008, then expanded the idea into a feature on the kind of budget that makes every practical decision visible on screen. In a 2009 interview, while the feature was still being completed, Dahl said the longer film had roughly a CA$300,000 budget and that the POV/mock-documentary approach was partly a practical response to not being able to light a conventional feature the way he had lit the short. The finished feature premiered in Canada in September 2013, while Dahl’s own site and some international materials label it a 2014 production, which explains the date wobble you find from one listing to another. Dahl’s credits on the film extend well beyond writing and directing into producing, editing, music, sound design and visual effects.
So this is not some random internet creepypasta accidentally stretched to feature length. It has a history, a short-film origin, a festival life, and a very specific low-budget Canadian horror texture. It also has one of those premises that, even when the execution irritates me, refuses to leave the room.
The Old Horror of People Being Replaced
The premise is clean: the world is being taken over by monsters that look exactly like us. A graduate-student film crew goes on a work-related road trip, begins noticing signs of doppelgängers, and slowly realizes that society is changing right in front of them — and in front of their cameras. That synopsis appears consistently across streaming and distributor listings, which describe the film as documentary-style horror built around creatures who infiltrate the world quietly and efficiently.
This is, of course, Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory. The 1956 Don Siegel film, adapted from Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, became one of the essential American paranoia films: a story about people discovering that their loved ones have been replaced by identical impostors. It has been read through Cold War anxiety, McCarthyism, conformity, mass society, and the loss of personal autonomy, even though Siegel himself reportedly rejected strictly political readings of his intent.
That is the useful thing about body-snatcher stories. They adapt. In the 1950s, the fear was ideological contamination. In the 1978 version, it became urban alienation and post-Watergate distrust. In later versions, it leaned into infection, identity, biology, surveillance, social collapse. The same basic idea keeps wearing new clothes.
There Are Monsters arrives after decades of this lineage, so it is not original in the grand conceptual sense. It knows the old trick: what if the person beside you is no longer a person? But originality is not always the point with horror. Sometimes the question is whether the old fear can still be made to twitch.
Here, it still can — not always elegantly and certainly not comfortably, but enough to keep the old fear twitching.
A Film Crew, a Road Trip, and the Worst Possible Group Project
The central characters are part of a graduate-student film crew. They are on the road for a project, interviewing people, collecting footage, doing the familiar documentary setup that found-footage films like to use because it gives everyone a reason to keep filming when any sensible person would have thrown the camera into a ditch.
The main crew includes Beth, played by Kristin Langille; Jeff, played by Guy Germain; Terry, played by Matthew Amyotte; and Dan, played by Jason Daley. Cast listings across film databases and review coverage identify these as the core group, with additional supporting roles feeding into the larger sense of a world beginning to slip.
This setup does two things. First, it justifies the presence of cameras. Second, it makes the characters professional enough, or at least aspiring-professional enough, that the film’s visual messiness becomes harder to excuse.
That may sound petty, but it matters. In a found-footage film about random teenagers in the woods, bad camera work feels plausible. In a story about a crew of film students, bad camera work starts to feel like either a deliberate aesthetic decision or an accidental joke. There Are Monsters often pushes that tension too far. These people are supposedly trained enough to be making a documentary project, yet half the time the footage looks like it was captured by someone trying to escape a bee. Still, there is a practical dramatic function to the crew dynamic. They do not all understand the threat at the same speed. That is important. Horror often fails when everybody instantly believes the impossible. In real life, most of us would rationalize. We would blame fatigue, stress, bad lighting, weird behavior, mental illness, drugs, mass hysteria, prank culture, social media nonsense — anything but “monsters disguised as people are replacing humanity.”
The better parts of There Are Monsters come from that staggered recognition. One person sees something wrong. Another dismisses it. Someone else notices a detail too strange to explain. Then denial begins to rot.
That gradual breakdown is where the film works.
Beth: The Emotional Center Trying to Stay Human
Beth is the character who gives the film most of its emotional traction. Kristin Langille’s performance seems to be the one many viewers and reviewers single out, and Dahl’s own site lists her as receiving a Best Actor award recognition at the 2013 Atlantic Film Festival.
What Beth brings is not grand heroism. It is a more useful kind of horror-movie intelligence: the ability to register that something is wrong before she has the vocabulary for it. She is not presented as some mythic final girl carved out of genre expectation. She feels more like someone trying to keep up with an impossible event while still operating inside normal social habits.
That is a big part of the dread. Body-snatcher horror depends on manners. You cannot immediately scream at everyone who smiles strangely. You cannot stab a neighbor because they pause too long before answering. You cannot accuse a receptionist, teacher, parent, or stranger in a convenience store of being an inhuman replacement because their face seems slightly off.
Civilization protects the monsters, and Beth’s fear grows inside that social trap. She notices, doubts herself, gets scared, recalibrates, and then has to act before the world gives her permission to act. Langille plays that movement well. Her fear does not always come out as theatrical panic. Sometimes it looks like the private horror of someone doing the math faster than everyone else and not liking the answer.
That is where the film’s tight close-ups occasionally help, even if I still found them excessive. When the camera gets too close to Beth’s face, it can be visually annoying, but it also forces us into that uncomfortable space where a person is trying not to fall apart. In a more polished film, we might get cleaner compositions, better blocking, and a more elegant emotional arc. Here, we get something uglier and more immediate.
Sometimes that ugliness is the point; sometimes it is simply ugly. The film lives in that argument.
Jeff: The Denialist, the Skeptic, the Guy Who Makes Everything Harder
Jeff is the sort of character these stories need because someone has to refuse the obvious for longer than is comfortable.
In real life, Jeff might be the most realistic person in the group. That does not mean he is the most pleasant to watch. He seems to represent ordinary resistance: the refusal to accept that the world has changed because accepting it means giving up the rules that made yesterday make sense.
There is always someone like this in a horror story. The person who insists there must be another explanation. The person who does not want panic to become contagious. The person who thinks everyone else is overreacting.
And to be fair, he is not entirely wrong to hesitate. In the early stages of a body-snatcher event, evidence is slippery. The monsters are not stomping through town in rubber suits. They are wearing familiar faces. Their wrongness appears in timing, posture, expression, tone. That is hard to prove.
Jeff’s skepticism, then, is not just obstruction. It is part of the film’s larger anxiety about perception. How much weirdness does it take before “something is off” becomes “something is inhuman”? How many small violations does a person need before the mind stops protecting normality?
Still, as a viewer, there is a point where denial stops being complexity and becomes irritation. Jeff walks near that line. He is useful to the structure, but the film’s already agitated visual style makes any character friction feel more abrasive. In a steadier film, his resistance might feel like tragic realism. In this film, with the camera shaking and faces filling the frame, it sometimes feels like being trapped in a badly managed group project while the apocalypse begins outside.
Which, admittedly, is its own kind of horror.
Terry and Dan: Peripheral Men in a Collapsing Frame
Terry and Dan round out the group, though they do not register as strongly as Beth. Terry has more presence, partly because Matthew Amyotte gives him enough nervous energy to make his shifting awareness believable. He becomes one of the figures through whom the group’s uncertainty passes. He is not necessarily the leader, but he helps carry the movement from “this is strange” to “we are in serious trouble.”
Dan, by comparison, fades more easily into the background. That is not always a failure of performance; some ensemble horror films simply use characters as pressure points rather than fully developed portraits. But in a film this visually chaotic, characters who do not assert themselves can get swallowed by the form.
This is one of the limitations of the movie. The premise is stronger than some of the character writing. I understood the crew as a unit, but I did not always feel that each person had enough distinctive interior life. Beth stands out because she gives us something emotionally specific. Jeff stands out because his skepticism creates friction. Terry has enough involvement to matter. Dan is there, but less defined.
In a more expansive version of this story, I would have liked more time with the crew before the paranoia sets in. Not necessarily a long slow build — the film is already testing patience visually — but a clearer sense of who these people are when they are not running, arguing, filming, or noticing someone’s face doing something it should not do.
The best body-snatcher stories hurt because replacement means loss. We need to know what is being lost.
There Are Monsters gives us the fear of replacement more strongly than the grief of it.
The Monsters: A Smile, a Face, a Performance of Humanity
The monsters in this film are most effective when they barely do anything.
That is not an insult. In fact, that may be the film’s strongest instinct. There are moments when someone smiles too broadly, stares too long, moves in a way that feels rehearsed rather than natural. The uncanny quality is not in elaborate effects. It is in the failure of imitation.
This is where the short-film origin matters. Dahl’s 2008 short There Are Monsters also revolved around the idea of ordinary people becoming terrifying through small behavioral dislocations. Sources describe the short as a 10-minute Canadian horror film about Garth and Maddie noticing a strange little girl in their backyard, the first sign that the world has changed.
A review of the short quotes Dahl explaining the everyday paranoia behind the concept: we trust that the clerk behind the counter is a living human being because she looks that way — until she starts acting off.
That is exactly the nerve the feature keeps pressing.
The monsters do not need much mythology. I understand the desire for explanation. I often want it myself. Where did they come from? How long has this been going on? Is this alien, biological, supernatural, interdimensional? The film offers hints and gestures, but it does not build a detailed lore machine.
In this case, that restraint mostly works. The terror is not really about origin. It is about recognition. Or failed recognition.
The monster is not scary because it has claws. It is scary because it is almost your mother, almost your classmate, almost the person you trusted five minutes ago.
A lot of modern horror over-explains itself until the fear gets laminated. There Are Monsters avoids that. Not always because of elegance, perhaps. Budget likely plays a role. But low-budget horror can sometimes benefit from not being able to show everything. The less the film explains, the more we are stuck with the social panic of the situation: what if everyone around me has already crossed over, and I am the last idiot still trying to be polite?
That is a solid horror question.
The Camera Problem
Now we have to talk about the camera. I know this is found footage, I know documentary-style horror needs roughness, and I know the frame is supposed to feel unstable because the world is unstable. I understand the theory. Watching There Are Monsters, though, I kept feeling my tolerance being sanded down.
The handheld style is relentless. The framing is often too tight. Faces fill the screen in ways that may be intended to create discomfort, but sometimes just create fatigue. There is a difference between visual anxiety and visual punishment, and this film occasionally crosses that line for me.
A 2020 review from The Scariest Things makes a similar complaint, arguing that the film has a strong idea and creepy moments but is heavily undermined by extreme shaky-cam and out-of-focus close-ups. It specifically points out the awkwardness of making the protagonists film students while presenting them as almost comically bad at basic camera operation.
That criticism feels fair, but Dahl’s own explanation complicates it in an interesting way. Speaking about the original short, he said he deliberately wanted a video-camera feel, used long lenses, and even kept soft-focus moments because he believed documentary realism heightened fear. The feature pushes that instinct much further. The found-footage form has always depended on a bargain: accept the roughness because it brings immediacy. The Blair Witch Project made that bargain famous, even if it was not the first film to use the approach. Later found-footage horror used cheap cameras, subjective framing, surveillance, webcams, news footage, police footage, screen recordings, and domestic video to make horror feel less composed and more discovered. Academic writing on found-footage horror often discusses how the form destabilizes the boundary between documentary framing and fictional horror, making the camera itself part of the experience rather than just a neutral recording device.
That is the good version of the argument. The bad version is the assumption that shaky camera automatically equals realism. It does not.
A film can be handheld and disciplined. It can be messy but legible. It can restrict our view without making us feel like the operator has no wrists, no balance, and no mercy. The best found-footage films understand that the image still has to communicate. The frame can be panicked, but the film cannot be careless.
There Are Monsters sometimes uses the camera brilliantly. A quick glimpse of wrongness. A face caught at a bad angle. A sudden distortion of normal behavior. These are moments where the form makes sense. You feel the characters trying to record proof while also trying not to die. The image becomes evidence, not just style.
But other times, the camera gets in the way of the fear. I found myself fighting the film instead of sinking into it. The tight shots became suffocating in the less useful sense. The movement did not always feel like panic. Sometimes it just felt like a design choice that had not been edited against human comfort.
And this is coming from someone who wanted to like the premise, which makes the frustration sharper rather than easier to dismiss.
Why the Body-Snatcher Idea Still Works
The reason I kept watching, despite all that, is simple: this type of horror still gets me.
There is something deeply unpleasant about a world where identity can no longer be verified by appearance. It turns the most basic social instinct into a liability. We read faces for safety. We listen for tone. We depend on small familiar patterns. A body-snatcher story weaponizes all of that.
In zombie films, the threat announces itself. Even if zombies were once people, they have crossed into visible otherness. You can run from them. You can barricade the door. You can tell who is infected, at least eventually.
Doppelgänger horror is nastier because it keeps the door open. Maybe the threat is already inside, smiling at the table.
This is why the old Body Snatchers template keeps returning. It is not just about aliens or pods or duplicates. It is about the terror of social trust collapsing. A familiar person becomes a question mark. A community becomes a trap. Normal life continues, but its meaning has changed.
There Are Monsters understands this. Its best scares are not always the loud ones. They are the moments when a person behaves slightly outside the human range. The smile is too fixed. The eyes are too patient. The face seems to be remembering how faces work.
That is strong material.
It also connects strangely well to the way the film has recently been rediscovered through clips. A short, contextless image of someone acting wrong can be more effective than an entire plot summary. The internet has become very good at isolating uncanny moments. Sometimes a ten-second clip can sell the premise better than a trailer.
In that sense, There Are Monsters may be more naturally suited to viral rediscovery than to conventional viewing. Its jolts, faces, and wrong-human moments travel well. Its sustained shaky-cam endurance test travels less well.
A clip made me interested; the full film made me negotiate with it.
Low Budget, High Paranoia
The film’s low-budget nature is obvious, but not always in a bad way. Horror has a long history of turning limitation into atmosphere. When you cannot afford spectacle, you focus on behavior, sound, space, and suggestion.
There Are Monsters is not gory in a major way. It does not build itself around elaborate creature effects. The monsters are mostly human forms made strange through performance, editing, sound, and occasional facial distortion. Reviews have noted that the effects are simple, with the film relying more on jump scares and atmosphere than heavy gore.
That suits the premise. Too much monster detail would probably weaken it. The fear comes from how little is needed to make a person feel wrong.
The sound design also matters. A film like this depends on dread gathering in corners. The sense of something changing beyond the frame is almost more important than what we see. Because the camera is so unstable, sound often becomes the thing that holds the scene together. Voices, silences, sudden noises, distorted human reactions — these become part of the film’s nervous system.
This is also where Dahl’s multi-role involvement becomes relevant. His own site credits him not only as writer and director but also as editor, composer, sound designer, and visual-effects artist. That kind of hands-on authorship can create a unified mood, even when the technical execution is uneven. The film feels like a singular obsession: faces are wrong, cameras are unstable, the world is infected, and nobody can quite prove it fast enough.
There is value in that, but there is also a cost.
A film this tightly controlled by one sensibility can double down on its own worst habits. The same commitment that gives it its claustrophobic paranoia also keeps it from pulling back when the viewer needs air.
The Social Horror of Acting Normal
One of the more interesting things about There Are Monsters is that it understands how much horror can hide inside social expectation.
When someone behaves strangely in public, most people do not immediately intervene. We look away. We explain it to ourselves. Maybe they are tired. Maybe they are unwell. Maybe we are being rude by noticing. Maybe it is none of our business.
The monsters exploit that hesitation.
The film’s doppelgängers are frightening because they operate inside ordinary spaces: roads, classrooms, stores, offices, homes. They are not invading from outside civilization. They are entering through its routines. A smile at a counter. A conversation with a stranger. A family interaction. A casual moment that suddenly becomes impossible to interpret.
This gives the film a more intimate kind of apocalypse. We are not watching cities fall in wide shots. We are watching trust fail in close-up.
Too close, in my case, but that is also the cleverness of the premise. The apocalypse does not need a skyline. It needs one person you love to become unreadable.
Where the Film Frustrated Me
I wanted more character depth. I wanted the camera to calm down once in a while. I wanted the film-student setup to feel less accidentally self-incriminating. I wanted the close-ups to be used more selectively, so they could regain power instead of becoming the film’s default nervous habit.
There is a sharper, more disciplined version of this movie hiding inside the one we got, and that version would still be rough. It should be rough. A polished There Are Monsters might lose some of its feverish oddness. But discipline is not the enemy of fear. A steadier hand in the editing and framing might have made the uncanny moments hit harder. When everything is frantic, genuine terror has to compete with visual exhaustion.
This is why I came away mixed rather than fully converted. I admire the idea. I like the body-snatcher hook. I think some of the scares work very well. I respect the low-budget invention. I understand why the short stuck with people and why clips from the feature can still grab attention years later.
But I also had a headache, and I do not think that should be dismissed as a viewer problem. Horror can be uncomfortable, but discomfort has different flavors. There is the discomfort of fear, and there is the discomfort of being visually jostled for ninety minutes. The first one I welcome. The second one I tolerate only when the film earns it.
There Are Monsters earns it in pieces, not always as a whole.
What It Gets Right
The film gets paranoia right — not the polished, cinematic paranoia of shadowy institutions and men in suits, but the smaller kind. The “did you see that?” kind. The “why is she smiling like that?” kind. The “something is happening and I sound insane when I say it aloud” kind.
It also gets the uncanny face right. Horror often works best when it tampers with something we look at every day. A face is supposed to reassure us. It is supposed to tell us who is there. When the face becomes unreliable, the entire world becomes unstable.
The monsters in There Are Monsters are frightening because they suggest that humanity is not a soul, a memory, or a moral condition. It might just be a performance. And if something else learns the performance well enough, what then?
That is the nasty thought underneath the film, and it is why the body-snatcher tradition has lasted so long. It gives physical shape to a social fear: that people can be emptied out and keep functioning. They can go to work, drive cars, answer phones, smile at children, attend meetings, make small talk. The machinery of everyday life continues. Only the inner life is gone.
As someone who has spent years looking at faces, expressions, layout, framing, and the small visual cues that make communication feel human, I find that idea hard to shake. Design, film, photography — all of it depends on noticing when something lands or does not land. There Are Monsters turns that instinct into dread. You are watching people and asking whether the performance of being human is slightly misaligned.
That is a good horror engine, even if the camera occasionally feels like it was operated by a man falling down stairs.
The Short Film Shadow
The feature’s relationship to the 2008 short is important because the short seems to contain the purest version of the idea. A short film can hit hard, leave questions unanswered, and get out before the mechanics begin to show. Many horror ideas thrive at that length. They are built for impact, not architecture.
The feature tries to expand that impact into a broader apocalyptic road-trip narrative. According to HorrorNews.net, the 2013 feature is an update and expansion of Dahl’s 2008 short, with an altered story; Dahl wrote, directed, and produced the feature.
That expansion creates both opportunity and strain. The opportunity is scale. We get a wider sense that this is not one isolated incident but a spreading transformation. The world is changing. The camera is catching the evidence in fragments. The story moves beyond one household into a larger social collapse.
The strain is duration. What is terrifying in ten minutes can become repetitive in ninety if the film does not modulate rhythm, character, and visual strategy. There Are Monsters has enough good ideas to survive the expansion, but not always enough variation to fully justify it.
This is probably why the film works so well as a discovery through clips. The core effect is immediate. The full feature asks for more patience.
Some viewers will have that patience. I had some, but not all.
A Small Film with a Persistent Aftertaste
I do not think There Are Monsters is a great film. I do think it is a memorable one, and that distinction matters.
Great films often feel resolved, even when they are disturbing. Memorable films can be uneven, irritating, clumsy, or badly behaved, but they leave something behind. This one left behind faces. Smiles. The suspicion that ordinary people might suddenly stop being ordinary.
I can complain about the camera, and I will. I can say the characters needed more depth, and they did. I can say the film’s visual style made me physically uncomfortable in ways that were not always productive, and that is true.
For all those complaints, I kept watching because the premise has teeth.
There is a version of horror that comes from spectacle: monsters, gore, scale, mythology, set pieces. Then there is this smaller, meaner version: someone you know enters the room, and you realize too late that recognition is no longer enough.
There Are Monsters belongs to that second category. It is rough. It is annoying. It is sometimes very effective. It feels like a film made by someone who understood one excellent nightmare and then insisted on filming it through a camera that hated my inner ear.
I cannot fully recommend it without warning people about the shaky-cam assault. But I also cannot dismiss it. The body-snatcher hook still works. The uncanny faces still work. The creeping suspicion still works.
Maybe that is enough. Some horror films arrive smoothly, do their job, and disappear. This one stumbles in, gets too close to your face, smiles wrong, and refuses to leave.
That counts for something, and it is probably why I am still thinking about the film long after I stopped arguing with its camera.
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