“I DON’T KNOW WHY THIS IS HAPPENING”

This chapter examines imaginings of living through terror. Cloverfield’s (2008) hand-held amateur camera aesthetic and giant monster’s unmotivated attack on NYC indirectly restages the terror of 9/11. Innovatively recasting the giant monster movie via realist horror locks the audience into the Everyman protagonists’ highly mediated victim-perspective, and foregrounds restricted vision and limited knowledge. Unequipped to professionally counter the monstrous threat, the Everyman’s response is necessarily displaced onto a heroic-redemptive rescue quest. The chapter argues the giant monster exceeds the Everyman/hand-held camera’s capacities to “capture” it, and so remains frighteningly unknowable—for doomed male protagonist and audience alike. Its absolute Otherness thwarts the Everyman’s remasculinization quest and finally confirms he is the monster that requires annihilation. The chapter also explores the shame of the emasculated male in the home invasion horror, The Strangers (2008), and the ambivalent redemption of the working class Everyman in Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds (2005).