CHUDs, Clovers, Quetzalcoatl: The Movie Monsters of New York City
H.P. Lovecraft, American horror fiction’s early 20th century disruptor, lived in New York City from 1924 to 1926. One of the six stories Lovecraft wrote during his Brooklyn years, “The Horror at Red Hook,” is routinely cited as the most flagrantly racist entry in an uncommonly racist oeuvre. It’s also the blueprint for a century of NYC monster movies to follow.
In Lovecraft’s lens, the ethnically diverse Red Hook is “a maze of hybrid squalor […] the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom.” The plot, quite overshadowed by setting and atmosphere, concerns a hero cop investigating a fallen aristocrat who’s lately been associating with “swarthy, evil-looking strangers” who “smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island.” During a raid that flushes out “unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners,” Lovecraft’s cop discovers a network of smuggling tunnels beneath the Red Hook tenements. There underground, he beholds a monstrous horde of demons, carnivorous giants, “headless moon-calves,” and “shapeless elemental things with eyes,” all led by a bloodthirsty, “tittering, phosphorescent thing” on a golden throne. The lasting impact of this experience upon the policeman, it’s said, is a phobia of “old brick slums and dark foreign faces.”
In the 100 years since the story’s composition, most narratives of monsters in Gotham have followed, knowingly or otherwise, in Lovecraft’s footsteps. Creature features in a city long associated with immigration seem to be fluent in the vocabulary of xenophobia and classism. Upon the centennial of “The Horror at Red Hook,” in a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is surging again in New York and elsewhere, it behooves us to take a critical look at the thrilling, problematic history of the Big Apple bestiary.
Kaiju Origins
You can’t talk about New York monster movies without addressing the gorilla in the room. King Kong (1933) created the megafauna template followed into the 1950s by Hollywood and, more importantly, Japan. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was inspired by King Kong’s 1952 re-release to create Godzilla (1954), and RKO Pictures returned the favor by licensing the Kong character to Toho, making him an official part of the Japanese kaiju canon. Godzilla paid NYC an unfriendly visit in 1968’s Destroy All Monsters, but Gotham wouldn’t get its own dedicated kaiju movie until Hollywood’s 1998 Godzilla. In the interim, Kong took another run at the city in 1976’s King Kong remake, where he traded his iconic Empire State Building climb for a trip to the top of the new World Trade Center towers. Speaking of postcard skyscrapers, in 1982 Larry Cohen unleashed his own giant monster in the form of Q – The Winged Serpent, a reincarnated Aztec god who nests in the crown of the Chrysler Building. The big ape got one more New York adventure in 2005’s King Kong, this time a 1930s period piece, and Cloverfield (2008) brought Manhattan-leveling kaiju into the post-9/11 era.
It’s hard not to notice how these films trace their monsters’ origins to somewhere foreign. In all the above versions, King Kong is shipped from his Indian Ocean island to New York for exhibition. The Winged Serpent known as Q reappears in Manhattan thanks to the prayers of 20th-century followers of Aztec religion, originating in the land now called Mexico. Although the Japanese films imply Godzilla’s mutations to be caused by American nuclear testing in the Pacific, 1998’s Godzilla originates in French Polynesia, and is a result of French nuke testing, further shifting the blame off American shoulders. The Cloverfield monster’s origin is unknown, but the film’s lore suggests it was awakened from undersea slumber by Japanese oil drilling.
The persistence of Asian signifiers in these movies, particularly the later ones, might be paying homage to the kaiju genre’s Japanese roots, but given what we know about the monster as symbolic other, the idea of inhuman creatures coming from foreign lands to wreak havoc has unfortunate implications. These films revel in the large-scale violation of legendary New York—and hence American—landmarks, including the Empire State, Chrysler, and Flatiron Buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Garden, and yes, the Twin Towers. Author James Sanders, interviewed by The New York Times in 2007, called the city a “global shorthand” for American civic society, suggesting that an attack on New York is synecdoche for an attack on the United States.
Though they depict creatures that tower over the city, Godzilla and Cloverfield also spend a lot of time underground, playing on an aspect of New York just as iconic as its heavenward spires. As above, so below.
Subway Shamblers
The New York City Subway is the most extensive rapid transit system in the western hemisphere, with nearly 500 stations and more than 2 billion annual riders. Subway creature features leverage the unsettling idea of the earth beneath us honeycombed with tunnels of permanent night where who knows what could be lurking. Artists in Lovecraft’s wake realized he didn’t have to dream up a fictitious warren of canals to house his monstrous menagerie; the city already had 250 miles of them. C.H.U.D. (1984) locates its titular “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers” in the city’s sewers and abandoned subway tunnels, and teams up an NYPD captain with the manager of a homeless shelter and an erstwhile fashion photographer. Another photographer, investigating a subway-bound serial killer in 2008’s The Midnight Meat Train, stumbles into a world of subterranean maneaters who have fed on surface-dwellers for centuries. Breeders (1986) has the NYPD trace a string of sexual assaults to an alien who has set up shop in an abandoned subway tunnel and started to reproduce by impregnating human women. Outside the horror genre, the titular creatures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise are, like Godzilla and Clover, also mutants of Japanese origin who inhabit New York’s sewers and abandoned train systems.
A Breeders monster, looking like a Muppet gone terribly wrong.
C.H.U.D. is particularly brazen about linking the underground monsters to the issue of NYC homelessness. Some portion of the city’s 158,000 unhoused people do find semi-permanent shelter underground. In 2022, the MTA chased about 350 people out of 118 separate subway encampments. In New York, social hierarchy is literally vertical. The richest live in high-rise penthouses, the middle-class live closer to ground level, and the poorest live on, or under, the street. C.H.U.D. eagerly points out that, despite at least a dozen homeless people having disappeared, the cops don’t take notice until a police captain’s wife is killed. Our old friend nuclear mutation creates C.H.U.D.’s monsters, but this time improper waste disposal is to blame, symbolically linking homeless people to urban refuse. Some other movies playing in this space are 1989’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, depicting horrific consequences from toxic waste in the NYC sewers, and 1987’s Street Trash, whose title speaks for itself.
The people who become The Midnight Meat Train’s titular meat are all from the city’s well-heeled class: businessmen, fashion models, patrons of the arts. The human servant who prepares victims for the monsters is an actual butcher: blue-collar joe by day, serial killer by night. The underclass is also represented by a trio of Black men who sexually assault a young woman—and whom the protagonist follows because they “looked suspicious,” a notion the film does not interrogate. The underground creatures are of a species older than the city itself, an arrangement recalling the subterranean Morlocks who feed on the effete surface-dwelling Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.
Another fashion model suffers sexual violence at the hands of the underclass in Breeders. The movie exploits the old conservative fear of threats to racial and sexual purity from rapacious others, echoing Lovecraft’s miscegenation anxiety. The climax, of course, takes place in the defunct train tunnels beneath the Empire State Building.
Of the New York underground, Andrew Ross writes:
“Surely no other city has had such a fantastic bestiary of historical residents—from alligators to ninja turtles—in its sewage tunnels. Linked, from the mid-nineteenth century on, to the alien presence of immigrant populations busily breeding mutant Americans, the rich zoological life of the underworld has continued to be a source of representation for threats to the urban racial order.” (The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, 135-6)
To take the full measure of Ross’s observation, we have to talk about another class of monster movie that thrives in New York’s underground spaces. So let’s shift our focus from the city’s two-legged residents to a different population entirely.
Five Burrows
An estimated 3 million rats call New York City home, and about 1 in 6 human households report insect infestations, so there’s ample room for monster movies to extrapolate ordinary vermin into apocalyptic scenarios. In Of Unknown Origin (1983), a banker descends to near-madness while doing battle with a large, intelligent rat in his renovated brownstone. In Mimic (1997) and its sequels, a genetically engineered insect breed evolves into a human-sized menace. Last year’s Sting depicts a carnivorous alien spider that grows gigantic and insatiable, and in Jim Mickle’s Mulberry Street (2006), a plague spread by rodent bites turns Manhattanites into ratlike zombies.
The likening of monster problems to pest problems doesn’t stop at the obvious, though. The Ghostbusters call themselves “exterminators,” and their grey jumpsuits invite comparisons to civic sanitation workers. Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) finds the critters infesting a Manhattan skyscraper, multiplying out of control and traveling through the ventilation ducts.
In 2018, then-president Donald Trump tweeted that Democrats “want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country [sic].” His use of exterminators’ language is consistent with a long history of depicting immigrants as vermin. I’ve written elsewhere that the original Gremlins embodies bourgeois 1980s American fears about globalism: the Asian-coded creatures overwhelm a small town with offspring that monopolize public resources. The sequel plays the same card, but this time lays it down in Manhattan. Q – The Winged Serpent, Breeders, Sting, and Godzilla (“Manhattan’s newest unwanted pest”), not to mention “The Horror at Red Hook,” also feature creatures from elsewhere who reproduce, or attempt to, in New York City. In other words, “anchor babies”—the nativist bugbear basis of proposals to revoke the founding American rule of birthright citizenship. Mimic goes further: After generations, the creatures have evolved to mimic humans and walk among us. They look like you and me. The building where the insects nest also houses an underground group of trafficked Chinese migrants sick with yellow fever, echoing Lovecraft almost exactly, and reflecting another historical facet of xenophobia: the fear of contagion.
You can interpret Ghostbusters as a conservative fantasy about ridding the Big Apple of “undesirables,” but other readings are possible. To Andrew Ross, it’s an outcry against the privatization of services. Peter Venkman’s quote, “Sometimes shit happens, someone has to deal with it, and who you gonna call?” implicates municipal authorities unable or unwilling to confront the problem (Ross, 135). The 2016 Ghostbusters reboot is even more explicit: The city actively tries to cover up the spectral outbreak. Mulberry Street shares this skepticism of the powers that be and their ability to handle a crisis. “Where is the emergency response?” the characters wonder, as the zombie nightmare stretches into its second day. The film, with its gentrification subtext, implies that the city has allowed working-class neighborhoods to literally cannibalize themselves, making it easier to clear them out and rebuild. Of Unknown Origin also evokes class struggle. Its wealthy hero fights to protect his fancy renovated brownstone from a rat he says would “be happier in the Bronx.” There is more vague Orientalism: Pacific A-bomb testing is mentioned again, and rats are said to be worshiped in “some places in Asia and India,” contributing to the animal’s implicit racial othering. Worst of all, the pest might cause the ultimate yuppie nightmare: making our hero fumble his career promotion.
Burning in the Melting Pot
Pop culture seems enchanted and repelled by New York in equal measure. “Nice gets you nowhere in this town,” says a news cameraman in Godzilla. A shopkeeper in Of Unknown Origin calls the city “an open sewer,” and in Ghostbusters II, the mayor himself declares that “being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker’s god-given right.” An old man in Breeders regales a victim with tales of the neighborhood before it went to seed, but then reveals himself as a predatory alien in disguise. In the words of The Midnight Meat Train’s Maya, “There never really were any good old days. It’s always been a hellhole.”
Of the generations of artists imagining unwholesome evil in these dilapidated spaces, many have taken Lovecraft’s cue and given it non-white racial coding. In Wolfen (1981), a film visually obsessed with urban blight, the city’s Native American population conceals a secret race of lycanthropes in “the great slum areas, the graveyard of your fucking species,” to feed on “your garbage, your abandoned people.” The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972) finds superstitious voodoo practitioners among the Puerto Rican community, and The Believers (1987) does the same for West Indians.
More monsters populate the city’s shabbier parts in films like Roberta Findlay’s Lurkers and Prime Evil (both 1988), situating demonic portals in a run-down tenement and monastery, respectively. Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982) and Brain Damage (1988) hide a deformed vestigial twin in a cheap hotel and an alien parasite in a decrepit apartment building. These films both reflect and fuel the longstanding perception of slums as inherently evil places, rather than morally neutral neighborhoods where the neediest among us are forced to live.
Gotham’s mean streets were a muse for grindhouse poets of urban decay like Cohen, Henenlotter, Findlay, and William Lustig (Maniac Cop), but that particular well seemed to run dry by the mid-1990s, thanks to the first of two developments that would change the city’s face forever.
There Goes the Neighborhood
In Urban Nightmares, scholar Steve Macek describes the moral panic over “the menace of the postindustrial metropolis” that seemed to grip American culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s—fears stoked by the likes of Donald Trump with his public call for the lynching of the eventually-exonerated Central Park Five. In New York, the inflection point came with the 1993 election of tough-on-crime mayor Rudy Giuliani. Under Giuliani’s direction, the NYPD ferociously prosecuted minor lifestyle crimes like graffiti and public drunkenness. This effort to “clean up” Manhattan led to the much-bemoaned “Disneyfication” of midtown. Gone were the peepshows, sex shops, and fleabag motels of the old Times Square, says Macek, “for redevelopment as upscale entertainment centers and festive marketplaces catering to middle-class suburbanites and tourists” which, let’s face it, don’t look nearly as good on film. The relative scarcity of New York-set monster movies from this period is not coincidental. The few we got were either glossy SFX-fests like Godzilla, or throwbacks to the old noir aesthetics like Mimic.
The second development, of course, was the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Every New York horror film made in the ensuing decade is, in some way, a response to 9/11, and monster movies are no exception. Mulberry Street’s sole survivor is a wounded serviceperson returning from Middle East deployment. The movie directly references terror threats and Bin Laden, and the plaguewielding rats emerging from subway tunnels evoke a mass transit strike like the London Underground bombings of July 2005. As recently as last year’s A Quiet Place: Day One, we’re still sending hostile aliens to attack Manhattan from the air. But with that awful Tuesday almost a quarter-century in the rearview, it’s Cloverfield that stands as the king of post-9/11 New York horror.
Not everybody considered that a good thing. Some critiqued the movie as a too-soon exploitation of New Yorkers’ 9/11 trauma. Cloverfield captures the chaos on the ground, desperate attempts to reach loved ones, spectacular destruction of iconic landmarks, and the way the public experienced the tragedy through confused news reports and amateur handheld video—all in gritty verité style.
The genteel class, less than a decade after the city’s “rebirth,” suddenly had a new thing to be nervous about. The combination of whitewashed urban renewal and terrorism panic created a peculiar situation in the years following 9/11, when the city was seen as simultaneously safer and more dangerous than ever before. The Midnight Meat Train captures this dichotomy: a victim points out the lack of subway graffiti as proof of safety, a few scenes before a transit cop confiscates the protagonist’s camera because the threat level is orange. It’s a paradox that finds its ultimate expression in the city’s preeminent symbol.
Torch, Shackle, and Crown
Lady Liberty makes frequent cameos in the New York monster canon. The Cloverfield creature, awakened by Asian industry and symbolic of Middle Eastern terrorism, famously decapitates her. The final showdown with The Winged Serpent, a mythical Mexican figure relocated to the Big Apple, takes place beneath a replica of the statue. In Ghostbusters II, she’s a symbol “that appeals to the best in each and every one of us”—yet the heroes’ objective is to thwart what Ross calls “a medieval European tyrant eager to obtain his green card.”
“The New Colossus,” the Emma Lazarus poem emblazoned in the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, rhetorically welcomes the world’s neediest “homeless,” while also calling them “wretched refuse.” That poem, incidentally, is another bit of Americana the Trump administration tried to roll back. Is the “Mother of Exiles” really a symbol of welcome, or is she a warning?
The nervous Rhode Islander who wrote “The Horror at Red Hook” would surely be bewildered by many things about the world a century later, but our movies might show him a New York he recognized: a city uncertain about its icons, in a nation ambivalent about its needy, in a world torn about—and by—its monsters.
Cullen Wade (he/him) is a writer and high school teacher from Charlottesville, VA, USA. He is the author of S(p)lasher Flicks: The Swimming Pool in Horror Cinema, out in 2025 from McFarland Books. His film writing has appeared in Night Tide Magazine, Horror Homeroom, HorrorGeekLife, and Deaf Sparrow. Follow him on Bluesky @cullenwade.bsky.social and Letterboxd @tobe_whooper.