Little Monsters (2019)

directed by Abe Forsythe

Taylor Hunsberger 

Working with children is a field I kind of just fell into in college and I guess I never really left. To be honest, I was not the biggest fan of children for the majority of my life, so I’m not sure what changed there, but I’m glad it did. I began in college as a volunteer for the devised theater program at a local high school in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Now, if you don’t know what devised theater is, that’s probably for the best, but it is essentially what that SNL sketch of theater students standing on black boxes are doing, except sometimes it does actually lead to good art. The process is in fact absurd, though it does work very well for teaching theater skills to young people! I worked with that group for the last two years of school, using writing activities to create short scenes based on the musical they were rehearsing for that year. The kids were amazing and we learned a lot about how to implement their ideas into their own work.

Once I graduated college with a degree in acting, I wanted to pursue performance opportunities in New York City but didn’t have the money, so I just worked my retail job until I saved enough to move to Jersey and commute. The following year I was finally hired by Wingspan Arts, an arts-based after school program where every day kids take a different art themed class. I was placed at The Neighborhood School in downtown Manhattan, where I supervised elementary students and taught a class once a week. This school made me fall in love with working in child care.

Never before had I worked with kids that were so eager and elated to see me every day. The joy burst out of them, even when their behavior did not reflect this. I was most comfortable with pre-k and kindergarten students, they taught me how to play chess, I taught them how to play checkers, and we worked on visual art projects together before, after, and during class. They are the light of my life and I miss them dearly during this time. There is truly nothing like the feeling of someone who is four years old starting to grasp the skills you have been teaching them every day for weeks.

All this being said, while I have been out of work during the pandemic, I have been binge watching a ton of horror movies. My best friend is a huge horror fan and introduced me to the genre last year, and since then, I obviously have had a lot of catching up to do. I made a list on all of my streaming apps, which included the movie Little Monsters, a 2019 made-for-Hulu zombie movie starring Lupita Nyong’o. I had been making my rounds through the more contemporary zombie movies and I loved Lupita in Us, so I decided to give it a try. I had no idea it was about a kindergarten teacher, and I am not exaggerating when I say that it made me supremely weepy.

I watched the movie alone in my parent’s living room and wow oh wow, was it a rollercoaster for me. The film primarily follows Dave, a cynical man who hates kids. Dave decides to volunteer as a chaperone on his nephew’s class trip to the Australian zoo because he thinks Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) is pretty. The trip is invaded by a zombie apocalypse, leaving Miss Caroline and Dave to care for the kindergarten class as they are trapped in the zoo’s gift shop overnight. Not only does Miss Caroline need to keep them from getting bitten from the zombies, she also needs to keep them calm and assure them that everything is going to be okay. This exact situation is not unlike our own world that has been in pretty consistent peril for decades. With increasingly scary situations that impact the lives of children on the rise, things like school shootings, and now a global pandemic, it is necessary to know how to handle young people in dire circumstances.

Miss Caroline uses a series of interactive coping mechanisms that she knows are effective with her class. Whenever the students get scared, she knows to play and sing along to “Shake it Off” by Taylor Swift to put them at ease. The fact that she is prepared enough to bring her ukulele along on the trip without knowing that a zombie takeover is about to break out shows how good of a teacher Miss Caroline really is. When certain activities do not work with her students, or they come to pay more attention to the terror outside, she adjusts her strategy, implementing new games and activities to distract them and keep them away from panic. She goes as far as to teach them a fictional story, telling the kids that they are playing a big game of tag and that the people in the field are “it.” To keep the kids safe, she tells them that they all need to stay away and not get tagged. She does this in order to explain to them what is happening, coaxing them into the narrative, careful not to scare them off. This is all the work of an educator who knows exactly what they are doing, and it is also the work of someone who genuinely cares about the emotional well-being of children. This is not just another movie featuring children, it is a movie that has a real lesson for adults to take away about valuing and respecting the humanity of children.

As an educator, I know that adaptability is the most important concept to understand when working with young people. All of my students come from different backgrounds and their behavior directly reflects those circumstances. In our program, we don’t know what those circumstances are, so we need to be open to doing whatever is necessary for our kids to feel most comfortable in learning new information. There are many methods to achieve this, such as through group games, individual quiet activities, or leadership opportunities. Every kid is different and the adults in their lives need to be willing to understand this, rather than dismissing them for poor behavior. Most often, correcting this behavior comes from giving them more responsibility, or giving them something that they are interested in doing, rather than punishing them. They are still learning and growing, and harshness is never the way to go. Little Monsters does an incredible job of demonstrating this in an extreme situation. Though the circumstances are a metaphor in this case, the principles remain the same: children need to be approached with care, not hostility.

Using horror to tell this story is so effective and I hope there are more films like this to follow. Horror and fear are not experiences that solely happen to adults; they happen to children as well. The zombies are an entity that this class does not understand, they are all between five and six years old and cannot even comprehend basic ideas yet, let alone flesh-eating people. These zombies represent the realities of the horrors of the real world that exist whether we like it or not, and we need to teach children about them. Children are not brainless creatures, they are human beings like you and me and deserve all the respect that we get. When I first started working with younger kids, I was astounded by what they could do and understand, and we owe it to them to help them grasp the scary situations outside their door. They are already being forced to do active shooter drills in America, which is a difficult thing to explain to someone who does not know what the alphabet is, but they need to know. Using common methods of teaching new information can be used in the same way to teach these horrific topics, as exemplified incredibly well in Little Monsters.

Educators and guardians are responsible for shaping the lives of young people and aiding them in navigating an increasingly scary world. Through the power of empathy and play, Miss Caroline is able to show Dave how brilliant and bountiful kids are with their powerful little brains and gigantic hearts. Little Monsters uplifts children in a way I have never seen before that also encapsulates the full humanity of their teacher. Miss Caroline, or Audrey, as she tells Dave to call her, is fully realized as a complex woman who both cares for children and has a life and desires of her own. She is a teacher because she wants to be a teacher and she has the great skill it takes to provide her students with the best experience possible. She knows the impact she will have on their life and dedicates her work day to ensuring that their needs are met, just as much as hers are. Audrey is a superhero, as are all quality educators.

I love teaching and I love Little Monsters with my gigantic heart. It made me giggle and weep, and left me with newfound appreciation for the work I do and why it means so much to me. I am so grateful that I found this path and that I found a movie that appreciates all that we do for our students. I can’t wait to see the world post-pandemic where education can thrive once more.

Taylor Hunsberger is an essayist, poet, and educator currently residing in Brooklyn. She has written for Manor Vellum, Screen Queens, and The Broadway Beat. During the day, she works for Wingspan, an arts-focused after school program, where she is a Site Assistant and teaches music classes to elementary students. In addition, Taylor is an Outreach Artist for Urban Stages where she tours her and her collaborator's original children's musical "Juno's Alien Adventure" to libraries around the city. In the words of her favorite poet Olivia Gatwood, she is a "good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl." More of her work can be found at www.taylorhunsberger.com or @tayparade on social media.