Kenan, making his feature film debut, is a lively storyteller. Monster House also bears the unmistakable creative stamp of Zemeckis and his fellow executive producer, Steven Spielberg. There are a few moments of amusing, self-conscious auto-homage: a Wilson basketball with a human face smudged onto it; plumbing fixtures that come to life with the slinky movements of Jurassic Park dinosaurs; a suburban Halloween out of E.T. But the deeper imprint of Spielberg's influence, in particular, lies in the film's evocation of childhood as a state of wonder tinged with darkness. The absence of supervising grown-ups is both scary and exciting, and the monstrous house will remind audience members of all ages of the pleasure of being frightened without pushing the fear past comfortable limits.
As in most ghost stories, the fright stands in for other emotions — grief, disappointment, loneliness — and the film's climactic sequences combine hair-raising sensation with dreamy and delicate pathos. The plain suburban setting becomes (as it did in E.T. and Zemeckis's Back to the Future movies) a zone of enchantment, in no small part because it seems so real.
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