Is “10 Cloverfield Lane” Really a Sequel to “Cloverfield”?

By Susannah Bragg McCullough

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), the J.J Abrams-produced thriller-horror with a plot shrouded in secrecy, has been touted as a not-quite-sequel to Cloverfield (2008). In a statement released via Collider, Abrams called the film a “blood relative of Cloverfield.” Directed by first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg, 10 Cloverfield Lane is by no means a direct sequel to the earlier hit that Abrams also produced, and some have viewed the comparison as more marketing ploy than artistic inspiration. But the new release does share Cloverfield’s tone, filmmaking ethos and, broadly speaking, its universe. Unlike the on-the-move, found-footage story of Cloverfield, 10 Cloverfield Lane features three actors contained within a small space. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays a woman who, after a car accident, finds herself held in a bunker by two men (John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr.) who tell her that the outside world has been ravaged by a chemical attack. While no one claims Lane is a true sequel, the filmmakers frame it as a spiritual relative or companion piece to Cloverfield.

But at what point did the filmmakers decide that the films were related? Screenwriters Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken said they did not originally conceive of the story as a Cloverfield spinoff. “We wrote an original screenplay,” Campbell said at the 10 Cloverfield Lane New York press conference. “It was not meant to be a sequel at the time. Cloverfield wasn’t in our minds when we wrote it. During the development process, the idea came up that it could be in the ‘Cloververse.’ Honestly, when we first started thing about it, we were a bit surprised. But the more you think about it, and now that people will start seeing the movie, it makes a lot of sense in terms of tone and the twists and the turns and the thriller aspect. So we got really excited because we knew that it was the right choice to make.”

Abrams said in his Collider statement that the Cloverfield connection arose during production and was developed over time. Whenever the idea arose, Trachtenberg said that the first-person, experiential quality of Cloverfield was something he wanted to emulate in 10 Cloverfield Lane. As a director who’s also influenced by video games (he cites popular games like Fallout, Unchartered and Last of us, as well as Portal, which he adapted into a short film), he wants us to feel we’re inside his story. “The original Cloverfield was told in this very unique first-person perspective, and it made that movie very experiential,” Trachtenberg said at the press conference. “I really wanted this movie to also feel less like something you’re watching and more like something you’re experiencing. Those games where you’re looking at the person you’re controlling and yet feeling everything that that character is feeling was something I really wanted for this movie. And luckily, Mary [Elizabeth Winstead], who I think is the best special effect in the movie, she gives a largely non-verbal performance, yet you always feel like you know everything that she’s thinking and feel everything that she’s feeling. That’s something that is very unique to video games and I was really excited to take from that and apply to this movie.”

Winstead also said she found the original Cloverfield inspiring. “I remember seeing it in the theater and loving it,” she said at the conference. “I thought it was such an inventive new take on the monster movie. They really kind of flipped it on its head and told it in a fresh, new, personal way. So I can see how this is connected in spirit.”

Like Cloverfield, the successor has eschewed common marketing approaches (in which the promotion often gives away the major arc of the plot) in order to preserve the film’s surprises. The 10 Cloverfield Lane trailer reveals almost nothing of the plot, apart from its opening premise, and the marketing team has taken pains to protect the secrets of numerous twists. “We would get the rewrites written on toilet paper in urine, which would slowly come to light in a microwave,” Goodman joked at the press conference. “The unfortunate thing was when we had to eat the script.”

Trachtenberg continued that the secrecy effort has been “very much J.J.’s thing, and it was something that I hoped would come to fruition in terms of the marketing and the trailer and all that stuff not really giving much away because the movie itself is full of secrets and surprises. And I think now people are able to engage with the movie the way it was designed to. And I also think it’s so exciting to harken back to a time when we only found out about a movie from its trailer. I remember vividly going to the movies to see Dave (1993), that awesome Kevin Kline presidential movie, and the trailer for Jurassic Park (1993) played, and I was like ‘What is that movie, it looks so awesome!’ And to recapture that… was just so exciting and very necessary for a movie like this.”

Most significantly, 10 Cloverfield Lane reflects the atmosphere, genre and storytelling philosophy of Cloverfield. This film, too, is a blend of genres that doesn’t follow predictable rules. “It was really important to us to play with genre expectations,” Campbell told ScreenPrism at the conference. “People think when they see a trailer they know what a movie is these days. Audiences are really savvy towards entertainment, and we did our best to zig when people expected us to zag as much as possible in the plot and with the characters. So we pulled on a lot of different influences as a result because we did not want to go down the same road that other people had previously.”

“I drew a lot from Rosemary’s Baby (1968),” Trachtenberg said. “I’m a big Hitchcock fan. Notorious (1946) is one of my favorite Hitchcock movies. That has a great sequence with a set of keys, and I think we have an equally—not equally—but also a very cool sequence with a set of keys in our movie. I looked a lot at sub movies. I looked at Hunt for Red October (1990) and Crimson Tide (1995) because those are also very contained movies but that feel really big. Game-wise, Fallout I drew on. And even the reason I did that Portal short is I really loved that game, and it shares something with this movie in that you’re really putting a puzzle together, and you’re really trying to piece everything together alongside the movie’s protagonist, which is a unique experience, to be so one-to-one, for that relationship to be so linked that you really feel connected to what’s happening in the movie.”

The Guardian writes that, in contrast to Cloverfield‘s kineticism, 10 Cloverfield Lane “is a one-location pressure cooker, influenced more by Hitchcock than an Xbox,” adding, “A little poking around shows that 10 Cloverfield Lane, originally called The Cellar, was shot and edited before anyone had the idea to change the title and make it part of a known intellectual property. (That is, of course, assuming that you buy the current story Bad Robot is selling. Maybe their ‘we’re marketing geniuses’ transparency is just more marketing?) Whether or not this is a bellwether for force-fed franchises to come or a wiseacre one-off is up for debate. What matters here is that this movie, whatever you want to call it, is really good.”

While skeptics feel the Cloverfield kinship, beyond tonal and genre links, is just a layered marketing ploy, that hasn’t stopped fan theories about possible connections between the worlds running rampant. A post on Moviepilot theorizes that if the military used nuclear weapons on the monster of Cloverfield, this could have led to the supposed chemical fallout in 10 Cloverfield Lane. John Gooman’s line featured at the end of the trailer — “Something’s coming” — also recalls the phrase “Something has found us” used in marketing for Cloverfield. The “Monsters come in many forms” tagline for 10 Cloverfield Lane similarly recalls the monster of the 2008 film.

Given that the relation between the two Cloverfield films seems at best to be an insight into their genre and tonal natures, viewers shouldn’t expect literal plot connections between the two. But both films embody a philosophy of filmmaking that emphasizes immersive experience, hybrid genre influences and appealing to savvy audiences who want to be taken for a surprising ride. The marketing shorthand tells us at least that if you liked Cloverfield, you’re going to like Lane. They belong to the same movie family.

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Is “10 Cloverfield Lane” Really a Sequel to “Cloverfield”?

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