‘The End of Oak Street’ Made Dinosaurs Scary Again
‘The End of Oak Street’ does a lot of things right, but the best thing it does is make dinosaurs as scary as they’ve always been.
Jurassic Park was a generational masterpiece. Much has been said about Steven Spielberg’s enduring blockbuster—how it changed filmmaking forever, how it remains the movie we think of when conceptualizing what we mean by the movies—though for all the discourse about its scale and effects, perhaps the simplest truth is that Jurassic Park, at its core, is terrifying. Those scares, courtesy of hungry, ferocious dinosaurs, are the legacy, yet the series’ six subsequent entries have pulled further and further away from the orbit of dinosaurs as horror. Jurassic Park will likely never be scary again, so thank God for David Robert Mitchell showing us how it’s done.
The End of Oak Street (review here) is scary. Really scary. It’s mean-spirited, dour, exceptionally more violent than I anticipated with a PG-13 rating, and primarily, almost genetically concerned with showing dinosaurs at their most primal and frightening. In an alternate, Oak Street-esque timeline where Jurassic Park’s horror origins endured, that might not be worth much, but as only the second legitimately scary dinosaur movie ever made, that’s everything to this dino (and horror) nerd.
Picture it. Like so many other kids who grew up on a cocktail of Jurassic Park and Jaws’ gateway horror thrills, I wasn’t just obsessed with the movies, but with the science and history behind them. And, sure, that science was controversial at the time, but I was a kid, so I didn’t care about whether Spielberg’s velociraptors were scientifically sound as much as I cared about the fact that dinosaurs were friggin’ metal as hell. I had all the toys, all the encyclopedias, all the books and tapes, and I was going to grow up to be a paleontologist. I didn’t, but a childhood friend (and Jurassic Park superfan) is currently a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. Dinosaurs were everything.
As I got older, my sensibilities gravitated more toward the horror, the possibilities, of dinosaurs as movie monsters specifically. After all, Spielberg did it, and it’s one of the greatest movies ever made, so surely there would be other filmmakers out there desperate to turn dinosaurs into lean, mean, horror-movie killing machines, no? No. tried in its cold open, though otherwise, blockbuster antics superseded claustrophobic terror. is better (and has some gnarly set pieces), though even that was too indebted to franchise filmmaking to really let the horror shine.
