Dawn of the Dad MASCULINITY AND MATURITY IN ABE FORSYTHE’S LITTLE MONSTERS

‘I never set out to make a zombie movie, it kind of just ended up happening,’ Little Monsters (2019) writer/director Abe Forsythe told film website Den of Geek last year, ‘but it happened in a really organic way, because it just fed into this stuff about my son, and his first year of kindergarten, and everything he’s taught me.’¹

Forsythe is best known for skewering Australian national myths. He wrote and directed the provocative race-riot satire Down Under (2016) and the buffoonish Ned Kelly spoof Ned (2003). By comparison, Little Monsters is not directly concerned with Australian identity – but it is shot through with Forsythe’s recognisably impertinent humour. As he explained to the website Screen Rant, the film was made independently, with a majority-Australian creative team, but closely followed the structure of an American studio comedy so that he and his crew ‘could subvert it with things you don’t ordinarily see in that type of movie. Then it would feel fresh and more shocking and more funny and more heartfelt, because [the audience] wouldn’t be expecting it.’²

Here, a zombie crisis stands in for a crisis of masculinity, wherein a callow protagonist who has dawdled too long on the threshold of adulthood must grow up at last. But, unlike other comedy-dramas with a ‘manchild’ at their centre, Little Monsters doesn’t reward Dave