The Sundance film “Little Monsters” is a warm-hearted tribute to teachers, especially Kindergarten teachers. Plus, there’s a zombie apocalypse.
Naturally the film is in Sundance’s Midnight Movie program.
The film stars Lupita Nyongo as Kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline, who takes her toddlers on a field trip to a petting farm—not realizing that the military testing facility next door has been overwhelmed by a zombie outbreak.
During one Q and A, director Abe Forsythe was asked where he got the inspiration for the story.
“When I was on a school excursion with him and his class and his kindergarten teacher. ”Forsythe explained, “we were all driving a tractor train and the tractor train stopped and the driver got off and it was because there was something ahead that she was investigating and that’s when the idea came to me and it just kind of snowballed from there. I’ve talked about this Kindergarten teacher before and how she amazing she was for my son too at that moment when I thought what if that was a zombie, how would we keep these kids alive?”
The film co-stars Alexander England, as the slacker uncle of one of the youngsters, who becomes a hero in crisis—as well as Josh Gad as an obnoxious children’s TV star who quickly shows he’s a coward.
Nyongo won an Oscar for the stark drama “Twelve Years a Slave” and also appeared in “Black Panther”. She said this is her first venture into comedy.
“I actually shot this film the same year that I shot this film the same year that I shot “Black Panther”” Nyongo said, “So, I went from that to this. Modest budget over here but I was ripped and ready to fight zombies for sure. Yeah, I really enjoyed the challenge. One of the hardest things is to be the straight man when everybody around you is being so foolish ya know? A lot of Josh’s lines are improv and it was just so hard to keep it together. He just went on and on that was actually harder than anything else. Oh wait, and also the children. Dealing with 11 children was no easy matter.”
She also praised her leading man, Alexander England.
“I just want to say that also working with Alex has also been quite something because he plays a real idiot in this and he’s so good at being absolutely stupid.” Nyongo continued, “But he’s like the most mature man and so he would go in and out of being so dumb and so intelligent. That was quite something to just work with all the time and he was such a reliable scene partner.”
