"Monsters come in many forms." That's the tagline for 2016's 10 Cloverfield Lane, a claustrophobic thriller in which a young woman named Michelle is held captive in an underground bunker. While much of the film centers around her attempts to escape from her prison, Michelle eventually discovers that the outside world is just as dangerous, thanks to an alien invasion.
Despite bearing the Cloverfield title, the film itself ultimately has very few connections to the 2008 monster movie, apart from the sci-fi-based monster/alien attack element. However, the Cloverfield series is notorious for its incredibly complex ARGs (alternate reality games), which reveal a lot more about each installment's fictional universe and justify the events of that film. 10 Cloverfield Lane's ARG even went so far as to tie in to real world events, all through the use of a set of secret websites.
What Is 10 Cloverfield Lane About?
10 Cloverfield Lane begins with a young woman named Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) getting into a car crash and waking up in some sort of bunker. Howard Stambler (John Goodman) greets her, and tells her that he has saved her life from a cataclysmic event that apparently happened on the surface. Michelle, Howard and a third man named Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) are apparently the only people left alive.
While Michelle initially adjusts well to living in the bunker, she and Emmett begin to discover inconsistencies in Howard's story, and they suspect he has some ulterior motive revolving around wanting a daughter figure in Michelle. After Howard kills Emmett, Michelle puts in motion a plan to escape the bunker, only to discover that Howard was telling the truth -- hostile aliens have arrived on Earth. She manages to destroy an alien spacecraft that pursues her, before heading off to find more.
How Does 10 Cloverfield Lane Connect To The Cloverfield Universe?
The ARG that led up to 10 Cloverfield Lane's release was incredibly elaborate, with fans discovering several fake websites that helped to build up the movie's lore. First, it was discovered that tagruato.jp, a website that was part of the first film's ARG, had been updated to include a picture of John Goodman's Howard in the Tagruato Corporation's "Employee of the Month" roster. This is significant because Tagruato were also the ones responsible for unleashing the monster in the first Cloverfield film. Following several clues embedded in the Tagruato site, fans were able to discover another website called FunAndPrettyThings, which contained several coded messages from Howard.
Through these messages, it was revealed that during Howard's time working for Bold Futura -- Tagruato's subsidiary that builds satellites -- he discovered something out in space. The increasingly aggressive and paranoid Howard quit the company shortly after becoming Employee of the Month and retired to a shelter that he had built in preparation for the aliens' arrival. As a result of his worsening mental state, Howard's family left him. Creating the FunAndPrettyThings site in a desperate attempt to communicate with his daughter Megan, Howard became obsessed with finding a new daughter figure -- hence his kidnapping of Michelle.
Howard's connection to Tagruato is referenced in the film, with Michelle briefly finding an envelope addressed to Howard with the Bold Futura logo on it. All of this continues the trend of the Tagruato Corporation being responsible for the terrible events in the Cloverfield series, but in this case they weren't responsible for the aliens. Instead, Tagruato was responsible for making Howard Stambler into a monster. After all, monsters come in many forms.