Considered to be one the largest giant movie monsters in cinematic history, Clover is the production name given to the giant, fictional monster that appears in the 2008 film Cloverfield. The creature was originally conceived by producer J. J. Abrams and was designed by artist Neville Page. In the film, the monster's name is never mentioned; the name "Cloverfield" is only given to the US Department of Defense case file of the incidents depicted in the film. The Department of Defense names the creature "LSA" for Large-Scale Aggressor in the film's Blu-ray special feature called "Cloverfield Special Investigation Mode". The name Clover was the nickname affectionately given to the monster among the production staff.
An even larger member of Clover's species makes a cameo at the end of the 2018 film The Cloverfield Paradox.
Appearances[]
Clover was first referred to in the viral marketing campaign for the 2008 film including a recording of its roar, foreign news clips about a monster attack and sonar images.
A similar monster appears in a four-part manga series Cloverfield/Kishin (クローバーフィールド) by Yoshiki Togawa, which serves as a spin-off to the film.
The monster made a first full appearance in Cloverfield, where it was seen rampaging through New York City and being attacked by the United States military.
Creation []
J. J. Abrams conceived of a new monster after he and his son visited a toy store in Japan while promoting Mission: Impossible III. He explained, "We saw all these Godzilla toys, and I thought, we need our own American monster, and not like King Kong, King Kong's adorable. But I wanted something that was just insane and intense". The monster was designed by artist Neville Page. He sought a biological rationale for the creature, though many of his ideas would not show up on screen. Page designed the creature as immature and suffering from "separation anxiety". He compared the creature to a rampaging elephant, saying "there's nothing scarier than something huge that's spooked". Page said of the creature's backstory, "For me, one of the most key moments in
our collective brainstorming was the choice to make the creature be something that we would empathize with. It is not out there just killing. It is confused, lost, scared. It's a newborn. Having this be a story point (one that the audience does not know), it allowed for some purposeful choices about its anatomy, movement and, yes, motivations". The creature was developed by visual effects supervisor Kevin Blank and Phil Tippett's company Tippett Studio. Blank described the intended goal of the creature, "Rather than the monster having a personality like Godzilla or King Kong, it's more of an entity or an event".
Design[]
Although conceived by the film's creators as being just a baby, the creature is 25 stories tall. It is very durable, withstanding impacts from missiles, artillery shells and bombs with minimal injury.
It is vaguely quadrupedal, though it is capable of standing upright over short distances. The limbs are comparatively long and thin compared with the body core, and according to creator Neville Page this coupled with its quadrupedal stance is meant to loosely imply that it is a newborn: he speculates that the adults may be bipedal. The forelimbs are large compared to the rest of the body. The hind legs are comparatively stubby. The creature's head at first glance appears to be a solid sphere, but it can open its jaw extremely wide, the head unfolding almost like an onion. Above the eyes on either side of the head are fleshy pouches which it puffs up when agitated.
The creature's design includes appendages on its underbelly, described by Neville Page as an "elongated, and articulated external esophagus with the business end terminating in teethlike fingers". They were designed as a body part to relate the scale of human prey to the huge scale of the creature. The scenes from the film where people were sucked into the feeding tubes were cut from the final edit, but the fourth and final chapter of Cloverfield/Kishin shows how the tubes work.
The creature is covered with parasites, which it sheds as part of a "post-birth ritual". Abrams described the parasites as "horrifying, dog-sized creatures that just scatter around the city and add to the nightmare of the evening." Reeves added that "The parasites have a voracious, rabid, bounding nature, but they also have a crab-like crawl. They have the viciousness of a dog, but with the ability to climb walls and stick to objects." The parasites fall off and begin to attack people. The top half of the parasite's head is the mandible, moving up from the lower jaw to open. The top and lower jaws end in serrated edges and also have four pairs of eyes each. The rest of the parasite consists of a crustacean-like carapace, several pairs of claws, and arms. A deep blue-purple muscular membrane stretches between the top and lower jaws. When a human is bitten, the victim becomes ill and bleeds profusely, mainly from the eyes, and shortly after this, the torso expands and explodes. They are called HSPs (Human Scale Parasites) on the Blu-ray Special Investigation Mode.
Artist Neville Page, in response to claims that the design of the creature was similar to that of the 2006 South Korean film The Host, said, "They are [similar] in that they ravage and seem to originate from the water, but the end results are quite different. However, when I finally saw some of the concept art, there were some very obvious similarities. But then again, I think that we were both channeling similar biological possibilities."
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