Humanzee: The Creature Feature Reimagined
Granules of dust dance in the air illuminated by a phone flashlight. In a bed meant for a person, lies a tiny chimpanzee. The light disturbs the creature and its eyes open. This video of this chimp with its half-asleep confusion and uncanny similarity to a human child sparked something within director Taro O’Halloran. According to O’Halloran, a combination of animal documentaries and chimp-centric content on Instagram was the impetus for his film “Humanzee.”
“Chimpanzees, I think, are so captivating because you can see a lot of our impulses in them. But then also, we’re so divorced from them. They socialize, they communicate, and they have lives, interests, and personalities. They have a society. I think that was a big part of the build-up to the idea. And then I was like, if we’re one extreme of evolution and they’re the other thing, what’s the middle look like?”
That “middle” to Taro O’Halloran looked like Ziggy (played by Zach Norton), a half-human / half-chimpanzee hybrid and the titular character in his short film “Humanzee.” Before I met O’Halloran or attended the premiere of “Humanzee” at Coolidge Corner Theatre I had already met Ziggy. All over Boston posters with the tagline “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS HUMANZEE? DO YOU WANT TO?” haunted me. I did want to. So I saw “Humanzee” and watched the world through Ziggy’s heterochromatic eyes as he discovered the horror of maternal overbearance and the truth behind his twisted lineage. “There’s something intrinsically related between evolution and our relationship with our parents,” O’Halloran says.
Everything about “Humanzee” struck me as being not so dissimilar to a picture shown at an elementary school parent-teacher meeting. One that indicates there might be trouble at home. Instead of a crayon scribble, the film is an acid trip that leaves you wondering not just “Why?” but also “How does a film like this come to be?”
O’Halloran’s film went through many iterations before reaching its final form. In the first script, “Humanzee” was a 1970s MKULTRA-esque period piece, then it was a short 16mm film with O’Halloran himself as the humanzee in a “shitty prosthetic” he bought online. Unfortunately, the Bolex camera was used incorrectly and this version was lost to the ether. O’Halloran’s last attempt before the final film was a “10-minute terrible short film” in early 2022 and then he moved on from the idea. This didn’t stop him from “always wanting to do it [Humanzee] justice or like see it the way that I saw it,” O’Halloran says.
Then someone asked him, “What are you going to do for your thesis?” and he was like, “Oh shit, I don’t know,” but immediately thought of the humanzee. Every version of “Humanzee” seems to have informed O’Halloran of what he did and did not want his film to be. “All the other versions were kind of like ‘this big lab and he [the humanzee] breaks out,’ like all this kind of genre-y stuff. I do love the genre-y stuff but I couldn’t connect to it on a level that felt meaningful for me,” he says.
Eventually, O’Halloran with the help of his writing partner Brett Melican was able to access the version of the film he’d had been yearning for “The one that exists now is this very whittled down version till it found like the very core of the idea.”
Its core is somehow simple yet complex. The film is a Creature Feature (a genre defined by its unnatural monstrous antagonists) although in “Humanzee” the creature is actually the least monstrous. That being said O’Halloran and Melican expertly skirt the trope “the real monsters were the humans all along” opting for a much more nuanced approach. The primary “antagonist” of the film Jane (a wink nod to Jane Goodall) played by Liz Bishop emits a sort of desperation to escape her circumstances to a point where you can’t help but feel bad for her. Throughout the film, Jane turns to New Age Spirituality. Her greatest support is empty platitudes about her “vibrational self” and how the law of attraction aligns with her spiritual rhythm. It’s a unique story in that its primary villain is not a person but more so the idea of isolation. “Well, I think, it came a lot from kind of interrogating suburbia a little bit. And like, that’s when the idea got the closest to, like the version in my mind’s eye,” says O’Halloran.
O’Halloran seems very conscious of this connection between spirituality, disingenuousness, and isolation: “Like, how do we as people like to repress things and like what is the version of yourself behind closed doors that isn’t there to the rest of the world? And like, so we found this character [Jane]. I think she became really interesting to me when I found her spirituality, too. It’s like spirituality as a means to an end. It’s like a jumping-off point for her. It’s like she’s very spiritual with all this symbolism and imagery but not in the ways that matter,” Jane is New Age hollowness taken to the extreme, that extreme being the humanzee she keeps locked away in her basement.
“Humanzee” is a paragon of the indie spirit. It’s an unapologetically strange grassroots marvel. The film strikes somewhere in between a light-handed critique of superficiality and social isolation while still paying homage to the classic Creature Feature. Its strong vision extends beyond its plot and into its character design. When pressed on why Ziggy was bald (both humans and chimps have hair) O’Halloran responded with “I don’t know he always has been… he’s bald.”
Taro O’Halloran’s advice to other filmmakers: “If you believe in the thing, yell at everyone till they do too.”
Click Here to watch the Humanzee trailer Follow humanzeemovie on Instagram to stay up to date on the film’s distribution and showings.