Preview: David Robert Mitchell & J.J. Abrams Tease the Dinosaurs and Secrets of THE END OF OAK STREET

Dinosaur movies are hard. At least, that’s what many of us have come to believe given that any live-action attempt not from (or directly tied to) Steven Spielberg has failed over the last 33 years. David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street seeks to change that.

Though we all know Mitchell from Under the Silver Lake and It Follows he, like many of us, has always had a soft spot for dinosaurs. When we asked him about the stress of tackling a subgenre that so many others have failed at, he offered a simple, “I grew up loving so many different kinds of dinosaur movies, like of course, Jurassic Park. But I also watched all the [Ray] Harryhausen movies with my dad.” Mitchell would go on to specifically call out films like “the original King Kong, The Lost World (1925)” and, of course, “The Valley of Gwangi.”

Eager to show off the new dino goods, Mitchell and Warner Bros. invited members of the press to a special preview of the upcoming film. Of course, it wouldn’t have been a party without producer J.J. Abrams, who joined Mitchell before and after the clip for a Q&A. 

The scene we screened seems to take place relatively early on in the story, featuring the small family at the center of the chaos (played by Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) as they go about their morning after a terrible storm. Said storm’s knocked out the power and water, but that’s the least of their problems after they go to find the family dog Starbuck and to check on their elderly neighbor. The former’s nowhere to be found, the latter is very dead, and there is all sorts of prehistoric pandemonium unfolding in suburbia.

We had the opportunity to ask Mitchell directly what made this scene the one to showcase what we were in for in The End of Oak Street, to which he offered, “I think it's a good sample of the suspense, mystery, and some of the humor of the movie.”

Both he and Abrams went into a bit more detail in the full discussion, breaking down everything from what makes a good nightmare to why the humans have to matter if they’re going to exist in a story that also features dinosaurs.

“Each of the characters has a secret,” Abrams teased. “But they're a family that you're so connected [to], you're so root[ing] for, [that you] believe in.”

Because Jurassic Park has been the gold standard for dinosaur films for over three decades, one might expect it to be the film that came up the most in conversation. Not the case! Instead, it was Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. 

“There was something about Poltergeist that you always felt was big-hearted even though it was really scary,” Abrams mentioned. “We see [that] in this footage. It really, it brings the chills and the thrills, but it's not a sadistic movie. It's got a big heart at its core.”

His sentiment is true of the footage we saw, but also evident in the wide-release trailers that showcase the model family dealing with the abject absurdity that unfolds around them. The quip about god, specifically, immediately highlights the familial ability to take each other to task even when it feels like it’s the end of the world.

One day, this family went to sleep. The next morning they woke up to no escape, with their suburb overrun by dinosaurs and every exit street blocked off by cliffs, prehistoric foliage, and a whole host of prehistoric creatures looking to have them as a snack. Mitchell has spent his career writing about the inescapable, so, to him, the pull of a story around the inescapable was always obvious. 

“[Things we can’t outrun] are at the core of our, of our nightmares, ultimately,” he explains. “These dinosaurs enter into the world of the family and intersect and interact in many different ways.” 

What’s so curious about that tidbit from Mitchell is that neither the trailers or the footage we saw at the preview have showcased any herbivores. That’s an obvious decision from a marketing perspective so far as the intent of a horror-adjacent film like The End of Oak Street goes, but the tease that the creatures may interact with the family in ways beyond “you’re dinner” is certainly intriguing, especially when coupled with the idea that everyone in the family is hiding one thing or another.

“I just think what you did just masterfully is juggling that many different balls at once,” Abrams says of Mitchell. “There was just so much that was going on that was so intentional. The thing that makes you care is you're really, you're really tracking all these different characters despite the madness of it. You might think, ‘Oh, this is a sequence where the dinosaurs persevered, you know, being chased,’ but there's so much more going on and all of it is intentional and setting up things for later.”

* Some quotes have been edited for clarity.

* Photo Credit: Flannery Underwood, Courtesy of Warner Bros.

The End of Oak Street hits theaters August 14