Night of the Zoopocalypse
Directed by Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro
Written by James Kee and Steven Hoban
Starring Gabbi Kosmidis, Scott Thompson, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, David Harbour
Rated PG
Runtime: 1 hour and 31 minutes
In theaters March 7

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

I was in an early screening when I first saw the trailer for Night of the Zoopocalypse, which at first glance didn’t seem that different from the other trailers for the animated children’s fare that the algorithms had decided to play before Paddington in Peru. But then I saw it: a writing credit for Clive Barker. I sat up and said out loud to my plus one to the event, “The Clive Barker? Hellraiser Clive Barker?!?”

Now, of course, the trailer didn’t specify that Barker only wrote the concept for the film: the screenplay was actually written by James Kee and Steven Hoban. The latter is best known for producing the Ginger Snaps trilogy—I had a similar but slightly lesser reaction to this revelation—but the idea that Clive Barker had an idea for a children’s animated horror film, a genre that has declined in quantity if not popularity over the past decade, immediately intrigued me. That’s how I found myself watching Night of the Zoopocalpyse, a truly strange and nostalgic movie about a night of monster mayhem at a small zoo.

The film follows Gracie (Gabbi Kosmidis), a young timber wolf who was born and grew up in the Colepepper Zoo and is bored of her wild-born grandmother Abigail’s (Carolyn Scott) constant practice drills for the pack in case of danger. Nothing ever happens at the Colepepper Zoo, she thinks. However, that very evening, after the human visitors leave, a meteor crashes into the petting zoo area, infecting fluffy bunnies and other small creatures with a space virus—the film is intentionally unclear about the mechanics or source—that turns them into zombie-mutant-monsters. The film is clever not to specify about what the animals turn into, but the specifics aren’t really important when a glowing, gummy, goopy monster is on one’s tail with an infectious bite. Gracie must team up with the newly captured mountain lion Dan (David Harbour), sarcastic ostrich Ash (Scott Thompson), self-interested proboscis monkey Felix (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee), spirited capybara (Heather Loreto), movie-obsessed lemur Xavier (Pierre Simpson), and adorable baby pygmy hippo Poot (Christina Nova) to save the zoo from being completely overrun.

The best part of this film are the horror elements, which should not surprise anyone given this film’s pedigree. A human deserted zoo is a creepy location at night, with grinning, ‘30s cartoon inspired animal paintings on almost every available surface, invoking a rural theme park more than a modern zoo. The animation of the mutant creatures is distinctive: all of them are a glowy purplish-greenish-bluish hue that invokes radiation, but they all have different shapes based on the animal they were before being bitten/exposed. The first bunny mutant, for example, has ears and basic bunny shape but arms and legs that are elongated and a face twisted into a malevolent smile. A gorilla is torn to pieces but reassembles itself in a not-quite-right caricature of its former appearance. There are even little evil frog mutants whose tongues are waaaaay too long for comfort. It’s body horror, but the gumminess of the mutants—they are almost tacky in their texture—allows the animators to toe the line between scary and too disturbing for children. I haven’t really seen an animated film balance these priorities so well since Henry Selick’s and Tim Burton’s stop-motion films; there is plenty in this movie that will creep out adults while not giving a child nightmares.

Zoopocalpyse is also a love letter to the ‘50s B sci-fi horror movie, maximizing its limited budget via simplified animation techniques, copious amounts of fog, and low-key lighting. The movie connection is made explicit by the character of Xavier. The lemur spends a lot of his time at the zoo devising fake or real ailments to perform for the humans so that they will lock him in the zoo infirmary at night, giving him access to a TV with cable. He loves watching movies, and the movie he is watching when Gracie and Dan first encounter him is a monster invasion movie. This almost meta character could be annoying, but the film cleverly emphasizes the eccentricity of Xavier’s commentary on the situation (“why did it have to be a monster film?”) and homages the films that it is imitating instead of blatantly referencing them—for the most part; there is a pretty great Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott) visual reference later in the film. It invokes The Thing from Another World (1951, dirs. Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby) and Invaders from Mars (1953, dir. William Cameron Menzies) without adding distracting Easter eggs. Xavier more closely related to Randy of Scream (1996, dir. Wes Craven) than he is to Deadpool.

While the horror and genre elements are solid, the characters are just fine. Gracie, Dan, and crew follow a predictable path of enemies-to-friends during the course of the night, predator and prey animals learning to work together in order to survive an unprecedented threat. It’s standard child’s fare, which doesn’t mean that it is bad, just that nothing about Gracie or Dan particularly stands out as new from a character or storytelling perspective. I swear that I will eventually stop comparing films to Flow (2024, dir. Gints Zilbalodis) and The Wild Robot (2024, dir. Chris Sanders), but both those films tell a similar story with more depth, nuance, and feeling than this film. Still, Night of the Zoopocalypse is a fun, spooky time, and I can definitely see this as a “baby’s first horror” film in the same way that Tim Burton’s animated films were for Millennials.

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