HUNGRY `HOUSE' FILMMAKER FEEDS KIDS' APPETITE FOR GOOSE BUMPS.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

With ``Monster House,'' first-time filmmaker and UCLA grad Gil Kenan wanted to make a kids' movie that he would have paid to see when he was a boy. And Kenan, 29, didn't grow up watching ``The Little Mermaid'' and ``Strawberry Shortcake.''

``I would say that `E.T.' probably changed my life when I saw it,'' Kenan says. ```Back to the Future' was a religious experience. I would make little diagrams trying to deconstruct the plot, trying to find holes in the time-space continuum. I loved `The Never-Ending Story,' `Gremlins' ... I guess you could say I was an obsessive moviegoer even then, as long as the movies were active and exciting.''

So when Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis hired Kenan to make ``Monster House'' (opening Friday), an animated movie about three kids battling a possessed house that swallows everything that comes near it, the goal was to make the scariest movie possible, using the motion-capture technology Zemeckis first utilized with ``The Polar Express.''

``I wanted to take kids to a place where they've never been before -- but not to a place where they need counseling,'' Kenan says with a laugh.

Fortunately for Kenan, he had the full support of executive producers Spielberg and Zemeckis, the filmmakers who just happened to direct two of the movies he loved as a boy.

``There was no rating I was boxed into,'' Kenan says. ``I think everyone was hoping for a PG, and I was ready to make some alterations after our first test screening to get that rating.

``But the audience went nuts, so all I trimmed was a bit of language. We submitted it to the ratings board and got the PG without cutting anything.

``That said, I don't think toddlers should be seeing this film,'' Kenan adds. ``It's not talking bananas singing a song of happy friendship.

``I'd say a kid should be at least 6 -- or maybe 5, if they're brave.''

Not everyone shares that opinion. Commercials for ``Monster House'' have been running nonstop on Nickelodeon for the past couple of weeks, saturating the ``Blue's Clues'' set with relatively benign images from the movie. Missing are some of the more terrifying scenes -- the house's long red rug rolling out the front door and snagging kids, policemen, dogs (you name it) like the Kraken's tentacle from the latest ``Pirates of the Caribbean'' movie.

```Monster House' has been marketed for kids, but it's more of a tweener movie,'' says Jane Boursaw, who writes family movie reviews for a variety of Web sites and publications. ``The kids in the movie are in constant peril -- and the house is terrifying.

``That's OK for older children, but little kids don't always know what's real and what isn't real. You don't want them waking up with nightmares about a house eating them.''

But that kind of horrifying house is precisely the attraction for older kids, not to mention the parents who might be with them.

``Monster House'' stands firmly in the tradition of Kenan's childhood favorites -- certainly ``Gremlins'' and ``The Goonies'' -- focusing on regular kids who strengthen the bonds of friendship while going on an extraordinary adventure. The peril is real, but so are the children, who, like the movie's target audience, are 10 to 12 years of age.

Kenan, 29, got the job on the strength of his UCLA senior thesis film, ``The Lark,'' a 10-minute live-action and animation blend about a dysfunctional marriage that brings a house to life.

``I really do believe the places we live in have a great bearing upon us as people,'' says Kenan, who bounced from Tel Aviv to London to Reseda during his childhood. He and his wife currently live in the Hollywood Hills, in what he calls ``an interesting old house with more than its share of stories.''

With its envelope-pushing storytelling and animation, Kenan sees ``Monster House'' as a way of chipping away at an American moral climate that he says has been ``getting more prudish as time wears on.''

``I think it's the kind of movie kids hunger for,'' Kenan says.

``It would be a shame if parents were afraid of having their kids enjoy a real experience at the movies, to be told a human story with fantasy and adventure as opposed to a couple of raccoons hitting each other with a fish.''

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com

SCRIPTED TO SCARE

Movie dialogue that gives us the creeps

Sure, haunted-house movies have the clattering shutters, the creaks and moans, the slamming doors and the sudden appearances of ghosts out of nowhere. But sometimes it's the words that give us the willies. Our favorite lines from spook-house movies:

``It was an evil house from the beginning, a house that was born bad.'' Prototypical ghostbuster (played by Richard Johnson) surveying the scene in Robert Wise's 1963 classic ``The Haunting,'' which remains the greatest haunted-house movie ever made.

``Heeeeere's Johnny!'' Jack Nicholson comes down with a severe case of cabin fever in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 classic ``The Shining,'' meeting ghosts in a haunted hotel and inspiring his son to look into a future full of ``redrum.''

``They're heeeeeere.'' Little Heather O'Rourke's announcement in 1982's ``Poltergeist'' can be seen as the direct descendant of Nicholson's ``Johnny'' line in ``The Shining,'' but that doesn't mean it's any less effective.

``But above anything else, I love the children.'' Deborah Kerr's English governess in ``The Innocents'' (1961) has the best of intentions, but really, isn't her love just a tad bit obsessive? Or is there a method to her madness? The greatness of Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James' ``The Turn of the Screw'' lies in its ambiguity. Psychological horror at its finest.

Boris Karloff: ``Grooooan ...'' Melvyn Douglas: ``Even Welsh ought not to sound like that!'' James Whales' 1932 deadpan horror masterpiece ``The Old Dark House'' doesn't get mentioned in the same breath as ``Frankenstein'' and ``The Bride of Frankenstein,'' but it's just as good a dark-and-rainy-night visit to a ramshackle house full of creepy eccentrics.

``I attended Juilliard. I'm a graduate of the Harvard business school. I travel quite extensively. I lived through the Black Plague and had a pretty good time during that. I've seen `The Exorcist' about 167 times, and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it, not to mention the fact that you're talking to a dead guy. Now what do you think? You think I'm qualified?'' Michael Keaton's poltergeist, ticking off his resume in Tim Burton's 1988 howler ``Beetlejuice,'' proof that manic humor fits nicely in haunted houses.

Girl: ``If those are its teeth and that's the tongue, then that must be the uvula.''

Boy: ``Oooh. So it's a girl house.'' Two preadolescents examining the living, breathing ``Monster House,'' easily the best kids' haunted-house movie ever made. (Admittedly, it's a small field.)

-- G.W.

CAPTION(S):

6 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) FEAR FACTOR

`MONSTER HOUSE' GETS ADVENTUROUS WHEN IT COME TO SCARES

(2 -- 3) no caption (scenes from ``Monster House'')

(4 -- 6 -- color) no caption (scenes from scary movies)

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SCRIPTED TO SCARE (see text)