10 Best 2016 Movie Fan Theories

In Dan Trachtenberg’s sci-fi horror 10 Cloverfield Lane, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) gets into a car accident and wakes up held captive in Howard Stambler’s (John Goodman) nuclear bunker where he informs her he’s saved her from an impending alien invasion. There she meets her other new roommate, local handyman Emmett who helped build the bunker and took shelter in it when the alien attack began. Despite the unusual circumstances and Michelle’s initial suspicion that Howard might be a delusional psychopath, the trio warm to each other. That is, until Michelle finds evidence of a prior female captive that may not have made it out of the bunker alive and is told by Emmett that a photo Howard has been claiming to be his runaway daughter Megan is actually of a local missing girl. After Howard shoots Emmett point blank range in the head after discovering him and Michelle trying to escape, it seems he is indeed a psycho.

According to some internet-dwelling folk however, all may not be as it seems and it could be the case that it’s not Howard who is 10 Cloverfield Lane’s villain and antagonist, but Emmett. They point out that Emmett could well have been lying about the identity of the girl in the photograph and, having helped build the bunker, knows enough about its layout to have been able to murder the girl himself and conceal her body. It’s true that Howard unlawfully held Michelle captive and blew a man’s brains out, but by the end of the film it’s revealed that he certainly wasn’t lying about the alien apocalypse aboveground. So, although Howard was at least being partially truthful, we have nothing that corroborates with Emmett’s version of events.

It might sound far-fetched and there’s no doubt that Howard wasn’t the most stable of people but as 10 Cloverfield Lane is the ‘spiritual successor’ of 2008 monster flick Cloverfield, which came accompanied by a crafty viral marketing campaign that spawned all kinds of fan theories, this theory could possibly have weight in the wider ‘Cloververse’. Maybe further instalments in the Cloverfield series (one is set for release next October!) might shed more light.