Cloverfield is a 2008 American found footage monster horror film directed by Matt Reeves, produced by J. J. Abrams, and written by Drew Goddard.

It stars Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T. J. Miller (in his film debut), Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel, and Odette Yustman.

Development began when producer J. J. Abrams started conceptualizing a new monster and enlisted Neville Page to design the creature, called Clover.

The footage from a personal camcorder is recovered by the U.S. Department of Defense in the area "formerly known as Central Park", bearing a disclaimer about multiple sightings of a case designated "Cloverfield".

[11] The final title Greyshot was proposed, taken from the archway that the two survivors take shelter under at the end of the movie, but Matt Reeves said this was rejected because the film was already so well known as Cloverfield.

To prevent the leaking of plot information, instead of auditioning the actors with scenes from the film, scripts from Abrams's previous productions were used, such as the television series Alias and Lost.

[16] The scenes of tanks firing at the creature while the main characters hide in a stairwell were filmed on Hennesy Street on Warner Bros. Studios backlot in Burbank, California.

[17] The film was shot and edited in a cinéma vérité style,[18] to look like it was taped with one hand-held camera, including jump cuts similar to ones found in home movies.

repeatedly when the head of the Statue of Liberty lands in the street is producer Bryan Burk, and director Matt Reeves voiced the whispered radio broadcast at the end of the credits.

[12] After viewing a cut of the film, Steven Spielberg suggested giving the audience a hint at the fate of the monster during the climax, which resulted in the addition of a countdown overheard on the helicopter's radio and the sounding of air raid sirens to signal the forthcoming Hammer Down bombing.

[12] The film's shaky camera style of cinematography, dubbed "La Shakily Queasy-Cam" by Roger Ebert, caused some viewers (particularly in darkened movie theaters) to experience motion sickness, including nausea and a temporary loss of balance.

[25] Because the visual effects were incorporated after filming, cast members were only familiar with early conceptual renderings of the beast and had to react to an unseen creature during their scenes.

[26] Artist Neville Page designed the monster, creating a biological rationale for it, though many of his ideas, including an "elongated, articulated external esophagus", would not show up on screen.

The controlled release of information on the film has been observed as a risky strategy, which could succeed like The Blair Witch Project (1999) or disappoint like Snakes on a Plane (2006), the latter of which had generated online hype but failed to attract large audiences.

[6] The viral marketing campaign drew the attention of alternate reality game enthusiasts, hoping to uncover information about the film hidden online.

Following various clues, players discovered that the monster is an ancient amphibious organism discovered during the construction of Chuai Station, an oil platform off the coast of Connecticut belonging to the Japanese company Tagruato, which had the purpose of extracting a substance called Sea Bed Nectar that would become the secret ingredient of a drink created by its founder Ganu Yoshida,[42] named Slusho.

This eventually turns out to be a Paramount number (people later received material on Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Kung Fu Panda, and The Love Guru).

[57] Based on the film's successful opening weekend, Hasbro began accepting orders for a 14-inch (36 cm) collectible toy figure of the monster with authentic sound[58] and its parasites that were shipped to fans by December 24, 2008.

A CD entitled Rob's Party Mix comes packaged in a special edition of Cloverfield made available for sale in Canadian Wal-Mart stores beginning on April 22, 2008.

The website's critical consensus reads, "A sort of Blair Witch Project crossed with Godzilla, Cloverfield is economically paced, stylistically clever, and filled with scares".

[73] Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle called the film "the most intense and original creature feature I've seen in my adult moviegoing life [...] a pure-blood, grade A, exhilarating monster movie".

He cites Matt Reeves' direction, the "whip-smart, stylistically invisible" script and the "nearly subconscious evocation of our current paranoid, terror-phobic times" as the keys to the film's success, saying that telling the story through the lens of one character's camera "works fantastically well".

[75] Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly said that the film was "surreptitiously subversive, [a] stylistically clever little gem", and that while the characters were "vapid, twenty-something nincompoops" and the acting "appropriately unmemorable", the decision to tell the story through amateur footage was "brilliant".

[77] Todd McCarthy of Variety called the film an "old-fashioned monster movie dressed up in trendy new threads", praising the special effects, "nihilistic attitude" and "post-9/11 anxiety overlay."

[78] Scott Foundas of LA Weekly was critical of the film's use of scenes reminiscent of the September 11 attacks in New York City and called it "cheap and opportunistic".

[79] Manohla Dargis in the New York Times called the allusions "tacky", saying, "[The images] may make you think of the attack, and you may curse the filmmakers for their vulgarity, insensitivity or lack of imagination", but that "the film is too dumb to offend anything except your intelligence".

She concludes that the film "works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt".

[80] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune warned that the viewer may feel "queasy" at the references to September 11, but that "other sequences [...] carry a real jolt" and that such tactics were "crude, but undeniably gripping."

"[111] In a 2012 interview, screenwriter Goddard gave an update saying, "I'm in, I'm ready to do it...someone call J. J. and tell him to get moving, but because Matt and J. J. and I have been fortunate enough to be busy, it's hard syncing our schedules up.

[120] On February 4, 2018, during Super Bowl LII, a TV commercial aired announcing the film would be entitled The Cloverfield Paradox and would have a surprise release on Netflix after the game.