Hear Me Out, 8 Monster Romance Movies for Anyone Intrigued by Wicker
Wicker is putting an unconventional love story on the big screen. Eight monster romance movies on Tubi have already asked whether human was ever really a dating requirement.
Dating is hard enough when everybody involved belongs to the same species. Cinema, naturally, looked at that problem and expanded the dating pool.
Monster romance has spent years making an increasingly persuasive case for creatures, vampires, werewolves, cannibals, dragons, and other options most relationship advice probably wasn't written to address. The appeal isn't always that complicated, either. The supposedly frightening option might understand you better, accept the part of you everyone else wants changed, or simply benefit from the humans around them doing an impressively poor job of representing their species.
Wicker, now in theaters, takes that logic somewhere wonderfully strange. Olivia Colman's Fisherwoman commissions a basketmaker to build her a husband after the judgmental village around her has made ordinary romance less than appealing, and Alexander Skarsgård emerges as the wicker man who unexpectedly gives her exactly the relationship everyone else thinks she shouldn't have. The village is scandalized. She's having a much better time. Which leaves us with an important romantic question: why the monster?
Tubi's Romance collection isn't exactly enforcing a humans-only policy, so we're following the love stories somewhere stranger. These eight stories cross the human-monster boundary and find something more interesting waiting there than whether the creature has fangs, fur, scales, or a concerning relationship with raw meat.
No judgment. We're hearing everyone out.
Bones and All
First dates are stressful enough without wondering whether your shared interests include cannibalism.
Maren has spent her life carrying an appetite that separates her from practically everyone around her when she meets Lee in Bones and All. Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet play two young “eaters” whose road trip across America gradually becomes a love story between people accustomed to believing the most frightening part of themselves makes ordinary connection impossible.
Lee changes the equation. Maren doesn't have to reveal her secret and wait for someone to decide whether she's still worthy of affection. He already understands the hunger because he's living with it too. Their monstrosity becomes the thing isolating them from the wider world and, strangely enough, the thing that allows them to stop feeling quite so alone inside it.
Bones and All took the page-to-screen route in our look at horror adaptations on Tubi, but its romance gives the story another kind of bite. Finding somebody who knows the worst thing about you gets a lot easier when they don't need an explanation.
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Spring
Vacation romances usually come with an expiration date. Ancient biological secrets are less standard.
After personal loss sends Evan away from home, a trip to Italy introduces him to Louise in Spring, and attraction develops quickly enough to make extending the vacation sound like a pretty good idea. Louise, however, has information missing from the dating profile. Their relationship initially gets to behave like something much more recognizable: flirting, dates, uncertainty over whether either person wants this to become serious. The supernatural part doesn't erase those ordinary romantic stakes when it arrives. It makes it harder to answer.
Attraction came first. The monster problem has to catch up. Evan therefore isn't deciding whether he could theoretically fall for a creature. He's discovering that the woman he already fell for happens to be one. Love now has a harder question to answer: does knowing what someone is change who they've already become to you?
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Your Monster
Laura Franco's human ex has already established a very low bar. The literal monster in her childhood home would like to clear it.
Melissa Barrera stars as an actor recovering from a breakup and cancer diagnosis in Your Monster, where returning home introduces, or rather reintroduces, her to the terrifying but oddly charming creature living in her closet. Tommy Dewey gives Monster plenty of attitude, but the relationship gradually becomes tied to something Laura desperately needs after months of making herself smaller: permission to be angry.
Monster doesn't become appealing because the movie suddenly convinces us fur is the hottest accessory of the season. He pushes Laura toward the confidence, rage, and voice she's been swallowing while the supposedly normal people around her have given her plenty of reasons to doubt herself. Our recent Whorrified movies lineup gave Monster his “hear me out” moment, but there's another point in his favor here: he doesn't ask Laura to become easier to love. He helps her stop shrinking herself for everybody else.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
A Werewolf Boy (Subbed)
Not every monster needs a pickup line. He might need somebody willing to sit beside him.
A move to the countryside introduces a sickly teenage girl to the feral young man hiding around her new home in A Werewolf Boy. Song Joong-ki's mysterious boy barely knows how to behave around other people, while Park Bo-young's character gradually begins teaching him how to live among them. Affection grows through care before either person can neatly label what's happening.
The connection isn't built around seduction or the thrill of choosing something dangerous. It's rooted in patience, companionship, and the experience of being treated gently when the rest of the world doesn't quite know what to do with you. As he learns how to exist around people, she gets companionship during a lonely chapter of her own life, making their bond feel reciprocal rather than one person simply “fixing” the creature. Keep the tissues nearby.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Blood And Chocolate
Being told who you're supposed to become is annoying enough without an entire werewolf society getting involved.
Vivian has spent her life inside a secret community of loup-garoux in Blood and Chocolate, where tradition has already written a fairly specific version of her future. Meeting human artist Aiden creates a problem because falling for him means wanting something outside the rules of her own kind and challenging a future other people have already planned on her behalf.
Now the monster is the one looking toward the human world. Our central question flips with her. Vivian isn't attractive because someone heroically decides to overlook her supernatural identity. She's the person deciding whether being born into one world means she has to let it choose her relationships too. Love becomes less about taming the monster and more about whether the monster gets to choose herself. “My family doesn't approve of my boyfriend” has rarely felt this understated.
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The Lure
Mermaids have suffered an impressive public-relations campaign. Pretty hair. Beautiful singing. Magical ocean energy. Nobody mentioned the teeth.
The Lure follows mermaid sisters Silver and Golden into the neon-lit world of a Warsaw nightclub, where their supernatural abilities make them natural performers and their appetite for humans makes employee relations slightly more complicated. The sisters don't approach their new world the same way either. Golden is much more comfortable with what they are, while Silver becomes fascinated by the possibility of building a life and romance among humans.
Silver's attraction to a human pulls the movie toward something stranger and sadder than a simple creature romance. Loving someone from another world starts raising questions about how much of herself she's expected to sacrifice to fit inside his. The problem isn't merely whether a human can love a monster anymore. Becoming acceptable to him may require Silver to surrender too much of what made her herself in the first place. Golden, meanwhile, has a very different philosophy regarding humans. Let's call it less romantic.
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Vampire in Brooklyn
Maximillian isn't exactly arriving with subtle intentions.
He needs to find the woman who can continue his vampire bloodline, and Angela Bassett's Rita happens to be much closer to that supernatural world than she realizes in Vampire in Brooklyn. Eddie Murphy plays the charismatic vampire trying to pull her toward an identity that's been hiding underneath her ordinary life, with Wes Craven steering the romance through horror and comedy along the way.
Max gives Rita access to information about her own heritage and powers that she hasn't fully understood, making his arrival tempting for reasons that reach beyond attraction.The catch, naturally, is that the person offering the answers also has his own agenda for what she should become. Monster boyfriend credentials remain under review.
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I Am Dragon
Imagine being kidnapped from your wedding by a dragon and somehow discovering the arranged marriage wasn't necessarily the romantic option. Romantasy would like the floor.
Princess Miroslava's wedding ceremony goes spectacularly off-script in I Am Dragon when a dragon carries her away to a remote island. There she encounters a mysterious young man named Arman, and the supposedly terrifying detour starts giving Mira reasons to reconsider the respectable future waiting for her back home.
The setup fits Wicker almost suspiciously well. Both stories place women inside worlds where other people have already decided what a proper relationship should look like. Introduce the monster and suddenly the socially unacceptable option can offer something the approved one doesn't: space to imagine a life chosen rather than assigned.
Monster romance loves pulling that trick. Everyone points at the creature and asks, “Them?” The heroine looks back at the available human options. Fair question.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.