“Monsters, Inc.” concludes with Randall getting banished to the human world — our world — for his crimes. We’ve seen this play out multiple times in the “Monsters” movies, and every time the monster is left with no recourse but to play the role of a monster, and establish itself within the human preconception of monsters.
In “Monsters, Inc.,” we see the character Yeti living his life as the Abominable Snowman, even though he’s hardly all that abominable. And in “Monsters University,” when Mike and Sulley get trapped in the human world, they find themselves in a summer camp ripped directly from a 1980s horror movie, with eerie lighting and creepy imagery galore. The only way to escape is for Sulley to become a campfire story monster himself.
How would Randall adapt to the human world? Well, again, he likes closets, he hates kids, he’s probably got a vengeful streak building inside of him, and he absolutely fits the human preconception of the so-called “Boogeyman.” If the shoe fits, Randall probably figured he should wear it. And without any monsters to talk to, instead living in isolation in the shadows of a strange civilization that hates and fears him, it makes sense that he’d lose himself in the role and become every bit the monster kids always assumed he was.
So it goes that he spends his time performing the only task he was ever good at — namely scaring kids to death — but now he does it literally. How fitting that his transformation from one type of monster to another, and his traversal from one world to another, would take the meta-textual form of traversing from one studio to another: from Disney’s family-friendly Pixar to Disney’s horror-friendly 20th Century Studios.
