It has taken a giant monster to rouse this blog from its postholiday hibernation — which is more context, by the way, than you’ll get from Cloverfield. That title is the upshot of “viral” Internet marketing that generated so much buzz that producer J.J. Abrams chose a nondescript code name for the film, borrowed from a street near his Hollywood office. It means nothing, which fits.

Nothing can be scarier than something, though. The Blair Witch Project, shot with one video camera from the point of view of the character holding it, proved that when you eliminate the omniscient perspective — when you show the audience only what a single character sees and no more — you introduce a note of irrational terror that millions of dollars of computer-generated effects can’t touch. But Blair Witch was a ghost story, a genre in which less is always more. What, asked writer Drew Goddard, if you used the same singular, disoriented vantage for a giant-monster picture, a spectacle: Godzilla through the eyes — or lens — of a sap way down below trying not to get stomped?