By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 14-page classroom-ready resource.
A 2-page Poem vs. Movie Comparison for students who have read the poem. This section is supplementary and can be skipped if students are only viewing the movie.
- Part of Section 1 (Imagine the Story) must be completed before the movie starts, and it asks students what they are interested or curious to see on screen.
- Sections 2 to 5 are completed after the movie to analyze changes, character choices, and the movie's overall "vibe."
Two sets of comprehension questions for differentiation. The multiple choice set may also work well with ESL and ELL students. Answer keys are included.
- 35 questions requiring full sentence answers.
- 35 multiple choice questions with 3 possible answers per question.
A storyboard and a synopsis that build on each other.
- A 9-scene storyboard illustrating pivotal events from the movie, with a short description of the main idea in each scene. The movie questions guide the sequencing.
- A synopsis of the movie, written using the storyboard as a guide.
A movie review and a piece of creative writing.
- A movie review with a rating, strengths, weaknesses, a recommendation, and a small poster design.
- Three short continuation scenes, each with a sketch, picking up from Wiglaf's final scene (the temptation and the deal, the son that is born, and the calamity the son later brings).
Why Watch This Movie With Your Students
Here's what your students naturally take away from the movie, whether through themes, values, ideas, or perspectives.
📜 A Poem Adaptation That Changes Its Source. The movie is loosely based on an Old English poem and rewrites parts of its story. In the poem the hero kills Grendel's mother, while in the movie he does not and she seduces him in the cave. For classes that have read the poem, those changes give students concrete differences to look for.
🏆 A Hero Who Pays for His Glory. The hero travels to Denmark to kill Grendel and earns glory there, but the movie shows what that glory costs him. He accepts a deal in the cave in exchange for becoming king, lies about it back in Heorot, and carries the result until a dragon attacks fifty years later. The movie follows that choice from the cave all the way to the dragon.
🗣️ A Hero's Own Account of the Cave. Back in Heorot, the hero gives an embellished account of what happened in the cave, and Hrothgar is not fooled. At the end, Wiglaf chooses to keep the hero's legacy intact even after hearing the truth. The audience sees the deal in the cave and then the account that follows it, so the two can be compared directly.
🐉 Monsters Who Are Someone's Sons. Grendel is Hrothgar's son, born of Hrothgar's tryst with Grendel's mother, and the dragon that attacks fifty years later is the hero's own son. Hrothgar indirectly reveals to the hero that he too was seduced by the demon, and the dragon in its golden human form tells the hero that the sins of the father have returned to him.
⚔️ Epic Conventions on Screen. The story is built from the settings and events of heroic legend, including a mead hall, a monster slayer, a cave, a dragon, and a Norse funeral on a burning ship. It is told with motion-capture animation rather than live action.
🔤 Old English Heard on Screen. Grendel's dialogue is spoken in Old English, the language the original poem was written in. Students hear it in a movie that is otherwise in modern English, which ties the story directly to its source.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG-13.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Frequent violence with blood, including dismemberment, impalement, and attacks by Grendel, a dragon, and sea creatures.
- Nudity includes a man nude for an extended period and a gold-painted female creature.
- Sexual dialogue and innuendo, and a strongly implied sexual encounter.
- Language includes some mild obscenities, sexual references, and name-calling.
- Characters drink mead in the mead hall, and some become drunk.
- Hrothgar jumps from a castle parapet to his death.
📋 A free editable parent permission slip is available for this movie. It explains the educational benefits of watching movies in class and includes a space for parental consent. → Download Free Permission Slip on TpT (Free resource)
Note for educators: Movie details and age ratings in this post are sourced from IMDb, Common Sense Media, and Wikipedia to help ensure accuracy.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
Click your subject below to see how this guide supports it:
📚 English Language Arts Teachers
🗣️ ESL and ELL Teachers
🌐 Social Studies Teachers
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons
🏠 Homeschool Parents
📜 History Teachers
🌟 Supporting All Learners A movie gives students a story to follow, and the guide gives them questions to work through as they watch. For students with autism, learning difficulties, and mild to severe disabilities, that combination provides a clear focus for the lesson and a concrete way to show understanding. The format can be useful in special education and learning support classrooms, where teachers need activities that give students a defined task during viewing. Find out more about why movies work for diverse learners.
How These Guides Work: From Movie to Lesson
Watching a movie is not a break from learning. It reaches students through sight, sound, and story at once, engaging the brain in ways text alone does not, and the structured work around it is what turns the viewing into a genuine lesson. You can read the research behind this on the Why Movies Work page.
- A Teacher Notes and General Directions page opens the guide with a brief overview of everything inside: what the movie is about, then each part of the guide in order with a short description of what it entails. You know what to expect from the whole resource before you hand out a single page, so you can pick up the guide cold and teach it the same day.
- Answer keys are included for the comprehension question sets, so grading is quick and you are not rewatching the movie to check answers. Some guides also include example answers for the creative and written activities.
- Print and go: classroom ready, with no additional preparation needed. Print one the morning you need it and the lesson is ready.
- Substitute and first-timer friendly. A guide can be handed to a substitute or picked up by a teacher covering the topic for the first time. Nobody running the session needs to have seen the movie.
- Differentiated comprehension sets. Most guides include two or three question sets at different difficulty levels, and most include a multiple-choice option that works well for ESL and ELL students. One class set covers your strongest readers, your strugglers, and your language learners without separate prep.
- Activities that go beyond recall. Each guide includes structured activities that ask students to engage with the movie, not just watch it, ranging from creative and written tasks to discussion and critical thinking questions depending on the guide. That variety matters in a mixed classroom: a student who freezes on a written question set may show real understanding through a drawing or a creative task, and a confident writer gets room to go beyond recall. For the teacher, it turns a movie session into work you can grade: comprehension questions show whether students followed the plot, and the activities beyond them show whether they understood it.
