Fright club.

Welcome to fright club

Why take your children to see a scary and disturbing movie such as Coraline? Because it's good for them, says the very evil Ryan Gilbey




o Ryan Gilbey
o The Guardian, Friday 1 May 2009
o Article history



In his seminal 1976 study The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim mourned the state of the fairy tale: "Most children now meet fairy stories only in prettified and simplified versions which subdue their meaning and rob them of all deeper significance - versions such as those on films and TV shows, where fairy tales are turned into empty-minded entertainment." He wouldn't say that if he were alive to see Coraline, a properly disturbing adaptation of Neil Gaiman's 2002 novella. Shot in stop-motion animation and 3-D, Coraline is the latest work in a vital tradition that dates back to a time before the Brothers Grimm began collecting their bloodcurdling tales. It's a fantasy that seduces its young audience, then scares the bejesus out of them. It is, in no uncertain terms, a horror film for children.

1. Coraline
2. Production year: 2009
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): PG
5. Runtime: 100 mins
6. Directors: Henry Selick
7. Cast: Dakota Fanning, Dawn French, Ian McShane, Jennifer Saunders, Keith David, Teri Hatcher
8. More on this film

Coraline is a young girl who discovers in her drab new home a tunnel leading to a parallel world of brightness and profligacy, where her parents are fun-loving instead of the workaholic drudges they are in reality. But there is a catch: Coraline's "Other Mother" and "Other Father" have buttons instead of eyes, and insist that their daughter undergoes an equivalent transplant if she is to remain in paradise.

At the screening I attended, the audience responded with an awestruck silence, interrupted only by the removal of the occasional whimpering child, which suggested a spell comprehensively cast. The nature of that spell is no different to the one that transfixed young readers of the 19th century Little Red Riding Hood, in which the heroine is duped by the wolf into drinking vials of her grandmother's freshly harvested blood, or the same era's German version of Rumpelstiltskin, which ends with the baby-snatching gnome tearing his own body in half. Children enjoy being grossed-out or spooked, within reason. And, unlike most of the things they enjoy, it's also frightfully good for them. "The telling of fairy tales is one way to elicit a child's thoughts and feelings," says Julia Avnon, a child and adolescent psychologist. "At its most effective, it exposes their conflicts and creates a non-threatening way to introduce them to the realities of life."

The film plays on anxieties general and specific. Most of us will have an understandable fear of sharp things being placed near our eyes, and the spectre of optical injury in Coraline makes the movie nothing short of a junior Un Chien Andalou. On the other hand, we don't all suffer from koumpounophobia (the fear of buttons), as my youngest daughter does, turning Coraline into a more than usually terrifying experience for her. But crucially, the film is structured around conventions road-tested in the most resilient fantasy narratives. There is an alternative world with a distorted reflection of reality (The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland); a grotesque bargain that demands an unthinkable surrender (Spirited Away, Rumpelstiltskin); a supernatural mirror out of Snow White by way of Cocteau; and an evil mother figure (see practically every fairy tale ever written).

"I read Coraline a few years ago, after having a daughter of my own," says children's novelist Joanna Nadin, author of the best-selling Rachel Riley series. "And I was terrified by the thought of familiarity turned on its head, of being so close to the safety of your world, and yet so far. But its quirkiness, and the outright comedy in places, manages to rein it in, just when you think it's going to overstep the mark. Personally, I love writing scary parts in my books, especially unusually cruel aunts with a liking for torture. I don't think I hold back, but I try to inject an element of humour, however dark, to diffuse the situation."

It is this interplay between fear and reassurance, horror and humour, which enabled Coraline to receive a PG rating. "The film certainly has its dark, scary moments," says Ian Mashiah, one of the BBFC examiners who decided on the movie's certificate, "but ultimately they add up to an adventure in which Coraline displays her own resourcefulness and bravery. That's the kind of message we look for in films at the lower classification levels, something to provide a counterpoint to more intense moments. Children will ultimately have to experience fear in the real world, and the fantasy setting of Coraline supplies them with a safe introduction to that."

The boldest latter-day author of children's fiction, Roald Dahl, knew precisely how to stimulate the fantasies of his readership, or to give their neuroses a taxing work-out. It is not his outright villains that astonish so much as his propensity for introducing disquiet into domestic environments. Dahl understood that while children require the stability of a caring parental environment, they need also to fantasise about losing or destroying it. The child heroes of The Witches and James and the Giant Peach have lost their parents by the time their adventures begin, allowing the reader to experience vicariously that trauma. Dahl's Matilda is even more daring, forcing its heroine to contend with cruel and disparaging parents, and a monstrous teacher. The latter is a more manageable threat, since fear in the classroom we can process easily, whereas sadism and tyranny at home, and the idea of parents who despise their own offspring, represents by far the superior terror.

Those Dahl books have made the transition to cinema exhibiting compromises that reveal much about our clumsy adult attempts to safeguard children. James and the Giant Peach, directed by Coraline's Henry Selick, unforgivably dispensed with the death of James's wicked aunts, who were flattened beneath the runaway peach in one of the book's riotous high-points. And Nicolas Roeg's otherwise gruesome take on The Witches (soon to be filmed again in a version produced by Guillermo del Toro) ended with the hero restored to human form, whereas Dahl left unbroken the spell that turned the boy into a mouse. It is unusual indeed to find a children's movie that ends on such a discordant note, though Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits, which closes with a 12-year-old orphaned after the death of his imbecilic parents, is an outstanding exception.

But children don't only like to be frightened - they need it too, if their emotional development is to be complete. "Being scared is a rite of passage," says Nadin, "but a pleasurable one. I don't see the gain in mollycoddling. A friend of mine dug out her old Ladybird fairytales from when she was young, to pass on to her own children, and was horrified to discover that some characters died - her mother had always invented more palatable endings. I'd be devastated to find out now that I had missed out on, say, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood getting chopped open, and Granny being found inside."

Too often there is needless panic over the prospect of giving children the heebie-jeebies. Tim Burton is currently preparing a feature-length stop-motion version of Frankenweenie, but his original 1983 live-action short, about a boy who brings his pet dog back from the dead with a few blasts of electricity and some needlework, met with disapproval from Disney, and hastened Burton's departure from that studio. It is to be hoped that the cultural climate is now more attuned to the value of childhood horror; though early reactions to Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's long-awaited film version of Maurice Sendak's cherished fantasy, suggest not. There have been widespread reports of recutting after test screenings that left some young audience members distressed.

Fretful studio executives should console themselves by looking again at the tradition of so-called family films, many of which - The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St Louis, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Return to Oz - incorporate heightened anxiety or terror. Even Disney, which has become shorthand for all that is saccharine in cinema, is unbeaten in the area of traumatically cathartic entertainment. It's ironic that the studio made a self-conscious detour into the live-action ghost story genre in 1980 with the tepid U-certificate chiller The Watcher in the Woods, when its back catalogue boasts many more authoritative passages of animated horror - the forest sequence in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the parental deaths in Bambi and The Lion King, the upsetting boy-to-donkey metamorphosis in Pinocchio.

Of course, there will always be unique "fear triggers" that lie outside the therapeutic dominion of the fairy tale. These can spark unforeseeable responses in individual viewers, or even whole societies, as Iona and Peter Opie point out in their 1974 collection, The Classic Fairy Tales. "When the great exhibition of children's books was staged in Munich immediately after the Hitlerian war, an exhibition that was intended to be, and was, an opening of doors to the new generation in Germany, it was found that the story of Hansel and Gretel was not always regarded as preposterous, that the fantasy was too close to reality, that for some the witch's oven too much resembled the gas chamber at Auschwitz."