Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me
Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age
“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”
-Neil Gaiman on Coraline
This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”
Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much
An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. I’ve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.
Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in “Coraline” adults see a child in danger – while children see themselves facing danger and winning
i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.
SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel “Coraline” is about a young girl in house in which there’s a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?
GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. She’d come home from nursery. She’d seen me writing all day. So she’d come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And it’d always be about small girls named Holly.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and she’d have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.
It’s anxious adults who desperately want to “soften” stories. Kids prefer the real thing: with monsters, bloodthirsty ogres and evil murderous stepmothers; where the littlest brother always wins and all the villains are horrendously punished in the end. The world is threatening to the eyes of a child, so they need a fictional universe where the little people have a fair chance against the big and strong.
^^^ Children’s stories that are so horrifying to most adults are stories in which the children face peril, but are able to overcome it. That overcoming is really important, not just in children’s literature, but in child development. Children who don’t have the peril-overcome, in fiction or in smaller ways, real life, develop as anxious, indecision-ridden adults lacking a good sense of independence.
The scary creepy Alice in Wonderland film mentioned earlier is Něco z Alenky (1988) by Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer. It’s one of my favorite Alice adaptations for its horror surrealism that, I think, well captures the madness and illogic that Carroll’s book of the adult world viewed by a small child.
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton
This is great and all, but I saw Coraline as a child and it was horrifying to me. I forbade my younger sister from seeing it until she was sixteen, at which point we watched it together sitting on my bed. My parents thought the movie was fine, creative, interesting, and had no idea why I reacted so strongly to it.
Let me tell you why.
Although I doubt it was intentional, Coraline reads like the story of an abused child. To me, another abused child watching that movie, it was a terrifying if somewhat symbolic representation of my own life. The horrific mother, the deadbeat father, crying alone at night. The idea that to become someone who my parents would want, I would have to harm myself and consent to them harming me. The cat who looked after me, the friend I was cruel to, the strange and uncomfortable adults in my life.
I agree that stories like the Hunger Games and others are fine. I love those kinds of stories, so does my sister. They show the child winning. But in Coraline, the child didn’t win. The child just accepted her lot in life, was brainwashed into thinking maybe she overreacted and her life Isn’t That Bad after all. Her mother bought her goodwill, as abusive mothers often do, and the movie ended.
It took me nearly ten years to figure out why I had hated Coraline so viscerally while my parents hadn’t cared a whit. Another abuse survivor pointed out to me; it’s because I identified with the child being attacked and gaslighted, while my parents identified with the parents who “weren’t so bad, after all.”
I will never like Coraline. Watching it again as an adult nearly made me cry.
The Chaos Bitches 