Horror Films for Children

Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema

Catherine Lester

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350265127
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350135284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre's most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Hollywood cinema in which children are addressed as an audience with specific needs, fears and desires, and where child characters are represented as sympathetic protagonists whose encounters with the horrific lead to cathartic, subversive and productive outcomes.

Horror Films for Children examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children's horror films, and identifies the 'horrific child' as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favourites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience?

Chapter 1

Frankenstein to Frankenweenie

The evolution of children’s horror in Hollywood cinema

In a brief discussion of Gremlins, M. Keith Booker offhandedly remarks that ‘it would have to be characterized as a children’s horror film, which . . . raises all sorts of questions’ (2010: xvi). Booker does not elaborate, but it is easy to surmise that such questions might include: What exactly is the children’s horror film? How does it negotiate the competing demands of children’s cinema and the horror genre? Where did it come from? Beginning with the latter of these questions, this chapter sketches an overview of key films and moments in twentieth-century Hollywood that led to the emergence of the children’s horror film in the 1980s. The second half of the chapter then examines the generic characteristics of late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century children’s horror films in order to map out some parameters and a working definition for this category of film.

It is difficult to say exactly when the story of the children’s horror film begins. Historical evidence shows that horror films have been enjoyed by children for as long as the term ‘horror film’ has existed, with notable early examples being Dracula (Browning 1931), Frankenstein (Whale 1931), King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack 1933) and other ‘monster movies’ of early and Classical Hollywood cinema (Smith 2005: 58). However, these are not ‘children’s horror films’ in the same way as the post-1980s examples discussed throughout the rest of this book. Taking Frankenstein as the paradigmatic example, there is little about the film’s concern with the unethical, irresponsible and overly ambitious use of science by the film’s morally questionable human adult protagonist, Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive), or its bleak conclusion that appears to align with dominant expectations and characteristics of children’s fiction such as a clear moral and a happy ending. However, Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich stress the importance of taking care ‘not to transfer one’s own understandings of genre terms and their meanings back onto previous periods in which the terms and their meanings might have been very different’ (2008: 3). More instructive, then, is whether the film was conceived or marketed with children in mind as a core part of the target audience? I have not been able to locate any evidence that this was the case. Moreover, despite the fact that the film was hugely popular with 1930s child audiences – a fact in which the film’s star Boris Karloff took great pride (Jancovich and Brown 2013: 251) – children’s very attendance at this and other early-Hollywood horror films was a source of adult anxiety. This was exacerbated by the fact that the only child character, Maria (Marilyn Harris), only appears briefly before being accidentally drowned by Karloff’s Monster. This scene was widely censored to excise the girl’s drowning, exhibiting a desire to protect children both within the film and in the audience.

Actual child audiences, however, did not see the Monster as a threat but a figure of sympathy; in Karloff’s words, his child fans expressed ‘such pity . . . for the “poor monster”. They are particularly sorry for any living thing, human or animal, that is ugly’ (Mannock 1933 in Jancovich and Brown 2013: 251). It is also likely that the Monster’s appeal to youth audiences was down to his innately childlike nature, allowing a point of identification with his plight as a misunderstood ‘newborn’ creature navigating the world around him, learning the rights and wrongs of society and frequently getting them wrong, all the while seeking the approval of an antagonistic parental figure, his creator Dr Frankenstein. In this way Frankenstein takes after the fairy-tale tradition, which Tatar argues addresses children’s fears through the representation of adults and authority as ‘the real ogres’ in child characters’ lives (1992: 191). This goes some way to explaining the enduring popularity of the character in later children’s or child-friendly horror texts like Frankenweenie and The Monster Squad, discussed respectively at the end of this chapter and in Chapter 3.¹

In light of the film’s popularity with child audiences of the 1930s, and a reading of the Monster as a child, Frankenstein allows a resistant ‘horrific child’ viewing strategy that I trace in later children’s horror films such as Gremlins. Indeed, the two films are linked by their foci on monstrous child-substitutes who are unfairly persecuted by human guardians and their ambiguous endings that can be read as either celebrating or mourning the destruction of these children. Even so, as I discuss in Chapter 2, Gremlins can be clearly identified as a children’s horror film through its marketing and paratexts; the same cannot be said for Frankenstein. Therefore, although I do not consider Frankenstein and its contemporaries to be ‘children’s horror films’ as such, they are important precursors and landmarks in the development of the genre in Hollywood cinema.

Fun and fear: ‘Child-friendly’ horror in Code-era Hollywood

The ability to identify children’s horror films in early-Hollywood cinema is further complicated by the Motion Picture Production Code, which was in place from the 1930s (Frankenstein narrowly avoiding its enforcement) until 1968. This aimed to ensure that all films released in the United States did not contain any objectionable content that might ‘lower the moral standards of those who see it’, inclusive of children (Leff and Simmons 2001: 286). The Code had no age restrictions, unlike its replacement, the MPAA ratings system. As such, almost all films released in the United States under the enforcement of the Code, including horror films, are technically ‘suitable for children’, though, as with Frankenstein, they are not necessarily ‘children’s films’. With that being said, there are two key contexts during Code-era Hollywood in which child audiences intersected with horror film production, spectatorship and exhibition. The first is a group of films that can be identified as deliberately adopting a childlike mode of address, and the second is spaces of horror film exhibition in which children were present, regardless of whether or not the films were specifically addressed to them.

The most obvious case study for films specifically addressed to children in Code-era Hollywood is the Disney studio. Walt Disney was adamant that he ‘[did] not make films primarily for children’, but for ‘the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty’ (in Behlmer 1982: 60). Although this statement is technically inclusive of viewers of all ages it indicates an explicit address to children, whether actual children or an older viewer who is encouraged to adopt a childish sensibility. As such, many Code-era Disney films can be identified as ‘children’s horror’ inasmuch as they are films addressed to a child, or childlike, audience and which adopt horror imagery and conventions. There are early animated shorts, such as The Skeleton Dance (Disney 1929) and Mickey Mouse vehicle The Haunted House (Disney 1929), which blend fun-house style spectacle with slapstick comedy; frightening moments in animated features such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand 1937) and Pinocchio (Luske and Sharpsteen 1940); and adaptations of Gothic literature like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Geronimi and Kinney 1949).

Outside of the Disney studio, other notable child-friendly horror films of Code-era Hollywood include the live-action The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (Rafkin 1966) and stop-motion-animated Mad Monster Party (Bass 1967). These and the aforementioned Disney films are all illustrative of broader trends in the provision of horror to child audiences from the Code era to the present day. Mad Monster Party is a parodic take on Universal monsters, who are made ‘child-friendly’ by being divorced from their horrific context and placed in a humorous situation. This dynamic can also be seen in contemporaneous cartoons (e.g. Looney Tunes’ Transylvania 6-5000 [Jones 1963]), children’s television (e.g. the Dracula-inspired Count von Count [Jerry Nelson/Matt Vogel] on Sesame Street [1969–present]), family sitcoms (e.g. The Munsters [1964–6], The Addams Family [1964–6] and Groovie Goolies [1970–1]) and would be later revived in the Hotel Transylvania film series. The blend of horror iconography with comedy is also key to The Haunted House, The Ghost and Mr Chicken and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, all of which present a cowardly, childlike adult (or mouse) within a scary location (a haunted house or, in the case of the latter, a forest on Halloween night), and whose over-the-top frightened reactions result in slapstick pratfalls to be laughed at rather than fear to be mirrored and shared by the audience. In The Ghost and Mr Chicken, what the hapless protagonist (Don Knotts) thinks are ghostly happenings are revealed to be elaborate tricks played on him by the house’s caretaker (Liam Redmond), in an uncanny anticipation of the structure of the horror-comedy cartoon series Scooby Doo, Where Are You! (1969–70). Horror-comedy hybridity was also key to the output of the highly prolific William Castle, known for promoting his films with gimmicks that encouraged audience participation. Famously, The Tingler (Castle 1959) was exhibited with buzzers installed in cinema seats which would activate at key moments to give audience members the impression that the film’s monster had broken loose from the film’s diegesis and was in the auditorium. On-screen, the star Vincent Price instructed spectators to ‘scream for your lives!’ There is an obvious juvenile thrill to be had from Castle’s interactive approach and, similarly to Disney, he sought to address an intergenerational audience that included ‘teenagers, children, all devotees of adventure and horror’ (Castle in Doherty 2002: 139).

In contrast to these horror-comedies, the horrific sequences in Snow White and Pinocchio appear to be intended as genuinely terrifying, but they are nevertheless short and isolated moments cushioned by the surrounding generic contexts of musical fantasy. Take Snow White’s (Adriana Caselotti) flight through the forest early in the film, where what she believes are the menacingly glowing eyes of trees are eventually revealed in the daylight to be those of friendly woodland creatures who lead Snow White to safety. This is illustrative of a notable alleviating method associated with frightening fiction for children, identified by Reynolds as a ‘sense of security’ that is provided when ‘what was thought to be inexplicable is explained, and what seemed dangerous and menacing is made safe’ (2006). Last but not least, these films are animated, a medium that would come to be heavily associated with child audiences and which can also be read as alleviating horror by establishing an obvious separation from reality. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is exemplar of this, where Ichabod’s (Bing Crosby) fear is made humorous through staple cartoon strategies for representing fear: green-tinged skin, bulging eyeballs and hair that stands straight on end. The alleviating strategies identified here are shared by children’s horror films that emerge at the end of the twentieth century, which I expand upon later, allowing them to be identified as important children’s horror precursors.

When it comes to the viewing habits of actual children during the Code era, evidence shows that children’s horrific tastes extended beyond the films discussed earlier to include films that may not have been specifically addressed to a child audience, but which were positioned as children’s films through exhibition practices. The 1950s and 1960s in particular were key decades for youth audiences in US cinema, for example with the founding of American International Pictures (AIP) in 1954, which actively courted the newly recognized teen demographic with a wide array of low-budget genre films, including horror (see Doherty 2002). For children in particular, television was a key site of engagement with horror; not only because of the family sitcoms mentioned earlier but also because of programmes like The Twilight Zone (1959–64) and the broadcasting of classic Universal horror films which were packaged together under the banner of ‘Shock Theatre’. Concurrent to this, theatrically released horror films were becoming increasingly adult-oriented with influence from art-house cinema and European imports like Peeping Tom (Powell 1960). Kevin Heffernan supposes that this trend alienated ‘horror fans used to Hammer and AIP product’, which we can infer likely means youth audiences (2004: 131). With this shift, the rising ubiquity of television (and televised horror) in American homes, and the cultural and industrial recognition of the teen demographic, film audiences were becoming increasingly fragmented. This is a fact that exhibitors capitalized upon in the late 1960s, especially with regards to catering children with a thirst for horror that had likely been fostered via television.

In his indispensable economic history of mid-twentieth-century US horror, Heffernan identifies children as a highly sought-after demographic. Afternoon matinees, also known as ‘kiddie matinees’ were ‘one of the most important subsequent-run markets for horror and science fiction films’ in the 1960s because children up to the age of twelve provided a reliable and constantly replenishing audience for whom older horror content could appear brand new (2004: 211–12). Despite the fact that television horror would have been accessible to children for free, Heffernan notes that a crucial draw of the kiddie matinees was that they provided an adult-free space away from the home, and the independence that this provided was likely a greater point of appeal than the films themselves (2004: 212–13). Still, it does not seem a stretch to surmise that the subversive nature of the horror genre likely dovetailed with and enhanced this appeal. A particularly fascinating detail is that one of the most popular horror films shown at kiddie matinees throughout the decade was Village of the Damned (Rilla 1960) which features children in key roles, albeit as antagonists (Heffernan 2004: 187). It is not clear whether this was a point of the film’s appea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Frankenstein to Frankenweenie: The evolution of children’s horror in Hollywood cinema
• 2 Children behaving badly: Representing and addressing the horrific child in Gremlins
• 3 No grown-ups allowed: The horrific ‘Crazyspace’ of The Monster Squad
• 4 ‘As normal as it could be’: ParaNorman and the normalization of the horrific child
• 5 A ‘child-friendly’ horror aesthetic: Challenging assumptions with Coraline
• 6 Man of the house: Gender, space and domestic violence in Monster House and The Hole
• Conclusion: Expansions and absences of children’s horror
• Notes
• Works cited
• Index
• Copyright