Bloomsbury
Academic
April
2023
Paperback
Illustrations:
26 BW images
ISBN:
9781350265127
RRP:
£28.99
Review by Adrian Smith
The 1980s was a fun time to be a child. The monster
kids of the 1950s and 1960s may have had Forrest J. Ackerman and his Famous
Monsters of Filmland magazine, but we had full-blown horror content in
films ostensibly made for a young audience, from the melting Nazis in Raiders
of the Lost Ark or the terrifying library apparition in Ghostbusters,
to a melting Stripe in Joe Dante’s equally hilarious and scary Gremlins.
In this new book dedicated to horror films aimed at children, Catherine Lester begins
by drawing on early examples such as Frankenstein’s murder of the little
girl by its titular monster, along with other pre-code horrors that primarily
drew a young crowd, through to its modern, reanimated version, Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.
The book then takes a deeper look at the ‘horrific’ childlike gremlins who both
commit violent acts and then have violence acted upon them (along with the
aforementioned Stripe, who can forget the gremlin in the microwave?). What
happens to the representation of children in the horror film when children are
the audience? Did the children in the audience take sympathy with the gremlins,
who let’s not forget, just happily sit watching Disney films with childlike
wonder when the adult world just leaves them alone? The violence combined with
the Looney Tunes tone of Gremlins caused some issues for the MPAA,
something which the book also goes into. Ultimately it led to the introduction
of the PG-13, apparently suggested by Steven Spielberg, the film’s producer,
who described the new rating as “PG with a little hot sauce on top.”
Lester also draws on another eighties staple,
The Monster Squad, a sort of The Goonies meets The Lost Boys
via Universal’s horror canon. By introducing the concept of the ‘Crazyspace’, a
space in which child characters are able to be the prime agents in dispatching
evil forces in the complete absence of adult supervision, the book explores the
way in which many films present children as autonomous and often superior to even
the most masculinised models of authority; in this case the kids defeat Dracula
and his fellow monsters before the US Army arrive, something which would have
been very different in the 1950s monster and science fiction movies, where it
was usually the army who saved the day.
Bringing the discussion into the 21st
Century, Lester also looks at the animated children’s horrors ParaNorman (one
of this reviewer’s favourites), Coraline and Monster House, along
with Joe Dante’s return to the children’s horror genre with 2009’s live action The
Hole. By covering almost a century of children's horror films, this book
makes for an insightful and entertaining examination of the horrific child and
the cathartic nature of the genre. For this reviewer, as a child horror was an
escape from the terrors of the real world, and as such it is a rewarding
experience to be able to read this major contribution to the study of these
strange and wonderful films. Horror Films for Children is highly
recommended, both the book and the films themselves!
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