Children's Horror

Here’s a paradox for you: Think about all the pains we take to avoid exposing kids to anything frightening. We don’t fight or swear around them, we censor references to sex or death. My parents even made midnight runs to Petsmart to replace seven generations of fish that were poisoned by Waco tap water so I wouldn’t have to say goodbye to the living decorations I hadn’t cared enough about to even name. With all that in mind, think about the most terrified you’ve ever been. Unless you’ve experienced some real horror in adulthood, odds are it was sometime when you were a kid. As constantly stressed out as I’ve been since fifth grade, nothing has ever topped the nighttime hallucinations I had when I was in Kindergarten, when the posters on my wall were windows to worlds of monsters and horrors slithered through the dark mass of toys on my floor.

Or maybe it’s not a paradox at all. Maybe we try so hard to avoid exposing kids to real-life horror because we know that their minds work differently and we don’t want to give them any more ammunition to terrify themselves over. As scared as I was as a kid, I’ve missed that kind of fantastical horror as I’ve grown up and forgotten how exactly it worked. There was a kind of awe to it that you can’t recapture with day-to-day stress or real life violence. That might be part of the reason why my one of my most recent guilty pleasures is the genre of children’s horror. 

By children’s horror, I don’t necessarily mean spooky stories for kids, since a lot of those use halloween imagery without ever really drilling into deeper anxieties. The best example I can think of is the Toy Story movies. Toys coming to life isn’t in itself a horrifying concept (at least, not the way Pixar does it), but it hits on fears of growing up, becoming obsolete, and not being able to move. Those feelings that scared a lot of kids (me, for example). Or think about the waiting place from Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! I’ve read Dante and Christian mystics imagine purgatory, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the same fear of a life of resigned anticipation than that one page in a kid’s book.

Most of the children’s horror I’ve seen lately has been TV, movies, and video games: Coraline, Over the Garden Wall, Gravity Falls, Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and the like. Even in less literary forms, I’m impressed at how the writers evoke horror without falling back on more mature things that haunt us. It really illustrates how universal so many of these fears are, that you can communicate them with a PG-rating and assurance that everything will turn out okay in the end and still haunt the viewer to their core.

Maybe these universal fears are at the core of what makes children’s horror so effective, and why so many adult horror stories fall back on the symbols of childhood (think Stephen King’s It or The Babadook). For kids or adults, it’s hard to confront guilt or mistrust or the fear of losing a loved one head on. It’s exhausting, so much so that it’s usually easier to ignore it and let the anxiety seep in to the rest of our lives. Rather than being vehicles for pure horror, then, these monsters actually make dealing with these issues easier. I think a lot of people underestimate what kids are capable of understanding and think that their fears are just signs of immaturity and stupidity. But even if the monsters are in your head, the fears are real. I wasn’t scared that the night terrors would hurt me, I was scared that they would eat my brother, sleeping a few feet away from me, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. That anxiety sticks with me to this day.

Maybe the reason why I’ve been so into children’s horror these days is because my time at home for the summer is dwindling. I’m heading back to Grinnell in two days, and I won’t be back home until Thanksgiving. Getting whisked away to some world of magic and danger is a common trope in children’s horror. Maybe venturing to Narnia isn’t the most accurate representation of what my next semester will be like, but sometimes we need little lies to make the world easier.