I adore horror. I love the imagery, the gut-wrenching frights and the creativity that arises out of a cinematic obsession with fear. While other genres descend into monolithic voids of originality — come on, how many superhero movies do we really need? — horror consistently finds new ways to flip the script. After all, what is trite can never be terrifying.
As such, I find it disappointing that very little horror content is geared toward younger audiences. Obviously, children shouldn’t be watching “Saw II,” but they deserve to have a few spooky experiences of their own. Thankfully, though rare, there are some made-for-kids films that are undeniably influenced by the horror tradition. Such films push the boundaries of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and are suffused with genuine scares and a well-crafted atmosphere, just like “Coraline” from 2009.
Directed by Henry Selick — known for “The Nightmare Before Christmas” — and based on a Neil Gaiman novella by the same name, “Coraline” follows the titular Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning) — a precocious, cerulean-haired youth who is homesick for Michigan. Coraline, her mother Melanie (Teri Hatcher) and her father Charlie (John Hodgman) have just moved to Oregon and into the towering “Pink Palace,” a rickety apartment complex occupied by an assortment of questionable characters and swarms of skittering cockroaches.
Separated from her hometown friends and dismissed by her workaholic parents, Coraline resigns herself to her miserable surroundings — that is, until she discovers a small hidden door in her apartment. The door leads to a parallel universe inhabited by idealized, button-eyed reflections of Coraline’s real parents.
These doppelgangers, dubbed “Other Mother” and “Other Father” are welcoming at first, but Coraline soon discovers that the Other Mother, who is actually an arachnid-like monster known as the Beldam, plans to trap her in the alternate reality forever, launching a ghost-filled, creeptastically crazy two-hour romp. I often find myself more unsettled by “Coraline” than I perhaps ought to be by a children’s film. It’s animated, rated for all audiences and contains no gore or viscera. Despite all this, there’s still something about the movie that just gets to me.
Most basically, “Coraline” is visually unnerving. Rendered using a blend of stop motion and 3D animation techniques, Selick’s creation is both lifelike and lifeless, much like the parallel universe that Coraline encounters. At times, the animation is beautiful, dazzling the viewer with bright colors and smooth action. But in other moments, the natural jerkiness of stop motion enhances the already troubling images playing out across the screen.
In this way, Selick effectively taps into the uncanny valley — a phenomenon used to describe creatures that look human and act human, but are ultimately not human — by having his characters lunge about irregularly and leer at the viewer with their sewn-on gaze. The Other Mother is particularly threatening, becoming increasingly spider-like over the course of the film as she grows more and more fixated on Coraline, with her elongated limbs, hollow face and disturbing, insect-like movements.
Yet, the real horror of “Coraline” goes even deeper. As children, almost everyone is guilty of daydreaming a little — constructing a version of reality where they do end up getting that toy, where there’s always food on the table, where everyone is friendly to them all of the time. Simply put, “Coraline” affirms this vision, inverting the daydream and revealing the dangers of a world built just for us.
Yeah, it probably would be a little creepy if everyone smiled all day every day. It most likely would not be such a good thing if our parents’ only commitment was to our individual happiness, regardless of the consequences. In a surprisingly mature turn for a children’s movie, “Coraline” attacks the basic building block of the young psyche — the dream — and finds terror in previously unexplored territory.
“Coraline” is a truly rare type of masterpiece, a horror film for the young that to this day strikes a chord with me. It is a monument to how horror could, and perhaps should, be for everyone, regardless of age. If you’re looking to revisit the dreams of the past and the nightmares they beget, you could do worse than “Coraline.”
William McCall is a sophomore in the College. Hoya Horror will appear online and in print every other week.
