If this wasn’t stop motion I might actually find it too scary to see. Then again I am a bit of a wimp when it comes to the uncanny, even when featured in a children’s film, and this one looks so full of Freudian dissonance it practically redefines das unheimliche.
Coraline is a little girl whose parents don’t really have time for her. She finds a door into another world, where some very nice people say they are her “other” parents, and shower her with gifts. But there’s something a bit weird about them. For one thing, they have buttons where they should have eyes.
The original 2002 novel by Neil Gaiman won the Bram Stoker Award for Young Readers, which should tell you something about its horror credentials.
But Gaiman himself points out:
As a general rule, Coraline the book is much creepier for adults than it is for kids, who tend to read it as an adventure. I suspect that this will be true of the film as well.”
All the same, the distributors clearly cottoned onto the fact that some of the more macabre aspects of the film e.g. doppelgangers who also happen to want to pluck out children’s eyes, aren’t particularly kiddie friendly.
So they’ve created two trailers, one that’s got a nice reassuring voiceover and one that – well – doesn’t. It’s fun to compare and contrast. The latter is more scary, though also a better trailer, so that’s the one you can watch below.
Gaiman’s comment on the fact that sometimes children can cope with frightening things better than we think actually tallies with the theory of a book I’ve been reading, The Uses of Enchantment, by the controversial child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim’s views on autism have been roundly discredited but his thoughts on the importance of fairytales – and their darker aspects – are interesting:
Children may be faced with deep inner conflicts and anxieties but more often than not are unable to express this verbally, so they may end up expressing fears indirectly, by fear of some real or imaginary animal, or fear of the dark, or such.
Parents may belittle these fears or altogether overlook them. Much of modern children’s literature may do the same.
But fairy tales confront these problems seriously and provide ways of facing such problems. Fairy tales can provide an outlet to anxiety. They frankly confront problems such as the fear of losing a parent or fear of dying. They also give hope that no matter how bad things may now seem that there is still hope of a happy ending.”
Adding to its allure, Coraline was directed by Henry Selick, a man with a proven talent for teasing the bizarre and beautiful out of fairytales – he previously made The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach.
Coraline is in UK cinemas from Friday 8 May.
