 This video is brought to you by 80,000 Hours, a non-profit that wants to help you find a fulfilling career that genuinely improves the world. More on that after the video. In 1931, the legendary silent film director Fritz Lang made his first movie with sound, a dark thriller called M. The first thing that we hear in that film is children playing a game to a nursery rhyme. It might be the earliest example of a horror film drawing on a nursery rhyme, but it was far from the last. In The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock juxtaposes children seeing a Scottish folk song with the ominous Gathering of Birds. In Evil Dead, a possessed woman sings a creepy song to the tune of Ring Around the Rosie. And then of course there's Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street, which writes a nursery rhyme about Freddy Krueger. Today, the creepy nursery rhyme trope is completely encoded within our culture. Honestly, it would be trite if it wasn't so effective. But that brings up a question. If nursery rhymes are meant to be sung to and by children, then why the hell are they so friggin' creepy? Let's take a closer look. Around the turn of the century, the folklorist Alice Bertha Gum put forth a dark theory about the origins of the children's rhyme London Bridge. According to Gum's theory, the seemingly innocent children's song is actually about the ritual sacrifice of children under the bridge. This theory is based around a piece of folklore that said bridges would be collapsed unless the body of a human sacrifice was buried in the foundations to watch over them. It's a chilling myth that recontextualizes a seemingly innocuous rhyme. There's a similar myth about Ring Around the Rosie, which claims it's actually about the Black Death. And it's said that Mary Mary, quite contrary, is loaded with hidden references to Mary the First, the Queen known as Bloody Mary. According to this theory, the silver bells and cockleshells of the song are euphemisms for torture devices, thumb screws, and pairs of anguish. The maidens all in a row are supposedly references to Iron Maidens. Could these dark origins account for our current obsession with creepy nursery rhymes? Well, not exactly. You see, there's no actual evidence of Iron Maidens being a real torture device at all, and Bloody Mary died before thumb screws were brought to England. As it turns out, the Ring Around the Rosie myth rings hollow too. That song has lots of variations that have nothing to do with disease, and the oldest known version of it appeared in a book of nursery rhymes from 1881, hundreds of years after the Black Plague. The myth of human sacrifice around London Bridge is equally spurious. Most modern historians don't really believe there's much credence to Lady Gum's theorizing. But while these dark histories might be exaggerated, they're likely born out of a kernel of truth. Plenty of nursery rhymes undoubtedly do have meanings that have been lost to us today, and that's because of the way nursery rhymes operate as traditions of folklore. Nursery rhymes are born out of the oral tradition. They're not really written like we imagine songs being written now. Rather, they evolve organically, with new words being created to existing tunes. This is how you get Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Ba Ba Black Sheep, two different songs both using the same melody from the French tune Avoudirais-Je-Maman. The music of these tunes stays relatively fixed, but the words change to reflect the cultural values of those singing. Just think of the way that schoolchildren today will paradise jingle bells with Batman references. For most of human history, lullabies and nursery rhymes were ever shifting. But in the late 18th century, technological and cultural changes conspired to lock a lot of the nursery rhymes that we now know into place. Printing became cheaper and more available, while a new cultural vision of children as innocent and pure was developing. As a result, nursery rhyme books became popular throughout Victorian England. When these books were printed, they locked in words to the rhymes, tying them to a very particular cultural worldview. In the centuries since, a lot of those cultural references have been lost, but the circulation of these books has continued. So now many of these songs are filled with cultural references that we just don't understand. And the human mind loves filling in the unknown with horror. There's a couple factors that compound this. Around the same time many of these nursery rhymes are shifting to the forms that we know, the brothers' grim were publishing dark fairy tales full of children being eaten by monsters. There's no doubt some cultural bleed over from these as we apply this sort of darkness to nursery rhymes. The Victorian era that codified many of these books also coincided with the birth of many of our modern horror tropes. Gothic horror was an exciting new form of literature and movements like spiritualism were finding footing around the Victorian world. Even today, many horror films still use Victorian manners and aesthetics as set pieces due to the cultural associations we have with that era. But the horror in nursery rhymes runs deeper than just Victorian associations. Media theorist Vivian Sobchak has noted that much of horror media is marked by a sort of opposition. She says that horror films deal with reversals of iconography that threaten the natural order of things. Horror films deal with moral chaos, the disruption of the natural order, and the threat to the harmony of hearth and home. Today, few things represent these ideas as well as children. Scott Derrickson, the writer and director of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, explained, In the modern world, nothing is more revered than children as they are the embodiment of innocence. And for that innate innocence to be contaminated by something evil or corrupt or dangerous is inherently mysterious and disturbing. So that's why we love finding horror in children's imagery. It reflects deep societal fears about the corruption of innocence. Nursery rhymes are meant to be simple and playful. They're meant to reinforce the cultural roles that children have in society. So when they're removed from this context and inverted, put into situations that reflect darkness and the threat of violence, the effect can be chilling. It's worth noting that this conception of children as being pure and innocent is actually a relatively modern invention. For a lot of human history, children were treated a lot more like small adults. They were part of the labor force, and they weren't seen as something that needed constant oversight and protection. Child mortality rates were also much higher back in those days, so the concept of the death of a child probably wouldn't have been quite as scary as it is today. Back in those days, people probably wouldn't have found the same horror in creepy children that we do today, because they had a different cultural association with the child. But a lot of this shifted during the late Victorian era, the very same time that nursery rhymes were being codified and horror tropes were starting to emerge. Our culture started to put so much more value on children, and so it's only natural that the concept of childhood being corrupted or threatened became a great fear. A few generations on and that manifests as movies about creepy possessed dolls, or those weird twins from The Shining, or in nursery rhymes. Oh, and for what it's worth, not everyone discredits the creepy origin stories of nursery rhymes. Iona and Peter Opie were two folklorists who spent their whole lives studying nursery rhymes, and they believed that Lady Gum's hypothesis about the London Bridge may have had some credence to it. And in 2007, when building work was being done for a tourist attraction, workers uncovered bodies, buried beneath London Bridge. So maybe, just maybe, there is a tinge of horror built into some of these nursery rhymes after all. This video is brought to you by the non-profit 80,000 hours, who I'm genuinely excited to have as a sponsor. That's because 80,000 hours isn't interested in selling you anything, they're interested in helping you. You have 80,000 hours in your career, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. That's a long time, and it means that your career is one of the biggest ways that you can make a positive impact on the world. 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