 Coraline by Neil Gaiman. It was published in 2002 and a lot of people thought it was too scary to be published for children. But it's more of a children's book than it is an adult book. So people were like, I don't know where to shelve it. And similarly to Harry Potter, I'm not sure if it was the editor or the publisher, but some such person allowed their kid to read the manuscript of Coraline and the kid loved it. So they were like, okay, I guess we'll publish for kids. Come to find out the kid in question was terrified of Coraline, but that's why they loved it. I was also made into a film by Leica Studios and the film is also considered to be pretty scary for children's movie. I know a lot of adults that won't watch it because they think it's too scary. But what is Coraline? What is Coraline about? And what makes it so scary? Because like, I mean, it's just a little girl in a house and there's a kitty cat and what's the problem? So Coraline, non-spoiler synopsis is about a little girl named Coraline Jones and she with her family move into a new house. The house has been split up into three units. It used to be one big house and now it has three apartments kind of in it. And so her family's moving into one of these apartments. Coraline is exploring her new house and she comes upon a door, a door that her mother tells her doesn't go anywhere. It's a door that's left over from when this house was like all one big house, but they've sealed off that door because that's now like the other side of that door is where a different unit is. So it's a door to nowhere. However, the door to nowhere might actually go somewhere. And the somewhere that it goes looks like our world, but not quite. So I've often said that Neil Gaiman has a talent for taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary, taking the extraordinary and making it ordinary. So it takes the mundane and makes it magical. The magically makes it mundane. So I think it's very fitting to talk about the kind of horror of the mundane that is present throughout Coraline. And this is his approach, I think, a lot of the time to making stories scary. Coraline is not the only scary thing that Neil Gaiman has ever written. Quite a few of his scarier stories, they share this kind of horror of the mundane. I feel like it's kind of like a neighbor to the old Hitchcock kind of adage about whatever I don't show you is much scarier than what I do show you. So Hitchcock was famous for sort of like having things happen off-screen that you don't actually get to see or that it fades to black because, again, it's like it's left to your imagination and whatever you're imagining is probably way more intense and personally scary than what any director could ever do. Gaiman does a bit of that. I think what Gaiman nails is the fact that things that are just slightly wrong can often be so much scarier than things that are super duper obviously wrong. So when any one person finds the most scary in a story will differ, of course. But I do think that the reason that Coraline is so unsettling is because it erodes one's faith in oneself. And the villain that Coraline ultimately defeats in the story, while there is like an external component to it, it's much more of an internal conflict and an internal battle that she wins. So the other mother that's on the other side of that door, this other side, it's scary and unsettling not because of how different it is from our world, because of how similar it is to our world. It's because it's almost indistinguishable from her real mother or her real house. We rely on our ability to recognize threats in our lives to keep us safe. You see a monster, it looks like a monster, you fight it or you run away. You know what to do. But what if the monster looks, sounds, acts, talks, smells like your mother? What if it appears to be something that should be the like ultimate figure of trust and faith for a child? And what if it's not like a horrible, obviously villainous version of mom? It's actually better, nicer, kinder, more generous? How do you guard against that? So in some ways, I think that Coraline is kind of a modern day Hansel and Gretel story. A quick refresher. Hansel and Gretel, they go into the woods and they get lost in the woods and they find a gingerbread house. And the witch who owns the gingerbread house invites them to eat all of what they would like from the gingerbread house. And they do. And they get trapped by the witch because the witch wants to fatten them up so that she can eat them. The children, they end up killing the witch and putting her in her own oven and escaping and going home. So Coraline, she finds herself in something of a gingerbread house. When she goes to the other side on the other side of the door with her other mother, this other mother is a kind of a witch and it has kind of built a gingerbread house. It's not made of gingerbread, but she's offering lots of temptations for Coraline, lots of like honey in the trap to make her want this day of her own volition. And I think these stories, stories like Hansel and Gretel and Coraline, they make you now also fear your ability to resist. So before I said that it would make you question your ability to recognize a threat, now you're being forced to reckon with the idea that you might not be able to resist temptation even if you do realize that you are under threat. Like, could you be also trapped in a web made of your own heart's desires? Would you be able to walk away from that? Now, I do want to talk about Coraline's parents. This is one of the things that I think that the adaptation misses the mark. And it's not insignificant to me that it misses the mark on this. And I, to be clear, I really, really love the film. I think it's a really amazing film and a really excellent example of stop motion animation. And I would like a lot of game and stories to be done that way. But anyway, so I do like the film to be clear. But the way that they handle the parents, I think Borderline ruins the movie for me. In the book, my reading of the book is that Coraline, the character, is in some ways an unreliable narrator. Not that she's lying or intentionally deceiving the reader, but she has a slightly skewed perspective. In the book, Coraline's parents, they're not like a borderline criminal in their negligence of her. They just don't have the time or the patience or the inclination to spend as much time or as much money as Coraline would like them to on her. And Coraline construes this as, like, wicked neglect. And reading the book, I don't know how I would have felt about it as a child. I will never know. But reading it as an adult, I find it to be a pretty realistic portrayal of the sort of unreasonable expectations of a child. It's not that Coraline, again, is deceiving you the reader, but what her parents are failing to do for her, it's kind of unreasonable of her to expect them to do so much for her. And by the end of the book, Coraline realizes that though her real parents didn't drop everything constantly to do whatever she wanted, they do love her and they do care for her and they do do things for her, whereas the other mother that was showering her with gifts does not actually care for her, doesn't actually love her. And she sort of realizes love isn't just about giving people whatever they want, whenever they want. In the film, Coraline's parents are legitimately borderline criminally neglectful. They are kind of terrible parents. Coraline is not exaggerating when she's upset about it. They ignore her, they neglect her, they force her to live in really unsanitary conditions. They feed her inedible things. Again, in the book, Coraline complains that she doesn't like it when her parents try recipes. And when I read it, as an adult, it reads to me like a kid who considers it child abuse to have broccoli on their plate, not that her parents are actually feeding her inedible food, which in the film, they seem to be feeding her inedible food. And I get that a film, it's more difficult to have an unreliable narrator. But in this case, because Coraline's not actually deceiving anyone, it's just that her expectations don't kind of align with reality. I don't think it would have been difficult to have the parents be pretty reasonable and Coraline just be kind of a brat about it. Maybe they feared that it would make Coraline less likable as a character if her parents seemed kind of nice and she was upset. But it ruins the message of the film to have the parents actually be awful. Again, Coraline in the book, she realizes that she has been kind of unreasonable and she arrives at a new appreciation for her parents. In the film, it's genuinely hard to see how anyone, let alone a child, could ever come around to being okay with parents like hers and with the treatment that she gets from them. And my other gripe with the movie, I don't know that it's a gripe, but YB. YB is a character that was added to the film, he doesn't exist in the book. His name is YB, which is short for why born, aka why were you born. That's how he explains the name and that's also what Coraline then calls him later, she calls him why were you born. This is so bizarre and so cruel and so dark, you would think that this is only in the film because well, Gaiman wrote it in the book and we're doing a loyal and faithful adaptation, but he didn't. That character does not exist in the book at all, that was completely invented for the film. And I get inventing a character that's a friend for Coraline to talk to to like, so she's not talking to herself, he's able to offer some exposition to the audience, I get adding a character like that. But why call him why a born? That's so, I just, why, why was that choice made? He could have been, he could have been a weird neighbor kid, he could have been strange, he could have been, he could have been a quirky character, but that is just so dark, I don't understand it. So yeah, I don't have an answer for this, this is not leading to me being like, ah then I learned that the reason, I don't know the reason for it, I will never know the reason for it. I'm genuinely asking if you can think of a reason why they would choose to do it like that. Did they think the movie wasn't dark enough already? Okay, so I opened by talking about how people thought Coraline might be too scary for kids. So is it for kids? Should kids read Coraline? I mean every child is different, but broadly I would say yes, it's for kids and it should be read by kids. Gaiman has proven time and again that he has a better sense for what kids are interested in than most people, and even better than most kids, because kids often can't articulate what it is that they want and Gaiman can. Children have sought out and enjoyed scary stories since time immemorial. Ghosts, stories around a campfire, urban legends to scare playmates, pranks to scare each other, fairy tales in their original form with their terrifying and bloody ends. And I hear you saying okay just because children seek it out, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's good for them or that they should be given it. I mean gingerbread houses, hello. But a quote that is quite often attributed to Gaiman, which is actually a him paraphrasing a quote from GK Chesterton, fairy tales are more than true not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. Dark and scary stories like Coraline, they allow people of all ages really, but we're talking about children, they allow children to confront something that is frightening, that is unsettling, that is troubling in a controlled and safe environment, to begin to formulate ways to overcome it, to begin to contemplate how that dragon might be beaten. Children have fertile imaginations, and if they are confronted with something like the other mother from Coraline, they will more often than not place themselves in the shoes of the protagonist and wonder what would I do? And Coraline is not an extraordinary child, she's not a Mary Sue, she's not a chosen one, she's just a regular girl, and she's not saved by having the kindest heart worth a guardian angel. She doesn't have a guardian angel, well I guess she has the cat, but like Coraline is a pretty average kid. Coraline teaches kids who are reading about her that the world is a dangerous place filled with things that might appear to be good or kind or desirable, but that it pays to be on your guard, to be wise, be brave and be tricky, and to not take for granted the less shiny, less pleasant things. But have you read Coraline? Do you want to read Coraline? Did you love it? Did you hate it? Have you seen the movie? Do you agree with me? Do you disagree with me? Do you think kids should read scary stories? Or do you think absolutely not that we should protect them at all costs from scary stories like this? I would love to know your thoughts, these are just mine. 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