Hello hello! This is Zabeth bringing you this week’s blog. Horror is a genre well-loved for it’s extensive use of fear, the play on emotions and thrill, as well as presenting some of the most unsettling visuals and stories that come to the media scene. But as the title suggests, we’re diving into the involvement of children in most horror media. I won’t spoil much here in the intro, without further ado, Enjoy Reading!~

Children as Horror

Horror as a genre is really fun because it's one of the only opportunities we as humans ever get to recontextualize our own negative emotions in a more positive light. Real fear, i.e., the sensation one might experience during an actual dangerous or unclear situation, is pretty unpleasant. When you're concerned about the well-being of yourself or others, the reaction you have to that generally isn't one you try to recapture. 

The horror genre, however, utilizes your own experience with the world and your ability to dictate what is or isn't a threat to provide you with a unique experience that gives you a similar reaction to what you might have when encountering a real danger - like jumping or screaming, except you don't have to worry about actually dying. 

With horror that focuses more on intensity, like slasher or possession movies, the creator is focusing on trying to give you a rush, a moment of panic that manifests as an actual physical reaction in you - one that, when not in real danger, can be kind of pleasant or satisfying after the fact. On the other hand, a more psychological horror is trying to play off your mind more than your body, giving you something to be nervous about and to linger in your head, again without the actual threat of harm. There's overlap depending on the movie, but those are the two big reactions you can expect out of horror, and anytime someone is trying to make horror, one of those reactions is what they're aiming for.

Horror creators use a lot of tricks to draw these reactions out of you. They're the classics: the jump scare, which obviously makes you jump; the depiction of violence, which makes you empathetically uncomfortable; and unnatural face or body, which plays off our expectations of how a person should look. These are to be expected when watching a new horror movie; they're staples because they've been and will likely remain effective for a long time.

So, my question is this: when a creator uses a kid in a horror project, what reaction do you think they're going for? And I don't mean as another character or as emotional bait or even as a victim of whatever true evil is in the fiction. I mean the scariest thing in the movie is supposed to be the child. Why do they do that?

Children in Horror

Let's not beat around the bush. I know you know what I'm talking about. It's important to make the distinction between something like "The Shining," a story which at times utilizes the innocence of a child dealing with a horrifying situation as a trick,  "Brightburn," which is about a kid who is scary, or it's supposed to be. Here's the thing, though: kids aren't that scary. 

"Brightburn" is supposed to be scary because it's, first of all, about a kid who can do something that no one else can, and second of all, it's a play on the Superman story - an origin most people are already familiar with, about a character who's well known for being extremely powerful. And third of all, "Brightburn" was bad, so who cares anyway? A normal kid like Lewis from Ohio triggers nothing in me. You could argue that a normal adult is equally unscary, but I recognize that one, almost every adult has significantly more physical power than a child, and two, that adults are capable of hiding their intentions and motivations in a much more convincing way than little Lewis would be.

I've never been scared of a kid, even when a kid does something that would be really upsetting coming from an adult, like screaming or hitting. The worst-case scenario is that it comes across as annoying or mean, and in the best-case scenario, it's almost cute.

Obviously, there's the rare situation where a kid does something truly awful, like killing someone, but at that point, it doesn't matter what the antagonist is anymore. There's been a horror movie made about literally any object you can think of killing people, from bongs to tires. The threats aren't specific to the thing anymore; now it's just the fear of dying, which is easy to talk about.

If I introduce a fictional stick figure named Bob and then introduce a second fictional stick figure named Bob and had Bob kill Bob, because there can only be one, even if I do it in the most visceral and shocking way possible, in the end, are you more afraid of stick figures or dying? Probably dying, but I don't know your life. The point is, kids aren't capable of doing a lot on their own as it is, so when a movie asks me to be scared of one, I always have to ask, well, why would I be?

Three Hypothesis

First, let's examine the classic stereotypical scary kid situation. There's a six-year-old dressed in old-fashioned clothes at the end of a hallway. She's doing something normal for a kid, like singing a lullaby or jumping rope. Maybe she's standing still, instead staring at the audience or a character. Maybe she even says some real hard [ __ ] like "you're going to die in here" or "he's right behind you" or something. 

Would that actually work on you if you were there in the hallway? I've been trying to put myself in the shoes of someone whose answer is yes, because I know they do exist, even if my answer is no. I've come up with a few theories for why it might work. The first is if you're a parent or work with kids or just really like kids in an appropriate way. When you become a parent, or so I've been told, your priorities change.The most important person in your life stops being yourself and starts being your child, and that can change the way you think about different situations, even if they're ones you've encountered before.

Suddenly, any kid in a horror movie stops being just a kid and starts being your kid, at least in your head. A movie like "The Babadook" is effective because it's mostly about the relationship between a parent and a child, and the child behaves pretty realistically and annoyingly, and that affects the mental health of his mother. I've never been a mother, or a father for that matter, and so for as effective as that movie is on me, imagine how much more it might be for someone who could see themselves in the depicted dynamic.

Now, is the kid in "The Babadook" the antagonist? No, it's the Babadook, but a significant portion of the Babadook's influence is through straining their relationship to the point of bastardization, and the kid's behavior throughout the movie plays a real part in that straining. I really like "The Babadook," but it's possible that someone with kids might like it a lot more, or potentially less, depending on how they respond to horror.

In this girl-at-the-end-of-the-hallway scenario, I'm not scared of the kid because it's not mine and I know that. But to someone who has a kid, even if it's not the little girl, someone who is so much more in tune with children as an adult, the question of what happened to make this child like this is suddenly more pressing. Were they hurt? What if your child was hurt like that? Are they trapped? Have they been manipulated by someone to do evil? The questions, which to me are related purely and wholly to my own self-preservation, suddenly take on a much greater weight if you have children of your own that you care about. I obviously care about the well-being of kids in general because I'm an average person, but I only stopped being one a couple of years ago, so my relationship with the whole concept is just different.

The second hypothesis I have about this is that it's somehow related to the uncanny valley in some way. Like I said, in my scenario, the little girl might be doing something that would be completely normal for any kid to do, but the thing which makes it threatening is the place that they're doing it. Hopscotch on the sidewalk is so normal that I likely wouldn't even register it as happening unless someone pointed it out to me. But if I had been exploring an old abandoned mansion and then found a little girl doing hopscotch in the attic, I might be a little more confused.

There's admittedly something very striking about witnessing someone taking a very normal action during circumstances when that action just does not apply. It's like getting into an argument with someone and instead of yelling or cursing, they just start laughing. It's clearly more aggressive to do the former of the options, but when someone reacts to something like that in a way that's so wildly out of left field, we're suddenly forced to question our understanding of the situation. Is this person mentally healthy? Do they see the situation as less intense for a reason I don't know about? What is it that they find funny?

We second-guess ourselves and become uneasy. I think it's possible that when we're in a horror situation, we expect to find something which is clearly a threat, and so when we turn the corner and see a little girl playing hopscotch, that expectation doesn't die immediately. Sure, we know that a little girl isn't normally dangerous, but if she's here and less scared than us, what does that leave us with? An overwhelming feeling that there is, in fact, something dangerous about her.

My last hypothesis, and the one which I find most compelling, is that one danger which we can recognize in actual children is their potential to misunderstand and react poorly to different situations. This feels a lot less like it applies to ghost girls and demon children, and more that it's about grounded, real-world horror.

There's a movie called "Goodnight Mommy" which illustrates this really well. After their mother receives a facial surgery that requires her to be bandaged during recovery, two boys start believing that the person who came home with her face obscured isn't really their mother. 

The specifics of the situation are complicated, to say the least, and there's a reveal near the end of the movie that recontextualizes a lot of the movie in a different light. But in its essence, the whole movie is about a child misunderstanding a situation and doing horrible things because of it. We've all been kids, and while we hopefully haven't done the things that the protagonist of "Goodnight Mommy" has, we can probably still remember a time when we reacted strangely to something we didn't understand.

A kid's understanding of reality is much more nebulous and open for misinterpretation than a functioning adult's. There's something worrying about the idea that a child is reacting calmly to something which scares you or is present in a place where they should not be. Because if they're not hellspawn or being possessed by one, then why are they actually here? What do they think is happening, and what are they going to do about it? It can be really hard to read a child's intentions.

So, these are my hypotheses. There's probably overlap between them, just like any other horror trick, but independently, I can understand why someone would be freaked out by them. It just isn't me. Maybe it speaks more to who I am as a person, but the first thing I think of whenever I see a little freaky kid appear in a horror movie is to lock them in a room and run far far away. Those kid legs aren’t chasing me down when I can drive. 

For a separate thought, somehow I do think of how children in horror can be an interpretation of how something like an innocent child associated with naivete can be corrupted by an evil force and not even by something like a ghost or demon but can be traumatized by harmful experiences that can lead them to grow up to spread the harmful experiences that they experienced. It’s a separate thought only though.

Thank you for reading this far into my blog! I hope you enjoyed reading this, just to preface that this is simply my thoughts and opinions alone, I do not mean any ill intent with this post. I’ll be posting again next week on Saturday! 

With matsalab,

Zabeth