Just Hear Me Out: Movies Should Terrify Children

There is a moment, partway through Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of The Witches, that has stayed with me for nigh on two decades.

In it, the young hero makes a desperate escape from the Grand High Witch (memorably and hideously played by Angelica Huston.) In the middle of the day, in plain sight, the Witch slowly stalks him, drawing inexorably closer, Satan herself disguised as a suave, middle-class woman.

I can summon this sight — the Witch cresting the hill — at a whim. It lives with me. For nights after I first saw it, I was a cowering wreck, perturbed by bad dreams and unable to sleep with the light off. To say it fucked me up would almost be an understatement. It was a viscerally unpleasant horror, a skin-crawling moment in which I came to terms with the fact that the world is filled with great evil, and that sometimes, your parents can’t help you.

And that’s a good thing. I don’t begrudge Roeg or Roald Dahl the nightmares that they gave me, just as I have no problem with the sleepless nights inflicted on me by the scene in Babe: Pig in the City in which a dog nearly drowns to death, hanging upside down by a chain, or the walking terror that is Large Marge from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. These were moments that do what all good art should do: they moved me, filled me with an unspeakable series of images that felt like something scraped off the very surface of the human id.

To imagine that all children’s art has to be of the Pixar variety — weepy, humane stories of resilience against the odds — is to underestimate the power of art, and to underestimate the expansive understanding of children.

Wes Craven, the famous horror film director, once said that terrifying art doesn’t create fears; it actualises them. Children already know that there’s something up with the world. They have experienced the strange, wordless terror of being in a room of drunk adults. They have realised, thanks to the death of a pet, or a grandparent, that all things pass; that change is nerve-shredding, and everywhere.

Terrifying art doesn’t teach children these things. It merely re-acquaints children with them, tapping into the wellspring of fear and confusion that lies under the very surface of what we tend to call “regular life” and giving words and images to what were otherwise snaking, abstract fears. And only when something has been named can it be confronted; only when horror has been pinned down can it be overcome. For children as with adults, there is something deeply therapeutic about being forced to confront the things that lurk in the shadows.

Take, for instance, Coraline, that contemporary bed-wetter. The button eyes are the surface-level horror. But the deeper one is the stark realisation that you do not understand your parents; that they do things after you have gone to sleep; that the world, and their world, does not revolve entirely around you. That’s fucking scary. And thank God that it is.