That the series “monster High”, of which a new film is expected this 2022, will again be a sensation among the youngest, it is not strange. Children’s terror, a logically attenuated terror, where monsters are used to talk about inclusion and bullyingIt’s been a trend for a long time.
In the case of “Monster High”, its protagonists, Draculaura (a vegetarian vampire daughter of Dracula), Frankie Stein (the daughter of Frankenstein), are young and flirtatious teenagers who attend a high school for monsters, where the fangs and seams on the body are the “vibe”.
inclusive
When did children start to prefer vampires and zombies to Barbies and superheroes? Since they noticed the seams of those other anachronistic “monsters” that responded to paradigms outlined in the middle of the last century.
In contrast, the new monsters appear as embodiment of the imperfect, and the struggle to fit in. This is the case of “Vampirina”, the Disney Junior series that tells the story of a little girl who moves with her family from Transylvania to Pennsylvania, and must adapt to being the new girl in the neighborhood, while keeping her condition and her problems a secret. strange companies: a gargoyle and a ghost.
The truth is that vampires, ghosts, werewolves, monsters, cemeteries, haunted houses (the list of topics or hashtags is huge), are trending among teenagers a long time ago: the horny “Twilight” saga is proof of that.
And in that segment are inscribed the movie revival like “Scream” or “It”: the fifth part of the saga of the killer in the mask came 25 years after the premiere of the first; and the adaptation of the novel by Stephen King that the Argentine Andrés Muschetti took to the cinema, promoted the revision of other eighties sagas. And the inspiration in that decade of more current series, such as the Netflix production “Stranger Things”, with all its copies.
Among the youngest, the approach to terror is another. The one who proposesHotel Transylvania”, which shows another side of Dracula: not as a lethal bloodsucker, but as an overprotective father who, after losing his wife at the hands of humans, builds a shelter so that all the monsters can vacation safe from civilization: the franchise is now in its fourth installment, which premiered directly on Amazon Prime this summer. An approach to the difficulties of fitting into a “normal” world that often instills terror.
Premise that is repeated in a relaunched classic: “crazy addams”. The series of the sixties had a second chance in the 90s: the films of 1991 and 1993 (with Raúl Julia, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, and Christina Ricci) are still seen by millions on Halloween season. And another animated update arrived in a pandemic (with deliveries in 2020 and 2021) with the same story that was born in comic format more than eight decades ago: Homer and Morticia are a passionate and gloomy couple, who live in their dark mansion with two children who they have fun planning to kill each other, a grandmother who is a witch and a butler who never understands if he is really alive.
skeletons
There are also options for the most reckless, those who don’t want sinister but funny characters, and are encouraged to look inside their closet before going to sleep. “Coraline” (2009) is a kind of disturbing version of “Alice in Wonderland”, but based on the novel by Neil Gaiman (his series “Sandman” will be released in the middle of the year on Netflix). And tells the story of a misunderstood girl by his parents that he finds a portal to another dimension where everyone, including his family, has buttons instead of eyes.
Coraline at first loves her new mom and dad, but soon discovers that they are not what they seem. The film received critical acclaim and grossed over $124 million worldwide. A success under the umbrella of the gloomy aesthetic that Tim Burton imposed: he detected early on the desire of children to peek into coffins, skeletons and horrifying beings.
The frustrated illustrator who worked at Disney drawing cute creatures one day got fed up, and imposed his unmistakable aesthetic: a mixture of the horror stories of Edgar Alan Poe and the settings of sharp and irregular angles of German expressionist cinema.
“The strange world of Jack” (1993), of which Burton was a producer, bears his stamp: the story of Jack Skellington, a skeleton who dreams of being the new Santa Claus because he is bored of officiating as king of “Halloween Country”, is already an icon pop. And the boys today buy, three decades after its premiere, the merchandising of their characters (it is worth watching the documentary on Netflix about how the film was conceived).
Burton later repeated the formula with traditional animation in “Corpse Bride” (featuring the voices of Jhonny Deep and Helena Boham Carter, fetish actors in the director’s cast of “Batman”), a dark tale in which Emily, a corpse bride, seeks the love of Victor, a lugubrious young man who is unfortunately engaged. And again in “frankenweenie”, about a boy scientist who is saddened by the death of his puppy, and decides to bring him back to life emulating the plot of the quintessential gothic novel: Frankenstein. And that links with another hit by Stephen King made into a movie: “Animal Cemetery”, which in 2019 had a revival with a children’s cast three decades after the original.
Nostalgia
It is that the end of the eighties and the beginning of the 90s was a window for many children’s and adolescent fictions with nods to terror (there are also noted the almost 100 episodes of “Tales from the Crypt” that HBO issued), and its relaunch was also explains from marketing by the appeal to nostalgia of those who today share these sagas with their children: there is one of the cult series of the genre, the ninety “Are you afraid of the dark?”, which told the story of Midnight Society, a group of young friends who gathered around a campfire to tell each other paranormal stories.
Also “Eerie, Indiana” NBC series that was later seen on Fox Kids, and that follows the story of Marshall, a boy who recounts the strange events that occur in the small town where he lives: girls who give their first kiss in a graveyard, schoolteachers with haggard eyes and crazy eyes, children undergoing hypnosis.
Marshall was played by Omri Katz, also the protagonist of “Hocus Pocus” (1993), the classic about three witches who return from hell to keep the souls of children. Starring Bette Midler, the film will soon have its long-awaited sequel (Sarah Jessica Parker would return), as happened with “Bruges” (with Anne Hathaway and Octavia Spencer), which returned in 2020 also thirty years after the 1990 original: it had Angelica Huston as the queen of witches dreamed of by the pope of the children’s novel, Roald Dalh.
But both sagas barely flirted with the disturbing: it was “Goosebumps”, the series that aired between 1995 and 1998 (and that today Disney + will replace with 10 new episodes) that redoubled the bet. His plots were much darker and more terrifying: living dolls that sow chaos, masks that turn children into decrepit old men, and monsters disguised as school librarians that stalk students.
Based on the successful series of books by RL Stine, “Shaking chills” marked a generation of small followers of horror and the sinister, and it was a winning franchise: in 2015 a film adaptation was made and in 2018 the sequel was filmed. Both raised more than 250 million dollars.
Of course, in “Goosebumps” there was no blood or disembowelment in the manner of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” But it scared the little ones, to whom the adults never believed that their doll was alive and that it was looking to harm them: a plot similar to that of “Chucky”, the cursed doll that had a new film in 2019 and premiered a series in October 2021 (it was seen by 9.5 million people and renewed for a second season), in one more example of return with glory of the eighties terror (her film debut was in 1988) that she takes up again in a serious horror film as “Annabelle”, the vintage doll that instills fear in the saga that had its last episode in 2019 and awaits a new installment.
Finally, a saga that is perhaps one of the most successful of the eighties in the genre, has just returned: “Ghostbusters: Legacy” premiered this summer with a pre-teen cast led by Finn Wolfhard (“Stranger Things” and “It”), Celeste O’Connor (“Selah and the Swords”) and Mckenna Grace (“Annabelle 3”), three names associated with new horror sagas, to which the original Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Sigourney Weaver joined, to link with the daddies. The formula that promises to revive the franchise to take advantage of the rise of children’s terror.
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