A Series of Unfortunate Events | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Girls Gone Missing? Halloween and Monster Movies for Kids

Margot Magowan runs the blog Reel Girl , which focuses on gender equality in the media (mostly on the representation, or lack thereof, of girls) does a regular feature called “Girls Gone Missing”. With Halloween just around the corner, she did a Halloween edition of this feature and shared her impressions of the three Halloween/monster movies for children out this fall, ParaNorman, Hotel Transylvania, and Frankenweenie. noting that in all three movies there is a major skew toward male leads and secondary characters, with almost no female characters in any of them. Margot and the Reel Girl community see this as a major problem, not just for these movies but for children’s movies in general, because there’s no reason that some of these male characters couldn’t be girls without the story changing at all. To paraphrase one of her commenters, does the story in ParaNorman change that much if Norman becomes Norma?

There are so many girls who love Halloween and monsters and movies about them, who grow up to be women who love Halloween and monsters and movies about them. So why should they be left out of the story, or a token character? But it’s one thing to identify the movies girls are missing from and another to offer options that show strong girls taking the lead. So, I asked Margot:

What do you recommend as far as monster movies intended for kids, then? As the editor for MonsterLibrarian.com and the mother of a monster-loving boy with a sister willing to go along for the ride I’d be interested in what you DO think are good choices. We held Monster Movie Month in July, which, while mostly at choices for adults, was inspired by my son’s love of the classic movies, and the three of us picked some movie choices parents could share with their kids, but I’d love to know what you think. Halloween is our busiest month of the year and our children’s section is one of the most popular parts of our site and that’s something I would love to share there.

Margot asked the Reel Girl community for suggestions, and here are some of the titles they came up with.

Coraline
Scooby Doo (the animated series)
The Corpse Bride
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Hocus Pocus
Kiki’s Delivery Service
My Neighbor Totoro
Monsters vs Aliens
The Addams Family

As a Halloween title, I’ll toss in the Charlie Brown Halloween special.

The general portrayal of women in horror movies also came up in the discussion, but that’s kind of irrelevant to my question (although it’s something I would be happy to start an individual post for if you want). For those of you reading this, do you agree with their choices for Halloween and monster movies that have gender equality (or at least strong female characters who haven’t been sexualized)? Do you have additional suggestions? I would love to hear what you think!

Defining the Scary Story

In explaining horror fiction for reader’s advisory librarians in The Reader’s Advisory Guide, Second Edition, Becky Siegel Spratford defined it as

…a story in which the author manipulates the reader’s emotions by introducing situations in which unexplainable phenomena and unearthly creatures threaten the protagonists and provoke terror in the reader.

We argued with her definition of horror fiction in our review, because here we consider genres such as human horror and killer animals as subgenres in horror fiction, as do many, many readers.

When I talk about scary stories for kids, I’m talking about something a little bit different, though, because what I consider “scary” doesn’t necessarily easily fall into genres (and sometimes it’s not especially scary, but has a focus on Halloween, or on creatures traditionally considered scary). I decided to ask my Monster Kid what he thought about all this.

Me: Does a scary story have to have a monster in it to be scary?

Monster Kid: No, a dripping, dark wood where you are lost is scary. That can be a scary story.

Me: So there doesn’t have to be a monster for the book to be a scary story?

Monster Kid: No, getting lost far away from your village in the dark is scary even without a monster. Even when there’s no monster, that’s a monster.

There you have it. You don’t need the unexplainable, otherworldly, or supernatural to make a scary story a scary story.

Here’s a list of the kinds of things that fall beneath the large umbrella of “scary stories” in children’s literature, according to several scholars in the subject:

Nursery rhymes
Fairy tales
Where the Wild Things Are and other picture books
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The Graveyard Book
A Tale Dark and Grimm
The Vampire Diaries
Twilight
The Hunger Games

Whether all of these REALLY qualify as scary stories (or horror, for that matter), or whether I should include Halloween books and not-so-scary monster tales in the “scary stories” category here, is certainly up for debate. But that dark and dripping wood that emerged from the mind of my six year old son… well, he certainly scared me with that, more than any monster could.