Home » Posts tagged "Monster Kids" (Page 3)

The Scary Stuff: What’s Really Too Hard for Kids To Handle?

There are always limits we place on children’s reading.  Sometimes those limits can be pretty arbitrary. Children of course, aren’t necessarily interested in why we make those limits. They just want to read what they want to read,

One reason we place limits  is that it makes us uncomfortable. At least, it makes a lot of us uncomfortable. Mostly we want to protect our children from the evil of the world, not give them the opportunities to unsettle or terrify themselves.

Fear is a strange creature. I can hear gleeful stories about undead robot zombies daily from my seven year old, but faced with a bumblebee he freezes. The line is very thin sometimes. Larry the pet werewolf has joined my son’s odd cast of imaginary friends. Sometimes Larry is a friendly puppy. Sometimes he’s a protector. And sometimes he’s scary, mostly to my five year old, who gets freaked out by the howling in the dark at bedtime. We appear to be stuck with Larry, a creature who embodies all the contradictions to the ways my son deals with fear. Kids’ reactions to what they read and what they see can be so different from ours, and what we find disturbing may be a key clicking open a lock on a door to a room they need to visit. Alternatively, it could really frighten them. But life is less rich if we avoid everything that might evoke emotions that can be difficult to deal with.

As a parent I see these contradictions and the accompanying discomfort differently than I do as a librarian. As a librarian I might try to guide a child to something that seems more age appropriate or warn them that the book she’s chosen has intense content, and that it’s okay to put it down, but I don’t think I would completely refuse to give a child a book. I have to trust that parents are aware of and supportive of their child’s reading. As a parent I have absolutely told my kids that there are some books, movies, television, that they are not ready for yet. The Monster Kid is angling to watch Night of the Living Dead, and that is not going to happen.

It’s important to include kids in the discussions of why you think they aren’t ready to read or watch something. They can learn from you, and you can learn from them. The knowledge can make us better at understanding the other person and respecting boundaries. And to express all this better than I really can, I’m going to share a link to a blog entry by Mini Lee, who I think has some interesting things to say about all of this from the kid’s point of view. As uncomfortable as some of the books and media kids are interested in may make you, the essential thing is that there has to be enough trust and respect there to be able to hold a conversation about it.

Posted on May 29, 2013 by , Reply

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.

Posted on August 8, 2012 by , 2 comments

Monster Movie Month Is Coming Up: Are You A Monster Kid?

The Monster Kids documentary Kickstarter project got me thinking about what it means to be a Monster Kid. When the classic monster movies first came out, you could only see them in theaters, for a limited time. My dad, born in 1945, might have seen Godzilla in the theater, but I’m not sure how available monster movies really were after they finished their movie theater runs. Maybe you could see them on television, but it wasn’t like you could get these movies on demand.

The seventies and eighties rolled along and with them came a series of books I have encountered over and over in many, many libraries; the Crestwood Books Monster Movie Series. Here’s an article from Rue Morgue about these books tribute to them from James at Cinemassacre. You can see that they influenced him not only to become a monster-loving kid but also a reader, a writer, and now a no-frills moviemaker. In terms of reader engagement, it doesn’t get any better than that.

One thing he talks about in his video is how impossible it was to actually SEE the movies he was reading about. These books were responsible for introducing a whole new generation of children to monster movies, movies that weren’t really even available for them to see. Unfortunately these books are no longer in publication, and most of them were so well loved that you might not find them in your library today. I can tell you how beat up they were when I was weeding library books fifteen years ago- I had to fight to keep them on the shelf. Bless the wonderful school librarian at my son’s elementary for keeping them safely on the shelf- they have had the same exact effect on him that they did on kids my age (or just a little older). Midnight movie hours also became popular with a certain crowd. There were a lot of these shows that were local, and Sammy Terry, the host of the show here, was certainly memorable- heck, now he’s considered part of local history. Of course, as we moved on into the eighties a lot of movies started to be available on VHS, but that doesn’t mean they were easily available. My dear husband went through some rather convoluted methods to get VHS copies of his favorite Japanese monster movies, not an easy thing before the Internet was available. Maybe you remember the advent of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the show that encouraged you to videotape it and send the tapes around to other fans of B movies, grainy copy after grainy copy.

As we moved into the nineties, it got easier to order movies, first on VHS tapes and then on DVDs, because it became possible to order online. Dedicated websites, Youtube and streaming video have radically changed the availability of information and of the movies themselves. Stuff that used to arrive at my house in envelopes from Hong Kong can now be accessed through Netflix streaming. And while it’s not USUAL to have a Godzilla obsessed six year old, said child can watch videos from the movies on Youtube, DVDs or streaming video. He can explore Toho Kingdom and find pictures of movie monsters using Google Image Search. He can learn about Ray Harryhausen just by typing the name into a search box in Wikipedia. He can even borrow his dad’s videocamera and film his own Godzilla movies. The idea that sixty years ago none of this was possible is incomprehensible to him. Only seeing movies in the theaters? Trading videotapes? No internet to watch videos of the Zone Fighter Monsters?

Note to librarians: even with the Internet, and multiple options for watching movies, he keeps checking out those Crestwood Monster Movie books. Having now brought home the Mad Scientists book he now knows more about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the Invisible Man than I do. So if you have them, for gosh sakes KEEP THEM!

Today’s Monster Kids have incredible resources at their fingertips and don’t even know it. But what they do have, still, is that love of monsters and the creativity it inspires. Whether you saw the original Godzilla in the theater, learned about him from the Crestwood Movie Monster books, were mesmerized by midnight movies, traded videotapes with other monster movie lovers, or saw giant monsters for the first time on Netflix streaming, there is the engagement and enthusiasm that teachers and librarians hope for when it comes to reading, understanding, and taking it to the next level. And that’s awesome. And in honor of that, this year we’ll be making July our Monster Movie Month. Got a favorite monster movie or idea for a book/movie tie in? Comment below or email us at monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com

Posted on May 19, 2012 by , Reply
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