Adults are always much more disturbed by Coraline, because I think it’s a different genre of book for them. From a kid’s-eye view, it’s an adventure. It’s about a little girl who goes up against something bad and wins, and they never have any doubt that she’ll get into trouble, and it’s cool, it’s okay, it’s like The Wizard of Oz. Adults, on the other hand, are reading about a child in danger, and a child in danger is a much stranger, more difficult field of literature to cope with, I suspect. Once you’re a parent, reading about a child in danger is really problematic.Maybe The Graveyard Book, then, isn't as scary to y'all because you aren't parents yet.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Gaiman on scary children's stories
From this Montreal Mirror interview about Coraline:
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I enjoyed this film a lot, and I can understand how it could be somewhat disturbing to adults. I felt pulled, in a way. I related to Coraline, yet I found myself also relating a lot to the parents as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's the same parallels and contrasts we talked about in class as well...having different impacts on adults and children. And even now, we (the college population) are considered adults, yet because we are not parents, we are almost in a third level of comprehension in our reading. I believe we are the middle ground in the way we interpret things. We still remember our child-like qualities, them having not been too far gone, yet we are also beginning to deal with everything that is being an adult, with the exception of children. It's very interesting. I wonder how my perceptions of the world and of literature will change when I DO become a parent.
Having never looked at it from a parent's perspective but now having it brought to my attention, I am intrigued by this perspective. This prompts me to look at the different degrees as well as types of scariness. In the case of The Graveyard Book, any form of spook factor or chilling would have to come from the psychological fear of a parent imaging their child in danger. I don't think readers, both adolescent and adult, are going to be spooked by the portrayal of the ghostly figures in the book (not as much as the characters within at least, such as Scarlett and her mother). The reason why the ghostly characters in the book do not even remotely scare me (in reality, the idea of random apparitions unnerves me, especially the ones that died a brutal and unjust death and then comes back and haunts people) is because they are depicted as caring and protective and from time to time seem to have held on to their humanistic nature. Granted, everyone's perception of what is scary varies as does for everything else. So as for the scary factor found in The Graveyard Book for parents and young adults alike, the scary in it all is that this is a situation that is within the realm of possibility. It is possible a whole family might be murdered in the middle of the night and a family member escapes. It is possible that one might end up at a graveyard at some ungodly hour. It is possible for a kid to venture out on his/her own and find guardian figures throughout the journey. It is possible for a person to have a fight a personal battle and come out on top. It is all possible, every little bit of it. Maybe the fact that the content is easy for a reader to relate to and the content holds some form of truth to where the words can leap off of a page and touch our minds and reason, this scares us.
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