My spooky season starts in August every year. Halloween is my favorite aesthetic, I’m low-key goth anyway, and I never run out of horror movies to watch.
I’ve already been watching so many movies.
I used to be easy to scare: basically, if it had ghosts, I was terrified. This still works on me a little bit — I struggle in particular with the suspense leading up to a ghost reveal — but for the most part, nothing scares me anymore.
Being afraid isn’t the only emotional experience you can have with horror, though. There’s sad horror, like The Sixth Sense and Martyrs, and there’s exciting gory horror like Saw. You can experience dread and nostalgia and anger and a genuine self-questioning depression.
Yet there’s one movie that nails fear in a way that nothing else does — a primal fright that makes me feel small and helpless like when I was a child, unsafe in your own home, and where nothing is the way it seems.
That movie, of course, is Coraline.
It’s a classic setup: a young girl and her family move to a house away from the life she used to know. It’s an old, scary sort of house, where she lives in close company with total strangers. Her stressed, busy parents don’t have time for her.
When she explores, she finds herself in — essentially — the most horrible portal fantasy you can imagine. She has to overcome fable-like trials in order to save herself, her family, and her friends.
This story is familiar. You’ve read it in a lot of fairy tales and coming-of-age stories about that weird, difficult time in a kid’s life where they shed the last trappings of young childhood and start hurtling toward adulthood.
That familiarity is why it’s so effective, in part: we all read stories like this as a kid, and it takes you right back to childhood to read them again. More than that, growing up is a universal experience, and the metaphors at hand are terribly effective.
I was already a proper adult when Coraline came out, but I’m still not immune. Being a child was a scary experience. Far worse than being an adult, where my problems are much bigger, more tangible, and higher stakes. Childhood is a time of being very small with very little control. When your parents aren’t friendly, there’s nowhere safe to go.
There’s so much more to Coraline than its flawless execution of ancient tropes, though. It’s one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. The stop-motion animation is incredible. The art direction is unmatched. The eerie, lovely score matches the beauty-terror of the rest of the movie.
Coraline also pulls no punches. It knows kids can handle the worst of the worst, and at times, it savagely attacks with imagery that still chills me.
It might be a movie made for young people, but it’s great at any age. If you let it take you on the journey, you might find it’s one of the genuinely scariest movies you’ve ever seen.
(image credit: Focus Features)
