A Child's Garden of Horrors

Children don't fare well in the realm of adult horror movies. Consider all the children falling like tenpins in pinafores to the vengeful spectre in The Woman in Black released earlier this year, or poor little Natasha Calis in The Possession, in theatres this Friday, an American tween acting out in ghastly ways when she is invaded by a malignant spirit sprung from a "Dybbuk box."

Yet within one particular sub-realm of horror movies, children fare better. In fact they are the designated audience for juvenile horror-comedy, which is enjoying something of a banner year in the latter half of 2012:

• ParaNorman, still in theatres, is a stop-motion-animated feature about a boy who sees dead people, and uses that talent to help defend a town against an invasion of zombie-like spectres.
• Hotel Transylvania (Sept. 28) is an animated adventure about the titular hideaway for supernatural creatures, operated by Count Dracula (voiced by Adam Sandler). The Count loses his cool and goes into protective father mode when his daughter Mindy (Selena Gomez) is courted by, horrors, an ordinary mortal. (The amusing voice casting includes Kevin James as the Frankenstein monster, Steve Buscemi as Wayne the werewolf, and Cee Lo Green as Murray the Mummy.)
• Frankenweenie (Oct. 5) is director Tim Burton's stop-motion animated remake of his own 1984 live-action short film, about a boy scientist who goes to extreme measures to revive his beloved family pet "Sparky."
• Monsters Inc. (Dec. 19) is a new 3D iteration of the 2001 Pixar hit about monsters who invade children's closets to gather the energy caused by their fear. The movie is being re-released in anticipation of a sequel, Monsters University in 2013.

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Hotel Transylvania features a cavalcade of animated creatures including a werewolf, a mummy and Frankenstein's monster.

If a justification of kiddie horror is required, perhaps there is no better witness for the defence than Allison Abbate, the producer of Frankenweenie and a series of prestigious films including The Iron Giant, The Corpse Bride and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Abbate struck up a professional relationship with Tim Burton early, acting as an artistic co-ordinator on The Nightmare Before Christmas. She subsequently drafted Mickey Mouse to play a mad scientist's assistant as co-producer of the Oscar-nominated 1995 cartoon short Runaway Brain. She says she has a natural affinity for genre movies.

"One of the things that draws me to the kind of films I make is that I like stories that push the boundaries of imagination," she says in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "I like to play with the things that scare us, the things that delight us, and the things that make us feel something.

"Anyway, when you think about the history of storytelling, people have always liked being scared," she says.

But a film that strictly indulges in scares for the sake of scares would be unrewarding. Frankenweenie offers an emotional twist on the macabre Frankenstein story that inspired it.

"The core of the story is take the Frankenstein story from the point of view of: What if Dr. Frankenstein doesn't reject the monster, and actually loves it and takes care of it?

"It's like taking the horror of the Frankenstein story and turning it on its ear because it's really a love story," she says.

"There is so much heart and there is so much lovely stuff in this movie that having it be too scary would have felt like a disconnect. You would have felt like you were in two different movies," she says, adding that the film has a lesson too.

"It shows that you need to take responsibility for the things you create."

As Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox offered sophisticated pleasures for both kids and adults, Frankenweenie pushes the envelope with Burton's choice to release the film in black and white (albeit in 3D black and white). She is not worried that a lack of colour might deter audiences.

"Kids are not freaked out by stuff like that until we tell them to freak out," Abbate says. "If you give a child something fresh and new and interesting, they respond really well to it."

Abbate says kids can also handle the movie's potentially challenging themes as well as they can handle the horror elements.

"I don't think you should ever talk down to kids," she says. "Because they are smarter than adults much of the time."

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Classic horror-comedy for the kiddies

IF you think marketing horror-oriented material to youngsters is a new phenomenon, think again.

Hollywood has been at the game for ages. As a matter of fact, two classics kiddie-horror offerings hit Blu-ray next week.

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"Frankenweenie" is a new stop-motion, animated comedy from director Tim Burton. (POSTMEDIA / HANDOUT)

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein may be the most beloved of the sub-genre. The 1948 film (which looks darkly fabulous in a pristine new digitally scrubbed rendition) casts Bud Abbott and Lou Costello as a pair of delivery guys who face supernatural danger after delivering a couple of crates to a Florida House of Horrors. The boxes contain the coffin of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange takes over the role from Boris Karloff).

Adding to the spooky chaos is Larry Talbot/the Wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.), who shows up for this immortal exchange with Costello's hapless Wilbur:

Larry: "You don't understand. Every night when the moon is full, I turn into a wolf."

Wilbur: "You and 20 million other guys ..."

Abbott and Costello were vaudeville vets who managed to parlay some ancient burlesque routines into a series of hit films. While their audience might have been primarily adult, this was the film that best translated to kids, who experienced the terrors of Universal's stable of horror icons in the safety of a comedy context. (Costello was one of the more childlike comedians of his generation, and kids have always tended to love him too.)

The other kid DVD is Mad Monster Party, a 1969 stop-motion animated feature from Rankin-Bass, the people who gave you bizarre Christmas perennial Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Remember the weird flavour of The Island of Misfit Toys in that holiday special? That permeates this monster mélange starring the voice of Boris Karloff as mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein, who decides to hand the reins of his monster empire to his nephew Felix, much to the chagrin of Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, the Hunchback and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.

Ultimately, this is an example of how the cultural freedom of the '60s could translate to a haphazard approach to narrative. But on the plus side, the puppets (with design work from Mad magazine artist Jack Davis) are lots of fun, and speaking of the '60s, voice work includes the talents of Canadian folkie songstress Gale Garnett and the late Phyllis Diller.

Take this line of dialogue as the best warning regarding Mad Monster Party: "You don't get invited. You get committed."

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 30, 2012 E8