A few days ago an exclusive trailer was released for ParaNorman, the newest film from the makers of Coraline.



You can watch the exclusive trailer here. It features more storyline and less Donovan, but it is un-embeddable. 

According to IMDB ParaNorman is the story of “A misunderstood boy who can speak with the dead [who] takes on ghosts, zombies and grown-ups to save his town from a centuries-old curse.” The film looks promising but it won’t stand out in the contemporary children’s cinema landscape. In fact, as a film about black magic, the paranormal, and monster mayhem, ParaNorman will stand as neat and uniform as a new tombstone amongst countless other movies of its ilk in 2012. Right now spooky is a commodity, and the cash cow is looking more and more like a tired zombie every day.

With gritty reboots being released monthly at the cinema, and entire sections of bookstores reserved for ‘paranormal romance’, those in charge of creating entertainment for children (and the young at heart), seem to have been given the direction to make it darker and spookier than ever. Spooky entertainment is nothing new, people have been telling ghost stories forever but right now it has reached a peak in popularity. I recently found out about Monster High dolls- the hottest new line of fashion dolls from Mattel (makers of Barbie).



Included in the marketing campaign is this (rather prolific) web series:



With its long-legged valley girl werewolves and zombies, Monster High is symptomatic of a pop-culture scene that has become saturated with spookiness. 

With all of these things going bump in the night, spookiness has diverged into two streams. The first is the completely neutered, facile, and trivial like Monster High. Here spookiness is reduced to a dress code and monster-based puns. I can only assume the imminent reboot of The Munsters will also run in this vein. The second stream, on the other hand, runs deeply and intensely. It’s hyper earnest. Monsters, ghosts, and magic are imbued with so much emotion audiences have no choice but to treat it with complete solemnity. Harry Potter and Twilight both run in this stream where spookiness is serious business, elevated to an almost religious level of importance.

To me, between these two streams there seems to be something missing. Between the vapid and the intensely solemn we have lost wit. There is a lot of room for wit in Spooky but thus far brains seem to be regulated to zombie food only. What I hope ParaNorman will revive is the ghoulish; the delight in the macabre that inspires the imagination and scares at the same time. It is time for spooky to get back its bite.

The problem is that spooky has become an aesthetic rather than an emotional response. Tim Burton has, of course, had a large part to play in this. As an auter his winning combination of twisty trees, striped things, and Danny Elfman music has established a style that many have drawn on. Using spooky as an aesthetic, however, isn’t enough to make a great film (as Burton’s later films clearly show) and simply juxtaposing spooky with mundane settings, like high school (see Harry Potter, Twilight, Monster High) while clearly popular, fails to employ the full potential of Spooky.

In my opinion the person who used spooky to its delightfully macabre best was Roald Dahl. In his children’s stories Dahl combined fear with wit and most importantly, dark humour, to create stories that both scared and inspired kids. By drawing on universal childhood fears like being lost or separated from parents and combining these with surreal settings, Dahl used an prevalent childhood emotion, fear, to make kids think. The added aspect of the surreal appeals to the part of the mind where dreams and nightmares come from, and it’s within dreams and nightmares that emotions are at their strongest. Combining the surreal with the emotive and adding wit and dark humour is the place where Spooky becomes magic.

Filmmakers who have used Spooky to its best, in my opinion, are Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle) and Jim Henson (Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal). Both scare the crap out of kids but leave them delighted and wanting more because they kindle an imaginative spark that gives the spookiness its magic. It is this crucial combination of thought and fear that makes Spooky work. Coraline, I believe, was made in this legacy, and I dearly hope that ParaNorman will be too.