This Horrific Life: The Kids Are All Right
A look at five great horror movies where the kid is the hero
In a way, horror is kid stuff. Adults don’t tell campfire tales or read by flashlight with a sheet over their head. It is easy to dismiss silly things like ghost stories in the face of unrelenting reality. We may love horror as adults, but we don’t feel it the way children do.
Perhaps because of this, there are a lot of horror stories with kids in the role of the hero. Horror, through child protagonists, seems uniquely suited to tackle the difficult aspects of childhood experience and allows adults to tap into a nostalgic echo of their early scares.
So let’s give Junior the monster hunting kit and see how he does…
The Lost Boys
Like most horror stories about kids, The Lost Boys is about growing up. Strip out all the vampires and you are left with an awkward kid trying to navigate life in a new city, a brother who is suddenly more interested in girls than in hanging out, and a mother who is dating a creep. Even without the undead, it is a lot for Sam to be dealing with.
The movie takes its name from the characters in J.M. Barie’s Peter Pan stories and is a direct reference to the tribe of Santa Carla vampires who, unlike Sam, will never grow older. Their existence is care-free - aside of needing a steady supply of blood, they have no problems. It is meant to be an alluring proposition - it seduces Sam’s older brother easily enough - but for Sam the vampires represent the freedom and security that eludes him.
No wonder he wants to stab them all in the heart.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Both Ray Bradbury’s novel and the 1983 film of the same name tackle the issue of growing up in a less angsty way. We’re introduced to the pastoral small town beauty of Green Town (the same Green Town that serves as the setting of Dandelion Wine) and to two friends, Will and Jim. It is a world of pure Norman Rockwell style nostalgia - until Mr. Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival rolls into town to serve up a dose of reality.
Mr. Dark is a tempter and he offers to the people of Green Town their deepest desires. The crippled football star will have his legs back, the wizened teacher will have her youth returned, and the lustful barber will have his beautiful ladies. Never mind that their sorrows are a meal for Mr. Dark and his people, or that getting their wishes will drive them mad.
Regret, which is what plagues the people of Green Town, is a side effect of getting old. In fact, age is the very thing that Will’s father regrets most - he believes a younger man would be a better father for his son.Will disagrees, but for the two to reconcile their differences, they have to make their peace with the reality of death.
Cycle of the Werewolf
Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf, and the slightly sillier film version Silver Bullet, tackles the disconnect between the world of children and the world of adults. It does this by giving the main character, a 10-year-old paraplegic named Marty, the secret knowledge that a werewolf is responsible for a series of grizzly killings in the town of Tarker’s Mills. Naturally, almost no one believes him.
Almost everyone in his life treats Marty poorly. His mother seems unaware of his handicap and his father acts like he is a pet. His older sister is jealous of all the attention he gets. It is hard to tell which is more isolating: his wheelchair or his knowledge of the truth behind the killings.
The one person who does believe Marty, his crazy uncle Al (played in the movie by the living embodiment of the crazy uncle, Gary Busey), is essentially an adult sized kid. He’s a bridge between the worlds of childish fancy and the seriousness of adulthood. It is Al’s belief - and his silver bullets - that gives Marty the power to kill the werewolf.
The Gate
The Gate is one of the most overlooked horror movies of the Eighties.Thanks to a mysterious geode unearthed in his backyard and an incantation found on a heavy metal record, Glen (played by a young Blood God, Stephen Dorff) and his friend Terry accidentally open a gateway to hell - all while Glen’s parents are away for the weekend. Devilish imps pour forth as the boys, along with Glen’s sister, Al, try to find a way to close the gate. After losing Terry and Al to the clutches of a zombie workman, and growing an eyeball in the palm of his hand, the horror culminates in the arrival of a gigantic demon in the living room.
At the center of all these supernatural hi-jinx is the relationship between Glen and his sister. Al is a teen and, as she has grown up, she has withdrawn from their mutual interest in space and rocketry. The growing distance between siblings is a familiar theme in kid horror, even if in The Gate it is mostly just set up for the climax, which involves the launching a model rocket powered in part, presumably, by familial love.
The Monster Squad
The Monster Squad is a love letter to monster movies, mashing up The Goonies with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Dracula has come to town to bring about an age of darkness. With him are the other Universal Monsters: Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy and the Gillman, all re-imagined in the glory of Stan Winston’s special effects. It falls to the Monster Squad, a group of kids obsessed with monster movies, to stop them.
There is no life lesson to be learned from The Monster Squad (except, perhaps, that the Wolfman has nards). Instead, what we have here is the perfect depiction of what it is like to be a kid who loves monsters: fear mixed with awe, repulsion mixed with fascination, fun mixed with horror.
In an author’s note at the end of Doctor Sleep, Stephen King writes, “Nothing can live up to the memory of a good scare, and I mean nothing, especially if administered to one who is young and impressionable.”
Doctor Sleep, of course, is the sequel to the Shining, where we find out how former kid hero Danny Torrance turned out as an adult. Hopefully it isn’t like being a child actor and Danny, and all these kids, turned out all right.
There are tons of other kid horror movies - let me know your favorites in the notes!
This Horrific Life is a daily exploration of horror, covering movies new and old (and half-watched), games, comics, music and anything else even vaguely spooky.
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