Gothic for Children

DiscussãoGothic Literature

Aderi ao LibraryThing para poder publicar.

Gothic for Children

1frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:50 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

2frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:50 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

3housefulofpaper
Abr 21, 2018, 7:04 pm

>1 frahealee:

Interesting question. I'm at a bit of a disadvantage as there were many children's authors I didn't read when I was a child (my early embracing of super hero comics and science fiction had a flipside of rejecting classic children's literature, historical novels, pretty much everything Gothic unless it was in science fictional dress). That said, I would have encountered some of these authors' works in school, or on television (in dramatisations but also in straight readings - the BBC had a programme called Jackanory, in which every week a book was read in five fifteen-minute instalments, Monday to Friday).

I suppose there's the perennial issue of defining "Gothic". A non-supernatural story might well tick a lot of Gothic boxes but how far would it differ from simply being an adventure story in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson (or can we say he's all Gothic, not just Jekyll and Hyde and some short stories? Maybe we can..

On the other hand, some works with the full complement of ghosts, vampires etc. may not have the mood of Gothic at all - in fact be light fantasies that produce the opposite effect of "Gothic gloom"...

So, with due regard for my lack of knowledge and confusion over exact definitions and allowable categories, perhaps I could diffidently offer some names:

As noted above, maybe Robert Louis Stevenson

Likewise Rudyard Kipling?

Two authors active when I was a child:

Joan Aiken

Leon Garfield (in the Stevenson/Charles Dickens mode)

A modern author whose done some M.R James inspired ghost stories for children, Chris Priestley

Neil Gaiman, of course (The Graveyard Book, Coraline.

I've noted before that British weekly girls' comics (as in comic books, rather than comedians) kept the Gothic flame alive well into the 1980s. There was a supernatural-themes title called Misty, a sort of stablemate of the Science Fiction/Fantasy title 2000 A.D. There have been a couple of recent hardcover reprints, collecting serialised stories that ran in the comic.

Of course works originally for adults are also repackaged for (older) children. Look online and lists of Gothic fiction for children include Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Wuthering Heights...

4frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:50 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

5alaudacorax
Abr 22, 2018, 3:56 am

>2 frahealee:

How about:

Y = Young Frankenstein - PG rating.

6frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:50 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

7alaudacorax
Ago 25, 2018, 5:48 am

My mind is boggling at the thought of Steve Buscemi as a werewolf. Got to see that.

8frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:50 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

9alaudacorax
Ago 25, 2018, 11:07 pm

>8 frahealee: ... trying to balance the indulgence with LO's Henry V commentary...

I take it you mean Bruce Eder's commentary on the Criterion edition - for a moment there I thought you'd got hold of one by Olivier himself - 'Why haven't I got that on my DVD!!!' Not that I'm Olivier's greatest fan - think he's overrated, to be honest - but it's a pretty iconic film, so of course I've got a copy.

10frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:51 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

11frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:51 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

12WeeTurtle
Editado: Out 4, 2018, 1:13 am

Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein

Perhaps not what you meant for this thread, but I got this from Early Reviewers here and I adore it.

13frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:51 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

14WeeTurtle
Out 5, 2018, 5:05 am

<13

Would Bridge to Terabithia really be considered Gothic? I read it back in high school and am thinking about reading it again.

What I love about Mary, is that it's an artistic biography about Mary Shelley and how she wrote the book, and it's pretty accurate from what I've learned. People had complaints about the dark nature of the art, but I'd say it's no worse than what shows up in Beetlejuice or The Adams Family,

15frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:51 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

16frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:52 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

17WeeTurtle
Out 8, 2018, 6:14 am

>16 frahealee: I believe that's where I saw it, hence my asking. ;)

Now I'm curious to go find the book again. The used store might have a copy but I like new when I can, especially if I plan to keep something. I haven't seen the film for Bridge as I don't like sad (I'm much better with horror). Alas, my aunt took her grand kids to see it and they hadn't read the book. She then started vetting movies just in case. If I had heard, I'd have warned them about it.

I'm not one for dressing goth, or having been in that phase really, minus in my own head. I find that a bit of amusement. I'm fair, being British and Nordic background, little, I dress conservatively, rarely wear make-up, and baby pink is really my best colour. The darkness, gargoyles, lonely oceans and eldritch oddities all live in my head and come out in writing and art.

Funnily enough, I was a total wuss as a kid. I was afraid of Earnest Scared Stupid and I hid under the blankets during the massive Ursula scene at the end of The Little Mermaid. I didn't start getting into horror until later, about the same time I started having issues with depression and anxiety. It's apparently not uncommon for anxious people to like horror movies. I suspect it comes from the horror movie moving feeling of anxiety to an outside target, instead it always floating mysteriously around inside someone's head. I wonder if gothic writing did some of the same thing, in that sour moods could be projected out of one's head by putting it to something else.

There's a book called I, Strahd based on a vampire character out of a DnD campaign setting called Ravenloft that is entirely gothic and gothic stereotype. (They even have an adventure for Masque of the Red Death.) I love the flavour of the setting, and that's a book I've quite enjoyed, though it's not something that would really be called literary. Mad dad looked it over a while back, and told me that it reads just like Dracula, plot-wise, until he becomes a vampire, then it shifts into more fantasy stuff.

Strahd is a shared character, and I've read three renditions of him, but Elrod's is my favourite. He's shifted over time in appearance, with him looking much more like your typical "Ricean" vampire with aristocratic clothes and long hair, over the midde-aged, venerable sort he was back at the start.

And this post is off topic. Not really for kids, but I imagine teens who like fantasy might be interested in the Ravenloft books. I think they are largely out of print now, but I think 6 were re-printed back in the early 2000s, Vampire of the Mists, (Strahd is the main antagonist there) among them.

18frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:52 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

19WeeTurtle
Dez 2, 2018, 1:25 am

I can think of a couple specific movies or entities for a couple letters up there but they are not really kid friendly. U is For Underworld (vampires AND werewolves!) but it's more teen and up I think. And X is for Xenomorph! Of course, if you don't already know what that is, google it and you'll see why it's not kid friendly.

On vampires I just remembered a movie that I I don't think is thought about much and that's The Little Vampire. I haven't seen all of it, but the parts I have seen were so cute! Here's the trailer on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRHWVeVFVf8

20alaudacorax
Dez 2, 2018, 9:55 am

>19 WeeTurtle:

I wonder if anyone's done any real research on the effects of traditional horror (as opposed to the modern slashers) on young kids. When you think of the gruesome original nature of a lot of fairy tales and children's stories things seem to have drastically changed over the last century, century and a half, on what is suitable for children.

21frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:53 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

22WeeTurtle
Editado: Dez 7, 2018, 6:27 am

>20 alaudacorax: There has definitely been a shift in the cultural view of things, death is a big example. Fairy tales come from eras where the deaths of close relatives were fairly common, as well as being at home at the time rather than in hospital or care facilities as those simply weren't a thing. We are much more distant from it than we used to be so are more affected by it. It has, perhaps, fallen a little bit into the unknown in a way.

I think whether children are afraid of something has a lot to do with exposure and the method of exposure (or lack of it). Taking the biography of Mary Shelley that I think I posted up top somewhere. There were comments about kids being scared or disturbed by the "zombie" dissected frog. However, that image isn't really scary accept for the knowledge that it's a dead thing and it shouldn't be sitting up. It's not showing violence or speaking bad language or anything. It's just creepy.

This brought up in a small way in The Little Vampire when the vampire finds out that the protagonist isn't afraid of him and is surprised by it. This, of course, means the movie gets to happen.

23WeeTurtle
Dez 7, 2018, 6:27 am

>21 frahealee:

The Little Vampire is a 'cute' approach to things like vampires, so I'd call it child friendly, especially as the bad guys are somewhat ridiculous with Ghostbusters looking apparatuses and there's not blood anywhere that I recall. Plus, vampire cows.

Underworld and series is definitely fighting and blood and probably some mature-ish themes. People transforming into things, biting each other, etc.

Xenomorphs are the alien species from all the "Alien" films. So those are definitely in the potentially/likely traumatic territory for people not into that sort of thing. The creative designer for them was H. R. Giger.

24alaudacorax
Dez 7, 2018, 12:42 pm

>22 WeeTurtle:

I was actually wondering whether any really scientific investigation has ever proved that it's in reality harmful to children to have the wotsit scared out of them by ghost stories, fairy tales, horror films or whatever, even to the point of giving them nightmares. Presumably the powers that be of my childhood and well into my teens assumed so, as even the kind of horrors made in the '50s, early '60s would have been 'X-rated' and, thus, 16+ in the cinemas (UK).

I can't help feeling that a child growing up without ever having a few nightmares would have had a deprived childhood. I'm reminded of something I read perhaps forty to fifty years ago. Some Israelis were starting to get worried about the way they were bringing up children: the children growing up on the kibbutzes were being carefully given what seemed to be the ideal upbringing - then it started to appear they were raising good citizens, but not future creaters and innovators and leaders.

Apart from anything else, I suspect that if everyone, ever, had had an idyllic upbringing nobody would have created the subject matter for this group's threads ...

As above, I'm making my own distinction between horrors, which are rooted in fantasy, and slashers which are based in reality - everyone would agree (presumably!) that it's bad for young kids to learn umpteen ways of eviscerating people slowly, and I gather that the connection between screen violence and violence in society was proven beyond doubt way back in the sixties.

25WeeTurtle
Dez 8, 2018, 1:20 am

>24 alaudacorax:

I'm not really sure. I believe that we are over-censoring things. I know that the movie ratings and such that are used in the USA are often a step higher than they are in Canada, and people worry a lot about exposure but I think a lot of that creates conditions for fear. The more we shelter kids from problems and challenges or fears, the fewer opportunities they have to learn how to cope. I know it is a concern in psychology that parents that see to everything their child needs and hides them from life problems creates teens that have no coping skills or ability to face the everyday problems that come up in real life.

I'm told as a child I had night terrors, and my cousin mentioned that she knew how to deal with her child's night terrors was from dealing with me. I was too young to remember so if I can react that badly to something that had no outside stimulus (that we could see), then hiding things doesn't seem to have much of a point.

Only once I do I recall something I saw giving me nightmares, and that was something that I associated with Doctor Who, and I think it was less that the scene was scary but that it was too real to me and I could imagine the situation a little too well. Alas, that moment of fear has deprived me of many years I could have been watching the show but I refused to until only a year ago or so. It's entirely possible that all this time I've been blaming the wrong show. I think I was about 4-5 at the time.

26alaudacorax
Dez 8, 2018, 11:32 am

>25 WeeTurtle: ... that had no outside stimulus (that we could see) ...

Perhaps your subconscious thought some rites of passage were missing from your life so manufactured some simulations?

27WeeTurtle
Editado: Dez 8, 2018, 10:02 pm

>26 alaudacorax:

Maybe. I found it interesting to note that authors and creatives types in the strange end seem to have a penchant for psychological things like night terrors. H.R. Giger, P.K. Dick, Lovecraft, etc. It might just be because we are looking at them more closely than other people, but I found it interesting to note.

There does also happen to be some ghost activity in my family, including a haunted house back in New Brunswick. Sadly, it's gone now. We're trying to track down a picture.

I don't think I was ever scared of ghosts, but mom would also comment about things like that. I was watching Poltergeist and mom was in the background, "Poltergeists don't act like that!" And then gripe at Hollywood for making these things evil and scary.

28WeeTurtle
Editado: Dez 9, 2018, 6:19 am

>26 alaudacorax:

Just watching a documentary right now called "Why Horror?" that's looking at why people like to be scared or watch horror in general. It hasn't talked about very young children, but it brings some of this thread to mind. It's brought up how watching a scary movie is often considered a right of passage of sorts, sort of like spending the night in a haunted house on a dare from friends, and the like, and that watching the first horror movie through represents an achievement.

Seeing horror through contained circumstances like movies or movie theaters (and I'll add video games) makes it something that we can experience in a controlled fashion which means we can also run away from it. Since we know it's the movie we are afraid of, we also know what we are scared of and that makes it something we can try and "beat" such as by sitting through the whole movie. Jurassic Park scared me so much as a kid that I left the theater. Eventually, piece by piece, I did see the whole movie, and I remember that this was such an awesome thing to adolescent me. I suddenly felt more powerful.

I think here how some of gothic horror is fear of the unknown. A moan on the wind is creepy until we know what's causing it.

People do get desensitized to horror, going by the narrator's brain scan in this documentary, and that's been an argument again horror and scary things. But in a way though, it's also an armament of some kind. It's common enough in my experience that after watching horror movies and such, my friends and I critique the film, even if it's just talking about how stupid the characters were and why they didn't try x or y to save themselves or kill the monster.

I encountered an article a while ago in a random Reader's Digest magazine that looked at gamers and dreams, and found that people that play a lot of video games (2 hours a day) tended to be disturbed less by nightmares. It wasn't that they didn't have nightmares, but that they were more likely to keep sleeping and deal with the nightmare rather than wake up afraid.

It seems to amount to exposure functions as a sort of mental practice for dealing with frightening things.

Oh! Enter Walpole and The Castle of Otranto! (Now I REALLY need to read that).

They have here that Gothic horror becomes the birth of modern horror, and takes horror from "moral instruction" (those nasty fairy tales and nursery rhymes) and makes it entertainment.

This documentary isn't bad. :)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3135424/

29housefulofpaper
Dez 9, 2018, 10:47 am

>25 WeeTurtle: it was less that the scene was scary but that it was too real to me and I could imagine the situation a little too well .

Oh, this rings a bell with me. It wasn't a drama though, it was the decision, whether by the BBC or the Government I don't know, to schedule Public Information films (PSA's in the States?) just before or just after the early afternoon programme for pre-school children.

So I would be sat down (alone, while my mother got on with some housework) to watch Trumpton or The Herbs and be forcefully introduced to the dangers of, inter alia, driving on bald tyres, driving without a seatbelt, drink-driving, carbon monoxide poisoning, placing a rug on a polished wooden floor ("you might a well have laid a man-trap"), not having a chain on the front door (we didn't have a chain on the front door, which became a source of anxiety), introducing rabies into the UK by smuggling an infected pet across the channel, swimming in dangerous waters (dangerous sea-tides or treacherous overgrown lakes and rivers), "stranger danger", flying kites near power lines....

30frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:53 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

31WeeTurtle
Dez 9, 2018, 11:42 pm

That scene is still nightmare inducing to me because I never did know what it was, and it's just creepy. It was a guy with something similar to an oxygen mask on, but a black one like fighter pilots wear, and he was looking around and then tried to pull it off. There was a red line along his nose where he was moving it, and a scene later he's screaming and the mask is spraying red something (blood, four year old me imagined), and he (I think he) is screaming like crazy. I think it was the face covering that was spraying something that got to me most.

Maybe it was a fighter pilot or something and some dead guy wound up in his oxygen supply and he was wondering what the deal was, cue upset at realization he's breathing some guy's blood.

I find that a less disturbing option.

The documentary did go on to talk about Japanese horror and cultural tie-ins, Resident Evil and the creation of the "survival horror" video game genre, and the potential affect of horror on young children. That part wasn't really answered.

I remember safety PSAs consisting of fitness, house hippos, and a cartoon light bulb that explained electrical safety with catchy jingles. Among other things.

32frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:53 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

33WeeTurtle
Dez 11, 2018, 1:44 am

>32 frahealee: Well, the zombie thing would depend on how fit you both happen to be. ;)

I think finally watching Jurassic Park helped a lot as far as getting me into scarier movies. I remember being proud of myself for it. I'm still not totally sure how I went from "Rated R? I can't watch that! Not allowed! Not allowed!" to "Horror! Weeeeeee!!!" but I'm pretty sure my step-sister had something to do with it. I also think at some point it became a matter of bravery and honour. I got a little tired of being a wuss and missing out on things because I was too scared of the non-scary film.

Helplessness was a thing though, now that I think about it. Earnest Scared Stupid bothered me a lot, and I left the room eventually. The monster scared me but I think it was all these kids meeting and getting turned into wood by the monster that bothered me more. My step-sister called me back in the room once the people figured out how to fight them, and it was a monster "death" spree and I thought it was the most wonderful thing ever. The dog was saved!

This reminds me of a Gaiman quote I encountered recently: "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten"

This goes back to that documentary that traces horror origins into morality stories with villains like the Big Bad Wolf. (Of course, in those days, women had to go find someone manly to defeat the villain. We're getting better about that. ;))

34frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:53 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

35WeeTurtle
Dez 11, 2018, 6:26 am

>34 frahealee:

I've never seen that film...only the beginning, and just far enough in to understand that it's "EYE-gor." ;)

36alaudacorax
Dez 11, 2018, 8:15 am

Oh, you really should finish it, >35 WeeTurtle:. It plays hilariously with so many scenes you'll be familiar with from old horror films. You probably should be familiar with all the Frankenstein classics first, though.

37frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:54 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

38WeeTurtle
Dez 12, 2018, 12:45 am

One day, I will re-watch piles of movies so that I can hear the commentaries attached to them.

It occurs to me, that with the talk about horror and overcoming your monsters/demons/video game villains, is it not a trait of Gothic horror that this is often difficult or impossible? Like it's a horror that sticks around and the ending is not always happy.

39frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:54 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

40housefulofpaper
Dez 24, 2018, 6:08 pm

I do like The Nightmare Before Christmas.

What about Gremlins? or Batman Returns?

I remember the 1947, and what must have been the 1973 TV Movie version of The Miracle on 34th Street being shown one Christmas in the 1970s, and both holding my attention.

A Val Lewton film I haven't seen yet is apparently set at Christmas, The Curse of the Cat People.

Similar to your experience of The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Amazing Mr Blunden is a film I haven't seen all the way though, but it's a Gothic ghost story aimed at children, but with a big budget and excellent cast (it was Lionel Jefferies' follow-up to The Railway Children).

Television:

I was just a few years too old for this, but there's a lot of affection online for the BBC's 1984 adaptation of The Box of Delights.

The "Charles Dickens" episode of Doctor Who from 2005, "The Unquiet Dead".

If you can find it (it's available as part of a DVD box-set in the UK, the Goodies' pantomime episode, "The Goodies and the Beanstalk" (who are the Goodies? imagine a sort of politically-, or at least satirically- inclined Monkees (they did get into the UK charts more than once) operating right through the 1970).

Merry Christmas and a happy and peaceful New Year to all.

41frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:54 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

42WeeTurtle
Editado: Dez 26, 2018, 6:06 am

The Nightmare before Christmas is one of my favourite holiday movies, and movies in general. My favourite Christmas movies are still The Muppet Christmas Carol and Die Hard. ;)

Good King Wenceslas is a song I forgot about a lot, but my favourite "version" is actually just a little music exercise my sister and I did when learning to play flute (me) and clarinet (her). I'd start and we'd alternate lines for a verse. It was fun at the time. :)

We listened to Nana Mouskouri's christmas album yesterday and it's something my friend loved so we' just listen to nothing else when decorating the tree. It's still where I get my version of songs I (try to) sing. I've decided to try and seek a casual vocal coach just so I can learn to adequately cover the ranges I mangle so I stop offending myself.

43housefulofpaper
Dez 27, 2018, 7:09 pm

>41 frahealee:
I don't have a favourite version of Good King Wenceslas (I assume you mean recording rather than arrangement?). It's a carol that we learned at school and so that "right" thing to do, I instinctively feel, is to sing it myself, rather than listen to someone else sing it.

Mind you, the muscle memory, or whatever it is, that's telling me that, belongs to the little boy I was 45 or more years ago, so I'd better NOT try to sing it as I did then!

My mother always played Perry Como's Christmas album (or one of them. Was there more than one?) in the run-up to the day itself, but I gather in recent years she's transferred her affections to Michael Bublé...

44frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:54 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.

45frahealee
Editado: Jun 21, 2022, 7:54 pm

Esta mensagem foi removida pelo seu autor.