After its schism from the horror genre, the children’s horror trend adapted to a family-friendly existence. In accordance to new genre expectations, the violence, gore and terror that had been part of Gremlins or The Gate was replaced with comedy, and the focus on children was enlarged to include adults. As children and parents were filling the cinema seats and screens, the pre-teen increasingly found himself represented in family films and addressed as part of American family dynamics, in an unassuming and rather understated shift from the previous norm of young child and teenager seen in films of the 1970s and 1980s. As the pre-teen ceased to be a conflicted and challenging notion, the focus of children’s horror shifted to the demands of an adult-dominated family audience; that is to say, children’s horror titles fell in line with broader expectations of the family film to entertain the children without hurting the sensibilities of their parents. For the most part, this meant adherence to the PG rating and mainstream family values, foregoing the edginess of the 1980s. With the wall between children and horror now partly restored and the pre-teen
identified as a de facto demographic, how did children’s horror navigate concepts of horror and childhood?
The 1990s were a time of acute change — for horror and children’s horror, as I explored in the previous chapter, but also for the family film and even the family itself, which was transformed by a drastic paradigm change in western parenting culture. New ideas about the role of the child and the
153 parent emerged during this period and theories of attachment proved very popular, inspiring the mainstream child-raising philosophy known as attachment parenting. This practice was described to American parents by Dr. William Sears in the bestselling The Baby Book, first published in 1993. As the name implies, attachment parenting entirely revolves around physical and emotional proximity between parent and child. The ideal attachment parent “follows the child’s lead”416 and actively fosters attachment through practices like extended breastfeeding, “babywearing,” bringing the child into the family bed to sleep and the use of non-authoritarian forms of discipline. The basis of attachment parenting is the positioning of the child right at the core of family life, a principle that reshapes not just the child’s position but that of the parent, who is envisioned as constant willing giver as well as constant learner. “Remember,” Sears admonished his readers, “your baby is not just a passive player in the parenting game. Your infant takes an active part in shaping your attitudes.”417 Babies and children would also shape family life more generally, as illustrated by Sears’ description of the attachment families he observed:
Attachment parents also seemed to enjoy parenting more; they got closer to their babies sooner. As a result they orchestrated their lifestyle and working schedules to incorporate their baby. Parenting, work, travel, recreation, and social life all revolved around and included baby — because they wanted it that way.418
Indeed, parents of the 1990s were devoted to their children and often engaged in sponsored activities like family days out or family holidays to child-friendly locations,419 with a view to enjoy their parenting and family life. Attachment Parenting International claims that these practices are “anything but new,”420 yet Sears realised how strongly they collided with the mainstream parenting
416 Attachment parenting International, "Frequently Asked Questions,"
http://web.archive.org/web/20080317033556/http://www.attachmentparenting.org/faq/general.shtml#what isap.
417 William Sears; Martha Sears; Robert Sears; James Sears, The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby -- from Birth to Age Two, Second Edition ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003), 11. 418 Ibid., 17.
419 Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America, 221. 420 Attachment parenting International, "Frequently Asked Questions".
154 philosophies of previous decades, admitting that his recommendations were “rather foreign to the [...] mind-set we’ve all been exposed to.”421 To be sure, Sears’ ideas were different enough — and became popular enough — that TIME recently named him “the man who remade motherhood.”422 This shift in the status and position of the child within the family was not restricted to attachment parenting philosophy: Taking Children Seriously, a movement founded in 1994,423 elevated the child to position it on the same level as the adults in the family, rejecting coercion in favour of “common preferences.”424 The 1990s also witnessed the rise of a demographic known almost exclusively for its devotion to children; this was the Soccer Mom, who “[paced] the sidelines of her children’s games, [wearing] T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like ‘I don’t have a life. My kids play soccer.”425 As described in the New York Times, “Soccer moms of the 1990’s were the ‘supermoms’ of the 1980’s. Many of them have kicked off their high heels and replaced them with Keds to watch their kids. If you are a soccer mom, the world according to you is seen through the needs of your children.”426 Though not every mother was a Soccer Mom or an Attachment parent, families in the 1990s
generally included children centrally in their lives as parents “appreciated children’s sense of wonder and spontaneity and sought to benefit from these qualities.”427
Family films of the period circulate these attitudes too. As Peter Kramer has pointed out, Hollywood in the 1990s was notorious for its “obsessive concern [...] with family issues.”428 The family was often used as ensemble character, as in The Addams Family and The Addams Family Values or The
Flintstones (Brian Levant, 1994), and the films were preoccupied with addressing and restoring
421 Sears, The Baby Book, 11.
422 Kate Pickert, "The Man Who Remade Motherhood," Time, http://time.com/606/the-man-who-remade- motherhood/.
423 Sarah Fitz-Claridge, "How Did Tcs Start?," Taking Children Seriously, http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/node/48.
424 "Common Preferences and Non-Coercion," Taking Children Seriously,
http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/common_preferences_and_non_coercion. 425 Neil MacFarquhar, "What's a Soccer Mom Anyway?," The New York Times 1996. 426 Ibid.
427 Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America, 164.
428 Peter Kramer, "Would You Take Your Child to See This Film? The Cultural and Social Work of the Family- Adventure Movie," in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Murray Smith Steve Neale (London, New York: Routledge, 1998), 294.
155 balance and unity within the family, particularly in relation to parent—child ties: films like Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (Randal Kleiser, 1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993), Jingle All the Way (Brian Levant, 1996), Jumanji (Joe Johnston, 1995) and the Home Alone series all feature narratives of families brought closer together. Interestingly, what sometimes differs between these narratives is how this balance is restored and where the responsibility is placed. In films like Mrs. Doubtfire, where the focus is more adult-driven, the narrative is driven by a parent’s love for his children (that is, his family), while films like Home Alone, who divide their attention between the adults and the children, tended to also highlight the child’s need for the family and his desire to move toward greater appreciation for his parents. As critic Hal Hinson noted, just as Kevin is “underappreciated and misunderstood,” “the point of ‘Home Alone,’ [...] is that Kevin, through his experiences, learns a little bit about self-reliance and appreciation for his family.”429 Jumanji similarly places a high level of responsibility on its hero, the child-adult Alan: it is through his adventures in Jumanji that Alan learns the importance of demonstrating gratitude and love to his father in order to keep the family
together. Alan’s lesson sets in motion a chain of prosperity so strong it reaches well beyond his nuclear family and into the community, even preventing the death of another set of parents and the crumbling of that family when Alan persuades the couple to abandon their child-free holiday plans. The adult-focused family films of the period therefore tend to address parental shortcomings, namely a neglect in prioritising the child, while the more child-focused family films like Jumanji and Home Alone also identify the child’s lack of appreciation for the extent of parental love as a second and equally important reason for family dysfunction in their narratives. But this discourse changed as the decade progressed. The shift is notorious in the Home Alone series. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (Chris Columbus, 1992) continues to present the balancing efforts of Kevin and his family toward mutual appreciation but the same is not true in Home Alone 3 (Raja Gosnell, 1997). The story focuses on a new child, Alex, and while the film’s events lead his family to develop greater
appreciation for him and question their lifestyle in order to prioritise him, Alex himself does not
156 undergo significant character growth. The two-way street toward family union that had been
established in the first films is thus substituted by a model where the onus is entirely on the adults. Similar messages are found in other films of the late 1990s, such as Liar Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997), in which a father is led by his son to self-improvement and family togetherness, or Jingle All the Way, which was received as having a “valuable message” about “the quality of family relationships and the need to make time for the kids.”430
This shift is subtle but important. As Bazalgette and Stapler have noted, western family films subscribe to a distinctive adult perspective — it is Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (Joe Johnston, 1989) and not Sis, Dad Shrunk Us431 — but as the 1990s progressed this orientation seemed to develop an ideology similar to the parenting trends of the period, namely a conception of the child as precious432 and the idea that adults need family closeness just like children, pursued by the most zealous proponents of attachment theory.433 This focus on the adult faction of family audiences, its wants and needs is tied to another trait of the family films of the 1990s, their nostalgia. I have already addressed this topic briefly in the previous chapter with The Addams Family, but there are other notorious examples of familiarity in 1990s’ film: the second Addams feature (Barry
Sonnenfeld, 1993), of course, but also The Flintstones, Richie Rich (Donald Petrie, 1994) and Casper, all of which were based on pre-existing franchises of the 1950s and 1960s. The Flintstones, for instance, was described in the Washington Post as a “live-action recycling of the ‘60s cartoon” and predicted to be “a sure thing: It’s fondly familiar to boomers raised on ‘Flintstones’ reruns and vitamins, and to their kids, helplessly in the path of the hurricane of hype, the hundreds of tie-in toys and products.”434 Though this comment suggested children as powerless, it credited them with
430 Edward Guthmann, "Film Review -- Arnie Doesn't Ring Any Comedy Bells / Hokey Holiday Film Doesn't Quite 'Jingle'," San Francisco Chronicle, 22 November 1996.
431 Staples, "Unshrinking the Kids: Children's Cinema and the Family Film," 96. 432 Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America.
433 Ann Hulbert, "All That Parents Can Do Isn't Enough," The New York Times, 20 March 1994. 434 Anon, "'The Flintstones' (Pg)," The Washington Post, 27 May 1994.
157 tremendous consumer influence and, moreover, presented adults as an equally strong force in the family and children’s market.
In this adult-dominated climate, where did children’s horror fit in? The reader will not be surprised to learn that there were not many examples of children’s horror in the 1990s and that this situation declined steadily as the decade progressed, as each title adopted new influences and conventions. The premise of Home Alone, for instance, might be horrifying for children but overall the franchise steers clear of childhood fears and, like Gremlins and Nightmare Before Christmas, heavily relies on the Christmas season to counter its horrors and create an aura of family-friendliness. In the same way, Jumanji is close to the heart of children’s horror but its child-focus is hijacked by the adult presences of Alan and Sarah. Even if the film continuously affirms their child-likeness and includes two pre-teens in its cast, the narrative’s driving force is diametrically opposite to that of previous films in the children’s horror trend as it takes Alan back into his childhood rather than forward into adolescence and independence (see chapter three). These films clearly assert the ideal of family unity, of treasuring the child and keeping him close, connecting with both child and adult viewers. Interestingly, these films also collectively affirm the existence of a clearly separate demographic within childhood that is neither child nor teenager. The children in these features are of a specific age, with a certain look and a distinctive set of interests and characteristics: like Glen and Terry in The Gate, Pugsley and Wednesday Addams and Alan and his friends in Jumanji are all pre-teens. Though the pre-teen is mentioned by reviewers and critics in relation to children’s horror audiences as far back as The Watcher in the Woods and Poltergeist, his presence is not as visible in the films’ actual narratives. On the contrary, most entries in the children’s horror trend cast children and teenagers but shy away from young teenagers or pre-teens. A few exceptions apply — Corey
Feldman’s character in Gremlins, the boys in The Gate (particularly Terry), and the characters in Little Monsters (Richard Alan Greenberg, 1989), who are six-graders —, but for the most part, the pre- teen was an abstract, invisible entity that existed mainly as an ambiguous audience group and, as I
158 have been arguing, a great cause of cultural tension. But in the 1990s, the pre-teen is often present and recognised all throughout the family film genre: he is the “skinny preadolescent boy” in Beethoven (Brian Levant, 1992);435 he is Kevin, home alone and indulging in “some preteen risky business: videos, sundaes and sled rides.”436
Indeed, it is in this decade that the pre-teen truly became king in children’s horror, obliterating representations of younger children and older teenagers in major roles. Casper demonstrates this turning point. The film singled out the pre-teen, focused entirely on his age-specific experiences, and cast no young children or teenagers. Moreover, the film’s text, its promotion and the attitudes of cast and crew as well as critics paint a completely new picture of the pre-teen: no longer a phantom demographic but a socially-established and culturally-recognisable age group. In line with its contemporary family films, Casper also focuses on adults and frames its characters within family dynamics and the quest for harmonious unity. The film’s use of Dr. Harvey, father to a pre-teen girl, are a great example of the period’s preoccupation with family attachment but also a clear signpost for the new direction children’s horror took under the family film umbrella.
In this chapter I will develop these ideas drawing on analyses of aesthetics, representation, tone and ideology, as well as interviews and reviews to point out the pre-teen as a fully established and integrated social group in American culture of the 1990s. I will also complement the previous chapter’s suggestion of a partial move away from the horror genre by analysing the different ways horror is used in Casper. I will note the ways in which horror was sublimated in the film’s aesthetics and narrative and explore the clear parallel established between death and the transition from childhood to adolescence through the pre-teen stage. This chapter will also reflect on the relative end of controversy around children’s horror and, particularly, on the implications of the end of this conflict: by virtue of presenting pre-adolescence as an aspirational stage for young children and
435 Rita Kempley, "'Beethoven'," Washington Post, 3 April 1992. 436 Jeanne Cooper, "'Home Alone'," ibid., 16 November 1990.
159 demystifying it for parents, Casper effectively sectioned pre-teens out of its audience, marking the end of the children’s horror film cycle.