Instituciones del sistema económico popular y solidario

As established in Chapter One, a resolved, hopeful ending is key to the children’s horror film. Before concluding this chapter, this brief coda considers the importance of endings to the question of whether children’s horror films about stranger danger can be read privileging one audience over another. This discussion focuses on The Witches as the end of the film is a departure from that of its source text, making a comparison of the two endings highly productive.

In the film, Miss Irvine appears at Luke’s home and returns him to human form, but in the novel the absence of this character means that Luke remains mouse. He is happy about this as his short life expectancy as a mouse means that he, an orphan, will not have to survive

195 in the world alone after his grandmother’s imminent passing. Bird argues that the film’s ending suggests that Luke’s story ‘is not the major concern of the film’, as his being turned back into a mouse removes the novel’s ‘necessary act of wish-fulfilment resolving what is arguably the greatest of childhood fears – namely, separation anxiety’ (1998: 120). This point may be true and, in addition, the novel’s protagonist remaining a mouse means that he can avoid some of the unappealing aspects of being human: ‘Mice don’t have to pass exams. Mice don’t have to worry about money’ (Dahl, 1983: 119). This recalls Chapter Three’s discussions of the appeal of being a zombie or a vampire to child viewers. The avoidance of responsibilities holds a clear appeal for child viewers, as does the idea of metamorphosis into a small animal. At the end of the film, Luke-as-mouse traverses his grandmother’s house via a series of tubes, toy train sets, vehicles made from Lego and a toy plane. In other words, his diminished size has transformed an ordinary house into a large-scale playground. This lends weight to Bird’s argument that, by returning Luke to human form and removing from him the opportunity to remain in a state of eternal childhood play, the film does not privilege the child audience.

Yet the extent to which remaining a child is a childish desire, rather than an adult one, is questionable. Luke’s shortened lifespan as a mouse means that he would likely never outgrow childhood, and would remain ‘fixed’ as a child for the remainder of his short life. As argued in Chapter Three, it is precisely the fact that childhood is not a fixed state that might explain why children are often used as a motif of horror in horror films targeted at adults, and children who are too unruly become rejected and destroyed by adult figures of authority. Conversely, a fixed child such as Luke-as-mouse is an easily controlled and dependent child, thus retaining the power hierarchy of adults over children. Helping to enforce this hierarchy is that although Luke is ‘fixed’ he is not monstrous, which differentiates him from the child- vampires discussed in Chapter Three; rather, Luke’s mousiness makes him permanently small, vulnerable and cute. More cynically, Luke would also be low-maintenance and low-

196 cost in terms of care. Adding that Luke is generally well-behaved, he is an ideal child. In relation to the issue of child abuse, it also means that Luke remains within the closely watchful eye of his grandmother. Both this and the fact that he is in the body of a mouse would presumably alleviate adult anxieties of Luke becoming a victim of paedophilia. For Luke to remain a mouse-child does indeed resolve separation anxiety, as Bird claims, but not the separation anxiety of the child. I argue that it resolves the separation anxiety of the adult who cannot stand to see their own child age. This brings us back to the issue of Peter Pan, the most iconic fixed child, and Rose’s arguments regarding Peter Pan, address, and adult desires.

Of Peter Pan’s agelessness, Rose ponders that he is ‘a little boy who does not grow up, not because he doesn’t want to, but because someone else prefers that he shouldn’t’ (1984: 3). The ‘someone else’ being the adult author/reader outside of the text, and the adult parent inside of the text, Mrs Darling, who in the opening of the novel says to her daughter Wendy, ‘“Oh, why can’t you remain like this forever!”’ (Barrie, 1911: 13). Of course, by the end of the novel, Wendy makes the choice to leave Neverland and to grow up. For as much as it might seem appealing to children to stay a child forever and avoid adult responsibilities, children also strive for the perceived freedom of adulthood and to be considered older, more mature and more independent than they are. Ebert also alludes to the childish desire to be older in his review of The Goonies, quoted above, in his suggestion that seeing child characters ‘act a little older than their age’ in films is a point of appeal for child viewers (1985). Further, to say to a young child that they are a ‘big boy/girl’ is usually considered a compliment, congratulation or encouragement. The childish desire to be older is also held by many of the child characters discussed throughout this thesis: Jim in Something Wicked This Way Comes,Max in Hocus Pocus, and Dane and DJ in The Hole and Monster House, who are discussed in the following chapter. It should be noted that in The Witches’ ending Luke states, ‘I really am happy to be a mouse, you know.’ However, his subsequent delight at being

197 restored to human form indicates that rather than being truly happy, he had merely resigned himself to life as a mouse.

Luke’s return to human form at the end of the film of The Witches can therefore be considered as addressing and fulfilling a childish desire to grow up and, contra to Bird’s argument, putting the needs and desires of the child first. The adult desire for children to remain children – whether so that their own children remain sweet and innocent forever, are safe from ‘risky strangers’ or, in Rose’s view, ‘[hold] off any possible challenge’ to adult sexuality (1984: 4) – is a selfish one. As temporarily liberating as Peter Pan’s eternal childishness might be, Maria Lassén-Seger calls the desire to remain a child forever a ‘regressive wish’ (2006: 216), and the fulfilment of this wish in The Witches novel a ‘symbolic death’ that can ‘only be understood as a disempowering of the fictive child’ (ibid.: 256). David Rees also calls the end of the novel ‘untherapeutic’ as it implies that even after evil (the witches) has been destroyed, it triumphs (1988: 148). Read in this way, the novel stands in opposition to the notion discussed in the Chapter Two that fairy tales, horror stories and other forms of children’s fiction provide children with a ‘therapeutic’ benefit.

That Luke’s transformation back into human form is a positive and empowering development is indicated by the scene’s mise-en-scène. When Miss Irvine arrives to transform Luke, he is asleep inside of a doll’s house, a prop that neatly establishes his static childhood. As the transformation occurs he rapidly grows in size and breaks out of it, literally outgrowing the enclosure that symbolises his entrapment (Figure 4.20). His naked body then tumbles through the air and he lands on the floor in a crouched position that John Izod reads as foetal (1992: 228) (Figure 4.21). The transformation is thus staged as Luke being reborn as ‘healthy and complete boy’ who has been given a new chance at life (ibid.). This aligns with Campbell’s monomyth, the final stage of which is that the hero is rewarded with the ‘freedom to live’ (1949: 238). As well as having been physically transformed, Luke is also

198 psychologically transformed. Claire Bradford argues that metamorphosis in children’s fiction can represent a ‘desire for stability’ (2001: 149): a stability that Luke lost following the trauma of being orphaned. The end of the film resolves this instability and brings the story full circle (aligning, again, with the circularity of Campbell’s monomyth) by allowing Luke to transform back into human form, signifying that his grief and psychic instability caused by his parents’ deaths has been resolved and that he is capable of surviving for the rest of his life on his own. Although this may be of comfort to adults beset with ‘thinking of the children’ that to grow up is what is ‘best’ for Luke, this arguably still puts the needs of the child over those of the adult.

While the prospect of Luke growing up alone is potentially an empowering one, it is of course also very frightening, especially as he is destined to grow up with no living relatives, and probably in the care system. Yet this is of course a children’s horror film – a subgenre informed as much by the fairy tale as the horror genre, both of which are widely thought to allow viewers to safely face their fears and anxieties and overcome them. The importance of facing one’s fears is especially important to the children’s horror films discussed in the next chapter.

Figure 4.20: As he transforms, Luke bursts out of the doll’s house that served as his home…

Figure 4.21: ...and tumbles onto the floor in a foetal position.

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Conclusion

Engaging with these case studies and the ways in which they display late-twentieth century adult fears of child abuse and female power reveals that the question of address – that is, whose fears and pleasures are at the heart of these texts – is not one with a straightforward answer. For as many times that there are references within these texts that are clearly targeted at adults only, whether to adult sexuality, paedophilia, politics or popular culture, there is a host of fears and pleasures in these films that are addressed to children: the pleasure of transgression felt by watching a film like The Monster Squad, through which child viewers can relish in seeing children like themselves swearing, using weapons and making friends with and fighting monsters in equal measure; the pleasure in seeing adult characters made a fool of and children succeed in saving the world where adult authorities cannot; or simply the pleasure of being frightened by grotesque witches and monsters. That this chapters’ case studies contain these differing modes of address makes them very standard mass-produced Hollywood products. However, one must also consider the rights of the child viewer over children’s media, and in particular the generic context of the children’s horror film. While adults are free to view and enjoy all horror films – including those created for children – a majority of horror films exclude children, either by their mode of address, by their adult content and restrictive classifications, or by all of these. Therefore, why should the little horror that does not exclude child viewers also spend a great deal of time addressing an adult viewer, who can watch any number of other horror films that are specifically addressed to them?

On the other hand, to consider adult and child audiences as binaries is also arguably simplistic and reductive. Firstly, this overlooks the fact that children’s films are often viewed by adults and children together as a family. Secondly, it ignores the likelihood that a child’s relationship with a film will evolve as they age. The range of references and subtext addressed to adult viewers in these films might mean little to nothing to most child viewers,