By Maria Lewis
Children and horror don’t seem like a great combination. But as the box-office success of the latest take on Stephen’s King’s IT has shown us, there’s something rather magical about kiddos front and centre in a horror movie. Stranger Things reminded us all just how much we missed that when it debuted on Netflix last year with a rag-tag group or resourceful kids on a quest to save not only their friends, but their town. Riding up on their bicycles and biding us over until season two premieres in October came the IT kids – or at least this new generation of IT kids. The box-office for IT’s opening weekend in the US was colossal, taking $123M domestic and over $60M internationally, with critics and audiences alike calling it one of the best – and scariest – movies of the year. Yet is it any surprise IT was effective? As a kid, everything is scary. The wind blowing a branch into the glass of your window is a monster trying to get in, the silhouette of a crumpled jacket is the boogeyman, and the weird neighbour with cats on your street seems like a murderer. Note: the weird neighbour with cats on your street is definitely a murderer. Yet with the world as big and frightening as it is, when something genuinely terrifying and sinister is added to the mix it becomes all the more impactful. And that’s a tool horror as a genre has been employing for decades.
A lone kid in a horror movie is effective. Danny and the twins from The Shining, the little brat from Chucky, Michael Meyers in the first Halloween, the Poltergeist siblings, The Conjuring children from both the first and second movie, the sunlight allergic little ones from The Others, the kid with the sack face (NOPE) from The Orphanage, and child actor royalty in Abigail Breslin and Rory Culkin in Signs. That is just the tip of the ‘youngins utilised in scary movies’ iceberg (FYI the blonde 43-year-olds playing kids in Children Of The Corn don’t technically count for the purposes of this argument, as they were villains). At this point, a kid in a horror movie is about as cliché as a door slamming shut of its own accord or someone suddenly appearing in a mirror. It is a device, yet kids – plural – isn’t deployed as often (or effectively). The eighties was the Golden Age for this, as audiences lived for seeing a gaggle of brassy kids thrown into situations they most likely wouldn’t make it out of (The Goonies, hello). Joe Dante’s Gremlins was a prime example and yes, it counts as a horror film. There are monsters, people get murdered, it’s scary as fuck *bangs gavel*. It also kicked off the horror sub-genre of youths – sometimes partnering with adults – forced to fight bloodthirsty creatures of some description. Critters was the most successful Gremlins rip-off and also kick started the acting career of Leonardo DiCaprio when he was still interested in doing movies that brought people joy. Gremlins was a huge hit at the time, taking over $150M in the US – which amounts to about $350M in adjusted dollars – and became an instant classic. It showed studios that although it might have been a risk on paper, audiences would come to watch kids in real peril.
The first adaptation of King’s IT rode that wave, appearing just a little over five years later with a cast of tweens to teenagers playing the ill-fated friends tasked with taking on the manifestation of evil. A lot more kitsch and not quite as polished as the 2017 version, IT was the kind of word-of-mouth movie that grew to become a hit. It was the flick kids talked about in hushed tones at school, the one you’d all wait to play at the sleepover once the parents had gone to bed. While Gremlins became a mainstream classic, IT was a cult one. Perhaps fittingly, King’s story has had a second chance in the spotlight with director Andy Muschietti’s vision 27 years later (that time period is relevant to those familiar with the passage of time from the story). Muschietti has a great track record with utilising children to creepy effect, with his debut Mama (based on his short of the same name) following two young girls who survive a horrific event only to be protected by a demented spirit … a spirit that follows them to their new home. Still one of the most eerie and downright memorable horror films of the past decade, the very phrase “Victoria, Mama!” will give you goosebumps. There’s that same energy among the central gang of IT, again played by a cast of actors around the same age as the characters in the book. You not only feel for them, you fear for them.
This was a sensation Joe Cornish tapped into in his downright legendary debut, Attack The Block from 2011. It felt a lil bit Goonies, a lil bit Gremlins, as a gang of South London youths have to face off against an invasion of deadly “gorilla looking” monsters from space who descend on their housing block. Here’s the thing, Attack The Block Kids die. I repeat: MOTHERFUCKING CHILDREN GET EATEN BY SPACE GOLLUMS! There are real stakes to this world, with real consequences, and no adults to come and save them. In fact, if the glowy tooth space monsters are the film’s Big Bad then adults are a close second. They do little more than hinder, help and eventually arrest our protagonists. Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone is another kid-led scarer, with a 12-year-old and his mates setting out to solve a supernatural mystery within an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. From Dante to Muschietti, del Toro to Cornish, there’s something these filmmakers understand that many of us have forgotten as we’ve grown into our adult lives: it’s scary being a kid. It’s downright terrifying, actually, yet it can also be exhilarating and fun and exciting. It doesn’t take much to flip those sensations and add a genuine threat, supernatural or otherwise. By staying tapped in to their inner child they have managed to not only terrify us, but bring something unique to the genre of horror again and again and again.
Maria Lewis is a journalist and author previously seen on SBS Viceland’s The Feed. She’s the presenter and producer of the Eff Yeah Film & Feminism podcast. Her debut novel Who’s Afraid? was released in 2016 with the sequel – Who’s Afraid Too? – out now. You can find her on Twitter @MovieMazz
