The Modern Horrification Of Childhood

Before we start, let me make one thing clear. I’m not condemning…most of what I’m about to discuss here. I’m not against horror simply because I don’t enjoy being scared. I prefer evil to lose with as few victims as possible while maintaining the drama of a serious threat. With the exceptions I will specifically point out, these things are doing their own thing. I’m still noticing a trend and I’m going to discuss it because it’s relevant to discussing storytelling.

Horror stories for kids are nothing new. From Goosebumps to Are You Afraid Of The Dark? to special Halloween episodes or just general stories of people fighting ghosts, some kids do enjoy being scared for fun. Even the Tales From The Crypt had a Saturday morning counterpart, Tales From The Cryptkeeper. I watched a few of these myself, but again, I wanted to see the villain lose and that’s was less Goosebumps territory and more Real Ghostbusters.

This is not what we’re discussing. It’s the reverse.

Between video games, movies, and YouTube series, there isn’t so much horror for kids as much as horror with kids, or with things kids love. If you’ve heard of Five Nights And Freddy’s and the various sequels, spinoffs, and knockoffs you know what I’m talking about. Film Theory and Game Theory often discuss other productions where a child’s TV show or online game is secretly a doorway to Hell or some other evil supernatural presence, at least within the world they take place in. The actual product isn’t for kids. Game Theory recently discussed a sequel to a “kids” game called Amanda The Adventurer 2 that I’ll that I’ll link to here (will auto play because it’s YouTube but now the Theorist shows are on Tubi) , a game where the player goes through tapes of an old kids show to find it’s been stealing kids’ souls. A lot of kids soul stealing in these Freddy inspirations even when they aren’t knockoffs.

I can take or leave it but it is worth discussing. No, when I get to the “why God why” part of this discussion it’s a different and more direct attack on childhood innocence. We will be looking at the recent trend of taking a preexisting kids show and turning it into a horror story because public domain happened and someone’s first thought was “slasher film”…which oddly started with something NOT in public domain and that’s going to get the hammer, too. This I’m going to be less kind about but let’s start with where this all began.

Five Nights At Freddy’s played on the supposedly creepy animatronics that would pop up in some restaurant kids birthday areas. Chuck E Cheese and Showbiz Pizza are the most well known of these but until the…1990s?…these were only the most popular examples. Oddly, nobody ever says this about the animatronics in theme parks, but they had the money to be more expensive and further away. I never understood this perspective myself, or the similar “fear” of Teddy Ruxpin. I thought they were cool and when family members had parties at Chuck E. Cheese a few of my tokens went into Chuck and company or the other two rooms with the hippo for the bar and the Elvis impersonating lion. I still played the games, hung out in the strobe light mouse hole, and probably jumped into the ball pit before the hypochondriacs ruined that experience.

Once it became the darling of let’s players, the franchise exploded. What was a story about animatronics possessed by the angry dead kids whose murdered bodies were shoved in there became this whole thing about The Crying Child, Remnant, trying to restore other kids through dead ones, and the lore (or if you’re MatPat, the loooooooooooooooooore) of that world and the various crazed and possessed machines that inhabit it. Clones would build off of that world or create their own, giving us things like Poppy Playtime, another Game Theorist favorite. What was sweet innocent fun for kids now became horror for adults. However, it’s over there doing its own thing. I’m not going to lose sleep over it and do find the lore building, though not the games themselves, a curiosity as a storytelling fan seeing a new method of storytelling continue to grow.

Other games like Amanda The Adventurer or the Bendy series take on sadder stories of evil demon-run companies (because of course) turning kids shows, cartoons, theme parks, and so on into death traps for the workers or the kids who came to play there. Various examples of childhood haunts now being haunted by the forces of evil, like the first run of Russell T. Davies’ Doctor Who where even the library was a place of evil. (We should have known something wasn’t right with that boy.) Goosebumps did a horror theme part game back in the 1990s, so it’s not a new phenomenon there, but the rest are trying to be Doki Doki Literature Club, something that is pretending to be something else but is actually a horror game or set in a world where “nothing is at it seems”. Not my genre but I can live with it. Movies like The Puppetown Murders or something less violent like Avenue Q or Team America I can even with with.

Then we get to this:

Sorry, I meant this.

Nice that someone else remembered that, but I was looking for something more recent. And live-action before you drop the Jellystone clip. A recent movie.

Wait, no. That would have been a dumb and lame unnecessary remake but fine. Okay, last time…THIS NIGHTMARE!

Oh look at the childhood glee…be beaten out of you with a sledgehammer. FUN!

The original show was people in costumes voiced by some of Hanna-Barbera’s go-to voice actors singing, having fun, dancing with little girls shut up you know what I mean, but this version decided to go the Freddy’s route by having animatronics who didn’t want their show canceled…so let’s give an extra reason to cancel it by going on a murder spree. Based on what they showed I don’t want to know what Snorky was going to do with the kid he’s walking off with hand in hand unless he’s not evil. I don’t want any of them to be evil, but they at least only killed the adults while scarring the kids for life. Happy birthday, I guess.

Had it ended there I might not have considered this for an article. Or maybe I would. In each of these cases this is something meant to make kids happy turn into something evil. The Banana Splits Movie was even done with Warner Brothers’ approval if not assistance pre-Zaslav. Now a new challenger has entered the arena: public domain horrorifications of childhood favorites. Winnie The Pooh: Blood & Honey was just the beginning. When the A.A. Milne book series made for his son, only to be published and make his son a bully target so now he hates them, went public domain, someone decided that rather than do a fresh take or more accurate adaptation than Disney did (Disney still owns their version of Pooh Bear and the 100 Acre Woods crew so “your” Pooh should be a full nudist, closer to E. H. Shepard’s illustrations) for kids, they made a movie where a serial killer dressed up in a Pooh outfit that would make costume shops go out of business if they sold it and murder people. It’s getting a sequel. Joy.

Sadly it isn’t stopping there. “Steamboat Willie” is the only Mickey Mouse cartoon in public domain, after Disney lost their good standing over politics and stopped being able to slowly extend copywrite into infinity. Again, Disney still owns the trademark and most of the other cartoons, so be careful what you do here. I would have preferred nothing to the horror movie of similar concept. Apparently the guy behind that also did a Grinch horror parody I was thankfully blissfully ignorant of until now and I just got more depressed. What brought this commentary into existence is that someone is already waiting for Popeye The Sailor Man’s incoming public domain status (probably just the comics and/or early cartoons, Popeye originally being intended as a one-story character in the newspaper strips of Olive Oil and her family, Thimble Theater, before being popular enough to take over) to create yet another horror movie, Popeye The Slayer Man. I wish that were a sick joke.

I know too many modern writers hate kids, but to go this hard after childhood memories and favorites that came into existence before these kids’ parents were born is just horrible…and not in the horror movie fun way. Making your own property and making a twisted version of a concept I can get over. It’s been done for years, since direct-to-video 1980s horror at least. When they’re actually going after Flegal, Pooh Bear, Popeye, and Mickey…that’s a bridge too far. At least the fairy tale stuff like turning a grown-up Hansel and Gretel into witch hunters was built out of something that was originally pretty dark. This stuff was meant to entertain children (well, the Thimble Theater/Popeye stuff might not have been for kids alone originally, until Hollywood decided all cartoons are for kids except for subversive adult “comedies”), but now childhood memories are being gutted for the blood and gore crowd. These same people would wince in their own horror if they saw Tales From The Cryptkeeper or some kid-friendly take on Freddy Kruger. (Never do that, by the way, and that’s from the guy who defends the Rambo cartoon.) I didn’t think the “everything for meeeeeeeeeeeee” crowd would go horror, but there you go: kids TV turned into adult nightmare fuel. I can’t wait (yes I can) to see what they do when Superman goes public domain soon with the same asteriks for Mickey’s current status. I sense a less blatant Brightburn in our future, and that makes me cry.

I would love to see pushback on this. A story where these characters were back to being the fun stories of our youth, or where the animatronics are secretly heroes. They actually did that once. In the 1960s Monster Squad had a scientist bring statues of Dracula, The Wolf Man, and a Frankenstein monster to life and fight evil. I don’t even want that. Well, maybe Popeye or Superman. I just want to see something made to entertain children…made to entertain children. There are going to be more of these public domain conversions now that Disney can no longer talk Congress into extending copyrights to protect their own butts. How many of them will become another low-budget slasher movie and which ones will find creators who want to bring that childhood fun and whimsy to a new generation of children? Can we get more of the latter? Please?