I don’t know how young I was when my well-meaning parents took me to see Darby O’Gill and the Little People, one of the Walt Disney Company’s live-action efforts from the Eisenhower era, which was being screened for some sort of kids’ movie day at the local university. Young enough, certainly, that I don’t recall much about the film — not the songs, not the blarney-encrusted plot, not even Sean Connery in one of his early leading roles. All I remember is the harrowing conclusion, when the banshee, the herald of death, made a spectral, fluorescent-green appearance — and close on its keening heels came the shadowy “death coach,” with a headless horseman driving silhouetted steeds across mists and scudding clouds. And even these details are sketchy in my memory (I tracked down the scene on YouTube for the purposes of this review), since the moment the death coach creaked on screen I rushed wailing from the theater, my harried father close behind.
Unless your preteen child is especially tough-minded, I would keep this cautionary tale in mind when trying to decide whether to take the whole family to see Coraline, a stop-motion-animated, 3-D-enhanced adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s slim, award-winning 2002 fairy tale. It’s one of the best non-Pixar children’s movies of recent vintage, but it’s also far and away the creepiest, woven through with uncanniness and studded with moments of pure horror. Today’s younger generation is probably too jaded to quail at a banshee (especially one conjured up through the cumbersome magic of late-’50s special effects), but I’m pretty sure that there are terrors in Coraline capable of sending many a seven-year-old squealing for the exits.
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