INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this video is all about stories that use monsters to encourage children to face their fears. Monsters are extremely versatile cultural phenomena. For the majority of my work on this channel, I’ve focused on monsters as symbols of the anti-human, as antagonistic forces against the cultural rules that organize societies. My primary research interests are monsters as political figures in any given time and place. But this is not the only thing that monsters can do. I’ve quoted this before and I certainly will again: W. Scott Poole tells us that monsters “do not mean one thing, but a thousand.” And sometimes those meanings can seem maybe kind of counterintuitive. For instance, if monsters are supposed to be scary, then why do so many stories use them to reassure young children?

            That is exactly what we’re going to look at today, with the picturebooks There’s a Nightmare in My Closet by Mercer Mayer and The Monster at the End of This Book by your fuzzy pal Grover (with an assist from Jon Stone), and then the film Monsters, Inc. So settle in for a perhaps uncharacteristically cozy video here on The Monster & The Child – although, this being me, we are still going to get plenty political – and let’s face some childhood fears.

“THE ONLY ONE HERE IS ME”: MONSTERS AS TEACHING TOOLS

            Mercer Mayer’s There’s a Nightmare in My Closet, published in 1968, contradicts its own title in the first line of its text. Despite the ominous present tense that gets us to open the book, the reader is immediately reassured by the child narrator that “There used to be a nightmare in my closet.” Already, the young child reader – or listener, as the intended audience is probably being read this story by a trusted adult – knows that the danger has already passed. The illustrations, however, capture the narrator’s fear: he lays in bed with the covers pulled up to his chin, staring at the shadows beyond the open closet door. He has a pop gun and a toy cannon lying on top of him and a military helmet and two toy soldiers on the floor. On top of these militaristic precautions, the boy tells us how he would always get out of bed to close the door and then not look behind him as he walked away. Illustrations show us how he would cower in bed in fear of the nightmare. Except then, “One night I decided to get rid of my nightmare once and for all.” He dons the helmet and lines up all of the army toys. This is the first time his facial expression is not afraid, but actually smiling – albeit with some lowered eyebrows. He anticipates his attack with seeming pleasure.

            When the Nightmare emerges in the dark, we can see that it’s a combination of scary and funny features. That’s a pretty neat artistic trick – the young child reader has to understand why the Nightmare would scare the narrator, but also not be too scared themself. Mayer pulls this off, to my mind, quite well. Scary features include the Nightmare’s size: his head brushes the ceiling, and what a head it is! Disproportionately large, it sports giant bat ears and a wide mouth. One of the Nightmare’s eyes is about the size of the child narrator’s head. The Nightmare also has a tail that ends in a spiked mace. However, there’s also something undeniably goofy about the Nightmare. He creeps across the room in an exaggerated tiptoe, like something out of Looney Tunes. Would you be scared if this thing came out of your closet? Yeah, probably – but then once you got a second look at his face, you might realize that you’d be okay.

            Indeed, as soon as the narrator turns the light on, the Nightmare is a lot less scary. For one thing, what looked like swamp-green skin in the dark is actually pale pink with light green splotches. Plus, the Nightmare is clearly intimidated by the narrator’s show of force as he brandishes his pop gun and says, “Go away, Nightmare, or I’ll shoot you.” (That line betrays the picturebook’s age, and don’t worry, we’re going to dig into all of this military stuff in a bit.) The narrator does not give the Nightmare time to heed his warning: “I shot him anyway.” The Nightmare cowers, and then starts crying. He sits with his hand in his gaping mouth, very much in the posture of a frightened baby or toddler.

            The narrator begins to process his own emotions: “I was mad … but not too mad.” He admonishes the Nightmare to quiet down so he doesn’t wake up his parents. When that doesn’t work, the narrator takes the Nightmare’s hand and tucks him into bed. The military toys are now abandoned as the narrator reaches up to pat the giant creature on its knee. He even closes the closet door for him, which makes the Nightmare smile tremulously. The narrator reasons that they can’t have another nightmare come out of the closet, because “my bed’s not big enough for three.” They both peacefully fall asleep side by side – and then another nightmare does, in fact, pop his head out of the closet. This one is also very goofy-looking, with orange stripes and a friendly grin. Despite the presence of monsters, it turns out there’s nothing to fear.

            In the introduction to the edited collection Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture, Jessica R. McCort discusses the subgenre of “faux horror,” which is often the introduction of very young children to horror genre tropes. While horror proper is intended to frighten, faux horror “tends to domesticate terror and make the frightening funny” (6). It “adopts what has traditionally been found terrifying and adapts it into something to be befriended and desired” (13). In other words, if we’re trying to answer our opening question – why use monsters to help children feel less afraid – it’s precisely because children already know that monsters are supposed to be scary. And that’s sort of interesting, right? Listen, early childhood cognition is extremely far from my area of expertise, but it’s amazing how much cultural information children learn without being directly told. I mean, ideally, most adults are not going around detailing all the types of monsters we’ve come up with to, like, toddlers, and then telling them that they should be afraid of them. For probably the majority of, for example, American children, the first time the concept of “monster” comes up in direct communication, it’s from an adult telling them not to be afraid. But the concept is so culturally ubiquitous that it’s already there, from a combination of just observation of cultural artifacts – and here I’m remembering my nephew as a baby loving all of the neighborhood Halloween decorations – in addition to the child’s own imagination and development as the brain learns how to prepare for potential danger. I am not going to get all heavy on the evo-psych here, but we can’t deny that kids’ brains are building ancient survival skills as they grow, and fear is nothing if not a survival skill. It tells us when we need to flip that fight-or-flight switch. This is especially true at nighttime, when we can’t see as well or we are in the “weak and defenseless” state of sleep, as Mary-Louise Maynes points out in her article “Monsters at Bedtime: Managing Fear in Bedtime Picture Books for Children.” That is part of why the bedroom setting is so effective, as it acknowledges that the child may experience fear in that place in a heightened way, even if they are safe. Besides, when most experiences are still so new, because you’re a kid who only got here like three or four years ago, it can be difficult to parse between real danger and imagined threats. Faux horror uses the language of the horror genres – often at this stage, the visual language, like in the illustrations of the Nightmare – to help kids start to make these distinctions. It’s successful because we can rely on kids to already have formed conceptual categories of “monster” just from hanging around in society for a few short years.

            There’s a Nightmare in My Closet, through both its text and illustrations, models behaviors and values that its readers can imitate when facing their own fears. McCort writes that texts like this one are modeled on “a pedagogy of bravery and choice that operates on the cultural belief that fear is a weakness to be overcome, or at the very least handled with intelligence” (18). I imagine some of my viewers may bristle, as I did, at this idea of fear as weakness, but it is very baked into our culture. The whole idea of “overcoming fears” is kind of predicated on that notion. It’s just that a lot of parents and teachers – the ones who tend to share my values, at least, and probably yours, based on the general vibe of my viewership – they would now reframe that into helping kids identify which fears are founded in reality and which are not, as opposed to conquering a weakness. Which, to be fair, is also what’s going on in these faux horror texts, as McCort points out: they “teach readers and viewers how to weigh and determine the best possible course of action” (19). They also “allow young readers and viewers to express deep-rooted feelings that aren’t always pretty” (13). Hence, we see Mayer’s narrator both very afraid as well as “mad … but not too mad.”  

            But if we view these narratives as teaching tools, which it’s pretty obvious they are intended in large part to be (albeit while still being entertaining), it’s important to interrogate the specifics of what they are teaching. In “From Aggressive Wolf to Heteronormative Zombie: Performing Monstrosity and Masculinity in the Narrative Picturebook,” Rebecca A. Brown argues that picturebooks that feature monsters often demonstrate expectations of childhood masculine identity. Her essay looks at both There’s a Nightmare in My Closet and Where the Wild Things Are, another classic boy-and-monster picturebook, though one that uses monsters in a different way than the one I’m discussing in this video. (As we already went over, monsters: a thousand meanings.) For There’s a Nightmare in My Closet, Brown calls attention to the way the child narrator reveals assumptions about the imagined child reader. After all, this text is clearly set up for the child reader to identify with the narrator, to take his behaviors as a blueprint for tackling their own fears. So what kind of constructed child is this literary figure? Well, a white male one. The bedroom setting, according to Brown, establishes a geography of early childhood that is tied to gender and class: it suggests “that the unfolding scenario could occur in any middle-class, white, male child’s most private domain” (94). And that maleness is defined in large part by the play-acting of military roles. The narrator protects his domain with facsimiles of weapons, and it is through force that he first gains control over the fear represented by the Nightmare. It is only when this force turns the Nightmare from a threat to a fellow child that the narrator switches roles. He then playacts a paternal part by tucking the Nightmare in and closing the closet door to keep out this other little kid’s fears (96). In this way, the narrator practices for the adult roles that await a person of his gender within his society: soldier and dad.

            So that’s some of the maleness of this narrative – what about the whiteness? In her book Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States, Sara Austin has a chapter entitled “Images of Racial Anxiety in 1960s and 1970s Picture Books.” Austin traces how “the parallel traditions of racial coding in picture book portrayals of Black children as animals, and the race-liberal doctrine of interracial friendship, combine into monster picture books of the 1960s, in which the racialized monster attempts to enter the white family, but is allowed to do so only on the white child’s terms” (52). I know that may seem like a bit of a stretch without context, but stay with me here. Austin lays out the basic narrative of these picturebooks, of which There’s a Nightmare in My Closet is a prime example: “The child is frightened of the monster, but sees that the monster is also frightened and befriends it, resolving the conflict. In these stories a kinship is established between the child and the monster. In fact, the monster is often depicted as childlike” (54). So there is an identification of the implied child reader not only with the child protagonist, but also to an extent with the monster. The narrator finds that his fear is shared with the Nightmare, and that they both want to be safe in bed with the closet door shut. But, Austin points out, “the monster is not the same as the child protagonist due to both the embodied differences between child and monster and the monster’s invasion of the child’s home and family. Even when the monster is found to be nonthreatening, the texts suggest that they do not belong in the child’s world, nor are they given a family of their own” (54). So the child reader is a little like the monster – but they’re more like child protagonist. They can be nice to the monster, but from a position of relative power, like the paternalistic care that the narrator gives the Nightmare.

            Austin connects this power dynamic to the ideology of race liberalism that was popular among, well, liberal white people in the 60s and 70s. Now, of course, there were worse racial ideologies that white people could and did have in this time period and today, but race liberalism can be identified by its unwillingness to engage with issues of racism as systemic. Instead, race liberalism imagines racism being solved by interracial friendship – especially among young people as they became more integrated (due to, you know, the Civil Rights Movement working against systemic segregation, but shhh). This outlook “appealed to white readers because it suggests that the ‘blot’ of racism was an individual rather than a structural issue” (57). Racists are just bad or, generously, mistaken people, but if we teach our white kids to not be like that, then everything will be fixed and fine. Clearly, this attitude has not entirely gone away.

But what’s all this have to do with There’s a Nightmare in My Closet? Well, Austin traces how allegories for race had historically been portrayed in children’s literature through animal and monster stories – from encouraging white children to have compassion for enslaved people by comparing them to pets in abolitionist literature, to benevolent colonization tales like Babar and Curious George, to the anti-segregationist fable of Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches (60-63). So even when monster books aren’t specifically about race – and to be clear, I doubt Mayer had any kind of racial message in mind when he was writing There’s a Nightmare in My Closet – they exist within and are likely influenced by this context of racialized monster allegories for kids. Pair this history with the fact that the white child protagonist has all the agency in the story, and we can see where these narratives may be reproducing some taken-for-granted assumptions. Austin argues that these stories show the monster as a child figure who can’t make their own decisions and needs to be magnanimously accepted and then taken care of by the white child protagonist. In There’s a Nightmare in My Closet specifically, Austin points out that the narrator accepts one Nightmare, but still has the power to reject more monsters, since the bed isn’t big enough for three – and that’s this white child’s decision to make, to control his own space.

            I don’t include Austin’s analysis to say that There’s a Nightmare in My Closet is 100% bad, actually. I don’t love the gun stuff in it now, but I remember being read this book as a very little kid and enjoying it. I have vague memories of being particularly captured by the illustrations of the Nightmare crying, which does kind of seem like a portent for my entire personality to follow. But it is important to put these books in the context of their time, especially when they were part of a larger trend of monster storytelling. Fear as an affect, an embodied response, may be biological, but once we start writing about it, it becomes cultural – and therefore it becomes political. That very much includes the writing that adults produce for the youngest members of our societies.

            Now, all of this analysis is fine and good, but if you’re worried that I’m about to burst your nostalgia bubble for The Monster at the End of This Book, don’t worry, Austin has a more positive reading of this one. If you have not encountered this absolute classic in a while, The Monster at the End of This Book is a highly interactive picturebook first published in 1971. Sesame Street itself was only a couple years old at this point, having premiered in 1969 as a revolution in educational television. Grover, already a beloved and recognizable figure, smiles and waves at the reader from the cover with a “Hello, everybodeee!” (Unfortunately, I can’t do the Grover impression that my mom could when she used to read this to me and my sister.) Grover is not quite so happy when the book opens: “WHAT DID THAT SAY?” he asks the reader, responding to the title. Once he ascertains that apparently there is, in fact, a monster at the end of this book, he says, “Oh, I am so scared of Monsters!” He immediately tries to collude with the reader, asking them not to turn any more pages, so we never get to the end of this book and therefore never encounter the monster. But obviously the child reader (or the adult reading to the child) won’t obey, causing Grover to wail out his fears and frustrations.

            And, I mean, that’s most of the book. Grover continues to plead with the reader to stop it with all of the page turning, and he devises more and more strategies to ensure that we never reach the end. He ties the pages up with ropes, he barricades them with planks of wood, and finally, he builds a whole entire brick wall to keep those pages closed. Once you collapse this last barrier with your mighty page-turning, Grover comments from beneath the rubble, “Do you know that you are very strong?” Throughout all of this, there are two obvious pleasures of this picturebook, which will be immediately evident to anyone who either has a memory of encountering this book as a kid or has had the good fortune of reading it to a child as an adult. The first pleasure is the melodramatic narration, which allows the adult read-aloud-er to yell and swoon and beg and flail like – well, like a Muppet. The more the adult (or just older) reader gets into the performance, the funnier it is for the intended child audience. The other pleasure is the constant disobedience that the book requires. Grover is telling you not to turn the pages, but then what do you do? You keep turning them! The fear of the monster that you may have shared with Grover is counteracted here with a little bit of mischief. Mary-Louise Maynes notes that the fun and humor of fear-managing stories can help them from feeling too didactic – and therefore too boring or just annoying. It’s one thing to just say “there’s no rational reason to be scared right now,” and it’s another entirely to bust down Grover’s brick wall.

Now, it is possible that this element may backfire for some kids depending on where they’re at with their development of empathy. My nephew really loved this book for a while, but then he went through a stage where it upset him to see how scared Grover was. Even though he already knew the punchline, he didn’t want to turn the pages when Grover was begging him not to. Which goes to show again that even media for the youngest of kids is never as simple as it seems, because those kids themselves are already complex people.

            Of course, it all works out in the end, because Grover is, in fact, the monster at the end of this book. Grover is overcome with relief that the thing he was so scared of is just “lovable, furry old Grover.” He gives himself a hug, and the revelation that the monster is ME is surrounded by little hearts. Grover attempts to say that he told the reader not to be so scared, but at the final page turn, we get an admission of “I am so embarrassed!”

            McCort notes that The Monster at the End of This Book, as a work of faux-horror, both teaches that suspense in a story can actually be fun and that some fears are “sometimes entirely in [kids’] own imaginations” (19). Comparing this faux horror to There’s a Nightmare in My Closet, however, Sara Austin sees some stark differences. She notes that Sesame Street was an integrated project from the beginning, so we do not necessarily have the solely white intended child audience that was generally assumed in much of children’s publishing. Sesame Street was intended to supplement early childhood education particularly for working class and urban kids, and the program deliberately built its neighborhood to reflect those children’s worlds. Austin points out that the monsters of Sesame Street like Grover are not mere replacements for people of color, because there are actual people of color on Sesame Street. Muppet diversity exists alongside human diversity as opposed to allegorizing it. But when it comes to The Monster at the End of This Book specifically, there are only two characters: Grover and the implied reader he addresses – and Grover, of course, is the only one depicted on the page. So instead of identifying with a child character who then makes decisions about a monster, the reader identifies directly with Grover, who is both child and monster. Austin argues that “unlike earlier monster picture books that suggest children are uniquely suited to accept difference, this book suggests that fear of difference is a mark of immaturity” (74). It is silly – embarrassing, even – that Grover was so afraid of a “monster” before he realizes that monster is just another word for lovable, furry old Grover. And personally, I rather like the implication here that there are things that we can learn by facing what we fear – particularly, things we can learn about ourselves.

“HUMAN CHILDREN ARE HARDER TO SCARE”: MONSTERS, INC.

            I have been lucky enough to teach courses about monsters at the college level, and when I did, my first day icebreaker question would always be, “What’s your favorite monster?” Inevitably, I would have at least a couple students per class tell me Sulley or Mike Wazowski. These were 18-and-19-year-old college first years, so they were no longer the primary intended audience of the Pixar film – though we’ll get into that more in a moment – but they retained really positive memories of this movie from their childhoods. It’s easy to see why. Monsters, Inc. is a visual delight, it has a great voice cast – always here for Billy Crystal – and it has characters anyone could root for. I hadn’t seen it in probably a good twenty years before rewatching it for this video, and I still thoroughly enjoyed it. But also, for the purposes of this conversation about exploring fear through monsters, I found it fascinating in its depiction of fear.

            Before we can get into that, though, let’s take a look at the story. Monsters, Inc. takes place in Monstropolis, a bustling city whose residents come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and numbers of eyeballs. Life there is pretty mundane. Neighbors greet each other on their way to work and complain about jury duty. At the heart of this city is the titular energy company, which harvests children’s screams to power the city. Scarers like the big blue Sulley travel through portals to the human world – children’s closet doors – and terrify kids so that, back on the other side of the portals, workers like Mike Wazowski can fill up the scream canisters to be converted into electricity. Sulley and Mike are the dream team of the plant, always at the top of the board for most screams collected. Even so, the city is facing a worsening scream shortage and therefore a looming energy crisis. It turns out that kids these days “just don’t get scared like they used to.” Every time a child isn’t frightened of their scarer, their door gets scrapped, and the city loses another energy source.

            What’s the cause behind this crisis? Apparently, for human kids, “the window of innocence is shrinking.” (You can imagine that line setting off a siren in my house summoning me to the scene.) Children as young as six are no longer scared of monsters in their closets. This is implied to be the fault of desensitizing violent media. The monsters, however, are not losing their fear. Scaring is considered an incredibly dangerous job, as children are believed to be toxic and infectious. Any artifact of the children’s bedroom that comes back through the door has to be decontaminated and quarantined – along with the scarer themselves. God forbid an actual child ever makes it through.

            So, obviously, that’s exactly what happens, but first, let’s pause. One thing I kept thinking about throughout the opening sequence of the film was how old, exactly, is the intended audience here? Now, that’s never as straightforward a question as it may seem. Lots of children’s media has a dual audience of both kids and adults, with aspects of the story that appeal to the age demographics on different levels. That’s pretty par for the course for Pixar in particular. But with Monsters, Inc., we have a story that features both kids and adults, but neither of the ages of those characters are the ages of the implied audience children. This movie only works for kids outside of that “window of innocence” – that is, kids who themselves are too old and essentially genre savvy to be afraid of monsters in their closets themselves. Now, I say it only works with the understanding that younger kids do watch and like this movie. My three-year-old niece is quite the fan of Mike Wazowski, though I don’t think she’s seen the entire film through yet, which is kind of my point: while a toddler can enjoy the funny little eyeball man, they’re not going to have the context to grasp the plot and much of the humor. So while Monsters, Inc. can function similarly to the picturebooks we discussed earlier, by assuaging fears through portrayal of monsters as funny and friendly behind their alarming appearances, I don’t think that’s the film’s primary thematic throughline.

            Much of this comes down to who the audience is positioned to identify with. In There’s a Nightmare in My Closet, the implied child reader identifies with the child narrator. In The Monster at the End of This Book, the reader identifies with Grover, who, as we’ve discussed, is both child and monster. But in Monsters, Inc., the implied child viewer is most likely to identify with the protagonist Sulley or the deuteragonist Mike – both of whom are full adults with factory jobs. The child in the movie, Boo, doesn’t appear for quite a while, and when she does, she is considerably younger than viewers who would be able to understand the full plot of the movie. Toddlers like Boo could watch the movie and identify with her, to be sure, but they’re not going to really follow the emotional throughline of the film as it pertains to Sulley and Mike. So for the viewer who is intended to comprehend the whole movie, the identification is with adults, who have adult concerns – and adult fears.

            First of all, the monsters fear the impending energy crisis. This is definitely one of those aspects of the film that presumably plays differently for the dual audience. But that’s not to say that kids aren’t aware of their parents’ economic concerns, especially if money is tight within the household. So while the direct parallels to fossil fuels may not register as strongly for an elementary schooler as an adult, the idea that the city won’t be able to meet the monsters’ needs can still come across. The monsters also are preoccupied with workplace politics and competition. A lot of this could translate pretty easily into school setting concerns. Sulley and the devious Randall are vying for the top spot as the record-breaking scarers, and Randall’s jealousy fuels his villainy. Mike, meanwhile, has a subplot about his romantic relationship with Celia, as he struggles with his work/life balance (and then his work/life/dealing-with-a-human-stowaway balance). That part is less likely to apply directly to an elementary-school-aged audience, but there are plenty of romances that are intended for kids. Just look at most of the Disney catalogue. I point this all out, though, to note that as children’s worlds grow more complicated, so do their monster stories – because so do their fears. And if the picturebooks convey the message that a little kid can face their fears, a story like Monsters, Inc. can show that children are not the only ones who may feel worried or anxious. Adults have fears to face, too.

            Sulley accidentally lets Boo into his world when he notices a door in the work station after hours. Her appearance in Monstropolis brings a storm of chaos and panic. Her nickname, of course, comes from her cheerful expression of scariness, imitating the monsters who she, for the most part, doesn’t really fear. The monsters, however, are petrified. Rumors fly about the rogue child’s laser vision and mind powers. At first, Sulley and Mike are mostly concerned with returning her to her door without anyone finding out they’ve come in contact with her, as they would have to suffer humiliating quarantine, complete with career setbacks. But Sulley quickly picks up on the fact that Boo is not actually as scary as she’s been made out to be, though Mike takes longer to convince. “That thing is a killing machine!” he insists, as Boo is engaged in the favorite toddler pastime of making herself dizzy. The exaggerated fear of Boo is sort of an inverse of the monsters themselves being so mundane: the humor comes from the ridiculousness of the notion of being scared of any of them. In “Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture,” Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock explains that that the monsters’ fear of humans in Monsters, Inc. demonstrates how fear is a cultural thing: “what one culture considers normal may be considered exotic by another” (279). Therefore, the child viewer is prompted to think twice about the things they may be afraid of – especially if they’ve been told to be afraid of them.

            But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t real things to fear. The reason that Boo’s door was present after hours was that Randall, her designated scarer, was working for a secret project on behalf of Henry J. Waternoose III, the owner of Monsters, Inc. Mr. Waternoose had appeared throughout much of the film as a benevolent mentor figure to Sulley, but genre savvy viewers may have known not to trust his fancy waistcoat and bow tie, even more than his crab legs and many eyes. Greed is something to fear, especially when it leads to extractive actions – in this case, quite literally. Waternoose and Randall plan on kidnapping children and hooking them up to scream extractors, essentially torture devices that hook onto kids’ faces. Maybe those not-so-innocent children aren’t as scared of monsters in their closets as they used to be, but we can sure count on them to scream – and scream and scream and scream – if we whisk them away and feed them into the gears of our industrial machine. So like: Monsters, Inc. gets pretty real here, with its depictions of the ways that powerful adults can use less powerful people – a demographic that definitely includes children – to hang onto wealth and comfort, the fate of those “beneath them” be damned. That’s the kind of thing that can’t be fixed by just facing what’s in your closet.

            But it must be faced nevertheless. Here, bravery is not just about overcoming personal challenges or anxieties, but about addressing actual threats in order to help others. It would be easier to just let the most powerful people have their way, but in getting to know Boo, Sulley and Mike have discovered a shared personhood across humans and monsters. Sulley, in particular, has to face his own wrongdoing in scaring children for energy for so many years. Yes, the outcome was important – how else would the city function? – but the ends never actually justified the means. Besides, there are other ways for the city to function: better, more sustainable ways, not that the powerful people are interested in that. (So a thing that doesn’t come up much on this channel because it’s not my professional area is the fact I am deeply passionate about environmental protection, and this film’s pointed criticism of destructive extraction when sustainable growth is right there ready to be implemented did kind of make me feel like screaming myself.)

In this case, the sustainable energy is children’s laughter, which is actually vastly more powerful than their screams. This metaphor works on a few levels, because as we’ve seen, faux horror relies on humor to, if not nullify, then at least mitigate fear. In No Go the Bogeyman, Marina Warner explains that “Humor is clearly one of the chief and most successful ways in which popular culture resists fear” (328). This movie, as many “funny monster” stories do, often relies on the misfortune of what Warner calls the fall guy, who in this case is Mike Wazowski. Any injury that befalls him is hilarious to Boo. Warner observes that “ogres lose their bite when they are shown up as blundering fools” (327). But, while slapstick isn’t necessarily my cup of tea, humor-wise, this isn’t necessarily just more of the same, in terms of deriving benefit from someone else’s pain. Warner explains, “Fall guys invite identification, of course, and while laughing at them exempts you from being laughed at, you simultaneously recognize the situations depicted as all too familiar” (330). As the viewer had already been invited to identify with Mike, even the humor at his expense can invite fellow feeling.

Monsters, Inc. lets kids know that a lot of the things that scare them don’t necessarily go away when they grow up. Even as an adult, it makes sense to be scared of the fact that there are people and institutions who don’t listen to the less powerful, and that oppress and harm them. Waternoose and Randall are willing to do violence to protect their positions, and that’s scary, no matter how old you are. But, the film shows, there are things that you can do about your fears. You can fight back, even when you’re scared – even if fighting back is legitimately dangerous. You can help find new, less scary solutions to life’s problems. You can laugh with – and sometimes at – your friends and be excited to get to know people who are different from you. You can be curious. The monsters aren’t always going to be who you assume they are, so it’s important to think twice about what you take for granted. And honestly? That’s a lesson that we scared humans have to learn again and again, for a much longer time than our childhoods last.

CONCLUSION

            Fear is something that all living things share to at least some extent. If there’s something in you that wants to stay alive, there’s a response that will move you away from the things that threaten that. That embodied instinct is so deep and so powerful that it comes as no surprise that we humans turn to metaphors like monsters to explain it – or to even conceptualize it. A young child may not cognitively know why their heart starts beating so hard in the dark. A monster puts a face, a source, a reason to that feeling. And as we grow older, those monsters stay with us, expanding their meanings and narratives to meet our more complex fears – as well as our responses to those fears.

            Of course, any monster media for kids is almost certainly made by adults, so it probably will tell us more about adulthood than childhood. Innocence and purity kind of require only positive emotions to remain – well, innocent and pure. If a child experiences too much fear, that can be seen as a loss or destruction of their innocence. It’s really an impossible task to tease out where the protection of that social construct ends and where the desire to provide good lives for individual kids begins, because social constructs are the organizing structures of culture and cultural thought. But I think we can critique many aspects of the construction of innocence – and I do, in almost every video on this channel – while acknowledging that, yeah, I don’t want kids to be too scared, either. I want them to be able to trust in the safety of their environments. But, since fear is inevitable for them as living beings, it’s important not to see fear as a childhood-ruiner or ender. Instead, helping kids deal with fear in ways that also build community and connection – through means such as storytelling – is, to my mind, a pretty noble goal for us adults to pursue. We just need to be willing to examine our own stories to see what biases or unintended tropes may have gotten in there, and we need to always remember that we’re not any less scared than the kids are. As long as we’re willing to keep going in spite of it, maybe that’s what kids need to know, too.

            I hope that you’ve enjoyed this video – if you did, please give it a like and leave a comment down below about your favorite early childhood monsters. Make sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already. We have video essays here every two weeks, and on the off-weeks, I’m releasing chapters from my YA manuscript, Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth, which features a genetically engineered werewolf. I am also making some moves on preparing my youth book club and mentorship services from the business side of things, so soon we will start fundraising, which will provide lots of fun opportunities for some extra content on here. The next video essay will continue the theme of exploring the concept of fear through monster stories – except this time we’ll be looking at adolescent fears, so it’s going to be a lot less friendly than this video, but hopefully still just as much fun. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• There’s a Nightmare in My Closet, by Mercer Mayer (1968)
• The Monster at the End of This Book, by Jon Stone (1971)
• Monsters, Inc., dir. Pete Docter (2001)

References

• Austin, S. (2022). Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States. Ohio State University Press.
• Brown, R.A. (2016). From Aggressive Wolf to Heteronormative Zombie: Performing Monstrosity and Masculinity in the Narrative Picturebook. In J.R. McCort (Ed.), Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture (pp. 90-120). University Press of Mississippi.
• Maynes, M. (2020). Monsters at bedtime: managing fear in bedtime picture books for children. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7, 63.
• McCort, J.R. (2016). Introduction: Why Horror? (Or, The Importance of Being Frightened). In J.R. McCort (Ed.), Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture (pp. 3-36). University Press of Mississippi.
• Poole, W.S. (2011). Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Baylor University Press.
• Warner, M. (1999). No Go The Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Weinstock, J.A. (2013). Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture. In A.S. Mittman & P.J. Dendle (Eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (pp. 275-291). Routledge.