INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and today we are talking about monster stories, stranger danger, and the categories of trustworthy and untrustworthy adults. The films that we’ll be discussing are Weapons from 2025, The Black Phone from 2021, and The Night of the Hunter from all the way back in 1955. Instead of doing a section on each one, as I often do, I’m going to give you a rundown of the plots upfront, and then we’ll analyze them all together in terms of their treatment of “dangerous adults.”

            Before we get into that, though, just a reminder that I have an ongoing fundraiser for Youth Monsterology, the program of teen book clubs and educational mentorship services that I am starting! Due to your incredible generosity, we not only reached the initial goal of $500, but we’ve reached the stretch goal of $700, too! I didn’t even set a second stretch goal, because I didn’t know if reaching beyond that would be possible, but the campaign is still going until the end of May, so yeah, let’s keep reaching! As a reminder, all contributions go towards making this program low-cost and accessible to as many young people as possible, while also making it sustainable for me to run as hopefully the start of my career in this space. There’s also more in it than that for you, as well, as different tiers of contributions get different rewards, such as YouTube shorts and writing feedback. Check out the launch video up in the corner and the link to the campaign in the description! Or, if you’re interested in supporting another way, my Patreon link is down below, too, and super thanks is enabled. Any earnings I get here gets deducted from what I have to charge future participants later, so I really, really appreciate it!

            And here is editing me with the second round of shoutouts for the backers of the Indiegogo. This time around, thank you so much to Caitycat66, bengallovesbagels, Hannah, mlphilley, Geraldine, Babette, and RaySage. I appreciate you all so much – thank you so much for making this project a reality.

            Okay, so back to the topic at hand: with whom is a child truly safe? It’s a decidedly loaded question. As I so often talk about on this channel, the prevailing modern construction of childhood – that is, our shared cultural belief about childhood – is that it is a time of innocence. Innocence itself has a host of associated meanings and assumptions. Obviously, innocence relates to morality; it can connote the simple absence of guilt, but the capital-R Romantic concept of childhood bumped that up to the active presence of purity and goodness associated with childhood. But innocence also is related to ignorance: a dearth of experience and knowledge. If you combine these two conceptual categories, you can see why conversations about childhood are often framed in terms of protection. It makes sense to want to protect and preserve moral goodness, and it also makes sense that a person without knowledge or experience would need protection. So children are not imagined as safe on their own: they need some adult to safeguard them.

            Now, as with many discussions about the social constructions of childhood, we do have to acknowledge certain biological realities. By and large, children are smaller than adults, and they are still in the process of developing cognitive skills that would help them assess and react to potential threats. Also, just based on how time works, they have a more limited set of experiences with which to analyze new situations. So I’m not out here trying to say protection is totally a social invention, and leave your two-year-old on their own. However, though biological realities underpin the need for adults to be involved with ensuring children’s safety, the decisions that a culture collectively makes about who those trustworthy adults should be is socially constructed, and, like all social constructions, it’s always worth double-checking our own to see if they actually hold as much water as we are conditioned to believe they do. And that is what I use monster stories to do.

            Weapons, The Black Phone, and The Night of the Hunter all feature children in peril. Not only does the danger itself derive from monstrous adults, but plenty of regular adults in these films also repeatedly fail to protect the children. They are not up to the task of identifying and eliminating the threats. In The Night of the Hunter, eventually one particularly savvy adult does help come to the rescue, but the two more contemporary films are not as optimistic. In those, the kids have to save themselves.

            All three movies portray the monstrous adult as an invader, an interloper in the community, but they do so in distinct ways. Who they choose to portray as predatory and threatening is worth examining alongside the cultural conversation around “stranger danger,” a mediated and political discourse that identifies threats to children as coming from outside the family unit. So let’s see what these films do with that, and what meaning we as consumers of child-centric monster stories can do with it, as well.

IDENTIFYING THE MONSTER

            Of the three movies we’re discussing here today, Weapons is the one that treats the identity of the monster most as a mystery. The premise is that one night, for no discernible reason, almost all of the students in a specific third gradeclass go missing. The ring cameras around the neighborhood show them leaving at exactly the same time, seemingly of their own accord, and running away with their arms out in a peculiar fashion. Only one student is left, a boy named Alex. The school closes for a time, a manhunt ensues, and the community turns up no concrete evidence of their missing children’s whereabouts. But there sure are a lot of suspicions and speculations.

            At the center of this storm is the teacher of the missing class, Justine. She was a new teacher and new overall to the community, and since hers was the only class affected, suspicion falls on her, despite the fact that police could not tie her to anything. Just as a fun little side note: Justine is the name of the nanny in the novel Frankenstein who takes the fall for the Creature’s murder of Victor’s little brother, William. I haven’t seen anything about whether this was intended, but I choose to take it as a nice little bit of monster intertextuality. This Justine is deeply upset by the situation, as one would be, and she faces constant harassment from the grieving parents, particularly Archer, who vandalizes her car (or at least is implied to) and stalks her.It doesn’t help that Justine is not a perfect victim (or, I guess, not a perfect innocent suspect). She has a drinking problem and also an on-and-off affair with a police officer, Paul, which is an issue for two reasons: Paul is married to not her and is also supposed to be part of the task force for the disappearance in which Justine is a major person of interest. So all in all: messy.

The film is divided into point of view sections, where we follow one character’s experience of the unfolding horrors. First is Justine, then Archer, then Paul. Then we have James, an unhoused drug addict whom Paul physically assaults after he gets stuck with one of James’s needles. After that is Marcus, the principal of the school, who has been trying to manage this crisis and is getting increasingly frustrated by Justine’s insistence on investigating the matter on her own, especially when she keeps trying to talk to Alex, who clearly does not want her doing so. Marcus is concerned about legal repercussions, as well as his teachers maintaining boundaries with their students. And then, finally, after all these adults, we get Alex’s point of view section, in which we learn the full picture of what’s actually happening.

In each of the adult sections, we get closer to answers, whether because the characters are trying to find them or whether they accidentally stumble into them, to their own peril. Everyone eventually gets caught in the web of the actual culprit: Gladys. Gladys is ostensibly Alex’s great-great-aunt who is staying with the family due to her failing health. Whether this is her actual identity is sort of ambiguous: Alex’s mom doesn’t even really know her, but feels duty-bound to take her in, since she has no one else. So Gladys may actually be family, but she also may be claiming that title for the access it grants her to her victims. You see, Gladys is a full-on, old school witch. Straight up, unambiguous monster. Beneath her bright wig and flamboyant makeup, both of which call to mind the figure of a clown – a classic embodiment of childhood fear in horror – she is declining into the indignities of death by old age. She bewitches Alex’s parents to siphon off their life force, and she demonstrates that she has complete control over them in this ensorcelled state. She can turn them into weapons – against others, and against themselves. She promises Alex that if he tells anyone what is going on in their home, she will make his parents kill themselves.

The horrors for Alex do not stop there. Turns out that two young-ish adults won’t cut it for Gladys’s life-extending purposes. So she instructs Alex – again, on pain of his parents’ deaths – to collect small belongings from his classmates. After he does so, she uses these belongings in a spell to call them all to her, and she has been keeping them in the basement as catatonic life source vessels ever since. Meanwhile, Alex keeps going to school, and then he goes to the grocery store to get soup to feed his incapacitated parents and classmates. He does not – he cannot – trust any other adults, and no adults adequately help him.

Indeed, even when the other point of view characters converge upon Alex’s home, they do so either as Gladys’s bewitched weapons (minus Marcus, who had already faced that fate and then died) or as attempted rescuers who essentially get their asses handed to them. Alex is the one who has to save himself, which he does by crafting a spell of his own. He had observed enough of Gladys’s witchcraft to figure out how to do it. Alex turns the kids in the basement into his own weapons – and fires them at Gladys. Cue a sequence where a horde of screaming children go streaking through suburbia and eventually literally tear the witch apart. After that, the spells are broken, sort of. A child voiceover tells us that some of the kids have started to recover the ability to speak, but their prognosis is ambiguous. The damage was done, and everyone, adults and children alike, have to figure out a way to deal with that.

So those are all the pieces: a bunch of highly flawed adults, most of whom are in “trusted” positions – teacher, parent, cop, principal – then one extremely predatory adult, also in a trusted position – older family member – and finally, the victimized kids slipping all the way through the cracks. A lot of the adults who are profiled also have elements that make them “suspicious” or less trustworthy in society’s eyes: drug addiction and houselessness at the most obvious, but also moral transgressions against the norm like affairs, problem drinking, actual physical violence, stalking, boundary-less behaviors, and then also just identities that can be twisted to be incompatible with proximity to childhood within our social constructions, as well, like “young single sexually active woman” or “gay principal,” in Marcus’s case. There’s this mix of stereotypically “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy” markers for each of them. I have mixed feelings about how effectively this all comes together, but we’ll talk more about that in the next section.

            The Black Phone, by contrast, is much more straightforward, as is my opinion of it: I didn’t like it. I thought it was boring and obvious and not even well-written on like a dialogue level. The whole thing was brown and muddy without any really memorable visuals to me. At no point did I get got by any scary moments, which is honestly such a low bar, because despite my monster-studying ways, I am but a humble fraidy-cat. I almost didn’t finish watching the movie in hopes that I could find a different story to discuss for this video, but if I want to talk about stranger danger, this really is the one.

            The Black Phone film is set in Denver, Colorado, in 1978. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were several high-profile cases of stranger abductions in real life that received a great deal of media attention. It wasn’t that crimes like this had never happened before, but now they were being broadcast to a much wider audience than just the locale where the kidnapping took place. This led to a perception of a sudden epidemic. In the aptly titled “Stranger Danger!,” Aimee Wodda explains, “the disappearance of young people was (incorrectly) assumed to be related to a dramatic rise in sexual exploitation, murder, and victimization, yet media reports tended to overstate the scope of the problem” (2-3). In other words, while obviously even one stranger kidnapping would be too many, they were not then and are not now the cause of the majority of either child abuse or missing children cases.

            Our main characters in The Black Phone are Finney and his younger sister Gwen, who are being raised by a single alcoholic father after their mom died by suicide. This movie kind of goes for the depiction of early adolescence that we see in narratives like IT, where the kids are grittier and a lot less innocent than adults would like to assume. Over the opening credits, we’re treated to a montage of some of the more disturbing trappings of childhood: skinned knees, bloodied mouths, etc. On top of his troubled home, Finney deals with brutal beatings from bullies. If that weren’t enough, rumors are circulating about a figure known as “the Grabber,” which is the laziest villain name I’ve perhaps ever heard. Kids keep going missing in rapid succession, and so far the police have had no luck in locating them.

            So, obviously, Finney is up next. At first, I thought this movie was at least doing something with his home life making Finney more vulnerable, because his dad is abusive on top of being an alcoholic, though it’s his sister Gwen who gets more of the physical abuse. She has psychic dreams, an affliction she shares with her late mom. These dreams were a major factor in the mom’s suicide, so the dad attempts to beat them out of Gwen. So I was like, okay, the instability here is related to the likelihood that Finney would be victimized by crime, except, no, not really, because one of the preceding victims had what looks like in flashbacks a pretty ideal home situation, with proud, loving parents. Some of the other victims, for what it’s worth, also had it rough, so maybe this was at least a thought in the filmmakers’ minds, but it’s not really followed through on. The Grabber just opportunistically grabs kids off the street, pulls them into his classic windowless van, and takes them to his basement lair.

            The Grabber is clearly a monster, but a metaphorical one. He is just a human, but he wears the trappings of monstrosity with a devilish mask. It has detachable lower halves with different expressions – smiling, frowning, and blank. Sometimes he also just wears the top half. The Grabber’s motivations for donning this disguise is not given to us; it’s not to conceal his identity, because he is bare-faced when he kidnaps the kids, which makes sense because a passerby would probably clock a demon-looking guy out and about in the neighborhood. I suppose one potential reason for the Grabber’s masks could be to distance himself from the violence of his crime. It’s not him, it’s some alter-ego. There’s even a hint of one of my least favorite tropes, the killer with multiple personalities, because at one point he insists to Finney that “someone else” killed the other kids. The Grabber also speaks to Finney with a couple of different voices and affects, some more conciliatory and others more aggressive. Though he never explicitly sexually abuses Finney or any of his other victims, the threat is very obviously implied, as he plays with Finney’s hair and even says, “I will never make you do anything that you won’t like.” But the main abuse that he metes out to his victims is the game of “naughty boy,” where he leaves their basement cell door unlocked, waits for them to try to escape, and then beats them. Eventually, he kills them, buries them at another location, and starts over with a new victim.

            Despite the fact that the killer is just a guy, this is still a supernatural horror movie. It’s just that it’s the kids who are the literal monsters – that is, nonhuman, or at least not human anymore. The titular black phone is an old disconnected rotary phone in the basement that at first just seems to taunt Finney with its uselessness. But then it starts to ring, and Finney receives calls from the ghosts of the past victims. The ghosts offer Finney advice about how to escape the Grabber, based on their own attempts. Much of the movie’s runtime is taken up by Finney receiving a call, attempting to enact the ghostly advice, and failing by coming up against some obstacle that the ghosts didn’t know about.

            Meanwhile, back home, Gwen keeps trying to dream the solution to Finney’s disappearance. Eventually, she succeeds in finding his location, with some assistance from the ghost kids. Simultaneously, the ghost kids’ escape advice all comes together like a booby trap Rube Goldberg machine that Finney is able to use to fight the Grabber. Finney gets the phone cord around his neck, and all the ghost kids yell their revenge at the Grabber as he dies. Finney and Gwen have an ambulance-side reconciliation with their drunk dad, and then the film ends with a newly-confident Finney – or “Finn,” as he now asserts – being admired by girls in his class for his daring escape. So no lasting trauma here, I guess!

            As in Weapons, the kids save themselves, unaided by useless parents and police, although the police here are presented as generally diligent and willing to listen to Gwen’s prophetic dreams, which I honestly think is kind of at odds with the overall themes of the film, but I also don’t think this film is particularly good at having themes, so. Also as in Weapons, the kids have to get a bit monstrous themselves to resist the predator. Alex takes up Gladys’s witchcraft, and the Grabber’s victims are literally vengeful ghosts. There’s also Gwen’s supernatural abilities, though that’s yet another under-explored aspect of this film; if they cut that entire element, very little would change. But the point stands that the kids have to become a little more Other and a little less innocent to be able to fight back.

            Our final film for today’s analysis is The Night of the Hunter, which isn’t supernatural at all: it’s just a thriller, so all monsters here are fully metaphorical. Thank you to Kiernan, friend of the channel and intro image artist, for recommending this one. In this movie, our predatory villain is Harry Powell, a traveling preacher and serial killer. He seduces desperate widows through his godly affectations, then kills them for their money before moving on to the next unsuspecting town. Powell’s religiosity isn’t just for show; he fully thinks that he is supported in his actions by a misogynistic God who hates “loose women” more than he hates murder. The police, meanwhile, hate stolen cars, which Powell is driving, so he gets arrested and has to do a stint in prison.

            Powell’s cellmate is a bank robber who killed a guard in the course of the robbery, and who is therefore set to be executed. When the bank robber ran from the crime, he had just enough time to get home and hide the money, entrusting the location to his two young children, John and Pearl. John, as the older child and presumably also because he’s the boy, is told to never tell anyone where the money is and to always take care of Pearl. The cops then arrive and arrest the kids’ father in front of them, in what is clearly a traumatic moment for John. Both father and son are good at keeping the location of the money a secret, though – much to the chagrin of Powell, who wants that score for himself. Well, no matter: seducing widows is what he does, after all. So that’s where he heads as soon as his cellmate is dead and he is released.

            Seducing the widow – and the other adults in the town – proves easy. The local holier-than-thou busybody has already been harassing the children’s mom to get remarried, because “No woman is meant to raise youngsters alone. The Lord meant that job for two.” Powell seems like the perfect man for the job, despite his LOVE and HATE knuckle tattoos, which, though at first off-putting to the buttoned-up community, soon become part of his charm as he is able to turn them into fodder for a fiery sermon. Powell has a deep, theatrical voice, which he uses to sing hymns to announce his presence – a character detail that turns genuinely creepy as he later stalks the kids in pursuit of the hidden money. Because John is not charmed by Powell, but in his resistance, he gives the game away, saying that he’ll “never tell” – so then Powell knows that John knows where the money is. So now Powell the widow-killer has a new enemy: a child.

            Their animosity grows as Powell marries the children’s mother Willa and immediately begins to psychologically abuse her. When she approaches him on their wedding night, fully in love and reasonably expecting wedding night things, he shames her for her “lust” and says that he only married her to provide a father for her children, not to make more. Cut to Willa on stage with Powell at a revival meeting, confessing how she was at fault for her first husband’s crime of bank robbery because of her womanly desires for perfume and makeup. Though there are definitely codified and taken-for-granted traditional gender roles in this film, due to the time period of its production and also the time period in which it’s set, which is a few decades earlier in the Great Depression, it’s still significant that the rampant misogyny of white American evangelicalism has been considered worthy of filmic critique for at least 70 years! Meanwhile, Powell’s battle against John continues. When John threatens to go to his mother, Powell says, “It’s your word against mine. Me, she believes.” Powell is almost able to get the secret out of Pearl through charm – she is younger and less suspicious– but his patience quickly runs out with dealing with children and he resorts to threats of violence: “Tell me, you little wretch, or I’ll tear your arm off!” Willa hears and attempts to raise an objection, for which Powell slaps her. She then reverts to trying to convince herself that this is the Lord’s will, but Powell has now run out of patience for her, too: he murders her, leaving him in sole charge of her children.

            The danger now immensely increased, Pearl winds up divulging the location of the money for fear that Powell will kill her brother. Their dad hid it in her rag doll, concealing the theft in a symbol not only of childhood innocence, but specifically feminine childhood innocence, where no one would expect to look for ill-gotten gains. Luckily, the kids are able to escape with the doll and they make their way alone down the river in a canoe, with Powell in hot pursuit. They are eventually found by woman who runs a home for orphans/children whose families can’t care for them (since this is the Depression, after all). Her introduction is swatting at them with a switch to get them to go to her house, which my modern eyes found, you know, alarming, but then she is subsequently framed as the one responsible and adequately compassionate adult in the entire film. As I reiterated on Patreon when I did my raw reaction to this movie, “corporal punishment” is just “physical assault” but done to kids, and I stand by that in any era, but this does very much show us how our collective cultural beliefs and practices around childhood are not static over time. Anyway, aside from the switching, this woman, Rachel, does care deeply for the children in her charge – and that includes actually listening to them. When Powell catches up with the kids and tries to charm Rachel into handing them over, she is the first adult to believe John and protect him and Pearl from this dangerous man. There is a powerful scene where Powell paces outside her home at night, singing his ominous hymn, and Rachel joins in the singing from the porch with a shotgun in her lap, barring the entrance. During her vigil, she sees an owl dive for a rabbit, and muses, “It’s a hard world for little things.” Yet, after she wounds Powell and calls the police on him, Rachel also says, “You know when you’re little you have more endurance than God is ever to grant you gain. Children are man at his strongest. They abide.”

            Strong or not, John clearly still suffers from the trauma of his father’s arrest. When the police show up to take Powell away, John goes through the same series of physical reactions that he experienced when his father was arrested. After holding strong with his dad’s secret for the whole film, he suddenly rushes to Powell, who is in handcuffs on the ground, and beats the rag doll over him, begging him to take the money that flies out of it. It’s a really psychologically complex scene, and I personally was impressed that it allowed for this complexity in its portrayal of a child. Powell then gets lynched by the same community that had so eagerly welcomed him in the first place, but Rachel makes sure the children are far away when that happens. The film sets things back to peaceful equilibrium in the end (this is Hays Code era, after all). We see John and Pearl in Rachel’s home, happy and comfortable, and Rachel once again marvels about children’s resilience: “The rain falls and winds are cold, but they abide.”

            Though Powell is not physically nonhuman, he is a serial killer, which is a category that is very much treated as a type of real-life monster due to the egregious violations of the (in this case very good and sound) rules of human society. But Powell uses various systems of power to present himself as inherently trustworthy – not a “monster” or a “stranger” at all. “Preacher” is all most adults need to know before trusting him – and specifically trusting him with their children. This flaw in their trust renders the other adults, including John and Pearl’s mom, also unsafe. Only Rachel, through actually paying attention to children’s experiences, is able to move past the cultural categories of trust and actually see the truth.

            So now we’ve got our three casts of characters: a small group of monstrous predators, a large group of adults who fail to protect children from these predators, the kids who have to protect themselves, and then Rachel, the one adult who listens to kids. Let’s now take a look at how these categories are constructed, how they relate to real issues of danger for kids, and what our mediated images of “monstrous predators” both reveal and conceal about society.

THE STRANGER, THE WITCH, AND THE PREACHER

            We can start with the most straightforward and, in my opinion, most flawed narrative: The Black Phone. It follows the cultural script of “stranger danger” from the 1970s to 1990s completely unquestioningly. Within the very name of “The Grabber” is a reduction of this character’s entire identity to the danger that he poses to children. Even the issues of mental illness or a potentially disrupted childhood of his own that are vaguely alluded to in this film are ultimately unexplored: the only thing that matters about him is that he is a stranger who grabs children off the streets. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, this type of predator is a very, very small minority when it comes to adults who actually harm children.

            As Mica Hilson writes in “The kind of person who would mess with a kid”: Cultural Fantasies of Stranger-danger and AM Homes’ Looking for Jonny, “American parents in the 1980s had only to watch the news or to pick up the paper to know that their child was in grave danger as soon as he or she was outside the home and no longer under the protection of a parent’s watchful eye. In reality, however, the home is a far more dangerous place for children” (90). Hilson and many other scholars whose works I read for this video are quick to point out that the vast majority of crimes against children, from murder to all forms of child abuse, are committed by close family members. Most “child abductions,” likewise, are carried out by parents or family members in the course of a custody dispute. Since the reality and the cultural narrative of stranger danger do not match up, Hilson argues that “it is important to understand both the psychological and sociological underpinnings of the fantasy of stranger-danger because it now plays such an important role in how Americans perceive childhood, public space, and their relationship to their fellow citizens” (91). Hilson identifies a breakdown of social trust inherent in this narrative, which fits very nicely with the rightward swing of politics during the 1980s, where “stranger danger” really came to the fore. Politicians like Reagan and Thatcher urged people to turn their focus inward to the nuclear family and away from larger community. Hilson writes, “While I would not go so far as to suggest that the stranger-danger panic of the 1980s and 1990s was specifically designed to indoctrinate the public into believing that ‘There’s no such thing as society’ and ‘people must look after themselves first,’ I will argue that it helped to reinforce and naturalize these ideologies” (92).

            I definitely see this pessimistic view of community in The Black Phone. Even the muddy color scheme paints a picture of a society that is crumbling and useless, with kids more or less on their own to recreate their broader culture’s violence against each other in the form of bullying. Now, the horror genre has no obligation to be optimistic about anything, really, but it’s important to examine what exactly any given narrative chooses to be pessimistic about. Nothing about the Grabber is subtle, including his actual kidnappings. You would think a neighborhood that has like a missing kid every two weeks might be on the lookout for broad daylight snatchings off the sidewalk and into a windowless van, but any sense of broader community is completely absent from the film. With that said, The Black Phone doesn’t actually portray the family home as a safe space, either, since Finney’s dad is incapable of protecting his children and, in fact, also harms them. But he can be forgiven in the end, redeemed by the family bond between his two children. Similarly, though the police aren’t actually the ones who save anyone, they are well-meaning and more trustworthy (if not more effectual) than other adults in the community. After all, “tough on crime” political rhetoric was one of the main elements of the stranger danger moral panic, as Aimee Wodda points out. The classic stranger danger narrative says the home and the police are the only institutions that can be trusted, and while The Black Phone wants to be too gritty to fully buy into that, it follows the stranger danger script too closely to condemn those institutions, either. So they’re presented as at least tepidly better than just being out on the suburban streets as a kid, where no one is looking out for you.

            The issue of the “stranger” in Weapons and The Night of the Hunter is more complex and therefore interesting. While the Grabber is a total stranger to his victims, and remains a stranger to the audience, since we’re never given any insight into what his actual deal is, the intruders in the other two films toe the line between outsider and insider. Gladys may or may not actually be a blood relative, but she passes as one, while Powell becomes a stepfather to the children that he terrorizes. In this way, these films present a much more true to life view of the location of greatest danger for the statistically average victimized child: the family home. John and Pearl in particular are explicitly more safe as very young runaways than within the walls of their own house. Wodda notes that runaway and quote-unquote “thrownaway” children – that is, minors who are kicked out of their homes – account for much larger populations of missing kids than stranger abductions do. The mere existence of these unfortunately large categories is proof positive that the family home is not automatically the bastion of safety that the stranger danger narrative positions it as, through cultural messaging like the classic milk carton campaign. Hilson writes, “the milk carton campaign reifies the notion of home as a safe space, eliciting pathos for the child who has supposedly been deprived of all the nurturance and comforts of home that the family seated around the dining table is currently enjoying” (95). The prominence of that cultural narrative, according to Wodda, precludes the reality that kids are much more likely to be harmed by people close to them from being “reflected in policy and legislation” (24). The gap in policy is mirrored in communities that assume if a child is at home, then all is well. Hence why the community members in The Night of the Hunter are simply overjoyed that John and Pearl have a father again, as the Lord intended. In Weapons, meanwhile, Justine’s fixation on Alex’s home life is met with frustration and censure from Marcus the principal, who is afraid of upsetting more children’s families. Alex isn’t one of the missing ones; he is home, so he’s safe, so he should be left alone and entrusted to his guardians. I appreciate that both of these films show how that attitude is completely off-base.

            With that said, Gladys and Powell are still ultimately strangers. They are unknown entities who infiltrate the family and community from outside, traveling from afar to reach them. Both Weapons and The Night of the Hunter stop short of making the predator an actual insider within a child’s family: they are not the parents who raised these kids from birth, and they are not loved ones who have been embedded in this space for a long time. Now, of course, there are plenty of movies and other narratives, very much including other monster stories, that do deal with actual abusive parents. So I’m not saying that’s like a gap in all storytelling. I just think it’s interesting the way we see this sort of mix of narratives within these two films that explicitly engage with the theme of hidden dangers to children. Both movies are really interested in the kinds of perils that other adults overlook and the barriers that children face to being able to trust adults outside of the home to help protect them from the monsters within. Yet both still ultimately locate the source of that danger as an outsider, even if those outsiders are quickly able to embed themselves inside the home.

            Weapons in particular is interesting in this regard by choosing to portray its monster as a classic old hag witch. So I’ve been holding my cards a bit close to my chest here, because I don’t intend this video to be a review of the movies, but Weapons didn’t work that well for me. I know it did for lots of other people, including a lot of my friends and some of my patrons, since we’ve discussed it over on Patreon – and again, if you’re interested in these bonus conversations, check out the link in the description. But I felt like I was really missing something when I watched it and just did not find it all that effective. (I will say, though, that the two friends I watched it with felt the same way, so I know I’m at least not alone.) My main issues were tone and pacing. I thought it was too long, especially the second act, and while I get what they were going for with the different point of view sections, the actual experience of watching it for me was sort of frustrating, because it felt like we were straying pretty far from the actual story at times. There are some legitimately well-done jump scares and general spooks in the first act, but the beginning felt more like just a straightforward horror to me, making the later turn into horror-comedy kind of jarring. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching the intensely campy ending, as well as Amy Madigan’s over-the-top performance as Gladys (though the fact that she won the Oscar over Wunmi Mosaku in Sinners is nuts to me, but that’s another conversation). I just didn’t feel like the whole thing meshed. But I recognize that I am in the minority at least of critics and reviewers, and I don’t want to be the fun police over here, especially when it comes to enjoying a good old-fashioned monster like a witch.

            And yet. Monster analysis is what I do, so let’s dig into this whole witch thing a little bit. Gladys’s entire deal is that she is old and dying. She seeks to extend her life by siphoning off the vitality of children. This is a monster tale as old as time, almost literally. Public historian Julia Martins wrote the piece “Why Do We Picture Witches as Old Women?” Martins also has public scholarship here on YouTube, so you can check out a link to her in the description. She explains that old women embodied medieval and Early Modern European societies’ fears about the end of fertility, and more broadly, what womanhood even means outside of child-bearing. Having outlived their culturally sanctioned usefulness, old women “were assumed to be jealous of younger women, wishing to harm them and their children. And this is what connects age and gender to witchcraft: envy.” This is why, Martins explains, so many of the classic accusations of witchcraft were attacks on fertility: crops and cattle dying, causing mothers’ milk to dry up, and also just literally causing impotence or barrenness. Witches were said to turn their targets into copies of their own dried-up bodies (literally, in humors-based medicine), withering their victims into desiccated husks: “Witches’ bodies were life-taking, not life-giving.”

            So Weapons certainly isn’t doing anything new with its witch. Even the fun campiness of Gladys’s appearance and over-the-top affect harken back to the past. In The Witch in the Western Imagination, Lyndal Roper explains that the witch is “carnivalesque,” even as she “belonged to elite culture, too.” The witch can be heightened camp and serious theological issue at the same time, and so “She permitted a host of complex emotional responses: fear, loathing, dread, but also allure and fascination.” Among many critics and viewers, there was a delighted response to Gladys as a classic, larger-than-life villain, and, predictably, there’s now a prequel about her in the works. But again at the risk of being the fun police, for all the other genuinely interesting elements in Weapons about what makes an adult culturally “trustworthy,” it does still land on “old lady evil” – specifically because she’s old and she’s stealing youth from kids – which is like kind of an irrevocably misogynist construction, no? Like, again, am I missing something? I feel really out of step with this movie and its response. Roper writes that the witch allows “writers and artists to escape the carapace of Christianity, while yet apparently subscribing to its moral values.” So you get to transgress because you’re writing about a transgressive figure, and you get the plausible deniability of saying, I’m not endorsing all these awful things, but we can have some fun with imagining them, as long as the witch still, for example, gets ripped apart by her child victims in the end. It’s a kind of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach that personally doesn’t quite work for me.

            I think it might annoy me less if the movie didn’t try to do as much thematically with the other adults. But it builds up this whole cast of complicated, very flawed adult characters who could be socially suspicious for a variety of unjust reasons – suspicion of the single young woman, suspicion of queer people, suspicion of unhoused or addicted folks (and honestly, that character has the least to do with any of the child characters at all). These same characters actually fail to help kids for different reasons, including ignoring red flags of a disrupted home life, responding to those red flags with boundary-less intrusion as opposed to actually creating a safe space for the child to come forward, or just focusing so much on their own emotions that they miss the kids’ needs entirely. That last one goes for kind of all of them. This is all really crunchy to me as a childhood studies and monster scholar – and then the real monster is a cartoon witch. To me, that sort of torpedoes the themes of the home as the real danger, since Gladys doesn’t actually originate from the home, and it also flattens all the other explorations of the disconnects between adults and vulnerable, victimized kids, because most kids aren’t actually at risk of having their youthful vitality extracted, and that is not a real reason that adults actually abuse kids. Well, maybe that one weirdo who wants to live forever and is really strange about his young adult son, but even then, he’s not a dried-up post-menopausal lady, he’s a tech bro. Meanwhile, while envy may be part of the broader milieu of emotional motivations for actual predators, a far more salient issue is the way that violent adults are so easily able to exert power over children. Like, that’s the real deal of child abuse: society is set up in such a way that the easiest person to victimize is your own kid, because they are placed entirely under the power of their parents and legal guardians. So if you’ve got an adult with anger issues, feelings of inadequacy, etc., then kids are an easy outlet. That fundamental truth gets lost here in a movie that wants, at least partially, to be about danger to kids. But like, if they just wanted to have a fun, campy witch movie and didn’t set up all this other stuff, I feel like I’d be like, okay, sure! So again, it comes back to mismatched tones for me.

            So in this set of movies, the one that actually worked the best for me thematically and the one that I felt offers the most interesting commentary on the monster and the child was the oldest one. That is not often the case in my experience, simply because of how the social constructions of childhood that I most critique are so often deeply entrenched within older media. I mean, they still are now, but at least we don’t have the Hays Code anymore, you know? And make no mistake, there are a lot of assumptions about childhood embedded within The Night of the Hunter, especially in the way it ends on that note of extolling children’s resilience in a way that kind of makes it seem like there won’t be any lasting trauma for John and Pearl, which I would find unlikely. Children can and do survive and heal from a lot, but the way their resilience is constructed in this film is definitely rooted in a Christian-flavored belief in childhood innocence: kids “abide” because they are fundamentally good. Obviously, you know I’m going to have issues with that, because that’s a recipe for overlooking children’s actual emotional needs. However, the film otherwise presents a narrative of how a monstrous adult may be enabled to harm children that I think is still relevant, thought-provoking, and compelling.

            Now, as I said before, Powell, like Gladys, is a threat that originates from outside the home. Also like Gladys, a key part of his plan is to take over the minds of the biological parents. But while Gladys does this literally with witchcraft, which leaves Alex’s parents still theoretically “good parents,” just incapacitated, Powell succeeds in turning Willa against her own and her children’s interests. So even though Powell is still in many ways the dangerous stranger figure, we do have a situation here in which the kids are also made unsafe by their own biological family. Willa doesn’t like that Powell threatens her kids with violence, but his misogynistic abuse of her has her convinced that that’s her own womanly failing, so she does not protect the kids, even before she’s ultimately killed.

            The way that Powell uses religion, and specifically evangelical Christianity, to make himself appear to be not a stranger but instead a trustworthy adult guardian is where I think the film thematically shines the most. In “Religion-Related Child Physical Abuse: Characteristics and Psychological Outcomes,” Bette L. Bottoms, Michael Nielson, Rebecca Murray, and Henrietta Filipas explain that, while of course this is not the case for many religious people, there are unfortunately subcultures in which religious convictions can “foster, encourage, and justify abusive behavior” (88). Specifically faith traditions that place a high emphasis on disobedience as sin can result in parents who “may believe that it is better to inflict temporary pain than allow their children to burn in eternal hell” (89). Now, Powell obviously doesn’t actually care about the state of John and Pearl’s souls. He just wants the money. But his fiery religious rhetoric about sin and following the narrow path of the Lord certainly creates an environment in which John and Pearl would be expected to obey his every word. To be a good child is to follow the orders of a man like him, within a community enmeshed in this brand of religiosity. Again, I’m pretty impressed by a film from the mid-1950s going so hard in its critique of American evangelical Christian misogyny and adultism – things that are still major problems in this country today, especially in the current historical moment. So while most people probably wouldn’t immediately classify The Night of the Hunter as a monster movie, the preacher definitely earns his place among the stranger and the witch. And if I were given the choice to go into a house with one of them – well, I don’t know who I’d choose, but I know I’m not choosing him.

CONCLUSION

            As much as the inclusion of Rachel the good Christian in The Night of the Hunter is definitely a requirement of the era, I do appreciate her presence insofar as she proves that the most important thing that any adult can actually do to protect children is to listen to them. And despite their respective flaws (and in the case of The Black Phone, their many flaws), all three films that we discussed today demonstrate that no adults, no matter how good they think they are, no matter how much they may want to think that they are doing what is best for the kids in their lives, can actually fend off a single monster without finding a way to make a safe space for kids to communicate what is going on. And I will say for Weapons in particular that it shows that this is often really, really difficult. Gladys’s threats against Alex’s family are very real, so he is not inclined to confide in anyone. This, sadly, is the case for many children in situations of harm. Lots of predatory people make credible threats against kids and their loved ones that keep their victims silent. But, as Powell makes explicit in his threats against John, the other big part of that environment of secrecy is the knowledge that adults are often more inclined to believe other adults over children, so why even bother telling? So adults need to pay attention to more than just what kids say out loud. I mean, I don’t know, maybe the grocery store clerk could have wondered why Alex was buying a million cans of soup by himself every day? And though in The Night of the Hunter, all it takes is one good woman, it would be a lot easier to help kids if there were a larger community of aid and safety. (In Gladys’s case, she can only make one little spell bowl at a time, you know?) Instead of relying on stock monster tropes like the stranger or the witch to identify the threats from outside, adults need to be aware that a lot of kids are facing threats much closer to home, and we need to work together to build spaces of safety by listening to, believing, and respecting young people. That probably won’t end in the fantasy of violent catharsis against the monster that all three of these films indulge in, but that’s sort of my point. Ironic though it may be for me to say so on this fantasy analysis channel, but we need to put aside those collective cultural fantasies if we’re ever going to offer real help.

            There are a lot of ways to act directly to provide this help, and I’ve linked the resource library of the National Center for Youth Law in the description. They’ve got a lot of information and toolkits, and I recommend just giving their whole site a look. But, while I know that “raising awareness” is often quite fairly derided when it’s the only thing people do to address an issue, I do think that when it comes to youth rights and children’s actual lived experiences, we are kind of societally still in a stage where we need to raise a whole lot of awareness, because our cultural narratives like “stranger danger” or “the child-menacing witch” are still so prevalent that they can really obscure many realities. So that’s what I try to do here, and I hope that these conversations are maybe also giving all of you some language and frameworks for bringing these ideas to your own communities, as well.

            I hope that you enjoyed this video and found it thought-provoking. Please let me know what you think of all these monster-vs.-child stories in the comments below, and don’t forget to like and subscribe so you don’t miss the next conversations. I want to thank everyone for all your thoughtful contributions lately – that psychopath video really took off, and for the first time since starting this channel, I haven’t been able to keep up with all of the comments, but I appreciate how much care you’ve been putting into your discussions. I truly cannot believe that I now have over 3,000 subscribers – that’s absolutely wild for an academic who’s used to her writing being read by like nine people, and now I have the opportunity to hold these conversations with so many of you, and I’m very grateful. Don’t forget to pop over to the Indiegogo if you’d like to prompt a more specific topic for a short or get some feedback on your own writing. I will be releasing those throughout the week, and then I will be back here next Sunday with more chapters from my YA manuscript Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth, and then again in two weeks with another video essay. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• The Night of the Hunter, dir. Charles Laughton (1955)
• The Black Phone, dir. Scott Derickson (2021)
• Weapons, dir. Zach Cregger (2025)

References:

• Bottoms, B.L., Nielsen, M., Murray, R., & Filipas, H. (2003). Religion-related child physical abuse: Characteristics and psychological outcomes. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, 8(1-2), 87-114.
• Hilson, M. (2021). “The kind of person who would mess with a kid”: Cultural Fantasies of Stranger-Danger and AM Homes’ “Looking for Johnny.” The Comparatist, 45, 90-105.
• Martins, J.L. (2023, Jan. 31). Why Do We Picture Witches as Old Women? Living History. https://juliamartins.co.uk/why-is-it-that-we-imagine-an-older-woman-when-we-think-of-a-witch
• Roper, L. (2012). The Witch in the Western Imagination. University of Virginia Press.
• Wodda, A. (2018). Stranger Danger! Journal of Family Strengths, 18(1), art. 3.

National Center for Youth Law resources: https://youthlaw.org/resource-library/