Letters To Hollywood: Keep The Children Scared

Dear Hollywood,

Why don’t you make disturbing films for kids like you use to?

Dear Reader, you remember your youth right? 

You’re sprightly, innocent, full of vigor until the day you watch the film that’s a little bit too disturbing for your white picket fence brain. 

You feel sick and tingly, excited and vulnerable, confused but aware. 

You know everything now. You didn’t before. 

You realise there is a darkness within the world, and it can be harnessed and explored through the medium of film and animatronic manipulation.

The Skekis were the arch nemesis of the Gelfling from the 1982 fantasy film The Dark Crystal, directed and concieved by Jim Henson and Frank Oz and marketed as a “family film.”

How ridiculous. I am sure my mother never sat down to watch this battered VHS, and if she had she would have found it lacking. It is a film aimed squarely at the fertile imagination of the youth who are tired of the safety net of The Never Ending Story and the comfort of The Last Navigator.

Kids who want a fully realised mythological world full of innocence continually crushed by horrifically sinewy vultures, as they remove the life force of the cutest breed of podlings I ever did see. 

The Podlings, a pure innocent race whose essence was sucked out of them by the Skeksis in upsetting manners, turning them into vegetable slaves.

The flamboyantly angular Skesis, designed by Brian Froud, are supposed to be a mix of reptile, bird and dragon and they were the most disturbing creature my 7 year old brain had ever witnessed. 

Original sketches by Froud. But at what point did he say, “they really need ruffles.”

In this clip we watch the Skeksis having some chow, and despite the dated nature of the film and the fact they hadn’t worked out how to make it look like they knew how to swallow, the general air of freakiness still resides. 

I used to fast forward through this scene.

The digetic noise of lip smacking gluttony combined with the primitive nature of their boney claw like fingers terrified me. The attention to detail on the creatures hands, beaks and movements, so you can literally see how they operate, made them far more real then I was able to deal with. I couldn’t 100% trust that the bad guys didn’t know I was watching them and, later on, might find me and eat me.

I had quite the imagination/mental problem. 

But I still relish the memories of abject terror.

Although the Skeksis were dark in tone and design, they were beautiful in their bizarreness, and a brilliant feat of imagination. They were a wonderful example for kids of what your imagination could construct, and along with “The Nothing” in The Never Ending Story were a joy to have nightmares about. 

Although The Nothing did look quite lame once it finally out of it’s cave and fought Atreyu. 

You’re like, “oh, its a dog.”

The olden day non CGI nature of these monsters, ye olde animatronic puppets, was what made them so jarringly upsetting as a youngster. They looked tactile.

Nowadays, their influence is clear in the innovative creature creation work of people like Guillermo Del Toro.  

The Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth

Although Pan’s is not a film for children, and if you saw it as a child then shame on your parents and their excellent taste, his other films (Hellboy une and deux) were marketed at pretty much anyone and they had some excellent beasts in.

The Angel of Death, who pops up at the end of Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, springs to mind. It is a wonderfully dark creation with it’s receding gum line, skeletal body and ominous wingspan. Plus no eyes.

He ends you, and he has no eyes.

The Angel is close to the bone when it comes to oftoo scary to be birthed by the imagination and given human form for small children to see, but I think that’s fine.

We need more of that Hollywood. We need less of the films about teenage girls being stabbed or Bieber achieving stuff, and more fucked up puppets.

I know we have dark fantasy films coming out of our earholes nowaways, but all The Lord of the Rings will not compensate for the fact that The Dark Crystal has an air of oddness and surrealism aimed squarely at the kids but without all the fancy effects of motion capture and CGI. 

The lack of CGI in movies such as Crystal, Hellboys and Pan’s makes the bad guys feel that bit more realistic, visceral and constructed with the upmost care and attention.

You can see the sketch work and intricate detail the concept artist poured their heart into.

You can believe that tiny bit more in the vision of the director.

You are less removed from the world you have been placed into for 90 minutes.

You can’t spot where something has been falsely inserted, where the joins and seams are, and as a child it was always nice to be encouraged to access another world with everything you had.

At least for a little while.

Although The Dark Crystal bombed theatrically it has since been embraced by adults with fond memories, and the Japanese. It was released at the same time as E.T (ouch,) but still became the highest grossing film in Japan until Titanic took it’s spot fifteen years ago. Sadly plans to make a sequel have been indefinitely shelved but there is the Del Toro/Henson company Pinocchio collaboration to look forward to. Let’s hope it is as twisted and dark as possible. 

If not for me, then for my inner child. 

 Love Ellen x