Monster in Me...On the Screen
When these monsters move onto the screen, we see the child and them interact on a more intimate level.
In Where the Wild Things Are (2009), the story is extended to take 100 minutes. In this version, Max wants attention from his older sister and his mother, who is dating someone, adding a more complex level to Max’s loneliness and frustration with his family. Another difference is that Max runs to the world of the Wild Things (Hanks 00:14:56) rather than the world appearing in his bedroom, separating Max from the world. The same story as the book continues, with the exception of a more developed relationship between Max and the Wild Things. In this version, Max leaves the world of the Wild Things not because he misses his home and does not feel loved the same way, but because there are ongoing tensions between the Wild Things and between the Wild Things and Max. The monstrosity of Max still stems from the same place (frustration and lack of attention), but it is not resolved in the same way, giving the audience a different idea of how to tame their own Wild Thing.
Coraline (2009) was also extended to make the film longer and to make the story more American, instead of the British story that it was written to be. The character Wybie, a young boy whose grandmother owns the house that Coraline’s parents rent, is added as someone who is the same age as Coraline. There is also a doll that looks like Coraline that allows the Other Mother to keep an eye out on her and it is also what gets Coraline to make her first steps into the Other World (Selick 00:12:41). But the most important difference is that movie Coraline actively enjoys traveling to the Other World and interacting with the Other people in her life compared to book Caroline. She falls asleep in the Other World just to wake up disappointed in her world again (00:21:53). Coraline also uses the Other Mother as a comparison against her own parents, one time even telling her real mother that her Other Mother would get her the gloves that she wants that her real mother refuses to buy for her (00:42:03). Because Coraline is so intrigued with this world, it further shows how boredom with one’s life and wanting more (as the ghost children did) can lead to a monstrous life and end.
A Monster Calls (2016) really emphasizes the fact that the monster and Conor are one. It opens with Conor’s nightmare where he lets go of his mother and with the monster as the narrator of the story. The film emphasizes the violence in the film, whether it is done to Conor in the form of the bullies at school or done by Conor through the stories or his yelling at various characters (his grandmother, the monster, and his father to name a few). Then there are the moments between the monster and Conor. During the first tale, Conor becomes physically wrapped up into the monster’s body (Atienza 00:24:15). In the second story, the audience watches as the monster and Conor move as one while destroying the parson’s house and his grandmother’s sitting room, respectively (00:51:44). And finally, before the fight after the third tale, the audience watches as Conor and the monster clench their fists in the same moment before attacking (01:12:37). The tales themselves emphasis that there is not real good or bad in the film, just as they did in the book, but this time through watercolor illustrations that draw the audience in and get them to believe what the monster is saying through coloring of the characters. The major difference in the depiction of monstrosity in this version of A Monster Calls is at the end when Conor finds an illustration by his mother when she was younger with his monster (01:40:27). While this may imply that the monster may have been a physical character shared between the two, I believe that it is also fair to say that the two shared the same monster in their youth because the experienced the same feelings as young adults. The monster was part of them both, demonstrating how monstrosity can become wrapped up in a person’s being.
Finally, Miss Peregrines’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016) stays fairly close to the source material. Along with A Monster Calls, this is the film that uses the term “monster” the most. The basic plot is followed, but there is more of a focus on the Hollows and Wights trying the same experiment again, as well as greater development of the older peculiars. For example, we see more from Enoch, the peculiar who can animate or reanimate things. He tells the story at one point of how he would bring corpses in his parents funeral home to life to fight each other (Burton 00:41:43) and again with skeletons to fight the Hollows at the end of the film (01:41:35). The Hollows, especially the leader Barron, talk often about how they are trying to “regain” humanity in this version of the story (01:12:45). They consume the eyes of peculiars, and since they too are peculiars, it is a type of cannibalism to regain humanity (01:13:45). Barron describes how he has been trying to regain “enough” humanity (01:43:39), as if there is a limit that must be reached to be deemed human and not monstrous once more. The monstrosity of all the characters is still described as genetic (00:33:22), therefore still relying on the same principal as the novel - that the monstrosity is part of their make up and it becomes harder to characterize all peculiars as evil.
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