For parents looking to terrify and educate children in equal measure, this adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline is surely a good, if unpredictable, starting point. Rebellious and sceptical when she needs to be- in the name of self-preservation- Coraline marked the first in a wave of family 'dramas' where the villain is not some supernatural threat but generational trauma.

Make no bones about it- Coraline is a genuinely horrific film, the kind you really wouldn’t want your child to be seeing in the first place. Put it this way: if your child has seen this movie, you have either failed or succeeded as a parent in epic fashion, either to the extent that you can designate it, convincingly, as ‘just a movie’, or in that it’s shruggingly relatable.

Penned by perennial wrecker of childhoods Neil Gaiman, Coraline follows a titular protagonist who finds a bricked-up door in her family’s new apartment, which leads her to a parallel universe occupied by ideal versions of her parents. They validate her, encourage her interests, make her feel seen- except for one small hitch. They have buttons sewn into their faces in place of eyes.

Coraline’s existing life, is, notably, unproblematic; in the modern age, she would struggle to cancel her parents even on TikTok. Their main crime is a deficit of attention towards her, one of many deliberately relatable sins which drive their bright, plucky progeny into the arms of their underworld mirrors.

Neil Gaiman’s horror conceits usually derive from a tiny, minorly fantastic twist on the utterly plausible, and the horrid animation style in this filmic adaption meets the brief with aplomb. The alternately clunky and spindly stylistic world of the twelve-year-old imagination maintains the perfect level of distance and dovetailing with the real-life distortions that occupy the contemporary tween imagination: a realistic yet twisted spin on the adult world, from neighbours to cats, which creates the space for a Grimm-esque parable without a moralistic tone.

This relatability is key to the fairytale logic upon which Coraline rides- somehow, like children, we accept that a world in which everyone has buttons sewn into their eyes could be superior to everyday life. It seems a small price to pay; everyone, from the friendless, spinsterly neighbours to the hunchbacked neighbour Werner (another nod to the stylings of the Grimms and German romanticism) seems happier over this small compromise.

Thus, and slyly, Coraline also poses an answer to the perennial question of why children lie to their parents. As Coraline sinks ever deeper into a world which her ‘real’ parents know nothing about- starting from her ‘Other Mother’s’ greeting with a big smile and a platter of roast chicken- the audience becomes increasingly complicit in her twisted alternate reality. Yes, she may have to hide a terrible secret- one which the adults in her mirror-world seem increasingly on the verge of betraying, as all the men, from the Other Father to her contemporary neighbour-kid Werner, start to buckle under the weight of the perfect facade which they portray. But isn’t that just the price of growing up? The Other Mother, looming ever closer with her sewing needles and attractively coloured selection of button eyes, seems to suggest so.

Although Coraline ultimately rejects the twisted logic of her fantasy escape, she sets a precedent for the trajectory of subsequent fantasy protagonists and villains- and the very idea of what could be ‘child-friendly’. From the demonic villains of 90s Disney tentpoles, recent movies from Frozen to Tangled, and from Turning Red to Encanto, have stripped away the mask of a supernatural horror to centre bad parenting as the real villain of Western childhood. The burden falls on Coraline to recognise and reject the ‘escape’ offered by the Other Mother, whose spiderweb of weaker victims- the Other Father and Other Werner- must be left in her wake as a survivor, guided by nothing but the world-crossing, wordless supernatural titan of the local cat. Show it to your kids for an absolute masterclass in stranger danger- but only if you have an adamantine domestic rapport to work from.