Coraline
when i was a kid everything scared me very much but very few things were able to scare me like the trailer for coraline so i never watched it until this night! (some other trailers that gave me similar nightmares are Penelope and Drag Me to Hell). I have always been super weak to "scary thing in your house / normal thing is not what it seems and will actually Get you" type horror. tbh it is Still something i am very sensitive to so i have to be careful! but i faced the fears tonight and it was very worth it this is a real masterpiece.
we love and hate our lives and we feel that all the time but usually more of one than the other in a given moment. its so easy to take anything for granted, or to build it up so much into everything. i think it must be very odd to have a child, who is both an extension of your body and also very much a new thing who wants to be their own. and you have to love the parts of you that you hate because your child will expose them! i think it must be so hard. and when youre a child you want to be independent, you want to feel good all the time, you want to be the center of a world that seemingly doesnt let you have Any Thing most of the time, even yourself! but how can you learn the joy of the neutral present absent from overwhelming desire without first experiencing the folly of overindulgence? and even if you learn that once it is so easy to forget because everything is always mentally sliding around and readjusting your neurons and synapses or whatever are bigger than the entire universe of atoms and theyre regenerating and youre being remade in every second as you. well its all a bit much for a kid to think about but we have to eventually. i think this movie does a wonderful job at meeting a childs mindset where it is and validating it, and challenging it at once. it feels very intentionally considerate and rides its line very well of treating something that can seem like a small adjustment to adults like the gigantic life consuming horrifying thing that it can be. this would have genuinely ruined my life if i had somehow managed to sit all the way through it as a 12 year old, its really good
(10-28-2025)