E X P E RT I S E
5 surprisingly helpful things you can learn from horror films This one is obvious: When you walk into a dark house, turn the lights on already. But there are other valuable lessons lurking out there, somewhere, as these cinephiles point out.
1 AV I VA B R I E F E L
Listen to your children’s fears. As a parent, you deal with fear in so many capacities. You have your own worries about your child’s safety, and you also have to deal with your child’s fears of everything from shots to having her mashed potatoes touch her green beans. Horror movies, while completely supernatural, teach us to take those concerns seriously. The 2014 Australian movie The Babadook comes to mind. It’s about a single mom and her sixyear-old son, who is being haunted by a monster. The mom writes it off as a “monster under the bed” fantasy. Of course, the Babadook turns out to be real. It serves as a good, if extreme, reminder that no matter how silly a child’s anxieties seem, the fear behind them is legit.
Written by Liz Loerke Illustration by Ben Wiseman
OCTOBER 2016
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