If you want to hear how Coraline's early childhood experiences helped her survive and save her
parents later on, then stick around to the end of this video.
[INTRO]
The Other Mother was an evil entity who preyed on the souls of children living in a particular
house for hundreds of years, and after a long reign of manipulation and terror, there was
only one girl who was able to outwit her and finally put an end to the horrors that took
place there.
Welcome to Horror History, in today’s lesson I’m analysing the life of Coraline Jones,
the brave explorer who was the first to ever survive the wonders of an alternate realm
called The Other World.
In order to understand where Coraline got the strength needed to take down the Other Mother, we first
need to take things back to the beginning.
[HORROR HISTORY]
Coraline Jones was born as the only daughter of two loving parents named Mel and Charlie
in the movie, but who are not named in the book.
Although they do care for Coraline, they are oftentimes very busy with their work; both of them
work from home on computers and I’ve never related to two characters so hard before.
Coraline’s favorite pastime was to go out exploring, but the house that the Jones’s
live in is in a bad part of town, where people throw away their unwanted junk, so her parents
forbid her from exploring in that area.
Coraline is persistent about though, and one day her Dad agrees to go with her, and they
come across a stream at the bottom of a hill.
Mr. Jones tells her to run up the hill as fast as she could, and she obeys as he stays
behind.
When she got back to the top of the hill, he runs up after her and picks her up.
He would later explain that the air was filled with wasps, and he had stayed back to take
the stings in order to give her time to escape.
He would explain to her that he didn’t see the action as bravery.
"It wasn't brave because he wasn't scared: it was the only thing he could do.
But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was
really scared.
That was brave."
This scene not only shows how much her father actually cares for her, but it would give
her the bravery she needed later in the story.
She also learned the value of resilience as a child, when her mother first took the training
wheels off her bicycle and she ended up getting scrapes on top of scrapes, but had a sense
of achievement when she finally mastered it.
Coraline had an otherwise normal childhood.
She came to find that she had an intense discomfort around spiders and she enjoyed eating simple
foods, and wasn’t a fan of her father’s complicated recipes, like his "leek and potato
stew, with a tarragon garnish and melted Gruyére cheese."
She was also not a fan of coconut.
When Coraline’s grandmother passed away, she left all of her expensive furniture to
the family, which Coraline found very uncomfortable, but it didn’t matter because she wasn’t
allowed to play in the drawing room where it was kept anyway.
The main story takes place one summer, three weeks before the beginning of school.
We know that this isn’t her first year of school, because it mentions that she’s been
there multiple times before, so I’d guess she’s going into second or third grade.
The family moved into a new house just outside of London, which was in a much safer area for
Coraline to explore and play in.
The Joneses owned only part of the house.
They were above Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, who were on the ground floor, and below Mr. Bobo who was on
the top floor.
There was also a unit adjacent to them on the second floor, which was vacant at the
time they moved in.
One of the first discoveries that Coraline makes upon moving in is the door to the vacant
flat, which filled her with intrigue.
The door was locked, and on one rainy day, Mrs. Jones shows her that there’s only a
brick wall behind it, which was likely put up when the house was divided up.
The next day, as she’s setting out to go explore, Mr. Bobo from upstairs tells her
that the mice he’s supposedly training for his jumping mouse circus have a message for
her, telling her: don’t go through the door.
This seems to suggest that animals are privy to the Other World in a way that other people
are not, which we see later with The Cat.
Coraline sets out to find a well that Miss Spink and Miss Forcible told her about, which
is supposedly very deep and very dangerous, and Coraline finds this kind of exciting because
she finds everything else boring.
School is only a week away now, and it’s raining outside, so Coraline stays in and
draws an abstract picture which looks like this.
The “I” is lost in the mist, a forewarning about how she would soon be lost in The Other
World.
Another warning comes when she visits the old ladies down stairs and they read her tea
leaves to predict she’ll be in danger.
With no siblings or friends to play with, she thinks a little danger would be some welcome excitement.
Miss Spink suggests that she “Never wear green in your dressing room,” and Coraline
has no idea what that means, and I didn’t either at first, so let’s break it down.
Miss Spink’s main thing is that she’s a retired theatre actress, so she’s referencing
an old theatre superstition that the performers shouldn’t wear green, because it’s bad
luck and it was thought that they would not stand out from the background which consisted
of green trees, grass and bushes.
Coraline however, while shopping for school clothes later in the story, wants to buy a
green pair of gloves to make her stand out from her classmates, and it would ultimately
be her alternative way of thinking that got her out of a few scary situations.
Miss Spink and Miss Forcible also give her a stone with a hole in it, which they believe
might help her in some way.
One afternoon, while she’s once again terribly bored of her life, her mom goes out to get
food for lunch and Coraline opens the door in the drawing room, but instead of a wall
of bricks, there’s a hallway.
It leads to an almost identical version of her world, but certain things look more sinister,
like the picture of the boy in the drawing room, who is normally staring at some bubbles,
but not looks like he’s planning to do something very nasty to them.
“Let’s get this over with so I can go home and play my clarinet.”
Coraline meets her Other Mother, who is like Coraline’s real mother but has buttons for
eyes and has much more interest in paying attention to Coraline.
They have a lunch with food that Coraline actually really likes.
“‘We've been waiting for you for a long time,’ said Coraline's other father.”
Yep.
Typically not a great idea to talk to people who say that.
They tell her that everyone has a set of Other parents, she just never knew about hers until
now.
The rats upstairs sing and perform for her, which she finds a little off putting, but
is willing to look past it because at least it’s something interesting.
She goes out to explore and finds that the cat in the garden can talk now.
He tells her he’s the same cat from her world, and hints at the possibility of danger
in this world.
The next wonder of the Other World that Coraline visits is the location that usually contains
Miss Spink and Miss Forcible’s flat, which is now a small theater.
The audience is filled with talking dogs, and the old ladies perform on unicycles on
stage, before stepping out of the old lady suits and revealing they are actually thin
young women with black button eyes, perhaps to resemble the ideal versions of Spink and
Forcible told about in their stories.
Coraline volunteers to take part in a stunt in which this Other Miss Forcible throws a
knife just above her head to pop a balloon, and gets a box of chocolates as a reward.
After finding out that the theater will continue performing forever, she decides to leave,
and thinks it’s time to be getting back to her own world.
But before she goes, she runs into her other parents, who are just... waiting for her there.
They tell her if she likes it here, she can stay forever, she just has to sew these buttons
over her eyes.
She basically NOPEs right out of there and passes back through the door.
When she gets to the other side, the hallway behind her is replaced by the brick wall before
she can turn back around.
Her mom still hasn’t returned when she gets back, so she watches TV as her parents are
gone all day.
She asks the ladies downstairs about them, but they haven’t seen anything, and are
about to take off to visit Miss Spink’s niece.
She goes to the supermarket to get her own meal, which consisted of limeade, cake and
apples.
She wrote a story on her dad’s computer, but at 3:12AM, her parents were still not
back, and she cried herself to sleep in their bed.
I think this is an important sequence, because Coraline’s parents are gone and she has
free reign to do whatever she wants all the time, but it isn’t as fulfilling as she
thought it would be.
Just as the Other World appears to be this amazing place where everything is catered
towards pleasing her and she finds it has it’s drawbacks, the real world is also less
fun without limitations.
I think we’ve all experienced this in some form.
When you’re old enough to buy your own groceries, you don’t just buy your favorite food every
day, because then it’s not special when you do have it.
The next day she’s woken up by The Cat.
Being back in the real world, it doesn't speak, but it leads her to her the mirror
downstairs, and in the reflection, she sees her parents looking sad and alone.
Her mom leaves a message with her finger, which says HELP US backwards.
Coraline knows what she has to do.
She gathers her bravery, marches up… and...
calls the police, one of the funniest parts
of the book in my opinion.
Of course, they don’t take her seriously at all, so then she brings a couple of apples
and the stone with a hole in it and heads back to the Other World with the cat.
“What we do here is go back.”
The Other Mother is waiting for her there, and tries to tell her that her parents gave
her the slip because they weren’t interested in having her anymore.
She has one of her rats steal the key to the gateway door, thus trapping Coraline inside.
Her other parents go to bed, and the Cat suggests that The Other Mother loves games, and maybe
if Coraline challenges her, she can win her parents’ freedom back.
Coraline is terrified to sleep in the other world, so she barricades her room using the
toybox before she goes to sleep.
When she goes downstairs the next day, things are getting even more weird than they were
before.
She goes to her Other Father’s study, and finds him just standing there, kind of pretending
to work, but not actually getting anything done.
She realizes that the house is mostly the same as her house, but there are a few small
differences, like the snow globe on the drawing room mantle which is usually empty.
She also realizes that this other reality is really just the house and the property
that immediately surrounds it.
She figures out that this place was created by the Other Mother to catch her like a spider
in a web, and that she hadn’t bothered to create anything beyond what you could see
from the house.
She notices that the trees further back in the distance look worse and worse, and it gets more and
more misty, and she eventually walks all the way around and back to the house, as if it
were all one large sphere.
This entire description reminds me of one thing: a video game.
The Other Mother created this world to entice Coraline and get her to want to stay forever,
just as a video game developer creates a fun world for the player.
But if you break outside the boundaries of where you’re supposed to be, the developers
put less effort.
The trees look very pixelated because you’re not supposed to see this part up close, you’re
supposed to stay immersed in the game.
That’s what video game devs want, and that’s what The Other Mother wants as well.
I think there’s a video game metaphor in Coraline.
It’s very similar to the favorite food analogy I mentioned earlier, playing a video game
can be fun, but you don’t want to spend all your time there and lose touch with the
real world.
When Coraline gets back, the Other Mother locks her behind the mirror for having poor
manners, and it is there where she meets the ghosts of the other kids whose souls were
stolen, by The Other Mother, one of whom refers to her as “The Beldam”.
They tell her that the Beldam will take her life, joy, heart and soul and leave her hollow.
And yes, I’m aware that my logo resembles the hollow mask from Bleach, you can stop
commenting that every day.
Every day…
The next day, Other Mother brings her back through the mirror into the kitchen, and Coraline
challenges her to a bet.
If she can find the souls of the ghost children and her parents, then the Other Mother must
let her go.
Other Mother accepts, swearing her right hand on it, but Coraline has no idea how she’s
actually going to find these things until she sees her reflection in the mirror, where
the Adder Stone given to her by the old women from downstairs is a glowing green coal.
This gives her the idea to look through it.
"OK."
"Ready?"
"Yeah.."
"Here we go. See you Shane!"
"What?"
"OOH--"
And that is when little Coraline decided, you know what?
I’m out.
No.
But she did find an ember colored marble that emitted the voice of the ghost boy and
collected it.
Which by the way is another video game comparison, I can’t tell you how many video games force you
to collect three spiritual stones, or 101 power cells… or whatever these things are.
"All I need to do is jump across this.
NO!!! YOU'VE GOTTA BE KIDDING M--"
So she gets the marble, and with each one she gets, the world around her kind of starts
falling apart.
The next place she looks is in the theater, where the book describes some of the most
horrific creatures ever created.
Coraline goes in search of the next soul in the theater, which now abandoned and dusty.
She casts a torch light upon the ceiling and sees these dog-bat things.
They aren’t too scary in the film, but in the book, they are described as hairless,
jellyish creatures that may have once been dogs, but had wings and hung like bats or
spiders.
There’s some kind of egg sac thing behind the stage, which contains two heads and two
of each limb, and when viewed through the stone, Coraline could see one of the souls
glowing inside.
So Coraline actually had to reach inside of this thing, Bill Denbrough style and retrieve
it, but she accidentally wakes it up.
When she sees the face, I can’t even describe it any better than it is in the book, so let
me just read that excerpt.
It resembled “the younger versions of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, but twisted and squeezed
together, like two lumps of wax that had melted and melded together into one ghastly object.”
Yep.
That’s pretty messed up.
One of the hands grabs out at her and starts yelling at her, calling her a thief.
As much as I love the movie, I’d kind of like to see the David Cronenberg version of
this, mostly just so I can see his interpretation of this scene.
When she gets back out, the world is starting to contort and lose it’s form.
She tells Other Mother that she’s found two of the three souls, and Other Mother tosses
her a key to the other second floor flat.
Remember, this is the equivalent of the vacant flat from Coraline’s world.
It’s her curiosity about that area that got her into this whole mess, and it would
get her into trouble again here.
This is the most haunting location Coraline ever has to explore.
She finds a giant dead spider in the bath, one of her worst fears, and eventually makes
it to a trap door leading into a cellar.
When she gets down there and turns on the light, she finds crude paintings on the wall,
but the bulb was not bright enough to fully make them out.
There was a bad smell from a rubbish pile in the corner, cardboard boxes covered in
mildew and decaying curtains, under which she noticed… a pair of feet.
She comes to find that the feet belong to a pale, puffy deformed blob that sits up and
stares at her with dark button eyes.
I would conclude that like everything
she has encountered in the Other World, The Other Father seen had seen was only an illusion.
She had manipulated this thing to look and act like her Father in order to trick her,
and she had discarded it here when she was done with it.
I think maybe the creepiest part of this is how when it speaks, “A mouth opens in the
mouthless face and strands of pale stuff sticks to the lips.”
This is also an important moment for Coraline’s character development, because she tells herself,
“You can be brave.”
Which is a reference to the story about her real dad getting stung my the wasps for her.
Now she’s got to find that same bravery to maneuver her way out of this situation
and be the one to save him.
She gets out of the situation by pulling the thing’s button off when it attacks her,
running for the trap door and locking the abandoned flat when she escapes.
Her last place to look is the top flat, where Mr. Bobo normally lives.
In this world, there was no man up there, just a horde of rats that give form to the
man’s clothes.
She spots the last soul glowing in her viewfinder, but it’s being taken away by one of the
rats.
Coraline gave chase, but ended up falling on the stairs, and the rat appeared to get
away, but luckily for her, she had befriended The Cat, and he’d captured it, earning her
the final soul.
Upon finding it, the house flattened even more, until it looked like a charcoal scribble
on grey paper, and she quickly went into the house to find her parents and confront the
Other Mother.
The ghost children speak to her through the marbles, telling her that the Beldam won’t
hold true to her word even if Coraline wins, so she comes up with a cunning plan to outsmart
her.
After spending pretty much the entire adventure thinking about it, Coraline realizes where
her parents are hidden: in the snow globe on the mantle, the one major difference between
the two worlds.
She tells the Other Mother she thinks they are in the passageway between the worlds,
thus getting her to open it and prove her wrong.
Coraline grabs the snowglobe while her back is turned, throws the cat, and is able to
escape back to her world, bringing her Mom and Dad with her and freeing the souls of
the children.
When she gets back home she appreciates her world for what it is, we know she’s completed
her character transformation when she falls asleep on the uncomfortable armchair in the
drawing room.
Her father makes pineapple pizza for dinner, which is kind of a compromise for her, she
eats the pizza but leaves the pineapple chunks…
The pineapple chunks are the only good part
That night, she dreamt of a picnic under an old oak tree, where she played with the children
whose souls she had rescued.
It’s a sweet moment because she finally has friends to play with in a way, but then
she thinks she sees a shadow cross over their faces and they tell her there is more she
has to do.
The Other Mother had sworn by her right hand let her go if she won the game, so now the
hand was scuttling around her world like a spider, trying to steal back the key.
The next day, Coraline visits Miss Spink and Miss Forcible again, and they tell her almost
everything is well, but they do see an ominous hand in her future.
Coraline comes up with one final plan to try to do away with the Other Mother once and
for all.
She sneaks back to the spot she had initially set out to look for when they first moved
into the house, the old well, making sure she is not followed.
She removes the planks from the top and sets up a mock tea party, using the teacups to
weigh down the picnic blanket and hide the fact that the well was open.
Then, she goes back to the house, dangling the key around for the hand to see, and LOUDLY
SAYS WHERE SHE’LL BE PLAYING.
This prompts the hand to go after her to try to steal the key.
She places it in the center of the picnic blanket, and the hand goes crashing down into
the depth of the well when it weighs down the blanket, and she replaces the planks,
forever trapping the hand and the key at the bottom of the well.
That night, as the summer ends, she hears what she thinks is the mouse circus getting
ready for a performance upstairs.
Coraline’s story is, like many tales about kids her age, a coming of age story, but her
transformation deals with much more nuanced themes.
She goes through the stage that every kid goes through, where their interests are maturing
and they have to learn to balance these interests, something that you’re very used to doing
as an adult, but even then can be challenging sometimes.
I think the biggest takeaway is that you have to learn to appreciate the dull parts of life
because they make the exciting portions that much better by comparison.
She also has to learn to grow up and face fear in a mature way, taking examples from
her parents and ultimately using those experiences to when her real mom and dad need her most.
So that’s the history of Coraline Jones, but there’s so much more lore to unpack
with her greatest enemy, the Other Mother, or the Beldam, so make sure you join my for
the next Horror History to learn all about that.
Your homework this lesson is to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring
that deathbell for notifications and I’ll see you in the next video.
Assuming we both survive.