The reason we consider Coraline to qualify
as a horror story on this channel has a lot to do with horrifying nightmare creatures
like the Beldam and her empty, button eyed underlings. It’s easy to overlook other supernatural
aspects of the story, like a talking cat and the mysterious trio of ghost children. These spirits were victims of the Other Mother
whose souls were captured and eaten away at -- over the years, to the point that they
no longer had their own identities. But before their untimely kidnappings, these
three children were individuals with their own unique stories. To learn how their life experiences ultimately
helped Coraline, stick around to the end of this video. This lesson is sponsored by Audible. Welcome to Horror History. The book and the movie adaptation of Coraline
are very similar, but the one big difference is the creation of a character named Wybie
in the movie, whose great-aunt was a casualty of The Other Mother and plays a part in the
story as the Sweet Ghost Girl. No such familial connection was present in
the book. Instead, author Neil Gaiman does leave us
some clues that can help us figure out what these kids’ lives may have been like. For example, I researched the usage of words
in the ghost boy’s vocabulary and found the only time period where each of these words
were popular in the lexicon was from about 1750 to 1850, also known as the Georgian Era
of Great Britain, so let’s take it back a few centuries to the beginning of his story. The small ghost boy likely came from a wealthy
family who lived on the plot of land that would eventually become the location of apartments
where the Jones family lived. There are multiple times when the boy mentions
his governess. A governess is a woman employed to teach and
train school age children in a private household, they were usually hired by rich European families
and have become somewhat rare since World War 1. While the movie Coraline takes place in the
Pacific Northwest United States, the novella is set in the United Kingdom -- Coraline’s
father takes a train to spend the day in London in Chapter 3. The ghost boy’s family probably built and
owned the house where the story is set. By the time of Coraline’s era, it had been
split up into four separate flats that rented out as apartments. Mr. Bobo’s level three flat is actually
renovated from an attic. Since the ghost boy’s family is implied
to be very wealthy, it makes sense that they’d have this huge estate, so big that it had
to be split up once the family no longer lived there. It seems that one of the boy’s hobbies was
hoop rolling, an English sport and children’s game where the participant would try to use
a stick to keep a hoop or wheel upright and perform tricks. The image of the governess carrying his hoop
and stick ended up being one of the boy’s longest lasting memories, even after he had
almost entirely forgotten who he was. The Governess not only taught him the three
basic subjects of reading, writing and arithmetic, but also seemed to impart life lessons. At one point, she told him: “nobody is ever
given more to shoulder than he or she can bear.” He would one pass this knowledge onto Coraline
so that she knew she wasn’t alone in her battle against the ancient creature. As a youngster, Ghost Boy had long curly hair
and wore breeches, a gown or dress-like article of clothing that young boys of about 2 to
8 years old were dressed in from the 1500s to the early 1800s. Breeches were given as a right of passage,
most likely associated with toilet training. Maybe I need to get my cousin a pair of britches
before this Thanksgiving. The boy enjoyed eating cooked trout and boiled
potatoes. As he got older, his family required him to
have his curly hair cut short. He would be the earliest known target of the
evil, world-building entity referred to as The Beldam. She used her skills as a seamstress to make
herself look like the boy’s mother. He briefly explains how she manipulated him. “I walked through the scullery door … and
I found myself back in the parlor. But she was waiting for me. She told me she was my other mamma, but I
never saw my true mamma again.” The boy’s soul was taken, and hidden within
a marble inside The Other World from which the Beldam presides. The marble appears grey to most, but takes
on a fiery ember color when viewed through a mystical adder stone -- the same color
as the tulips at his estate and the embers of the fire that burned in his nursery on
cold winter evenings. Since they’ve all lost their individual
identities, it’s hard to tell who is who when they’re speaking to Coraline, but using
clues in the prose and the vocabulary each character uses, I was able to go through and
assign each line to one of the ghost children. We know the next one to be born is the girl
who wasn’t in the movie, because she at one point says, “this is the finest food
I’ve eaten in centuries,” implying that she’s at least a couple hundred years old. So she’s probably the one using words like
“thou”, “aye” and “care’st” meaning she was probably born in the 1860s
in Britain’s Victorian era. Not as much is known about this girl, but
she’s described as being a very pale child, dressed in what seemed to be spider’s webs,
with a circle of glittering silver set in her blonde hair. We never learn her name, so I’m just gonna
call her the Goth Ghost Girl, which is ironically, the same thing I call all of the girls that
follow me on Instagram. She seems to really like flowers, and she
possibly eats them. Coraline takes a great liking to her when
they do finally meet, but unfortunately for her, she too was tricked and captured by The
Beldam -- dashing her opportunity to one day grow up. She expresses that her joy was taken from
her, leaving her an empty husk with no heart or soul. The last of the children to be born was The
Tall Ghost Girl, who uses mostly more contemporary language with occasional exceptions. At the picnic in Coraline’s dream, she’s
eating sliced bread and jam. Sliced bread was invented in 1928, so I’ll
place her birth date in the 1930s. She wore a brown shapeless dress, and a brown
bonnet that was tied under her chin, matching the color of her soul marble. She describes the Beldam feeding on her, until
there was nothing left. “Only snakeskins and spider husks.” As the Beldam makes use of their souls for
sustenance, they begin to lose their unique traits, and their memories fade away. Their names are the first to be forgotten,
and before long, they could not remember much of anything, including their own gender in
life, but they do know what the Beldam did to them. Despite this, they do continue to exist in
ghost form. What I’m about to say isn’t confirmed,
but I do have a theory about what the Beldam does with their human bodies. It’s stated that “the Other Mother could
not create. She could only transform, and twist, and change”
things that already existed. Her world is inhabited by “Other” versions
of the people in Coraline’s world. These beings also serve as The Beldam’s
servants. There are three other humanoid entities: the
Other Ms. Spink, the Other Ms. Forcible and The Other Father. Remember, the Other crazy man upstairs is
really just a pack of rats in human clothing and the Other Wybie is not in the book. So we’re left with these three: two female
and one male. I think these creatures were created by The
Other Mother out of the deceased bodies of the three ghost children. Another century goes by until Coraline becomes
the fourth known child lured into The Other World by the Other Mother. As I mentioned near the beginning of this
video, the Neil Gaiman novella, Coraline, is the canon material that I use as my basis
when analysing a character’s history. The graphic novel, the movie, the video game
-- these are all adaptations, they aren’t created by the original author, so they aren’t
considered canon. But there is one more piece of content in
the Coraline canon. The audiobook, which is available on Audible,
is narrated by the original author, Neil Gaiman. The spoken words in the audiobook are the
same as the text in the novel, but this also means the inflections, accents and enunciations
of the words can be analysed when trying to determine the author’s message; something
I will be doing in future videos. I use Audible as the definitive version of
the story. It even includes interludes with original
music, including the very creepy song of the rats. 🎵 "We have teeth and we have tails. 🎵 We have tails. We have eyes. 🎵 We were here before you fell. 🎵 You will be here when we rise..." At Audible you can find the largest selection
of audiobooks, originals and podcasts, which you can keep forever in your Audible library. Right now, Audible is hooking up Horror History
viewers with an amazing offer. Just visit Audible dot com slash czsworld
or text czsworld to 500-500 to start your 30 day trial. That’s Audible dot com slash czsworld. When Coraline refuses to comply with The Other
Mother’s requests, she’s thrown into the dark space behind the mirror and locked away
there as punishment. It is here that she makes contact with the
ghost children. She reaches around the dark room until she
finds what seems to be a nose and lips. The tall girl warns her to keep her voice
down, since the Beldam may be listening. When they find out that Coraline is still
alive, they encourage her to flee, explaining that they’ve been trapped for a very long
time; a time beyond reckoning. The boy is the one to suggest the idea that
Coraline could try to win their souls back from The Beldam -- and they all explain to
her that they’d be unable to leave with her when The Beldam lets her out. “Now we belong to the dark and to the empty
places. The light would shrivel us, and burn.” As Coraline curls up to sleep in the dark,
damp area behind the mirror, one of the ghost children kisses her cheek and whispers an
important clue, telling her to look through the stone. This is a reference to the adder stone given
to Coraline by her neighbors, it possesses magical properties that will help her scan
the Other World for the location of the souls. Coraline tells The Other Mother about her
encounter with the kids and says she must be planning the same for her, to which she
responds that, “nobody sensible believes in ghosts anyway.” Coraline searches the entirety of the Beldam’s
world and finds the boy’s soul hidden in a toy chest, the Tall Ghost Girl’s soul
guarded by the other versions of Spink and Forcible and The Goth Ghost girl’s soul
protected by the rats in Mr. Bobo’s apartment. After finding the first, the Ghost Boy urges
her to hurry on to save the others, but after the second, The Tall Ghost girl wishes her
to flee while she still has her life. The Beldam tries to throw her off by giving
her the key to the empty flat, and the children try to warn her, saying that the Beldam does
not mean well, and they don’t believe she would try to help Coraline. They’re right. It’s a trap, but Coraline is able to escape
and with the help of The Cat, retrieve the final soul. The voice of the Goth Ghost Girl gives her
one more piece of advice. “She has lied to you. She will never give you up, now she has you. She will no more give any of us up than she can change her nature.” This leads to the big confrontation where
Coraline tricks the Other Mother into the opening the passageway between the two worlds
so that she can rescue her parents and escape, but the Beldam catches the door as she tries
to pull it shut. Coraline suddenly becomes aware of other people
in the corridor with her. Their hands move through her and she feels
their strength added to her own. The voices tell her to hold strong and pull
and with the added power she’s able to force the door shut, dismembering The Beldam’s
hand in the process. As she crosses back into her own world, the
wraiths disappear. Upon getting back to her room, she removes
the marbles from her pocket before going to sleep. That night she dreamt of a picnic with the
three children, who now had their human-like forms back. Perhaps rather than being ghosts, they were
now angels. After eating, they play games in the meadow,
before having dessert. Coraline thanks them all for coming, but knows
not all is well when a shadow crosses their faces. The kids thank her for saving them, but explain
that for her it isn’t over quite yet -- not until she’s defeated the hand of the Beldam
that continues to scuttle around in the real world. The Goth Ghost Girl’s explanation implies
that they may now move onto the afterlife, saying that they’ll now set out for uncharted
lands, and what comes after no one alive can say. But before moving on, they remind Coraline
that she already has the traits necessary to defeat the Beldam: to be wise, brave and
tricky. The Boy hugs her and tells her to take comfort
in the fact that she’s still alive. Which is not… that… reassuring. Especially coming from someone who got killed
by the thing she’s about to fight. The children move away from her to a wooden
bridge by a stream. They wave back at her before the dream goes
into darkness. When Coraline awakes, the marbles that had
contained the three souls are broken. Whatever had been inside when was gone. She places the fragments in a box before formulating
her plan for taking down her Other Mother once and for all. Typically in a horror story, a ghost has some
kind of unfinished business -- and the spirit sticks around and haunts someone or something
until it’s final scores are settled. However, it seems to me that these three kids
were unable to move onto the afterlife because they were no longer in possession of their
own souls, and they were needed in order to move on. They don’t seem to need to hang around until
Coraline avenged them by trapping their killer at the bottom of the well, though it is possible
that they were just so confident in Coraline’s abilities that they could go on knowing that
they’ve already given all the advice they can give, and that she would have no problem
finishing the job. If you want to hear about the histories of
other Coraline characters click that playlist on the left and drop me a comment about who
you’d like to see me cover next. Remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new
horrors every week, RING the deathbell and select ALL notifications and I’ll see you
in the next one. Assuming we both survive. To survive: get a vaccine, use a facemask
and social distancing.
