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.
